Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

58

Day two picked up where the previous day had left off. Roger Brown built his case, brick by brick, each witness adding his or her blow to Jessica’s constant plea of innocence. Critics of Brown, however, might be quick to point out that if hatred toward an ex-spouse was motive for murder, coupled with things we said in the heat of anger and under our breath, we would not be able to build enough courthouses to prosecute the accused.

As Brown moved his case forward, he made that hatred Jessica had for Alan, which Brown believed had turned into a thirst for revenge and murder, the center point around which every witness pivoted. By the end of the day, Brown would send nineteen witnesses to the stand. Among them, few could describe that hatred in more depth and detail than Naomi Patterson, Jessica’s longtime friend.

Naomi was nervous, of course. But she was also there to tell the truth, as far as she knew it. She wasn’t looking for vengeance, as Jessica had implied by the look on her face when Naomi raised her right hand and sat down.

Naomi had been there since the beginning; she could offer the jury a complete portrait of Jessica and Alan’s married life before all the trouble started. She could show jurors how much Alan loved his pregnant young girlfriend and wanted to do the right thing by marrying her. And again, how Jessica, after she and Alan divorced, routinely abandoned her kids.

“Y’all were pretty close?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“After they divorced, did you continue to visit with her, to see her?”

“Yes, sir.”

Several questions later, “Did you have discussions with her . . . from time to time, about her living with this man [Brad Tabor] in his apartment, and her children being over there at her mother’s house?”

“Yes, sir. She knew that I didn’t approve of it.”

Brown was smooth in the way he was able to work in various facts surrounding—or leading up to—the point of no return he felt Jessica had ended up at. As she appeared more and more slighted, each man Jessica dated post-Alan saw through her greedy, malicious way of shunning her ex-husband. It was obvious in the way Jessica had pushed the brunt of her troubles on Alan: she blamed him for everything.

Yet the bomb Naomi dropped exploded after Brown asked her to talk about a conversation she’d had with Jessica not long before Alan and Terra were murdered.

“Did she say anything about Alan coming to the house [on February fifteenth] to pick up the children?”

“Yes, sir, she did.”

“What did she tell you . . . ?”

Naomi spoke with a likable earnestness. It was hard not to believe what she said. Her credibility was spotless.

“It got to the point,” Naomi began, “in the conversation, that she stated to me that when Alan came to the house to get the children, she was going to set him up for domestic violence and that she was going to—Kelley was going to hide the car so that Alan would feel that she was home alone with the children, and she was going to provoke him for the domestic violence so that it would help her in her court case.”

The courtroom let out a collective sigh as Naomi told her story. It wasn’t a stretch for most—including the jurors—to take a leap from setting Alan up for domestic violence to murder. If she was capable of planning and carrying out one, why not the other?

“And did she say what was then supposed to happen?”

Naomi paused. Cleared her throat. “And she also stated”—this was harder than she thought—“that if Alan were to touch her, that Kelley would kill him.”

After a few more questions, Brown handed Naomi over to John Wiley, who seemed eager to question the young mother.

“Well . . . you knew Alan, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“And you went to high school with him, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And y’all had been friends for many years?” Wiley’s inflection implied that there was something wrong with all of this. Or that he was perhaps leading up to a zinger of a punch line.

“Yes, sir.”

“But more recently, y’all hadn’t been as close as y’all had been before, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“And, in fact, you’ve never even been to the Myrtlewood Drive house, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“You never even visited there?”

“No, sir.”

“So you and Jessica were not nearly as close friends as you once were?”

“We were fading, yes.”

Brown looked at his coprosecutor, Laura Hodge, wondering where Wiley was going. Brown and Hodge had spent months preparing for trial, searching through documents, putting together witnesses, making sure they understood the custody case inside and out. They had spoken to Naomi themselves. What was Wiley’s strategy here? His questioning seemed to build up to nothing. Sure, Jessica and Naomi weren’t regularly having beers together anymore, attending Bible class or having tea and meeting at the park with their kids. But Naomi and Jessica had talked on the phone enough to be considered very close friends. Naomi was, after all, a sounding board for Jessica, who regularly called to dump her ex-hubby baggage on Naomi.

