“I’m going to get him,” Jessica told that friend. She repeated a prior threat: “I’m going to set him up for domestic abuse.”

Jessica’s plan was to provoke Alan into hitting her; then she would run to the police and press charges.

The judge signed off on a writ of arrest and sent deputies to find Jessica and put her in jail.

But then something happened.

“To the best of my recollection,” Jessica’s mother, Dian Bailey, later said in court, “it was somewhere right in November 2000” when Jeff left Jessica. They split up. “And they might try reconciliation a day or two [later],” Dian added.

Jessica and the kids stayed at Dian’s. According to Dian, Alan wasn’t the poster child for fathers he had claimed to be in court. “Alan was not consistent in his visitation,” Dian told the court, “whether that it be the first or the third, or it might be two hours on a Saturday if he can’t make it, or it might be that he would take them out for dinner. . . .”

Further, Dian claimed, Alan had skipped visitations. He’d call and say he would be there, but he would never show up.

After a time Jessica moved back into the house on Myrtlewood Drive, reconciling with Jeff. She wasn’t pregnant any longer, she said. Either she had lost the child, lied about being pregnant to begin with, or had another abortion.

During this period Jeff and Jessica didn’t claim an address. Jessica told Alan she and Jeff were buying a house, but Alan didn’t know where. The kids, moreover, weren’t enrolled in school. It appeared that Jessica, Jeff and the kids had disappeared.

Alan and Terra were horrified by the prospect that Jessica and her new husband—a man Alan didn’t know very much about—might have packed up and taken off with Alan’s kids. Jessica was now hiding the children from him, more than just denouncing his advances to see and speak with them. But it wasn’t only Alan she was running from. Jessica owed the court ten days in jail.

By the end of November, Frank Head filed additional court actions against Jessica regarding her desire not to allow Alan to see the kids during the Thanksgiving holiday, or on McKenna’s birthday. Alan was beside himself. Jessica was like a broken record. The same behavior all over again. She refused to follow the court’s ruling, even if it meant jail time.

Frank Head asked the court to issue a subpoena to the custodian of records for the Hoover City School System so he could find out where the children’s educational records popped up. The idea was that Jessica would have enrolled the children in school somewhere. There had to be a record. It was Alan’s belief they were attending Green Valley Elementary, on Old Columbiana Road, about a mile from Jessica’s mother’s house. Alan knew the kids were being dropped off there at different times.

When the Hoover City School System failed to return a hit on the kids’ whereabouts, Frank Head went to the custodian of records for Southminster Day School in Vestavia Hills. Alan heard that maybe the kids were enrolled there. Of course, he called the Pelham PD, but they couldn’t give him any information.

By this point Jessica was served several Violation of Previous Orders. All with no response from her. In a December 21, 2000, letter (which he had no idea where to send), Frank Head announced that Alan wanted to see the kids on Christmas, per order of the court.

Christmas came and went, as did the New Year celebration.

Alan never saw or spoke to his kids.

The issue now became, not if Alan Bates would ever see his children again, but where, exactly, was Jessica hiding them.

37

By the end of January 2001, Alan still could not find Jessica or the kids. It consumed him. He was torn over not being able to maintain any type of ongoing relationship with his girls. He feared the worst—that Jessica had taken off, out of the state or the country. Alan and Terra had taken the kids into their Maryland home that previous summer, but after dropping them off a few weeks before school started in August, they had not heard from them since.

Five months. Not a peep.

The stress began to wear on Alan. All that time he had spent with the kids over the previous summer, building up their confidence, was now, undoubtedly, being deprogrammed out of them by Jessica and her twisted lies.

“Look,” Kevin Bates said, “she never really had a job, so she never had any money, and when the kids wanted to have things and she couldn’t buy them, after having used the child support that Alan gave her every month, she started to tell the kids, ‘Oh, your dad is not paying me child support, so we have to eat rice every night.’”

Had it all started again? Jessica telling the children Alan was a deadbeat dad who didn’t want to see them? Alan could only imagine what she might be saying now that she owed jail time to the court.

Jessica knew the more time the kids spent with Alan, the better the chances were that they’d realize he wasn’t some sort of one-eyed hideous monster she’d made him out to be. Sooner or later, as the kids grew, they were going to figure out that she had been the liar all along—that is, if they continued to see Alan.

On February 8, 2001, the court postponed the Bates/McCord trial until May 15. There had been over a year of postponements by this point. The date gave Alan no repose. He was certain Jessica planned not to show up. How could the woman be jailed, held in contempt or follow the court’s ruling—if she had been on the run?

When Alan understood that any hope of a civil (or legal) arrangement was dashed by Jessica’s inability to live up to her obligations, it “threw him for a loop,” family members said. “At this point,” Kevin Bates added, “my brother began to see and realize how much damage her behavior was doing to the children—all for her own gain.”

To see his kids being used and abused tore the man apart. He needed to end it—to do something. Alan wanted to reach out to the kids and explain what was going on.

“Alan doesn’t get to the point to where he wants to file for custody until very, very late in the game,” Robert Bates added. “The court action he took was, simply, to enforce the visitation rights he had in place already.”

Jessica knew how to work the system. Alan had believed the system was going to protect him. She was sentenced to jail and she was dodging the court and the sheriff. What else could Alan do?

He was powerless.

In all of this, Terra became Alan’s anchor, his best friend. The woman he could turn to and vent his frustrations. She never judged. She stood behind him, and encouraged Alan to do whatever was necessary to see that his children were taken care of. Despite how much money it cost. How long it took. Or where they had to travel to get the job done.

Why? Alan wondered. Why is Jessica being so difficult?

Kevin and Robert could see it on Alan’s face every time they saw him.

Why?

Jessica was only hurting the kids. It didn’t matter who was right, who was wrong. That simple rule whereby whatever divorced parents did affected the children was so true. However Jessica and Alan acted in front of the kids would reflect how the kids turned out as adults. Look at Jessica. Her life was a case study, in and of itself. According to what she had said, her father used her and her siblings as pawns after her parents divorced—and here she was doing the same damn thing.

Jessica later reflected on this period of her life, saying, “I don’t recall ever boasting and laughing about denying Alan anything. . . . I wasn’t angry at Alan that he was going to see the kids. I thought that would have been nice. . . .” In regard to picking up the children, or telling them Alan was on the way, Jessica said, “You know . . . you have to keep in mind that a lot of times he didn’t come. So I don’t know that the children put a lot of stock in me saying, ‘You’re going with your dad for the weekend, or you’re leaving with them at such and such time. ’” Jessica said there were times when “we were sitting by the door waiting . . . and many times he was not [there]. And, frequently, he wouldn’t call, either. So I think it was kind of old hat for the kids for him not to come.”