Law enforcement had an arrest warrant. Jessica was being charged with contempt. She was going to jail for not allowing Alan to see his kids—the judge had warned her repeatedly.

“I could hear them,” Jessica said, “discussing that there was some sort of an order relating to the children and an order for my arrest.”

“Some sort of an order,” as if she had no idea why they were there.

In fact, Jessica later claimed she had no idea an arrest warrant had been issued for her. She insisted that no one had told her about it.

“Yeah, can I see your documentation?” Jeff asked. The kids were upstairs with their mom, listening. They “became very upset. Very, very upset,” Jessica said.

The girls cried, she claimed. Jessica tried calming them. She said she explained what was going on. “Preparing them,” she called it. Again, this was after first saying she had no idea why the cops were at her house.

Jeff looked over the paperwork downstairs. It all seemed legit.

Why was he stalling?

“Does this order amount to a search warrant?” Jeff asked. He knew the law.

No answer.

“Well, does it?” he asked again.

If it didn’t, he said, law enforcement was not allowed into the house to search for Jessica. They would have to wait outside.

Instead, Jeff claimed, the sheriffs walked past him toward the door, one of them asking, “Is she here?”

Jeff opened the door. “Come right in.”

“Where is she?”

Jeff looked at the paperwork again.

“We’re separated,” he said, walking in behind them. He was trying to say that he and Jessica had split up. “She’s not here.”

Downstairs, undeterred, one of the sheriffs asked Jeff, “Where is she?”

By this point Jessica had told the children that the cops were there to take her away. “Well,” one of them said (if you believe Jessica), “just say you’re Auntie.”

“No, baby,” Jessica said, “that’s not really going to fly. They are police. That won’t work.”

“Oh yes, it will, Mommy. Yes, it will.”

The kids hugged her.

Downstairs, Jeff looked away after he was asked for a third time if Jessica was home. Then, “I have no idea where she or the girls are, sorry.”

There was movement in the house. One of the deputies heard this and headed up the stairs.

He found Jessica in the master bedroom with the kids.

“Are you Jessica Bates McCord?”

“Auntie . . . Auntie . . . Auntie,” the kids chanted, according to Jessica.

“That’s my aunt,” one of the girls said.

“I’m Belinda (pseudonym), Jessica’s sister,” Jessica said (according to several reports of this incident).

The sheriff was suspicious. It was the way Jessica had answered.

“Why are you here?” the sheriff asked. “Where is Jessica?”

“Um, Jessica left a couple of months ago and we haven’t seen her.”

“Well, why are you here with the kids? Aren’t these Jessica’s kids?” The sheriff then asked the children their names, knowing they were Jessica’s kids. They had a court order, which had the names of the girls. They were supposed to pick them up, too.

Jessica thought about the question. “Well, Jessica ran off because she caught me in bed with Kelley.”

Interesting excuse to give when hiding your identity.

One of the sheriffs called a supervisor to see if someone could dig up a photograph of Jessica and send it over. They also wanted fingerprints so they could verify she wasn’t lying.

As they discussed this, Jessica “admitted” who she was to the sheriffs.

After a bit of small talk, Jessica was handcuffed and taken outside. The story she told upstairs, the sheriff later said, “didn’t jibe with us.”

Inside the sheriff’s car, preparing to leave for Shelby County Jail, Jessica broke down. She started bawling. Hyperventilating. She was scared, she claimed.

After crying for a spell, she got angry. Then she snapped out of it and said, “This isn’t fair. Somebody’s going to pay for this!”

40

Jail was not a place compatible with Jessica McCord’s character. The idea that she was in the same room with common criminals that she looked down upon infuriated the woman. When it came time to make telephone calls, it was Jeff who bore the brunt of his wife’s anger. She berated him on the telephone in front of other prisoners. Cursed at him. Made unrealistic demands. “And,” one fellow inmate later said, “talked to him like he was a five-year-old. . . . You know, she gives the orders.”

“You need to get off your ass and do whatever it is you can to get me out of here,” Jessica snapped during her first call to Jeff. This was before swearing at him and slamming the phone down on its cradle.

She called back a few minutes later. “I’m the one locked up for ten days, and you and my mother are not doing anything out there to help me.”

Jeff asked how things were going. He was concerned.

“How am I doing? How . . . you’re responsible for my being here, Kelley.”

“Basically,” Jeff said later, she made him feel that “I was responsible for all the problems in her life at that particular time.”

Jeff considered that because Jessica was the one sitting in the jail and not him, everything had to be his fault. Jessica’s constant criticizing was, Jeff said later, all part of the manipulation effort on her part to get what she wanted. “She felt that I should have figured out a better or a different way to have handled the so-called ‘problem’ (meaning Alan) before it got to the point where she was hauled off to jail.”

Jessica was livid. Absolutely furious. She ordered Jeff to call someone and get her out of jail before she went mad. All Jeff could do was listen and wonder what in the world he could do. She had violated an order of the court. Why wasn’t she getting that? Sure, Jeff was a cop, but he couldn’t do anything for her now. It was ten days. Suck it up.

“Jessica’s . . . attitude,” a fellow inmate said later, putting it mildly, “was kind of rough.”

Jeff had been told over and over by Jessica that Alan was abusive. Jessica explained to him that Alan was stuck on getting back at her and had repeatedly hurt her and the kids. And now the court had the nerve to go and side with him and his new wife. Maybe it was Jeff’s fault. Maybe he could have done more for his wife. Maybe there was something to what she had suggested a few weeks back—that the only way to get rid of the problem was to tend to it themselves.

As that conversation had progressed, Jessica talked about the idea of losing the children to Alan. She could not allow that to happen. Alan could never get custody. That was not an option here.

“I’ll do anything to keep those kids, Kelley.”

She sounded desperate, and Jeff knew what she meant.

“I know . . . I know,” he said.

“Kelley, anything. I’ll do anything to keep those kids. You know that.”

She said it “several more times,” Jeff later explained.

During Jessica’s ten-day stint in jail, Jeff and Dian called Alan and asked if he would allow Jessica to leave the jail for two days—during the Christmas holiday—so she could spend that time with the children. The court wasn’t going to allow her out of jail unless Alan signed off on it.

Without hesitation Alan agreed. For him, it had never been about punishing Jessica. It had never been personal. It had always been about the children.

Before leaving jail after her ten-day stint, a fiery Jessica McCord—even after Alan had allowed her the holiday with the kids—turned to a cellmate and let the woman know how she felt about being locked up.

“Somebody is going to pay,” Jessica snapped.

PART IV