Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

22

Early Monday morning, February 18, 2002, detective sergeant Tom McDanal secured a second search warrant, partly based on the foundation that the HPD had developed new information. In that first search they might have missed something. So members from the HPD’s forensic squad and CAPERS unit headed back over to the McCord house.

HPD investigators Greg Rector, Mark Tant, Laura Brignac, D. C. Scively and Peyton Zanzour were part of the team that arrived for the second search. Immediately it turned into a slog through the muck of the McCord home that would, this time around, prove to be far more productive than the first.

Lieutenant Greg Rector, commander of the Investigations Division of the HPD, walked into the garage. Sidestepping what was a heap of garbage piled around a plethora of “stuff,” Rector began his search with his flashlight, combing the walls. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary. A good search team left no stone unturned. Officers checked every square inch of space, no matter how tedious and unnecessary it seemed. It took a special eye for this detail: someone with patience and a knack for the mundane. Rector admitted later (with a laugh) that he was perfectly suited for the job.

Within moments, the veteran investigator locked onto a wooden desk pushed up against the wall near a doorway that led into the McCords’ den. The wall the desk had its back to was actually the opposite side of the den wall inside the home. Investigators noticed the wallpaper on the other side of the wall looked a bit askew. Maybe just sloppily installed. Albert Bailey, who said he was working on the house, prided himself a master craftsman. Jessica told investigators that her stepfather was one of those types born with a hammer in one hand, a saw in the other. Whoever had wallpapered the McCord den—presumably Albert—had either not watched enough episodes of This Old House, had downed one too many beers while working or had rushed to complete the job. There were two different types of wallpaper meeting somewhere in the middle, at waist-high level. The wallpaper line was crooked. The seams did not match up. Even more interesting, it was easy to tell that the wallpaper had been recently installed. Sure, Jeff and Jessica McCord said they were having work done on the house that weekend. But in the scope of the investigation, it all seemed too convenient. On top of that, the kids told Detective Laura Brignac that everything in the den was different.

Going back inside the garage, Lieutenant Rector took his flashlight and looked around the area where the wooden desk was butted up against the wall. While running his flashlight along the floor by the legs of the desk, staring at one section in particular, Rector noticed something.

A hole in the Sheetrock.

He looked down on the garage floor. There was Sheetrock dust and shards of broken plasterboard. Next to one edge of the wooden desk, close to the floor, sure enough, there was a small hole in the wall. The back of the desk was away from the wall about three inches. Protruding from the hole in the Sheetrock was debris, broken bits of the plasterboard, a chalky white dust and a powdery substance that looked like confectioner’s sugar. There was also a small bit of insulation from the inside of the wall that looked to have been pushed through. Something had been jabbed through the wall, from inside the den, and had popped a hole in the Sheetrock.

Rector panned his light down at the floor.

There it was: a spent projectile on the concrete floor of the garage, next to the baseboard, in near perfect condition.

One of the desk legs had an indentation, Rector noticed. Like a scar from where the bullet looked to have hit and bounced back. It was directly above where the bullet sat on the concrete floor.

If you looked down, it wasn’t hard to figure out that a bullet had come through the wall, hit the desk, left a rather visible scuff mark on the desk leg, then fell to the ground.

Rector then went around to the other side of the wall, inside the den. Several investigators were in the room, looking around at various sections of the recent remodeling project.

Rector explained what he had found in the garage.

There was no hole, however, anywhere on the wall where it should have been. If a bullet had been fired from inside the den within the past week, say, and went through the wall and landed on the floor in the garage, there should have been a hole in the den wall. At least that’s what the evidence in the garage seemed to suggest.

But there wasn’t.

They knew why, of course.

Slowly investigators peeled back the new wallpaper.

And there it was: a small hole the size of a bullet in Sheetrock inside the den.

At some point one of the investigators put a trajectory rod through the hole; it indicated the bullet was fired from approximately the chest height of an average-sized human being who was facing the wall. The person would have been standing several feet away from the wall, pointing the weapon toward the garage. The aim was directly on the spot where the McCords’ couch had sat before Albert Bailey removed it from the home.

Peyton Zanzour was in another part of the garage, poking around, when he noticed a bag next to the garage door. It was just sitting there on the floor, to the right of the washer and dryer.

