Later, Jessica spoke of her reasons for maintaining such a messy house: “I have my days. We had been sick for—you know, we had been fighting the flu, back and forth, and, plus, I was pregnant. I had just gotten pregnant, and I was having morning sickness. And I hate to say it. I can’t do dishes when I’m throwing up. I mean, it’s just not in me to do that. And my husband does not help with the house. We’ve got four kids in the house, [one] a little baby. You know, I’m throwing up every other day. Lots of clothes. Bedding. And, yes, I’m not a good housekeeper. I admit it. I would rather be playing with my children than to have a pristine house and no time for them.”

Zanzour decided to take it slow and easy. Maybe just walk around for now and see what stood out. Look in drawers. Under beds. Closets. The attic.

They uncovered “some ammo” in a room downstairs. In the master bedroom upstairs, they hit a cache of additional ammunition and weapons: a Smith & Wesson pistol with a holster, two Smith & Wesson magazines, a box of shotgun shells. In the attic was a .38 Smith & Wesson pistol, a rifle and four magazines loaded with ammo.

Jeff McCord was ready for a war.

In one photo, taken inside the kitchen area, Scively photographed a roll of paper towels in the garbage. It seemed like it might be important.

Zanzour and Tom McDanal gathered everyone outside at one point, several hours later. It was near 5:30 P.M. Time to stop the search. It was difficult to find anything in such a jumble of garbage and clutter. On top of that, the search warrant they had did not cover tearing things up and looking in walls. Furthermore, out of all of the weaponry and ammunition they uncovered, there was no .44 caliber.

After she finished interviewing the children at the Bailey house, Laura Brignac called Tom McDanal. She knew he was with the team searching the McCord home. She was excited. She had a lead. An important piece of the puzzle, perhaps. Brignac knew where the focus of the search warrant should be centered. The kids had inadvertently mentioned several things that seemed to stand out. Now Brignac believed that if a crime had been committed in that house, there was no doubt where.

“The den,” Brignac told McDanal. “Look in the den.”

Standing outside the house, Tom McDanal went silent. That was information he did not want to hear now.

17

Though she had one year left of high school, Jessica Callis seemed overjoyed at the notion of being a mother. She had that glow about her face—a mother-to-be plumpness suited Jessica’s large frame. To top it off, she had hooked herself a responsible high schooler and dedicated “family man.” To boot, Alan was an active Christian. In addition to all that, a self-imposed shotgun to his back or not, Alan Bates planned to marry his pregnant girlfriend and make things proper.

The Bateses were a little taken aback by this new—sudden—fresh face in the family. Alan had known Jessica all of approximately six weeks. She was pregnant. She was having the child. They were getting married. The plan, for now, was Jessica would quit school and move into Alan’s parents’ house. All this, and no one really knew the first thing about the girl.

“What do we know about this person?” Kevin and Robert Bates later said the family asked themselves. Not necessarily in a derogatory fashion, but more out of curiosity and desire. “Who is she? We really don’t know anything about her, and she is going to now become part of our everyday lives?”

It wasn’t such a shock to the family that Jessica was into Alan as much as she seemed. Alan had a string of girls, throughout his junior-high and high-school years, vying for his attention. He never played into it, however, or abused the privilege of being popular with the ladies. Alan would just as well smile and be on his way. He dated—sure, he did. But dating was not something Alan focused on, as it was for so many of the other young men his age. Alan was busy with the bands he played in, studying, school politics, the theater. Girls were definitely not first on his teenage list of priorities.

“Our parents were young to become grandparents,” Kevin remembered. “But they were smart enough to know that Jessica was still a kid, too. She had some growing up to do.” No one in the family ever asked outright: “Was this the right girl for Alan?”

They simply accepted Alan’s choice and trusted his judgment.

Jessica was a kid. Of course, she came across immature and a bit obsessive at times. Many teenage girls can be that way. This was a period before text messaging and the Internet and cell phones. Teenagers filled their days and nights with other things. That said, neither time, space nor electronic gadgets could curb what postpuberty hormones inevitably forced on kids: the need for companionship. Jessica wanted more than anything else what she herself never had: a stable environment. Someone to love her unconditionally. It was not hard for Jessica to tell that the Bates family could provide it all.

“You see red flags,” Kevin said, commenting on those small outbursts in the beginning of Jessica’s more bizarre behaviors, and the stories she began to tell about her own family, “and you think part of it’s immaturity or her coming from a different background or different family.”

Diversity. America was built on it. Part of the fabric and DNA of every community.

The bottom line for the Bateses was that they weren’t about to judge this girl based on the fact that she had allowed herself to get pregnant. Or that she shared a few crazy anecdotes about growing up in the Callis household. Alan was not the type of person to have fallen for the blond, blue-eyed cheerleader, anyway, even though she might have fallen for him. In Jessica, Alan was attracted to what he viewed as her intellect. Jessica came across as very smart and intellectual. Alan liked that. She was also confident and wouldn’t back down. Strong. He liked that, too. And then, on top of all that, she put out.

“She talked a big game,” Kevin added later. “She had been, at one time, in the honors high school.” She had the foundation of aptitude there, a chance to broaden her opportunities, even though she was raised—again, according to what Jessica claimed—in such a disturbing, violent, abusive environment.

As Jessica moved in and commingled with the Bates family, nursing her growing belly, complaining about the difficulty of carrying the child, Alan continued at Shades Valley, working toward finishing his senior year. Jessica stayed home, sat around telling the stories of her life. Philip Bates was fairly diligent about keeping a family log of every important event in the children’s lives: baseball, soccer, football, whatever special occasion depicted the children growing up. When those albums came out and Alan shared the experiences of his formative years with Jessica, she countered with what were some of the most peculiar family tales of her own.

Jessica had tears in her eyes. They were sitting around, going through a large binder of Bates childhood memories, bringing Jessica into the fold of the Bateses’ lives.

“What is it?” Alan asked, concerned about the pain Jessica had apparently been whisked back into while thinking about how well the Bates family got along. How “normal” their family seemed.

“My father, he was so abusive. . . . When he left the house, he burned all of our family photographs,” Jessica said, according to Bates family members. “We have no pictures of any of us left.”

Alan and the others were drawn into this. Whether it was true or not, Kevin Bates later pointed out, “We never knew or questioned, not until years later.”

Alan felt a pang of sympathy for Jessica rise in him as she told these stories. He was falling deeper in love with her. Which was, many later speculated, the way Jessica had planned it. She used the sympathies of others to manipulate her way—“or worm, actually,” one source put it—into the good graces of the Bates household. She saw an opening and went for it.