“Well, let’s do the [second] search warrant first,” Brown suggested, “see what comes out of it—and we’ll make the arrest after that.”

One step at a time. Be prudent. The guilty always make mistakes. Not that McDanal had suggested such a thing, but the idea was to make the case stick, as opposed to rushing into it.

Brown thought about things. There were a few aspects of the case that struck him immediately. Inside the trunk of Alan’s rental car, forensics uncovered one bullet that had hit Alan in the wrist and went through his watch. A .44 caliber.

“Probably the only reason that it stayed in him,” Brown said later, “is because it hit his watch. It’s the only bullet we got.”

Brown contemplated this fact: We’ve got us eight bullet holes, four in each victim, but only one bullet that was removed . . . during autopsy. That meant there could likely be additional projectiles somewhere. Maybe inside the McCord home. But the first search had not turned up anything. In fact, out of all the ammunition the HPD uncovered inside the McCord house during the first search, not one bullet was a .44 caliber.

Detective Laura Brignac weighed in with her thoughts about Jessica and Jeff McCord, Albert and Dian Bailey, letting Brown know where she was coming from. Brignac could tell by interviewing Dian and Albert, especially, that Jessica and her mother had some sort of pull on the men in their lives, which meant that there might be more people involved.

“Dian Bailey and Jessica,” Brignac said, “definitely ruled the roost. What they said in that family went. As a matter of fact, the control they had over these men [Albert and Jeff], the more we got into the investigation, became obvious. Albert was henpecked. I don’t know another word for it. Albert wanted to cooperate, say something, but you could tell that the wrath of Dian and Jessica would have been upon him. We wondered later what Jessica had on Albert to control him as much as she did. He was afraid. He feared Jessica. Heck, everybody feared Jessica.”

From what Brignac could discern, looking into Jessica’s eyes, talking to her during those early moments of the investigation, “There is no conscience there. It’s all about her manipulating and controlling. She did that—and did it well.”

Roger Brown was no wet-behind-the-ears investigating prosecutor. Analyzing a suspect in a murder case was all well and good, but he needed hard evidence to arrest Jessica McCord. He could not rubber stamp an arrest warrant without something tangible, concrete. That said, however, Brown and the HPD, now certain the case was theirs, knew there had to be spent projectiles somewhere. This was going to be the key here. Another bullet. The HPD needed to find it. Because the bottom line now was that all DA Roger Brown and the HPD had was, at best, a few spurious accusations and several circumstances pointing to Jessica killing her ex-husband and his wife. As far as something solid linking Jessica, Jeff or the both of them together to any crime, well, they had nothing. That first search of the McCord home had yielded no trace evidence.

There was a second problem. The house itself. The McCord home was trashed. The garage, for one, was cluttered from side to side, roof to ceiling. The woman was a slob to the tenth power. In having a close look at the inside of the home during that first search, the HPD considered that finding anything they could use was going to be like walking through a maze without an end.

“Literally,” Detective Brignac said later, “we thought of [finding a spent projectile in that house] as finding a needle in a haystack, solely because that house was such a mess.”

The one thing about cops, however, is that they are diligent and tenacious, and most have type A personalities. They don’t give up. When cops smell the smoke of a gun barrel, they keep searching for the source—no matter where it takes them or how difficult the search might seem.

DA Brown just had to convince a judge that a second search on the same property was going to be worth the court’s signature.

21

Alan was distraught over the woman he loved. He was sleeping on a cot on the campus of the University of Montevallo. He and Jessica were arguing whenever they spoke. With all this turmoil surrounding him, Alan decided to fall into his studies in order to make sure he could at least provide for his children, should he and Jessica not make it. Alan wasn’t giving up on the marriage by any means. But as he started his senior year, he was at his wit’s end now, wondering if Jessica would ever change.

“He seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Kevin said, “from our perspective, simply because she wasn’t contributing anything to the family. She wasn’t doing anything but spending every dollar that he made.”

Nearly two hundred miles north, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jessica’s biological father, George Callis, was living with his second wife, Olivia. He was totally disconnected from the children he fathered with Dian. Not long before Alan started sleeping on the campus, a series of events in George Callis’s life took place that gave rise to the idea that Jessica’s stories of an abusive childhood might not be so exaggerated, after all.

It was near six o’clock on the night of November 11, 1992. George called the local Chattanooga Police Department. There was a problem at his house, he said.

“I need an ambulance,” George said. He sounded resolutely calm and collected for a guy who needed medical help at his home ASAP.

“What’s the problem, sir?”

A pause. Then, “I’ve been beating my wife,” George said stoically. “She stopped breathing.”

Officers and medical technicians arrived soon after the call to find George upstairs, standing over Olivia, staring down at her.

Olivia was laid out on the bathroom floor. Unconscious. Still as a rock.

“What happened?” one cop asked.

“Um, I, well, I beat the hell out of her,” George stated.

The life, too. Olivia was dead. Her face was so badly beaten, cops could barely recognize a human being underneath all the blood and bruises. It looked as though George had taken a baseball bat to the woman’s face. He had finally graduated—a wife beater had turned a corner and had become a killer.

George was arrested, found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. It was there, amid the confines of cement walls and barbed wire, that George Callis, according to the dozens of pages of scribbled gibberish he sent me, found Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Both of them were now guiding his every move. These days, you ask George a question about the way he treated his family back then, or why he killed his second wife, you get something along the lines of: I have prayed about this and the HOLY SPIRIT has led me to recall what the LORD JESUS said at Matthew 10v8. . . . Then an extended quote from the Bible follows, with George stepping back in at some point, adding, Also, at least this could be the avenue whereby I could expound on the fact GOD and HIS SON JESUS plus THE HOLY SPIRIT are trying to get people to see [how] abortion is, if it continues, the way SATAN is blinding people and that GOD will have to pour HIS WRATH on us. GOD uses base ones and despised ones too, anybody HE chooses, to do what HE wants. Money, or the love of it, is not my primary concern. . . .

(Yes, George asked me for money in exchange for information, which I, of course, refused.)

This man, the same person who had raised Jessica and her siblings, arguably guiding them through those early, influential, formative years of childhood, sent me page after page after page of this “Scripture-inspired” nonsense, much of it entirely unreadable.