After Jeff nestled the kids into their car seats and left his house on the morning of November 21, 2001, turning right at the north side of the lake, heading toward Dundale Road, he noticed a car get up behind him, he later said.

Odd, this time of the morning, Jeff thought. Especially here.

It was obvious the car had been waiting for him to leave.

According to Jeff, the man driving that car was Alan. Fed up with Jessica’s refusal to allow him to see his children, Alan had decided it was time to do something about it himself, Jeff said.

“I was not aware of any reason for him to be there,” Jeff said later. “We had not received [anything], no phone calls, no certified mail, nothing in the mail, no messages regarding this [visit]. . . .”

How in the world could they?

Anyway, Alan stayed on Jeff’s tail, following him closely behind. They traveled into downtown Hoover via the interstate. Then into Green Valley, where Jeff picked up his pace and led Alan into a subdivision before heading into Pelham—where, of course, Jeff had plenty of friends.

Jeff said he was scared. Jessica had primed him with a version of Alan replete with “rage,” he said, “anger, domestic violence, whatever.” Whether it was true was beside the point. Jeff was under the impression, he later claimed, that it was. “I’m just taking her word for it.”

And now here’s Alan, following him like some madman.

As Jeff got closer to the Pelham PD, Alan backed off, he said, realizing that Jeff was not going to stop. Confronting the guy in the parking lot of the police department where he worked was probably not the best idea.

Jeff claimed he dropped the kids off at the sitter’s after Alan took off. Then he went to work. Grabbed an officer, one of his coworkers, and asked him to fill out a report. He certainly wasn’t going to be harassed by Jessica’s crazy ex-husband.

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In between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Alan’s lawyer bombarded the court with motions. He also filed several subpoena requests for school records. The court still could not find Jessica or the children. She was either keeping them out of school, homeschooling them, or they had moved far away. The fact alone that Frank Head had done all this work—not to mention that Alan lived nine hundred miles away—was a good indication that Jeff was either lying about Alan following him that day, or—in a paranoid state Jessica had induced—he had convinced himself that a stranger was Alan.

Frank Head filed a motion for a December 11, 2001, hearing date to hash out what was turning into a legal quagmire. The woman was breaking so many different laws. Where was the accountability, and what was the court doing to find her? Thus far, it appeared that the court hadn’t done much to serve an arrest warrant.

In turn, the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit Court of Shelby County rubber-stamped two Failure to Abide by Previous Order of the Court orders by Alan and issued another series of arrest warrants.

It did no good.

As it turned out, Jessica had been hanging around Brad Tabor’s place during this period of time. Unbeknownst to Brad, she and Jeff and the kids were hiding out. Brad even babysat the kids from time to time. But when Jessica didn’t show up on time to drop off the girls, Brad called her. One such day he asked what was going on.

True to her nature, Jessica found a way to blame Alan: “Kelley has the girls,” Jessica said breathlessly, “in the car . . . and they’re . . . Alan had been following them. He’s not bringing them home because he doesn’t want Alan to know where we live.” She made the implication that Alan was a raging lunatic, looking to cause violence.

A day later, Brad called Jessica to ask what was going on. Why all the fuss about Alan knowing where she lived?

“I’m concerned Alan is going to win custody,” Jessica said. She sounded dismayed.

“Really?”

“It’s the homeschooling. That’s what’s going to win it for him.” Jessica was never licensed to homeschool the kids. In addition to everything else, she had lied about that, too.

Brad didn’t know what to say. Jessica mentioned jail. Brad had no idea things had spiraled so out of control.

“I can’t lose the girls, Brad, and the child support. I need that money.”

Jessica liked to say she and her children had a “close relationship.” She could always talk to them, she insisted, about anything. And yet what she claimed to have talked to them about at times bordered on the psychotic and bizarre, considering how young they were.

“And when they were growing up,” Jessica admitted, “you know, all along the years, they would ask me things, have questions after watching a TV show about maybe drug usage or premarital sex, which, I mean, I had premarital sex and was not married when I had them. (Not true.) We would have separate conversations about each of these things and about just different types of values that we found to be important.” Jessica instilled in her kids, she claimed, not to “have preconceived notions about other people, because you’re not that person. You haven’t lived their life. You don’t know! How road rage is just crazy, because you’re driving down a road and you don’t know why this person cut you off in a car. You don’t know.”

She went on to explain why we receive tax refunds “and that you don’t have to take that money,” she told them, “if you don’t want to. . . . That’s a choice you make as a member of society. You have to pay your taxes, but you don’t have to take extra back.”

Did it make sense to share this with ten- and eight-year-old children?

Jessica thought so.

She also described how geometry works and her idea behind Einstein’s theory of relativity. “A lot of what we learn is perception . . . and that was what I taught my children. I would want them to continue to understand that things are fluid, things change, and simply because one person says that’s an absolute, it may not be. . . .”

Jessica was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), [BPD] is a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image, and behavior. This instability often disrupts family and work life, long-term planning, and the individual’s sense of self-identity. Originally thought to be at the “borderline” of psychosis, people with BPD suffer from a disorder of emotion regulation.¹

This description would serve to illustrate Jessica’s behavior inside the next three months, almost as if it were written specifically for her. One of the worst fears a person suffering from BPD can face is the thought that their most sacred possession in life will be taken away.

This, many doctors agree, can cause a person with BPD to spin entirely out of control.

On December 18, 2001, Jeff and Jessica were at their Myrtlewood Drive home with the kids. Jessica knew she was in violation of the law. She’d been keeping the kids away from Alan for well over a year. He had not even spoken to them.

While the McCords were inside, there was some movement outside the house.

Jeff looked out the window. He knew what it was. So did Jessica.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO), along with an officer from the Hoover PD, was in front of the McCord home. From the bathroom window upstairs, behind the blinds, Jeff watched the two vehicles pull up.

Pulling away from the blinds, Jeff heard the car doors slam.

“Can I help you guys?” Jeff asked, meeting them outside in the driveway moments later.

Jessica was upstairs in the master bedroom. According to her, she had just woken up. It was early morning. “We were all still in bed,” she recalled, “in pajamas and everything, watching Martha Stewart on TV.”