Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

49

Late that same afternoon, Tom Klugh was in Georgia, getting ready to head out to the local mall and purchase his first cell phone. He finished placing the onions and potatoes into the ground. Showered. Then he headed out the door. Tom had fought the temptation to upgrade to the technical side of life long enough. Terra was gadget-savvy and connected electronically, like most everyone else Tom knew. So he figured the best way to communicate with his only daughter was to give in and buy a cell phone.

When Tom got home, one of his friends called the house. The guy wanted to go out and get something to eat and have a few beers. They’d meet up with additional friends at the bar.

“Why not?” Tom said.

He arrived back home, somewhere near 6:30 P.M., and started fussing with his new phone. Terra was going to be happy about the purchase, Tom knew. The first person he wanted to call on the new phone was the one person he had, essentially, bought it for.

Terra’s number rang several times. Then her voice mail picked up.

By now, it was near seven o’clock. “Hey, sweetie,” Tom said into Terra’s voice mail, “just want to let you know I got a cell phone today with a plan that allows me to call you anytime I want to. I love you!”

Tom would often tell Terra, “You know, you’re my favorite daughter.”

She’d sass back: “But, Dad, I’m your only daughter.”

They’d share the perfect laugh.

When Tom didn’t hear from Terra that night, he went to bed believing that she and Alan had picked up the girls and driven to Marietta. They were probably dog tired. They could all connect the following morning. Maybe even get together.

50

The scramble was on in Hoover to clean up the Myrtlewood Drive crime scene. There wasn’t a lot of time. Maybe six hours. Seven, tops. People were expecting Alan, Terra and the kids. Maybe Jessica and Jeff had the night and early morning. But by tomorrow afternoon law enforcement was going to no doubt be calling, asking questions. Trying to locate Mr. and Mrs. Alan Bates.

Alan’s rental car was pulled up to the gate in back of the house. Jeff found two old blankets and a set of outdated drapes they were going to toss in the garage.

“Help me,” he said.

Together they wrapped both bodies.

Terra was the lightest. They picked her up first. Jeff grabbed her shoulders, Jessica her feet, as if carrying a stretcher.

They did the same with Alan’s body.

Jessica next went into the kitchen. She picked up the telephone. They had already heard Terra’s phone ring as they were cleaning up, but, of course, they didn’t answer it. That was Tom calling his daughter.

In the kitchen Jessica dialed Alan’s cell phone number. Voice mail picked up. “Hey,” Jessica said, “where are you guys? We’re waiting for you. The girls are here.” It was a lie, obviously. “We’re all waiting for you. Where are you?” Then, with a sarcastic, cynical tone, “It’s real nice of you not to call.”

Jessica and Jeff grabbed some glass cleaner from underneath the sink and a roll of paper towels. They needed to wipe down the rental car after ditching it and setting it on fire.

“Lighter fluid,” one of them suggested.

Jeff went out to the garage. They didn’t have any. He picked up a gas can.

“No,” Jessica said.

Right. It’d be better to stop somewhere along the way and get a few gallons of gas. Buy a new can. Ditch it somewhere along the way.

There was a lot left to be done inside the house. They needed to get rid of the bodies first. Then they could head back to the house to begin the cleanup.

Jeff said he’d drive Alan’s rental. He got behind the wheel. Jessica jumped inside the family van after locking the house.

They looked at each other.

Time to move.

Jessica had the Bateses’ cell phones with her. She planned on making a few calls along the way to set up a ruse that Alan and Terra had been using their phones, communicating with each other.

The plan was to hit the road and drive “somewhere over the Georgia border.” First, though, they’d have to drive into town and purchase those movie tickets.

Jessica suggested stopping at a local strip mall. She had a problem, according to what Jeff later said. She had been fidgeting with Terra’s cell phone to see if she could get into the voice mail to hear that message someone had left. In doing that, Jessica thought she had somehow recorded “incriminating evidence” against them as she randomly pushed buttons. She had panicked. She wanted to stop at the Galleria, a local cell phone kiosk, she told Jeff, to ask for help.

“Okay.”

Jessica asked the guy behind the counter, “How do I erase voice mail on this thing? Can you help me? How do I listen to it?”

The guy didn’t know.

Jessica turned to Jeff, who was standing there with her, looking around. “Let’s go,” she said.

From there, still in Hoover, they drove to a pay phone in the CVS parking lot nearby. Jessica needed to call her mother and set that part of their alibi in motion.

“Do it,” Jeff said.

