Death Trap (5 page)

7

Jessica and Jeff McCord arrived home early on the morning of February 16, 2002, a Saturday. They had been out all night. To the movies, Jessica later said. Dinner. Then a long drive. Some sort of romantic jaunt to one of Jessica’s old hangout spots (they were celebrating Valentine’s Day a little late) from her teen years. Then a stop at Home Depot—the first in line at the door before the place was even open. There to pick up supplies so Jessica’s stepfather, Albert Bailey, could work on the house that day.

Both of them were tired. After putting her keys down on the kitchen table, Jessica scrolled through her caller ID to see who had phoned the house in their absence.

Philip and Joan’s number popped up several times from the previous night and that morning.

Must be Alan,
Jessica said she thought at that moment. Alan had not shown up at the house as planned to pick up the kids, Jessica claimed. Maybe that was him, calling to give his excuse.

She dialed the Bates household in Georgia.

“Hello,” Philip said. He sounded frazzled. Anxious. There were voices in the background Jessica could hear. Although she didn’t know it, the GBI had sent two investigators to the Bateses’ home in Marietta. They were there to begin recording information and getting to know a little bit more about Alan and Terra’s schedules and lives. They had just arrived and were getting settled. Alan’s brothers, Kevin and Robert, had just recently shown up, too.

“Is Alan there? Can I speak to him?” Jessica asked.

“I wish I could let you,” Philip said, a note of discomfort and confusion in his cracking voice. “But I don’t know where he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I cannot find him.”

“Oh,” Jessica said. “Oh, my gosh.” She later said this information Philip gave her was startling. It was unlike Alan to simply up and disappear. Alan was responsible. The do-gooder. The A student. The kid who never let anyone down. Jessica said she could never see Alan not alerting his parents to a new plan or his not showing up. When it came to her, she said that was a different story entirely. There were many times, Jessica later said, when Alan claimed he’d pick up the kids, but had never shown up.

Still, something was terribly wrong with this picture.

“I’m on the other end with someone important, Jessica,” Philip said at one point during the conversation. “I’ll have Joan call you back.”

Jessica hung up. Stared at the phone.

Five minutes later, Joan called.

“Alan and Terra are both missing,” Alan’s mother said matter-of-factly. “They have not come to Georgia as planned.
Where
are the children?” Joan was stressed and impatient. She knew how Jessica could be. She’d slept very little the previous night. She did not need her ex-daughter-in-law’s nonsense now.

“My mom’s house.”

“They haven’t shown up. They’re not here. . . .”

Jessica said she didn’t know how to react to Joan’s accusatory tone. Almost immediately, Jessica felt, Joan was condemning her. Poking a finger in her chest. She was only calling to threaten. Make the implication that Jessica had something to do with Alan and Terra’s disappearance. ( “It got ugly real quick,” Jessica recalled.)

“You’ve harmed them,” Jessica said Joan snapped at her. Joan was, obviously, upset. Uptight. On edge. Distraught. Crying. Saying things she would not remember later on. “They’re missing.
Where
are they?”

“Please let me know, Joan, what’s going on when you find out. I would need to tell the kids something.” The kids were expecting Alan and Terra to pick them up. They had anticipated their arrival. But Alan and Terra never came, Jessica said. As she spoke, apparently trying to explain this to Joan, she could hear Philip in the background. He was giving someone her address and phone number. Jessica could hear him clearly, as if she were in the same room. She asked Joan, “
Why
is he giving out my address? What’s going on? Why is he giving out my mom’s address? Tell me, Joan!”

Joan wouldn’t answer.

“Please, Joan. Please let me know, when you do, what’s going on.”

They hung up.

According to Jessica, the phone call upset her. She was bewildered and didn’t know what to make of it. She went to Jeff.

“What should we do?”

“Well,” Jeff said in his stoic Southern drawl, “let’s just go about our business here. There’s nothing that we can do. Sitting here, being upset, that isn’t going to solve anything.”

