Alan was looking forward to sitting down and speaking his mind on the entire matter. Laying it all out.

This was it for Alan Bates. Game day. As soon as those depositions were done, he could pick up the kids, head off to Marietta, Georgia, for the weekend and meet up with family and friends. After that, all he had to do was wait until his day in court.

Finally the system was falling back into favor with the truth.

43

As far back as the spring of 2001, Jessica had suggested to Jeff that violence was likely the only way to settle her dispute with Alan. There was no other way. Alan was going to win in court.

“Let’s kill him,” Jessica said one day (according to Jeff).

Officer Jeff McCord had shrugged it off as the frustrated gesture of a woman who hated her ex-husband. How many scorned ex-wives, full of fury, had sat around with friends, sipping cheap wine during happy hour, and then blurted out, I wish he were dead?

In mid-February 2002, after a meeting with David Dorn at his office downtown, Jeff and Jessica returned home and picked up that “let’s kill him” conversation once again. Jessica turned to Jeff and, according to what Jeff later claimed, said, “We should just kill him.”

They were in the living room. Alone. The kids were gone. Probably over at Jessica’s mother’s house.

Jeff looked at his wife. She sounded serious this time. Like she actually meant it. He was startled by this.

Alan and the custody matter was the focus of the McCord marriage. From the moment it appeared that Alan was going, by Jessica’s count, “to get his way,” life inside the McCord household centered around how Jessica was going to get Alan back—and how Jeff was going to help her.

Jeff didn’t put too much thought into the suggestion of killing Alan. “I figured she was blowing off steam,” he said later, “just ticked off . . . standard divorce stuff.” Jeff added that he never had any reason to “think she’d even consider following through with anything. So I didn’t pay any, any real attention.”

Then she said it again a few days later. This time over the telephone. “In my opinion, Kelley, Alan needs to be killed.”

“What?” Jeff had forgotten about those prior suggestions.

“Different people—‘friends’—have suggested,” Jessica continued, “everything from the only way to get rid of this problem is to put a bullet in his head, to something needs to happen to him. . . .”

Jeff was taken aback by this recent proposal. Jessica sounded matter-of-fact, as if murder was an option she was now actually considering. She wasn’t just “blowing off steam” anymore, Jeff could tell. The woman was talking—and apparently had been talking to others—about killing Alan.

Jeff recalled, in his circuitous, hard-to-follow way of dismissing his involvement, “Her reason at that time, she really didn’t specify reasons, other than the prior history of domestic abuse [she claimed], just in her, according to her, the type of person he was, how he . . . how badly or however he mistreated [the children], how controlling he was, so forth and so on.”

Jessica had made all of that up. Alan was none of those things. There was no record of Alan ever being abusive toward Jessica or the kids.

The idea of losing the children to Alan didn’t jibe with what David Dorn later said. Describing this same time period and the tone of Jessica’s demeanor then, Dorn reported that he had been telling his client he was fairly confident she would be able to retain permanent custody of the children, as far as he was concerned. “All throughout the process, you know,” Dorn testified in court later, “it was my professional opinion we were going to win. . . . There was never a time when I told her [that] we were going to lose.”

But Jessica went home and played it off on Jeff differently. She made it appear as though she was under the enormous amount of pressure of losing the children—and she couldn’t allow an abusive maniac to raise her kids. She had told Jeff that both of her wrists had been broken by Alan and that he had once cracked her sternum. She showed him the scars, Jeff said.

Looking at them, Jeff responded, “Oh, my goodness.” He believed every word. “From watching the way she was able to pick up things,” Jeff said later, and the way she had to handle anything heavy, her wrists didn’t have the same strength as most people. “At least what I’ve seen in my experience.”

And so it was that display of weakness, apparently, that had led Jeff to believe that Alan had hurt her wrists.

Jessica described two separate incidents where she claimed Alan had put her in the hospital.

Jeff was curious, his cop instinct creeping up on him. “Did you file a police report? Did you have him prosecuted?” Jeff also wondered why the judge in the custody matter wasn’t persuaded by any of this.

“Look, at the time this happened [the mid-1990s],” Jessica said after Jeff questioned her, “when I called the Shelby County Sheriff’s [Office] for assistance, when a deputy showed up, his attitude was ‘Well, you know, you’re not dead. . . . You know there’s nothing I can do. He’s married to you.’”

And so, with Jessica’s continued references to the children being forced by the court to go live with an abusive father, Jeff McCord began to think about protecting his wife and her children any way that he could. The question gnawing at him as deposition day approached, however, became: how was he going to step in and defend them?

44

The thought of getting rid of Alan consumed Jessica. It was now a focal point rather than a passing joke. In Jessica’s mind, the court would see the facts of the case. She couldn’t escape from the past: jail, hiding the kids from Alan, assaulting him, keeping the kids out of school, all the lies.

Despite what her attorney was saying, it all added up to a loss. The only way to avoid putting the kids through the hell that awaited them with Alan and Terra, Jessica kept nagging Jeff, was to take Alan out of the picture.

“To her,” Jeff commented later, the kids being taken away to live with Alan “meant ‘gone for good.’ The kids would be out of her life entirely. She would never be able to get them back.” Jessica was convinced, Jeff believed, that “Alan and his family would do everything in their power to see that she had little, if any, contact with them.”

Payback. A taste of what Alan had endured for seven years. Such a turn of the tables terrified Jessica. So she made up her mind: she was no longer going to allow the court to decide the fate of her children.

During the first week of February 2002, Jessica called Naomi. They had not spoken in some time. Naomi could hear the rage in Jessica’s voice coming out of the telephone. “She was livid.”

“Can you believe it?” Jessica said. “Can you believe he had me put in jail?” Here it was well over a month since she had been released and Jessica was still stewing about it.

“How are you doing?” Naomi wanted to know. It was the first she’d heard that Jessica had gone to jail.

“I cannot believe that he allowed me to stay in jail over Christmas. . . .”

Naomi had no idea Jessica was lying about this. She didn’t know what to say. How to react.

“Alan’s incredible,” Jessica said before they hung up.

As deposition day neared, Jessica was back to not allowing Alan to talk to his children.

Alan was patient. He felt the court was going to work for him this time around. It was a matter of waiting for that March 5 trial date and following the court’s orders up until then. He’d waited years. What was another few weeks?

Jessica approached Jeff once again with the idea that the best way to deal with Alan was to have him killed or to do it themselves. Something had to be done. March was right around the corner.