Death Trap (4 page)

5

GBI crime scene specialist Todd Crosby was one of the first to arrive at the Hawkins Academy Road scene that morning. Crosby worked out of the GBI’s Milledgeville, Georgia, office, a sixty-minute drive south of Rutledge. He had received a call at four forty-five that morning from the GBI Communications Center and hit the road in his crime scene van shortly after.

The GBI works on a “request only” basis, supporting all law enforcement agencies in the state of Georgia. According to its mission statement:
[The] GBI is an independent, statewide agency that provides assistance to the state’s criminal justice system in the areas of criminal investigations, forensic laboratory services and computerized criminal justice information.

The Bureau, as it’s sometimes called, is split up into three divisions: investigative, forensic sciences and crime information. Each works to serve the other—and the corresponding law enforcement agencies calling on the GBI for help. It is an agency that has been operating in the state of Georgia in some form or fashion since 1937.

With two severely burned bodies in the trunk of a car, there was a good chance someone was trying to cover up a set of murders. The mob did this sort of thing—although, they were generally a lot cleaner about it. If you know what you’re doing, a fire is a great way to destroy evidence. The only problem is, you had better make sure you finish the job; because with the technology available today, a forensic team is certain to uncover bags of trace evidence in support of its case if the fire doesn’t do the trick. Arson investigation is not as difficult as it may seem. Fire can sometimes preserve evidence and leave clues otherwise unavailable.

This was, of course, one of the main reasons why Todd Crosby was summoned to the scene. His job is to collect biological and fingerprint evidence. If someone left his or her DNA at the scene, or fingerprints somewhere on this vehicle, Crosby would find it with any one of his many forensic tools.

Crosby was briefed as to what was going on. The GBI Communications Center paged him and explained what it could. By 6:40
A.M
., Crosby parked his van near the scene. Getting out of his vehicle, he was now among the commotion of flashing red and blue lights lined up along the road. Soon the sun would be up. Then the real work could begin.

Crosby first noticed that the original crime-scene tape was in an area too constricted and confined. It was awfully windy out, more so than it normally was on an average day. The scene needed to be expanded in case pieces of trace had drifted away with the wind. So Crosby ordered “approximately two hundred yards on either side of the vehicle” to be “roped” off. This area would be the “new crime scene.” The idea was to begin a gridlike search of the ground for anything: cigarette butts, chewing gum, footprints, a fingernail, a piece of paper. Whatever jumped out. Killers are not generally prone to pick up after themselves and leave no evidence. Sure, the murderer generally thinks he or she is smarter than the rest of the world (especially law enforcement), but the reality is that
all
killers leave evidence behind. Crosby’s job was to find what this killer had haphazardly left in his or her wake. That one clue. That one piece of the puzzle that might just make sense—and tie things together—in the coming days.

The wind picked up as Crosby began his duties. You get only one or maybe two shots at a crime scene before it becomes too overtaken and infested by people. “Contaminated” is the word they use. After a day, an outside scene like this wasn’t going to be worth a damn.

Around the car, as the sun rose and illuminated the immediate area, pine trees were scattered, stuck perfectly in the ground like immense green arrows pointing toward the sky. There was not a house in sight anyone could see. As Crosby conducted his search, he photographed things. The initial area the technician focused on, which Crosby knew to be the most important, was the inside of the trunk, where both bodies had been uncovered. From the inside of the vehicle, looking toward the backseat, he noted it was an area of the vehicle that had been burned completely. So much so, Crosby could see into the trunk from inside the car.

As he glanced into the vehicle, a set of knees stared eerily back at him.

“Her legs,” Crosby said later, “were bent back around, behind her. . . .”

It was a woman. She was small. Very petite. Moreover, it was easy to tell—and this would become an important factor as the case progressed—that the victim closest to the backseat of the car had been placed in the trunk first.

Were they dead before being placed inside the trunk? Chances were the victims had been murdered by some other means—the fire had not killed them—at a second location. Which meant there were likely two crime scenes involved.