Her stepfather answered. Jessica said, “Is it okay if the kids are left with you for the rest of the night?” She said something about Alan blowing them off and they wanted to make a night of it alone, without the kids.

The kids were already there. “Sure,” Albert said.

It had not occurred to Jessica, however, that she had just called Alan’s cell phone and left a message saying that the kids were with her.

After the call Jessica led the way. They hopped onto the I-459, heading up to the I-20 and into Georgia.

After about ninety minutes of driving, Jessica signaled Jeff to pull over.

They were heading into Anniston, Alabama, directly east of Hoover, approximately twenty-five miles from the Georgia border. “We made the stop in Anniston,” Jeff explained later, “and got something to eat at the SUBWAY.”

After a quick bite they cut up Alan and Terra’s credit cards, along with “whatever else from . . . both their wallets or purses.”

“Atlanta?” Jeff queried to his now-manic wife.

She shrugged yes. “I made some phone calls.”

Jeff was confused.

Phone calls? What did she mean by “phone calls”?

“From their phones to make it appear as if they had car trouble.”

Jeff tossed several pieces of the gun along the side of the road as they headed out of Anniston back onto the main road.

Outside Atlanta they stopped to purchase a gallon of gasoline and a new gas can. After passing through Atlanta, still heading east on I-20, Jessica pulled over at a rest stop.

“We need to wipe the car down.”

“Right,” Jeff said.

They went to work, Jeff explained. They both wiped the “interior of the car. . . . Wiped down the door handles, wiped down anything anybody might have touched.” Before leaving, Jeff walked into the information center at the rest area and bought some lighter fluid and a cigarette lighter.

“[We] got back on the road and started driving,” Jeff said later. “For whatever reason, she finds Rutledge, Georgia.”

Jeff never mentioned why, if they had planned on torching the vehicle, they were so concerned about wiping it down.

By now, it was somewhere near 2:00 A.M. The road Jessica had turned onto in Rutledge was secluded. Dark as motor oil.

Perfect.

Jeff didn’t like it so much. He took the lead, drove around and in front of Jessica. He wanted to find a place farther into the forest, away from people and homes. “I went down a couple of side roads,” he recalled. “Somehow we turned onto . . . where the car was left.”

Hawkins Academy Road.

“Initially we tried to leave it, or thought about leaving it, across the road from where it was finally left . . . but it would have been very noticeable. . . .”

They got out of their vehicles. Stood together. Looked around.

Jeff “doused” the car with gasoline. Then he opened the trunk and poured some of the gas over the two people he had murdered.

After that, he flicked the lighter, took several steps back.

As he described what happened next, Jeff used the word “kerflooey.”

Nothing happened.

Inside the McCord family van, Jessica had several paper towels she had used to wipe the rental vehicle down. She grabbed a few sheets. Ran over to the car. Lit one of the paper towels and gave it to Jeff.

He tossed it inside an open window.

Kerflooey!

Still, nothing happened. It wasn’t like a Hollywood movie. No big mushroom cloud of smoke below an atomic flame. None. Jeff actually “singed his fingertips a couple of times” while trying to get the car to ignite.

Laughing while later describing this part of the night (yes, laughing . . .), Jeff McCord said he had trouble “trying to get everything lit.”

Jessica became frustrated. She stomped about. “Come on . . . come on, Kelley!”

Jeff threw up his hands. “You do it, then.”

Jessica grabbed the paper towel.

She must have tossed it in the right place, because as soon as Jessica flipped the lit paper towel into the car—poof—a loud suction sound preceded what was that immense fireball explosion they had been expecting all along.

“’Course that could have had something to do with the air and the fumes by that time,” Jeff surmised later.

The car was now ablaze. Engulfed in bright flames. The heat was incredible. It pushed Jeff and his wife backward.

They ran for the van. Jessica got behind the wheel and took off out of there as fast as she could.

“It’s done,” she said happily, driving away. “You’ve done something great for the girls, you know that, Kelley.”

Jeff felt proud, he later said.

Yes, proud.

Jessica had managed to make the guy feel good about murder.

“You’ve done something great for me, too,” she added.

“At that time,” Jeff recalled later, “I was taking song and verse, her version on how badly Alan had treated her and how bad he was to the kids. And had actually seen . . . some of that verified by them. ‘Them’ meaning the girls. . . .”

Jeff never explained what, exactly, he was referring to here.

As they drove away, flames to their backs, black smoke, melting plastic, burning flesh—and child custody matters—were all behind them. As they sped away from the scene like two Hollywood killers, Jeff said he had one last thought.

