Death Trap (31 page)

“Well, before I left, when I left, or what?”

“Well, did you leave the house?”

“Yes, I did leave the house. We went by Mom’s.”

“You say ‘we’?”

“My husband and I. And I stuck my head in the door and said, ‘Is everybody okay? What’s going on?’ And, you know, [Alan’s kids] were still there, and I think they were watching Nickelodeon or something like that. . . .”

Wiley decided to play devil’s advocate. Maybe to interject, one could only speculate, a bit of authenticity into the conversation. Jessica’s testimony was confusing. She sounded casual and removed. She came across as cold and unfeeling. It was as if she was sickened by the idea that no one believed her at face value and she had to explain herself.

“A lot of us are going—well, let me withdraw that.” Wiley paused. Thought about it. “How could you have been so flippant and unconcerned about the fact that there was an
arrangement
for Alan to come and pick up the kids at six o’clock and, yet, Alan hadn’t done so?”

Wiley was right. Jessica had given the jury a confusing scenario that seemed to cover her tracks—no matter what she was asked later. She was at her mom’s. Then at home. She was back at her mom’s. Then on the road.

Many times juries will consider the parts of the story you leave out as evidence, too. As they would figure out soon enough, neither Jessica nor Wiley had mentioned that Jessica called Alan on his cell phone from her home—a fact telephone records proved—during this time period.

Answering Wiley’s question regarding the arrangement, Jessica took the opportunity to stomp on Alan’s memory some more.

“Because it happened so frequently. I mean,” she repeated just in case no one had heard her the first time, “it happened so frequently. You know, I cannot take you through all of the years we were divorced, but it did happen frequently. . . .”

Wiley moved on to Terra.

“We got along,” Jessica said. “We got along
very
well. Our big thing was that I cared about my kids, and
she
cared about my kids. And anybody who cares about my kids, I’m going to try to get along with. And she was very diplomatic and tried really hard to, you know, whatever conflict Alan and I had, to not let that really, you know, get all over the kids. She was real concerned about my kids.”

And then, as if she had rehearsed talking about this portion of the night in preparation for a Broadway role, Jessica told her version of the remainder of the evening and the next morning.

Movies.
The Lord of the Rings.

She and Jeff didn’t like it, so they went to the bathroom and snuck into
Black Hawk Down.

Didn’t like that, so they left the theater.

“I went back to my mom’s to see—I was hungry. We had not, you know, eaten that evening. And went back to Mom’s to see if she would be up for keeping the kids any longer. Thought maybe we could kind of nudge her into it, since it was so late.”

Although she had a cell phone, Jessica testified that she called her mother from a pay phone near the movie theater earlier that night.

When Wiley asked what time she returned to her mother’s, she had no trouble recalling that it was “midnightish.”

She said they left her mother’s house and went to Southside, the southern half of Birmingham’s downtown district. “We parked and walked . . . and, you know, just talking. I had spent a lot of my teenage years down on Southside, hanging out, and telling [Jeff] all about that. And he wanted to go to a strip club.”

Since she had never been inside a topless bar, Jessica said what the heck. Let’s do it. Why not?

They ended up, according to her testimony, at the PlayLate Club, somewhere near two to two-thirty that next morning, February 16.

They stayed an hour. “It was not my cup of tea.”

The problem with this story, jurors figured out easily enough, was that the bouncer at PlayLate, a man who had testified during the state’s portion of the case, was a former cop who knew Jeff McCord. And that former cop said he would have recognized Jeff if he had walked into the club—
especially
if Jeff was with a woman, seeing that it was not every night females frequented the PlayLate.

The rest of the early morning, Jessica testified, was a hodgepodge of lies she had a tough time keeping straight. She explained how, tired and beaten down by being up all night, walking hand in hand with Jeff, like two young lovers, they went over to the Home Depot as the sun came up. They looked at carpet samples. She said she wanted the house to look good for “the March court date” with Alan. The state was going to be coming into her house to check things out. Their dog, a black Lab, had ruined the carpet. It “was really nasty and it needed to be replaced.”

They didn’t buy anything, however, Jessica said, except for a carpet “trim knife.”

