Bad Girls (32 page)

When they reached Riverside, California, Boetz and Judd were told the paperwork to release Bobbi and Jen was going to take a few days. So the detectives decided to go see the girls and conduct interviews with each while they waited. Why waste the time, moping around, waiting on paperwork? Boetz told me. After a good solid rest, Boetz and Judd headed in to see the girls on the morning of May 10.

Bobbi and Jen had decided on a story they were going to stick to. According to what Jen told the
Texas Monthly,
this conspired tale of what happened emerged as Jen and Bobbi were holed up together inside a cell in Riverside. They talked while locked up and decided to see if they could get Jen out of it all. They decided to tell lies to make it seem as though Bob had been raping Jen. If they stuck to it, perhaps the authorities would believe them and feel the crime was committed in self-defense.

Jen walked up to Bobbi, who was sitting on the floor, her back to the cell wall. Jen said, “I have an idea” (according to what Jennifer told
Texas Monthly
). Jen explained to Bobbi how “no one really knew what happened inside Bob’s bedroom.” Because of that, she and Bobbi could concoct any story they wanted, as long as they stuck to it. Jen even mentioned Bobbi’s son and how he would be without his mother if Bobbi went to prison. It just wasn’t fair. They had to do this.

“I’m going to take the blame for you,” Jen said she told Bobbi as they waited inside that jail cell.

After they chitchatted a bit more, Bobbi said (according to Jen’s version in
Texas Monthly
), “You know I’m going to be with you forever if you do that.”

This is the first time (and it’s important to note that the
Texas Monthly
story would publish merely weeks before Bobbi’s trial) that Jen ever gave the impression that Bobbi had had something to do with the murder. Before this, it was entirely on Jen.

Neither of the girls asked for a lawyer. Boetz and Judd interviewed Bobbi first. According to Boetz, Bobbi Jo was wired, wispy, and gaunt. (Note that I called and e-mailed Penny Judd numerous times, but she never returned my calls or e-mails. This occurred after Brian Boetz had told me he had spoken to her and she had agreed to an interview.) It was clear Bobbi Jo had been beaten down by her days on the road. And yet, the one characteristic Bobbi (and Jen) showed more than any other, Boetz told me, was the notion that they hadn’t really done a bad thing. From what Brian Boetz felt, the girls were under the impression that this was some sort of misunderstanding that was going to go away as soon as they returned to Mineral Wells and were given the opportunity to explain themselves.

Boetz recalled upon first meeting Jen that she was “hysterical, crying, nervous, tired, hungover . . . and it sounds kind of funny, but she was every one of them” at the same time.

There were moments during the course of Jen’s first interview when she even appeared to be laughing.

The main story line both girls got across during their initial interviews in Blythe, California, with the MWPD was that Bob had been coming on to Jen for weeks and made one last aggressive advance toward her, which forced Jen into protecting herself by killing him.

Jen and Bobbi told a tale of Bob bailing them out of jail and then wanting sex from Jen as payment. When he came at Jen demanding payment, she shot him.

Boetz listened. He had problems with the girls’ statements, knowing what the crime scene looked like. (The girls had spoken of a struggle inside Bob’s bedroom—which Boetz could not reconcile with the scene after being inside the room.) Boetz let them talk through their stories without interrupting them, or playing any of his cards.

After each girl signed her statement, Penny Judd and Brian Boetz convinced the girls to waive extradition and allow the MWPD to transport them back to Mineral Wells.

Each agreed without even asking what it actually meant in the scope of their cases.

On May 11, 2004, early in the morning, Judd and Boetz picked Bobbi and Jen up at Riverside County Jail.

“Look, this ride back home is not going to be the time or place to talk about what happened,” Boetz explained as they got into the car. “We just talked about it all here. We’ll have more chances in the future to talk. You both understand?”

Bobbi and Jen said they did.

“And listen . . . there’s not going to be any touching each other or any affection going on, okay?” Boetz explained a bit sheepishly.

Both agreed.

The plan was to drive straight back to Texas.

Brian Boetz said watching the two girls along the way became like “looking at two people in love, to be honest. They’d stare at each other, laugh, joke around, talk of things that I had no clue about whatsoever. Then they’d turn around and be crying. . . .”

This didn’t sound so much like love—but perhaps adolescent fixation, coupled with the physical and emotional difficulties and complexities of coming off a monthlong bender of using hard-core drugs and booze daily. Both girls had to be suffering from some form of withdrawal. That giddiness and mixture of emotions were their addictions draining from their pores. Their emotions were riding on that clichéd roller coaster.

“They were scared and nervous,” Boetz said. “I think, during that twenty-four-hour period of driving back, we got to see a lot of different emotions from them at different times. It told me that they really didn’t understand the severity of what happened and what they’d done.”

Boetz listened as best he could. “As I heard them, I believe they thought that when they got back to Texas that they’d be set free. There really were times when I thought that they thought they’d be set free because [Bob Dow] was a bad guy himself.”

They arrived in Mineral Wells on May 12, 2004, at 1:45
P.M
. Jen and Bobbi were held at Palo Pinto County Jail, a local facility with an old-fashioned holding tank and shoe box–sized cells with whitewashed walls, a metal plate sticking out of the wall that a thin mattress sat on, a corner shelf for belongings, a library about the size of a walk-in closet, an entirely closed-in basketball court with one hoop, and a jail administrator donning a ten-gallon hat, big ol’ gun clipped to his belt, and a no-holds-barred attitude. This was where Bobbi and Jen would be held until their cases were adjudicated.

