Death Trap (14 page)

Jessica walked in during the middle of the night. Alan was packing. He made it clear he was leaving. Getting the hell out of her life. This time for good.

“It’s over, Jessica. I’m through.” They had gone around this track before. It wasn’t going to work. The affair was the final blow.

Jessica paced. Then came that rage Alan later told his brothers about welling up inside her as she wore a hole in the carpet. Her demeanor changed. She was breathing heavily. Alan knew what was coming. The screaming and yelling. A fit.

Jessica—Kevin Bates explained later (both he and Robert got the story from Alan the following morning)—walked calmly into the kitchen. Reached inside a drawer and took out a chef’s knife. It was one of those creepy stainless-steel jobs that horror movie types, like Jason or Michael Myers, use.

Alan saw what she was doing and went for the door.

Jessica ran at him, screaming. She wielded the knife. Headed straight at Alan.

He managed to slam the door on the tip of the blade, he told Robert—as Jessica went to stab him.

The knife stuck in the door.

Adrenaline flowed like a drug through Alan’s bloodstream. He wanted to turn around and confront her. Instead, he thought better of it and went for his vehicle.

“He left, and that was it,” Kevin Bates said. “The marriage was over.”

 

 

From Alan’s perspective, it wasn’t worth calling the cops and filing a report against his wife. He was moving out. He made plans to begin a new life—without this madwoman. The last two years had been torture on his emotions. The older the children got, the more corrosive the effect Jessica’s insanity would be on them.

It could not continue.

On Sunday, Alan, his father and Kevin drove to the house to collect Alan’s belongings. When they got there, the house looked as if someone had ransacked it. Jessica had pillaged the entire inside of the home, searching for anything belonging to Alan. She took every photograph, anything ever given to Alan by someone else, and either cut it up or smashed it with a hammer. The garbage can outside was full of destroyed items, many of which Alan had once treasured.

Alan stood over the garbage can and dug through it, salvaging anything he could, even if it was broken into pieces. The photographs were worthless—nothing but scraps of torn paper.

Expressing herself in this manner, Jessica showed how she dealt with the end of a relationship. This was her first serious relationship, as well as Alan’s. Before Alan said he was leaving, Jessica came across apologetic and sorry for causing the marriage any distress. She appeared willing to work things out. But after she realized it was over for good, she went into revenge mode.

Snapped.

The war had begun.

“Indeed,” Robert said, “from then on, it was Jessica saying, in not so many words, ‘I am going to do everything I can to make you miserable.’ Throughout this entire situation of the breakup, she tended to hide behind the kids and manipulate the kids, but it wasn’t just limited to that.”

The fact that Alan never played into Jessica’s drama, Kevin and Robert said later, or engaged in any abusive behaviors, either before the separation or after, “made her madder. But he would never even argue with her. He was a peaceful person. Alan would sacrifice everything of himself to keep everyone around him happy—and often did.”

Jessica was not finished playing games. She called Naomi, whose parents owned a Suburban SUV. “Can you come down here and help me move out?”

Jessica told Naomi that Alan had kicked her out of the house—that he wanted the house and she was going to give it to him.

“I actually helped her move into an apartment in Southside,” Naomi said.

According to Jessica, the separation was mutual. Something they had both decided on.

“We’ll likely divorce,” Jessica told Naomi.

After packing everything they could fit into the Suburban, Naomi took the girls and got into the vehicle. She told Jessica she’d wait. Alan happened to be there that day. Jessica said she wanted to say good-bye to him.

Alan and Jessica stood on the porch. Naomi watched from the rearview mirror. The amicable end of the relationship that Jessica had laid out on the way to the house made sense to Naomi as she sat and thought about it. She watched Jessica and Alan hug. Jessica even kissed him. They seemed friendly toward each other. Just as Jessica had said.

Great,
Naomi thought, watching,
this isn’t going to be one of those messy divorces. They’ll be okay.

Jessica got in. She seemed fine. Quiet, but okay. She was upset about everything, yet eager to get to her new apartment.