To the right of the bag was a pile of clothes.

Inside the bag Zanzour discovered a “wadded-up piece of [old] wallpaper,” about the size of a grapefruit.

He knelt down. Wearing latex gloves, flashlight in his mouth, the investigator took the piece of wadded-up wallpaper from the bag and unfolded it.

At first it didn’t register. But then staring at it—bingo—there was the hole, about the size of a bullet.

Zanzour stood and took the wallpaper into the house. He held it up against the section that had been recently peeled back.

Like a Mylar overlay—a dead-on match.

Things made sense: someone had peeled off the old wallpaper and put new paper over the bullet hole, but did not plaster the hole first.

The HPD needed to get the bullet from the garage to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS) lab and have ballistics check it against the bullet the Bureau had uncovered in the trunk of Alan’s rental car. That would be the real test. If the ADFS matched the two, the HPD could bank on those arrest warrants they were hoping to file against Jeff and Jessica.

Several pieces of furniture, including a small coffee table you might put in front of a couch, were taken outside the McCord home for the purpose of conducting luminol testing. Inside, parts of the rug in the den were torn up to display what appeared to be tile underneath—some of it new.

“The tile that was on the floor,” Peyton Zanzour said later in court, “it was very dirty. There was dirt in places that was, like, in piles, a sandy type of dirt. It was very unusual, number one, that there was that much dirt.”

The dog could have tracked that dirt into the home.

But the dirt didn’t seem to be a collection from years of carrying it into the house on the soles of shoes; it “appeared,” Zanzour testified, “to be as if it was dirt from the outside.”

The theory, apparently, was that people were coming and going. Moving things around. In and out of the house.

Furthermore, when investigators took a closer look, they could tell that some of the tiles underneath the carpeting were new, while others were not. This did not make much sense. Especially seeing that there were plenty of other tiles underneath the carpet that could stand to be replaced. Why would a homeowner change only some of the tiles and then cover them with carpeting?

To hide something was the only answer the HPD could come up with. Jessica and Jeff were not providing any other alternative solution.

Zanzour found “gold-colored carpet” fibers near the base of the hearth of the fireplace inside the den. It was clear upon careful examination that the fibers did not match the carpet the HPD had removed from the den floor.

There was an old carpet somewhere, the HPD was now certain. That carpet needed to be located. It was probably loaded with trace evidence, and possibly even blood from the victims.

“Shelby County Landfill,” someone said. It was the closest dump site to the McCord home. Jessica, Jeff and Albert had admitted they had taken items to the dump that Saturday morning and the previous day. If the HPD could find the carpet, they were confident they were also going to find enough evidence to send Jeff and Jessica to Alabama’s death row.

“As I recall,” Jessica said later, “the carpet that was on the floor of the den went out with the trash.”

Standing outside the home, D. C. Scively examined the coffee table that investigators had taken from the den. There was a small stain—about the size of a dime—on one of the coffee table legs. In addition, there were smaller “stains” on the glass portion of the table. All of these appeared to be red in color.

Scively sprayed a few mists of luminol on the glass and table leg.

Waited.

It took a few seconds, but there it was: that fluorescent shimmer, like a child’s glow stick, exposing the blood of the recently departed.

23

Jessica alienated Alan from his children the moment he walked out of the house in 1994. One would have to assume that she believed if Alan had abandoned the marriage, why should she show him any respect where the children were concerned? He was the one who left. He had deserted them. He took it upon himself to leave. There had to be a price to pay for such a betrayal.

In the years to come, Jessica had no trouble expressing her opinions regarding Alan’s responsibilities as a father; and it was clear that from the moment Alan was out of her life romantically, Jessica’s goal was to make him look as bad as she could in the eyes of his kids.

Jessica didn’t last long in the apartment she rented after leaving the house in Montevallo. She moved back into the house once she realized Alan wasn’t going to be staying there. But even this act of hospitality on Alan’s part—he insisted Jessica take the house because of the kids—was later turned around by her malicious tongue.

“Alan moved into an apartment in Southside,” Jessica said in court, “and I was still in Montevallo at the time. And that fall [of 1994] and in the winter [of 1995], I came down sick. It was very, very cold in that house down there. I came down sick, and the kids were sick. And I just could not keep up by myself being sick with the two kids, so I went to stay with my mother.”

