Death Trap (34 page)

67

On April 25, 2003, shortly after Jeff formally pleaded guilty, Jessica was sentenced to life without parole. In the end the judge took the advice of the jury and signed the Sheriff’s Commitment Order, sending Jessica to prison for the remainder of her natural life. She was never going to see freedom again. After Judge Vinson handed down the sentence, she asked Jessica if there was anything she had to say for herself. Maybe some explanation? Sorrow? Remorse?

Jessica declined.

Asked later on by a reporter if she wanted to make a comment, Jessica “smiled,” Carol Robinson noted, and said, “Not hardly.”

Before being whisked off to prison, Jessica was allowed to spend some time with friends and family, including her mother and grandmother, who were in court for the sentencing. Jessica laughed as she chatted with her family. What was so funny, no one actually knew. But the fact that she would appeal her case was probably fueling Jessica’s hostile, defiant attitude. It was still all a joke to Jessica McCord. There’s no doubt she saw herself getting out of prison one day when the appeals court heard her plea.

John Wiley was a bit more grounded in reality. He showed professionalism as he left the court, telling reporters, “The death penalty is wrong in any case and this case is no exception, so we’re very pleased and relieved that Mrs. McCord is delivered of that possibility of being killed by the state of Alabama. “She gets to turn her attention now to her appeal, and, hopefully, one day she’ll have a new trial and a more favorable outcome.”

Jeff and Jessica McCord ended up on the same bus heading out to prison later that day. There was one bus. All prisoners boarded. The males were separated from the females by a fence, but they could still speak to one another.

As Jessica stepped up onto the bus, shackles clanking, a cocky smile across her face, she noticed her husband sitting in the back among a group of inmates.

In her sarcastic way, quite mean-spirited and vile, Jessica stopped, smiled and looked at Jeff. By this time she knew Jeff had come clean with his version of the murders and had cut himself a deal. Up until this point Jessica had had nothing but good things to say about Jeff.

“Hey, everyone,” Jessica said as loud as she could, the entire bus stopping to look up, “that’s my husband.” She pointed Jeff out. “He’s a cop!”

Jessica sat down and faced the front.

Due to how high profile my case was, it is rather safe to say that virtually everyone in metro-Birmingham knew that I was a police officer,
Jeff McCord wrote to me after he was asked if this verbal assault against his character by Jessica had caused him any problems later on when he got to prison. It’s no secret that inmates are not too fond of cops as cellmates.

Overall, I have had no real problems as a result of it or in relation to my former profession
. . . .
I have been housed in either protective custody or administrative segregation depending on my placement.

68

Roger Brown was convinced Dian Bailey had lied to him while testifying during her daughter’s trial. A grand jury believed the evidence Brown had presented in relation to those charges. Now Brown was determined to prosecute Dian Bailey and the McCords’ friend, Michael Upton, who, the prosecutor’s office believed, had lied during his grand jury testimony. How dare these people think they can lie to the police and prosecutors investigating a double homicide? For what? To protect murderers? Reaffirming Brown’s contention that Upton lied about the storage facility, Brown got the results of Jeff McCord’s polygraph, and the examiner felt Jeff was telling the truth.

On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, Michael Upton was in court facing a jury on charges of hindering prosecution and perjury for his role in lying during the investigation into the deaths of Alan and Terra Bates. Upton was said to have told varying stories regarding that storage facility and the possibility of potential evidence Jessica had hidden.

Investigators never found the storage unit or the evidence. Still, Upton, a man in his early thirties, sat and listened as prosecutor Doug Davis explained to a jury the state’s case against him.

Davis said Upton repeatedly changed his story, which led police to believe he was lying. More than that, Davis was firm in his personal belief that Upton had “decided loyalty to his friends [was] more important than the truth. He chose to cross the line of criminality.”

Richard Poff, Michael Upton’s lawyer, explained that his client had no idea a storage facility existed; he only knew of a storage unit that Albert Bailey had rented. Apparently, Upton got mixed up in the fiasco when Jessica asked him to help her stepfather move some furniture from Bailey’s storage unit over to her mother’s house so the kids would have something to sleep on while she was in jail.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Poff argued. “This is all a tale of sound and fury signifying
nothing.
”

The star witness of the day, after Roger Brown and detective Laura Brignac testified, was one of Jessica’s former cellmates. She told police that Michael Upton knew of the “bloody stuff” in the storage unit.

