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  A Killer’s Stunning Transformation

  “He was choking me, and I reached in and pulled my gun out and shot him. I shot him. Because I thought he was going to kill me.”

  “You emptied the gun into him, didn’t you?” asked her attorney.

  “I emptied the gun in him, yes, I did. I am so sorry! ”

  Rhonda Glover sobbed on the witness stand, but a moment later, when Assistant District Attorney Bryan Case cross-examined her, she was suddenly a different person altogether. The tears were gone; her tone brittle. Her eyes were ice.

  “Ms. Glover,” asked Bryan Case, “your earlier testimony on direct was that you and he basically met at the threshold of the door?”

  “Yes, and he began choking me.”

  “He began choking you. And you are going towards him pointing a gun at him, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Going towards him, yes?”

  “Yes,” Glover replied coldly.

  “And is that the way they taught you in the defensive use of firearms to deal with a dangerous situation?”

  “Yes.”

  “To go at it with a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he begins choking you, and you have shot this gun a number of times, correct?”

  Glover was getting progressively irked.

  “Yes.”

  “And if you shot it a number of times, you know how to shoot the gun, and how is it that your testimony now, I assume, is that you started pulling the trigger and just never stopped, right?”

  “Yes, I shot him. It just,” Glover paused, and then snapped, “I shot him. The gun just went off.”

  Also by Burl Barer

  Mom Said Kill

  Broken Doll

  Body Count

  Head Shot

  Murder in the Family

  FATAL

  BEAUTY

  BURL

  BARER

  All copyrighted material within is

  Attributor Protected.

  Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.

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  Copyright © 2011 by Burl Barer

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  eISBN-13: 978-0-7860-2792-7

  eISBN-10: 0-7860-2792-4

  First Printing: January 2011

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  A Killer’s Stunning Transformation

  Also by Burl Barer

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments and Clarification

  Resources

  For Jordan Barer, my beloved son

  Make your home a haven of rest and peace.

  —Abdu’l-Bahá

  This is about the right of a woman to defend herself in her own home.

  —Rhonda Glover

  This is about a mentally ill woman murdering the father of her child.

  —Travis Webb

  This is about the strangest story of madness and murder I’ve ever encountered.

  —Fred Wolfson

  The government is not allowed to take it upon itself to kill someone first and declare him or her an abuser later——only a woman can do that to a man.

  —Warren Farrell

  Prologue

  The story of James “Jimmy” Joste and Rhonda Glover has all the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy: the rich prince, the beautiful ingénue, true love, hot sex, backstabbing, intrigue, conspiracy, intoxicants and the contemporary equivalent of witches and ghosts.

  For fifteen turbulent years, Glover and Joste had all the trappings of marriage—except the certificate. He purchased her a $350,000 engagement ring and numerous extravagant residences; he fathered her son. The storybook romance of the wealthy Prince Charming and the all-American princess is heavily footnoted with episodes of irrational violence, illegal drugs, delusional mental states and frequent visits to their residences by law enforcement.

  Any story that combines vast wealth, exotic locales and beautiful women, with mind-altering drugs, Devil worshipers, demons and a Glock 9mm handgun, is, as the saying goes, “all good fun until someone gets hurt.”

  We’re talking death here. Rhonda shot Jimmy at least ten times. “I emptied the gun into him,” she told police. “I just kept shooting until he fell, but I honestly didn’t think I mortally wounded him. I wasn’t that good a shot.”

  She didn’t have to be a good shot. This was close range, rapid-fire. One expert insisted that six of the shots were fired into Joste after he was on the ground, including two well below the waistband of his shorts.

  To Rhonda Glover, the entire issue is the right of a woman to protect herself in her own home. “I am,” she proudly asserted, “the self-defense poster child.

  “On July 21, 2004, just five days before my birthday, I was brutally attacked, choked, and my life threatened by my ex-boyfriend, in my home in Austin, Texas,” said Glover. In her version of events, she was separated from her longtime millionaire boyfriend, Jimmy Joste, because she feared his violent and abusive nature.

  “I lived in fear of Jimmy Joste,” insisted Rhonda Glover, and her personal recollection of their fifteen-year relationship could very well be something along these lines:

  “When I met him, he was warm, kind, clever and crazy about me. We moved in together, but it wasn’t long before his drunken rage and violent outbursts had me shaking in terror. I couldn’t live with him, and he said he couldn’t live without me. He wouldn’t let me go. He stalked me, he scared me, he bought me and he forced himself on me. I bore him a son and placated him by allowing him to do what he wanted—to play the part of the generous lover. He could buy me gifts and houses, but he couldn’t claim my heart or my soul. No one except me knows what Jimmy Joste was like behind closed doors. He had one face to his friends, but it was a mask. The dollars he flashed blinded people, including me, to his dark side. He was sick, perverted, evil and dangerous. He wasn’t alone in his duplicity and deceit. I can give you names—important names of important people who use their wealth and prestige to obscure their true nature.”

