Williams went back to his car and got on the radio.

4

Philip and Joan Bates did not find much sleep throughout the night of February 15, 2002. Alan’s parents spent long periods staring at the ceiling. Wondering. Waiting. Counting sheep. Their stomachs in knots. When was the phone going to ring? When was that news coming? Joan knew it wasn’t going to be good.

A mother’s instinct.

“I had done all I knew how to do,” Philip said later, recalling that hectic night, “and went to bed for a few hours.”

That morning Philip made coffee. The clock on the wall in the kitchen said 6:00 A.M. They had not heard from Alan since Friday afternoon. Not a word from anyone, for that matter. Philip called his son’s cell phone again, same with Terra’s. But he got the same voice message.

He put the phone down, he said later, and thought about it: Darn. Those kids are in trouble.

It was time to file a missing persons report, Philip knew. It was the only way to get law enforcement out and about, looking for Alan, Terra and the kids.

Sipping his coffee, Philip knew the first question law enforcement would ask was a question he did not have the answer to. He needed to get some information first. Be prepared. Have what they need. Don’t sound desperate. Appear organized. An engineer thinks through every contingency, every possible problem before it happens.

The worried father took out a pad. Sat down and called rental car agencies inside the Birmingham Airport terminal to see which company had rented Alan and Terra a car. Philip knew Alan always used one of the agencies from the airport. He just didn’t know which one.

So he started with Avis.

“I told them who I was, what I was trying to do, and my concern,” Philip said later.

The agent was helpful. Said he understood Philip’s dilemma. Maybe he could help. Heck, he wanted to help.

Philip asked, “Have you rented a car to my son, Alan Bates . . . and if so, could you give me the color, make, model, maybe a description of it, so I could file a missing persons report?”

Philip knew he was probably going to have to repeat this same line to several different companies until he found the one Alan had used. But what he heard on that first call, he certainly did not expect.

“Um . . . hold on a minute, sir,” the agent said. He sounded concerned. Worried. There was urgency in his young voice. “I need to get my supervisor.”

Philip was shocked by this comment. Was there a red flag in the computer system on Alan’s bill?

A manager came on the line. Philip told the same story. Then the manager made a suggestion that spiked the hair on the back of Philip’s neck. “Sir, I was told to give this number out to anyone calling here regarding that rental.”

The number was for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Philip’s heart fluttered; his stomach twisted.

“What?”

Here it was, Saturday morning, February 16, and Alan, Terra and the girls were a no-show. Philip had even called Terra’s father, Tom Klugh, a man who knew just about every move his thirty-year-old daughter made. (Terra was set to turn thirty-one in about six weeks, on March 30.) Tom had not heard from them, either. And now here was some car rental agent manager telling Philip to phone the GBI.

“That’s when I knew,” Philip said. “That was it.”

5

GBI crime scene specialist Todd Crosby was one of the first to arrive at the Hawkins Academy Road scene that morning. Crosby worked out of the GBI’s Milledgeville, Georgia, office, a sixty-minute drive south of Rutledge. He had received a call at four forty-five that morning from the GBI Communications Center and hit the road in his crime scene van shortly after.

The GBI works on a “request only” basis, supporting all law enforcement agencies in the state of Georgia. According to its mission statement: [The] GBI is an independent, statewide agency that provides assistance to the state’s criminal justice system in the areas of criminal investigations, forensic laboratory services and computerized criminal justice information.

The Bureau, as it’s sometimes called, is split up into three divisions: investigative, forensic sciences and crime information. Each works to serve the other—and the corresponding law enforcement agencies calling on the GBI for help. It is an agency that has been operating in the state of Georgia in some form or fashion since 1937.

With two severely burned bodies in the trunk of a car, there was a good chance someone was trying to cover up a set of murders. The mob did this sort of thing—although, they were generally a lot cleaner about it. If you know what you’re doing, a fire is a great way to destroy evidence. The only problem is, you had better make sure you finish the job; because with the technology available today, a forensic team is certain to uncover bags of trace evidence in support of its case if the fire doesn’t do the trick. Arson investigation is not as difficult as it may seem. Fire can sometimes preserve evidence and leave clues otherwise unavailable.

This was, of course, one of the main reasons why Todd Crosby was summoned to the scene. His job is to collect biological and fingerprint evidence. If someone left his or her DNA at the scene, or fingerprints somewhere on this vehicle, Crosby would find it with any one of his many forensic tools.

Crosby was briefed as to what was going on. The GBI Communications Center paged him and explained what it could. By 6:40 A.M., Crosby parked his van near the scene. Getting out of his vehicle, he was now among the commotion of flashing red and blue lights lined up along the road. Soon the sun would be up. Then the real work could begin.

Crosby first noticed that the original crime-scene tape was in an area too constricted and confined. It was awfully windy out, more so than it normally was on an average day. The scene needed to be expanded in case pieces of trace had drifted away with the wind. So Crosby ordered “approximately two hundred yards on either side of the vehicle” to be “roped” off. This area would be the “new crime scene.” The idea was to begin a gridlike search of the ground for anything: cigarette butts, chewing gum, footprints, a fingernail, a piece of paper. Whatever jumped out. Killers are not generally prone to pick up after themselves and leave no evidence. Sure, the murderer generally thinks he or she is smarter than the rest of the world (especially law enforcement), but the reality is that all killers leave evidence behind. Crosby’s job was to find what this killer had haphazardly left in his or her wake. That one clue. That one piece of the puzzle that might just make sense—and tie things together—in the coming days.

The wind picked up as Crosby began his duties. You get only one or maybe two shots at a crime scene before it becomes too overtaken and infested by people. “Contaminated” is the word they use. After a day, an outside scene like this wasn’t going to be worth a damn.

Around the car, as the sun rose and illuminated the immediate area, pine trees were scattered, stuck perfectly in the ground like immense green arrows pointing toward the sky. There was not a house in sight anyone could see. As Crosby conducted his search, he photographed things. The initial area the technician focused on, which Crosby knew to be the most important, was the inside of the trunk, where both bodies had been uncovered. From the inside of the vehicle, looking toward the backseat, he noted it was an area of the vehicle that had been burned completely. So much so, Crosby could see into the trunk from inside the car.

As he glanced into the vehicle, a set of knees stared eerily back at him.

“Her legs,” Crosby said later, “were bent back around, behind her. . . .”