Death Trap (11 page)

After she finished interviewing the children at the Bailey house, Laura Brignac called Tom McDanal. She knew he was with the team searching the McCord home. She was excited. She had a lead. An important piece of the puzzle, perhaps. Brignac knew where the focus of the search warrant should be centered. The kids had inadvertently mentioned several things that seemed to stand out. Now Brignac believed that if a crime had been committed in that house, there was no doubt where.

“The den,” Brignac told McDanal. “Look in the den.”

Standing outside the house, Tom McDanal went silent. That was information he did not want to hear now.

17

Though she had one year left of high school, Jessica Callis seemed overjoyed at the notion of being a mother. She had that glow about her face—a mother-to-be plumpness suited Jessica’s large frame. To top it off, she had hooked herself a responsible high schooler and dedicated “family man.” To boot, Alan was an active Christian. In addition to all that, a self-imposed shotgun to his back or not, Alan Bates planned to marry his pregnant girlfriend and make things proper.

The Bateses were a little taken aback by this new—sudden—fresh face in the family. Alan had known Jessica all of approximately six weeks. She was pregnant. She was having the child. They were getting married. The plan, for now, was Jessica would quit school and move into Alan’s parents’ house. All this, and no one really knew the first thing about the girl.

“What do we know about this person?” Kevin and Robert Bates later said the family asked themselves. Not necessarily in a derogatory fashion, but more out of curiosity and desire. “Who is she? We really don’t know
anything
about her, and she is going to now become part of our everyday lives?”

It wasn’t such a shock to the family that Jessica was into Alan as much as she seemed. Alan had a string of girls, throughout his junior-high and high-school years, vying for his attention. He never played into it, however, or abused the privilege of being popular with the ladies. Alan would just as well smile and be on his way. He dated—sure, he did. But dating was not something Alan focused on, as it was for so many of the other young men his age. Alan was busy with the bands he played in, studying, school politics, the theater. Girls were definitely not first on his teenage list of priorities.

“Our parents were young to become grandparents,” Kevin remembered. “But they were smart enough to know that Jessica was still a kid, too. She had some growing up to do.” No one in the family ever asked outright: “Was this the right girl for Alan?”

They simply accepted Alan’s choice and trusted his judgment.

Jessica was a kid. Of course, she came across immature and a bit obsessive at times. Many teenage girls can be that way. This was a period before text messaging and the Internet and cell phones. Teenagers filled their days and nights with other things. That said, neither time, space nor electronic gadgets could curb what postpuberty hormones inevitably forced on kids: the need for companionship. Jessica wanted more than anything else what she herself never had: a stable environment. Someone to love her unconditionally. It was not hard for Jessica to tell that the Bates family could provide it all.

“You see red flags,” Kevin said, commenting on those small outbursts in the beginning of Jessica’s more bizarre behaviors, and the stories she began to tell about her own family, “and you think part of it’s immaturity or her coming from a different background or different family.”

Diversity. America was built on it. Part of the fabric and DNA of every community.

The bottom line for the Bateses was that they weren’t about to judge this girl based on the fact that she had allowed herself to get pregnant. Or that she shared a few crazy anecdotes about growing up in the Callis household. Alan was not the type of person to have fallen for the blond, blue-eyed cheerleader, anyway, even though she might have fallen for him. In Jessica, Alan was attracted to what he viewed as her intellect. Jessica came across as very smart and intellectual. Alan liked that. She was also confident and wouldn’t back down. Strong. He liked that, too. And then, on top of all that, she put out.

“She talked a big game,” Kevin added later. “She had been, at one time, in the honors high school.” She had the foundation of aptitude there, a chance to broaden her opportunities, even though she was raised—again, according to what Jessica claimed—in such a disturbing, violent, abusive environment.

As Jessica moved in and commingled with the Bates family, nursing her growing belly, complaining about the difficulty of carrying the child, Alan continued at Shades Valley, working toward finishing his senior year. Jessica stayed home, sat around telling the stories of her life. Philip Bates was fairly diligent about keeping a family log of every important event in the children’s lives: baseball, soccer, football, whatever special occasion depicted the children growing up. When those albums came out and Alan shared the experiences of his formative years with Jessica, she countered with what were some of the most peculiar family tales of her own.

Jessica had tears in her eyes. They were sitting around, going through a large binder of Bates childhood memories, bringing Jessica into the fold of the Bateses’ lives.

“What is it?” Alan asked, concerned about the pain Jessica had apparently been whisked back into while thinking about how well the Bates family got along. How “normal” their family seemed.

“My father, he was
so
abusive. . . . When he left the house, he burned all of our family photographs,” Jessica said, according to Bates family members. “We have no pictures of any of us left.”