Then came her excuse for removing the backing on the leather sofa. She and Jeff wanted to reupholster the couch. The backing had cigarette burns on it. She said the dog had chewed up the seat cushions. The mattress, which police never recovered, had been tossed out in back of the yard. They decided to dispose of the sofa after tearing off the backing and realizing it wasn’t worth fixing.

Of course, they replaced the wallpaper in the den because Jeff had mistakenly shot the television out one night, Jessica testified, and then shot at the wall while practicing “night firing” he had to qualify for at the Pelham PD.

So Jeff had practiced his skills with a gun inside the house?

“I was furious with him.”

As the morning break came, Jessica had given answers to just about every question the state posed. Her testimony was designed to chisel away at the state’s case, and she went through, one by one, each piece of evidence, providing an alternative explanation. For those in the gallery who might have believed Jessica, as she implied that the charges were based on conjecture and circumstantial evidence, you’d have to leave the courtroom thinking,
Is this not the unluckiest woman in the world?

61

After a short morning break, John Wiley got his client back on track. There was a clear indication Jessica was almost finished. She had spent nearly three hours on the stand already. Had her direct examination been productive? Had she accomplished putting reasonable doubt into the minds of the jurors?

“When she was being questioned by her attorney,” Carol Robinson later told me, “her demeanor was almost laughable. It
was
laughable. She was trying to come off as prim and proper, very Pollyannaish—and it just wasn’t working. No one in the courtroom was buying it, and the jury wasn’t, either.”

Jessica testified about how distressed she was after talking to Philip Bates on February 16 and learning of Alan’s disappearance. She mentioned how ill-tempered and disgraceful she perceived the Hoover PD to be when they arrived to serve the first search warrant. She gave the jury the impression that the HPD had ransacked her house, which was, she admitted, a mess, anyway.

Jessica talked about the early-morning hours of Saturday, February 16. How she and Jeff hung around the house. This was a slippery slope for Wiley. On that Saturday, Jessica had been questioned by Kimberly Williams and Sheron Vance. She had to watch what she told the jury about this.

In turn, the best way to deal with the situation, Wiley apparently had decided, was to avoid it completely.

Not long after the lunch break, Wiley introduced several photographs of Jessica with her children. Roger Brown objected. The photos, Brown implied, bore no relevance to the case. They had been introduced to present Jessica as a maternal type. She was trying to show the jury she was a loving, doting mother.

The judge said they’d discuss it during lunch recess.

“Thank you,” Brown said.

“Jessica,” Wiley asked, “did you kill Alan Bates?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you kill Terra Bates?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Thank you.”

 

 

Roger Brown had held his tongue long enough. Now Brown stood and, with a measured tone, said, “You told us just before lunch that when the police asked about searching your car and your husband’s SUV, you volunteered it. . . . Is that what you said?”

“They did.”

“I didn’t
ask
you that,” Brown said. And this was where Jessica was going to run into trouble: On direct she could dance around the issues and answer questions at will; here, on cross, she would have to answer Brown’s questions frankly. Brown was not going to allow scripted answers that served Jessica’s agenda.

“Isn’t that what you said?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have anything to hide?” he posed.

“No.”

“You were going to be very cooperative with police, right?”

“I allowed them to look through my vehicles, yes,” Jessica agreed.

“Sure, because you
didn’t
have anything to hide, right?”

“I allowed them to look through my vehicles because they asked.”

“Did you have something to hide?” Brown questioned.

“No.”

For the next few minutes, they went at it: back and forth. Jessica said she did this. Brown said no, you did that.

“That’s not true,” Brown said.

“Yes, it is,” Jessica replied.

“No, it’s not.”

“
Yes,
it is.”

Brown had an easy way about him. His colleagues showed him the respect he deserved. Definitely a trial lawyer’s lawyer. “Roger is fun to watch in a courtroom,” Carol Robinson said later, “and always has been. He is an incredibly strong presence and just inspires confidence. He is intimidating. . . . He’s always sort of reminded me of Harrison Ford. He’s not flamboyant, just steady, dry and sarcastic. A force to be reckoned with, if you will.”