 

 

The next day, August 6, Jeff McCord sat and, for the first time publicly, described how he and Jessica had murdered Alan and Terra Bates, and then went about an elaborate plan to try and cover up the crimes.

Listening to Jeff’s graphic, detailed descriptions of the murders, Michael Upton sat with a stoic flush of sadness written across his face. At times tears streamed down his cheeks. Upton later said that none of it seemed real until Jeff McCord illustrated the murders so vividly on the witness stand. Upton said that up until that moment, he still held “on to some hope that they (Jeff and Jessica) were still innocent.”

Upton took the stand himself and told the jury he had no idea Jessica had rented a storage facility. He also said he “suffered from memory loss” due to a car accident he was in years before. Because of the injuries he had sustained, Upton testified, he “easily [became] confused under stress, which may have led to a misunderstanding during grand jury proceedings.”

Shocking the courtroom, Upton then said that his wife, pregnant with his child, dropped dead of a heart attack just two months ago.

 

 

Closing arguments were heard later that afternoon; then the jury was asked to deliberate the case. Perjury, a Class C felony, was good for ten years in the state pen if a judge felt inclined to give such a stiff sentence.

The next morning, after three hours of discussions, the jury found Michael Upton guilty of perjury (the judge dropped an additional charge of obstruction).

Michael Upton was devastated, his attorney said after the trial.

A little over a month later, Upton was sentenced to “spend a year in a work-release program,” followed by five years of supervised probation. This meant Michael Upton would spend his nights in jail, but be allowed to leave during the day and work outside the prison.

69

Dian Bailey’s alleged crime, although similar to Michael Upton’s, might have had far greater implications on Jessica McCord’s case, prosecutor Teresa McClendon explained to a jury on the morning of October 27, 2003. The fact that Dian lied during Jessica’s trial could have influenced jurors to acquit her daughter, essentially allowing a murderer to escape justice.

That made this particular crime of perjury inexcusable, McClendon suggested.

The prosecutor told jurors how Jeff and Jessica carried out this vicious, premeditated double homicide with callousness and hatred. She spoke of how they lured Terra and Alan into the house. How they made them feel comfortable, using the children as bait. But then Jeff shot them four times each without warning.

These were evil people. Anyone who helped them should be viewed the same.

And so here comes the mother of one of the accused, who had walked into a courtroom some months ago and stomped all over the law. Above anyone else, Dian Bailey should have known better—she had worked for the court system herself for nearly two decades.

In his opening argument Bill Dawson downplayed his client’s responsibility, talking about Dian’s emotional state at the time, telling jurors she was “working full-time, caring for a father with Alzheimer’s and a mother with pneumonia”—all while taking care of her daughter’s four children.

The woman was burned-out. She didn’t know up from down, when she had seen her daughter and when she hadn’t.

“She told what she
thought
was the truth,” Dawson said.

 

 

Jeff came in and told his tale of murder once again, stunning another jury with his words. However, nowhere in Jeff’s version of the events did he testify to stopping at Dian’s house at or near midnight, which was what Dian had told jurors during Jessica’s trial.

There was no way to confuse this detail—because it never happened.

Dawson attacked Jeff’s credibility, implying that he was now on the state’s payroll—so to speak—and part of the prosecution’s team, fulfilling his duty as part of a deal he had signed to escape the death penalty.

Jeff could be back on the street, inside thirty years, Dawson said.

 

 

Sheron Vance, the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant who had gone with Bureau agent Kimberly Williams to Dian’s house that Saturday morning, said Dian was “visibly surprised” when Jessica told police she had stopped by her mother’s house the previous night, near midnight.

An unplanned lie. Just tossed out there.

“I was looking,” said Vance, “right at Dian. She had just been standing there, staring into space the entire time.” But when Jessica mentioned to Williams that she had seen her mother the night before, Dian “rolled her eyes and took a step back. . . .”

 

 

Fifty-eight-year-old Dian Bailey decided against taking the witness stand.

That out of the way, closing arguments were next.

The jury took thirty minutes to convict Dian, completing a hat trick of guilty verdicts for the prosecution. Dian didn’t respond to the verdict. She sat, no emotion, dumbfounded and confused.

 

 

On December 9, 2003, Jefferson County Circuit Court judge Mike McCormick gave Dian Bailey an eight-year sentence. The courtroom was silent while McCormick spoke. Filled with whispers afterward.

Eight years.
Ouch!

Jessica’s mother would spend one year in a Shelby County work-release program—same as Michael Upton—and an additional seven years on probation, with no actual jail time.

