September 2005
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.
AFTER THREE DAYS OF TRAVELING, Jennifer Jones was exhausted as she drove across the state line from Arizona into California. The baby-faced eighteen-year-old’s legs and arms were sunburned from the beams that shone down hard through the windshield, warming the cloth seats and intensifying the musty smell of cigarette smoke and marijuana. She was driving a 1989 blue-and-tan GMC pickup with a busted radiator that she and her new girlfriend, Bobbi Jo Smith, had stolen back in Texas.
“We can’t run forever,” Jennifer told Bobbi Jo; she’d seen too many episodes of America’s Most Wanted to think otherwise. Still, she felt glamorous being on the run, and she was a tiny bit disappointed that there wasn’t a blockade of state troopers ready to gun them down as they drove past the “Welcome to California” sign. The two had been combing the headlines of newspapers at gas stations all along Interstate 10, but not once had they seen any mention of Bob Dow, their former housemate, whom they had left back in Mineral Wells in his bed, his face covered with a pillow and pierced with three bullets.
If they were captured alive, they’d have a heck of a story to tell. Even if they were having a hard time remembering which version of the tale was true: Had Bobbi Jo pulled the trigger? Had Jennifer killed him? Or was it that Jennifer shot him in the arm and then Bobbi Jo finished him off? Their stories had begun to morph even before they’d left town. (The account that appears in this article is drawn from interviews with Jennifer Jones, her family and friends, police records, witness statements, and trial transcripts. Bobbi Jo Smith, whose trial is pending, was not interviewed on the advice of her attorney.)
On May 5, 2004, Bobbi Jo Smith, a nineteen-year-old with short-cropped bleach-blond hair and a petite boy’s frame, had sauntered into Jennifer’s father’s apartment. “We killed Bob,” she announced as Jennifer trailed in behind her.
At the apartment that day were Jennifer’s half sister Audrey; Audrey’s girlfriend, Krystal; and Jennifer’s mom, Kathy Jones, who had recently been paroled from prison on a robbery charge. “Is it true?” one of them asked, giggling nervously.
Jennifer’s mother thought the two kids were just joking around. Then she saw her trembling daughter nodding yes.
“Bob was raping Jennifer,” Bobbi Jo explained. “So she shot him.”
“If that’s true,” said Kathy, “you need to call the cops and tell them what happened.” Everyone glanced at one another, waiting for someone to call Bobbi Jo’s bluff, but she wasn’t kidding. And she had no intention of going to the police. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get out of here fast.” And before anyone could stop to think about it, all five of them jumped into Bob Dow’s truck. Bobbi Jo took the wheel as they sped out of town, telling the others, “I did this. I’ll drive.”
A couple days later and halfway across Arizona, the group started to splinter, and Jennifer and Bobbi Jo decided to head out on their own. Alone now, the two continued on into California. Jennifer watched Bobbi Jo nod off in the passenger’s seat as the sun set. She imagined their life together on the run. Maybe she could get a job as a waitress up in Washington State, a heaven she had seen on the pages of Better Homes and Gardens.
That night they pulled up behind an abandoned pool hall in the tiny town of Blythe, about ten minutes past the state line. They set a blanket and pillow down on the ground so they could look up at the stars while they listened to the truck’s radio. When George Strait’s “I Cross My Heart” came on, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer wrapped their arms around each other and slow-danced.
As soon as the temperature dropped, they climbed back in the truck and drifted off to sleep. They were living the outlaw dream: Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde. Jennifer had always believed that she was a distant relative of Clyde Barrow’s, and she knew the tragic ending to that story. But that didn’t matter. She was content for the first time in her life. Right up to the moment she heard a police radio outside the truck door.
JENNIFER JONES HAD BEEN LOOKING for logic and patterns in her surroundings in a diary she’d started at age fifteen, three years before she was accused of shooting Bob Dow in the head with a .22.
12-28-00 Dear Journal, These dreams are coming to me for a reason, showing me some kind of sign. Which path to take, I guess.
She’d had a lousy upbringing, even by the standards of Mineral Wells, a meth-scourged town whose population had declined and whose economy had crashed when Fort Wolters was closed, in 1975. The rough life was certainly familiar to Jennifer’s mother, whose childhood was marked by abuse. As a teenager, Kathy had rebelled against authority by sneaking out of the house and stirring up trouble. When she was fifteen, she’d stolen a horse and sold it for a couple hundred dollars. She’d tried to steal her grandma’s car when the old woman was taking a bath. Kathy told her mother that if she wasn’t going to live the right way, she was going to live the wrong way.
Kathy was 22 years old when she married Jennifer’s father, Jerry Jones, in 1985. By then she had already given birth to two girls, Audrey and Emily. A year later she was pregnant with Jennifer. A year and a half after that, she and Jerry had another girl, Stephanie. Four girls in six years. Kathy began partying, getting into drugs. She turned to theft and prostitution to keep up with her crack cocaine habit. When Jennifer was three years old, Kathy moved out of the house. Jennifer would hear stories about how her mom was cleaning other people’s homes and working as a prostitute for money.
January 22, 2001 Dear Journal, I spent the night with [Lawrence], but we didn’t do anything because…I didn’t want to. I woke up around 9…then Lawrence took me home. My sister said that I was turning out to be like my mom. I go somewhere and don’t tell no one. She is in prison. I’m not going to turn out like her.
Jerry struggled to persuade Kathy to come back. “The kids need you,” he’d say. But Kathy was in and out of jail on prostitution and drug charges. The family’s Sunday outings consisted of visits to see her. Jerry had quit his job at the local oil company, but he made his way by picking up odd jobs like fixing fences and clearing rocks out of fields. For food, he often shot deer and gathered vegetables from his mother’s garden so he’d have enough cash left over to pay the electricity bills. He was trying to create some stability. But by the time Jennifer was a teenager, the phrase “You’re going to end up just like your mother” was already following her around. Aunts and uncles often made the comparison. Physically, it was certainly true. Like Kathy, Jennifer was a pretty girl who threw herself into her laughs; she was big-boned and broad across the chest. Her behavior began to mimic Kathy’s as well.
February 5, 2001 Dear Journal, I had a blast last night. I tried weed for the first time. I got high. It felt okay. I couldn’t stand, then I couldn’t hold my eyelids up.…I’m disappointed in myself, but as long as I feel good, I don’t care. My dad isn’t even talking to me for staying out. . . . He said something. “I’m about to not care if you come back anymore.”
Jennifer began to take pride in the comparison to her mother. The way she saw it, Kathy was tough and a survivor. People spoke of the time she’d barely dodged a bullet—literally—and the time she’d almost died in a bar fight. Jennifer hoped people would talk about her that way someday. And so she started to explore what she called the two paths. On days when she’d be at her Aunt Anita’s house, making sweets with Ritz crackers and marshmallows and peanut butter, she was as delightful as any niece. But whenever someone would test her delinquent side, she couldn’t help herself. Once, when her sister Stephanie’s friends dared Jennifer to burn herself with a cigarette lighter, she pressed the hot metal tip onto her arm and left it there until her skin melted like a piece of caramel.