When they arrived, Jessica complained about pains in her abdomen. “My stomach . . . it hurts . . . I’ve been bleeding all day.”

The comment shocked Naomi, because she was under the impression that Jessica’s trip to D.C. was for an abortion.

“Are you okay? Can I take you to the hospital?”

“No . . . I just miscarried. Must have been all the heavy lifting.”

Didn’t make sense: a miscarriage
and
an abortion?

Naomi was concerned. “Let me take you.”

“No, it’s no big deal. I wasn’t that far along. I’ve been through this before. Don’t worry about it.”

22

Early Monday morning, February 18, 2002, detective sergeant Tom McDanal secured a second search warrant, partly based on the foundation that the HPD had developed new information. In that first search they might have missed something. So members from the HPD’s forensic squad and CAPERS unit headed back over to the McCord house.

HPD investigators Greg Rector, Mark Tant, Laura Brignac, D. C. Scively and Peyton Zanzour were part of the team that arrived for the second search. Immediately it turned into a slog through the muck of the McCord home that would, this time around, prove to be far more productive than the first.

Lieutenant Greg Rector, commander of the Investigations Division of the HPD, walked into the garage. Sidestepping what was a heap of garbage piled around a plethora of “stuff,” Rector began his search with his flashlight, combing the walls. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary. A good search team left no stone unturned. Officers checked every square inch of space, no matter how tedious and unnecessary it seemed. It took a special eye for this detail: someone with patience and a knack for the mundane. Rector admitted later (with a laugh) that he was perfectly suited for the job.

Within moments, the veteran investigator locked onto a wooden desk pushed up against the wall near a doorway that led into the McCords’ den. The wall the desk had its back to was actually the opposite side of the den wall inside the home. Investigators noticed the wallpaper on the other side of the wall looked a bit askew. Maybe just sloppily installed. Albert Bailey, who said he was working on the house, prided himself a master craftsman. Jessica told investigators that her stepfather was one of those types born with a hammer in one hand, a saw in the other. Whoever had wallpapered the McCord den—presumably Albert—had either not watched enough episodes of
This Old House,
had downed one too many beers while working or had rushed to complete the job. There were two different types of wallpaper meeting somewhere in the middle, at waist-high level. The wallpaper line was crooked. The seams did not match up. Even more interesting, it was easy to tell that the wallpaper had been recently installed. Sure, Jeff and Jessica McCord said they were having work done on the house that weekend. But in the scope of the investigation, it all seemed too convenient. On top of that, the kids told Detective Laura Brignac that everything in the den was different.

Going back inside the garage, Lieutenant Rector took his flashlight and looked around the area where the wooden desk was butted up against the wall. While running his flashlight along the floor by the legs of the desk, staring at one section in particular, Rector noticed something.

A hole in the Sheetrock.

He looked down on the garage floor. There was Sheetrock dust and shards of broken plasterboard. Next to one edge of the wooden desk, close to the floor, sure enough, there was a small hole in the wall. The back of the desk was away from the wall about three inches. Protruding from the hole in the Sheetrock was debris, broken bits of the plasterboard, a chalky white dust and a powdery substance that looked like confectioner’s sugar. There was also a small bit of insulation from the inside of the wall that looked to have been pushed through. Something had been jabbed through the wall, from inside the den, and had popped a hole in the Sheetrock.

Rector panned his light down at the floor.

There it was: a spent projectile on the concrete floor of the garage, next to the baseboard, in near perfect condition.

One of the desk legs had an indentation, Rector noticed. Like a scar from where the bullet looked to have hit and bounced back. It was directly above where the bullet sat on the concrete floor.

If you looked down, it wasn’t hard to figure out that a bullet had come through the wall, hit the desk, left a rather visible scuff mark on the desk leg, then fell to the ground.

Rector then went around to the other side of the wall, inside the den. Several investigators were in the room, looking around at various sections of the recent remodeling project.

Rector explained what he had found in the garage.

