Death Trap (8 page)

PART II

RED BOOTS AND WATER

13

A fine middle-class community of hardworking, good-natured people, Cahaba Heights, Alabama, is located in Jefferson County, inside the confines of the Birmingham-Hoover metropolitan area. Birmingham was one of several central locales during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by the late American hero Dr. Martin Luther King. In fact, at one time, early in the movement, Birmingham was called “Bomb-ingham,” being the violent stage for eighteen unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods over a six-year period. This, mind you, on top of what became known as the “vicious mob attack,” which was centered on the Freedom Riders on Mother’s Day, 1961. There is a long history of violence in Birmingham; but also, perhaps more relevant to the peace Dr. King inspired, there is an air of redemption and civil obedience, there inside the internal framework of the community. Wrongs being righted. People being treated as the human beings they are, regardless of the color of their skin.

The Cahaba Heights section of Birmingham is just about in the middle of the state. The name was born from a Native American settlement originally located in the southeastern United States, the Choctaw (“water above”). Cahaba Heights has always been small-town. In the year 2000, there were some five thousand people living in this particular section of Birmingham, a metropolis with a population (including its suburbs) consisting of 1,079,089 people, making Birmingham the largest city in the state. Many of the people are assiduous, churchgoing, true-to-heart Southerners, living out the honorable moral virtues instilled in them by their ancestors. Cahaba has an ideal relation to the city, set on a perfectly placed cross section of Interstate 459 and Route 38.

Shades Valley High School has been part of Irondale’s landscape, on Old Leeds Road, since 1996. Irondale is another fine Birmingham suburb that built itself up into a community of fun-loving, caring, pious people. One of its most famous residents is actress-turned-author Fannie Flagg, who brought fame to the town of just under ten thousand via her
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
novel and a later Hollywood film version, starring Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker.

Comparatively speaking, Shades Valley has a reputation among students and parents as being one of the best schools in the region, if not the state. Of course, this is an open-ended argument, rooted in the deep feelings locals in the South have for their high-school football and basketball teams. Yet, maybe a little bit of God’s grace and goodness seeps into the pores of the people in Irondale, no matter what their take on reglion or spirituality is. The most recent Shades Valley location on Old Leeds Road is a literal neighbor to Mother Angelica’s successful Catholic-based Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) studios, where Catholic programming is aired worldwide to upward of 160 million households, twenty-four hours a day.

Alan Bates grew up as the middle child in a household of three boys. Alan and his brother Robert both attended Shades Valley when it was located in Homewood, just off Route 31, near the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Alan excelled in high school. He was one of those kids every mother prayed their daughter would drag in through the door one day after school and announce as her boyfriend. Alan took Southern hospitality to new heights, learning all he conveyed from two fine and loving parents. Alan was an honor student. He was voted class president three years running, beginning his freshman year, in the tenth grade. (Shades Valley ran things differently than most schools. Junior high was seventh grade through ninth; high school tenth through twelfth.) Not only was Alan an active member of his church and his family, a God-fearing unit of reverent Christians, but Alan played drums in various bands, including gospel and Christian.

“[Alan] picked up an interest along the way,” his father, Philip, later said, “in technical theater and was responsible for . . . his senior class having a stage production at Shades Valley, which they hadn’t in years. But he was interested in the lights and the sound and the set design and the behind-the-scenes things that make a theater production go. He wasn’t interested in the drama. But he loved that!”

Alan loved the theater so much, it wasn’t uncommon for friends to stop by the Shades Valley auditorium during lunch hour and find Alan sitting there, eating, relishing the feel and smell of just being around the stage. One such friend, Marley Franklin (pseudonym), who had known Alan and the Bates boys since they were all in diapers, often sat and ate with her buddy.

“Alan and I,” Marley said later, “were raised like brother and sister. He loved the theater, even then, in high school. He just felt so at home there.”

It was during the summer break of 1988, Alan heading from his junior to senior year, that he met Jessica Callis, a local Hoover girl. Jessica was every bit the polar opposite of Alan. On paper they should not have clicked. However, they seemed to get along and shared several things in common (what, exactly, no one really could pinpoint, even years later). Jessica grew up the oldest of three children in what was a broken home, over in the Whiting Road section of Hoover. According to Jessica years later, violence was one way to solve problems in the Callis household. Sure, the family sought solace in God’s word on Sundays in the form of the Edgewood Presbyterian Church on Oxmoor Road in Birmingham. But it was obvious the values preached from the pulpit by Pastor Sid Burgess must have gone in one ear and out the other of big daddy George Callis. There were beatings, Jessica later claimed, on top of openhanded slaps that left red marks and bruises; a week hardly went by without her parents getting into some sort of heated confrontation that ended in her mother crying, her dad taking off to go get drunker than he was already.

