Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

62

Since day one of the trial, the courtroom had been packed. There was a certain “energy” in the room, as one person later described it. It wasn’t “somber,” or terribly sad, “though there were definitely times that were more solemn than others.” Still, the subtle tone simmering in the background hummed with the feeling that everyone was present because two people had been brutally murdered. It was sometimes easy to forget there were victims—the dead. Trials become about suspects. Victims often get lost in the shuffle of testimony and evidence. Kevin and Robert Bates, as well as friends of the Bates and Klugh families, were there to remind everyone that victims should never be forgotten.

Even though Jessica had finished testifying, the day was far from over. The accused double murderer had spent upward of four hours in the witness-box. As she sat down at the table, with her family—including a brother dressed in his U.S. Navy uniform—there in the front row to support her, Jessica had to feel somewhat wounded. At times she had been impatient and argumentative with Roger Brown. At others, well, she sounded desperate and unwilling to tell the truth in spite of implicating herself. This was not going to sit well with the jury.

As Jessica settled in her chair, her mother, Dian Bailey, stood and walked toward the witness stand. What would soon prove to be an important part of the trial—something most everyone would overlook as a mere formality—Dian raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth.

“The whole truth and nothing but . . .”

Dian spoke in a low monotone. She was not comfortable in the witness stand, testifying at her daughter’s murder trial. What mother would be?

After Wiley had Dian talk about where she worked inside the court system of collecting money from deadbeat dads, she talked about Jessica moving into her house after Jessica and Alan had divorced. The point of it was to clarify that Alan’s kids—all of Jessica’s kids, for that matter—were frequent guests at the Bailey household.

The next several questions focused on how Dian and her late husband, Albert, had made a second home for Jessica’s kids. They had clothes for the children at their house. There was a bedroom “denominated” (Dian’s word) specifically as the children’s.

Some sat and wondered where this line of questioning was leading. But that was made clear when Wiley asked, “Had there ever been times, to your knowledge, that Alan was scheduled to pick up the girls for visitation and failed to do so?”

“Yes.”

“Few or many times?”

“There would be a lot of times that you would find out he wasn’t coming, yes.”

Another round of slapping a dead man across the face was under way.

“Would it be safe to say that it got to the point where no one was surprised that he didn’t show up?”

“Yeah. For me, yes.”

As she continued, Dian painted a gloomy and stressful picture of her life at the time Jessica and Alan were fighting for custody, saying, “My father was—we put him in a nursing home on Valentine’s Day, the day before [the deposition]. My mother was at home ill with pneumonia.”

Dian testified that she got home from work on Friday, February 15, 2002, at “five-thirty [P.M.] or so. . . . My husband and grandchildren were [there].” She said she understood Alan was going to pick the kids up at Jessica’s Myrtlewood Drive home that evening. But Alan had picked up the kids at her house in the past “many times.” He would also come by her house to “look for them.”

Wiley asked if Jessica came by that evening.

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you what she was doing or intending to do, or anything?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She was going to go to dinner and a movie [with Jeff].”

Wiley asked about a phone call Dian had received from Jessica later that night. She said it was somewhere near eight o’clock (during the movie, when Jessica said she had stepped out for the Pepto-Bismol).

“She wanted to remind me to give [the youngest] his medicine.”

“Later on that night, did you have a conversation with Jessica?”

“Yes,” Dian answered.

“And do you know about what time that was?”

“It was after twelve-thirty.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I had just given [the youngest] his bottle. Just finished giving [him] his evening bottle.”

“And what was the gist of—was that a telephone conversation?”

Dian did not hesitate: “No. She came to the house and she was going to pick up the kids. And I told her, I said, ‘The kids are asleep—let them stay here.’”

Roger Brown whispered something to Laura Hodge. What Dian had just testified to was in stark contrast with the state’s findings. Dian was saying, in effect, that Jessica had stopped by the house after midnight. Brown and Hodge knew that was impossible if Jessica and Jeff were in Georgia, driving to Rutledge to dump the bodies and to torch Alan’s car. Either Dian Bailey had just committed perjury, or Jeff and Jessica were not responsible for the murders of Alan and Terra.

“Do you know whether or not her husband was with her?” Wiley asked.

“Yes, he was. He was in the car.”

Brown wrote something down on the legal pad in front of him.

“Would it be unusual for Jessica to ask you to let the kids just stay over like that?”

“Oh no, no.”

“Would it be safe to say, really, your house was just like a second home for those kids?”

“Definitely a second home for the kids.”

“That’s all I have, Your Honor.”

Roger Brown didn’t waste any time. “More like a first home, Mrs. Bailey?” the prosecutor said, standing, looking down at his legal pad.