Jessica tried to give the impression that because Alan had moved out, she had a hard time paying for heat. Alan gave her money from day one. There is a long, multipage computer printout detailing every payment Alan ever made to Jessica. The guy never missed.

It’s clear Jessica needed to blame the people around her for anything that might have been even remotely considered her fault. She couldn’t take responsibility for a failed marriage and begin a new life. It needed to be someone else’s burden.

Friends became uncomfortable around Jessica as she routinely played the situation against Alan. Her whole life revolved around Alan. Everything was his fault. In front of the kids, she ranted and raved about Alan not paying her child support and not wanting to visit the kids.

None of it was true.

Bottom line: Alan gave Jessica more money than he had to. For example, Alan was paying Jessica child support even before the divorce decree was signed and sealed. Jessica took that money and spent it on herself, and then turned around and blamed Alan for not taking care of the kids financially.

Without being able to fend for herself and the kids as a single mom, Jessica moved into her mother’s house in Hoover, abandoning the house in Montevallo. Her mother and stepfather could help out with the kids. Dian was about to start a new job as an accounting supervisor for the child support enforcement unit at the family court. At the time Jessica moved in, Dian was a cashier for the collections office of the court.

The Bates divorce was finalized in January 1995. If she chose, Jessica could take the Montevallo house, as Alan promised, until the kids were adults. The Circuit Court for the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit of Alabama gave Jessica, under Alan’s complete blessing, the responsibility of the care, custody and control of the minor children . . . , the Bates divorce decree stipulated. Alan had no trouble relinquishing primary custody. Kids belonged with their mother. He was all for it. At the time Alan believed Jessica was a competent adult mother who could take care of her children. She would get over the breakup. She’d realize what was important. Despite the violent nature she displayed and the negative attitude seemingly festering inside her, Alan trusted she’d snap out of it and come to terms with the notion that their lives were now about raising the children. He had no idea what was spinning inside Jessica—or what was in store for him in the coming months and years. Nor did he ever presume Jessica was capable of the behavior he was about to meet up with.

No sooner had a judge signed off on the divorce did the real problems begin for Alan. He knew it was going to be a fight, but he had no idea how bad it would become. Jessica routinely kept the children away from Alan, allowing him visitation only when she said so. And even then, it turned into Jessica purposely keeping the kids away from their father.

They weren’t divorced a month and Alan was fed up. He was pulling his hair out, wondering what he had to do to see his kids. He’d call and no one would answer. He’d leave a message and the kids wouldn’t call him back. He’d ask the kids, when he finally got to see or talk to them, if their mother or grandmother had given them his messages and they said no. There were times, family members and friends later explained, when Jessica took things as far as sending the kids outside to sit on the front porch with their bags, telling them Alan was “on his way.” She would tell them this, knowing there was no scheduled visitation planned. After hours of sitting and waiting, Jessica would then call the kids back into the house, reportedly saying, “See, he doesn’t care. He’s not coming!”

Then came the men. Jessica hung around a popular local restaurant, J. Alexander’s, in Hoover. One night she ran into someone she knew. Barry Cyrus (pseudonym) was older than Jessica. “The first time I met her . . . she was in high school, I was in college,” Barry later said in court.

They never dated. Just friends, Barry insisted.

Now Jessica was giving Barry that eye, though—the look of a newly divorced woman out and about, prowling, looking for a man. She was going to show Alan that she didn’t need him. She could go out and find herself somebody else.

The more they hung out together as platonic friends, Barry noticed how much Jessica had changed since high school. Barry also noticed the way in which Jessica addressed the children, especially when she talked about Alan. It was always in a negative light. Alan was the bad guy. The evil one. The cause of all Jessica’s and the kids’ problems. She constantly said vicious things about Alan to the kids, undermining his role as their father.

“I had mentioned to her a couple of times where she would say some things kind of unkind about Alan in front of the children,” Barry said later in court.

“Try not to do that in front of the kids,” Barry told Jessica. He was unnerved by the way she spoke to them about Alan. It was not only uncomfortable and wrong, but it was having an ill effect on how the kids behaved and viewed life in general.

