This was a far cry from the same woman a week prior. That same person on the telephone with Joan Bates. Jessica herself later claimed that talking to Joan during those moments when Alan and Terra were considered missing was uncompromising and nerve-wracking. She told Joan: “Please let me know . . . what’s going on when you find out. I would need to tell the kids something.”

Jessica had plenty of opportunity to talk to her children about what was going on. By this point she hadn’t said a word. Now she was concerned about them?

Brignac knew better. She was speaking to a woman who had admitted stopping at a fast-food restaurant on her way home and eating all of the food inside the family van by herself, down the street from her house, so she “didn’t have to share” with the kids. Jessica McCord was a selfish, uncaring, conniving, manipulative accused murderer. She was focused on her own needs. Not what her children deserved or needed.

“In some ways,” one source close to the case told me,

“I’m surprised [Jessica] didn’t kill the girls, too, so she could punish everyone. She liked feeling as if she had some sort of control over everything.”

Steel bars and concrete walls were no match for this woman. Nothing was going to stop Jessica from wielding her manipulative ways over her kids. Her reputation preceded itself.

While she had been in jail during Christmas, 2001, for contempt, and the kids were with Alan and Terra, Jessica called Alan one night. The kids were acting normally up until that moment, getting along well with Alan and Terra. They were all doing their best to rebuild relationships and become a family unit. For the kids it was a far different experience from living back in Hoover with Jessica.

“That was until [the kids] had their phone calls with Jessica,” one source later explained, “and then Terra and Alan would have to spend the next few days getting them back out of whatever sort of spell Jessica put them under.”

As they drove, Brignac took a call from her colleague Tom McDanal, who was already at the jail. “Get ready, there is a lot of media here waiting on you.”

Brignac thought about it. By now, the detective had been awake for almost two straight days, working various angles of the case in order to secure the arrest warrants. She was as sleep deprived as the rest of the team—and beginning to feel it.

“Thanks, Tom.”

Jessica complained again from the backseat. Her cuffs were too tight. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.” She hoped the comment would convince Brignac to cut her some slack.

Hanging up with McDanal, Brignac unbuckled her seat belt and turned around to face Jessica again. The comments—“I’ll be out’a there in no time,” coupled with the constant crying about being pregnant and uncomfortable—grated on the detective’s fragile nerves, eating up any energy Brignac had left. Her short fuse had burned out. She was tired. Fed up with Jessica’s attitude. The way Jessica spoke to a police officer, showing no respect for the law. Another human being, for that matter. Who did this woman think she was, sitting back there, handcuffed, on her way to face charges for double murder that could result in her death? Who in the heck, Brignac considered, was this woman to sass back at her?

“Look,” Brignac said, entirely fed up, “I have some news for you. You’re not getting out of jail! And I hope to hell that you are pregnant. Because you’re going to give birth in jail, and they’re going to snatch that baby from you—and you’ll never see it again.”

Brignac turned around. Sat down with a thud without waiting for a response. “It was a horrible thing to say,” Brignac recalled later. “But I was very tired.”

The warrant officer looked at Brignac, an incredulous crinkle in his brow.

Jessica fumed. “We’ll see about that, Detective.”

“She was mad as a wet dog. Still real cocky,” Brignac remembered.

Pulling into the jail parking lot, the warrant officer was “nervous,” Brignac explained. “Here was this media [circus] waiting on us all.”

He parked by the back entrance, where prisoners are escorted into the building. Brignac, one hand on the door handle to get out of the car, looked over at the warrant officer and said, “You ready?”

They exited the vehicle. Brignac walked to the back to help Jessica, who was trying to hide her face from photographers as best she could.

As the warrant officer got out, he somehow tripped the car alarm.

Brignac laughed.

Then, as he went to go turn it off with his key ring, he hit the trunk button, instead, popping it open.

Brignac couldn’t take it: she broke down. “He was flustered,” the detective recalled.

Jessica and Jeff were processed and placed in lockup.

That control over everyone else’s life that Jessica had so much centered her days and nights on was now in the hands of the state of Alabama.

PART III

THE NARROW GATE

35

Jessica is a fan of Hollywood. She loves superhero movies, those big blockbuster types with the hundred-million-dollar budgets and young stars flying around in flashy spandex suits, stomping their way through computerized scenery. Something about the good versus evil archetype encompassing those films spoke to Jessica’s egotistical pride—and her aggressive, violent nature. An old friend of Jessica’s later spoke of what she called a “clichéd” albatross of “good and evil” that hung around Jessica’s neck. How it was there from the beginning, when Alan first met her in the late 1980s. The idea of Alan being raised in such a wholesome, good-hearted family, and turning out to be a peaceful, productive human being, represented the “good” in a world of “evil” that Jessica, in many ways, seemed to almost thrive in.

“When we were kids, I could not help but feel a negative energy around Jessica whenever she was near,” that friend explained. The description sounded hackneyed, the friend added. “I know it does.” But with Jessica came a “dark shadow” hovering over her—a metaphoric cloud, representative of the malice and impiety present in most everything she did. And as Alan and Jessica’s marriage crumbled and the divorce and custody battle turned vicious, this malevolent nature in Jessica’s heart rose to the surface.

That “good versus evil” dynamic, always there between them, now took center stage. “I recall clearly Jessica once telling Alan,” that friend concluded, “‘You marry her (Terra) and you’ll never see your kids again.’” This was from the same woman who had, back in high school, laid eyes on Alan before they hooked up and said, “I’ll get him no matter what . . . and trap him if I have to.”

To Jessica, strength could always overcome weakness. Ultimately the tough survived. Not the virtuous or lawful. But the most powerful. In Jessica’s world you didn’t need good on your side to win. You needed to outthink your opponent. To be smarter and more cunning. This self-righteous, win-at-any-cost attitude Jessica harbored—fighting Alan over the kids because the thrill of the fight and winning fed her ego—was going, with any luck, to push Jessica toward a victory she so desperately needed. Not getting the kids. No. She could never be comfortable with that. This was about something else now.

Destroying Alan.

Yes. Watching Alan crash and burn.

In early 2000, Alan filed an “amendment to [his] petition” for custody, stating that a new job would send him all over the country, traveling with a theater group. He wanted to see the kids during the week, as well as on the weekends he was back in town.

A new trial date in the custody matter was set for April 4, 2000. This was when Jessica and Alan could work out what had become a plethora of accusations against each other: from not paying bills to not being able to see the kids. Jessica turned what appeared to be a straightforward, amicable divorce five years prior into a mess costing both of them more money than they had. Why couldn’t she allow the man to see his kids? It seemed so simple.