Jessica skated on the questions she didn’t want to answer and talked in circles around those she did. It was not hard to tell she was afraid to answer certain questions, for fear of getting caught in a lie. She had told so many untruths it was difficult to keep track. Brown knew this—and started to chip away at it.

The fact that Jessica had allowed police to search her vehicles, Brown pointed out, yet she would not allow them to search her house without a warrant, spoke volumes as to where her loyalties were in the investigation. This told police she knew something. Her ex-husband and his wife were missing—murdered. Jessica claimed not to have had anything to do with it. Yet, all that aside, she was unwilling to do everything in her power to help.

Sure it made her an immediate suspect. Why wouldn’t it?

Brown asked, “So [you made] a telephone call . . . at what time? Six-forty?”

“Six-thirty to six-forty, something like that.”

“So you said, ‘Thanks for coming by’?”

“I said, ‘Thanks a lot for’—I think I said, ‘Thanks a lot for not showing up.’”

“Oh, okay. And you also said, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on, Alan, but we’re here waiting for you,’ didn’t you?”

Jessica studied Roger Brown like the opponent he was. Her facial expression told the room what she was thinking:
Where are you going with this ?

“Yes,” she finally answered.

“Well, that was a lie, wasn’t it?” Brown said.

“Kelley and I were there.”

“He wasn’t picking you up for visitation.”

“Kelley and I meant ‘we.’”

“Oh, I see,” Brown said. “But the fact of the matter, Mrs. McCord, is that Alan and Terra’s lifeless, dead, bullet-riddled bodies were down on that couch in your den, and you made this call to set up some kind of an alibi?”

“No!”

“‘We’re waiting for you and we have movie plans. We need to go. I wish you would hurry up.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“I don’t remember the exact words.”

“Well,” Brown said, poise and experience oozing from each word, “there certainly wouldn’t be any reason for you to sit around and wait. That wasn’t interfering with your movie plans, was it?”

“I’m sorry, could you restate that?”

Brown repeated the question.

“
What
wasn’t interfering with my movie plans?” Jessica made it sound as if she was confused.

“Alan’s not coming by.”

“We had to wait on Alan because that was where he was supposed to come.”

“You told us this morning that sometimes he would come there, and he would always go to both places.”

Which was it?

The exchange was heated and accusatory. Brown knew she was lying. He asked Jessica about that phone call she made to her mother from the pay phone near the theater. Jessica claimed to “step out” of the movie while it was playing, leaving Jeff by himself, so she could go around the corner and call her mother.

Brown made her pinpoint an exact location.

She did.

The smart prosecutor then pointed out that the pay phone Jessica made the call from was “two miles” from the movie theater.

Two miles.

“And you went down there,” Brown said, recalling a statement Jessica gave during her direct testimony, “because you needed to get some Pepto-Bismol?”

“I had an upset stomach all day.”

“So the drugstore that is approximately a hundred yards from the movie theater in the same shopping center . . . that was too inconvenient?” Sarcasm bled from Brown’s inflection.

“What drugstore is that?”

“I don’t remember the name of it. . . . You didn’t go there?”

Jessica was caught in a bit of a sticky situation. Brown made it clear there was also a grocery store nearby, which she could have walked to in minutes. Someone with a stomachache would not likely go to the farthest store away to seek a quick remedy like Pepto. But Jessica had testified that she walked past a grocery store and drove two miles to a pharmacy.

Logically speaking, it made no sense.

“Then you went back to the movie with your Pepto-Bismol?”

“I went back to the movie theater, yes.”

“And they let you in without a ticket?”

“Who says I didn’t have a ticket?” Jessica sassed back.

“The ticket stubs were in your husband’s wallet.” She herself had testified to this fact.

But Jessica had an answer for that, too. “They were in his wallet later.”

“Well, how did they get from you to his wallet?”

“I’m sorry?”

Brown repeated the question.

“I assume at some point I gave them to him.”

“Oh, so you took them so that you could get back in?”

For the next few minutes, the prosecutor and the defendant sparred, going back and forth on the same points: the strip club, times, where they went after the movie, the ticket stubs. They discussed the front door at the house. Brown wondered why they never replaced it.

Jessica said they couldn’t afford it.