Then there was a phone call one day from Alan to Naomi.

“Have you seen Jessica?”

No one could find her. She was AWOL—again.

“As a matter of fact,” Naomi said, “I haven’t seen her for months.”

Alan asked Naomi if she could call over to the Bailey house for him and find out what was going on.

“I will.”

“Is Jessica there?” Naomi asked Dian.

Dian sounded discouraged, Naomi later explained. “Yeah, I’ve got the girls here. She’s been gone a couple of months. I cannot find her. She’s not coming to see the kids or calling.”

Naomi asked around and finally found out Jessica was shacked up with some other guy.

“You need to go home and take care of your girls!” Naomi snapped at Jessica after locating her. Naomi was upset. The kids depended on Jessica. Here it was, Jessica’s mother now raising her grandkids. It wasn’t right. Naomi wanted Jessica to take responsibility. Grow the hell up.

Jessica said she was pregnant again. “Twins.”

“Twins?” Naomi was floored. The last thing Jessica needed was more children. She couldn’t handle the two she had.

Naomi didn’t know what to say.

“I miscarried the twins, though,” Jessica finally admitted.

“You get yourself home and take care of those girls.”

As Jessica made Alan’s life as unhappy as she could, most notably by turning the children against him, depriving him of the one thing she had control over (seeing the kids), Alan got busy with his own life—the one thing she couldn’t control. Alan now had a degree from the University of Montevallo. He fell headfirst into his first real job in the theater as stage manager for the historic Alabama Theatre in downtown Birmingham. For the most part Alan’s job consisted of what he loved more than anything besides his kids: reworking larger Broadway productions for the smaller stage.

The man behind the curtain.

In order to lead the new life she wanted for herself, Jessica spun more of her vicious and self-centered lies, using the children as weapons to get what she wanted out of Alan. Jessica refused to take a job. She told the court she worked for her stepfather as his secretary, but that was, at best, an exaggeration; at worst, a flat-out fabrication. The man didn’t have that much work to require a secretary. The fact of the matter was, Jessica did not want to work. She believed Alan should support her and the girls.

By the end of 1995, it was clear to Alan that Jessica was taking the child support he paid her each month and using it for her own wild lifestyle of chasing and bedding men. All of this while telling the kids that “Alan wasn’t paying her,” Kevin and Robert Bates later said.

The entire situation tore Alan apart. From his engineering father, Alan acquired a trait that was now going to help him in his day-to-day dealings with Jessica. Alan grew into the most methodical, organized and thorough person many of his friends and family said they had ever met. He kept detailed records of everything in his life.

“He planned, organized, labeled and filed [things] with amazing precision,” Kevin Bates later said with admiration. “In fact, when things started going sour in the visitation, shortly after the divorce, Alan began meticulously recording, saving, labeling and filing every harassing or threatening voice mail he received from Jessica, and put them neatly in a box—which he labeled ‘evidence.’”

24

There was still work to be done inside the McCord home as Monday, February 18, 2002, progressed. Wherever the HPD looked, another piece of incriminating evidence against Jessica and Jeff McCord seemed to pop up. There was now good reason to believe Alan and Terra Bates were murdered inside the McCord home.

Outside the den door, in the garage, a can of gasoline with an inch of liquid was uncovered. More ammo was found. A new bottle of Clorox bleach—empty. Several shards of wallpaper matching the old pattern, which were recently torn off the walls, were found crumpled up.

Empty boxes of tile.

And paper towels. Plenty of used paper towels were unearthed inside garbage cans throughout the house. No one knew then how important these paper towels would become.

Evidence tech Mark Tant, a seventeen-year-veteran law enforcement officer with the HPD, noticed as he took photographs of the outside of the house that there was no mailbox. It was the only house on the block without a mailbox.

Another anomaly. Why no mailbox?

The den was so crowded with stuff, Tant said later in court, “you could barely walk through there. You were stepping on things.”

Boxes. Books. Clothes. Toys. DVDs. Tapes. Old newspapers. And trash.

In the far corner of one room on the main floor was a bookcase, later learned to be Jessica’s. It was full of true crimes and thrillers. Dozens of them.

At some point that day, Tant was summoned to Pro Tow Towing, a service the HPD used to impound vehicles. The garage was located off Route 150, down on Lorna Road, not too far from the McCord home.