Jessica was a third-generation Edgewood Presbyterian churchgoer (though she rarely attended services as she grew older); her grandmother was a member of the church for some sixty years. “One of the saints of God’s Kingdom,” Pastor Burgess said of Jessica’s grandpappy in one of his 2002 sermons. Jessica’s mother, Dian, was the church treasurer at one time. Dian’s second husband, Albert Bailey, was “an active elder” on the council of the church. It was inside Edgewood that Jessica was baptized and given the Christian name Jessica Inez, after her grandmother—a name Jessica would use for the rest of her life whenever asked.

The church—or religion, in general—was one of the fundamental differences Alan and Jessica shared. As Jessica later put it, “Alan was brought up in the Church of Christ, which is not my, I mean, it’s Christian but, you know, the basic tenets are different than mine.” Edgewood was more of a “liberal church,” she said. “And the whole theory, different views on how girls should be treated, especially within the confines of the church. And I disagreed vehemently with [Alan’s] family on that. . . .”

And so it would seem, at least in the realm of schoolgirl crushes and teen romances, that as “an item,” Alan and Jessica would have not made a good match. Still, all that piety and good living was the social, public side of life Jessica led as a child. Living inside her home—keep in mind, this is according to Jessica herself—was a bit like stepping down into the fires of hell every day. And in that sense, unbeknownst to either of them, Alan and Jessica were like two magnets trying to stick together. Kids from vastly different upbringings, with vastly different values and vastly different views of life, trying to come together.

A positive and a negative.

Sparks.

Nevertheless, Alan saw something in the young, auburn-haired girl with the cute smile, pudgy cheeks and boisterous, look-at-me disposition. Jessica was no knockout, like the more popular girls in school Alan could have snapped a finger and took out, but she had something. Maybe a twinkle in her eye Alan was attracted to. A flare for life. A subtle vulnerability. Perhaps a calming voice that made him feel at the same time both comfortable and defenseless.

Whatever it was, Alan liked the package.

Marley Franklin, who was hanging around with Alan every day during that period when he met Jessica, later said, “Jessica hated my guts.”

As soon as she transferred to Shades Valley, Jessica made sure that people noticed her. Jessica did have a subtle beauty about her in high school; she stood out. Still, she craved and almost demanded attention.

“She latched onto Alan pretty quick, pretty hard and heavy,” one old friend said. “She loved the fact that [Alan] was a ‘band guy.’”

As Jessica and Alan became closer, Jessica pulled Alan aside one day and told him, “You stop hanging out with [Marley]. You
never
speak to her again.”

It was about control. Jessica was stepping in and taking charge of Alan’s life.

Marley got an uneasy vibe from Jessica and felt she and Alan were headed for trouble. Still, to Marley, Alan could make his own choices; he was a brother, not a lover. Marley wanted nothing to do with him romantically, or “in that way.” Then again, it was unnerving for her that this new girl in Alan’s life was telling him what people he could and could not hang out with.

“I got a really bad read of her,” Marley said. “I mean, everybody that knew her got a bad read of Jessica. You could just tell she carried with her a negative energy.”

It was like a cloud, former friends said. An aura about Jessica.

Perhaps Jessica fed a wild side of Alan that he rarely ever allowed to come out. She was aggressive. She was “different.” Heck, Jessica was more than willing to put out.

“She was
fun,
” said a former high-school classmate, “you know, and I am sure that was appealing to Alan.”

14

Williams and Vance had a ring to it, maybe like
Cagney & Lacey.
The only difference being that Bureau agent Kimberly Williams and MCSO investigator Sheron Vance were focused on catching a real killer. A double murderer, in fact. Or pair of murderers. There was nothing Hollywood about any of that. Two people were dead. Two fine human beings had been shot and their bodies burned. Two families were now trying to understand what had happened. Trying to deal with this loss.

The ripple effect of murder—how it spread out so far and wide.

Forever.

Vance and Williams stayed in town on the night of February 16, 2002. They knew the answers to their questions regarding the murder of Alan and Terra Bates were most likely going to be found in and around the Birmingham region. Both had a feeling Alan and Terra never made it out of Birmingham alive. The Bureau was certain the crime scene was somewhere in town—not Georgia, which was, Williams said, clearly nothing more than a “dump site.” Convincing the HPD of this was going to be a bit more complicated, Williams and Vance considered. HPD investigators still weren’t sold on the idea that Alan and Terra were murdered in their jurisdiction. After all, Alan and Terra could have met their demise somewhere along the road between late Friday afternoon in downtown Birmingham and early Saturday morning in Rutledge, Georgia. There was over two hundred miles of roadway and wilderness separating the two places. Anything could have happened. And until it was clear, Williams and Vance were sticking around to see it through.