What is done is done. . . . Nothing I can do to reverse it now.

51

By 3:00 A.M., February 16, 2002, according to Jeff McCord’s version of the murders, he and his wife were on their way back to Hoover, desperate to begin cleaning up what was the initial crime scene back at home.

On their way through Atlanta, Jeff and Jessica stopped at a convenience store. Jeff got out of the car and put the gas can on the sidewalk.

Jessica walked over and wiped it down.

Then Jeff tossed the lighters out the window. They landed in a ravine on the opposite side of the sidewalk.

The first place Jeff and Jessica drove to when they got back in town was Home Depot. They were first in line, standing by the entrance before the place was open.

Ten minutes after they were allowed in, all they bought was a razor blade of some sort—“that looked a lot like a pizza cutter,” Jeff explained—to cut carpeting and some heavy black plastic.

Entering their Myrtlewood Drive house, Jessica took a look around. Things appeared different now that they weren’t scrambling to get two bodies out of the house. She looked at the sofa: bullet holes through the backrest; blood was on the leather. The carpet was also saturated with blood. The place was a mess. It would take forever to get rid of all the evidence, put in new carpeting, patch holes in the walls, toss the couch.

What were they going to do?

Jessica walked around. Jeff knew that look. He was familiar with it. Her wheels were spinning.

“Let’s just burn everything,” Jessica blurted out.

Another fire?

They could, Jessica suggested, light the side of the house on fire where the murders had been committed. Burn that evidence up, too. It had worked back in Georgia; at least she believed it did.

“No way,” Jeff said. Not a good idea. “Let’s just see if we can think of a different way to do this.”

52

Early Saturday morning, Naomi, her husband and the kids got up and decided to take off. A trip out of town. Spend the day together. They didn’t get many chances to have family time, but when they did, Naomi and her husband made the best of it.

Getting home later that evening, somewhere near six o’clock, Naomi plopped down on the couch. She was exhausted. As the kids got settled, Naomi surfed through the vast variety of cable channels on television, not paying too much attention.

When she hit the local news, she left it on.

“Two bodies found inside the trunk of a burned-up car in Georgia. . . .”

Naomi didn’t think anything of the report and went to bed.

The next day Naomi turned on the news again. There was that same story. This time, though, the newscaster announced the names of the victims.

“Alan and Terra Bates.”

“She did it!” Naomi screamed.

“What are you talking about?” her husband asked, walking into the room.

Naomi pointed to the television.

Her husband realized what was going on. He knew she was talking about Jessica.

“Jessica killed them,” Naomi verified as her husband stood there, astonished by this news.

Naomi went into the kitchen and called the Hoover PD.

“Sorry, ma’am, all of our officers are out”—they were at the McCord home, in fact, serving that first search warrant—“at this time. You’ll have to call back tomorrow morning.”

Naomi spent an hour calling around, trying to get ahold of Alan’s parents. She had no idea where they lived. Finally she called Cecil Whitmire, Alan’s old boss from the Alabama Theatre.

“They live in Atlanta,” Whitmire said.

“Thanks.”

Naomi talked it over with her husband the next morning and decided she needed to call the police and explain everything she knew. The time for loyalty was gone. In Naomi’s mind Jessica was a double murderer.

Detective Laura Brignac called Naomi later that morning. “Look, we’re in the middle of an investigation,” the detective said, “I cannot really talk to you right now about this.”

Naomi said she had information to share. “I want to meet with you.”

“I cannot meet with you right now, sorry,” Brignac said.

“Okay . . . but can I at least tell you why I have called you?”

Brignac thought about it. “Sure.”

Naomi went through as much as she could as quickly as she could get it out.

Silence.

Then, “I’ll be at your house in an hour,” Brignac said.

PART V

THE BRINK OF ETERNITY

53

Jessica and Jeff McCord were tight-lipped and unified after capital charges for felony murder were filed on February 22, 2002. Neither was ready to throw the other under a bus, just yet. Jessica wouldn’t talk at all. Jeff babbled in circles. Now it was up to prosecutor Roger Brown to make sure all the evidence the Hoover PD had collected, while working in tandem with the Bureau, would serve to convince a jury that the McCords were guilty as charged.

The Edgewood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham was buzzing with talk after Jessica’s arrest. Many relatives from her mother’s side were members of the church. The pastor, Sid Burgess, focused much of his Sunday, February 24, sermon on “fellow parish member” Jessica Inez Callis Bates McCord.