  Rhonda claimed that she broke free from Joste, as best she could, living in a different city, and avoiding him at all costs. “I was terrified that I would be a missing person,” said Glover. “I would be
one of those skeletons in a remote area where hikers go, or that I would be a mother searching for her child on an AMBER Alert. Life was very weird for me. Jimmy had lost his mind. He had a secret life, and after he got comfortable doing drugs in my house, he decided to let me in on his alternative lifestyle. I am not crazy. I was with a crazy man. He was out of his mind. He threatened me, called me a bitch, said he was going to kill me, and then grabbed me by the throat. He was choking me. I shot him because I thought he was going to kill me. It was self-defense. I feared for my life.”

  The story of a battered beauty who, in final desperation, ends the cycle of violence sounds like a made-for-television movie. “It is more a made-up excuse for murder,” insisted a Travis County assistant district attorney (ADA). “She was waiting for him in the upstairs bedroom wearing a lovely flower-print sundress with no pockets. In her hand was a Glock nine-millimeter handgun. This was cold, calculated murder.”

  1

  You never forget your first car, first kiss or first corpse. That new car smell only lasts so long, and the olfactory sensation instigated by your best girl’s perfume, or lover’s cologne, lingers as treasured nostalgia. The stench of death clings to you like a parasite, fouling your mind and haunting your memories. No homicide detective forgets that first dead body.

  When you’re a homicide detective in Texas, snuffed lives litter your career’s landscape like so many scattered leaves. Each victim’s dignity must be preserved, and each crime scene must be kept pure. When you discover a corpse, investigate, don’t contaminate.

  The bullet-riddled body of Texas millionaire/oil entrepreneur James “Jimmy” Joste was discovered July 25, 2004, in the upscale Austin Mission Oaks residence technically owned by his estranged girlfriend, Rhonda Lee Glover. This event triggered a multistate investigation requiring involvement by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the United States Secret Service, the Kansas State Police and the homicide division of the Austin Police Department (APD).

  Prior to arresting the person responsible for Joste’s death, Austin homicide detectives Keith Walker and Richard Faithful uncovered allegations of conspiracy, financial fraud, manipulation of oil markets, kidnapping, child murder, drug dealing, satanic rituals and perverse sexual behavior by respected members of Texas’s social elite. The investigation began with a phone call from Janice Van Every on Sunday, July 25, 2004.

  “I came up to Austin to visit my son, Paul Owen,” explained Van Every. “At approximately nine-thirty P.M., Saturday night, July twenty-fourth, we went to the residence of my niece [Rhonda Glover] at Mission Oaks. I observed that the garage door was open, and a car parked inside. No lights were on, and we decided not to go in. We came back the next morning. The garage was still open, and a navy blue Volkswagen was still parked inside. I could see that the utility door was open. I tried knocking on the door and ringing the doorbell several times, with no luck. I also tried calling on the phone, but received no answer. I tried the front door, and it was unlocked. I opened it a crack, and then closed it. I yelled for whoever was inside to answer, but no one came. We became concerned and called police.”

  The first respondents on the scene were Officers Martinez and Paez. Knocking on the front door, they repeatedly made loud announcements of their presence, but no one responded. “We entered the house,” said Officer Richard Paez, “and immediately noticed the foul smell of something rotting. There were also large insects throughout the house— a possible indication that there was a dead body inside the home.” As the two Austin police officers moved up the stairs, the offensive odor increased in intensity.

  “Almost as we reached the top of the stairwell,” said Paez, “I saw what appeared to be a deceased person lying on the hallway floor. We decided not to go farther, walked out the way we came in, and then called our supervisor, and advised dispatch to summon all necessary units to the crime scene.”

  Homicide detectives Keith Walker, Eric De Los Santos and Richard Faithful were soon on their way to the Mission Oaks residence, along with Austin’s crime scene analysis team. “I’d been with the Austin Police Department about eleven years when that call came in,” recalled Keith Walker, “and I’d been a detective for about five and a half years. Homicide detectives investigate any unnatural death or any death that is not known to be natural. That includes accidental, overdoses, homicides, anything of that nature that doesn’t involve traffic.”

  It was Walker’s turn to take the role of lead detective under Austin’s rotation system. “Once you are assigned to a case,” explained Walker, “you then start again at the bottom and work your way up. Detective De Los Santos was there to assist me. Detective Faithful was number two, my backup detective, so to speak, and we also use other members to take statements and assist in the investigation, as needed.”

