Текст книги "Death Trap"

Автор книги: M. William Phelps

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

65

It wasn’t necessarily closure the families wanted. Just truth. The Bateses needed to know what happened. They felt Jeff McCord could give that to them. Roger Brown waited until after Jessica’s trial, because he didn’t want one case to meddle or cause problems with the other. But Jessica had been found guilty, the jury recommending life. It was time to go to Jeff and see if he wanted to talk.

Now or never.

The state offered Jeff two consecutive life terms in trade for the truth. All of it. Step-by-step, what happened? When? Where? How?

Jeff thought about it. Jessica’s jury had spoken loud and clear. Why would a second jury believe him?

Jeff called his attorneys.

“I’ll take it.”

66

Hoover PD detective sergeant Tom McDanal asked everyone in the room if they were ready.

Head nods and “okays” followed.

“Testing, one, two, three, four . . . five,” McDanal said aloud, adjusting the tape recorder.

It was 9:20 A.M., on April 15, 2003.

From there, Roger Brown took over. They sat inside the jury room adjacent to Judge Virginia Vinson’s courtroom. Laura Hodge sat next to Brown; McDanal there at the table next to them; Hoover PD detective Laura Brignac next to McDanal; Jeff McCord’s attorney, Mike Shores, sat next to his client.

There was a numbing sense of irony present in the room that no one needed to acknowledge. It was just there. Like the hum of the air ducts. Jeff had been in this same position in years past—but on the opposite side of the microphone. Now Jeff was the perp. His story being put on tape. How the tables had turned! And over what? A woman? Jeff McCord felt he was facing charges of double murder because his wife, a woman he had loved—maybe too much—and obeyed—without question—had asked him to help her get rid of a problem.

That turned into two “problems,” essentially.

“Mr. McCord,” Roger Brown said, “uh . . . I’m going to go over the things we went over a little earlier, and that we discussed with your attorney yesterday.”

Jeff nodded. Looked away.

“Um . . . in return for the reduction of charges that we made,” Brown continued, “you have agreed to fully disclose to us everything you know regarding the circumstances of the deaths of Alan and Terra Bates, leading up to it and following it.”

Brown then explained how he would administer “an oath,” and everyone expected Jeff McCord to be truthful. It was that, or the deal was off.

“We may wish to administer a polygraph at a later time to satisfy ourselves of the veracity of what you have to say. Do you understand all that?”

“Yes.”

Jeff McCord was ordered to raise his right hand.

They talked formalities first: address, age, former job as a police officer. And then the day—February 15, 2002, a little over a year ago now—which Brown referred to as “the occurrence.”

The life and death of two fine people could be refined into two meaningless words of such little value. It wasn’t Brown’s word, but a professional way to address the murders on tape.

“The occurrence.”

Jeff talked about how his day-to-day life was with Jessica, her three kids and the kid they had together. Things seemed all right at first. He loved the woman.

A large truck drove by the window outside as Jeff spoke. Roger Brown waited for the noise to subside, then got back to the interview.

The former Pelham police officer was passive. Quite taken aback by the process of talking about what led up to the murders, and what actually had happened that day. Brown asked Jeff if he knew Alan Bates at the time Jeff and Jessica got married.

“I knew who Mr. Bates was,” Jeff said. “No, I hadn’t—I don’t even think I had met him once at the time.”

Jeff married Jessica, and yet he had not met her ex-husband, who had been, according to what Jessica had told Jeff, a violent nuisance in her life. Someone to fear. It was clear from Jeff’s responses that Jessica had married him out of spite, wanting to one-up Alan and his then-future marriage to Terra.

Jeff said he met Alan for the first time in August 2000.

“Next to the interstate in Montevallo.”

Alan picked up the girls. Terra wasn’t with him. Brown moved on to what had become a pivotal point in the postdivorce relationship between Alan and Jessica: the fact that Jessica withdrew the children from the school system and began homeschooling them. Not because she wanted the children to have a better education, but for the sole purpose of hiding them from Alan.

After Brown asked the question, making reference to the fact that Jessica was hiding the family so Alan couldn’t find them, Jeff took a deep breath. Sighed. Shook his head. It was one of those oh yeah moments, as if he’d forgotten how devious his wife had become. Because he lived in the situation day in and day out, Jeff speculated, it was harder for him to see what was happening in front of his eyes.

