Death Trap (9 page)

15

Alan didn’t run for class president his senior year. He met Jessica during the summer of 1989 and his life changed. Part of that change was a bit of rather sobering, shocking news Jessica hit Alan with, about six weeks after they met, which Alan had a hard time talking about with anyone else besides his best friend, Marley Franklin.

Alan took Marley aside one day in school and told her. “Jess is pregnant.”

Marley was surprised, but not shocked. (“There’s a difference,” Marley observed.)

Some time went by. Marley beat herself up. She’d had a feeling something was going to happen between them. She sat talking with a mutual friend of hers and Alan’s one day. “She trapped him. I should have told him before it happened. I
knew
it.”

Alan heard what Marley had said. Upset about it, he called her. By this time Alan had made a decision about the pregnancy.

“Alan was such a good person,” Marley said later. “He was always going to do what needed to be done.”

Alan told Marley that Jessica had asked him never to speak to her again. It was ridiculous, they both knew. But Alan was upset at what Marley had said. Maybe now was a good time to part ways, at least for a little while.

“I felt really, really bad that I hadn’t sat down with him and truly told him how I felt about Jessica and the whole thing. So I said something about her that got back to him, and it hurt him and I feel really bad about that . . . but she hated me to begin with, because she didn’t trust the relationship I had with Alan.”

They were all so young. So immature and naïve. And here was Alan and Jessica bringing a baby into it all.

What was clear from that point on was that Jessica Callis was a girl who got what she wanted. Bates family members later agreed with this. When Jessica put her mind on something, nothing was going to stop her. It didn’t matter what people said. Or did. When Jessica was determined, nothing was going to stand in her way.

And she would prove this—time and again.

“She set her sights on Alan the moment after she met him and wanted to have him, and that was it,” Kevin Bates recalled.

Some saw Jessica as a person whose intentions were often misunderstood because she had a habit of always putting others before herself. Where friends were concerned, Jessica was “very selective . . . and only associate [d] herself with those who [were] good role models . . . ,” a former friend said. Moreover, Jessica’s independence, even at the puppy love age of sixteen, was evidence of maturity and a broad outlook on life in general. She was unique in that respect, the same friend claimed. An old high-school mate said Jessica’s “honesty” and integrity was “sometimes misconstrued as arrogance or rudeness.” It was the way she spoke: Jessica came across as crass and snotty, even though she didn’t always mean to. While others were convinced that Jessica’s abrasiveness and contentious attitude were products of her upbringing, it was, others stated, nothing more than her demeanor. Once you got to know Jessica, there was no mistaking the fact that she was different in so many ways.

If there was one thing about Jessica that stood out more than anything else in high school, it was her social skills. Jessica was not a shy person by any means, but she was not outwardly open in a social group setting, either. Like her friends, she hung with a group or “clique” of kids. From junior high on, Jessica had no trouble getting the boys to like her, and she thrived on the attention she got by giving herself sexually. One thing Jessica found hilarious, if not altogether a portent, she told a friend one day, was “that the last four digits of my phone number spell ‘boys.’”

It was a joke, of course. But in the scope of her life, a harbinger.

Naomi Patterson (pseudonym) met Jessica in middle school but lost touch with her in ninth grade, hooking back up during their sophomore year together at Shades Valley. Naomi and Jessica became close. Ended up doing a lot of things together.

“In middle school,” Naomi recalled, “Jessica was more normal. She never said much about her home life then, or got real deep.” She held her cards close and was quiet—until she got to know a friend. “She was just your typical teenager at that point. Highly intelligent, though. Jessica was very smart.” So smart, in fact, she was involved in a project called Research Learning Center (RLC). It was offered by the school system. Basically, it was a group established for kids with an obvious proclivity for higher learning. Alan was also invited into the RLC program, but opted out because it meant he would be isolated from the main campus of Shades Valley and the rest of the kids.

Naomi and Jessica didn’t fit in with the factions of smart kids, the popular crowds or any of the other cliques.

“There was a whole group of us who were offset to the side,” Naomi explained. “I teased somebody years later saying that, back then, we were Goth before Goth was even Goth.”

They wore all black and stood out. It was the late 1980s. When most of the other kids wore their hair piled and teased higher than a beehive, formed solid as brick with cans of hair spray, Jessica and her gang wore a “flat and straight” hairstyle. Maybe just to be different.

By this point Jessica’s life was spiraling out of control. She was only in the tenth grade. It got to the point where she was kicked out of the RLC program for not keeping up with her studies.

Jessica seemed to be living on her own. Although she lived with her mother and stepfather, it appeared that she could come and go at will. She was always going places, taking off in her car and not coming back for days. It was as if she had no supervision, Naomi said. No one to answer to.

“Rarely at home, if she could help it. And if she was home, she claimed there was always arguments. Especially with her stepfather.” Albert was the disciplinarian in the house, clearly, Naomi observed. He wanted Jessica to do the right thing. “But he couldn’t control her.”

No one could.

 

 

According to some, Jessica saw Alan Bates as her golden ticket, a gateway—or free pass—into a better way of life. After all, Jessica hadn’t grown up with all the benefits of a normal two-parent household. For Alan, he didn’t know it yet, but there was no turning back once Jessica set her claws into him. “No” wasn’t an answer Jessica Callis accepted. And regardless of what friends said, or what Jessica herself later claimed, her behavior became the best indicator as to where her life was heading.

