This was new information. Probably important, too.

“Maybe that person was sitting,” the doctor explained. “I’m not sure. But there was something behind. That bullet exiting [the body] pressed the skin, and the skin hit that object and that caused [the] contusion.”

The exit wounds the doctor referred to didn’t have that familiar “blowout” starfish pattern of torn skin the doctor knew to be consistent with this type of exit bullet wound. Something was firmly pressed up against that area of the skin as the bullet passed through. This finding was common in the bodies of men executed by firing squad: because they were backed up to a wall and shot. The bullets had an extra layer of material to go through, allowing for the exit wound of the body to be clean.

In the end the doctor signed off on both deaths as homicide. Cause of death was determined to be multiple gunshot wounds of the torso and upper extremity, he penned.

So Alan and Terra were dead, as everyone assumed, before they were placed inside the trunk of Alan’s rental car and it was set afire. Both were shot, seemingly execution-style, at close range, probably as they tried to defend themselves. In the doctor’s final opinion, in fact, the idea that several shots were fired into each body was overkill. The fact of the matter, the doctor agreed, was that “one or two of these bullets would have been fatal in and of themselves without immediate medical attention. . . .”

Any good cop knew that overkill was another way to describe revenge or inherent, repressed anger. There was passion and vengeance behind these murders. Whoever killed Alan and Terra had a reason—no matter how vile and vicious or even insane it might seem.

15

Alan didn’t run for class president his senior year. He met Jessica during the summer of 1989 and his life changed. Part of that change was a bit of rather sobering, shocking news Jessica hit Alan with, about six weeks after they met, which Alan had a hard time talking about with anyone else besides his best friend, Marley Franklin.

Alan took Marley aside one day in school and told her. “Jess is pregnant.”

Marley was surprised, but not shocked. (“There’s a difference,” Marley observed.)

Some time went by. Marley beat herself up. She’d had a feeling something was going to happen between them. She sat talking with a mutual friend of hers and Alan’s one day. “She trapped him. I should have told him before it happened. I knew it.”

Alan heard what Marley had said. Upset about it, he called her. By this time Alan had made a decision about the pregnancy.

“Alan was such a good person,” Marley said later. “He was always going to do what needed to be done.”

Alan told Marley that Jessica had asked him never to speak to her again. It was ridiculous, they both knew. But Alan was upset at what Marley had said. Maybe now was a good time to part ways, at least for a little while.

“I felt really, really bad that I hadn’t sat down with him and truly told him how I felt about Jessica and the whole thing. So I said something about her that got back to him, and it hurt him and I feel really bad about that . . . but she hated me to begin with, because she didn’t trust the relationship I had with Alan.”

They were all so young. So immature and naïve. And here was Alan and Jessica bringing a baby into it all.

What was clear from that point on was that Jessica Callis was a girl who got what she wanted. Bates family members later agreed with this. When Jessica put her mind on something, nothing was going to stop her. It didn’t matter what people said. Or did. When Jessica was determined, nothing was going to stand in her way.

And she would prove this—time and again.

“She set her sights on Alan the moment after she met him and wanted to have him, and that was it,” Kevin Bates recalled.

Some saw Jessica as a person whose intentions were often misunderstood because she had a habit of always putting others before herself. Where friends were concerned, Jessica was “very selective . . . and only associate [d] herself with those who [were] good role models . . . ,” a former friend said. Moreover, Jessica’s independence, even at the puppy love age of sixteen, was evidence of maturity and a broad outlook on life in general. She was unique in that respect, the same friend claimed. An old high-school mate said Jessica’s “honesty” and integrity was “sometimes misconstrued as arrogance or rudeness.” It was the way she spoke: Jessica came across as crass and snotty, even though she didn’t always mean to. While others were convinced that Jessica’s abrasiveness and contentious attitude were products of her upbringing, it was, others stated, nothing more than her demeanor. Once you got to know Jessica, there was no mistaking the fact that she was different in so many ways.

If there was one thing about Jessica that stood out more than anything else in high school, it was her social skills. Jessica was not a shy person by any means, but she was not outwardly open in a social group setting, either. Like her friends, she hung with a group or “clique” of kids. From junior high on, Jessica had no trouble getting the boys to like her, and she thrived on the attention she got by giving herself sexually. One thing Jessica found hilarious, if not altogether a portent, she told a friend one day, was “that the last four digits of my phone number spell ‘boys.’”

It was a joke, of course. But in the scope of her life, a harbinger.

Naomi Patterson (pseudonym) met Jessica in middle school but lost touch with her in ninth grade, hooking back up during their sophomore year together at Shades Valley. Naomi and Jessica became close. Ended up doing a lot of things together.

“In middle school,” Naomi recalled, “Jessica was more normal. She never said much about her home life then, or got real deep.” She held her cards close and was quiet—until she got to know a friend. “She was just your typical teenager at that point. Highly intelligent, though. Jessica was very smart.” So smart, in fact, she was involved in a project called Research Learning Center (RLC). It was offered by the school system. Basically, it was a group established for kids with an obvious proclivity for higher learning. Alan was also invited into the RLC program, but opted out because it meant he would be isolated from the main campus of Shades Valley and the rest of the kids.

Naomi and Jessica didn’t fit in with the factions of smart kids, the popular crowds or any of the other cliques.

“There was a whole group of us who were offset to the side,” Naomi explained. “I teased somebody years later saying that, back then, we were Goth before Goth was even Goth.”

They wore all black and stood out. It was the late 1980s. When most of the other kids wore their hair piled and teased higher than a beehive, formed solid as brick with cans of hair spray, Jessica and her gang wore a “flat and straight” hairstyle. Maybe just to be different.

By this point Jessica’s life was spiraling out of control. She was only in the tenth grade. It got to the point where she was kicked out of the RLC program for not keeping up with her studies.

Jessica seemed to be living on her own. Although she lived with her mother and stepfather, it appeared that she could come and go at will. She was always going places, taking off in her car and not coming back for days. It was as if she had no supervision, Naomi said. No one to answer to.

“Rarely at home, if she could help it. And if she was home, she claimed there was always arguments. Especially with her stepfather.” Albert was the disciplinarian in the house, clearly, Naomi observed. He wanted Jessica to do the right thing. “But he couldn’t control her.”

No one could.