“Alan felt—I know he did—that he could give Jessica a better life,” Kevin said.

Alan developed deep compassion for Jessica as she took on the role of motherhood, acting like she was born for it. With the new family they were creating together, Alan said more than once, he could provide Jessica with the stability she’d never had. They’d break the cycle. With their child. Their marriage.

Make it work.

Together.

“There was the whole package that Alan brought to her,” Robert later said. Alan’s oldest brother had been out of college for several years when Jessica moved in. “There was nothing spectacular about her.”

White picket fence. Three-bedroom house. Two-point-two kids. Two cars. A dog. Maybe a boat. Family walks in the park after Alan got out of work.

It all sounded so good. So warm and fuzzy. Jessica could envision it all, as if writing the script of her life—all centered, of course, around the birth of her first child.

The day Samantha was born, March 20, 1990, was full of joy and love and caring in the hospital for everyone. Dian Bailey was there, as was Albert. Kevin and Robert, along with new grandparents Joan and Philip, were beside themselves with pride and adoration. Here was this new child in their lives. Such a tremendous bundle of joy. A gurgling, pudgy, red-faced gift from God, dropped from Heaven into their laps.

What a blessing.

“It was a shared family moment,” Kevin said, recalling that day in the hospital. “An exciting first grandchild for both families.”

This was the first time the two families had gotten together in the same room since the wedding back on January 26, 1990. There was a mild strain of awkwardness. Everyone was still getting to know each other. But things were okay. They all got along. Albert Bailey explained that he was a handyman, a local contractor with a small business. “If it was a deck to be built, he could build it,” Jessica said of Albert. “If it was a water heater to be replaced, he could do it.” He was a “very handy guy.”

If Alan ever needed work, Albert suggested, he could throw the boy some hours, here and there.

Every dollar would help.

And so, they were an American family making the best of this unplanned situation. Alan was determined to be a great father, and he very likely would be, considering his pedigree. Jessica was steadfast in her desire to raise her children in stark contrast to her own upbringing. She was going to give the kid everything she never had.

Philip Bates lived by the common affirmation that “two wrongs never made a right.” The family was happy to have Jessica and the child in their home. That traditional Christian upbringing, whereby you got married first, had children, climbed up the ladder of your career, had cookouts and birthday parties on Saturdays, attended church on Sundays, and subliminally counted down the moments until your death, was but a pipe dream. Yet, Alan was a traditionalist. Getting Jessica pregnant, he was determined to do whatever he had to do to give her and his child the life they deserved.

“My parents were worried that Alan felt pressured from his conventional upbringing to marry Jessica and be an honest man and father, and all those things,” Kevin said.

Indeed, just like that, Alan was an adult. He was seventeen years old. Still in high school. It was the beginning of a new decade. The 1980s were history. Alan had a bright, prosperous future ahead of him.

Now he had a wife and child.

How things could change overnight.

Alan never viewed any of this as having a shotgun poked in his back, forcing him into a Las Vegas chapel. He embraced the idea of marriage and fatherhood. Took on the role as if he had been born to do it.

By April 1990, Alan and Jessica had lived with his parents for nearly two months. They decided to move, however. The best place was Hoover, into Jessica’s mother and stepfather’s house. Sam was a month old. Living in Hoover would be more convenient for Alan and school. Dian could help out with the baby. Jessica could begin to think about her future.

That lasted a month. It was said that a fight erupted between Jessica and her mother. Whatever the case might be, Alan and Jessica were back at the Bates house in Cahaba Heights four weeks after leaving.

Jessica was different this time around. She pulled Joan Bates aside one day, for example, shortly after moving back in, and said, “Listen, you are not to answer the phone if my mother calls. You cannot invite my mother over to this house. I will say when she can see her granddaughter.”

It was a control issue: Jessica had the power—the baby—to refuse her mother something she had apparently wanted. Payback was a bitch. It was as if Jessica was proving to her own mother how she had felt—the pain she had experienced growing up, being shuffled between her biological father and mother, and being put in the middle of what was a war between her parents.

Jessica was very much in the driver’s seat of her life now. It was as if, as soon as she had a little bit of power over someone, she wielded it. And because of the tenuous relationship she’d had with her mother throughout the years already, Jessica was calling the shots now that she was a mother.

An eye for an eye.

For all those in the Bates household, the situation became volatile, not to mention uncomfortable and, at times, embarrassing. They had no real chance of seeing or understanding it at the time, but a pattern was developing in front of their eyes.

Robert was out of the house. He came home from time to time. Being away from the situation—distanced—Robert could see things the others couldn’t. It was like not seeing your cousin for a year—you instantly noticed how much she had grown.

“I noticed immediately,” Robert said, “that as Alan finished high school, things for him and Jessica were slowly beginning to become out of balance.”

Out of balance, the family would soon come to understand, would turn into the understatement of Alan and Jessica’s life together. From the moment Alan married Jessica, his life would be thrown into chaos. Because beneath a seemingly composed veneer that Jessica presented when around the Bates clan, coming out of her shell every once in a while to tell a tale of horror or to try to gain sympathy, lay an incredible brewing drama. Inside Jessica’s soul, one could argue, she kept hidden an incapacitating, silent rage that would expose itself as she became more comfortable in her role as Mrs. Alan Bates. It was a fury, maybe even a woman’s wrath, about to come to life.

18

After initial testing by the Bureau’s forensic lab in Atlanta, it was learned the blood found on the McCords’ couch that Albert Bailey had tossed out near that Dumpster across town was not a match to that of Alan or Terra Bates.

Indeed, the blood was someone else’s.

Law enforcement had not expected this. The case had begun to look like a slam dunk. Most law enforcement involved would have bet that the blood was Alan’s and Terra’s. However, here was scientific proof it was not. A setback, sure. But no reason to abandon the hunch that Jessica McCord had something to do with the demise of her ex-husband and his wife.

As Jessica and Jeff began to accept what was going on in their lives, things seemed a bit surreal to Jeff. He was one of the cops generally involved in conducting the search and disrupting someone’s life. Now the cops were focused on him. How quickly the tables had turned.

Jeff said he had always wanted to become a police officer. “Because I had been a fan of shows such as Adam-12, S.W.A.T. and Hill Street Blues,” he told me.

Jeff had early “designs” and goals pre- and postcollege of being a probation officer. His dream then was to help children. Show wayward kids that there was life after crime. Prove that everyone deserved a second chance. He even once went to work for The King’s Ranch, a Christian-based, adolescent-treatment center in Shelby County.