The problem Brown had with the door was that if it was not working on the Friday night Alan was supposed to pick up the kids, and they had gone to the trouble of leaving that note on the door, why did she walk out the front door several times that Saturday and Sunday? She had just admitted they couldn’t afford to fix it.

“We did go out the front door, yes.”

“So, obviously, this blanket (covering the door) and this sign and all of this problem with the front door was down by then, wasn’t it?”

“No.”

Brown moved on to the Contempt of Court Arrest Warrant. He suggested that Jessica had called three different people—two of them lawyers—to find out if there was a warrant out for her arrest; yet she testified that she had no idea the warrant existed.

“You talked about [killing Alan] so much,” Brown said near the end of his cross-examination, “that when you were about to get out [of jail after the ten-day sentence, one of the inmates] said to you, ‘You’re going to kill that man, aren’t you?’”

“[She] hardly spoke to me while I was there. No, she didn’t say that to me.”

“And your response was to laugh, wasn’t it?”

“Again, I just said she didn’t make the statement to me!”

“So [she] didn’t say that, either?”

“[She] said she hated police officers and their wives and hoped they all die. [She] did not make the statement to me.”

Brown asked about another inmate whom Jessica had supposedly said the same thing to.

“I don’t know who [she] is,” Jessica answered.

Brown went through Jessica’s previous statements regarding her not allowing Alan visitation based mostly on the fact that scheduling was sometimes off. It had nothing to do with her denying him an opportunity to see his kids.

If that was the case, Brown suggested, why wasn’t Jessica more upset over the contempt charge? Why not show up in court to fight it? Why ignore it and then serve time in jail without kicking and screaming? “And knowing that there was absolutely no basis for that, you were outraged,” Brown asked rhetorically, phrasing it more as a statement, though.

“No,” she said, “‘outraged’ is not the right word.”

“Well, we’ll use yours then. What is it?”

“I was upset.”

“Upset? Angry?”

“Not at that point, no.”

“No?”

“Not at that point,” Jessica answered.

“Just upset?”

“I was upset.”

“Upset emotionally so that you cried?” Brown posited.

“Oh, I’m sure I did.”

“Upset so that you vented your anger? Did you scream and yell?”

“You mean upon finding out?” Jessica countered.

“Yes.”

“Did I stand there and scream and yell?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe so, no,” Jessica answered.

“What did you say?”

“I don’t recall the exact moment I found out. You know, I—”

“Now, Mrs. McCord,” Brown said, interrupting, “you have portrayed yourself all morning to these ladies and gentlemen as being a very cooperative and nice Martha Stewart–type mother who was doing everything you reasonably could to allow Alan to visit with his children. Now, all of a sudden, here comes a piece of paper with all of these lies in there that says you’re denying his visitation rights.
That
didn’t make you mad?”

Jessica had no response. She kept dancing around the issue, and looked worse for it. She was so noncompliant and arrogant in her replies that Brown actually snapped back at one point: “Alan made phone call after phone call after phone call to you to try to arrange visitation, and you uniformly ignored his messages,
didn’t
you?”

“Phone calls to where?”

“To you!” Brown responded.

“Again, where?”

“I’ll ask the questions, Mrs. McCord. It doesn’t matter
where.
Did he make a phone call to you to try to arrange visitation?”

“At what time?” Jessica asked.

The judge had heard enough. She leaned over and said, “Mrs. McCord, just answer the question.”

“He has in the past called me regarding visitation . . . ,” she finally agreed.

Brown brought up the point of the missing mailbox.

“It kept getting knocked over,” Jessica said. “There didn’t seem to be much point. We were running behind on bills because if they cannot deliver the mail, your bills are late. So [Jeff] got a PO box and the mail wasn’t late.” It just happened they did this when Alan and the court were looking for Jessica.

Then they discussed schooling for the kids. Jessica said she took the kids out of school—not to hide them, but because she had been “unhappy with the Hoover schools for quite some time.”

“Pathetic” was the word that came to mind when those in the courtroom later recalled Jessica’s answers. She seemed to have an excuse for everything. Her answers were beyond transparent and reprehensible.

Brown took a few deep breaths. He realized the best way to attack the lies Jessica spewed was to use her own words.