After a few more questions, Wiley broke a golden rule most defense attorneys will say you never, ever consider doing—unless you’re sure the case has slipped from your hands: attack the victim.

As casual as if he were asking about a shopping trip, Wiley said, “Okay, now, you know Alan used to beat her up when they were married, don’t you?”

A loud gasp filled the courtroom. Courtroom spectators looked at one another with shock. Had the man any evidence of such an accusation? Was he stomping on the grave of a dead man, who was unable to defend himself?

“No, sir.”

“She’s told you that, though, hasn’t she?”

“Not until recently.”

This was where Jessica was headed with her defense. She thought she had covered her tracks by telling Naomi that she’d had some important secret to admit—all that time she and Alan were together, Alan had been violent with her.

“Alan was the last person on earth who could have ever done such a thing,” Naomi said later, clearing up any confusion as to where she stood on the matter.

Jessica’s former attorney, David Dorn, testified later on that same afternoon. The problem for Jessica was that Dorn was an honest man who told the truth—and the truth was what began to hurt Jessica the most as each witness came forward and exposed another mean-spirited, hurtful, threatening remark or threat on her part toward Alan. No one was immune to Jessica’s arrogance and malicious mind-set. She spared no one around her the eruption of her wrath, most of which was focused on Alan. All because, Brown and Laura Hodge proved with each witness, Alan wanted his ex-wife to hold up her end of the divorce decree.

Jessica believed the rules did not apply to her, and each one of the state’s witnesses agreed.

By the end of the second day, Brown had shown the jury graphic photographs of what was left of the badly charred bodies of Alan and Terra. This as a slew of law enforcement witnesses took the stand to talk about what they hoped truly mattered in a court of law: hard evidence.

Brown and Hodge were determined to keep their case on a taut leash and not allow it to get out of hand with experts carrying on and on for hours. Juries tired easily from sitting all day. Attention spans became frayed. Attitudes easily touched off by a witness rambling on about this strand of DNA and that mitochondrial definition of blood. Brown didn’t want to alienate the jury by boring them with unneeded forensic nonsense, trying to make his case out to be some sort of hour-long television show that it was not. He had his experts explain the evidence in simple terms that the jury could wrap their minds around without too much added noise.

One of the state’s most impressive—if not substantial—pieces of evidence, Brown and Hodge knew going in, was the information the state had acquired from Terra’s and Alan’s cell phones. Jessica would have been better off leaving the phones alone, but she had to play with them. And that, the prosecution felt, was going to now come back to haunt her.

Brett Trimble sat. Brett was the custodian of records for Spring Communications Company. Here was one of those unbiased witnesses Hodge had brought in to talk about data. Pure, unadulterated information. Brett wasn’t sitting in for either side. The guy was there to talk about the information he had taken from cell phone records. This sort of evidence was ironclad. People lie. Cops sometimes leave things out for their own biased reasons. Friends can have an agenda. But records—documentation like this—speak to a truth no one can taint.

It is what it is, as they say.

Brett went through and described how he had looked at Alan’s and Terra’s cell phone numbers and matched them up to cell towers during that particular period of time the prosecution was interested in—between Friday night, at approximately six o’clock, and the next morning, very early. He did a search for “activations and locations.”

When you make a call on your cell phone, the signal hits the closest tower in the area where you make that call. That transfer of electronic information produces a record. A hit. The company who owns the tower knows which numbers are using which towers, where and at what times.

Brett called it a “cell site.” (Some may want to refer to it as one more addition to the Big Brother family.)

As you drive in your car, for example, away from, say, tower one, and come closer to tower two, your cell phone picks up that second tower site. From the time you start the call, Brett explained to the jury, until the phone call concludes, no matter where you drive or walk, each tower records all your moves.

Bad news for Jessica McCord.

Hodge showed Brett photographs of several cell towers, which covered a range, or radius, of about three miles, Brett said.

After the witness viewed several photographs, Hodge asked Brett to explain how those recordings—of the cell towers—are made.

“Well,” Brett said, “a call is made and it is entered into our computer system. Our computer system looks for the subscriber and locates it, and it is sent through the tower in to the customer.”

“So the subscriber and customer are the same thing?”

“That’s correct, yes.”

“How is a tower going to know where your cell phone is?”