“I’m sorry?” Dian asked.

“It was more like a first home, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

Two questions later, “The evening Mr. Wiley asked you about when you said she came by your house or, excuse me, called you on the phone, I’m not sure which it was, and told you her plans were to go to dinner and a movie.”

“Right,” Dian answered.

“Was that on the telephone or at your house?”

“That was at my house.”

“What time was it?”

“I want to say it was sometime after six-thirty or so.”

“Sometime after six-thirty?”

“Yeah.”

After Dian said she believed Jeff and Jessica were driving the family van during that six-thirty visit, Brown asked what vehicle they were driving when they returned to the house early the next morning, at or around twelve-thirty.

“I didn’t get up and look.”

“You didn’t notice when they came inside?”

“No.”

Through extensive questioning, Brown made a point to the jury that while Jessica was hiding out from Alan and the court, Alan’s lawyer, Frank Head, had hired someone to serve Dian with an order to take a deposition, but Dian had lied to that man when he came to her door. She told him she was someone else. Then one day when the same man came upon her while she was outside at work, smoking a cigarette, she ran inside the building to avoid him.

“In fact,” Brown added, “he followed you into the building and tried to engage you in conversation, and you went into a secure employee area where he couldn’t come back there, right? Is that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

Brown wanted to keep his cross brief. Hit Jessica’s mother with the facts and let her fall on her sword.

“Finally, Mrs. Bailey, do you recall in the spring of 2002, I invited you by subpoena to come to the grand jury and tell the grand jury what you knew about the situation, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“And you did come to the grand jury, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Dian replied.

“And when you came in there, when I began to ask you questions, you invoked your right against self-incrimination, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And refused to answer my questions?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“Thank you. That’s all.”

Wiley concluded his case with one more witness, bringing the grand total to three. Brown called a few rebuttal witnesses. It was late in the day. After Brown had rested his case, and Wiley waved his hand indicating he was also finished, the judge said it had been a long day. It was a good time to end proceedings. But everyone was expected back in court the following morning—a Saturday—by nine.

The judge gave the jury its familiar warning regarding discussing the case among themselves. After all, each side still had closing arguments left to give.

63

First thing Saturday morning, a year to the day Alan and Terra were murdered, Roger Brown, looking confident and prepared, began his closing by paying homage to the jury. He said there was no way he could drive a forklift, work as an engineer, “manage” homes or be a nurse—all jobs held by the jurors—and yet, “Any one of you,” Brown said humbly, “can come down here and do what I’m about to do—argue this case on behalf of the state of Alabama, and Alan and Terra.”

Brown talked about the obvious: every murder was senseless. He spoke of the questions one might have when confronted with such horror: namely, why?

“What did they ever do to her?” Brown asked, pointing to Jessica. He went through the visitation and custody matters in brief, not spending too much time rehashing what his witnesses had testified to already. Just about every point Brown made hit on target to rebut what Jessica had said on the witness stand.

“It’s all about her,” Brown said in a loud voice.

He talked about how Jessica and Jeff got rid of the couch because it was likely covered with blood and bullet holes. Finally, just ten minutes later, Brown challenged Jessica’s defense team to “get up here and tell you what is a plausible, reasonable theory consistent with her innocence on these facts.”

Brown was done.

Bill Neumann had been part of Jessica’s defense team from the beginning of the trial. Yet Neumann had been invisible. Now he stood and made a point to note his absence in the case. “I know you haven’t heard my voice,” Neumann said, “since about Monday, and . . . I guess you were wondering if I had a voice left.” He explained how he had caught a cold that was “getting progressively worse.”

It took Neumann some time to get his thoughts in order. He apologized for anything “inappropriate” he might say in defense of Jessica—especially those things that the jury might consider an insult “to the memory of Alan and Terra Bates.” But it was his and John Wiley’s duty as officers of the court to defend their client’s rights. Part of such a defense, apparently, was going to include a walk over the graves of these two murdered people.

Regarding all of the fighting that went on between Alan and Jessica, Neumann said, there was one constant. “Do you remember what the attorneys said? That [Alan and Jessica] were moving toward an agreement . . . and she was going to likely keep custody.”

He disputed those witnesses who claimed Jessica had said she’d kill Alan before she let him have the kids. He talked about those witnesses’ arrest records. Their drug habits. He mentioned the lack of forensic evidence the state had, not giving a clear indication as to why Terra’s blood might have been found on the McCord coffee table—seeing that Jessica herself testified that neither Alan nor Terra had ever been inside her house and had even failed to show up on the night in question.

From there, Neumann beat the drum of circumstantial evidence and how one might think twice about convicting someone on it alone.

