Death Trap (16 page)

25

They lived in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Cullowhee is a quaint little village in between Rich Mountain and Pumpkintown, located at the base of Western Carolina University. Throughout the past half-century, Cullowhee has housed anywhere between two thousand and three thousand people. This is Blue Ridge–Smoky Mountain territory; Small-Town, USA, where neighbors watch one another’s backs.

It was the early 1970s. Terra Klugh was three years old. It rained hard that morning, on and off. The torrential downpours were enough to swell the creeks in the region into fiercely powerful moving streams that could swoop in and swallow up a child of Terra’s age in an instant. As an adult, Terra loved to travel. As a child, she was one of those kids who liked to go outside and explore—take off on her own and wander about, pick dandelions and blow them into the wind, maybe roll around in fields of flowers. Her parents were kids themselves, only in their early twenties then. Four years older than his wife, Tom was studying psychology at a nearby graduate school.

Terra’s mother was busy doing some things around the house one afternoon. Tom was at school, but he called to say he’d be home soon. At some point Terra’s mother happened to call out Terra’s name.

No answer.

Uh-oh.
There was that honest-to-goodness heart-pounding panic alarm every parent experiences at one time or another. A pain burst and throbbed in her chest as anxiety fueled a search.

“Sweetie? Sweetie?” Terra’s mom said, walking hurriedly around the house.

Nothing.

She went from room to room.

“Sweetie?”

Not a peep.

Walking toward the front of the house, Terra’s mother realized the front door was open.

Terra was gone.

And then the real panic set in.

“When I got home,” Tom said later, “Terra’s mom told me what happened.”

Tom walked down by a barn about a quarter mile from the house.

“I saw some boot prints.”

Terra had just gotten a pair of red rubber rain boots, the shiny kind that a Hallmark card depicts kids wearing while splashing around in summer puddles. Because it rained so hard that morning, Terra decided to put on her new boots and go out on one of her adventurous walks.

Down by the fast-moving creek, Tom spied those boot prints again—tiny molds in the mud stamped all over the place. They led down to the creek, where the embankment dropped off sharply into the water.

Then he saw barefoot prints walking away from the water on the other side of the boot prints. They were heading in the opposite direction. Little tiny feet that Tom knew in his heart were his daughter’s.

He took a look at the water. How fast the current moved. Shook his head.

“Terra . . . my goodness,” Tom said to himself.

“It looked as though she had walked down to the creek and threw her boots into the water. If she would have fallen in the water . . . Terra was gone.”

Tom headed back to the house.

As it turned out, a neighbor found Terra wandering around and brought her back home.

For Tom, the story epitomized what is, he says, “the evidence of God.” His wife had a hard time with the memory, thinking she’d done something wrong. But Tom (and later Terra) knew it was nothing more than a curious child. The mother wasn’t to blame. There was no room for guilt or liability.

“It just happened.”

One of those things.

Beyond that, “it wasn’t Terra’s time to part with the world,” Tom told me years later. “It would have been an easy time for her to have parted the world, but there was more for her to do.”

Indeed, Tom Klugh’s young princess, so stubbornly foolish in her adolescence, so free-spirited and colorful, had other plans in life to fulfill.

 

 

In nearly every way that mattered, Terra Klugh was the polar opposite of Jessica McCord. Terra was all that Alan’s first wife wasn’t: quiet, kind, self-reliant, warm, compassionate.

“She really, really liked Alan,” Marley Franklin said later. “What a doll of a girl. Just as sweet as you can imagine.”

Terra’s formative years were spent in Clemson, South Carolina. She studied for a short time in London, where she pursued a degree in art history. Her minor was mathematics, which she pursued at Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia. Terra spent four years as an architectural historian for the Historic American Building Survey, and then became a project historian for the Alabama Theatre. One of Terra’s goals was to begin work on her master of arts in historic preservation, an area of history she adored. Historic preservation was Terra’s passion, and one of her primary focuses was to attend Goucher College, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Terra was conscientious, pretty, smart and extremely mature when, in 1995, as Alan and Jessica entered into a tumultuous, postdivorce phase of their lives, she started working at the Alabama Theatre. At twenty-five, Terra was career-minded, same as Alan. By then, Alan was in charge of “everything [technical] that happened on the stage . . . ,” Alabama Theatre’s executive director, Cecil Whitmire, said later. Whitmire was single-handedly responsible for saving the Alabama Theatre from destruction. Like everyone who met Alan, Whitmire thought the world of him.

Terra was sent to the Alabama Theatre as part of a restoration team put together by the Department of the Interior (DOI). The team traveled from D.C. to Birmingham to document the theater for the Library of Congress. Terra was living near Washington, D.C., at the time, and working for the government in one of its historic American buildings and structures programs. The last thing Terra was looking for was love. Her career was soaring. Plus, Terra had a way about her when it came to men. She was extremely private about this part of her life.