The title of the sermon spoke to the church’s reaction to the charges against its member: “Still ‘Open-Hearted, ’ Still ‘Open-Minded.’”

There was going to be no judging going on inside the walls of Edgewood. Jessica was going to be given the benefit of the doubt.

“Right here, right now,” Burgess preached from the pulpit that morning, “this congregation has been rocked on its very foundation. . . .”

Burgess then explained how murder charges had been brought “against one of our own.” He called Jessica a “third-generation member.” He spoke of the “headlines” in the newspapers and the “highlights” on television. He mentioned how Jessica’s family had been pillars inside the Edgewood church community for “almost sixty years.” He asked parishioners, after listing all the health problems Jessica’s family had endured throughout the years, to be there, as the church itself would be, for Jessica, Dian and Inez, Jessica’s grandmother. The “embarrassment, the pain and agony, now the anguish of a daughter and granddaughter charged with a capital offense, we, their brothers and sisters,” he shouted, pumping his fist, “must also share.”

The pastor next poeticized how Jesus had taken up His cross. Then asked those who believed in Him to stand by His side, follow and do the same for Inez, Dian and Jessica.

Unity.

Jessica’s church family was a devoted group of Christians—no doubt about it. Pastor Burgess spoke of how, during the week leading up to that Sunday’s service, he thought perhaps he could “duck” out of talking about the case “up here in the pulpit.” But after seeing the effect the news had on church members during the week, crying for Jessica’s “innocent children,” coming together and “openly weeping” for Dian, Inez and Jessica, there was no way he could deny his flock his shoulder. So he decided to take the difficult path and confront the issue head-on.

“How can a pastor not at least try to address such heartfelt pain?”

“Open-Minded, Open-Hearted” was this church’s slogan. Local television cameras showed file shots of the building during the nightly news—and there was that recognizable bumper sticker from the church with that so-familiar slogan plastered on the back of Jessica’s vehicle as it was towed away by the police.

By the end of his impassioned and compassionate sermon, Burgess said that while the “larger community” was prepared to “give up on Jessica McCord,” God was not. Even if she was to be ultimately found guilty, he explained, “we know God has a history of redeeming murderers.”

Ending the sermon, he compared Jessica to Saul on the road to Damascus, and recalled how Jesus was able to convince this onetime Christian basher and nonbeliever to drop everything and follow Him.

54

The first the public heard regarding details of the crimes came during a probable cause hearing, on Thursday, April 4, 2002. There was one witness on hand to lay out the state’s case against Jeff and Jessica McCord—Detective Sergeant Tom McDanal.

During the hearing McDanal called Albert Bailey a “suspect” who had not been charged yet. The theory was that Albert had helped Jessica and Jeff cover up their crimes by willfully and willingly dumping evidence.

The murders were a family affair, apparently.

Jessica’s court-appointed attorneys argued vehemently against the treatment their client had received since charges were filed. They even hinted at the notion that one possible defense might be police misconduct, citing the notion that the Hoover PD did not have probable cause to search the McCord home. They also suggested that “Jeff McCord’s position as a police officer influenced Hoover investigators.”

“Someone made the McCords a suspect even before there was a body found,” one of Jessica’s defense attorneys said. Then, at one point, Tom McDanal was asked, “Was there acrimony between your department and his department? Did the Hoover Police Department have any problems with a police officer from another department living in your jurisdiction?”

“No,” McDanal said in his terse, matter-of-fact demeanor. It was preposterous to think that police officers would go after another cop like that, especially with two people dead and an investigatory clock ticking. Moreover, the bodies of Terra and Alan Bates had been recovered almost first thing that morning.

The attorney asked about other suspects—why, for example, had the Hoover PD failed to explore other leads?

“It was pretty obvious we were on the right track,” McDanal said.

Judge R. O. Hughes ultimately agreed with the prosecution ; there was sufficient evidence to send the case to a grand jury.

After that, the notion of Jessica’s health came up. After all, she was pregnant again. She had not been lying about that little detail. By now, she was starting to show. Neither she nor Jeff had a history of violent crime convictions (save for that little attack on Alan that had caused him a broken arm). Her attorneys wanted to see them both out on bond. It was only fair.

“She is at a great risk of losing the baby,” her lawyer explained.

Roger Brown argued against this, making his point quite clearly, if not candidly. “This is a potential death penalty case. [These were] vicious, brutal killings. These are dangerous people and they need to stay in jail.”

The judge considered both arguments.

“Bond denied.”