Death Trap (13 page)

It was an outrageous lie. So far removed from the person Alan proved himself to be. Jessica offered no proof whatsoever to back up this claim. It went totally against the grain of what Alan stood for and believed morally. What was more, every one of Jessica’s and Alan’s friends claimed otherwise: Alan had done whatever he could to save the marriage, while Jessica had done whatever she could to see that it failed.

 

 

If what Jessica said is true, and there was always a fine line between fantasy and reality, truth and lies, where Jessica was concerned, she had no ethical teaching growing up. Jessica was raised in Hoover, in the same house her mother, Dian, and stepfather, Albert Bailey, lived in at the time Alan disappeared and was found dead. The neighborhood was the same as any other middle-class locale in Hoover. Not a bad place to live out your formative years as an Alabamian. Yet, even though Jessica later said she hardly recalled much of her first five years, she claimed her life was nothing more than a wild, unstable and terribly abusive ride. She said her mother was constantly running away from an offensive, violent husband, a man locked in a perpetual pattern of destroying lives.

According to Jessica, George Callis, her biological father, was a brute of a man who seemed to think the answer to disciplining his children was to scare them into submission. Jessica related once that her father liked to lock her in the closet for hours when she was unruly or disrespectful. There was one time, she later explained in medical documents, when George displayed “snap judgment” anger. The Callises’ dog, Champ, was down the block from their home, tearing it up with another dog, rolling around on the ground, biting and grunting.

Jessica ran home to get her dad, hoping he could do something to stop it.

George jumped in the family car, drove down the block, asked Jessica where the dogs were fighting.

“There . . . hurry,” she said. Little Jessica was terrified that Champ was going to get hurt. Or worse, be killed by the other dog.

George drove into the yard and ran over both dogs, according to two reports of the incident, crushing them to death in front of several neighborhood kids.

This sort of violence has a lasting effect on a child; they learn quickly to contend with stressful situations by resorting to violence themselves.

One of the Callises’ neighbors, Dottie Gillispie, told
Birmingham News
reporter Carol Robinson that George hit Dian, but that Dian didn’t want to do anything about it because she feared the man so much.

“He had beat the hell out of her,” Dottie was quoted as saying.

George was abusive, no question. There is a paper trail of evidence left in the man’s wake to support the fact that he liked to beat on women and children. Dian and George were divorced on March 6, 1978. Jessica was almost seven years old. George moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, after living in Semmes, Alabama, for a short time. He drove into Birmingham every other weekend to pick up the kids for visits. As it was, Dian took George to court in hopes of him fulfilling his obligation as the kids’ father and paying child support. She also wanted him to pay medical and “other” bills he was responsible for, per a court order—which was where the tug-of-war, the children at the center, started between Dian and George.

George used the kids as a means to seek revenge on Dian for the obvious hatred he harbored against her and the legal issues surrounding the demise of their marriage. Part of the divorce decree stipulated that George
shall pick up the children on the front porch [of Dian’s home] when exercising his rights of visitation and shall not enter the premises unless explicitly invited therein.

It sounded familiar, as Jessica later insisted on the same language in her divorce with Alan. The major difference, of course, was that when Alan Bates said he was going to pick up his children, he showed up. In Jessica’s case, as a young girl of seven and eight, unaware of the bitterness involved in some divorce and custody matters, reports claim that it wasn’t uncommon for Jessica to sit on the porch and wait for a father who never showed up. And when he did, he was loud, violent, drunk and accusatory, threatening that if the children—Jessica, her brother and sister—were unruly in any way, he would never pick them up again.

George’s true madness unveiled itself after he and Dian separated. He kicked Dian and the three kids out of the house they lived in and sent them packing without any of their clothes, no money or accommodations. The kids missed school. Had nowhere to live. Very little food. No means of support.

George laughed at Dian. Made her look bad in front of the children whenever the opportunity presented itself. According to a civil action case Dian filed some years after the end of the marriage, she claimed the reason they’d separated was because George beat her. She was scared for her life. There were times when George struck Dian in front of the children:
in the face, slapping and beating her on her arms, back, and other parts of her body,
one court filing contended.

Dian sensed George would one day murder her. That killer instinct was there in his eyes. He was a wife batterer, sure. A drunk, no doubt. But there was something else about him when he snapped into a violent rage. He blacked out. His aggressive behavior escalated. And Dian’s fear meter went off the charts.

Dian was able to get George kicked out of the house finally so she and the kids could move back in.