“I’m going out tonight,” she’d tell her father over the phone.

“A date?”

“No, no, no.”

“But you’re going out with a guy, right?”

“Yeah.
Out,
Dad. That’s all it is.”

“You sure you’re not dating?”

“No. No.”

Next subject.

Ever since she was a kid, Terra had a strong will about her. She was her own person. Part of it, Tom Klugh believed, was from being raised an only child, and the family moving around a lot.

“Except for the first couple of years,” Tom said, “we were in Fort Sill, Oklahoma . . . when I was stationed there during the Vietnam War, and then a little time in North Carolina when I was in school.”

Terra left for Hollins with the idea of becoming a mathematician. She had a change of heart, though, and flipped her major to architectural history once she got to Roanoke. Maybe it was being in such a historic town with the ambiance of America’s history at her doorstep. Who knows? The point is, Terra had found her passion in life and decided to go for it.

Terra took after her mother. Tom Klugh said his ex-wife was extremely artistically inclined. A ballet dancer. An expert potter. Whatever she did, it seemed, Terra’s mom mastered.

“My ex-wife,” Tom said, laughing admiringly, “has more talents than anybody should be given.”

While Terra and her mom got along well and remained close, Tom said they seemed to always compete against each other.

“You have to understand,” Tom recounted, “Terra was raised by two pretty immature adults. I was twenty-three when Terra was born, her mom just nineteen. But I don’t think age says anything about our emotional stock.”

The one thing Terra didn’t appreciate was when she confided in her mother, and then her mom went back and told Tom. This exasperated her.

“I always told Terra, ‘You know, you have
two
parents here. They’re supposed to know these things.’”

While studying and working for the DOI, Terra took that trip with the preservation team in charge of restoring the Alabama Theatre. Not only was she staying in town, but she was working at the theater—where she soon crossed paths with Alan.

The moment she set eyes on him, friends later suggested, Terra “just fell in love with him.”

“I had never really gotten the impression from her,” Tom said, “that she was serious about anybody—that is, until she met Alan. Of course, there were others along the way, sure. But usually they tripped over their bootlaces if given enough time. And so that was it for them. But Alan . . . he was different.”

They became friends first. But that didn’t last long; the relationship moved quickly. Terra felt “at ease” around Alan, a feeling she’d experienced with no one else.

“She certainly talked about him a whole bunch,” Tom added. “We did a lot of talking on the phone.”

The impression Tom got after meeting Alan for the first time was that he wasn’t this “warm, gushy person. . . . He was very nice. Certainly, he wasn’t one of these toady people, who would ‘yes, sir, Mr. Klugh’ to everything I said.”

An Eddie Haskell, in other words. A phony. Some guy trying to warm up to the dad in order to get in good with the daughter.

No, Alan was confident. Clean-cut. Quiet. Reserved. Determined. Liked to keep to himself.

“A lot like Terra.”

Neither Alan nor Terra shared things about their lives with other people. But they found each other—and with that, the ideal sounding board.

They hadn’t even been officially dating when Terra turned to Alan one day after knowing him for only a brief time and said, “You know, I really see a potential here with you. I’m quitting my job.”

“Quitting?”

Alan was frightened by this. He knew Jessica. He knew the turmoil he was involved in was just beginning. He knew that it was going to get a lot worse before it got better. Did he need to drag someone else into the mix—especially someone as loving and caring as Terra? She didn’t need that in her life.

Terra’s job would have taken her away from Alan after the company she worked for finished up at the Alabama Theatre. As the team she worked with moved on to other parts of the South to continue the work, Terra was going to have to leave Alan.

She thought about it. Decided she wanted no part of moving away from Alan.

Alan was thrilled. Exalted. Happy. But also scared.

“She was a beautiful, strong spirit,” Kevin Bates remembered, “who just made my brother shine. She was the perfect companion for him.” Terra Klugh brought out the best in Alan Bates; and they brought out the best in each other. “It made us realize we were looking at an adult relationship for Alan,” Kevin added, “and this couldn’t be a better situation.”

Terra had short, straight auburn-brown hair. The most delicate, clear, white skin—smooth as paper—and a smile that woke up any room she entered. Terra loved to hike with Alan. She grew up with a penchant and passion for ballet, like her mother. Her voice, friends insisted, was distinct: soft-spoken, sweet in tone, gentle and kind. And yet, while Terra exuded an immense amount of femininity, certainly a woman from head to toe, she wasn’t afraid to pick up a power tool and build a piece of furniture.

“She had a quiet strength,” Kevin Bates said, “which was just the perfect companion to my brother.”

Soul mates.