  When Walker arrived, the crime scene specialists had not yet entered the house: “That’s because we didn’t know at that time who owned the house, and we didn’t know for sure the identity of the victim. Once it was determined that the death was suspicious, the house was left alone, pending entry into the house in a legal manner. In this case a search warrant was required. We needed to know who owned the house, whose name was on the utility bills and who was paying the property taxes. Our Detective Fortune got right on that, Eric De Los Santos was already canvassing the neighborhood, and Ms. Van Every told Detective Faithful that the victim in the house was most likely Mr. James Joste, father of her niece’s nine-year-old son.”

  “Okay, here’s the story,” Faithful told his fellow detectives. “She says that her niece, Rhonda Glover, and Joste had split up, and that Glover had their son. There was supposed to be some sort of custody problem over their son, and neither of them was supposed to have custody of the boy. The aunt came looking for Glover because no one had heard or seen her for several months. She says that she was concerned for the boy and Glover, and she hoped that maybe Glover and the boy came back to Joste, or at least talked to him, and that he might know where they were. That’s why she came to the house.”

  The only thing detectives knew for sure was that there was a dead body, not yet identified, in the upstairs hall. The fact that the individuals who called the police were looking for Rhonda Glover and a nine-year-old child weighed heavily on Walker’s mind.

  “We didn’t know what had happened in that house,” affirmed Walker. “We didn’t know if there were other crimes involved as well. We had two major concerns. One was that Ms. Glover might be a suspect, and that her son could be in danger from her. The other concern was just as disturbing. It was equally possible that Glover and her son had been abducted, and both of them were in danger for their lives. We issued a broadcast nationwide to be on the lookout for them based on what little information we had at the time.”

  By the time everyone dispatched to the scene arrived, and Faithful had elicited basic information from Janice Van Every, Detective De Los Santos had spoken to most of the neighbors, including Andy and Judy Granger.

  “Andy Granger began to tell me how he only saw an older white male at the unit,” recalled De Los Santos, “but Judy Granger interrupted. She said that they would give us information, but did not want to be called into court. I tried to explain to her that if the information they provided was considered significant by the district attorney, then there was a possibility they could be called in. Judy stated that if that were the case, they have nothing to say. I left it at that and continued canvassing.”

  At 11:43 A.M., De Los Santos spoke with April Lord, Shannon Hopkins and Allison Atchley. “The three women could only recall that an older white male lived in the unit. They recalled that he seemed nice, waving, and he had a black motorcycle.”

  “The last time I saw the guy who lives there,” Paul Mathews told De Los Santos, “was on Tuesday. I saw him come in through the gate, and backing the VW into the garage. I didn’t pay a lot of attention because I was simply getting my mail.”

  Neighbor Nellie Byrne walked the neigh
borhood frequently, but did not notice anything out of the ordinary. She did recall seeing Joste’s garage door open on Thursday. Kathleen Dunegan also recalled seeing the garage door open on either Monday or Tuesday. “I had never seen him leave it open before,” she said. “In fact, I walked over and knocked on the door to check on him. I didn’t get any answer, so I left.”

  Jack Young told De Los Santos that he knew an older man lived in that unit, but didn’t know him personally. “I think he may have had a girlfriend,” said Young, “but that was some months ago.”

  “I know my neighbors slightly,” said Patricia Reichle. “I haven’t seen Rhonda Glover in about a year, or her son. Mr. Joste told me that Rhonda was living in their house in Houston. He’s had different people house-sitting from time to time,” Reichle explained, “but I think the last time anyone house-sat was several months ago. As for the garage door, I think I noticed it open since about Wednesday, the twenty-first. ”

  Sara Buss also spoke freely. “I haven’t seen anyone around the house other than the man who lives there,” she said. “The overhead garage door has been open for several days. I don’t recall if he left the garage door open all the time, but I definitely remembered that it has been open several days, and that there was that car backed into the garage. I haven’t seen anyone at the house for a few days.”

  Detective Faithful was standing in front of the residence when Wanda Stevens, a member of the home owners’ board for the community, pulled up to him. She kindly offered assistance. “Stevens informed me that the access codes to get into the gate are personalized, but that they have no way of tracking them,” said Faithful. “Stevens also informed me that there are no cameras in the community to monitor entry and exit.”

  Forty-five minutes after his final interview with Jimmy Joste’s neighbors, De Los Santos left the scene and drove to the station to draft a search warrant. Detective Fortune completed the required research, passing it on to De Los Santos.