There was no hole, however, anywhere on the wall where it should have been. If a bullet had been fired from inside the den within the past week, say, and went through the wall and landed on the floor in the garage, there should have been a hole in the den wall. At least that’s what the evidence in the garage seemed to suggest.

But there wasn’t.

They knew why, of course.

Slowly investigators peeled back the new wallpaper.

And there it was: a small hole the size of a bullet in Sheetrock inside the den.

At some point one of the investigators put a trajectory rod through the hole; it indicated the bullet was fired from approximately the chest height of an average-sized human being who was facing the wall. The person would have been standing several feet away from the wall, pointing the weapon toward the garage. The aim was directly on the spot where the McCords’ couch had sat before Albert Bailey removed it from the home.

Peyton Zanzour was in another part of the garage, poking around, when he noticed a bag next to the garage door. It was just sitting there on the floor, to the right of the washer and dryer.

To the right of the bag was a pile of clothes.

Inside the bag Zanzour discovered a “wadded-up piece of [old] wallpaper,” about the size of a grapefruit.

He knelt down. Wearing latex gloves, flashlight in his mouth, the investigator took the piece of wadded-up wallpaper from the bag and unfolded it.

At first it didn’t register. But then staring at it—
bingo
—there was the hole, about the size of a bullet.

Zanzour stood and took the wallpaper into the house. He held it up against the section that had been recently peeled back.

Like a Mylar overlay—a dead-on match.

Things made sense: someone had peeled off the old wallpaper and put new paper over the bullet hole, but did not plaster the hole first.

The HPD needed to get the bullet from the garage to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS) lab and have ballistics check it against the bullet the Bureau had uncovered in the trunk of Alan’s rental car. That would be the real test. If the ADFS matched the two, the HPD could bank on those arrest warrants they were hoping to file against Jeff and Jessica.

 

 

Several pieces of furniture, including a small coffee table you might put in front of a couch, were taken outside the McCord home for the purpose of conducting luminol testing. Inside, parts of the rug in the den were torn up to display what appeared to be tile underneath—some of it new.

“The tile that was on the floor,” Peyton Zanzour said later in court, “it was very dirty. There was dirt in places that was, like, in piles, a sandy type of dirt. It was very unusual, number one, that there was that much dirt.”

The dog could have tracked that dirt into the home.

But the dirt didn’t seem to be a collection from years of carrying it into the house on the soles of shoes; it “appeared,” Zanzour testified, “to be as if it was dirt from the outside.”

The theory, apparently, was that people were coming and going. Moving things around. In and out of the house.

Furthermore, when investigators took a closer look, they could tell that some of the tiles underneath the carpeting were new, while others were not. This did not make much sense. Especially seeing that there were plenty of other tiles underneath the carpet that could stand to be replaced. Why would a homeowner change only some of the tiles and then cover them with carpeting?

To hide something was the only answer the HPD could come up with. Jessica and Jeff were not providing any other alternative solution.

Zanzour found “gold-colored carpet” fibers near the base of the hearth of the fireplace inside the den. It was clear upon careful examination that the fibers did not match the carpet the HPD had removed from the den floor.

There was an old carpet somewhere, the HPD was now certain. That carpet needed to be located. It was probably loaded with trace evidence, and possibly even blood from the victims.

“Shelby County Landfill,” someone said. It was the closest dump site to the McCord home. Jessica, Jeff and Albert had admitted they had taken items to the dump that Saturday morning and the previous day. If the HPD could find the carpet, they were confident they were also going to find enough evidence to send Jeff and Jessica to Alabama’s death row.

“As I recall,” Jessica said later, “the carpet that was on the floor of the den went out with the trash.”

Standing outside the home, D. C. Scively examined the coffee table that investigators had taken from the den. There was a small stain—about the size of a dime—on one of the coffee table legs. In addition, there were smaller “stains” on the glass portion of the table. All of these appeared to be red in color.

Scively sprayed a few mists of luminol on the glass and table leg.

Waited.

It took a few seconds, but there it was: that fluorescent shimmer, like a child’s glow stick, exposing the blood of the recently departed.