Death Trap (6 page)

9

Kimberly Williams and Sheron Vance made it to the PPD by 2:00
P.M
. Of course, they had gained an hour as they passed over the invisible line of the Central time zone.

They waited around. Had some coffee. Explained the situation. “We talked to the chief and a couple [Pelham] investigators about Mr. McCord,” Williams told me.

Through that, one thing became clear: Jeff McCord was not your typical cop. He had never been part of the blue crowd.

“They told us he was a loner. Strange person. Kept to himself.” Not your traditional blue blood. Jeff was that guy who didn’t say a lot but always seemed to have something heavy on his mind. We all know someone like this.

By 2:45
P.M
., Jeff McCord arrived to clock in for his shift.

“His superiors told him to come in and talk to Miss Williams,” someone close to the case later said. “There’s a . . . question about whether or not it was voluntary.”

Primarily, Williams and Vance wanted to create some sort of timeline for Alan and Terra, and find out what piece of the puzzle Jeff McCord could bring to the table. Simple stuff. Common questions Jeff had probably asked suspects himself as a police officer. There wasn’t going to be any dark room, a chair in the middle of the floor, lights in his face. Just three cops talking. Getting to the truth.

At least for the time being.

Immediately Jeff came across as standoffish and aloof. He had an attitude about him that said,
You got a lot of nerve questioning me!
Kind of odd for a fellow cop to be so cagey and unhelpful. Then again, Williams understood, she didn’t know the guy. She had nothing to base her judgment on. Maybe this was Jeff’s general demeanor? The way he acted around everyone.

“You always want to try and build a rapport first with a witness,” Williams explained in her clear Southern accent. “This way you can tell how he answers questions.”

With Jeff, that was not going to be easy; he did not want to talk.

Jeff was concerned about speaking with two investigators from another state regarding a case that they did not want to divulge any information about. Jeff asked Williams why she needed the information, and Williams danced around that issue. She wasn’t about to show her cards. Both Williams and Vance weren’t saying much more than how they were looking for Alan and Terra Bates. On top of that, Jeff had been up most of the night with his wife. He was playing on a short fuse. He’d slept for a few hours that afternoon, but for the most part, he hadn’t slept in the past two days.

Jeff’s chief pulled him aside, according to what Williams later said. “You’re under no obligation to talk to these investigators,” the chief told his officer. Yet, there was something in the chief’s voice, a look, letting Jeff know in not so many words that it might be in his best interest to tell them what they needed to know.

“I understand,” Jeff said.

As the interview went forward, the tone remained informal. Very brief, too. Williams asked Jeff where the kids spent the previous night.

“The kids, oh,” Jeff said as though he’d had a memory lapse, “I supervised them packing for the weekend. They were supposed to be picked up by Alan at six. When Alan failed to show up, we dropped them off at their grandparents [Dian and Albert Bailey, Jessica’s mother and stepfather], somewhere near six forty-five.” Dian and Albert lived on Whiting Road in Hoover, Jeff explained, about a half mile from the McCords’ house on Myrtlewood. The drive took minutes.

Williams nodded and wrote that down.
6:45.

They stood inside the same interview room the Pelham police used to interrogate suspects and witnesses. Jeff sat. He had his uniform on. His weapon holstered. He kept looking at his watch. He needed to get ready for his shift.

Williams asked where Jessica was at the moment.

“Her mother’s house.”

“What was supposed to happen yesterday?” Williams wanted to know. She asked Jeff for the day’s schedule. What was the McCord plan and how had they carried it out?

Jeff shrugged. Didn’t want to respond to that.

“Did the Bateses show up for the depositions?”

“Yeah,” Jeff answered freely. “They did.” But Jeff wasn’t there. He said he was at home with the kids.

“Did you personally have any contact with them afterward?”

“Nope.”

Jeff wasn’t going to say much more than yes or no. He was either obviously hiding something or this was the way he reacted to questions from anyone. Williams and Vance had nothing to compare his reactions to. They had just met him. And the guy was easy not to like right from the start, Williams said. “We wanted to know about these depositions—what happened before, after, and so on,” she explained later. “What he knew about them being in Alabama. What he knew about where they went, and what the plan was for them to pick up the children.”

But Jeff McCord kept “talking in circles,” Williams said.

“Just tell us, then,” Williams stated at one point during the interview, now a bit frustrated and impatient with this fellow cop, “what
you
did, Officer McCord? What did
you
do yesterday since the time you got up? Talk us through your day until right now.”

For Vance and Williams, they got the idea Jeff was being uncooperative. “We had no idea if this was the way he was or [if] he was actually hiding something. We had no idea how he processed things, or how to gauge when to be alerted about something. He was just very . . . very quiet.”

