14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
PART III - THE NARROW GATE
35
36
37
38
39
40
PART IV - GONE FOR GOOD
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
PART V - THE BRINK OF ETERNITY
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kill for Me
Copyright Page
Notes
For Dianne Manion,
Friend, neighbor, first reader
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For this project I reviewed thousands of pages of trial testimony, police reports, court records/filings, motions, trial evidence, divorce decrees, letters, cards, e-mails and various other documents, in addition to conducting over seventy-five hours of interviews. To protect some of my sources, I have changed several names. They are clearly marked in the text. I also changed the names of Jessica McCord’s children, although I never spoke to them. Jeff and Jessica McCord, in addition to all the key players involved in this true-crime saga, had his or her chance to speak with me. Some chose not to. I commend all those who told their stories and added that additional layer of truth I seek when writing these books.
—M. William Phelps
October 2009
PROLOGUE
Friday evening, February 15, 2002. There was a slight breeze blowing in from the north, under partly cloudy skies. It was sixty-one degrees.
Warm. Mild. Pleasant.
Not bad for the South in the middle of winter.
Pam Walker worked for a division of BlueCross BlueShield in Birmingham, Alabama. Like clockwork, Pam returned home from a tiring day at 5:45 P.M. Her dog had been cooped up in the house all day. So Pam had a habit of pulling into the reserved parking space in front of her condo and immediately taking the pooch out for a walk.
The condo complex on Warringwood Drive in Hoover was in a quiet section of town, not yet affected by the overly congested, economically stimulated boom taking place in this popular suburb of Birmingham. The condo complex consisted of about twenty units connected in a line, like row houses.
As usual, Pam took the dog out back. There was a ditch there that dropped down into an area with a wall of trees lining the back of the condo units. It was the best place for the dog to take care of business.
Enjoying the warm winter air, Pam forced the pooch along the tree line to the opposite end of the condo complex, away from her unit. Across from where Pam stood, that thickly settled wooded area behind the condo units blocked what was a housing development—directly west—on the opposite side of the tree line. On a clear day, you could almost see through the trees, past a little ravine, into the corresponding neighborhood: a nice, cozy suburban denizen of middle-class homes. Sort of a white-picket-fence community.
Husbands. Wives. Children. Grandmothers and grandfathers.
Pam stood at the border of the wooded area. Her pooch went about its business. By now, it was, Pam remembered later, about fifteen minutes into her walk—or somewhere close to six o’clock.
Just then, as the dog finished, a loud noise startled Pam Walker. The sound was something out of the ordinary: two cracks in a successive pattern.
Pop. Pop.
“Directly across from where I was standing,” Pam later said in court.
Firecrackers? Pam thought.
But the Fourth of July was months away.
Kids. Playing around. Maybe a car backfired.
Who knew?
There was a ravine in front of Pam. The sounds had definitely come from just beyond the wooded area, where all those seemingly perfect lives inside model-train-set houses were located on the opposite side of the trees.
After thinking about it, Pam hustled her pooch back inside and forgot about the strange noises—that is, until weeks later, when the cops came knocking, asking people in the neighborhood if they had heard anything close to “gunshots” back near the middle of February.
In every life, joy flashes gay and radiant across the sorrows of . . . which the web of our life is woven.
—Gogol, Dead Souls
PART I
A GRUESOME DISCOVERY
1
Joan and Philip Bates raised three delightful boys. They were as close as parents could be to their children. A solid family unit, the Bateses were one of those wholesome, old-fashioned Southern Christian families who believed strong ties, loyalty, respect, support and admiration for others were what mattered more than anything else in life. Married nearly forty years, Joan and Philip lived in and around Birmingham, Alabama, until 1991, when Philip took a job in Georgia, and moved the tribe to Atlanta. Philip was an engineer, able to get his degree, he was proud to admit, because Joan had worked her fingers to the bone and taken care of the family financially while he finished school. No doubt about it, the Bates marriage was a partnership.
Fifty-fifty.
In 1992, after twenty-nine years with BellSouth, Philip retired, relocated the family to Marietta, just outside Atlanta, where he went to work for an engineering firm, the Parsons Corporation. By 2000, the kids were grown and out of the house. Now it was time for Joan and Philip to settle into their “golden” years and enjoy the fruits of a life lived under the auspices of hard work and moral decency. There were grandkids and daughters-in-law these days. Family get-togethers and holidays.