Death Trap (17 page)

27

Alan and Terra enjoyed the serenity of being in a mature relationship. They respected each other. Cared how the other felt. Talked things through like adults. This was new to Alan, who had lived a life of “romantic” hell for as long as he could remember.

Jessica, meanwhile, was busy holding on to Cupid’s arrow for dear life, following it wherever the path led. If Alan had gone out and landed himself a catch with Terra, Jessica needed to find herself a man. Someone she could flaunt in Alan’s face. Someone who could help her achieve whatever goals in life she now had.

Near the fall of 1995, Jessica visited the Lion & Unicorn Comics Games & Cards store on Lorna Road, not too far from her mother’s house. It was one of those hobby shop/comic-book stores that sold various types of fantasy gaming items and other collectibles. It also advertised a line of vintage comic books and baseball cards.

Jessica later said she hung out in the store because she got involved in playing a game called Magic: The Gathering. (The game falls in line with the idea behind
Lord of the Rings.
)

It was a role-playing game—an appealing proposition to those who partake in fantasy, but also have an inherent need to control things. Essentially, Magic was the genre-breaking first in a series of card games that involved an ongoing plot, forcing players to buy additional products in order to continue playing the game competitively. An ingenious invention, in terms of marketing. The game was introduced in 1993 by a mathematician. The game revolves around your typical “good versus evil” plotline, in which wizards go up against “the dark side.” Some liken it to an updated version of the popular 1980s phenomenon Dungeons & Dragons.

Jessica had other ideas, however, for heading into Lion & Unicorn. A man worked behind the counter, Brad Tabor (pseudonym), in whom she apparently saw potential. Brad lived alone and was content in his job at the card shop.

No one could understand why Jessica was attracted to the guy—that is, until it was later learned that Jessica believed Brad was going to one day inherit some money. Then it made sense: that “entrepreneurial” side of Jessica, in a perpetual state of looking for a free ride, a sugar daddy.

From Jessica’s perspective, Brad fit into that mold.

Near January 1, 1996, Jessica and Brad started dating. Brad was taken with this attractive young woman who seemed to be not only full of herself, but confident, strong-willed and full of sexuality. To his surprise and delight, she was also into him.

Jessica knew how to manage what she had; she could doll herself up to look eye-catching and trashy hot. She owned the spotlight when she walked into that store, unafraid to shake her “thang” and play into whatever sliver of sexual sparkle she could conjure.

When Brad asked, Jessica said she had been married once and went through a divorce “several years prior.”

It would be the first of many lies that Brad would soon hear.

Brad got Jessica a job at the Lion & Unicorn. They began spending time together. Brad liked Jessica. To him, she was a hot chick without kids who seemed to be interested in the same things he was. What was there not to like?

Indeed, Jessica failed to mention up front that she had two kids at home (or, rather, staying at her mother’s house). Brad never suspected she was lying. Why would he?

In the years following, like most things in her life, Jessica viewed her relationship with Brad in a different light: “We slept together and dated,” she said in court, “and the order varied. It was an on-and-off thing.”

Not true. According to one of Jessica’s former friends, as soon as Jessica and Brad started hanging out and working together, and Jessica found out Brad was going to “come into some money,” she was all over the guy. She started sleeping with him voluntarily. He didn’t need to work at it.

Ask Jessica, however, and you come up with a different version of how they met. “I worked there. And he worked there on occasion and came in basically to see who the girl was that was working in the store, because it was very unusual. And we became associated because we both played a game called Magic.”

Setting aside the truth of how they met, regarding the idea that Jessica failed to tell Brad she had children, she said: “That’s not true. I had been warned not to date him because he did not
like
children.”

She never gave a reason (if it were even true) why Brad disliked children. Or why she would consider dating a man who felt that way.

“I didn’t make it a policy,” Jessica stated further, “to take people I went out with around my children. I thought it would be hard for them to have people, you know, going in and out. And . . . I had no intention of just getting divorced and dating one guy and getting immediately remarried. I didn’t want the kids to suffer from a constant change of people.”

Some wondered if that was motive enough
not
to share with a man that you allegedly liked that you had children. Like many things Jessica later said, her excuse for a particular behavior made little sense.

Brad lived in an apartment in the Five Points region of Birmingham. He had a simple life.

Work. Home. Work. Home.

Magic.