It was just easier to go along with Jessica than to fight her.

Jeff could understand how wrong that all was now. He had gone along with Jessica on all these matters because she was his wife and he believed that’s what husbands were supposed to do.

Obedience.

As Jeff explained it, near the time Jessica proclaimed to be homeschooling the kids, somebody from the Hoover central school office, or Green Valley Elementary, he could not recall which, called the house.

“Yes?” Jessica said. “What is it?”

“Due to some sort of bureaucratic snafu, the records weren’t in order. The girls cannot continue to be students at the school and have to be removed.”

Apparently, the house the McCords lived in on Myrtlewood Drive in Hoover was not on file, Jeff said. It appeared the kids were going to the wrong school. So the school had them removed—which played right into Jessica’s desire to hide them from Alan.

From there, she simply decided not to enroll them in another school.

During this same time period, Jeff explained, he never witnessed any animosity between Alan and Jessica regarding the kids or visitations. This was an important point for Roger Brown. The problems leading up to the murders began, by Jeff McCord’s account, during the fall of 2000, a year and a half before he and Jessica murdered Alan and Terra.

After Jeff gave a detailed account of the murders, placing himself behind the murder weapon, Brown asked him to go through how he and Jessica disposed of the bodies. It was clear to Brown that Jeff was following Jessica’s lead during the entire ordeal. She directed. Jeff listened. Whenever she panicked or lost her head, it was Jeff who took over. The Hoover PD had been close in putting together the murder and cleanup afterward—90 percent of the department’s theory proved accurate, as far as Jeff’s explanation of that day and night went.

Jeff said that as they were on the way to the dump that Saturday morning to get rid of some of the evidence, his chief phoned.

“I get a call. . . . I get a call from . . . work.” He was told either to phone the GBI himself or have his attorney do it. “We get back to the house, I call this number I’m given . . . and as it turns out . . . I spoke with [someone from the GBI], identified myself, and he told me he had no clue why I would need to call him.”

Brown confirmed with Jeff that Jessica’s high-school friend in Montevallo—the house where they had stayed on the night before they were arrested—a guy who was now facing perjury charges for lying during his grand jury testimony—did know where the storage facility was that Jessica had placed some of the evidence in. According to another source that police had interviewed, a cellmate of Jessica’s said that Jessica and Jeff rented a storage facility. Inside the small unit Jessica had apparently put plastic bags containing “bloody stuff,” along with furniture and the luggage Terra and Alan had with them. Jessica was said to have arranged for her high-school friend Michael Upton and her stepfather to “clean out the storage unit” in exchange for $500 cash to split.

Upton turned around and, according to prosecutors, lied during his grand jury testimony when asked about this same incident.

He, along with another person closely tied to the case, were about to be indicted, Brown told Jeff.

Jeff laughed at that.

As the interview drew to a close, Jeff seemed more relaxed and even in a good mood. Not once during the interview did Jeff McCord express any sorrow for the victims—nor any remorse whatsoever for killing them. He came across cold and calculating, as if he were the one walking away with a win. There were times, as chilling as it sounded, when Jeff laughed out loud. The man had shot at point-blank range two people he had no connection to, two people he did not know the slightest about, and he laughed when telling portions of that story.

Regardless of what family and former friends would later say, that behavior alone said a lot about who Jeff McCord was.

67

On April 25, 2003, shortly after Jeff formally pleaded guilty, Jessica was sentenced to life without parole. In the end the judge took the advice of the jury and signed the Sheriff’s Commitment Order, sending Jessica to prison for the remainder of her natural life. She was never going to see freedom again. After Judge Vinson handed down the sentence, she asked Jessica if there was anything she had to say for herself. Maybe some explanation? Sorrow? Remorse?

Jessica declined.

Asked later on by a reporter if she wanted to make a comment, Jessica “smiled,” Carol Robinson noted, and said, “Not hardly.”

Before being whisked off to prison, Jessica was allowed to spend some time with friends and family, including her mother and grandmother, who were in court for the sentencing. Jessica laughed as she chatted with her family. What was so funny, no one actually knew. But the fact that she would appeal her case was probably fueling Jessica’s hostile, defiant attitude. It was still all a joke to Jessica McCord. There’s no doubt she saw herself getting out of prison one day when the appeals court heard her plea.