Naomi was out of school by the time Jessica became pregnant with Alan’s child. Naomi was working, getting ready to attend college. Jessica called, however, and brought Naomi up to speed about what was going on in her life.

“I met this guy,” Jessica explained one night, referring to Alan. “He’s something.” Jessica laughed.

“What is it?” Naomi wanted to know. What was so darn funny about meeting a boy?

“We’re sneaking around . . . messing around in my car.” Jessica thought it was funny that she and Alan were having sex at will. It was as though she had bagged herself a catch and used sex to keep him coming back.

It didn’t take a lot of work on Alan’s part to get Jessica to put out. She had no trouble attracting a flock. When she met him, she was still seeing and sleeping with another boy, several friends said. And yet, as soon as she realized Alan could give her something more, maybe something she wanted that the other boy couldn’t, she made Alan her focus.

The Bates family took most of their summer vacations down on the Gulf Coast. They stayed on the beach at a condo they rented from a friend. During the summer before Alan’s final year of high school started, weeks after Alan and Jessica had met, Alan explained to Jessica that he wouldn’t be around for a while. He and the family were going away on vacation. He told her they went down to the coast every year. Alan said he enjoyed it. The vacation was the perfect place to get his mind ready for the upcoming school year.

Alan told Jessica not to worry. They could hook up when he returned. He liked her. He wanted to continue the friendship. He ended the conversation by letting her know the beach his family was heading to, but he never gave Jessica the exact address. They said their good-byes, and agreed to meet up when Alan returned.

Heading south, Alan felt good about this new relationship. It was the beginning of a typical high-school romance. Jessica showered him with attention and affection, sleeping with him willingly, and Alan was thrilled by it all. Most kids his age would be. He met a good-looking girl who put out.

Alan’s older brother, Robert, was off at college. But Kevin, Alan’s little brother, went to the Gulf Coast with the family. One morning Alan and Kevin stood on the condo balcony. No one else was awake. Two brothers just enjoying the early morning, looking out at the span of the wondrous water in front of them. They talked as two brothers might. Kevin looked up to his big brother Alan, six years older. He saw in Alan a role model on which to mold his future.

Standing, scanning the beach, Alan did a double take. He stopped and stared at two people sitting on the sand out in front of the condo building. It was early. Too early for beachgoers. The shore was pretty much deserted at this time of the day. These two looked like they had slept on the beach.

Alan took a closer look. No way. Couldn’t be.

“That’s Jessica,” he said, surprised by his own words.

It certainly was Jessica. She was with a friend.

“No way . . . you’ve got to be kidding me,” Alan said aloud, more or less talking to himself. “Why is she here?” Birmingham to the coast was a 260-mile trip, almost four hours of driving. One way.

When they arrived, Jessica and her friend traveled up and down the coastline in the town Jessica knew Alan was staying in until she found the Bates family van. It was parked, sitting in a driveway with scores of other vehicles. After locating the vehicle, Jessica and her friend went out on the beach and stayed the night, knowing that Alan and his family were in one of the condos and would ultimately end up on the beach that day.

Alan had no idea Jessica was coming. She never said a word about it. In fact, they hadn’t even been
officially
dating. They were “seeing” each other. Alan had slept with her a few times. That was the extent of the relationship.

Alan and Kevin ran down to the beach. Greeted Jessica and her friend.

“Hey,” Alan said.

“Hey, yourself,” said Jessica.

Alan invited them to lunch.

“He was a teenager. . . . He was flattered,” Kevin Bates later recalled. “They didn’t stay with us or anything like that. She just came down for that day.”

An eight-hour drive to see Alan for a few hours.

Alan didn’t think anything of it. He was a little puffy-chested at the notion a girl had gone to so much trouble to visit him. Here she was, all the way down at the Gulf Coast from the center of Alabama—a teenager, driving the entire way, scouting out the family van, just to see a guy she had just met.

Alan felt a pang of intimacy. Maybe even love. He was special. At least in Jessica’s eyes.

“It was shocking to him more than anything that she could just . . . that she had this freedom (as a teenager) to just do whatever she wanted,” Kevin said later.

Had Jessica’s parents allowed her to travel all that way? She was sixteen. Out and about, running around the South.

Chasing a boy.

When Alan and his family returned from vacation, school was just about ready to begin. Alan and Jessica had some fun. The summer was filled with memories, but Alan wanted to refocus his attention on school. His future. College.

“They were on the verge of breaking up,” one friend remembered later. “They weren’t really dating at this time.”

But Jessica wasn’t going to let Alan get away. Not a chance. He was too good a catch.

It was here that Jessica and Alan’s relationship took flight—that is, after Jessica went to Alan with the news of being pregnant. They were on the brink of a breakup, and Jessica just happened to get pregnant. Was it even Alan’s child?

Soon after, Alan became more and more withdrawn from his family. He had always been a child—like his brothers—who felt comfortable going to his mother and father with the adolescent problems beleaguering most teens. They were a close-knit family. Philip Bates liked to tell his kids that any problem could be worked out: “Just come to us with it.”

Be not afraid.

“We’ll help you through anything.”

As the fall came and school commenced, Philip noticed that the space between Alan and his family grew. Alan was clearly distracted. Something weighed heavily on the boy’s mind.
What’s bothering him
? Philip and Joan Bates, and even eleven-year-old Kevin, often wondered. They’d watch Alan walk about the house, his head drooped, shoulders slumped. They could tell his mind was buzzing with an obvious problem he was trying to solve alone. Alan had never been like this.