George moved to Tennessee during the late 1980s. It was then that he met a sweet woman, Olivia, who soon became his wife. Within no time, however, Olivia was now bearing the burden of George’s insanity and violent nature as he started to hit her.

The guy could not leave women alone. It was something inside him. One drink led to two, which led to George walking into the home and abusing his wife.

But then, George took things to a new level one night. This happened just as Alan and Jessica, in late 1993, began to experience major problems themselves. Jessica had long ago written off her father as a deadbeat dad with whom she wanted nothing to do. But she was about to be rattled by a telephone call explaining what George had done—a crime that would turn out to be, in many ways, a prelude to what would take place in Jessica’s own life.

20

Roger Brown was an old-fashioned Southern prosecutor who believed in the Joe Friday approach in a court of law: “I’m a cop. . . . All we want are the facts.”

Brown was a tried-and-true Alabamian, right down to his deep-seated Christian values. For twenty years he served as the lay minister at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Homewood. He prided himself on being a straight shooter. Liked to do things by the book.

As the chief district attorney (DA) for Jefferson County, Brown had his hands full with cases ranging from white-collar crime to child abuse, rape, theft and murder. A broad brushstroke of crime to contend with. Brown was a member of the Alabama Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Rules of Criminal Procedure, and he served as a member of the supreme court’s Advisory Committee on Pattern Jury Instructions. When it came down to it, Roger Brown knew the ins and outs of a courtroom because he believed in the values that Lady Justice doled out—and he had spent a better part of his life experiencing it all firsthand.

Brown was contacted at his office on Monday morning, February 18, 2002, by the HPD. He was briefed about what was going on. If the case ever made court, Brown knew, he would be in charge.

Certainly, for the bad guys in Brown’s district, you did not want to stand on the opposite side of the courtroom facing off against this solidly built man with the deep baritone voice. His Southern drawl casually accentuated an eloquence Brown had fashioned, and few could boast of sharing it with him.

The part of the job Brown didn’t favor as much as actually working in the courtroom was supervising all of the attorneys in his district.

“I had administrative responsibilities for the office . . . and supervising those attorneys was like, ah”—Brown took a moment and thought about his choice of words—“herding cats, as they say. Supervising forty lawyers got to a point where it wasn’t fun anymore.”

Brown said he spent most of his time listening to the complaints of attorneys in the district. But when a hot case came around, he had no trouble forgetting about the shortcomings of the job and getting down to the business he was hired to take care of.

He jumped in headfirst.

Detective Sergeant Tom McDanal called Brown and explained to the prosecutor what was going on with the McCords. McDanal went into great detail about the case, describing the evidence they had collected thus far, along with his thoughts, ending with, “This is what we got, Roger.”

“Search warrant?” Brown wanted to know.

“Yes,” McDanal said, explaining that the HPD needed that second warrant. “And we want to arrest her.”

“Well, let’s do the [second] search warrant first,” Brown suggested, “see what comes out of it—and we’ll make the arrest after that.”

One step at a time. Be prudent. The guilty always make mistakes. Not that McDanal had suggested such a thing, but the idea was to make the case stick, as opposed to rushing into it.

Brown thought about things. There were a few aspects of the case that struck him immediately. Inside the trunk of Alan’s rental car, forensics uncovered one bullet that had hit Alan in the wrist and went through his watch. A .44 caliber.

“Probably the only reason that it stayed in him,” Brown said later, “is because it hit his watch. It’s the only bullet we got.”

Brown contemplated this fact:
We’ve got us eight bullet holes, four in each victim, but only one bullet that was
removed . . .
during autopsy.
That meant there could likely be additional projectiles somewhere. Maybe inside the McCord home. But the first search had not turned up anything. In fact, out of all the ammunition the HPD uncovered inside the McCord house during the first search, not one bullet was a .44 caliber.

Detective Laura Brignac weighed in with her thoughts about Jessica and Jeff McCord, Albert and Dian Bailey, letting Brown know where she was coming from. Brignac could tell by interviewing Dian and Albert, especially, that Jessica and her mother had some sort of pull on the men in their lives, which meant that there might be more people involved.

“Dian Bailey and Jessica,” Brignac said, “definitely ruled the roost. What they said in that family went. As a matter of fact, the control they had over these men [Albert and Jeff], the more we got into the investigation, became obvious. Albert was henpecked. I don’t know another word for it. Albert wanted to cooperate, say something, but you could tell that the wrath of Dian and Jessica would have been upon him. We wondered later what Jessica had on Albert to control him as much as she did. He was afraid. He feared Jessica. Heck, everybody feared Jessica.”