John Wiley was a bit more grounded in reality. He showed professionalism as he left the court, telling reporters, “The death penalty is wrong in any case and this case is no exception, so we’re very pleased and relieved that Mrs. McCord is delivered of that possibility of being killed by the state of Alabama. “She gets to turn her attention now to her appeal, and, hopefully, one day she’ll have a new trial and a more favorable outcome.”

Jeff and Jessica McCord ended up on the same bus heading out to prison later that day. There was one bus. All prisoners boarded. The males were separated from the females by a fence, but they could still speak to one another.

As Jessica stepped up onto the bus, shackles clanking, a cocky smile across her face, she noticed her husband sitting in the back among a group of inmates.

In her sarcastic way, quite mean-spirited and vile, Jessica stopped, smiled and looked at Jeff. By this time she knew Jeff had come clean with his version of the murders and had cut himself a deal. Up until this point Jessica had had nothing but good things to say about Jeff.

“Hey, everyone,” Jessica said as loud as she could, the entire bus stopping to look up, “that’s my husband.” She pointed Jeff out. “He’s a cop!”

Jessica sat down and faced the front.

Due to how high profile my case was, it is rather safe to say that virtually everyone in metro-Birmingham knew that I was a police officer, Jeff McCord wrote to me after he was asked if this verbal assault against his character by Jessica had caused him any problems later on when he got to prison. It’s no secret that inmates are not too fond of cops as cellmates.

Overall, I have had no real problems as a result of it or in relation to my former profession. . . . I have been housed in either protective custody or administrative segregation depending on my placement.

68

Roger Brown was convinced Dian Bailey had lied to him while testifying during her daughter’s trial. A grand jury believed the evidence Brown had presented in relation to those charges. Now Brown was determined to prosecute Dian Bailey and the McCords’ friend, Michael Upton, who, the prosecutor’s office believed, had lied during his grand jury testimony. How dare these people think they can lie to the police and prosecutors investigating a double homicide? For what? To protect murderers? Reaffirming Brown’s contention that Upton lied about the storage facility, Brown got the results of Jeff McCord’s polygraph, and the examiner felt Jeff was telling the truth.

On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, Michael Upton was in court facing a jury on charges of hindering prosecution and perjury for his role in lying during the investigation into the deaths of Alan and Terra Bates. Upton was said to have told varying stories regarding that storage facility and the possibility of potential evidence Jessica had hidden.

Investigators never found the storage unit or the evidence. Still, Upton, a man in his early thirties, sat and listened as prosecutor Doug Davis explained to a jury the state’s case against him.

Davis said Upton repeatedly changed his story, which led police to believe he was lying. More than that, Davis was firm in his personal belief that Upton had “decided loyalty to his friends [was] more important than the truth. He chose to cross the line of criminality.”

Richard Poff, Michael Upton’s lawyer, explained that his client had no idea a storage facility existed; he only knew of a storage unit that Albert Bailey had rented. Apparently, Upton got mixed up in the fiasco when Jessica asked him to help her stepfather move some furniture from Bailey’s storage unit over to her mother’s house so the kids would have something to sleep on while she was in jail.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Poff argued. “This is all a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

The star witness of the day, after Roger Brown and detective Laura Brignac testified, was one of Jessica’s former cellmates. She told police that Michael Upton knew of the “bloody stuff” in the storage unit.

The next day, August 6, Jeff McCord sat and, for the first time publicly, described how he and Jessica had murdered Alan and Terra Bates, and then went about an elaborate plan to try and cover up the crimes.

Listening to Jeff’s graphic, detailed descriptions of the murders, Michael Upton sat with a stoic flush of sadness written across his face. At times tears streamed down his cheeks. Upton later said that none of it seemed real until Jeff McCord illustrated the murders so vividly on the witness stand. Upton said that up until that moment, he still held “on to some hope that they (Jeff and Jessica) were still innocent.”

Upton took the stand himself and told the jury he had no idea Jessica had rented a storage facility. He also said he “suffered from memory loss” due to a car accident he was in years before. Because of the injuries he had sustained, Upton testified, he “easily [became] confused under stress, which may have led to a misunderstanding during grand jury proceedings.”

Shocking the courtroom, Upton then said that his wife, pregnant with his child, dropped dead of a heart attack just two months ago.

