Kathy was 22 years old when she married Jennifer’s father, Jerry Jones, in 1985. Kathy told her mother that if she wasn’t going to live the right way, she was going to live the wrong way. She’d tried to steal her grandma’s car when the old woman was taking a bath. When she was fifteen, she’d stolen a horse and sold it for a couple hundred dollars. As a teenager, Kathy had rebelled against authority by sneaking out of the house and stirring up trouble. The rough life was certainly familiar to Jennifer’s mother, whose childhood was marked by abuse. 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. 22.ġ2-28-00 Dear Journal, These dreams are coming to me for a reason, showing me some kind of sign. 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. Right up to the moment she heard a police radio outside the truck door. She was content for the first time in her life. Jennifer had always believed that she was a distant relative of Clyde Barrow’s, and she knew the tragic ending to that story. They were living the outlaw dream: Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde. When George Strait’s “I Cross My Heart” came on, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer wrapped their arms around each other and slow-danced.Īs soon as the temperature dropped, they climbed back in the truck and drifted off to sleep. 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. That night they pulled up behind an abandoned pool hall in the tiny town of Blythe, about ten minutes past the state line. 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. She imagined their life together on the run. Jennifer watched Bobbi Jo nod off in the passenger’s seat as the sun set. Alone now, the two continued on into California. I’ll drive.”Ī couple days later and halfway across Arizona, the group started to splinter, and Jennifer and Bobbi Jo decided to head out on their own. Bobbi Jo took the wheel as they sped out of town, telling the others, “I did this. “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. And she had no intention of going to the police. “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. Bobbi Jo Smith, whose trial is pending, was not interviewed on the advice of her attorney.) (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. 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. If they were captured alive, they’d have a heck of a story to tell. 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. 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. “We can’t run forever,” Jennifer told Bobbi Jo she’d seen too many episodes of America’s Most Wanted to think otherwise. 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. 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. AFTER THREE DAYS OF TRAVELING, Jennifer Jones was exhausted as she drove across the state line from Arizona into California.
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