From what Brignac could discern, looking into Jessica’s eyes, talking to her during those early moments of the investigation, “There is no conscience there. It’s all about her manipulating and controlling. She did that—and did it well.”

Roger Brown was no wet-behind-the-ears investigating prosecutor. Analyzing a suspect in a murder case was all well and good, but he needed hard evidence to arrest Jessica McCord. He could not rubber stamp an arrest warrant without something tangible, concrete. That said, however, Brown and the HPD, now certain the case was theirs, knew there had to be spent projectiles somewhere. This was going to be the key here. Another bullet. The HPD needed to find it. Because the bottom line now was that all DA Roger Brown and the HPD had was, at best, a few spurious accusations and several circumstances pointing to Jessica killing her ex-husband and his wife. As far as something solid linking Jessica, Jeff or the both of them together to any crime, well, they had nothing. That first search of the McCord home had yielded no trace evidence.

There was a second problem. The house itself. The McCord home was trashed. The garage, for one, was cluttered from side to side, roof to ceiling. The woman was a slob to the tenth power. In having a close look at the inside of the home during that first search, the HPD considered that finding anything they could use was going to be like walking through a maze without an end.

“Literally,” Detective Brignac said later, “we thought of [finding a spent projectile in that house] as finding a needle in a haystack, solely because that house was such a mess.”

The one thing about cops, however, is that they are diligent and tenacious, and most have type A personalities. They don’t give up. When cops smell the smoke of a gun barrel, they keep searching for the source—no matter where it takes them or how difficult the search might seem.

DA Brown just had to convince a judge that a second search on the same property was going to be worth the court’s signature.

21

Alan was distraught over the woman he loved. He was sleeping on a cot on the campus of the University of Montevallo. He and Jessica were arguing whenever they spoke. With all this turmoil surrounding him, Alan decided to fall into his studies in order to make sure he could at least provide for his children, should he and Jessica not make it. Alan wasn’t giving up on the marriage by any means. But as he started his senior year, he was at his wit’s end now, wondering if Jessica would ever change.

“He seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Kevin said, “from our perspective, simply because she wasn’t contributing anything to the family. She wasn’t doing anything but spending every dollar that he made.”

Nearly two hundred miles north, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jessica’s biological father, George Callis, was living with his second wife, Olivia. He was totally disconnected from the children he fathered with Dian. Not long before Alan started sleeping on the campus, a series of events in George Callis’s life took place that gave rise to the idea that Jessica’s stories of an abusive childhood might not be so exaggerated, after all.

It was near six o’clock on the night of November 11, 1992. George called the local Chattanooga Police Department. There was a problem at his house, he said.

“I need an ambulance,” George said. He sounded resolutely calm and collected for a guy who needed medical help at his home ASAP.

“What’s the problem, sir?”

A pause. Then, “I’ve been beating my wife,” George said stoically. “She stopped breathing.”

Officers and medical technicians arrived soon after the call to find George upstairs, standing over Olivia, staring down at her.

Olivia was laid out on the bathroom floor. Unconscious. Still as a rock.

“What happened?” one cop asked.

“Um, I, well, I beat the hell out of her,” George stated.

The life, too. Olivia was dead. Her face was so badly beaten, cops could barely recognize a human being underneath all the blood and bruises. It looked as though George had taken a baseball bat to the woman’s face. He had finally graduated—a wife beater had turned a corner and had become a killer.

George was arrested, found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. It was there, amid the confines of cement walls and barbed wire, that George Callis, according to the dozens of pages of scribbled gibberish he sent me, found Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Both of them were now guiding his every move. These days, you ask George a question about the way he treated his family back then, or why he killed his second wife, you get something along the lines of:
I have prayed about this and the HOLY SPIRIT has led me to recall what the LORD JESUS said at Matthew
10v8.
. . .
Then an extended quote from the Bible follows, with George stepping back in at some point, adding,
Also, at least this could be the avenue whereby I could expound on the fact GOD and HIS SON JESUS plus THE HOLY SPIRIT are
trying
to get people to see [how] abortion is, if it continues, the way SATAN is blinding people and that GOD will have to pour HIS WRATH on us. GOD uses base ones and despised ones too, anybody HE chooses, to do what HE wants.
Money
, or the love of it, is not my primary concern. . . .