Alan and the others were drawn into this. Whether it was true or not, Kevin Bates later pointed out, “We never knew or questioned, not until years later.”

Alan felt a pang of sympathy for Jessica rise in him as she told these stories. He was falling deeper in love with her. Which was, many later speculated, the way Jessica had planned it. She used the sympathies of others to manipulate her way—“or worm, actually,” one source put it—into the good graces of the Bates household. She saw an opening and went for it.

“Alan felt—I know he did—that he could give Jessica a better life,” Kevin said.

Alan developed deep compassion for Jessica as she took on the role of motherhood, acting like she was born for it. With the new family they were creating together, Alan said more than once, he could provide Jessica with the stability she’d never had. They’d break the cycle. With their child. Their marriage.

Make it work.

Together.

“There was the whole package that Alan brought to her,” Robert later said. Alan’s oldest brother had been out of college for several years when Jessica moved in. “There was nothing spectacular about her.”

White picket fence. Three-bedroom house. Two-point-two kids. Two cars. A dog. Maybe a boat. Family walks in the park after Alan got out of work.

It all sounded so good. So warm and fuzzy. Jessica could envision it all, as if writing the script of her life—all centered, of course, around the birth of her first child.

The day Samantha was born, March 20, 1990, was full of joy and love and caring in the hospital for everyone. Dian Bailey was there, as was Albert. Kevin and Robert, along with new grandparents Joan and Philip, were beside themselves with pride and adoration. Here was this new child in their lives. Such a tremendous bundle of joy. A gurgling, pudgy, red-faced gift from God, dropped from Heaven into their laps.

What a blessing.

“It was a shared family moment,” Kevin said, recalling that day in the hospital. “An exciting first grandchild for both families.”

This was the first time the two families had gotten together in the same room since the wedding back on January 26, 1990. There was a mild strain of awkwardness. Everyone was still getting to know each other. But things were okay. They all got along. Albert Bailey explained that he was a handyman, a local contractor with a small business. “If it was a deck to be built, he could build it,” Jessica said of Albert. “If it was a water heater to be replaced, he could do it.” He was a “very handy guy.”

If Alan ever needed work, Albert suggested, he could throw the boy some hours, here and there.

Every dollar would help.

And so, they were an American family making the best of this unplanned situation. Alan was determined to be a great father, and he very likely would be, considering his pedigree. Jessica was steadfast in her desire to raise her children in stark contrast to her own upbringing. She was going to give the kid everything she never had.

Philip Bates lived by the common affirmation that “two wrongs never made a right.” The family was happy to have Jessica and the child in their home. That traditional Christian upbringing, whereby you got married first, had children, climbed up the ladder of your career, had cookouts and birthday parties on Saturdays, attended church on Sundays, and subliminally counted down the moments until your death, was but a pipe dream. Yet, Alan was a traditionalist. Getting Jessica pregnant, he was determined to do whatever he had to do to give her and his child the life they deserved.

“My parents were worried that Alan felt pressured from his conventional upbringing to marry Jessica and be an honest man and father, and all those things,” Kevin said.

Indeed, just like that, Alan was an adult. He was seventeen years old. Still in high school. It was the beginning of a new decade. The 1980s were history. Alan had a bright, prosperous future ahead of him.

Now he had a wife and child.

How things could change overnight.

Alan never viewed any of this as having a shotgun poked in his back, forcing him into a Las Vegas chapel. He embraced the idea of marriage and fatherhood. Took on the role as if he had been born to do it.

By April 1990, Alan and Jessica had lived with his parents for nearly two months. They decided to move, however. The best place was Hoover, into Jessica’s mother and stepfather’s house. Sam was a month old. Living in Hoover would be more convenient for Alan and school. Dian could help out with the baby. Jessica could begin to think about her future.

That lasted a month. It was said that a fight erupted between Jessica and her mother. Whatever the case might be, Alan and Jessica were back at the Bates house in Cahaba Heights four weeks after leaving.

Jessica was different this time around. She pulled Joan Bates aside one day, for example, shortly after moving back in, and said, “Listen, you are not to answer the phone if my mother calls. You cannot invite my mother over to this house. I will say
when
she can see her granddaughter.”

It was a control issue: Jessica had the power—the baby—to refuse her mother something she had apparently wanted. Payback
was
a bitch. It was as if Jessica was proving to her own mother how she had felt—the pain she had experienced growing up, being shuffled between her biological father and mother, and being put in the middle of what was a war between her parents.

Jessica was very much in the driver’s seat of her life now. It was as if, as soon as she had a little bit of power over someone, she wielded it. And because of the tenuous relationship she’d had with her mother throughout the years already, Jessica was calling the shots now that
she was a mother.

