Death Trap (24 page)

40

Jail was not a place compatible with Jessica McCord’s character. The idea that she was in the same room with common criminals that she looked down upon infuriated the woman. When it came time to make telephone calls, it was Jeff who bore the brunt of his wife’s anger. She berated him on the telephone in front of other prisoners. Cursed at him. Made unrealistic demands. “And,” one fellow inmate later said, “talked to him like he was a five-year-old. . . . You know,
she
gives the orders.”

“You need to get off your ass and do whatever it is you can to get me out of here,” Jessica snapped during her first call to Jeff. This was before swearing at him and slamming the phone down on its cradle.

She called back a few minutes later. “I’m the one locked up for ten days, and you and my mother are not doing
anything
out there to help me.”

Jeff asked how things were going. He was concerned.

“How am I
doing
? How . . . you’re responsible for my being here, Kelley.”

“Basically,” Jeff said later, she made him feel that “I was responsible for all the problems in her life at that particular time.”

Jeff considered that because Jessica was the one sitting in the jail and not him, everything
had
to be his fault. Jessica’s constant criticizing was, Jeff said later, all part of the manipulation effort on her part to get what she wanted. “She felt that I should have figured out a better or a different way to have handled the so-called ‘problem’ (meaning Alan) before it got to the point where she was hauled off to jail.”

Jessica was livid. Absolutely furious. She ordered Jeff to call someone and get her out of jail before she went mad. All Jeff could do was listen and wonder what in the world he could do. She had violated an order of the court. Why wasn’t she getting that? Sure, Jeff was a cop, but he couldn’t do anything for her now. It was ten days. Suck it up.

“Jessica’s . . . attitude,” a fellow inmate said later, putting it mildly, “was kind of rough.”

 

 

Jeff had been told over and over by Jessica that Alan was abusive. Jessica explained to him that Alan was stuck on getting back at her and had repeatedly hurt her and the kids. And now the court had the nerve to go and side with him and his new wife. Maybe it
was
Jeff’s fault. Maybe he could have done more for his wife. Maybe there was something to what she had suggested a few weeks back—that the only way to get rid of the problem was to tend to it themselves.

As that conversation had progressed, Jessica talked about the idea of losing the children to Alan. She could not allow that to happen. Alan could
never
get custody. That was not an option here.

“I’ll do
anything
to keep those kids, Kelley.”

She sounded desperate, and Jeff knew what she meant.

“I know . . . I know,” he said.

“Kelley,
anything.
I’ll do anything to keep those kids. You know that.”

She said it “several more times,” Jeff later explained.

 

 

During Jessica’s ten-day stint in jail, Jeff and Dian called Alan and asked if he would allow Jessica to leave the jail for two days—during the Christmas holiday—so she could spend that time with the children. The court wasn’t going to allow her out of jail unless Alan signed off on it.

Without hesitation Alan agreed. For him, it had never been about punishing Jessica. It had never been personal. It had always been about the children.

Before leaving jail after her ten-day stint, a fiery Jessica McCord—even after Alan had allowed her the holiday with the kids—turned to a cellmate and let the woman know how she felt about being locked up.

“Somebody is going to pay,” Jessica snapped.

PART IV

GONE FOR GOOD

41

Jessica hired a new attorney, David Dorn, as soon as she got out of jail. She handpicked Dorn out of the Yellow Pages and called him. A day later, Jessica sat in Dorn’s office. She talked about what she expected out of legal representation. She called the ongoing battle with Alan a “visitation child custody case.” Alan was suing for full custody, she explained. This scared Jessica. She saw the children slipping from her grasp. Of course, part of her monthly paycheck left with the kids. There was no way she could allow that to happen.

It was January 8, 2002. Dorn reviewed the case. There was a hearing scheduled for January 14 to discuss what had occurred “prior to then.”

Perfect. Dorn could familiarize himself with the case, and the court would bring him up to date on the rest.

Alan was awarded temporary custody of the kids while Jessica was in jail, and he still had them. Terra was overjoyed. Before Alan had left to pick up the children, Terra e-mailed a friend. She explained the situation, noting:
We haven’t seen or talked to [the children] in a year and a half (thanks to his ex-wife).
She explained further that Alan had been granted temporary custody.
It’s a sad situation, but hopefully it will all turn out OK.

During the January 14 court date, Dorn was able to discuss the situation with Alan’s lawyer, Frank Head, and Dorn later said, “Bottom line is, Jessica got her children returned to her.”

Alan had enrolled the kids in the school system of Maryland. They had gone through three weeks of classes. Jessica, however, proved to the court that she was going to have the children homeschooled properly this time, under the auspices of a licensed homeschooling organization connected to a church near her home.

“I’m on the faculty of a school,” Jessica told Dorn, explaining that she was qualified and could teach at Hope Christian School.

