Then there was a phone call one day from Alan to Naomi.

“Have you seen Jessica?”

No one could find her. She was AWOL—again.

“As a matter of fact,” Naomi said, “I haven’t seen her for months.”

Alan asked Naomi if she could call over to the Bailey house for him and find out what was going on.

“I will.”

“Is Jessica there?” Naomi asked Dian.

Dian sounded discouraged, Naomi later explained. “Yeah, I’ve got the girls here. She’s been gone a couple of months. I cannot find her. She’s not coming to see the kids or calling.”

Naomi asked around and finally found out Jessica was shacked up with some other guy.

“You need to go home and take care of your girls!” Naomi snapped at Jessica after locating her. Naomi was upset. The kids depended on Jessica. Here it was, Jessica’s mother now raising her grandkids. It wasn’t right. Naomi wanted Jessica to take responsibility. Grow the hell up.

Jessica said she was pregnant again. “Twins.”

“Twins?” Naomi was floored. The last thing Jessica needed was more children. She couldn’t handle the two she had.

Naomi didn’t know what to say.

“I miscarried the twins, though,” Jessica finally admitted.

“You get yourself home and take care of those girls.”

As Jessica made Alan’s life as unhappy as she could, most notably by turning the children against him, depriving him of the one thing she had control over (seeing the kids), Alan got busy with his own life—the one thing she couldn’t control. Alan now had a degree from the University of Montevallo. He fell headfirst into his first real job in the theater as stage manager for the historic Alabama Theatre in downtown Birmingham. For the most part Alan’s job consisted of what he loved more than anything besides his kids: reworking larger Broadway productions for the smaller stage.

The man behind the curtain.

In order to lead the new life she wanted for herself, Jessica spun more of her vicious and self-centered lies, using the children as weapons to get what she wanted out of Alan. Jessica refused to take a job. She told the court she worked for her stepfather as his secretary, but that was, at best, an exaggeration; at worst, a flat-out fabrication. The man didn’t have that much work to require a secretary. The fact of the matter was, Jessica did not want to work. She believed Alan should support her and the girls.

By the end of 1995, it was clear to Alan that Jessica was taking the child support he paid her each month and using it for her own wild lifestyle of chasing and bedding men. All of this while telling the kids that “Alan wasn’t paying her,” Kevin and Robert Bates later said.

The entire situation tore Alan apart. From his engineering father, Alan acquired a trait that was now going to help him in his day-to-day dealings with Jessica. Alan grew into the most methodical, organized and thorough person many of his friends and family said they had ever met. He kept detailed records of everything in his life.

“He planned, organized, labeled and filed [things] with amazing precision,” Kevin Bates later said with admiration. “In fact, when things started going sour in the visitation, shortly after the divorce, Alan began meticulously recording, saving, labeling and filing every harassing or threatening voice mail he received from Jessica, and put them neatly in a box—which he labeled ‘evidence.’”

24

There was still work to be done inside the McCord home as Monday, February 18, 2002, progressed. Wherever the HPD looked, another piece of incriminating evidence against Jessica and Jeff McCord seemed to pop up. There was now good reason to believe Alan and Terra Bates were murdered inside the McCord home.

Outside the den door, in the garage, a can of gasoline with an inch of liquid was uncovered. More ammo was found. A new bottle of Clorox bleach—empty. Several shards of wallpaper matching the old pattern, which were recently torn off the walls, were found crumpled up.

Empty boxes of tile.

And paper towels. Plenty of used paper towels were unearthed inside garbage cans throughout the house. No one knew then how important these paper towels would become.

Evidence tech Mark Tant, a seventeen-year-veteran law enforcement officer with the HPD, noticed as he took photographs of the outside of the house that there was no mailbox. It was the only house on the block without a mailbox.

Another anomaly. Why no mailbox?

The den was so crowded with stuff, Tant said later in court, “you could barely walk through there. You were stepping on things.”

Boxes. Books. Clothes. Toys. DVDs. Tapes. Old newspapers. And trash.

In the far corner of one room on the main floor was a bookcase, later learned to be Jessica’s. It was full of true crimes and thrillers. Dozens of them.

At some point that day, Tant was summoned to Pro Tow Towing, a service the HPD used to impound vehicles. The garage was located off Route 150, down on Lorna Road, not too far from the McCord home.

The HPD impounded Albert Bailey’s white GMC van, the vehicle he had driven to transport the couch to that Dumpster site in town. The HPD believed Bailey might have transported the carpet, too, either knowingly or unknowingly. And there may well be additional evidence inside the van. Best thing to do was bring it in and process it.

On the back of the window of the beat-up van, Bailey had one bumper sticker, split into two sections: AMERICA, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.

The guy was a patriot.

Inside the body of the van, Tant found several pieces of tile matching those found inside the McCord home.

He took the pieces out of the van and photographed them.

The HPD released the McCord home for the second time in three days. Jessica stayed at the house. Jeff was “escorted” to the HPD after volunteering to give another statement.

Inside the interview room Jeff made it clear that he wasn’t taking much of this all that seriously—which seemed rather odd, considering the stakes. He was cocky. Laughing and joking around. Acting like he had the situation under control.

Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected.

Peyton Zanzour and Tom McDanal started the interview by turning on the videotape recorder. First they asked about the couch. Who had removed it from the house? When? Why? “Who took the cushions off? Where are the cushions?”

This . . . seemed to confuse McCord, a report of the interview noted.

“Look,” Jeff said after thinking about it, “I took the cushions off the thing so they would not blow off when the couch was removed from the house and taken to the dump.”

But the couch was transported inside Albert Bailey’s van.

Another lie.

“Which dump?” one of the investigators asked.

Jeff shrugged.

“Why was the leather stripped from the back of the couch?”

Jeff considered the question. “To make it lighter. And the cushions were actually taken to a charity drop-off at the Wal-Mart in Pelham.”

“Where was the stripped leather disposed?”

Jeff said Jessica tossed it; he had no idea where.

The former cop continued to laugh. Apparently, two dead bodies and evidence pointing toward him and his wife was some sort of a joke. “Him being a police officer,” Detective Brignac, who was in another room watching the interview on a TV monitor, said later, “you’d think he’d want to help us. But he kept saying he didn’t know anything . . . and then he’d sit there and laugh.”

“That carpet,” one of the investigators asked, “when did y’all remove it?”

“Jessica removed that, too. I have no idea where it is.”

As the interview went on, Jessica called the station house repeatedly. “I want to talk to my husband! Where is he? I need to talk to my husband.”