An eye for an eye.

For all those in the Bates household, the situation became volatile, not to mention uncomfortable and, at times, embarrassing. They had no real chance of seeing or understanding it at the time, but a pattern was developing in front of their eyes.

Robert was out of the house. He came home from time to time. Being away from the situation—distanced—Robert could see things the others couldn’t. It was like not seeing your cousin for a year—you instantly noticed how much she had grown.

“I noticed immediately,” Robert said, “that as Alan finished high school, things for him and Jessica were slowly beginning to become out of balance.”

Out of balance,
the family would soon come to understand, would turn into the understatement of Alan and Jessica’s life together. From the moment Alan married Jessica, his life would be thrown into chaos. Because beneath a seemingly composed veneer that Jessica presented when around the Bates clan, coming out of her shell every once in a while to tell a tale of horror or to try to gain sympathy, lay an incredible brewing drama. Inside Jessica’s soul, one could argue, she kept hidden an incapacitating, silent rage that would expose itself as she became more comfortable in her role as Mrs. Alan Bates. It was a fury, maybe even a woman’s wrath, about to come to life.

18

After initial testing by the Bureau’s forensic lab in Atlanta, it was learned the blood found on the McCords’ couch that Albert Bailey had tossed out near that Dumpster across town was not a match to that of Alan or Terra Bates.

Indeed, the blood was someone else’s.

Law enforcement had not expected this. The case had begun to look like a slam dunk. Most law enforcement involved would have bet that the blood was Alan’s and Terra’s. However, here was scientific proof it was not. A setback, sure. But no reason to abandon the hunch that Jessica McCord had something to do with the demise of her ex-husband and his wife.

As Jessica and Jeff began to accept what was going on in their lives, things seemed a bit surreal to Jeff. He was one of the cops generally involved in conducting the search and disrupting someone’s life. Now the cops were focused on him. How quickly the tables had turned.

Jeff said he had always wanted to become a police officer. “Because I had been a fan of shows such as
Adam-12, S.W.A.T.
and
Hill Street Blues,
” he told me.

Jeff had early “designs” and goals pre- and postcollege of being a probation officer. His dream then was to help children. Show wayward kids that there was life after crime. Prove that everyone deserved a second chance. He even once went to work for The King’s Ranch, a Christian-based, adolescent-treatment center in Shelby County.

“I worked primarily in boys homes,” he said. “My job entailed teaching or helping to teach social and independent living skills to ‘at risk’ youth with a variety of emotional, psychological and behavioral problems.”

At one time Jeff McCord was a mentor. He believed children without a chance in life deserved a role model who could show them that achievement was a state of mind. Success was there for everybody, regardless of class, race, gender or social standing. You could do anything you wanted in life. This had always been one of Jeff’s core convictions, on which he aimed to build his experience as a police officer upon.

“Cops, deputies and road troopers are in the best position to help people in need or distress,” Jeff noted. “Be it by direct action or referral.”

According to one of Jeff’s high-school teachers from Opelika, Alabama, a man who later became friends with Jeff’s mother, Jeff’s problems did not start until he met and married Jessica.

“I observed [Jeff] as he attended church from a young child,” Bobby Kelley, Jeff’s former science teacher, later noted. “After he left home, I became acquainted with his mother, and close friends [with her] a few years prior to his involvement with Jessica.”

The Jeff McCord that Bobby Kelley knew and taught was “an obedient child,” Bobby said, “slightly introverted and very respectful of authority. He was an average student and average athlete. Although he was supported by his mother in his participation of sports, there was a noticeable absence of a father figure.” Jeff’s parents had divorced.

Bobby said there was no doubt Jeff was a “man’s man.” Jeff’s sexuality “or sensuality” was never questioned then, but there were observations and issues surrounding Jeff’s ability to bond with the opposite sex in a healthy manner. His fear of being rejected by a female he had “conquered” was likely, some suggested, one of the reasons why Jeff was easily influenced and controlled by Jessica. He had won her heart. To Jeff, that was the difficult part of the relationship—the challenge. Whatever happened afterward, whatever supposed hell he had to endure, was “the price” you had to pay in order to keep her.

“The way he changed after meeting Jessica was very strange to those of us who knew him,” Bobby remarked.

Looking over Jeff’s life, however, you could clearly see the correlation between the value he put on opposite-sex relationships and the choices he later made. Jeff’s mother was there for him—always. She had raised a great kid. Without a male role model around, it was Jeff’s mother who took him to baseball and football practices and cheered for him at the games.

More important to Jeff’s future relationship with Jessica, there was a “conservative presence that permeated through other things,” Bobby Kelley claimed, “like Jeff’s inexperience with the dating area of his life, and the indirectness he dealt with confrontation and, to a degree, allowing manipulation to occur [in order to] prevent conflict.”