Jessica moved in with Brad. Her clothes and all. Six weeks went by, Brad later said, before she finally admitted she had two kids living at her mother’s house. Two kids, in fact, who needed their mother and were not seeing their father on a regular basis because Jessica was so darn bent on spiting Alan.

This manner of conduct turned into a vicious circle. Jessica would leave the kids with her mother for long periods: weeks, a month, two months. Days, certainly. She would not see them—and sometimes, a friend later said, she rarely ever called them. She didn’t care. Jessica wanted what she wanted, and nothing—not even her own flesh and blood—was going to stand in her way or stop her.

And now she had Brad.

Naomi called Jessica once in a while to see how she was doing. After learning Jessica was leaving the children with her mother, Naomi was upset. She wanted to reprimand Jessica and scold her into feeling guilty about it—and then demand she get over to her mother’s house and take care of those kids.

Forget about Brad. The kids need you.
This was a recurring thought, Naomi said.

Jessica got mad. Gave Naomi some excuse as to why she wasn’t at her mother’s with the children.

Then, as Naomi and Jessica were talking, Jessica came out with it: “I’m pregnant now, anyway.”

Naomi expected to hear that Jessica was planning a trip to Mississippi or another state to get an abortion. Jessica claimed to have already had one abortion (Brad’s child) after miscarrying twins.

But not this time. “I’m keeping it,” Jessica stated.

From the sound of it, Jessica was looking at the new baby as a means to an end: another child support check from a guy who was, she believed, going to come into a healthy sum of money someday. Thus, all things considered, it would appear babies were a source of income for Jessica.

Not long after she moved in with Brad, Jessica went to him and announced that she was pregnant, adding, “I’m keeping the baby.”

According to Jessica, Brad did not want anything to do with being a father. “I was not going to have an abortion,” Jessica said years later in court, recalling this period of her life, “and I was not going to have my baby and give her away. I would
never.
”

But that’s exactly what she did, Brad later explained. “Well, the first child. She aborted it.”

About five or six months later, Jessica went to Brad again. “I’m pregnant.”

This led to problems with the relationship. Brad and Jessica were not on the same wavelength about anything. So they split shortly before the child was born. Jessica moved out of the apartment and back into her mother’s house—now back with her two kids . . . and pregnant with another child.

28

In Georgia, members of the Bates and Klugh families were not far from where the reclusive novelist Flannery O’ Connor—a woman who seemed to set in bronze a long-lasting image of what a true “Southerner” represented—once stated that the “things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all.” The Bates and Klughs waited and wondered. Part of each of them leaned on that strong sense of family still so ingrained in the Deep South. The hardest element of it all was accepting that Alan and Terra would never again grace the dinner table at a family function. There would be no more phone calls just to catch up and say hello. No more of those million-dollar smiles Alan could flash to make you feel great. No more sharing of the good things in life. No more laughs or memories in motion. Terra and Alan were there one day, gone the next, as if they had vanished.

The other horrifying aspect of having to deal with a tragedy of such immense scope was that, of all the people in the world, the reality that Alan’s ex-wife could have had something to do with his death was simultaneously sobering and appalling. In Philip and Joan Bates’s wildest dreams, they could not have fathomed life to have taken such a terrible, personal turn. That inherent parental need to protect your child was there in every second of life. It was a challenge Philip and Joan took as the price of perfect love. And they had weathered the storm well—that is, up until this moment.

“Our parents had always put our needs before their own,” Kevin Bates later explained. “They worked hard together to provide us each with everything we ever needed, and many (but not all) of the things we wanted. When we relocated to Atlanta in 1991, they chose our home for the best public-school system in the area for my benefit, despite the fact that this left Dad with up to an hour commute one way to work each day. Though us kids were all . . . out of the house, they remained very active and interested in our lives and looked for any opportunity to support our endeavors. They regularly traveled to see any show Alan worked on, whenever it would come within driving distance of Atlanta. And, of course, they looked for any opportunity to enjoy and spoil their grandchildren.”

That flawless continuity of life was dramatically disrupted—all at once. Severed without warning. Both families asked themselves two questions as the hours passed:
What now? How do we deal with such an aggravated, abrupt end to two wonderful lives ?

By late Monday night, February 18, well into Tuesday morning, several facts were apparent to the families: (1) After some soul-searching, no one could discern any other known human being on the face of the earth who could have—or would have—wanted Alan and Terra dead, and (2) Jessica McCord expressed motive and had opportunity, two of the most important factors driving this type of crime.