In front of the female victim, closest to the back end of the vehicle, Crosby photographed and studied the second victim’s feet and legs. Both were somewhat visible if you stood over the trunk and looked directly down. This victim was a man. They could tell by the size of his left arm, which had been burned entirely away from his fingertips, up to about his elbow. His bone, near the bicep area, was visible.

Crosby took scores of photos. Flashes of light—
pop, pop, pop
—paparazzi-like, one after the other. Crosby studied how the bodies were placed and how they might have been put inside the trunk.

“His legs,” Crosby noted, talking about the second victim, “come up and then bend back around the thigh area . . . the right side of the body.”

Crosby noticed that both of the victims’ arms and legs were discernible if you looked closely. The same was true with regard to other parts of their bodies. The back of the male’s calves were, in the same way as the female’s, bent flush against the back side of his thighs. These people were definitely, Crosby was now certain, crunched up together and then placed into the trunk—another indication that they were killed beforehand at a second location.

As Crosby searched the trunk, another GBI technician combing the scene noticed something. There was a comforter underneath the bodies that hadn’t been completely consumed by the fire.

They definitely needed that.

Hairs. Fibers. DNA.

Slowly, with the help of several additional investigators, including Susan Simmons, the deputy coroner of Morgan County, Crosby removed the body of the male and carefully placed him in a waiting body bag.

On the male victim’s left hand was a wedding band. Crosby photographed it before the body was zipped away in the bag. As he did this, Crosby noticed what appeared to be a bullet wound on the man’s wrist.

Interesting.

The male victim had possibly held up his hands to block an oncoming bullet, perhaps instinctively protecting himself. Maybe there was a bullet fragment somewhere?

Looking at the female victim next, Crosby noticed what he called “defects in the body,” eventually finding out that they were also “bullet holes.” The female victim had a wound in her lower back.

The comforter was now clearly visible.

When both bodies were placed in body bags, they were taken to the GBI Crime Lab for further study and autopsy.

Not too far away from the vehicle, one of the many crime scene specialists who had shown up at the scene found something else. It was a sheet of paper towel with the imprint pattern of a little boy and little girl. The corner of the paper towel was burned, but a majority of it was still intact.

A GBI agent bagged it.

Upon further investigation, GBI investigators found what looked to be an engagement ring inside the trunk, but the diamond was gone. It was underneath where the female victim’s body was placed. There were all sorts of debris in the trunk. Then two duffel bags were located: one contained partially burned clothes; the other—on a quick glance—was full of what looked to be court documents.

The theory was that the murderers had probably hoped these duffel bags would be incinerated with the rest of the evidence.

No such luck.

There was a particular reason these two people were murdered. That was clear from the evidence at this early stage. Any cop worth his yearly salary knew that finding that reason would lead to a suspect.

Connect the dots. Despite what
Law & Order
and
CSI
portrayed on television, some investigators still viewed police work in that same simple, gumshoe manner. One piece of evidence leads to the next.

Baby steps.

As Crosby finished his work at the scene, investigators from the GBI and the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office walked the scene looking for additional trace. At one point Crosby located and photographed a .44 Magnum Remington shell casing someone uncovered about ten to fifteen feet from the rear of the vehicle.

It was an odd find. A .44 would have blown the male victim’s wrist off, not put a hole in it. Two weapons? Two different guns used in the same crime?

Another anomaly.

When he finished, Crosby was whisked up in the air by helicopter. This gave him the opportunity to take scores of aerial photographs before heading back to the GBI Crime Lab.

As investigators continued searching the scene, someone found a spent projectile that was mushroomed over on the top inside the trunk.

An important piece of the puzzle.

Not long after that, someone located a cigarette butt, a Marlboro Light.

Things were coming together rather expeditiously.

6

GBI investigator Kimberly Williams was at the Hawkins Academy Road crime scene in Georgia most of the morning. She arrived, along with several other investigators from the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office and her GBI colleague Todd Crosby, near 6:30
A.M
.

By late morning it was confirmed that the car was indeed the same red Pontiac Grand Am that Alan Bates had rented at the Avis airport terminal in Birmingham. Of course, this was not good news for Philip, Joan, Kevin and Robert Bates, who were now huddled together in Marietta, waiting for any sign of hope that Alan and Terra might be alive and well—that this entire episode was nothing more than a great misunderstanding.