“It’s circumstances, and that’s all it is. There are many explanations for a set of circumstances. . . .”

Indeed, there were—and Brown had done a great job of pointing them out.

He then moved on to the bullet, which he believed to be the definitive piece of evidence of the state’s case. There was only one way to attack its credibility.

“But what [the scientist] said also was that the projectile was markedly deformed.” Setting that trap, Neumann explained that ballistics, in his opinion, was not the same as DNA. “Not quite at the same level as what you perhaps had some expectations of before you walked in here.”

For the next ten minutes, Neumann talked about speculative matters: Where was all the blood? he asked. If Alan and Terra were murdered inside the McCord home, why wasn’t there more blood? Then he called the murders an “elaborate scheme” the Hoover PD fit into a box wrapped around Jeff and Jessica. He said Jeff could have very well fired his gun in the house. But then gave no explanation as to how a matching bullet ended up underneath Alan’s body in the trunk of his rental car—that is, other than saying ballistic experts were wrong.

Did the fact that Jessica left the movies and went to a store two miles away make her a murderer?

Of course not.

What about presuming a suspect innocent? Where was the benefit of the doubt? In a facetious tone, mocking Brown’s assumptions, Neumann added, “You know, Mrs. McCord’s mother must be lying about Jessica coming by the house around, I believe she said, twelve-thirty. She must be lying about talking to her on the phone . . . and if she’s lying, Mrs. McCord is guilty of murder. They want you to take a lot of little things and, just for the lack of a better expression, make a mountain out of a molehill. . . .”

Neumann and Wiley did not have a lot to work with. In defending Jessica, their hands were not tied behind their backs, but practically severed. Jessica had not given her attorneys any tangible, clear explanation for the evidence against her. On top of that, she came across as arrogant and even taunting on the witness stand. It was a hard sell to come out and claim that she was telling the truth. But what else could Neumann and Wiley do? They had to fight.

“Circumstances, circumstances, circumstances. How good is it? Well, that’s for you to decide.”

Neumann went on for another ten minutes, repeating himself many times, then apologizing for repeating himself. Finally, “There’s so much at stake here. We’re talking about a lady who’s got five beautiful children who—well, I appreciate it, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll leave the rest of whatever I’ve missed to Mr. Wiley. . . .”

With that, Neumann passed the torch to his partner. It was quite common in Alabama courtrooms that when two or more lawyers defended a client, both gave closing arguments.

Wiley talked about the idea that it was a capital murder case and a woman’s life was at stake. He tried to play on the sensibilities of twelve men and women playing God with a person’s life. He cleared up the notion that it was the judge’s decision to sentence Jessica—if she was found guilty—to life without parole, or death. The jury was simply there to make recommendations in these matters.

“So, in your deliberations, you’ve absolutely got to think about your guilty verdict. You are killing Jessica McCord, just as surely as if you pulled that switch and electrocuted her, or if you open a little valve and let the lethal fluid into her veins. You have got to know that if you find her guilty in this case, you are executing Jessica McCord. You are causing her death.”

Silence.

Wiley was playing the guilt card in more ways than one.

The experienced lawyer carried on, beating the same drum Neumann had just completed, trying to bolster the argument Neumann had made about blood, DNA, ballistics. It sounded as winded and as weak as it did the first time around—only now the jury was tired of hearing it again.

And then Wiley mentioned Dian. “She’s telling the truth!” he shouted. “She saw Jessica and Kelley McCord there at twelve-thirty at her house! And because of that fact”—he paused a moment—“they couldn’t have been over in Georgia burning that car between one and two [in the morning].”

Exactly what Roger Brown and Laura Hodge had been saying all along.

Wiley continued for another fifteen minutes.

Then Brown got up and gave a rebuttal.

Brown made a great point—he said if the jury was to believe what Wiley and Neumann had argued during their closings, that would mean, simply put, that “everyone is a liar.”

Cops.

Doctors.

Scientists.

Every single expert the state presented.

They were the liars and—yes!—Jessica McCord and her mother were the truth tellers.

64

It didn’t take long. By 4:45 P.M., Saturday, February 15, 2003, after just two-and-a-half hours of deliberations, the jury foreman indicated that a unanimous decision had been reached.

Jessica sat still as a leaf. No emotion whatsoever.

When polled, each member of the jury stood and answered “guilty.”

After a bit of movement amid the whispers in the courtroom, Judge Virginia Vinson explained that everyone was going to be returning on Monday morning, at which time the defense would argue for life; the state for death.

Before any of that, however, the jury would hear testimony as part of the death penalty phase. Then they could deliberate once again and make a recommendation to the judge for life or death. Would Jessica be executed for her crimes, or be sent to prison for the remainder of her natural life? Either way, the outcome was not something Jessica was going to accept without a fight.