Before he was finished, McCormick asked Dian if she had anything to say for herself.

Like her daughter, Dian said no.

“Apparently,” McCormick concluded, “out of some misguided loyalty, you chose to lie. This is a very serious matter.”

 

 

Finally, during the summer of 2004, after the Klugh and Bates families filed a $150 million wrongful-death suit against Jeff and Jessica McCord, both families won an additional judgment that allowed them to collect any money Jeff McCord might make from a book or movie deal throughout his lifetime.

Then they went after Jessica for the same.

Neither Jeff nor Jessica would ever profit from their crimes.

“This sort of settlement is, first and foremost, to prevent the criminals from profiting from their crime,” Kevin Bates told me in closing. “Should any money ever come of selling Alan and Terra’s story, we just wanted to ensure that every penny went to Alan’s girls—who have truly lost the most from Jeff and Jessica’s horrific and selfish actions.”

70

Terra’s father, Tom Klugh, didn’t need to know any more about life than he had learned over the past several years. He had lost his only child to a cruel murder. He was divorced. Then, with all of the trials and lawsuit hearings behind him, Tom Klugh got a call from his doctor.

Prostate cancer.

A rough road didn’t even begin to describe those past few years for Tom.

But then others had it worse, Tom knew deep down. There were other people in the world suffering a hell of a lot more than he was. He didn’t want people feeling sorry for him. He just wanted to go away for some quiet time and begin to rebuild and recover.

That story of Terra tossing her red boots into the stream back in the early 1970s when Tom and his wife and Terra lived in Cullowhee, North Carolina, kept coming back up for Tom as he went over his life up to this point. Tom had always felt strongly that Terra’s life had been spared by God on that day. She was
allowed
to live by her Maker because there was more for her to do. In dying with Alan by the hand of evil, Tom still felt Terra’s mission in this life had been fulfilled.

“I had heard from some people who saw Terra and Alan that day of the deposition,” Tom recalled, referring to the hours before Alan and Terra were murdered, “when they were leaving a local restaurant, that they never seemed happier. They were walking away from this restaurant across from the Alabama Theatre. . . . I got the feeling that they, well, that they
knew
they were leaving. I know it sounds a little hokey, but they were really, really happy at that time.”

The question that bothered Tom was
Why?

After Terra and Alan’s memorial service, Tom took a portion of Terra’s ashes, a small bit from the vase, and placed it in a vial. He didn’t know what he was going to do with the vial when he took it, but he felt confident that the purpose would come to him someday down the road.

Now, many months after the trials and convictions, with all the madness of the murders behind him, after thinking things through, it was perfectly clear to Tom what he needed to do with that vial of Terra’s ashes.

He called his brother. “I need you to come with me.”

“Where?”

“Cullowhee.”

They took off and made the trip into the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a pilgrimage, Tom recalled, more than a simple road trip two brothers had embarked on. They headed back to the place where, “by all rights,” Tom said, Terra should have been killed nearly twenty-nine years prior—that is, had God wanted to take her home on that day she wandered down by the river. It only seemed fitting to Tom that some of his daughter’s ashes be spread over—or returned to—that small creek she had almost fallen into and drowned in so many years before.

An ode to her memory?

Perhaps.

A way to honor her memory?

Maybe.

For Tom, it was more like paying God back—giving Him the respect He deserved. Maybe thanking Him for giving Tom those additional decades with his daughter.

Tom and his brother couldn’t really get down to the creek edge because it had grown in so thickly with brush and trees. But there was a small bridge they could stand on. It extended over the water rushing fast underneath.

“There . . . let’s go,” Tom said.

He opened the vial and said something to himself.

Paused.

Then, standing in the middle of the bridge, he spread the ashes over the water.

Some of the solid, heavier pieces of ash fell into the creek and made small splashes. However, the remainder, which had turned into a large cloud of dust as it headed down toward the water, was “picked up,” Tom recalled, “by a gust of wind and carried into the air,” as if there were somebody waiting to scoop it up into her hands.

“I get chilly bumps on my skin just thinking about it,” Tom remembered.

Looking at this display of what Tom could see only as an angel picking Terra up and carrying her off, he thought of what Terra might have said, had she been there in the flesh standing next to him on that bridge.

In the flesh, of course, because it was so obvious Terra’s spirit was there with Tom and his brother that day.

The circle of his daughter’s life, from where Tom Klugh stood, was complete. She and Alan, Tom was now certain, could rest in peace together.