She never gave a reason (if it were even true) why Brad disliked children. Or why she would consider dating a man who felt that way.

“I didn’t make it a policy,” Jessica stated further, “to take people I went out with around my children. I thought it would be hard for them to have people, you know, going in and out. And . . . I had no intention of just getting divorced and dating one guy and getting immediately remarried. I didn’t want the kids to suffer from a constant change of people.”

Some wondered if that was motive enough not to share with a man that you allegedly liked that you had children. Like many things Jessica later said, her excuse for a particular behavior made little sense.

Brad lived in an apartment in the Five Points region of Birmingham. He had a simple life.

Work. Home. Work. Home.

Magic.

Jessica moved in with Brad. Her clothes and all. Six weeks went by, Brad later said, before she finally admitted she had two kids living at her mother’s house. Two kids, in fact, who needed their mother and were not seeing their father on a regular basis because Jessica was so darn bent on spiting Alan.

This manner of conduct turned into a vicious circle. Jessica would leave the kids with her mother for long periods: weeks, a month, two months. Days, certainly. She would not see them—and sometimes, a friend later said, she rarely ever called them. She didn’t care. Jessica wanted what she wanted, and nothing—not even her own flesh and blood—was going to stand in her way or stop her.

And now she had Brad.

Naomi called Jessica once in a while to see how she was doing. After learning Jessica was leaving the children with her mother, Naomi was upset. She wanted to reprimand Jessica and scold her into feeling guilty about it—and then demand she get over to her mother’s house and take care of those kids.

Forget about Brad. The kids need you. This was a recurring thought, Naomi said.

Jessica got mad. Gave Naomi some excuse as to why she wasn’t at her mother’s with the children.

Then, as Naomi and Jessica were talking, Jessica came out with it: “I’m pregnant now, anyway.”

Naomi expected to hear that Jessica was planning a trip to Mississippi or another state to get an abortion. Jessica claimed to have already had one abortion (Brad’s child) after miscarrying twins.

But not this time. “I’m keeping it,” Jessica stated.

From the sound of it, Jessica was looking at the new baby as a means to an end: another child support check from a guy who was, she believed, going to come into a healthy sum of money someday. Thus, all things considered, it would appear babies were a source of income for Jessica.

Not long after she moved in with Brad, Jessica went to him and announced that she was pregnant, adding, “I’m keeping the baby.”

According to Jessica, Brad did not want anything to do with being a father. “I was not going to have an abortion,” Jessica said years later in court, recalling this period of her life, “and I was not going to have my baby and give her away. I would never.”

But that’s exactly what she did, Brad later explained. “Well, the first child. She aborted it.”

About five or six months later, Jessica went to Brad again. “I’m pregnant.”

This led to problems with the relationship. Brad and Jessica were not on the same wavelength about anything. So they split shortly before the child was born. Jessica moved out of the apartment and back into her mother’s house—now back with her two kids . . . and pregnant with another child.

28

In Georgia, members of the Bates and Klugh families were not far from where the reclusive novelist Flannery O’ Connor—a woman who seemed to set in bronze a long-lasting image of what a true “Southerner” represented—once stated that the “things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all.” The Bates and Klughs waited and wondered. Part of each of them leaned on that strong sense of family still so ingrained in the Deep South. The hardest element of it all was accepting that Alan and Terra would never again grace the dinner table at a family function. There would be no more phone calls just to catch up and say hello. No more of those million-dollar smiles Alan could flash to make you feel great. No more sharing of the good things in life. No more laughs or memories in motion. Terra and Alan were there one day, gone the next, as if they had vanished.

The other horrifying aspect of having to deal with a tragedy of such immense scope was that, of all the people in the world, the reality that Alan’s ex-wife could have had something to do with his death was simultaneously sobering and appalling. In Philip and Joan Bates’s wildest dreams, they could not have fathomed life to have taken such a terrible, personal turn. That inherent parental need to protect your child was there in every second of life. It was a challenge Philip and Joan took as the price of perfect love. And they had weathered the storm well—that is, up until this moment.

“Our parents had always put our needs before their own,” Kevin Bates later explained. “They worked hard together to provide us each with everything we ever needed, and many (but not all) of the things we wanted. When we relocated to Atlanta in 1991, they chose our home for the best public-school system in the area for my benefit, despite the fact that this left Dad with up to an hour commute one way to work each day. Though us kids were all . . . out of the house, they remained very active and interested in our lives and looked for any opportunity to support our endeavors. They regularly traveled to see any show Alan worked on, whenever it would come within driving distance of Atlanta. And, of course, they looked for any opportunity to enjoy and spoil their grandchildren.”

That flawless continuity of life was dramatically disrupted—all at once. Severed without warning. Both families asked themselves two questions as the hours passed: What now? How do we deal with such an aggravated, abrupt end to two wonderful lives ?

By late Monday night, February 18, well into Tuesday morning, several facts were apparent to the families: (1) After some soul-searching, no one could discern any other known human being on the face of the earth who could have—or would have—wanted Alan and Terra dead, and (2) Jessica McCord expressed motive and had opportunity, two of the most important factors driving this type of crime.

As the families interacted while waiting for bits of news to trickle in, it was hard to push away the theory that Jessica had killed both of these beautiful people.

Roger Brown called Philip Bates early that week to explain “as much as I could at the time,” Brown later told me, concluding the call with an apology for not being able to be more forthcoming with information.

“This is what we have, Mr. Bates. I’ll call you as soon as I can give you anything more.”

Philip, that engineering mind of his calculating things out its own way, understood there was a major investigation going on. Philip and the others would get the facts as they became available. The last thing anyone wanted to do was taint a future court case by pressuring Roger Brown to cough up particulars about his case.

“I understand,” said Philip. It pained him. Sure. But he also knew how fragile and fluid the situation was and would be until an arrest was made.

Hanging up the telephone, Philip walked out of the kitchen and told Kevin, Robert and Joan, “We’ve got the right man working on this.” Philip was impressed by Brown’s matter-of-fact way of dealing with such a delicate state of affairs. Brown spoke in truths. Plain. Clear. Concise. Philip respected that. Brown didn’t care to speculate. He rarely said anything, in fact, that he or his investigators did not know for certain.