Closing arguments were heard later that afternoon; then the jury was asked to deliberate the case. Perjury, a Class C felony, was good for ten years in the state pen if a judge felt inclined to give such a stiff sentence.

The next morning, after three hours of discussions, the jury found Michael Upton guilty of perjury (the judge dropped an additional charge of obstruction).

Michael Upton was devastated, his attorney said after the trial.

A little over a month later, Upton was sentenced to “spend a year in a work-release program,” followed by five years of supervised probation. This meant Michael Upton would spend his nights in jail, but be allowed to leave during the day and work outside the prison.

69

Dian Bailey’s alleged crime, although similar to Michael Upton’s, might have had far greater implications on Jessica McCord’s case, prosecutor Teresa McClendon explained to a jury on the morning of October 27, 2003. The fact that Dian lied during Jessica’s trial could have influenced jurors to acquit her daughter, essentially allowing a murderer to escape justice.

That made this particular crime of perjury inexcusable, McClendon suggested.

The prosecutor told jurors how Jeff and Jessica carried out this vicious, premeditated double homicide with callousness and hatred. She spoke of how they lured Terra and Alan into the house. How they made them feel comfortable, using the children as bait. But then Jeff shot them four times each without warning.

These were evil people. Anyone who helped them should be viewed the same.

And so here comes the mother of one of the accused, who had walked into a courtroom some months ago and stomped all over the law. Above anyone else, Dian Bailey should have known better—she had worked for the court system herself for nearly two decades.

In his opening argument Bill Dawson downplayed his client’s responsibility, talking about Dian’s emotional state at the time, telling jurors she was “working full-time, caring for a father with Alzheimer’s and a mother with pneumonia”—all while taking care of her daughter’s four children.

The woman was burned-out. She didn’t know up from down, when she had seen her daughter and when she hadn’t.

“She told what she thought was the truth,” Dawson said.

Jeff came in and told his tale of murder once again, stunning another jury with his words. However, nowhere in Jeff’s version of the events did he testify to stopping at Dian’s house at or near midnight, which was what Dian had told jurors during Jessica’s trial.

There was no way to confuse this detail—because it never happened.

Dawson attacked Jeff’s credibility, implying that he was now on the state’s payroll—so to speak—and part of the prosecution’s team, fulfilling his duty as part of a deal he had signed to escape the death penalty.

Jeff could be back on the street, inside thirty years, Dawson said.

Sheron Vance, the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant who had gone with Bureau agent Kimberly Williams to Dian’s house that Saturday morning, said Dian was “visibly surprised” when Jessica told police she had stopped by her mother’s house the previous night, near midnight.

An unplanned lie. Just tossed out there.

“I was looking,” said Vance, “right at Dian. She had just been standing there, staring into space the entire time.” But when Jessica mentioned to Williams that she had seen her mother the night before, Dian “rolled her eyes and took a step back. . . .”

Fifty-eight-year-old Dian Bailey decided against taking the witness stand.

That out of the way, closing arguments were next.

The jury took thirty minutes to convict Dian, completing a hat trick of guilty verdicts for the prosecution. Dian didn’t respond to the verdict. She sat, no emotion, dumbfounded and confused.

On December 9, 2003, Jefferson County Circuit Court judge Mike McCormick gave Dian Bailey an eight-year sentence. The courtroom was silent while McCormick spoke. Filled with whispers afterward.

Eight years. Ouch!

Jessica’s mother would spend one year in a Shelby County work-release program—same as Michael Upton—and an additional seven years on probation, with no actual jail time.

Before he was finished, McCormick asked Dian if she had anything to say for herself.

Like her daughter, Dian said no.

“Apparently,” McCormick concluded, “out of some misguided loyalty, you chose to lie. This is a very serious matter.”

Finally, during the summer of 2004, after the Klugh and Bates families filed a $150 million wrongful-death suit against Jeff and Jessica McCord, both families won an additional judgment that allowed them to collect any money Jeff McCord might make from a book or movie deal throughout his lifetime.

Then they went after Jessica for the same.

Neither Jeff nor Jessica would ever profit from their crimes.

“This sort of settlement is, first and foremost, to prevent the criminals from profiting from their crime,” Kevin Bates told me in closing. “Should any money ever come of selling Alan and Terra’s story, we just wanted to ensure that every penny went to Alan’s girls—who have truly lost the most from Jeff and Jessica’s horrific and selfish actions.”