(Yes, George asked me for money in exchange for information, which I, of course, refused.)

This man, the same person who had raised Jessica and her siblings, arguably guiding them through those early, influential, formative years of childhood, sent me page after page after page of this “Scripture-inspired” nonsense, much of it entirely unreadable.

 

 

Despite all that had happened in their short lives together, Alan never stopped talking about the theater. The lights. The stage. All that went into the production of a Broadway play. It was part of Alan’s DNA—his release from the doldrums and anxieties of a marriage on the verge of imploding. Alan was possessed with being the man behind the curtain; he didn’t want anything to do with the spotlight. No notoriety or top billing. Instead, it was the lighting, the set design. Those aspects of a production that were done nearly anonymously.

“Alan is the one who will go on and win a Tony Award,” Joan Bates said, knowing how dedicated her son was to what he believed God had put him on the earth to do.

“He actually had a deal with Mom,” Kevin said later with a humble laugh, “that he’d buy her a Jaguar when he did [win].”

As the Christmas holiday of 1993 approached, Alan and Jessica were like two cars heading in opposite directions. While Alan’s collegiate life soared, Jessica’s homemaking and attempt at taking on odd jobs slid down as she fell into an abyss of depression and self-pity. This depression, doctors evaluating Jessica in the years to come would say, and the tenuous mental state that Jessica was in, seemed to manifest into “a manipulative fashion for secondary gain.”

She saw an avenue for which to blame others for her troubles and maybe get something out of it.

Married life was all about Jessica. Her world centered not on her children, Alan or what she could offer a failing marriage. Instead, Jessica focused on her own needs and the advantage she could take of the situation.

As Alan spent more time at Montevallo, harnessing his passion for the stage as a means to deal with a home life breaking apart, Jessica began to wonder once again what was going on. What was truly keeping Alan away from home? Was there someone else? Had Alan met another woman?

Jessica soon got a second wind and made some decisions. She went out and acquired her GED, as promised. Then decided to start taking classes herself.

Where?

Montevallo, of course. If Alan could be successful and graduate from college, why in the hell couldn’t she? She was tired of staying home, taking care of his kids. Fed up with cooking his meals. Washing his clothes. Changing diapers. Playing the housewife. It was time she took control of her own destiny. What if Alan left her? Where would Jessica be then? What would she have to fall back on?

Heading into the heart of winter 1993, after about a year of living in a household of numbing relentlessness—doing the same things and getting the same results, fighting and arguing and not working together—by the beginning of 1994, Jessica was twenty-two years old and was now taking her life back. No more was she going to lie around the house all day and night wasting away.

It was time to get off her butt and become somebody.

Do something.

By now, Jessica told anyone who would listen that Alan was hitting her, that he was abusive and mean-spirited. That he yelled and screamed at the kids. He was this terrible, rotten man. She was also saying they didn’t get along sexually. Didn’t share the same religious beliefs. And, to top it off, their politics were so far separated from each other, she often wondered how they ever got along to begin with.

“We were very incompatible,” Jessica commented later in court. “Between religion and politics and everything. Sexuality. I mean, just everything!”

Alan never once believed that couples should end a marriage or relationship because there were problems. He never felt that “rough times” were an indicator that the relationship was doomed. A marriage was a sacred bond. But also a living, breathing thing. It was going to experience ups and downs. Highs and lows. Love might even come and go, but Alan was determined. He was in it for the long haul. He hoped Jessica felt the same.

Jessica began to go out. As she did, she learned quickly that there was life beyond the four walls of her living room, the whine of two young kids and a television set. She was young. She could work at it and get her looks back. She could show Alan she wasn’t some lazy-ass housewife who depended on a man for everything.

“Before [McKenna] was born, there were some troubles,” Kevin Bates recalled, speaking about this period, “but Alan seemed to think that they were behind them, up until the new baby was born. When she was pregnant with [McKenna], everything was going forward.” Indeed, the marriage was fluid, moving in a
direction.
It had purpose and meaning. “After [McKenna] was born, this was when Jessica decided that she suddenly wanted to go back to school.”

Now the marriage was moving in two directions. Neither of them knew where the other was going. Or what the other wanted out of the union—if anything.

Alan did everything he could to take on more responsibility. He did not want to deprive his wife of her supposed “dream.” He juggled two kids and two jobs and still found the time to study and continue going to school himself. The man never slept.