Wiley asked the judge if Jessica could have a moment with her family before being taken to jail.

The judge did not hesitate.

“No.”

Perhaps she wasn’t in the mood to be granting a double murderer any conveniences.

Dian Bailey was on the verge of breaking down when Jessica, being escorted out of the courtroom by two guards, mouthed, “It’s okay.” Life or death was her future, but . . . it’s okay?

Members of the Bates and Klugh families cried. There was no jubilation or pending celebration in learning that what you had known all along—but had held out the slightest bit of hope was not true—was now a fact.

Jessica McCord had murdered Alan and Terra.

If anything, it was time to commemorate two lives lost and think about how the family members were going to address the one person responsible for those deaths.

Two days later, on the morning of February 17, 2003, Jessica was marshaled back into the courtroom. This time, however, she did not wear a slick blue suit coat, white shirt and black shoes with flashy buckles. She was now dressed in an Alabama Corrections Department jumper.

Dian Bailey took the stand first. Jessica’s mother told stories of Jessica being beaten as a child by her natural father, George Callis. Much of the animosity between Callis and Dian postdivorce, Dian suggested, was centered around visitation rights. The implication was that none of what Jessica had done could be considered her fault alone, simply because it had happened to her as a child. She had been hardwired.

In many ways, this was true. Yet, on the other side of the argument, how many kids out in the world had undergone the same abusive treatment and did not grow up to be double murderers?

Jessica testified next. She talked about her children. How much they needed her. Especially her four-month-old. She didn’t allow the young children to visit her in prison. Not because jail was not the right place for a child to see his or her mother, or the environment was not conducive to rearing children, but, Jessica said, because “there’s germs and stuff in jail.”

Jessica talked about high school and her grades. She said she had gone to a “school for the gifted.” It was, in some ways, sad to hear that a woman with so much promise as a high-school student had gotten pregnant, dropped out and then led a life of constant struggling. Jessica wanted it all, but in her mind a wonderful husband, a house and child weren’t enough. And when Alan decided to leave the marriage, well, she couldn’t take it.

She snapped.

Jessica’s tone was more subdued, now that she had been convicted. At times she drifted off into stories of sitting, talking to her children, explaining life to them.

When Roger Brown cross-examined Jessica, he focused on her and Alan’s first child—the pregnancy that led to their marriage.

“You told Kelly McCloskey (the court reporter during the deposition) . . . ‘I don’t know why he even wants [Samantha]. She’s not his.’ Is that what you said?”

“I didn’t say that to her exactly, no. And as I just stated, he is her father on her birth certificate.”

“But he’s not her father biologically?”

“No, he’s not. Not to my knowledge, he’s not.”

“So you became pregnant by someone else?”

“I became pregnant and, unfortunately, the time is in question, yes.”

“So you lied to Alan about him—”

But Jessica wouldn’t allow Brown to finish. “No.”

“—him impregnating you?”

“Absolutely not! Never. Alan was at [college] when that happened, and his entire family knows it.”

The bottom line here was that the Bates marriage was based on a lie; Alan had married Jessica out of responsibility to a child that wasn’t his.

Philip Bates, who had learned recently that he had prostate cancer, sat on the stand next. Brown questioned him about the children and their “monstrously different” attitudes whenever they came from Dian Bailey’s house. It took about two days, Philip figured, after Jessica had them, before the Bates family could get the children back into “a routine.”

Brown asked Philip if he ever asked Alan about Samantha being his child.

“On two occasions,” Philip said, “I specifically remember asking him, was he sure it was his child, and he just shrugged it off. ‘Oh, Dad, sure it is.’”

Jessica was still lying. Here she was facing her mortality, and yet still not ready to be remorseful or come to grips with the fact that she could be sentenced to death.

Both sides gave closing arguments, each, of course, standing on his side of the death penalty.

The judge told the jury what it needed to do.

The jurors returned ninety minutes later.

Life without parole was the recommendation. The vote, however, had said something about Jessica Bates McCord: seven for life, five for death. There were five human beings on that jury who believed Jessica should die for her crimes.

The judge wasn’t prepared to render her sentence just yet, though. She needed to study the evidence and read through the testimony given that day. She had to make a conscious decision based on the jury’s advice.

Word was that Jeff McCord, understanding that one jury had seen through Jessica’s lies already, wasn’t willing to roll the dice any longer. He was now itching to cut a deal.

The more compelling news, however, had little to do with Jeff or Jessica directly. Behind closed doors Roger Brown and Laura Hodge were preparing cases against two people connected to the McCords in relation to Alan’s and Terra’s murders—both of whom were about to be indicted.