Bad Girls (2 page)

So there you have it: Two girls on separate paths meet and realize life is full of surprises. The decisions these girls make after hooking up change their lives forever. The decisions they make on their own, however, will change the way in which the truth is exposed and how “justice” prevails.

For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living.

For he created all things, that they might have their being: and the generations of the world were healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon the earth:

(For righteousness is immortal:)

For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity.

Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it.

Wisdom of Solomon: 1:13-15; 2:23-24

PROLOGUE

T
HERE ARE MILES
upon miles of unpaved, gravel-packed roads all over Texas. There’s also a litany of tarred surfaces in great need of repair and repaving, rickety barns ready to fall over from just the right gust of wind, and old homes far beyond the fixable improvements of a Home Depot makeover. In many ways, all of this adds to the bucolic beauty of rural Texas. And when you think about it, especially while watching a dust cloud kick up behind an old Chevy heading out into an open field on a sunny, dry day, it becomes a metaphor for life, not only in the Lone Star State, but everywhere else, too. Because life in the real world—for most people, I think—does not consist of a white picket fence, a family dog, a pair of healthy kids, two vehicles (or, rather, one SUV and a minivan) sitting on a plush blacktop driveway, a golf course lawn cut every Saturday on a John Deere, some manageable debt, colorful, blight-free perennials, perhaps a boat, barbecues on the weekends, Christmas bonuses, vacations, family photos developed at the local Walmart hanging along the banister. Sometimes life throws daggers. And if you end up on the receiving end of one, well, watch out.

You’re dead.

Or certainly maimed for life.

No more soccer-mom minivan trips across town with your neighbors’ kids, arguments over white or wheat PB&J school lunches, walks in the park with the ladies from church while taking in all of the town gossip, PTA meetings, Little League games, ice cream running down the filthy arms of whining kids. No. If you happen to be on the receiving end of one of those daggers, you’ll find yourself staring down the tunnel at that white light—if you’re lucky—and buckets of tears, along with a lifetime of melancholy chiseling away the days. Unemployment checks (while they last). Food stamps. And, after waiting in the church line, bricks of sour orange-colored block cheese.

This will be your life.

Bobbi Jo Smith was not one of those “lucky” kids, her parents jumping for joy on the sidelines while she scored the winning goal. She never played Barbies with the popular neighborhood girls. Nor had she become part of what is the new, twenty-first-century “working class” searching for the next meal and a government handout. Somewhere in between, Bobbi was just a girl, essentially, when she realized her mother didn’t give two shakes about her. And Dad? Well, who the hell was he, anyway?
Where
was he? By the time Bobbi was old enough to look around and not only put into context, but truly understand, where she was being raised, she found herself in the sleepy, shanty little Texas town of Graford, of which many in the state had never even heard. For those kids like Bobbi, in certain sections of this rather pleasant town boasting a mere 578 residents (2000 census), they looked around and met the despondent gazes—distant and stoic—on the faces of everyone surrounding them. They eventually realized they were staring into a mirror. The young gawked at their futures; while the old shook their heads at their past. There weren’t too many moms and dads around to take their babies for walks, or to share their days watching
Sesame Street
and
The Electric Company.
If you were fortunate enough (and so very few were), you saw your parents long enough during the day to get yelled at and maybe stung by the slap of a whipping belt. Not for what you did. That was too easy. But for the shitty life your parents had to deal with every day. Aggression, the experts call it. Repressed anger misdirected at the human beings you could hurt the most and, largely, get away with. Not everyone in Graford lived this way, of course. That is not what I mean here. But for Bobbi, this was her life.

And it was one of the many reasons why Bobbi relied on her grandmother. The old woman—and Bobbi’s son, the child Bobbi had before she was old enough to work legally, or have the guts to come out and live the lifestyle she wanted—meant everything to Bobbi.

My mother was never in my life,
Bobbi told me as our conversations began in early 2012.
My grandmother raised me.

Bobbi had learned from her upbringing, adding,
I’m a great mother.

Yet she wrote this to me from a jail cell.

Go figure. The value this young woman put on things. The bar she now lived under set fairly high. At first, it didn’t make sense. But then, later on, it did, once I understood the framework of Bobbi’s life and how she ended up behind bars, facing five decades of never feeling the warmth of the sun’s glow on her back as a free woman.

I’m nothing like I was raised. And I’m thankful to God for that.

Again, a strange comment coming from a woman who had been in prison for eight years already at the time she wrote it.

And she was only in her twenties.

Still, prison was four walls and a lock. Bobbi could never get used to this life. On the day one of her best friends left prison, out on parole, Bobbi turned to her as she walked away.

“I don’t want to die in here,” Bobbi said. “Please don’t let me die in here.”

It had been years
since Bobbi saw her son. But in January 2012, the boy was brought into Gatesville Prison for a visit with a woman he really didn’t know. To the child, perhaps, Bobbi was some sort of a folk hero, locked away behind bars for a crime, according to Bobbi, she had not committed. A vicious murder, in fact, that Bobbi claimed a casual bed partner of hers at the time committed—a cute girl Bobbi had known for nearly a month or so before the man Bobbi considered a father figure was shot repeatedly in the head at point-blank range.

“It’s like we’ve never been apart,” Bobbi said after the visit with her boy, now eleven years old. “I love him so much. He’s my motivation.”