Still, the judge wasn’t satisfied. It was decided that Jessica would place the children into a more traditional, conventional school system. At least for the remainder of the year. When—and if—she could prove the homeschooling qualifications she claimed to have, and Alan agreed, she could educate them.

Dorn explained to Jessica that the judge was adamant about the visitation schedule—considering her history—being kept. No more fooling around. It was time to heed to the court and allow Alan what was rightfully his.

This riled Jessica.

Alan brought the girls to the courthouse that day. When all was settled, and Jessica begrudgingly decided to honor the judge’s orders, the kids were back in her arms.

“Jessica, Alan is going to be taking the girls to lunch,” Dorn told his client after court, “so he can say good-bye to them, okay?”

Dorn later said Jessica became “very agitated” by this statement, but she agreed.

Alan took the girls to lunch and then went back to Maryland. He and Jessica were set to face off in court within the next few weeks. The custody hearing was on schedule. They were both set to give depositions in Dorn’s office explaining their side of the story. Until then, the girls would stay with their mother.

A few days after that initial court date, Dorn found out Jessica had lied to him. In doing so, Dorn had turned around and had lied—unknowingly—to the judge.

This did not sit well with the experienced, well-liked attorney. So he corrected the record. “[I]t came to my attention,” the lawyer later explained, “that the information I had represented to the court about the homeschooling was not true. . . . The children were
not
being educated under . . . the curricula of the homeschooling agency that we had represented, and that Jessica was
not
considered part of the faculty.”

She had fabricated every part of the story.

How had Dorn found this out? Alan’s lawyer called him and explained that he had checked Jessica’s story out, and none of it was true.

After Frank Head called David Dorn, he relayed the information to the court.

The judge called Dorn. “What’s the deal?”

Dorn explained.

“Well, I am going to make an order,” the judge stated, “that the kids be returned to Mr. Bates immediately.”

“I need some time to discuss this with my client, Your Honor.”

“Yes . . .”

“Can we schedule an evidentiary hearing?”

Dorn wondered how the matter could be solved like this over the telephone. Frank Head was expected to present evidence in a court of law and prove Jessica was a liar. It was the proper way to go about it.

“The twenty-eighth,” the judge suggested.

Ten days.

Alan Bates would be dead by then.

42

It was hard to imagine, but Jessica McCord had won the first round. She lied to the court, the judge and her lawyer, but she had managed to retain custody of the girls.

“What?” was Alan’s reaction when he heard. He could not believe it. Neither could his attorney or his family. After all she had done, Jessica had managed to get her way once again.

It was beyond ridiculous.

According to the judge’s new order, Jessica could keep the girls
during the pendency of this [investigation, but the] defendant shall not conduct homeschooling of either child absent written consent of plaintiff. It is also ordered during the pendency of this case that both parties shall at all times inform the other of his or her phone number and residential address.

Alan had heard all this before. They were going around in circles.

Not to fear. During the upcoming trial Frank Head promised he was going to expose every single law that Jessica had broken over the past seven years and show the court the person she truly was. Alan had audiotapes of Jessica raging mad on his voice mail. She sounded belligerent and vicious. He had witnesses. Documentation. There was no doubt: the kids were leaving that court on March 5, 2002, with Alan; he was certain to win.

David Dorn seemed like the type of honest lawyer that Frank Head felt he could deal with in a civilized manner. They were both fighting for their clients’ rights. Sure. Yet, they all needed to get along and allow the court to make judgments on facts—not Jessica’s version of the events or the lies she told. Dorn seemed like the right lawyer to be able to get that done.

After deciding on the matter of temporary custody, which took place in the judge’s chambers, and never made it into the actual courtroom, Head and Dorn decided they both wanted to take depositions from one another’s client sooner rather than later. March 5 was right around the corner. The depositions needed to be done quickly.

“Frank, find out when your client can come back from [Maryland] to Birmingham and call me.”

“I will,” Frank Head said.

A day or so later, Head called Dorn and rattled off a few dates.

“February fifteenth sounds good to me,” Dorn agreed.

“Okay. Since Alan’s flying in from Washington, he’d like to have the kids for that weekend.”

Dorn approached Jessica with the idea. Her reaction was the norm: steam from her ears. Or, as Dorn later put it, “Not positive. You know, agitation.”

On February 8, 2002, Frank Head confirmed the date of the depositions to take place at Dorn’s downtown Birmingham office, first thing Friday morning, February 15.

Seven days away.

As we discussed,
Frank Head wrote in the letter to Dorn,
Alan would like to get the children for the weekend. . . .
Alan could pick them up that Friday after the deposition and return them to Jessica on Sunday night.