This, mind you, while Jessica took
a
history class. One course. Which amounted to about three hours of class time and study per week.

No sooner had Jessica gone back to school when she came home one night and began hootin’ and hollerin’ to Alan about a “new friend” she had met in school. Some guy. One of her classmates. They got along like buddies, she said. He was “helping” her through some tough times, both in school and at home.

To Alan, this was a major relief. “She’s making friends . . . that’s great,” Alan told family members. It sure beat sleeping all day and feeling sorry for herself. Getting fat and angry and bitter.

Near Valentine’s Day, 1994, after almost two years of working on keeping the marriage together, Jessica approached Alan with an idea.

“I need to take a trip to Washington, [D.C.],” she said, “for a class project I am working on in history.” Jessica said she needed to do some research for a paper that was coming due. The trip would serve two purposes: schoolwork and a break from each other. It would help the marriage.

Alan thought about it. “Great,” he said.

“Lots of research. I’ll be by myself.”

Alan believed the trip would do her (and him) a lot of good.

Time apart makes the heart . . .

So Jessica left.

At some point that weekend, while Jessica was in D.C., Alan was rummaging through the house, looking for something. He dug through drawers. Looked in closets. As he did, he came across several missing items in the house belonging to Jessica that made him question whether she had actually taken the trip by herself. He never said what was missing, but one would have to assume it was lingerie and/or female items that would persuade a husband to think his wife planned on having sexual intercourse while she was away.

Alan was hurt, obviously. They were having problems. But an affair was no answer. In his pain and frustration, Alan searched the house and came up with a phone number for that “friend” Jessica had been talking about—the guy she had met in history class.

He dialed the number.

The guy’s mother answered.

“Hi, I was wondering if Steven (pseudonym) is home?”

“No,” the mother said, “he’s in Washington, D.C.”

Alan called Jessica at her hotel later that weekend. Knowing she wasn’t alone, he confronted his wife over the telephone with what he believed to be an affair she had premeditatedly planned and now executed.

Jessica screamed at him. Took to the defensive, as if she had nothing to explain. Nothing to hide. Nothing to talk about.

“I’m on my way home!” she yelled. “You had better be there. . . . This is
not
over, Alan.”

This
being the argument and discussion regarding what she was doing in D.C. How dare Alan question her. The damn nerve of the guy.

To several others, before she left, Jessica said she was going to D.C. for two reasons: one, to do research; two, to get an abortion. Why? Because no doctor in Birmingham, she claimed, or any of the larger cities surrounding it, would “touch her” again. As to who the father of the child was, Jessica never said.

“We all thought it was for an abortion,” a friend later commented, referring to the trip to D.C. “That she didn’t want any more children after having McKenna in 1992. I knew she was going with that guy, but I believed, or she made me believe, they were just friends.”

Jessica worked at keeping the few friends she had apart from one another. It was one more way to manipulate the people in her life. Because none of her friends hung around together, she could tell lies to all of them, and not have to keep track of each fabrication.

Throughout the call to Alan, Jessica said several threatening things that convinced Alan there was going to be a “violent confrontation” when she returned. And if there was one thing Alan Bates did not want any part of, it was an aggressive situation, heated argument or contemptuous exchange with her. Alan understood that a day or two of silence could help a situation tremendously. Maybe make room for a better solution. He never hit Jessica. He never raised a hand to Jessica. It’s safe to say, many of his friends and family agreed, Alan had never even
thought
about being violent with Jessica. Even after she attacked him, Alan resisted the temptation to strike back. Once, when Jessica was arrested for assault years ago, instead of defending himself, Alan held her down until police arrived. Contrary to what Jessica later told several people, there is no evidence to indicate Alan ever hurt her.

After Alan and Jessica hung up, he called his parents. “I must get out of here.” He explained how he felt Jessica was returning from D.C. on a mission to do battle with him—and he couldn’t deal with it. “I need to get the kids out of here.”

After a call to Robert, he agreed to meet Alan. He said he would take the kids and drop them off at their parents’ home.

Alan was on edge. Stressing over what was going to happen when Jessica returned.

“You okay, man?” Robert asked. He wanted to help.

“Yeah. Fine.”

Robert could tell the wheels were spinning. Alan shared his deepest feelings only with Joan, his mother, but always after the fact. At the moment Alan would handle things himself. The main point, what worried Alan more than anything, was getting the kids out of the house—and that was done. They were taking off with Robert to spend the night with their grandparents. Alan could handle Jessica.