The boy became Bobbi’s light. A constant beacon of hope and clarity she sees on a horizon beyond the concrete prison walls surrounding (maybe engulfing) her. It’s that love she has for her child that drives Bobbi today, helping her to, she noted,
push through this place . . . [that] at times . . . is almost too much to consume.

Odd word choice there, I thought: “consume.” As if Bobbi is being force-fed a system she doesn’t have a taste for.

Bobbi claimed to have not spoken to a man in eight years—even the male guards inside the prison. This was one of the reasons why Bobbi had developed a bit of anxiety about meeting with me while I was in Texas (March 2012). Thus, a prison visit I so much looked forward to wasn’t meant to be.

I think Bobbi was happy with this outcome. I do not feel she wanted a face-to-face with me—not then, anyway. She could have made the visit happen if she wanted. But she didn’t trust me. And I, to be clear, didn’t believe she was innocent at that time. I didn’t trust
her.
I thought she was just one more guilty, incarcerated female murderer, begging me to listen to her story in hopes I would believe what was now hindsight tethered with carefully chosen lies.

Writing to me, however, became the perfect way for Bobbi to explain (and express) herself in what was a nonthreatening environment; her way of telling me how things actually happened. Facing me, allowing me to question her and put things into perspective, might have been too much, too soon. In the end, what we worked out turned into the ideal circumstance. I could e-mail Bobbi. Yes, e-mail. I was able to send the e-mail to a site run by the prison system, and Bobbi, after receiving the e-mail that day or the following morning, would respond by a phone call to a friend, or a letter (she cannot e-mail me back). It kept our conversations moving fluidly. What impressed me right away was Bobbi’s willingness to answer
any
question. In many passages of this book, Bobbi’s conversation with me will be styled as though it had occurred in a spoken situation—not a written reply or passed-along response. Our give-and-take was such that we were speaking on a personal level.

Along this journey, Bobbi and I had arguments; she angrily accused me of the most egregious exploitations, as others have before her and still others will in the days to come. Then she apologized. She condemned my work (in general) and apologized again. Our relationship over the course of telling this story changed remarkably. Yet within it all, I got to know this woman. And, more important, as I pushed through the evidence in this case and interviewed Bobbi extensively (often asking the same questions in different ways), I began to believe she was convicted of a crime she did not commit.

Those early letters between us were the first in what would become a host of correspondences over the course of a year. Each detailed a specific portion of the life and times of a young girl who had moved in with a considerably older man after she got pregnant as a young teen (knowing she was a lesbian). She wound up in prison a few years later, doing what amounted to life for a murder she has repeatedly and steadfastly denied having any part in—a murder, I should point out, I believed Bobbi had committed when I began this project.

This book is going to explore the entire case in great depth. With all of the resources available to me—trial transcripts, police reports, letters and journals, autopsy reports, recorded interviews by law enforcement, interviews with all of the key players, along with a modest amount of additional resources—I believe I was able to get to the bottom of who murdered forty-nine-year-old Robert “Bob” Dow. And this conclusion, for certain, will shock some, infuriate others, and hopefully give some understanding of why Bob was murdered.

PART ONE

LOVE IS BLIND

CHAPTER 1

“S
OMETHING BAD MAY
have happened.” It was the only fact she was certain of. Beyond that, the woman thought the victim might be “a friend of her niece’s.” His name “might have been” Bob, but that was all she knew. She feared the worst, however: “Bob Something” was dead. She didn’t know the exact address—where the police could find him—but she could explain to someone how to get there, and would escort cops to the house if they wanted to meet her somewhere in the neighborhood.

On a quiet evening, May 5, 2004, forty-eight-year-old Richard “Rick” Cruz called the Mineral Wells Police Department (MWPD) and explained what his wife, Kathy, had just told him. Both Kathy and Rick were in somewhat of a panicked state. Not freaked out. But their feelings were more of a puzzled, what’s-going-on–type thing they didn’t quite understand.

“Have you heard anything about someone being shot on Eighteenth Street?” Rick asked the 911 dispatcher.

Rick had the street wrong. It was actually Twentieth Street. Still, dispatch wasn’t in the business of sharing information with worried callers phoning in to report gunshots fired at people.

“What other information do you have?” the 911 operator asked.

Rick explained the layout of the neighborhood best he could. He said he and Kathy weren’t all that familiar with Mineral Wells and this particular neighborhood where Bob supposedly lived. They had only heard about it.

The operator said they’d send an officer out to Eighteenth Street to check things out.

Rick and Kathy Cruz lived in Graford, Texas, directly next door to Kathy’s mother and father, Dorothy and Fred Smith. Graford is about fifteen miles from Mineral Wells, where the shooting was said to have occurred. Kathy and Rick had arrived home at about 4:30
P.M
. Rick was driving. As they exited the vehicle after Rick parked, Kathy’s mother, Dorothy, standing on her porch next door, waved them over.

“Come here,” Dorothy shouted. She seemed frazzled and agitated, as if in a hurry to get them over there so she could speak her mind about something.

“What is it?” Kathy asked.

Dorothy was “very upset,” Kathy later explained to police. Kathy and Rick noticed Dorothy was on the telephone. Apparently, after walking over and assessing the situation, Kathy found out that Dorothy was talking to her other daughter, Kathy’s sister.

Something terrible was going on.

“What is it?” Rick and Kathy asked.

A pause. Then a bombshell: Somebody shot Bob.