“Well, towers are constantly in contact. They ping your cell phone.”

“What do you mean by ‘ping’?”

“Well, they send tiny bits of information to update your time and your date.”

“Is this like a sort of signal in a way?”

“Yes.”

Jessica was getting antsy in her chair. This information was adding up to a curtain-raiser of some sort, and there was no way that what was behind it was going to work in her favor.

Technology, a lifesaver. Computers are always looking over our shoulders. Recording everything we do. In this case that electronic information was proving to be one of the most powerful pieces of evidence Laura Hodge and Roger Brown had presented. If Alan and Terra were dead at six-thirty on that night, who could have been using their cell phones?

Only their killers.

Hodge asked a series of questions that walked jurors through a few phone calls made on Alan’s cell phone on the night of his murder. One was made at 5:57 P.M., the other at 6:14 P.M. Both calls pinged the same tower, Rocky Ridge Road at Patton Chapel, which is in Hoover, near Route 31.

“At Rocky Ridge Road,” Hodge queried, “. . . at five fifty-seven, we’ve got the north side. But then at six-fifteen, we’re moving to the southeast side. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct,” Brett said. The phone calls were made from different locations, Hodge had Brett point out. More than that, the 6:14 call, Brett explained after being asked, was made from Alan’s phone to Terra’s phone.

“Do your records also show a phone call made from Alan’s phone at eight-thirteen [P.M.] on Friday, February fifteenth?”

“Yes.”

Hodge asked what number Alan’s phone called.

Alan’s phone again called Terra’s phone.

“Did a cell tower receive a signal from Alan’s phone?”

“Yes.”

“Which tower was that?”

It was that same tower, Brett testified.

As they went back and forth, Hodge brought out the fact that at 8:58 P.M. Terra’s phone called its voice mail system and then called Alan’s cell phone again. The tower that recorded those calls was located on Jackson Trace Road, in Lincoln, Alabama, a good forty miles east of Hoover/Birmingham. Thus, the calls were being made by someone traveling east, toward Georgia. That second call, in fact, ended, Hodge pointed out on a map she set up for the jury, in Easta-boga, Alabama, even farther east.

It seemed like compelling evidence—that is, if Hodge and Brown could prove who was using the phones. Because at this point all the evidence showed was that two people were communicating with each other via the Bateses’ phones and checking their voice mail.

After all, those people could have been Terra and Alan. No expert had testified to a time of death.

59

During a break for lunch on Thursday, Brown indicated that he was likely going to wrap up his case by day’s end. He was confident in the few witnesses he and Hodge had left. If you’re Roger Brown, you want to end a trial for double murder on a high note. As a prosecutor, you want the jury to have all the information it needs without clogging up the case with unnecessary odds and ends. “Thank God,” Brown told me later, “this type of crime is so rare. It’s so nonsensical. Ludicrous. One of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my career. All over a child custody battle. Jessica McCord didn’t give a flip about her kids. She used them to torture Alan Bates.”

The trial had gone as Brown had anticipated. “Look,” he added, “I know people expect it to sound like some mystic stuff, but trial preparation and following through is not. After you do it five hundred times, you don’t really think about what you do. It’s kind of instinctual. The Hoover PD and the GBI did a great, terrific job.”

As day two moved into late afternoon, Roger Brown and Laura Hodge had Hoover PD detectives Peyton Zanzour and Rod Glover carry what Birmingham News reporter Carol Robinson, inside the courtroom covering every nuance of the case, called “the star in the courtroom.” But it was not one of Brown and Hodge’s witnesses. Instead, the detectives placed that black leather sofa in front of the jury. The one Albert Bailey had transported around town a day after the murders, only to drop it off in back of a warehouse building next to a Dumpster. The prosecution had the sofa brought into the room to show the jury how it had been stripped of its backing.

This was the couch, Brown insisted, that Alan and Terra sat on as they were shot to death. The backing had been taken off, obviously, because it had bullet holes and blood. Looking at the couch, one could easily figure there would be no other reason to strip it like it had been, other than to hide something. Why would you strip a couch halfway and then discard it? That wasn’t rational behavior.

To explain the sofa, among other details of the case that had been uncovered, Brown called GBI agent Kimberly Williams.