 

 

Contacted the previous night while bowling, HPD detective Laura Brignac got to the station house first thing the next morning, February 17, 2002. Detective Tom McDanal explained to Brignac that there was a lot to do. Interviews. Tracking down basic information. Canvassing. Checking out cell phone records. Computers. Keeping tabs on the McCords, who seemed to be moving from one place to another. Writing up search warrants. Studying what type of evidence the Bureau was processing and seeing how it fit into what the HPD was uncovering in Alabama.

Brignac was the perfect fit for the job. She grew up in a town of about forty thousand, so there was that shade of the small-town Southern belle in her demeanor; yet she understood the nuances of the big city. She was the middle child of three girls. Brignac had studied sociology and earned a master’s in counseling and guidance from, of all places, Alan Bates’s alma mater, the University of Montevallo. Her main focus in school, and later in life, became children and families—troubled juveniles, specifically. Brignac worked at various shelters with probation officers dealing with kids who ran away from home. She wanted to help. She wanted to make a better life for kids who never really had a chance. After college she went to work at a group home for children. Working there, Brignac became friends with one of the HPD’s juvenile officers who brought kids to the home. One day the juvenile officer called Brignac to say good-bye. “I’m getting married and moving to St. Louis.”

“Well, congratulations,” Brignac said.

“You should go to Hoover and apply for my job,” the woman suggested. She knew Brignac was the perfect fit.

That was 1985. Brignac didn’t think twice about it and took the bait.

“The next thing I know,” Brignac told me later, a mixture of humility and shock in her voice, “I’m being sworn in, given a badge and a gun and . . . I’m like, ‘Wait a minute!’”

Brignac was fortunate in the sense that when she started on the job, she went to work for a progressive chief who just so happened to be in need of an investigator with some experience working with kids and families.

“So I am probably the only [detective] in the country who was never a patrol officer first,” Brignac added. “He just put me right into investigations and the criminal unit.”

 

 

Back in Georgia, inside the Division of Forensic Science morgue at Bureau headquarters in Atlanta, forensic pathologist Dr. Krzysztof Podjaski got to work on the autopsies. There was a lot riding on these examinations; the results of which could possibly provide several important answers to questions that would eventually help solve this case quickly, sparing the families a load of additional heartache and anguish.

A native of Poland, Podjaski had been in the United States for about fifteen years. He spoke English fairly well, having learned the language back home. Podjaski was well schooled in trauma surgery and orthopedics. He finished his two-year residency in Hartford, Connecticut, at Hartford Hospital. From there it was on to Atlanta, where he spent a year in forensic pathology and then joined the Bureau.

Some have a misunderstanding of the word “pathologist,” bringing to it a certain Hollywood flare and connotation that we see today on crime television, vis-à-vis shows like
CSI, Law & Order
and
Bones.
Watching the television version of forensic pathology, a viewer might be inclined to think that pathologists are crime-solving wizards, or crime scene–inspecting sleuths—that one hair fiber or tooth mark can solve a case. Some think they run around town interviewing suspects and tracking down leads. But when you get inside the morgue and see what goes on, the reality is quite different: it’s more tedious study and medical panache than
Star Trek
–like technology and
ah-hah
moments. Scientifically speaking, pathology is the actual study of, as Dr. Podjaski put it in court so perfectly, “bad things that happen to the human body that are of interest to law.”

A careful dissemination of the facts (or clues) a dead body might reveal. The cause of death. The reason someone died.

It was so simple on the surface.

On the day Alan and Terra’s severely charred (“burned to a significant degree”) remains were brought in for the doctor to have a look at, he had been with the Bureau for a little over two years. Podjaski’s focus was on the
cause
of death. All investigations began with a cause. The effect was gleaned from there. And so on.

Both bodies, zipped up inside black body bags, were brought in by deputy coroner Susan Simmons. By this point dental records had indeed confirmed just about 100 percent who the victims were. No surprises there: Alan and Terra Bates. The backstory, however, one that pathologists try not to get involved with, was substantially different. Alan and Terra were a happily married couple in the prime of their lives. There was no reason for them to be dead.

And that’s where a pathologist came into the situation. To unearth the why behind the tragedy.

The first thing Podjaski did was examine the outside of the bodies, or what was left, actually. He conducted what he deemed an “external examination.” Multiple photographs were snapped before the doctor even put a finger on either of the victims. As needed, X-rays, especially when there was a possibility that the victim (s) had been stabbed or shot, were taken.