Jeff’s posture told another story—and this was something Williams studied furtively, intuitively. It stood out after a time. Jeff appeared defensive in his movements, especially the way he reacted to questions—which is something else entirely. A suspect cannot camouflage how his body reacts to questions put in front of him, no matter how hard he tries. It’s instinct. All people do certain things with their hands, legs, maybe a crinkle of the brow, an eyebrow lift, a rub of the nose. Makes no difference how hard a suspect might try to conceal his actions and movements. His ticks. Cops just need to figure these out and they can give a lie detector test on the spot without a person even realizing it’s going on.

“It was like pulling teeth,” Williams said, “getting information”—even basic stuff—“out of him, and then when he decided to talk, he ran us in circles.”

Did Jeff know this trick, too?

As the interview carried forth, Jeff rattled on and on and seemed to be talking about nothing. So Williams interrupted him. “What point is it that you’re trying to make, Officer McCord?”

Jeff lifted his shoulders and dropped them back down. Did he even know?

What is going on with this guy?
Williams thought at that moment. “It was beginning to concern us, just because he was so matter-of-fact at times and jabbering at others.”

Up and down.

This turned out to be another red flag. The fact that the guy was all over the place was cause for concern. He was apparently hiding something.

“What did you and your wife do last night?” Williams asked, breaking it down into bites. She decided to start back at the beginning.

Jeff went into a long “spiel, this convoluted” story, Williams explained, about what they had done.

“We saw
Lord of the Rings,
” he began. “Then snuck into
Black Hawk Down.
We went for a river walk and drove around. . . . Oh yeah, and . . . well . . . Jessica wanted to go to a strip club, so we went.”

“Okay . . .”

“Well, look,” Jeff said, reaching into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet, “I have the movie stubs.”

How convenient,
Williams thought. Time- and date-stamped movie stubs.

The GBI had already contacted the HPD and had gotten them involved. By now, both agencies had positive confirmation that the bodies were Alan and Terra Bates’s. They had been murdered. As originally thought, they were dead before being stuffed into the trunk of Alan’s rental car.

Once the GBI knew Alan and Terra were supposed to pick up the children at the McCord house the previous evening, they decided to put a surveillance on Jeff and Jessica’s house. Philip and Joan Bates mentioned there was some animosity between the two families, and Jessica hated her ex-husband and was fighting him for custody of the children. Standing in front of Jeff McCord, questioning him regarding his whereabouts the previous night, Williams and Vance knew a good portion of this corrosive history. And now they had Jeff handing over—he just
happened
to have them on him—movie stubs. At best, it all seemed so staged. At worst, Jeff was just a numbskull and didn’t really understand the ramifications of his highly suspicious actions.

“Can we see those stubs, Officer McCord?”

“Sure,” Jeff said happily.

Jeff produced what Williams described as “two pristine movie stubs” from the Carmike Cinema on Lorna Road, in Birmingham. He took them out of his wallet. The date on the stubs was, sure enough, February 15, the previous night, 6:57
P.M
.

How ’bout that.

Williams and Vance looked at each other. “This was a definite red flag,” Williams told me later. “Generally, people leave movie stubs in their coat pocket, pants pocket . . . and here are these two pristine—in case I needed them, apparently—stubs.”

“You cannot keep those,” Jeff said. Then, with an overconfident smugness, “But you can go ahead and make a copy of them.”

Why doesn’t this guy want to help?
Williams pondered.

Okay, so they had gone to the movies. “A night out,” as Jeff put it. And he and Jessica were, in fact, gone until the break of dawn. That much could be proven. They had driven over to the Home Depot in Birmingham first thing in the morning, 6:00
A.M
., to pick up materials to begin several long-overdue remodeling projects. Yet, they walked out of the Home Depot with basically nothing.

On the face of it, Williams and Vance considered, it sounded like, well, a story.

A carefully crafted alibi.

“The thing is,” Williams said, “the truth doesn’t change. It is what it is. No matter how you remember it, the truth does not change.”

After they concluded the interview, Jeff took off to another part of the station house, one would imagine, as far away from Vance and Williams as he could get inside the same building. Williams and Vance went in to see Jeff’s chief. They needed a few favors.

“Keep him here for his shift, could you?”

“Sure,” the chief said.

“Yeah, we want to keep him off the road.”

“No problem.”

“Listen,” Williams said, “if his wife calls, don’t let him speak with her.” The last thing they wanted was for Jeff and Jessica to talk. If they were hiding something, Jeff would spill what he had just talked about and they would have a chance to get together with their stories. The GBI wanted to speak with Jessica before she got a chance to speak with Jeff again.

Leaving the Pelham Police Department, Williams and Vance got hold of detective sergeant Tom McDanal from the Hoover PD. HPD was busy conducting surveillance at the McCord home, and from another room, several detectives monitored the interview with Jeff at the Pelham PD. Williams wanted to know if McDanal could go with her and Vance over to Dian Bailey’s house on Whiting Road. They wanted to speak with Jessica McCord immediately, but at this point the GBI wasn’t sure whose case this was going to turn out to be. On top of that, it would only help if a representative from the corresponding agency investigating the case was there.