On the bottom of the letter, Head wrote a short note to Alan, whom he CC’d. He gave Alan the address to Dorn’s office and telephone number, should he arrive that Friday morning in Birmingham and be delayed at the airport for any reason. If he was going to be late for the deposition, he should call.

Alan was looking forward to sitting down and speaking his mind on the entire matter. Laying it all out.

This was it for Alan Bates. Game day. As soon as those depositions were done, he could pick up the kids, head off to Marietta, Georgia, for the weekend and meet up with family and friends. After that, all he had to do was wait until his day in court.

Finally the system was falling back into favor with the truth.

43

As far back as the spring of 2001, Jessica had suggested to Jeff that violence was likely the only way to settle her dispute with Alan. There was no other way. Alan was going to win in court.

“Let’s kill him,” Jessica said one day (according to Jeff).

Officer Jeff McCord had shrugged it off as the frustrated gesture of a woman who hated her ex-husband. How many scorned ex-wives, full of fury, had sat around with friends, sipping cheap wine during happy hour, and then blurted out,
I wish he were dead
?

In mid-February 2002, after a meeting with David Dorn at his office downtown, Jeff and Jessica returned home and picked up that “let’s kill him” conversation once again. Jessica turned to Jeff and, according to what Jeff later claimed, said, “We should just kill him.”

They were in the living room. Alone. The kids were gone. Probably over at Jessica’s mother’s house.

Jeff looked at his wife. She sounded serious this time. Like she actually meant it. He was startled by this.

Alan and the custody matter was the focus of the McCord marriage. From the moment it appeared that Alan was going, by Jessica’s count, “to get his way,” life inside the McCord household centered around how Jessica was going to get Alan back—and how Jeff was going to help her.

Jeff didn’t put too much thought into the suggestion of killing Alan. “I figured she was blowing off steam,” he said later, “just ticked off . . . standard divorce stuff.” Jeff added that he never had any reason to “think she’d even consider following through with anything. So I didn’t pay any,
any
real attention.”

Then she said it again a few days later. This time over the telephone. “In my opinion, Kelley, Alan needs to be killed.”

“What?” Jeff had forgotten about those prior suggestions.

“Different people—‘friends’—have suggested,” Jessica continued, “everything from the only way to get rid of this problem is to put a bullet in his head, to something needs to happen to him. . . .”

Jeff was taken aback by this recent proposal. Jessica sounded matter-of-fact, as if murder was an option she was now actually considering. She wasn’t just “blowing off steam” anymore, Jeff could tell. The woman was talking—and apparently had been talking to others—about killing Alan.

Jeff recalled, in his circuitous, hard-to-follow way of dismissing his involvement, “Her reason at that time, she really didn’t specify reasons, other than the prior history of domestic abuse [she claimed], just in her, according to her, the type of person he was, how he . . . how badly or however he mistreated [the children], how controlling he was, so forth and so on.”

Jessica had made all of that up. Alan was none of those things. There was no record of Alan ever being abusive toward Jessica or the kids.

The idea of losing the children to Alan didn’t jibe with what David Dorn later said. Describing this same time period and the tone of Jessica’s demeanor then, Dorn reported that he had been telling his client he was fairly confident she would be able to retain permanent custody of the children, as far as he was concerned. “All throughout the process, you know,” Dorn testified in court later, “it was my professional opinion we were going to win. . . . There was never a time when I told her [that] we were going to lose.”

But Jessica went home and played it off on Jeff differently. She made it appear as though she was under the enormous amount of pressure of losing the children—and she couldn’t allow an abusive maniac to raise her kids. She had told Jeff that both of her wrists had been broken by Alan and that he had once cracked her sternum. She showed him the scars, Jeff said.

Looking at them, Jeff responded, “Oh, my goodness.” He believed every word. “From watching the way she was able to pick up things,” Jeff said later, and the way she had to handle anything heavy, her wrists didn’t have the same strength as most people. “At least what I’ve seen in my experience.”

And so it was that display of weakness, apparently, that had led Jeff to believe that Alan had hurt her wrists.

Jessica described two separate incidents where she claimed Alan had put her in the hospital.

Jeff was curious, his cop instinct creeping up on him. “Did you file a police report? Did you have him prosecuted?” Jeff also wondered why the judge in the custody matter wasn’t persuaded by any of this.

“Look, at the time this happened [the mid-1990s],” Jessica said after Jeff questioned her, “when I called the Shelby County Sheriff’s [Office] for assistance, when a deputy showed up, his attitude was ‘Well, you know, you’re not dead. . . . You know there’s nothing I can do. He’s married to you.’”

And so, with Jessica’s continued references to the children being forced by the court to go live with an abusive father, Jeff McCord began to think about protecting his wife and her children any way that he could. The question gnawing at him as deposition day approached, however, became: how was he going to step in and defend them?