“What did you and your wife do last night?” Williams asked, breaking it down into bites. She decided to start back at the beginning.

Jeff went into a long “spiel, this convoluted” story, Williams explained, about what they had done.

“We saw Lord of the Rings,” he began. “Then snuck into Black Hawk Down. We went for a river walk and drove around. . . . Oh yeah, and . . . well . . . Jessica wanted to go to a strip club, so we went.”

“Okay . . .”

Strip club?

“Well, look,” Jeff said, reaching into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet, “I have the movie stubs.”

How convenient, Williams thought. Time- and date-stamped movie stubs.

The GBI had already contacted the HPD and had gotten them involved. By now, both agencies had positive confirmation that the bodies were Alan and Terra Bates’s. They had been murdered. As originally thought, they were dead before being stuffed into the trunk of Alan’s rental car.

Once the GBI knew Alan and Terra were supposed to pick up the children at the McCord house the previous evening, they decided to put a surveillance on Jeff and Jessica’s house. Philip and Joan Bates mentioned there was some animosity between the two families, and Jessica hated her ex-husband and was fighting him for custody of the children. Standing in front of Jeff McCord, questioning him regarding his whereabouts the previous night, Williams and Vance knew a good portion of this corrosive history. And now they had Jeff handing over—he just happened to have them on him—movie stubs. At best, it all seemed so staged. At worst, Jeff was just a numbskull and didn’t really understand the ramifications of his highly suspicious actions.

“Can we see those stubs, Officer McCord?”

“Sure,” Jeff said happily.

Jeff produced what Williams described as “two pristine movie stubs” from the Carmike Cinema on Lorna Road, in Birmingham. He took them out of his wallet. The date on the stubs was, sure enough, February 15, the previous night, 6:57 P.M.

How ’bout that.

Williams and Vance looked at each other. “This was a definite red flag,” Williams told me later. “Generally, people leave movie stubs in their coat pocket, pants pocket . . . and here are these two pristine—in case I needed them, apparently—stubs.”

“You cannot keep those,” Jeff said. Then, with an overconfident smugness, “But you can go ahead and make a copy of them.”

Why doesn’t this guy want to help? Williams pondered.

Okay, so they had gone to the movies. “A night out,” as Jeff put it. And he and Jessica were, in fact, gone until the break of dawn. That much could be proven. They had driven over to the Home Depot in Birmingham first thing in the morning, 6:00 A.M., to pick up materials to begin several long-overdue remodeling projects. Yet, they walked out of the Home Depot with basically nothing.

On the face of it, Williams and Vance considered, it sounded like, well, a story.

A carefully crafted alibi.

“The thing is,” Williams said, “the truth doesn’t change. It is what it is. No matter how you remember it, the truth does not change.”

After they concluded the interview, Jeff took off to another part of the station house, one would imagine, as far away from Vance and Williams as he could get inside the same building. Williams and Vance went in to see Jeff’s chief. They needed a few favors.

“Keep him here for his shift, could you?”

“Sure,” the chief said.

“Yeah, we want to keep him off the road.”

“No problem.”

“Listen,” Williams said, “if his wife calls, don’t let him speak with her.” The last thing they wanted was for Jeff and Jessica to talk. If they were hiding something, Jeff would spill what he had just talked about and they would have a chance to get together with their stories. The GBI wanted to speak with Jessica before she got a chance to speak with Jeff again.

Leaving the Pelham Police Department, Williams and Vance got hold of detective sergeant Tom McDanal from the Hoover PD. HPD was busy conducting surveillance at the McCord home, and from another room, several detectives monitored the interview with Jeff at the Pelham PD. Williams wanted to know if McDanal could go with her and Vance over to Dian Bailey’s house on Whiting Road. They wanted to speak with Jessica McCord immediately, but at this point the GBI wasn’t sure whose case this was going to turn out to be. On top of that, it would only help if a representative from the corresponding agency investigating the case was there.

McDanal said sure.

Now there were three different law enforcement agencies investigating the deaths of Alan and Terra.

Heading over to Dian Bailey’s home, Williams and Vance received reports from the Pelham PD that Jessica was, as they had suspected, calling the station already—“repeatedly”—and asking to speak with Jeff.

But no one allowed it.

10

Williams and Vance made a detour. They stopped at the McCords’ Myrtlewood Drive home to see what was going on before heading over to Dian and Albert Bailey’s. The HPD informed both investigators that there was an older gentleman inside the McCord house. His van was pulled up to the back door. It appeared he was working on the house. Taking things out. Bringing things in. At this point anybody even remotely connected to Terra and Alan could know something. But inside the McCords’ house—that was different. What was this guy doing?

Williams and Vance knocked on the front door. That sign—telling visitors to go around to the back—was still there.

With no response, they walked around. The man came out. “Can I help you?” He had a surprised look about him.

They identified themselves and asked what he was doing in the house.

“I’m Albert Bailey,” he said. “I’m just doing some work on the house.”

“You see Jessica around?” Vance asked.

“No . . . I don’t know where she is. I think she might have gone over to the Home Depot.”

They knew where Jessica was.

“Thanks,” Williams said.

Then they left.

A twenty-nine-year law enforcement veteran, HPD detective sergeant Rod Glover was in charge of the surveillance at Jessica and Jeff McCord’s house on Myrtlewood Drive. He heard that Vance and Williams had gone over to the McCord house and had spoken to Albert Bailey. But they had left to visit Jessica’s mother, just blocks away.

The investigation of two missing adults had now spread out to include two different states, several towns, and various law enforcement agencies. It was midafternoon on February 16, 2002, a bright and cold Saturday in the middle of the most miserable month of the year. Williams and Vance were headed over to the Bailey residence. Glover, who was traveling down Lorna Road, was getting ready to make a left onto Chapel Hill and connect with Myrtlewood. As he did, Glover took a call from Chris Bryant, an officer stationed near the McCord home. Bryant was watching the house, waiting for Glover to arrive. It was Bryant who spotted Jeff McCord, hours earlier, leaving the house on his way to work, alerting the GBI and Pelham PD.

“We got a white van,” Bryant said over the radio, “on the move, leaving the location.”

Albert Bailey.

The white van pulled out of the driveway as Bryant spoke. Bryant got a read on the plate and called it in.

“Ten-four.”

The van was headed toward Rod Glover. He had since stopped on Lorna Road to wait for Bailey’s arrival so he could pick up the tail.

Bryant sat in his car, down the block from the McCord house. Leaving, Albert Bailey didn’t suspect a thing. Why should he? He had no idea, in fact, he was being watched and now followed.

Glover got behind the van. From Lorna Road—a four-lane, heavily traveled commercial route—the van made its way onto Highway 31, northbound. Then turned off and onto Southland Drive, traveling out of the city of Hoover and into Homewood, a neighboring town. From there, Albert Bailey headed toward Oxmoor Road, near the Birmingham town line, and made his way into a thickly settled industrial area, where Coca-Cola, Budweiser and several other large corporations had local warehouses and plants.