Didn’t make sense: a miscarriage and an abortion?

Naomi was concerned. “Let me take you.”

“No, it’s no big deal. I wasn’t that far along. I’ve been through this before. Don’t worry about it.”

22

Early Monday morning, February 18, 2002, detective sergeant Tom McDanal secured a second search warrant, partly based on the foundation that the HPD had developed new information. In that first search they might have missed something. So members from the HPD’s forensic squad and CAPERS unit headed back over to the McCord house.

HPD investigators Greg Rector, Mark Tant, Laura Brignac, D. C. Scively and Peyton Zanzour were part of the team that arrived for the second search. Immediately it turned into a slog through the muck of the McCord home that would, this time around, prove to be far more productive than the first.

Lieutenant Greg Rector, commander of the Investigations Division of the HPD, walked into the garage. Sidestepping what was a heap of garbage piled around a plethora of “stuff,” Rector began his search with his flashlight, combing the walls. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary. A good search team left no stone unturned. Officers checked every square inch of space, no matter how tedious and unnecessary it seemed. It took a special eye for this detail: someone with patience and a knack for the mundane. Rector admitted later (with a laugh) that he was perfectly suited for the job.

Within moments, the veteran investigator locked onto a wooden desk pushed up against the wall near a doorway that led into the McCords’ den. The wall the desk had its back to was actually the opposite side of the den wall inside the home. Investigators noticed the wallpaper on the other side of the wall looked a bit askew. Maybe just sloppily installed. Albert Bailey, who said he was working on the house, prided himself a master craftsman. Jessica told investigators that her stepfather was one of those types born with a hammer in one hand, a saw in the other. Whoever had wallpapered the McCord den—presumably Albert—had either not watched enough episodes of This Old House, had downed one too many beers while working or had rushed to complete the job. There were two different types of wallpaper meeting somewhere in the middle, at waist-high level. The wallpaper line was crooked. The seams did not match up. Even more interesting, it was easy to tell that the wallpaper had been recently installed. Sure, Jeff and Jessica McCord said they were having work done on the house that weekend. But in the scope of the investigation, it all seemed too convenient. On top of that, the kids told Detective Laura Brignac that everything in the den was different.

Going back inside the garage, Lieutenant Rector took his flashlight and looked around the area where the wooden desk was butted up against the wall. While running his flashlight along the floor by the legs of the desk, staring at one section in particular, Rector noticed something.

A hole in the Sheetrock.

He looked down on the garage floor. There was Sheetrock dust and shards of broken plasterboard. Next to one edge of the wooden desk, close to the floor, sure enough, there was a small hole in the wall. The back of the desk was away from the wall about three inches. Protruding from the hole in the Sheetrock was debris, broken bits of the plasterboard, a chalky white dust and a powdery substance that looked like confectioner’s sugar. There was also a small bit of insulation from the inside of the wall that looked to have been pushed through. Something had been jabbed through the wall, from inside the den, and had popped a hole in the Sheetrock.

Rector panned his light down at the floor.

There it was: a spent projectile on the concrete floor of the garage, next to the baseboard, in near perfect condition.

One of the desk legs had an indentation, Rector noticed. Like a scar from where the bullet looked to have hit and bounced back. It was directly above where the bullet sat on the concrete floor.

If you looked down, it wasn’t hard to figure out that a bullet had come through the wall, hit the desk, left a rather visible scuff mark on the desk leg, then fell to the ground.

Rector then went around to the other side of the wall, inside the den. Several investigators were in the room, looking around at various sections of the recent remodeling project.

Rector explained what he had found in the garage.

There was no hole, however, anywhere on the wall where it should have been. If a bullet had been fired from inside the den within the past week, say, and went through the wall and landed on the floor in the garage, there should have been a hole in the den wall. At least that’s what the evidence in the garage seemed to suggest.

But there wasn’t.

They knew why, of course.

Slowly investigators peeled back the new wallpaper.

And there it was: a small hole the size of a bullet in Sheetrock inside the den.

At some point one of the investigators put a trajectory rod through the hole; it indicated the bullet was fired from approximately the chest height of an average-sized human being who was facing the wall. The person would have been standing several feet away from the wall, pointing the weapon toward the garage. The aim was directly on the spot where the McCords’ couch had sat before Albert Bailey removed it from the home.

Peyton Zanzour was in another part of the garage, poking around, when he noticed a bag next to the garage door. It was just sitting there on the floor, to the right of the washer and dryer.

To the right of the bag was a pile of clothes.

Inside the bag Zanzour discovered a “wadded-up piece of [old] wallpaper,” about the size of a grapefruit.

He knelt down. Wearing latex gloves, flashlight in his mouth, the investigator took the piece of wadded-up wallpaper from the bag and unfolded it.

At first it didn’t register. But then staring at it—bingo—there was the hole, about the size of a bullet.

Zanzour stood and took the wallpaper into the house. He held it up against the section that had been recently peeled back.

Like a Mylar overlay—a dead-on match.

Things made sense: someone had peeled off the old wallpaper and put new paper over the bullet hole, but did not plaster the hole first.

The HPD needed to get the bullet from the garage to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (ADFS) lab and have ballistics check it against the bullet the Bureau had uncovered in the trunk of Alan’s rental car. That would be the real test. If the ADFS matched the two, the HPD could bank on those arrest warrants they were hoping to file against Jeff and Jessica.

Several pieces of furniture, including a small coffee table you might put in front of a couch, were taken outside the McCord home for the purpose of conducting luminol testing. Inside, parts of the rug in the den were torn up to display what appeared to be tile underneath—some of it new.

“The tile that was on the floor,” Peyton Zanzour said later in court, “it was very dirty. There was dirt in places that was, like, in piles, a sandy type of dirt. It was very unusual, number one, that there was that much dirt.”

The dog could have tracked that dirt into the home.

But the dirt didn’t seem to be a collection from years of carrying it into the house on the soles of shoes; it “appeared,” Zanzour testified, “to be as if it was dirt from the outside.”

The theory, apparently, was that people were coming and going. Moving things around. In and out of the house.

Furthermore, when investigators took a closer look, they could tell that some of the tiles underneath the carpeting were new, while others were not. This did not make much sense. Especially seeing that there were plenty of other tiles underneath the carpet that could stand to be replaced. Why would a homeowner change only some of the tiles and then cover them with carpeting?