Jessica was unable to do chores around the house, she said. She was totally preoccupied with the situation. Pacing, waiting for Joan, Philip or anyone to call with some information. A bit of news. Some sort of word as to what in the heck was happening.

“Look,” Jeff said, watching his wife fuss about, “it’s not going to make them call any faster.”

Jessica needed to know. She’d have to tell the kids something sooner or later.

After a time, Jessica recalled, she and Jeff went back to cleaning up the house so her stepfather could come in later on that morning, as planned, to put in a new kitchen floor. In fact, according to Jessica, there was all sorts of work going on inside the house. Wall plastering. Carpeting. Wallpapering. Furniture and toys being tossed out. Cleaning. Trips to the dump. Also part of the anxious nature in fixing up the house and getting things thrown away was the fact that the state was coming to look things over as part of the child custody matter Jessica and Alan were involved in. Jessica admitted she was no Suzie Homemaker, but she didn’t want to give the state the wrong impression.

“Alan and Terra are much better housekeepers than I am,” Jessica said later. “I mean, it certainly would have been an issue [for the state], had it been in the condition it was at that time.”

8

Back at the Bates household in Marietta, the morning was a series of frantic, angst-filled uncertainties, disorder and questions. Philip called Robert early that morning to brief him about what was happening.

“I called the rental car company, Robert . . . spoke with GBI . . .”

Robert got the feeling something terrible had happened—he just didn’t know what.

“Drop whatever you’re doing and get up here,” Philip said.

Robert called Kevin, explained what was going on.

“I’m on my way,” Kevin said.

Robert, his wife and their kids were in Newnan at his mother-in-law’s house. They had driven down the night before. Robert and Kevin planned to head over to their parents’ house that afternoon—on Saturday—to meet up with Terra, Alan and the kids. They hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. Alan had turned thirty on January 22. They planned a belated birthday party for him. They were going to spend the day and night together as a family. Laughing. Joking around. Telling stories. Catching up.

Just like old times.

Kevin arrived first. As he walked in, there was a terrible, cold silence in the house. A deafening hum of pain and emotional tension. His mother sat at the table. Joan was silent and sullen. She stared blankly, Kevin recalled, “her eyes covered in tears, her face red.”

The progression of processing what was about to happen, Kevin recalled, was taking place in front of him. Both his parents were thinking things through. Facing facts. Trying to digest what was going on. What was coming. Accepting that a child is dead is not what parents are designed to do. It is a slow, wearisome transformation from protector to feeling like you’re running to stand still. You want to do something, but you have to come to the realization that there is nothing you
can
do.

Then you’re expected to open up and help an investigation that’s going on around you.

It’s as though the soul is being torn apart—slowly.

Philip didn’t say much. But what he said stung Kevin as he acclimated himself to the house, the tone, and what was happening. It was like being sucker punched. You had no idea you had been hit until you felt your jaw begin to swell, turned and then saw someone running away from you.

“The GBI is on the way,” Philip explained tersely, not pulling punches. His voice choked up.

The idea that Alan and Terra were in a car accident became the mainstay of thought. It was something they all considered, without verbalizing their feelings. That look Philip gave Kevin, however, told him something else. Staring at his father, Kevin considered:
The GBI would not be coming here if Alan and Terra were involved in a car accident.

No way.

“At that point you realize something really wrong has happened,” Kevin said later. Before that, there was the hope that a hospital would call to say Alan and Terra were there. Alan was okay. Hurt, but okay. Terra was there by his side, holding vigil, befuddled and amazed. But safe.

When Robert walked in, he could see the look on Kevin’s, his mother’s and his father’s faces: gloom and doom. A pale shade of white. Ghostly. The life had been drained out of them, the air sucked from the room. Philip Bates was not a man who broke under pressure. He was an engineer. He thought things through with a methodical sense of composure. He analyzed situations, came up with solutions. Here, though, at this moment, Philip was dazed. He didn’t have the answer.

Kevin filled Robert in.

“Well,” Robert said under his breath so his mom and dad couldn’t hear, “I’m with you. The GBI doesn’t get involved with just a traffic accident. This is bigger.”