Williams pointed out from the stand that yes, the couch tested positive for blood. But no, it was not Alan’s or Terra’s DNA profile. Still, what the lab had found instead of blood was perhaps much more telling: a certain common household chemical.

On cross-examination John Wiley tried to poke holes in the fact that Jessica and Jeff gave Agent Williams and Investigator Sheron Vance different times for dropping the kids off at Jessica’s mother’s house on the night of the murders. But he got nowhere. Then he started in on the couch and how Williams had drawn conclusions—speculations—about it.

In response to Williams not answering the way Wiley had perhaps wanted, Brown asked Williams on redirect, “Mr. Wiley asked you about this [sofa] being luminoled and revealing the presence of blood. What else did that luminol reveal? Did it reveal the presence of bleach?”

“Yes, sir,” Williams answered.

“Where it had been wiped?”

“What appeared to be that, yes.”

Brown played a smart game. Trial lawyers liked to ask questions that they knew the answers to, not those they didn’t. John Wiley, it seemed, pulled things out of midair to try and trip up the witnesses. In Wiley’s defense, however, one would have to assume that his biggest problem in defending Jessica was that he had a pathological liar for a client.

Brown and Hodge next brought in their expert on ballistics, Ed Moran. Moran explained the details surrounding what was a compelling photograph of two bullets—one found in the trunk of Alan’s rental car, and the other found inside of the McCords’ garage—side by side. As one looked at the photo, it was not hard to tell with a naked, untrained eye that they had identical tool markings. And that, Moran explained, meant those projectiles had been fired from the same gun barrel. Now, how could a bullet fired from a weapon in the McCord home, and a bullet fired from the same barrel found underneath Alan’s body, have been fired by anybody else besides Jessica and Jeff McCord? Save for a setup, there was no other explanation.

After Moran left the stand, Brown recalled Hoover detective Peyton Zanzour, who answered one question to clear the record.

“Mr. Zanzour, I apologize,” Brown said, “I neglected to ask earlier. This location of Myrtlewood Drive, the house of the defendant and her husband, Jeff McCord, is that located in the Birmingham Division of Jefferson County, Alabama?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s all. Thank you.”

“I don’t have any questions,” John Wiley said.

“You can step down,” Judge Vinson told Zanzour.

Brown stood. Whispered something to Hodge. Then: “May it please the court,” he said, “the state rests.”

“All right. Ladies and gentlemen,” Vinson said, “this has timed out very well for our afternoon break. And always at this point in a trial, there are things I have to take up with the attorneys. So we’ll let you have your afternoon break.”

Wiley made an immediate motion for verdict of acquittal. It was based on, he said, “The state’s failure to make out a prima facie case of capital murder, just for the insufficiency of the evidence and, in particular, for the state’s failure to prove during its case that the two bodies are these of Alan and Terra Bates.”

The reach—it was worth a shot.

“I’ll overrule your motion,” the judge said politely.

Court adjourned at 3:45 P.M.

60

On Valentine’s Day, a Friday, both sides were back in the packed courtroom by 9:00 A.M. Roger Brown and Laura Hodge knew from speaking to Judge Vinson and John Wiley in chambers the previous afternoon that this day was going to be one of the more memorable of the trial. The gallery was a bit stirred, waiting and wondering if Jessica was going to take the stand, or would she roll the dice and keep her mouth shut. Those who knew Jessica were certain that she would demand to have the last word. There was not a situation in her life where Jessica had not given her two cents, and then some. If nothing else, she was relentless when it came to letting people know how she felt and what she thought.

After the morning gavel the judge took care of a few preliminary matters. Then John Wiley stood and, with a sense of reluctance in his voice, said, “The defense calls Jessica McCord.”

She stood. Walked to the stand like a peacock. Everyone watched. Here was the star of the show, raising her right hand, preparing to tell her side of this terrible tragedy.

There was a certain smugness to Jessica she couldn’t hide. It was in the way she carried herself. How she smiled out of the corner of her mouth. The way she looked at people and seemingly said, How dare y’all not believe me.

All Jessica had said since her arrest was that she needed her day in court to explain her innocence. Then everyone would see that she’d had nothing to do with killing Alan and his lovely wife. Well, here was that chance.