Alan was content romantically for the first time in his life—which would, he was soon to realize, only increase the hatred and dissension Jessica felt toward him already. If there was one thing that infuriated Jessica McCord more than anything, it was the competition of another woman.

26

MCSO chief investigator Michael Pritchett had been involved in the investigation since that burning car was reported in his jurisdiction. Pritchett, a twenty-five-year lawman, took on the job of locating a source for the “child’s print” paper towel found on the ground at the Georgia crime scene. It was one sheet of paper towel, slightly crumpled, burned on one corner. The decoration imprinted on one side was a stick figure of a child, along with the simulated scribble of a preschooler learning his ABCs.

A child’s handprint was located directly underneath the writing. There was a smiley face sun figure next to rows of flowers.

Pritchett took a photograph sample of the paper towel and hit the road.

“I went to nine different stores, retail stores in the area of where the bodies were found,” he said later in court. “As a matter of fact, there was nine closest stores to the scene. And the larger retail stores in the area, I went to check to see if they had in stock this pattern of paper towel. . . .”

Pritchett asked the clerk at several locations the same question: “Are you familiar with this pattern?”

All of them said, “No.” They had never seen it before.

In fact, the sheriff testified, “No clerk remembered having sold that pattern.” As the investigation would soon divulge, there was a good reason why.

 

 

Back at the ADFS Birmingham Regional Laboratory, Firearms and Toolmarks Identification Unit scientist Ed Moran got busy testing the bullet found at the Georgia crime scene against the bullet recovered inside the McCord garage. Here was the “smoking gun” evidence—nearly literally—that every prosecutor dreamed of. A match, without question, would tie Alan’s and Terra’s deaths to the McCord home.

Forensic expert Moran had sixteen years behind the microscope. He was rather blunt and realistic when explaining his often tedious job: “It’s not like it is on TV.”

Indeed. Matching bullets with lands and grooves was more complicated than putting two microscopes together on a granite lab table, looking into both of the glass eyes and, during a commercial break, coming to a conclusion.

With a master’s in criminal justice from the University of Alabama, a bachelor’s from Auburn University, Moran had been involved in firearms and toolmark investigation since 1990. He lectured and taught firearms courses. Few men in Moran’s trade were more experienced.

“There are two types of markings I look for,” Moran explained, referring to the science of figuring out if two bullets had been fired from the same weapon barrel. “The first markings are called general rifling characteristics. That would include the number of lands and grooves on the bullet, and the widths of the lands and grooves, and the directions of twists.”

A bullet slides through the barrel of a gun, twisting and turning its way out, spiraling toward its intended target. This causes “special” tool marks left on the outer part of the jacket of the projectile. Think of a barber’s red-and-white swizzle stick spinning outside his shop—that candy-cane-like pattern of stripes.

Same thing.

“Lands and grooves,” Moran continued, “are machined onto the inner surface of the inside part of the barrel during the course of manufacture. They can be likened to ridges or valleys on the inside of the barrel.”

Simple science. After all, no manufacturer can machine lands and grooves identical in each barrel. It’s impossible.

“I cannot make a positive identification that two bullets were fired out of the same
gun,
” Moran said, clearing up an assumption that television has promulgated into a fact of forensic science. “But I could eliminate whether two bullets were fired through the same
barrel.
”

If, for example, a bullet had six lands and grooves, Moran said, which turn (or spiral) to the right, and a barrel has five lands and grooves rotating to the left, “there’s no way
that
bullet could have been fired through
that
barrel.”

Simple math.

There are also microscopic striations machined into the inner surface of a barrel during manufacturing. These cannot be duplicated.

“Those markings are to be likened,” Moran insisted, “to a human fingerprint.”

Moran lined up the bullets inside two microscopes. The one on the right was from Alan’s wrist. The bullet struck Alan’s watch, which slowed its trajectory, ultimately lodging into his wrist. A fragment of that projectile was found underneath Alan’s body. If Alan had not been wearing a watch, the bullet would have gone through his wrist, and might not have ever been found.

The bullet on Moran’s left was from the floor of the McCord garage.

Moran explained what he found: “When you look at this . . . I think we can somewhat readily see that the striations match up precisely. . . .”

Like a hand in a glove.

In Moran’s opinion, which seemed to be backed up by the evidence, he was certain that the bullet extracted from Alan’s wrist and the bullet located on the floor of the McCord garage had been fired from the same barrel. Moran guessed a Remington Peters—a gun, incidentally, that had
not
been recovered from the McCord home among Jeff’s large cache of weapons.

As the investigation picked up steam in Alabama, a report came in from Georgia. There was a good reason why that particular pattern of paper towels had not been found in an approximately fifty-mile radius of the Georgia crime scene. Those particular paper towels were sold in the Birmingham region of the country.