“We were just trying to think things through. What do you do?” Kevin later explained. “You don’t know much, and what you do know is not good.”

As they comforted one another, various emotions came in waves: hope, worry, dread. Up. Down. Tears. Then a happy memory. More doubt. Then a glimmer of optimism.

At this point they just wanted to know where Alan was. The GBI had not given them any specific details.

The GBI agents at the house were total professionals. They walked in. One of them comforted the family without giving away too much information. As they talked, another agent was getting details via walkie-talkie from the other agents at the crime scene and out in the field.

The agent asked the family for the spellings of names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Where? When? How? What time?

Everything seemed to be going at hyper speed. Kevin and Robert gave the agent as many phone numbers as they had. Philip explained what he knew up to that point. And this was the reality about tragedy: in its early stages you’re forced to go over the same stories again and again. The details are in the repetition.

“Where was Alan? Where did he fly into?”

Robert answered.

Then they’d ask how he seemed: Happy? Sad? Upset? Angry?

Slowly the pieces of the GBI’s investigation began to emerge and come into focus for the Bateses. The GBI’s questions, in turn, gave the family answers. The agents didn’t need to say anything more.

“They handed the bad news out in bites you could handle,” Robert recalled. He appreciated that immensely. This wasn’t a movie of the week. No knock on the door by two state troopers with their hats in their hands and a mouthful of heartbreak. This was a process. A slow dance toward what was looking to be an inevitable truth the family was going to have to contend with, one way or another.

Knowing how distraught and upset Philip and Joan were, the agent called Robert outside. It was there, out of the earshot of Joan and Philip, that she explained how they had uncovered two bodies in the trunk of Alan’s rental car. She wanted to let Robert know that they needed Alan’s dental records.

Robert’s stomach turned over when she asked. He knew, then and there, his brother was dead. He didn’t need DNA or dental confirmation. Instinct grabbed hold of his throat, put a lump in it. The only silver lining—if it could even be called such—in the middle of this devastating news was that there had been only two bodies found in the car.

Not four.

That meant the kids were not with them.

The agent wanted to let Robert know first, before breaking the news to Philip and Joan. It wasn’t corroboration that Alan and Terra were dead, of course—that’s not what the GBI was implying here. The investigator said she’d seen more bizarre things happen in her career. But there was a good chance it was their bodies. The dentals records would answer a lot of questions.

“How do you think I should deliver this to them?” the agent asked Robert, meaning Philip and Joan.

“Dad likes to deal in facts. Give him the facts—however you choose to—and he’ll manage.”

As the morning carried on, bits of information came into focus. As they spoke, first the GBI let out that they had uncovered bodies in the trunk of Alan’s rental; a while later, it became a car fire; then, “Can we have those dental records?”

One plus one plus one equals three. Every time. Kevin and Robert knew it. The slow walk toward the bitter, sad truth: Alan and his wife were dead.

Murdered.

The agent also mentioned that the GBI had investigators heading into Birmingham.

Kevin and Robert looked at each other.
Birmingham?

“We may have another crime scene over there.”

Philip came by. He seemed to be listening. “Alan was in Birmingham,” he said, “giving a deposition in his child custody case.”

That was important.

After a bit more going back and forth, some history of what was going on with Alan and Jessica, where Alan might have taken off to if he decided not to pick up the children, the GBI had what it needed and got ready to leave.

“We’ll be calling you with updates, okay?” the agent promised.

Philip nodded his head. “Thank you.”

What was left for the Bates family to do now? Especially because in their hearts they knew, deep down, that Alan and Terra were dead. This new dose of anxiety came in the form of an explanation as to what had happened, who had killed them.

Kevin and Robert went into autopilot, comfort mode, without even thinking about it. Stay busy. Do things. Make calls. Get Terra’s family involved. Get family members over to the house so they could begin to put a support system in place for what they knew were going to be the roughest days of their lives ahead. Someone would have to tell the kids. Someone would have to sit them down and explain that their father and stepmother were gone. In fact, as Robert and Kevin and Philip thought about it, where were the kids?