Most important to Brian Boetz was the crime scene photographs compared to Bob Dow’s room. Jen and Bobbi had each spoke in their first statements of a fight going on with Bob inside that room and Jen’s inability to protect herself—hence the need for the weapon and killing Bob.

However, when Boetz placed the crime scene into that context the girls had described, the problem Boetz had was how Bob had been found.

“Because of the way he’s lying there, and the way the bag is covering his head and the blanket is covering . . . part of his body,” Boetz later said.

All of this seemed inconsistent with a struggle: Bob was lying on his back. The laundry bag was over his head.

“Right,” Boetz added. “He’s lying on his back—to me, as if he was just lying there, not struggling or fighting with anyone.”

Boetz then read through the statements the MWPD had taken up to that point from Bobbi, Jen, Audrey, Kathy, Krystal, Dorothy Smith, and the Cruzes. And that was when something became clear: “I decided that they weren’t being truthful.”

Boetz went to see the girls. He didn’t reveal his hand; instead, he asked, “Would you mind taking a polygraph?”

Both girls said they didn’t have an issue with taking a lie detector test.

Still, neither asked for an attorney.

CHAPTER 42

B
OBBI AND JEN WERE
able to stay in touch while held inside the jail at the Palo Pinto County Sheriff’s Office (PPCSO). Jen later said in court that this was when she and Bobbi “[came] up with a different story.” Why they decided to change the story again, Jen never mentioned. Perhaps it was because the MWPD had ratcheted up pressure by asking them to take a polygraph.

At first, when asked why she decided to come forward and give a second statement (which was ultimately the second time she lied about what happened), Jen responded, “I thought if I told a lie, then I wouldn’t be convicted of a crime.... That if I lied, and I made it look like I was the person that was—that was getting in trouble—I was, you know, I was the person that did it and everything, then I wouldn’t be in that much trouble.” Jen stopped and collected her thoughts. Then she added: “If I was the person that . . . he attacked . . . and everything, then I wouldn’t get that much time.”

She was also trying to protect Bobbi. In coming up with this second story, Jen explained, she was hoping to spring Bobbi from jail. She said Bobbi wouldn’t leave her alone while they were locked up in Palo Pinto—that Bobbi kept complaining about not being present for her family.

“I need to get out of here,” Bobbi allegedly told Jen one night. “My whole family is falling apart. . . .”

On May 14, 2004, first
thing in the morning, the girls were driven from the Palo Pinto County Jail in Palo Pinto, Texas, to the Behavioral Measures & Forensic Services, in Dallas. Detectives Brian Boetz and Penny Judd were convinced the problems within the stories they’d heard from both girls had been the result of lies. They wanted the truth.

“We had held them overnight in Mineral Wells at our holding facility,” Boetz later recalled, “and there was one reason why we did that. Based on the stories that they gave us in California and the evidence . . . we thought they weren’t telling us the complete truth.”

Boetz and Judd asked the girls to wait inside a conference room while they met with the polygraphist in the hallway. After looking over the case report Boetz handed him, the polygraphist clarified how the test would work. “One girl at a time,” he explained. “There’s a television monitor in that room over there, where you can watch and listen.”

Bobbi went into a room with the polygraphist, while Jen was escorted into a separate room to wait. (There was some confusion later about this simple fact, and that the girls might have been polygraphed at the same time, but it’s clear that each was polygraphed separately.) Bobbi had rested since being back in town. She looked somewhat adjusted but also scared, nervous, and in great need of what her body craved most: drugs and alcohol. Not the ideal conditions with which to walk into a polygraph, but the examiner had seen worse.

As he explained to Bobbi how the test worked, giving her a chance to review all of the questions he was going to ask beforehand, Bobbi “broke down and started crying,” Brian Boetz, watching from a video monitor, later said.

“You all right, ma’am?” the polygraphist asked.

Bobbi Jo continued to cry.

From the other room, Boetz looked on. He’d seen this before. Suspects are brought to a breaking point and they crack. Boetz felt Bobbi was ready.

“Miss Smith?”

“I lied to the cops,” Bobbi told the polygraphist. “I lied. But I want to tell the truth now.”

The test was over before it started.

I asked Bobbi Jo
about the polygraph and this second story, which she and Jen supposedly invented. Why would she break down like that during the polygraph?

I don’t have anything to say about it,
she wrote back.
I mean, they
wanted
me. And I was no fool to that test. It was all set up to try and break Jennifer and I.

Bobbi was right about that. Boetz told me he didn’t believe them, so he set the polygraph up to see what would happen, to see how they’d react.

As for the second statement Bobbi was about to give the MWPD, she said, “I tried to stick to the story Jennifer and I had talked about [in the jail].”

The problem was that when a person told the truth, she didn’t have to remember details. The facts came easy. When a person lied, she got caught up in her own stories and began to backpedal. And with a young girl who’d never been arrested, going up against an experienced cop holding her freedom in his hands, the cop would win every time. Bobbi also believed then that she and Jen were a team; they had designed a new strategy and were going to stick to it

Detective Brian Boetz escorted
Bobbi into a room in the same building where the polygraph had been held. He asked her to sit down.

“You want to give us another statement?” Boetz asked.

“Yes,” Bobbi answered, following along with the plan she and Jen had discussed.

Boetz had Bobbi wait for him. He needed to call the MWPD and have someone fax a blank statement and new Miranda warning document for her signature.

Meanwhile, Penny Judd walked Jen into the examination and sat her down.

“I’ll be in the next room,” Judd told Jen.

Jen nodded, indicating she understood.

Judd watched on the monitor.

The polygraphist explained how the test was going to work, where the connectors would be placed on her body, and how the questioning would progress. Yet, just as the test was about to start, Jen turned on the tears.