Jeff had a “very healthy” relationship with his mother. He was allowed to grow, Bobby said, “and function without conflict” in the home. This is an important piece of a healthy upbringing. The idea that children learn to resolve disagreements in their lives with chaos is wired into their psyche at an early age. With Jeff, however, his character, or the impression of who he was as a young man, was never made that obvious or fully developed, Bobby Kelley speculated.

“If I have given the impression he was weak, that is not the case at all. He was able to function well on his own two feet. He had a . . . healthy communication with his mother during and after he left home.”

That all changed, however, after Jessica was introduced into the dynamic of Jeff’s life. Here was a dominating personality now taking over the role as authoritarian, in other words. Jessica was stronger than Jeff emotionally; she had been through more. If you believe Bobby Kelley’s version, Jeff was just happy to have someone love him.

It was when he started dating Jessica that the communication between Jeff and his mom deteriorated rapidly, Bobby said.

“I don’t want it to seem as if I’m saying that he left a dominant mother for a dominant wife. It wasn’t that way. [Jeff’s mom] is a strong woman, but [she] clearly wasn’t a dominant, controlling, manipulative person.”

Like Jessica.

Regardless, Jeff stopped responding to his mother’s phone calls after he and Jessica married. No doubt, Jessica told him not to speak with his mother before consulting with her first.

When he heard that, Bobby Kelley suggested to Jeff’s mom that she start sending correspondences to her son via the Pelham PD, bypassing Jessica altogether.

“It was during the time that [Jeff’s mom] was unable to communicate with [Jeff] that she called me,” Bobby Kelley said later. “The discussion was . . . that it would be very necessary to contact him at the [Pelham] PD, be it by phone or mail, to insure that [he] got the correspondence, whether he responded or not. I clearly told [Jeff’s mom] that was the best way to insure communication avenues were open and we both agreed that [Jeff] would not have to suffer the brunt of having to deal with his decision to communicate. So it was [Jeff’s mom] who initiated this activity with the desire to have a dialogue.”

And it was Jessica who put the brakes on it.

At home there’s no question Jessica monitored what was said between Jeff and his mother. She was keeping Jeff—same as she had with other people in her life—away from someone he loved.

Meanwhile, Jeff, instead of dealing with the conflict he knew it would cause between them, decided to go behind Jessica’s back and, on the surface, pacify her insecurities.

Jeff’s mother called the house one day. “He’s not here,” Jessica said.

“Have him call me,” Jeff’s mom demanded.

“Oh, I will. . . .”

But Jeff never called. When his mother finally did speak with him, he said he had never received the messages.

Jeff had a woman in charge of his life—one who felt threatened by the woman who had raised him. Jessica knew she could not control Jeff’s mother. This caused a transference of anger and put pressure on Jeff.

“I truly [know Jeff’s mom] feels that this factor played a part in the breaking of [Jeff’s] spirit by [severing] family ties, to which, I regret, he had to make so many emotional disconnections,” Bobby Kelley later said. “It is that point that led me to tell her that I felt [Jeff] was being manipulated to play her to get what Jessica wanted. And that, I expected, due to his passive nature, Jessica would or had learned the buttons to push to get [Jeff] to do whatever made her happy.”

Jessica was the puppet master, that much is clear. She told the man what to do and when to do it—and he obeyed her. Former friends and relatives all agreed: Jeff was in the same boat as many others who had to deal with Jessica over the years. You agreed with her so as not to have to endure her wrath. It was easier to oblige than face a monster.

Except Alan. Alan Bates wasn’t going to sit back and allow the woman to dictate his life, especially when he could or could not see his children. A line had to be drawn.

 

 

Standing with Jessica, watching all this attention being paid to his house, Jeff McCord thought about those moments when he valued the idea that his true calling was to help people in need. Now here he was, on the opposite side of that equation. His life had flipped over on him. The cops were chasing him.

“I grew up in the church,” Jeff commented. “It would be safe to say I have done my share of ‘backsliding. ’”

As Jeff and Jessica stood outside, Tom McDanal was on the telephone with Detective Laura Brignac, who had just finished interviewing Albert and Dian Bailey, as well as Jessica’s children. Brignac knew where the search needed to be centered inside the McCord house. The den.

She explained her theory to Tom McDanal.

“We’ve released the house,” McDanal said disappointedly.

Brignac’s shoulders dropped. She knew that in order to go back into the McCord home once it was officially released, even with this new information from the children, the HPD needed a second search warrant. And getting a second warrant on a location you had just finished searching was going to take some time.

Which was exactly what Jeff and Jessica McCord wanted to hear.