McDanal said sure.

Now there were three different law enforcement agencies investigating the deaths of Alan and Terra.

Heading over to Dian Bailey’s home, Williams and Vance received reports from the Pelham PD that Jessica was, as they had suspected, calling the station already—“repeatedly”—and asking to speak with Jeff.

But no one allowed it.

10

Williams and Vance made a detour. They stopped at the McCords’ Myrtlewood Drive home to see what was going on before heading over to Dian and Albert Bailey’s. The HPD informed both investigators that there was an older gentleman inside the McCord house. His van was pulled up to the back door. It appeared he was working on the house. Taking things out. Bringing things in. At this point anybody even remotely connected to Terra and Alan could know something. But inside the McCords’ house—that was different. What was this guy doing?

Williams and Vance knocked on the front door. That sign—telling visitors to go around to the back—was still there.

With no response, they walked around. The man came out. “Can I help you?” He had a surprised look about him.

They identified themselves and asked what he was doing in the house.

“I’m Albert Bailey,” he said. “I’m just doing some work on the house.”

“You see Jessica around?” Vance asked.

“No . . . I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone over to the Home Depot.”

They knew where Jessica was.

“Thanks,” Williams said.

Then they left.

 

 

A twenty-nine-year law enforcement veteran, HPD detective sergeant Rod Glover was in charge of the surveillance at Jessica and Jeff McCord’s house on Myrtlewood Drive. He heard that Vance and Williams had gone over to the McCord house and had spoken to Albert Bailey. But they had left to visit Jessica’s mother, just blocks away.

The investigation of two missing adults had now spread out to include two different states, several towns, and various law enforcement agencies. It was midafternoon on February 16, 2002, a bright and cold Saturday in the middle of the most miserable month of the year. Williams and Vance were headed over to the Bailey residence. Glover, who was traveling down Lorna Road, was getting ready to make a left onto Chapel Hill and connect with Myrtlewood. As he did, Glover took a call from Chris Bryant, an officer stationed near the McCord home. Bryant was watching the house, waiting for Glover to arrive. It was Bryant who spotted Jeff McCord, hours earlier, leaving the house on his way to work, alerting the GBI and Pelham PD.

“We got a white van,” Bryant said over the radio, “on the move, leaving the location.”

Albert Bailey.

The white van pulled out of the driveway as Bryant spoke. Bryant got a read on the plate and called it in.

“Ten-four.”

The van was headed toward Rod Glover. He had since stopped on Lorna Road to wait for Bailey’s arrival so he could pick up the tail.

Bryant sat in his car, down the block from the McCord house. Leaving, Albert Bailey didn’t suspect a thing. Why should he? He had no idea, in fact, he was being watched and now followed.

Glover got behind the van. From Lorna Road—a four-lane, heavily traveled commercial route—the van made its way onto Highway 31, northbound. Then turned off and onto Southland Drive, traveling out of the city of Hoover and into Homewood, a neighboring town. From there, Albert Bailey headed toward Oxmoor Road, near the Birmingham town line, and made his way into a thickly settled industrial area, where Coca-Cola, Budweiser and several other large corporations had local warehouses and plants.

Where was this guy going?

Past a United Parcel Service (UPS) plant, Glover watched the van pull back onto Lorna Road and into the parking lot of Uncle Bob’s Self-Storage. Albert Bailey was either picking something up or dropping something off. Either way, Glover knew, it would be smart to continue following him. By this point HPD had called the Birmingham Police Department (BPD) and Homewood Police Department, inviting both agencies into the tail. Depending on which town Bailey was eventually pulled over in, there would need to be officers from that town on site.

The van pulled out of Uncle Bob’s parking lot a few minutes later and Glover followed.

Albert Bailey drove around the area, in and out of several businesses, before entering a warehouse parking lot. A minute later, he found his way back onto the main road, where he cut over to Green Springs Highway and proceeded into the town of Birmingham. Glover lost sight of the van at various intervals, but never entirely.

Following once again behind the van, now heading down Oxmoor Road for a second time (now near a strip mall), Bailey put on his blinker and moved into the left lane to turn into the parking lot.

Birmingham and Homewood patrol cars following Albert Bailey hit their lights and made the stop.

Glover pulled up behind the van and got out of his car.

He walked to the back of the vehicle and took a quick look inside.

A couch?

Indeed. Bailey had one of the McCords’ couches (from the family room downstairs) inside his messy van. The padding on the back support of the couch was stripped clean, leaving the framework of it exposed.

The cushions were gone, too.

But why?

Glover walked over to the driver’s-side door of the van and had a few words with Albert Bailey. Then he got back into his unmarked police vehicle and drove away.

Officer Glover told Bailey he was free to go.