Wiley walked Jessica through her family life.

The children.

Home.

Marriages.

She seemed nervous, Wiley pointed out. Though Jessica hardly showed it once she found her groove.

“I’m sorry,” she said after Wiley told her to relax.

As Jessica talked about meeting and marrying Alan, she expressed a version of the marriage that few had heard. She claimed she and Alan were “incompatible” on every level, especially in the bedroom, at church and at the political polls—seemingly three deal breakers in the fine print of a romance contract.

Then the attack on Alan’s fathering skills began. Jessica talked about how bad a father Alan was for not wanting to see his children or maintain any sort of regular visitation schedule with them. She gave the impression that after the divorce Alan was more interested in his work than his kids.

This raised eyebrows. But not in the way, perhaps, that Jessica might have wanted.

As she got comfortable, it was clear that Jessica McCord was not going to give brief, succinct answers to the questions her lawyer asked. Rather, she launched into tedious criticisms of Alan, his attorney and the way Alan had handled the custody matter from day one.

Bash the dead guy.

It got to a point where—taking into consideration all of the evidence the state had presented already—one had to wonder if Jessica was talking about the same person. The same life. Or even the same trial. For example, Jessica accused Frank Head of “not seeing” her in court on several of those occasions he had claimed she failed to show up for a custody hearing.

Many wondered if she was actually being serious when she said this. It was either that, or Frank Head must have been wearing a blindfold.

She even went so far as to blame Alan for the continued court postponements, saying he was always away on tour with the theater group.

To anyone who knew the history, Jessica’s answers were pathetic and so transparent that it was hard not to laugh out loud in open court.

“When did you first learn,” Wiley asked, “that the judge had held you in contempt of court and issued a warrant for your arrest?”

Jessica repeated the question.

“Yes,” Wiley affirmed.

“I did not learn that until I was arrested.”

So Jessica was theoretically asking everyone to believe that for over one year she’d had no idea an arrest warrant had been issued in her name. For twelve months she did not realize she was being held in contempt of court. Would a jury believe this, or resent the idea that Jessica felt she could get away with such an outright lie? After all, this same statement was coming from a woman whose husband was a cop at the time!

Several questions later, Wiley asked Jessica about the arrest. How she remembered that day. “And you heard testimony,” he concluded his question, “that you pretended to be your sister?”

For the record the witnesses included sheriffs, cops and attorneys.

Still, according to Jessica, they had it all wrong. “I heard that,” she said, “yes.”

“And you don’t—that’s not exactly what happened, is it?”

Jessica said no.

Wiley asked her to explain.

“Yeah, the day that they came, it was very early in the morning that day. We were all still in bed, you know, in pajamas and everything, watching Martha Stewart on TV.” One big, happy American family, in other words. Enjoying themselves as they woke up. Some were surprised Jessica had not tossed in a story about breakfast in bed to put a nice bow on it all. “And my husband heard some knocking and went around. I was using the restroom. And I could hear them discussing that there was some sort of an order relating to the children and an order for my arrest.” When she told the sheriff she was her sister, Jessica asked the jury to believe, it was more or less in a mocking fashion. She was joking. She claimed she told the children what was about to happen—that she was going to jail—and they became emotional, crying and bawling, begging her to say she was their auntie. So, to humor the kids and save them from the immediate impact of their mom being taken away in handcuffs, Jessica said she told the sheriff she was her sister. But that the sheriffs knew she was joking around.

No one bothered to point out that Jessica had just got done saying she had no idea there was an arrest warrant issued on her behalf—therefore, how could she possibly tell the children there was an order for her arrest if she didn’t know it yet?

It was all just a misunderstanding, Wiley suggested with his questioning. A way to divert the children’s attention for a moment so the impact of the arrest wouldn’t be so bad on them.

“As a matter of fact,” Jessica told the jury with a straight face, “I’m an extremely sarcastic person, and I tend to use it at inappropriate times.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you could pass yourself off as your sister with these police officers?”

“Good Lord, no,” Jessica said, a slight smile, her phony Southern belle demeanor sounding forced. “They’re experienced police officers. If somebody could pull something like that on them, they need to go back to the academy.”