As the families interacted while waiting for bits of news to trickle in, it was hard to push away the theory that Jessica had killed both of these beautiful people.

Roger Brown called Philip Bates early that week to explain “as much as I could at the time,” Brown later told me, concluding the call with an apology for not being able to be more forthcoming with information.

“This is what we have, Mr. Bates. I’ll call you as soon as I can give you anything more.”

Philip, that engineering mind of his calculating things out its own way, understood there was a major investigation going on. Philip and the others would get the facts as they became available. The last thing anyone wanted to do was taint a future court case by pressuring Roger Brown to cough up particulars about his case.

“I understand,” said Philip. It pained him. Sure. But he also knew how fragile and fluid the situation was and would be until an arrest was made.

Hanging up the telephone, Philip walked out of the kitchen and told Kevin, Robert and Joan, “We’ve got the
right
man working on this.” Philip was impressed by Brown’s matter-of-fact way of dealing with such a delicate state of affairs. Brown spoke in truths. Plain. Clear. Concise. Philip respected that. Brown didn’t care to speculate. He rarely said anything, in fact, that he or his investigators did not know for certain.

Brown made a promise to keep Philip in the loop. And Philip appreciated it, knowing that when a Southern man—especially a lawman—gave his hand to shake on and his word, he damn well meant it.

The families had not yet come out and said to one another that
Jessica did this.
“But,” Kevin commented later, “we knew the chances of it being a random act of violence kept diminishing. . . . Jessica was the only enemy Alan had in the world, and she was, after all, the last person he was meant to go see before he and Terra vanished.”

Among them all was the sinking, sick feeling—like some sort of virus they couldn’t see, touch or get rid of—that Jessica resorted to murder to solve her problems. And then the confusing questions: Why would she do such a thing? How in the world
could
she do such a thing?

From where the Bateses stood, the scenario was clear and plausible. Alan and Terra were supposed to pick up the kids somewhere near 6:00 or 6:30
P.M
. Jessica said they never showed up. She called Alan and left a message on his cell phone. Alan and Terra were found in the trunk of their rental car along the I-20, past Atlanta—heading in the opposite direction of his parents’ home, near three-thirty that next morning.

When you stepped back and thought about it, what else could have happened?

As the days passed, Kevin and Robert Bates, along with members of Terra’s family, converged at the Bates home, waiting for calls to come in. As they did this, the focus was put on the children. Number one, where were they? Two, had anyone told them what had happened to Alan and Terra?

Neighbors and friends sent food and flowers, cards and condolences, to the Bates home. The days became a foggy haze of puzzlement and melancholy. Some sort of dreamlike reality. It was as if they were all living someone else’s life, just going through the motions of the day. You do things and later wonder how they got done. You don’t recall conversations. Driving places. Eating or cooking meals. The body and mind seem to work together in unison, while the soul weeps.

Making funeral arrangements kept everyone busy for a few days. It was agreed that Alan and Terra would be cremated and memorialized together.

“As they would have wanted,” said one family member.

“Everyone realized,” Kevin added, “that no matter who killed Alan and Terra, they were gone, regardless. We were focused on what we
needed
to do. What we
could
do. How do we honor them? We don’t even have their bodies yet.”

The idea that closure was going to come sooner rather than later was not a certainty anyone could take comfort in just yet. They all knew, understood and accepted that Alan and Terra were dead. Yet, officially, they were still waiting for “positive confirmation” that those two terribly burned bodies in the trunk of that rental car were actually Alan and Terra. Death’s limbo. You know in your heart, but you still cannot stop holding out hope. Dental records were one thing. DNA another. Until then, that hidden optimism—a single strand of subtle brightness—hangs out there in the open, and you don’t want to turn your back on it.

With the media stirring in Birmingham, waiting on the HPD’s next move, reporting on the case, play by play, the families decided the best place to have the memorial service was Georgia.

 

 

The
Birmingham News
put one of its more esteemed, prized reporters, Carol Robinson, on the case. Carol had over a decade-and-a-half ’s worth of experience working the Birmingham crime beat. Most Hoover cops knew Carol. Appreciated her work. Valued her tenacity for printing the truth. “That is rare,” one cop told me, “in newspaper reporting around here.” If nothing else, investigators from the HPD knew that Carol would cover the story with a deference to the families and set her sights on facts. Carol had a reputation for not focusing on sensationalism but instead keeping her eye on what made the story important in the fabric of the local, social landscape. She was a reporter’s reporter.