Podjaski wrote in his report that Alan’s body exhibited
extensive charring, from head to toe, and has a pugilistic attitude with the right arm flexed at the elbow and the left hand at the wrist.

Pugilistic attitude—or, as it is more frequently called, “pugilistic posture”—is a common occurrence found in victims of a fatal fire. What happens is that the body, as it heats up, is exhausted of most of its fluids. This loss of bodily fluids, mainly water, causes a restriction in the muscle tissue, which curls the tips of the fingers, the tips of the toes, ankles, elbows and any other place in the body where there is a moveable joint. Some say the body, when it is presented in this way, takes on a “boxer’s position.” The reasoning behind this observation is that the hands, wrists, elbows and knees are flexed and curled inward, due to the shrinkage of tissue. In homicide investigation this posture the body holds is sometimes mistaken for what is a “predeath attempt to shield oneself from an attacker.”

Podjaski noted that Alan’s right forearm was
burned away approximately 5 inches distal to the elbow. The lower extremities are contracted at the knees and ankles, with almost complete disarticulation at the knee and ankle joints.

To look at a body that has been burned grotesquely in a fire is a ghastly reminder that the body is made up mostly of fat and muscle tissue, which burns fast and ferocious when subjected to an intense flame—much like the bristle on a steak flaring up on the grill.

“The charring of the soft tissues,” the doctor said later, referring once again to Alan’s body, “is most severe on the anterior portion of the face and the right side of the head.”

Any exposed section of Alan’s face, in other words, had been burned almost completely off.

One of Terra’s extremities (arms) was partially burned, the other
totally, completely burned away,
the doctor wrote. Her
skin is completely burned away with some charred muscles and soft tissues.

The doctor opened both bodies and removed the organs, one by one. Whenever he came across what he believed to be a wound of some sort, he used metal rods, or “probes,” to figure out the trajectory any possible projectiles could have taken, pointing out a possible cause and direction for the wounds. Because the bodies were so badly burned, however, it was difficult for the doctor to figure out if he was looking at exit or entrance wounds. To find this out would take further examination.

With Terra, the doctor was certain the wounds on her back were “consistent with exit as opposed to entrance [wounds],” he said.

There was a second bullet wound, a “little bit closer to what we describe as axilla,” or the armpit, directly underneath the position in the body where the arm connects to the shoulder socket.

Terra was shot, it appeared, as she lifted up her arm, probably as she instinctively defended herself. This was likely the first shot. A victim cannot necessarily put up her hands to shield herself if she has been shot anywhere else.

A third wound the doctor found was located in Terra’s chest. A fourth in the “flank,” or near the belly area on the side near the hip.

From the evidence available and the way in which the probes projected various trajectory patterns, it appeared to the doctor that Terra was shot four times, each hitting a different area of her body as she instinctively protected herself and fell to the ground. Terra’s killer approached her with a weapon, began firing and didn’t stop.

The poor woman never had a chance.

But then something odd stood out to the doctor—something quite significant. On both bodies there was an irregular, elongated area of the back side detailing a particular region of “dark discoloration.” In the doctor’s humble opinion, this subtle wound marking meant that the body was likely “pressed against something” when the bullet exited the body.

This was new information. Probably important, too.

“Maybe that person was sitting,” the doctor explained. “I’m not sure. But there was something behind. That bullet exiting [the body] pressed the skin, and the skin hit that object and that caused [the] contusion.”

The exit wounds the doctor referred to didn’t have that familiar “blowout” starfish pattern of torn skin the doctor knew to be consistent with this type of exit bullet wound. Something was firmly pressed up against that area of the skin as the bullet passed through. This finding was common in the bodies of men executed by firing squad: because they were backed up to a wall and shot. The bullets had an extra layer of material to go through, allowing for the exit wound of the body to be clean.

In the end the doctor signed off on both deaths as homicide. Cause of death was determined to be
multiple gunshot wounds of the torso and upper extremity,
he penned.

So Alan and Terra were dead, as everyone assumed, before they were placed inside the trunk of Alan’s rental car and it was set afire. Both were shot, seemingly execution-style, at close range, probably as they tried to defend themselves. In the doctor’s final opinion, in fact, the idea that several shots were fired into each body was overkill. The fact of the matter, the doctor agreed, was that “one or two of these bullets would have been fatal in and of themselves without immediate medical attention. . . .”

Any good cop knew that overkill was another way to describe revenge or inherent, repressed anger. There was passion and vengeance behind these murders. Whoever killed Alan and Terra had a reason—no matter how vile and vicious or even insane it might seem.