As Brown and Hodge looked on, shaking their heads in disgust, the jury gave indications in their movements that they had seen through Jessica’s narcissistic, self-indulgent lies. She had made no mention of the fact that the sheriff who had arrested her had called into the department for fingerprints and a photograph, and they waited for ten to fifteen minutes in the house before Jessica finally admitted she wasn’t her sister.

Wiley asked Jessica to explain the previous day’s testimony from a woman Jessica had spent some time in jail with during that ten-day stint during Christmas, 2001.

“Did you ever have a conversation . . . about how you could kill your [ex-]husband and get away with it?”

“No,” Jessica said. She sounded flippant. It was as if this, too, was another misunderstanding. The woman had taken what was a joke and turned it around on her. “The longest conversation I had with [that witness] was about when the Pelham PD arrested her and how angry she was about it.” The insinuation was that since Jeff McCord was a Pelham police officer, the witness was getting back at Jessica any way she could. “Everybody down there (in the jail) knew that my husband was a Pelham police officer. Several of the girls had been arrested by Pelham, and I had a picture of my husband there. They all knew who he was.”

Over and over, Jessica bashed Alan whenever the chance arose. At one point she talked about how Alan would come to town but not visit with the children. “[B]ecause he was too busy.” She never mentioned that Alan could not find her or the kids—that she had hid out from him. Jessica said Alan had lied during the deposition, claiming that he had been denied visitation. The fact was, she said, she had never denied him anything.

Clearly, Jessica had an answer for every situation that went against her, and even some that didn’t. The reason for the bullet found in the garage was simple, Jessica explained. Jeff had misfired his gun in the house. After a complete search, however, neither she nor Jeff could find the bullet. She claimed all that talk about her saying she wanted Alan killed was a misinterpretation of the facts. Didn’t matter that three witnesses—none of whom knew each other—had testified that Jessica had said Alan would pay for what he was doing and needed to be killed. What she had actually said, Jessica tried convincing the jury, was that Jeff was a police officer, and most people had the impression that cops are “very, very aggressive” people, “when, in fact, police officers tend to be very controlled and will not just, you know, walk up on you and they’re going to draw their gun and things like that. It’s not the Wild West and people think like that.”

Her answers did not always match the questions.

For a time she played herself off as the caring ex-wife, never once saying anything bad about Alan. She certainly never “boasted and laughed about denying” him what was rightfully his. Witnesses had testified the previous day that Jessica ridiculed and taunted Alan as they left the deposition that Friday afternoon, telling him he would never see the kids again.

“I wasn’t angry at Alan that he was going to see the kids” that weekend of his death, she said. “I thought it would have been nice if his parents had come to town to visit with everyone here. . . .”

“And the children,” Wiley asked, “were aware that he was going to take [them that weekend of his death]?”

“You know,” Jessica said, “I told them. You have to keep in mind that a lot of [the] time, he didn’t come.”

“What do you mean?”

“So I don’t know that the children put a lot of stock in me saying, ‘You’re going with your dad for the weekend. You’re leaving with them at such and such a time.’”

“You mean there were times after the divorce when his visitation time would come and he wouldn’t appear to collect the kids?” Wiley sounded shocked by this. Alan had been portrayed during the state’s portion of the case as a loving father who was being denied visitation.

“Right,” Jessica said without missing a beat. “Again, you know, first and third [weekends] for the longest period of time until April 2000, he had first and third [weekends]. And first and thirds, six o’clock, we’re sitting by the door, waiting, you know.”

“And he’s not there?”

“Many times, he was not. And frequently he wouldn’t call, either. So, you know, I think it was just kind of old hat for the kids [to expect] him to not come.”

Many sat and considered how easy it was for Jessica to sit in that chair and lie. How commonplace it was for her to attack a dead man. The documentation, she must have forgotten, would tell a different story. There was page after page of affidavits, signed by Alan, resolved by judges, describing the polar opposite to what she was now trying to pimp. Yet the most laughable part of her testimony, said one source in the courtroom, was that as Jessica sat and told her tales with a straight face, she was “probably believing half of the lies herself.” She was so vain that she actually believed the jury was going to buy it all.

For a woman facing the death penalty, that could be a fatal oversight.