The HPD impounded Albert Bailey’s white GMC van, the vehicle he had driven to transport the couch to that Dumpster site in town. The HPD believed Bailey might have transported the carpet, too, either knowingly or unknowingly. And there may well be additional evidence inside the van. Best thing to do was bring it in and process it.

On the back of the window of the beat-up van, Bailey had one bumper sticker, split into two sections: AMERICA, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.

The guy was a patriot.

Inside the body of the van, Tant found several pieces of tile matching those found inside the McCord home.

He took the pieces out of the van and photographed them.

The HPD released the McCord home for the second time in three days. Jessica stayed at the house. Jeff was “escorted” to the HPD after volunteering to give another statement.

Inside the interview room Jeff made it clear that he wasn’t taking much of this all that seriously—which seemed rather odd, considering the stakes. He was cocky. Laughing and joking around. Acting like he had the situation under control.

Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected.

Peyton Zanzour and Tom McDanal started the interview by turning on the videotape recorder. First they asked about the couch. Who had removed it from the house? When? Why? “Who took the cushions off? Where are the cushions?”

This . . . seemed to confuse McCord, a report of the interview noted.

“Look,” Jeff said after thinking about it, “I took the cushions off the thing so they would not blow off when the couch was removed from the house and taken to the dump.”

But the couch was transported inside Albert Bailey’s van.

Another lie.

“Which dump?” one of the investigators asked.

Jeff shrugged.

“Why was the leather stripped from the back of the couch?”

Jeff considered the question. “To make it lighter. And the cushions were actually taken to a charity drop-off at the Wal-Mart in Pelham.”

“Where was the stripped leather disposed?”

Jeff said Jessica tossed it; he had no idea where.

The former cop continued to laugh. Apparently, two dead bodies and evidence pointing toward him and his wife was some sort of a joke. “Him being a police officer,” Detective Brignac, who was in another room watching the interview on a TV monitor, said later, “you’d think he’d want to help us. But he kept saying he didn’t know anything . . . and then he’d sit there and laugh.”

“That carpet,” one of the investigators asked, “when did y’all remove it?”

“Jessica removed that, too. I have no idea where it is.”

As the interview went on, Jessica called the station house repeatedly. “I want to talk to my husband! Where is he? I need to talk to my husband.”

“Busy, ma’am.”

“I need to speak with him. Please . . . now.”

“No. You can’t right now. He’s busy.”

Getting nowhere, Jessica decided to pack up the children and head down to the HPD.

Back inside the interrogation room, one of the investigators asked again, “Jeff, where is the carpet?”

“I think she took it to the dump.” Jeff named two different “public dumps in Alabama.”

“Which one?”

He went quiet.

“We need to know which dump.”

“Am I free to leave?” he asked at that point.

“Sure.”

The interview was over. Jeff sat as they got the paperwork for the search warrant together and gave him copies.

“I need my gun and belt so I can turn it into Pelham,” Jeff said. “I suspect I’ll be placed on administrative leave until the outcome of this investigation.”

McDanal left the room to go get Jeff’s gun belt.

When he returned (phrasing it as though there was bad news, that same report indicated), McDanal told Jeff, “There’s a problem with the evidence room door—we cannot retrieve the gun belt at this time.”

Jeff went into a laughing fit in response to McDanal’s explanation: After learning what the actual news was, McCord laughed uncontrollably and then noticeably, physically relaxed, the report noted.

Up and down. An emotional roller coaster for Jeff McCord. He didn’t know how to feel. Or how to act.

Jeff was told he could leave. Jessica was waiting outside in the parking lot.

“There was just so much going on, so much to be done at this point,” Detective Brignac said later, “we had our hands full. We were all working sixteen-hour days by then. . . .”

Jessica sat in the family van with the children and their clothes. Jeff got in. They were heading to Pensacola, Florida, to drop the kids off at Jessica’s sister’s and maybe wait out the investigation down there.

Jeff made no promise he’d be back in town anytime soon.

“If they stay in Florida,” one investigator said, “we’re going to have big problems because of jurisdiction issues.”

As Jessica and Jeff pulled out of the parking lot, two officers in an unmarked vehicle got behind the van and followed them.