“I’m going out tonight,” she’d tell her father over the phone.

“A date?”

“No, no, no.”

“But you’re going out with a guy, right?”

“Yeah. Out, Dad. That’s all it is.”

“You sure you’re not dating?”

“No. No.”

Next subject.

Ever since she was a kid, Terra had a strong will about her. She was her own person. Part of it, Tom Klugh believed, was from being raised an only child, and the family moving around a lot.

“Except for the first couple of years,” Tom said, “we were in Fort Sill, Oklahoma . . . when I was stationed there during the Vietnam War, and then a little time in North Carolina when I was in school.”

Terra left for Hollins with the idea of becoming a mathematician. She had a change of heart, though, and flipped her major to architectural history once she got to Roanoke. Maybe it was being in such a historic town with the ambiance of America’s history at her doorstep. Who knows? The point is, Terra had found her passion in life and decided to go for it.

Terra took after her mother. Tom Klugh said his ex-wife was extremely artistically inclined. A ballet dancer. An expert potter. Whatever she did, it seemed, Terra’s mom mastered.

“My ex-wife,” Tom said, laughing admiringly, “has more talents than anybody should be given.”

While Terra and her mom got along well and remained close, Tom said they seemed to always compete against each other.

“You have to understand,” Tom recounted, “Terra was raised by two pretty immature adults. I was twenty-three when Terra was born, her mom just nineteen. But I don’t think age says anything about our emotional stock.”

The one thing Terra didn’t appreciate was when she confided in her mother, and then her mom went back and told Tom. This exasperated her.

“I always told Terra, ‘You know, you have two parents here. They’re supposed to know these things.’”

While studying and working for the DOI, Terra took that trip with the preservation team in charge of restoring the Alabama Theatre. Not only was she staying in town, but she was working at the theater—where she soon crossed paths with Alan.

The moment she set eyes on him, friends later suggested, Terra “just fell in love with him.”

“I had never really gotten the impression from her,” Tom said, “that she was serious about anybody—that is, until she met Alan. Of course, there were others along the way, sure. But usually they tripped over their bootlaces if given enough time. And so that was it for them. But Alan . . . he was different.”

They became friends first. But that didn’t last long; the relationship moved quickly. Terra felt “at ease” around Alan, a feeling she’d experienced with no one else.

“She certainly talked about him a whole bunch,” Tom added. “We did a lot of talking on the phone.”

The impression Tom got after meeting Alan for the first time was that he wasn’t this “warm, gushy person. . . . He was very nice. Certainly, he wasn’t one of these toady people, who would ‘yes, sir, Mr. Klugh’ to everything I said.”

An Eddie Haskell, in other words. A phony. Some guy trying to warm up to the dad in order to get in good with the daughter.

No, Alan was confident. Clean-cut. Quiet. Reserved. Determined. Liked to keep to himself.

“A lot like Terra.”

Neither Alan nor Terra shared things about their lives with other people. But they found each other—and with that, the ideal sounding board.

They hadn’t even been officially dating when Terra turned to Alan one day after knowing him for only a brief time and said, “You know, I really see a potential here with you. I’m quitting my job.”

“Quitting?”

Alan was frightened by this. He knew Jessica. He knew the turmoil he was involved in was just beginning. He knew that it was going to get a lot worse before it got better. Did he need to drag someone else into the mix—especially someone as loving and caring as Terra? She didn’t need that in her life.

Terra’s job would have taken her away from Alan after the company she worked for finished up at the Alabama Theatre. As the team she worked with moved on to other parts of the South to continue the work, Terra was going to have to leave Alan.

She thought about it. Decided she wanted no part of moving away from Alan.

Alan was thrilled. Exalted. Happy. But also scared.

“She was a beautiful, strong spirit,” Kevin Bates remembered, “who just made my brother shine. She was the perfect companion for him.” Terra Klugh brought out the best in Alan Bates; and they brought out the best in each other. “It made us realize we were looking at an adult relationship for Alan,” Kevin added, “and this couldn’t be a better situation.”

Terra had short, straight auburn-brown hair. The most delicate, clear, white skin—smooth as paper—and a smile that woke up any room she entered. Terra loved to hike with Alan. She grew up with a penchant and passion for ballet, like her mother. Her voice, friends insisted, was distinct: soft-spoken, sweet in tone, gentle and kind. And yet, while Terra exuded an immense amount of femininity, certainly a woman from head to toe, she wasn’t afraid to pick up a power tool and build a piece of furniture.

“She had a quiet strength,” Kevin Bates said, “which was just the perfect companion to my brother.”

Soul mates.

Alan was content romantically for the first time in his life—which would, he was soon to realize, only increase the hatred and dissension Jessica felt toward him already. If there was one thing that infuriated Jessica McCord more than anything, it was the competition of another woman.

26

MCSO chief investigator Michael Pritchett had been involved in the investigation since that burning car was reported in his jurisdiction. Pritchett, a twenty-five-year lawman, took on the job of locating a source for the “child’s print” paper towel found on the ground at the Georgia crime scene. It was one sheet of paper towel, slightly crumpled, burned on one corner. The decoration imprinted on one side was a stick figure of a child, along with the simulated scribble of a preschooler learning his ABCs.

I ♥ DADDY.

A child’s handprint was located directly underneath the writing. There was a smiley face sun figure next to rows of flowers.

Pritchett took a photograph sample of the paper towel and hit the road.

“I went to nine different stores, retail stores in the area of where the bodies were found,” he said later in court. “As a matter of fact, there was nine closest stores to the scene. And the larger retail stores in the area, I went to check to see if they had in stock this pattern of paper towel. . . .”

Pritchett asked the clerk at several locations the same question: “Are you familiar with this pattern?”

All of them said, “No.” They had never seen it before.

In fact, the sheriff testified, “No clerk remembered having sold that pattern.” As the investigation would soon divulge, there was a good reason why.

Back at the ADFS Birmingham Regional Laboratory, Firearms and Toolmarks Identification Unit scientist Ed Moran got busy testing the bullet found at the Georgia crime scene against the bullet recovered inside the McCord garage. Here was the “smoking gun” evidence—nearly literally—that every prosecutor dreamed of. A match, without question, would tie Alan’s and Terra’s deaths to the McCord home.

Forensic expert Moran had sixteen years behind the microscope. He was rather blunt and realistic when explaining his often tedious job: “It’s not like it is on TV.”

Indeed. Matching bullets with lands and grooves was more complicated than putting two microscopes together on a granite lab table, looking into both of the glass eyes and, during a commercial break, coming to a conclusion.