Alan made a decision to tell everyone. But he wasn’t going to sit down and explain to his mother and father what had happened. So he wrote “a nice long letter” and left it for them on his dad’s desk.

Picking it up and reading, Philip knew he had raised a responsible son. A boy who cared about others. Could he argue with that? Could he be angry at the boy for wanting to do the right thing?

Despite the uphill battle and obstacles Philip knew Alan now faced, he was proud his boy had decided to handle it like a man.

“It was a very apologetic letter,” Kevin Bates later commented. “Alan was saying sorry for bringing this on, sorry for making this mistake, that he was raised better than this, but he was also taking full responsibility. ‘We’ll make things work,’ I think was one of the quotes Alan wrote to my dad.”

Joan wasn’t sold on Jessica as the mother of her grandchild. There was something about Jessica that Joan didn’t like. She was upset with herself that she wasn’t able to help Alan before things got to this point. But what could she do now? She had to support her son.

Alan’s letter outlined the fact that he had—at least according to Jessica—impregnated her some weeks before and didn’t know how to disclose it to the family. He thought a letter was the best way to address the situation. Part of what Alan wrote, however, was that he understood the values his mother and father had always instilled in him as he grew up. He was entirely prepared to take “full responsibility” for the pregnancy—abortion, of course, not ever being an option—by marrying Jessica. If he was going to become a father (a March 1990 due date was on the calendar), Alan Bates was going to provide for his child and the child’s mother.

Make things right.

This didn’t mean Alan was going to give up on his dreams of working on Broadway, behind the scenes as a technical director and stage person. Or that he was planning on giving up on his love of music or quitting high school to drive a forklift at some warehouse or work behind the counter of a convenience store and buy a mobile home. Those weren’t bad things, but he had other priorities in life set in front of himself. Instead, this news meant there would be a bump in the road. Certainly. Times would be tough. Absolutely. But college was still part of Alan’s future. Alan could see it. Feel it. He was not giving up on himself. In fact, maybe now more than ever, seeing that he was going to become a father and a husband, Alan Bates needed to turn his dreams into reality.

Jessica called Naomi to share the latest. Naomi stopped by Jessica’s mother’s house for a visit shortly after the call. Jessica was lonely. She was at home all day, with nobody around, her stomach growing. Alan still in school and working.

“You’re keeping this one?” Naomi wondered. Jessica was showing by this point. It was strange to Naomi. Not that life was a choice, or abortion an option, but Naomi was confused by her friend’s behavior: how had Jessica come to the decision? (“For whatever reason,” Naomi said later, “Jessica decided it was okay to keep this one. . . . ”)

Still, why not the other babies? Why had she chosen to keep this particular child and not any of the other babies she had aborted?

Jessica explained that she and Alan were getting married, but it wasn’t the flowery picture Alan was telling his family—at least from Jessica’s point of view.

“The only reason I’m marrying him,” Jessica told Naomi that afternoon, “is because Alan’s grandfather has agreed to pay for me to have the baby at Brookwood.” There were hospitals in town that those less fortunate, without insurance, checked into for treatment and births. Brookwood was a private hospital.

“Only if we’re married, though,” Jessica said, “he’ll pay for it.”

16

Investigators knew Jessica’s stepfather, Albert Bailey, left Jeff and Jessica’s Myrtlewood Drive house with a couch that Saturday, February 16, 2002. Then, for some odd reason, the man drove around town with it. Given the circumstances, knowing what the investigating law enforcement agencies now knew about the crime, it seemed peculiar that Albert would do such a thing. The timing was suspect. The pathologist said there was a good chance Alan and Terra were sitting down (or leaning against something) when they were shot. Could they have been sitting on the couch that Albert Bailey was tooling around town with?

The Bureau and the HPD were waiting for a judge to sign off on a search warrant to get into the McCord home. They wanted to see what it was Jessica had been so vocal about, and determined to keep from them. The fact of the matter was—at least from the side of the fence where law enforcement stood—that if Jessica did not have anything to hide, and Alan and Terra, as she herself had been so adamantly certain of, had never been inside her home, why wouldn’t she willingly allow law enforcement to have a look?

After being stopped the previous day, the HPD followed Albert Bailey again. During that second tail, they witnessed him drive behind Uncle Bob’s Self-Storage on Citation Drive for a second time, then take off back home. Albert was questioned later on that day and asked about the couch. After some prodding, Albert fessed up and told the Bureau where he had dumped it.

Asked why he did this, Albert said, “Jessica told me to.”

Williams and Vance found the couch near Citation Drive, next to a large Dumpster. The couch was “turned up on its back . . . sitting next to” that Dumpster, Williams said later, “against a fence . . . upside down so the back would have been toward the fence.”

The backing of the couch—what you would rest up against when you sat down—had been torn off. Actually, investigators observed, it was “cut out.” It was a fairly new couch. Moreover, it was one of those sofa beds. But the mattress, along with the cushions, was also missing.

The timing of all this was incredibly suspect to investigators.

Williams and Vance looked through the Dumpster, hoping to find the remains of the couch or the cushions.

Nothing.

The two investigators went into a nearby building and spoke to several people who were there that previous afternoon when Bailey had dumped it. But they all said the same thing: “We never saw the couch with any cushions.”

Williams ordered the couch to be picked up and brought in. Forensics needed to go over it. There were a few stains (dark spots) on one of the armrests. With a quick spray of luminol, it was determined those stains were, in fact, blood. The money was on whether it was Alan’s, Terra’s or a mixture of both their blood.

That afternoon, Williams heard the warrant had finally come through. HPD investigators had armed themselves and were headed over to the McCord house on Myrtlewood. The thought and speculation driving the search was that it wasn’t going to be a pretty scene. Jeff McCord was a cop. That meant he had weapons. The McCords seemed like hostile, uncomfortable and tactless people. What were they going to do if they felt threatened?

Near one o’clock, on the afternoon of February 17, 2002, Jessica and Jeff walked out the front door of their Myrtlewood Drive home. The look on their faces before they spotted the police made it seem as though it were any other day. Jessica carried her youngest child in her arms. Jeff held the door for her.

No sooner had they stepped onto the front steps did she and Jeff hear some sort of a commotion going on around them.

A ruckus.

Several police officers, Jessica explained later, came hurrying around the corner, guns drawn, pointed at her and Jeff. They were “yelling” and “screaming,” Jessica claimed. “Hands above your head . . . right now.”

The focus was on Jeff, who had his “duty belt” with him. Jeff packed a service revolver.