Girls Gone Wild

When Bobbi Jo Smith and Jennifer Jones left Mineral Wells, they were young and in love. They had a full tank of gas, a case of beer,and the open road ahead. There was only one problem: They’d left their roommate—a 49-year-old amateur pornographer— lying in bed with three bullets in his head.

by Katy Vine

September 2005

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Just being in the truck meant that Jennifer’s mother was violating her parole and ensuring herself several months of hard time. But perhaps Kathy had rediscovered her nurturing side. Understanding the trouble her daughter was in, she started to take action to protect her. When the group ran out of money on day two, Kathy told Bobbi Jo to give her a Luger she’d taken from Bob. Then she pawned it at a shop in New Mexico, propelling the group into Arizona with another $70. When Krystal wanted out, she made sure to leave her behind at a phone booth in Chandler, where she could call her anxious mother. That day, on May 7, they hit Buckeye, Arizona, and they pulled over at a Days Inn where Kathy had arranged for Jerry to wire them some more cash. She even hatched a plan to trip up the prosecutors if they ever got caught. “You girls should get married,” she announced to Bobbi Jo and Jennifer. “That way you won’t have to testify against each other.”

The group set up a little ceremony next to the motel, under a giant cottonwood tree. They didn’t have much in the way of formal wear. Bobbi Jo wore jeans and a T-shirt. Jennifer wore the same and held some wildflowers in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kathy, meanwhile, read 1 Corinthians 13 from the motel’s Gideon Bible and helped the girls exchange ad hoc vows as Audrey stood witness behind the couple. Bobbi Jo gave Jennifer a ring with a blue stone in it to seal the deal. Afterward, she led her bride through the parking lot back to the motel, where Jennifer told her, “I’ll always be with you, no matter what.”

That night, the couple was sitting in the motel pool waiting for Audrey and Kathy to return from a nearby truck stop, where they’d gone to pick up some food. It had been more than an hour since they’d left, and Bobbi Jo started to get nervous. Maybe one of their companions was planning to rat them out. She was especially anxious about Kathy. “Let’s go check on them,” Jennifer said, trying to convince her that her own mother would never turn them in. But as they drove the couple blocks to the truck stop, Jennifer spotted her mother and Audrey talking to some men in the parking lot and grew certain that the men were police officers. A few moments later, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer were back on the highway, alone. And the next night they were asleep in the truck, just inside California.

WHEN THE POLICE FINALLY CAUGHT up to them in the predawn hours, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer didn’t run or put up a fight. They weren’t surrounded by squad cars and brought down in a gunfight, as they had sometimes fantasized. Tips from family members led the police to Blythe, where officers placed the girls under arrest without incident and hauled them down to the Riverside, California, jail. There, they sat in a small cell together. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison,” said Bobbi Jo, crouched on the floor with her back against the wall.

But Jennifer had another idea. No one really knew what had happened in Bob’s bedroom. She thought about Bobbi Jo’s son, who would be left without a mother. “I’m going to take the blame for you,” she said. “No matter what.”

“Would you really?” Bobbi Jo asked.

“Yes.”

“You know I’m going to be with you forever if you do that.”

That was all Jennifer needed to hear.

They spent the next year sitting in separate cells on opposite ends of the small jail in Palo Pinto, near Mineral Wells. Though they weren’t allowed to visit with each other, they soon found ways to communicate. During the day they yelled through the bars, holding conversations from one end of the wing to the other. At night, they discovered that they could correspond through the air ducts that linked their two cells. While the other inmates tried to sleep, the two would cozy up to the ducts and continue to hone their strategy. Bobbi Jo updated Jennifer on her son. Jennifer reassured her she’d take full responsibility.

“Don’t worry, honey,” Jennifer said at one point. “Bob was fixin’ to get busted. We’re not going to get caught. They’re going to thank us. I love you.”

And Bobbi Jo said, “I love you too. We’re going to get through this.”

“I’m your backbone and you’re mine,” Jennifer said.

To the Palo Pinto County jury that assembled for Jennifer’s sentencing hearing in April, it must have been hard to imagine that the sweet-looking girl before them would be pleading guilty to such a heinous crime. Jennifer wore a black dress decorated with red rosebuds, and she’d employed toilet paper from her cell to spin tight curls into her long brown hair. She teased the bailiff, a longtime family friend, rubbing his bald head and joking with him, and she hugged her dad, gently pulling a piece of fuzz from his ear as he tried to tell her everything was going to be all right. Had the jury seen Bobbi Jo Smith, maybe they would have had the same reaction as the authorities in California. According to Jennifer, they’d said, “We know you didn’t do it. That tattooed girl did it. Don’t you dare take the rap for her.”

By the time she took the stand, she had already changed her story once. In her first account, Jennifer had told the authorities that Bob was forcing himself on her when Bobbi Jo walked in and wrestled him to the bed, giving Jennifer just enough time to shoot Bob. In her second statement, given four days later, she’d said that Bobbi Jo had left in Bob’s truck to make a grocery run and returned to find that Jennifer had shot him. On the witness stand, she told yet another version. She was in the bedroom with Bob, she said, her voice shaking a little as the prosecutor drew the story out of her. She’d shot him twice but didn’t kill him. Then Bobbi Jo had walked in and told Jennifer that she needed to finish him off.

“Bobbi Jo didn’t have the guts to do it or what?” the prosecutor asked.

“No, sir. She did not.”

“She didn’t?”

Jennifer shook her head no.

“But you did?” he asked.

“Yes, I did,” she said.

“She was all talk, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, sir,” Jennifer replied. “She was.”

After just a few hours, the jury came back with a sentence of 48 years in prison.

A few days later, Jennifer was awake at night waiting for her transfer to the state penitentiary in Gatesville. Bobbi Jo, who was still awaiting trial, yelled to Jennifer through the air ducts one last time. “I’m getting out,” she said. “You can’t be there for me no more. You’re going to be locked up. I’ve found somebody new.”

THIS MAY, JENNIFER JONES sat at a table behind the security glass in the visitors’ room of the Gatesville Prison, one month into her 48-year sentence. She was dressed in white prisoner’s garb, and she had gained about thirty pounds since she’d been caught. There was no trace of the smile she’d shown at her sentencing.

She perked up when she described how she had gotten a lot of time to visit with her mother. Kathy’s role in the road trip had earned her another few months in Gatesville as well. There, the two of them spent hours together, catching up, sharing stories, and talking about old times. Kathy had even apologized for not having been a better role model. But she had also denied that she had turned the girls in.

Jennifer said she wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. Her own story had changed again. She had fired only two shots at Bob, she told me; Bobbi Jo unloaded the final two. She swore she wasn’t trying to get out of something but that Bobbi Jo had manipulated her. “She’s in my head all the time,” she told me. “She has this book of spells, and she’d burn candles all the time and make people fall in love with her. She knew how to make people do things for her.” But now she’d show Bobbi Jo: She said she was planning to testify against her and would set the record straight when Bobbi Jo finally went to trial. “For all I know, I might have shot the wall first. I dropped the gun on the floor and Bob was shaking and Bobbi Jo picked up the gun and unloaded it.”

She told me she remembered what she’d written in her journal five years ago, about how she had been looking for a sign, trying to figure out which path to take. Only now, Jennifer was beginning to think her path had chosen her. “I always heard that Clyde Barrow was a relative, so I guess it’s in my genes,” she said. “To tell the truth, I thought they’d understand and let me go.”

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