Carol was home, sick, on Monday. A source close to the HPD called her. “Stand by, something big is coming your way.”

She was interested, obviously, and the tip had a quick-recovery effect on the illness she was battling.

The attractive blond reporter, a native Southerner, was born and raised in Dixie. Carol and her family moved to Avon, Connecticut, for four years—from five to nine years old—but they had lived in the “Yellowhammer State” ever since. A graduate of Vestavia Hills High School in Birmingham, Carol went to Auburn University and started working for Alabama’s largest newspaper, the
Birmingham News,
three months out of college, in 1986. It was her first and only full-time newspaper job. Heading into the McCord case, some sixteen years later, Carol was now the senior reporter, leading the newspaper’s crime coverage. She had an understanding of covering high-profile murder cases: the slayings of three Birmingham police officers, the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing and the subsequent five-year hunt for fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph, as well as the reopening of the case of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

Getting out of bed and heading into work, Carol realized she had not even heard that two bodies with Birmingham ties had been found in Georgia. Still, she dragged herself into the office and wrote what would be the first of several stories the
Birmingham News
devoted to the case:
KILLINGS FOLLOW CUSTODY FIGHT
:
PELHAM OFFICER, WIFE SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING.

“As you can tell,” Carol later told me, “it was made clear quickly that the McCords were suspects. . . . [The case] was a talker, but not, say, to the level of Natalee Holloway. That is, because there was not time for it to build as a mystery. . . . There was not much made about Jeff being a police officer because he was not much of a police officer, in that he was not some big, bad cop with a list of awards or disciplinary actions against him. He was just vanilla. Jessica became a popular villain as time wore on because she was trashy, crazy—and nobody could understand what she had that would attract so many men. . . .”

Carol’s first story detailed the case up to the point of which it had been reported publicly, focusing on bare facts. It was enough to get the ball rolling so Carol could call on her sources and dig in.

“Had we been in Birmingham,” Kevin commented, referring to the families, “we would have been right in the middle of the fire.”

 

 

There was a lot brewing around town as Jessica and Jeff planned their next move. Part of the speculation was that Jessica fled—took off somewhere and could not be found. Investigators knew she and Jeff had driven to Florida to avoid the media and, presumably, the police, as well as to drop the children off at her sister’s house. It was not uncommon for Jessica to head to Florida to visit her sister and, one former family member noted, “run away from her problems.”

Jessica was an expert at avoiding accountability.

Word soon spread, however, that Jeff and Jessica had dropped the children off in Florida and had turned around and headed back to Alabama. One comfort to the Bateses in knowing this was that the kids were going to be spared all that was blowing up back home. The kids surely didn’t need pressure of any sort. No good could come out of them seeing their dad’s picture on the local nightly news, or their mother’s name in the newspapers. The impact of the deaths alone was going to be hard enough. To think that their mother was being viewed as a suspect would be devastating.

Philip Bates called Jessica’s sister’s house in Florida numerous times. He wanted to speak with the kids. Then ask her to make sure they were sent to Atlanta in time for the memorial services. The funeral was planned for Saturday, three days away.

“I’ll pay for their flights and your hotel room,” Philip announced into Jessica’s sister’s voice mail that week during one of his many messages, “if you can bring the children here for the service.”

The Bates brothers said Philip never got a call back.

Word was that Jessica’s sister had some sort of problem in her house and it had to be fumigated. So she and the kids stayed at a neighbor’s. She wasn’t getting any of her messages. It was strange, bearing in mind all that had happened. Why wouldn’t she check her voice mail during such a critical period of time? But investigators from the HPD backed up this fact.

By Wednesday, February 20, the kids had no idea their father and stepmother were dead. No one had told them. Instead, the news was given to them about an hour before the Birmingham police arrived in Florida to pick the kids up and transport them back to Alabama. Once they arrived in Alabama later that night, the children were scheduled to meet with grief counselors. After that, they would stay with an aunt and uncle.

“Jessica’s sister told them [that Alan and Terra had been killed], right before we arrived,” one investigator claimed. “Which we didn’t want done. They still had to ride with us back to Alabama. We wanted them to at least have that ride back without having to think about it. But that was not the case.”