GBI investigator Williams was familiar with the location in Rutledge where the bodies were recovered. She lived north of Milledgeville, about twenty minutes away. As she walked the scene, the wind picked up steadily, blowing the investigator’s blond hair wildly around. With the wind came the cold, at least by Georgia standards. Williams was assigned as case agent; she was now in charge of the Bureau’s side of the investigation from this point forward. By now, the seasoned investigator was aware that Alan and Terra Bates were supposed to have picked up Alan’s kids outside Birmingham in Hoover and driven to his parents’ house in Marietta. It was a good bet, considering the makeup and description of the bodies found in the trunk, that somewhere between Birmingham and Rutledge, Alan and Terra Bates had met with the violent hand of evil.

Williams had been with the GBI since 1995. A cop with her experience didn’t need DNA and dental records to override her gut instinct. When all the cards were turned over, the only hand Williams could see was that the bodies in the trunk were Alan and his wife. Williams had been around her share of murder scenes, family arguments turned deadly, husbands and wives shooting each other for no apparent reason. Murder was not common, but it had a certain pulse to it that spoke through victims and the way they were found.

“I definitely would not say that I have seen everything,” Williams said later, “but I have been exposed to a great deal by working narcotics and field cases.”

The answer to what was now a mystery, Williams knew after realizing where the car had driven from, was in Birmingham. Or at least that was probably the best place to start. The other concern was the children who were supposed to be with Alan and Terra. Where were they?

Thank God—in some strange way—that there were only two bodies in that trunk—and both were adults.

“Once we identified who the car most likely contained, obviously the victims could not be identified formally,” Williams said, “and once we talked to the Bates family and found out Terra and Alan Bates were overdue . . . we focused on where they were last seen.”

And all roads led to Birmingham.

Backtracking, following Alan and Terra’s footsteps, Birmingham was the ideal location to begin that end of the investigation. Seeing that it had been confirmed that Alan walked out of a deposition downtown somewhere near 3:30
P.M
. the previous day and hadn’t been seen or heard from since, Birmingham was the start of the GBI’s timeline—or, more like it, deathline. The other arm of the investigation was going to be the hardest to go forward with right now: questioning Alan’s family. Searching for those important details and clues without letting them know what, exactly, was going on. The GBI couldn’t come out and say they had found Alan and Terra in the trunk. They needed positive identification before that could be done. It was a catch-22: because for positive identification to be made, they needed dental records and DNA from those same people.

“Vance,” Williams called out to MCSO investigator Sheron Vance, who partnered up with Williams almost immediately, “can you come with me?”

Williams and Vance left the Rutledge scene for Pelham, Alabama—this, while a second GBI agent, Sherri Rhodes, took off for Marietta, Georgia, to interview members of the Bates family. They could discuss developments via radio and receive updates about the crime scene from the road. Best thing to do was to spread out and begin putting the pieces together.

Jessica McCord’s second husband, Jeff, was a Pelham, Alabama, police officer. Cops helped each other. That clichéd code of blue silence and brotherly love they all lived by might come into play here. The brotherhood of law enforcement. Jeff would be the best person to start with. Williams and Vance decided that the Pelham PD was as good a place as any to begin. From talking to Jeff, they could track down Jessica and find out if and when she saw or heard from Alan last—that is, if everything went as planned, and Jeff was willing to help.

“Primarily,” Williams told me, “[we selected an interview with Jeff McCord first] because we knew where he was supposed to be, which was at work.” Jeff had swapped shifts, GBI found out, with another officer earlier that week; he was scheduled to be working that Saturday, covering for the cop. After speaking with the chief of the PPD, Williams understood the best way to approach Officer Jeff McCord was to arrive at Pelham before Jeff’s 3:00
P.M
. shift started. The chief assured Williams that no one would tell him the GBI and MCSO were on the way.

The focus in talking to Jeff McCord would be on what time Alan and Terra showed up at the McCord home. That was going to be very important. Once Vance and Williams had that information, they could continue to backtrack—and maybe find out who had last seen Terra and Alan alive.