Despite all that had happened in their short lives together, Alan never stopped talking about the theater. The lights. The stage. All that went into the production of a Broadway play. It was part of Alan’s DNA—his release from the doldrums and anxieties of a marriage on the verge of imploding. Alan was possessed with being the man behind the curtain; he didn’t want anything to do with the spotlight. No notoriety or top billing. Instead, it was the lighting, the set design. Those aspects of a production that were done nearly anonymously.

“Alan is the one who will go on and win a Tony Award,” Joan Bates said, knowing how dedicated her son was to what he believed God had put him on the earth to do.

“He actually had a deal with Mom,” Kevin said later with a humble laugh, “that he’d buy her a Jaguar when he did [win].”

As the Christmas holiday of 1993 approached, Alan and Jessica were like two cars heading in opposite directions. While Alan’s collegiate life soared, Jessica’s homemaking and attempt at taking on odd jobs slid down as she fell into an abyss of depression and self-pity. This depression, doctors evaluating Jessica in the years to come would say, and the tenuous mental state that Jessica was in, seemed to manifest into “a manipulative fashion for secondary gain.”

She saw an avenue for which to blame others for her troubles and maybe get something out of it.

Married life was all about Jessica. Her world centered not on her children, Alan or what she could offer a failing marriage. Instead, Jessica focused on her own needs and the advantage she could take of the situation.

As Alan spent more time at Montevallo, harnessing his passion for the stage as a means to deal with a home life breaking apart, Jessica began to wonder once again what was going on. What was truly keeping Alan away from home? Was there someone else? Had Alan met another woman?

Jessica soon got a second wind and made some decisions. She went out and acquired her GED, as promised. Then decided to start taking classes herself.

Where?

Montevallo, of course. If Alan could be successful and graduate from college, why in the hell couldn’t she? She was tired of staying home, taking care of his kids. Fed up with cooking his meals. Washing his clothes. Changing diapers. Playing the housewife. It was time she took control of her own destiny. What if Alan left her? Where would Jessica be then? What would she have to fall back on?

Heading into the heart of winter 1993, after about a year of living in a household of numbing relentlessness—doing the same things and getting the same results, fighting and arguing and not working together—by the beginning of 1994, Jessica was twenty-two years old and was now taking her life back. No more was she going to lie around the house all day and night wasting away.

It was time to get off her butt and become somebody.

Do something.

By now, Jessica told anyone who would listen that Alan was hitting her, that he was abusive and mean-spirited. That he yelled and screamed at the kids. He was this terrible, rotten man. She was also saying they didn’t get along sexually. Didn’t share the same religious beliefs. And, to top it off, their politics were so far separated from each other, she often wondered how they ever got along to begin with.

“We were very incompatible,” Jessica commented later in court. “Between religion and politics and everything. Sexuality. I mean, just everything!”

Alan never once believed that couples should end a marriage or relationship because there were problems. He never felt that “rough times” were an indicator that the relationship was doomed. A marriage was a sacred bond. But also a living, breathing thing. It was going to experience ups and downs. Highs and lows. Love might even come and go, but Alan was determined. He was in it for the long haul. He hoped Jessica felt the same.

Jessica began to go out. As she did, she learned quickly that there was life beyond the four walls of her living room, the whine of two young kids and a television set. She was young. She could work at it and get her looks back. She could show Alan she wasn’t some lazy-ass housewife who depended on a man for everything.

“Before [McKenna] was born, there were some troubles,” Kevin Bates recalled, speaking about this period, “but Alan seemed to think that they were behind them, up until the new baby was born. When she was pregnant with [McKenna], everything was going forward.” Indeed, the marriage was fluid, moving in a direction. It had purpose and meaning. “After [McKenna] was born, this was when Jessica decided that she suddenly wanted to go back to school.”

Now the marriage was moving in two directions. Neither of them knew where the other was going. Or what the other wanted out of the union—if anything.

Alan did everything he could to take on more responsibility. He did not want to deprive his wife of her supposed “dream.” He juggled two kids and two jobs and still found the time to study and continue going to school himself. The man never slept.

This, mind you, while Jessica took a history class. One course. Which amounted to about three hours of class time and study per week.

No sooner had Jessica gone back to school when she came home one night and began hootin’ and hollerin’ to Alan about a “new friend” she had met in school. Some guy. One of her classmates. They got along like buddies, she said. He was “helping” her through some tough times, both in school and at home.

To Alan, this was a major relief. “She’s making friends . . . that’s great,” Alan told family members. It sure beat sleeping all day and feeling sorry for herself. Getting fat and angry and bitter.

Near Valentine’s Day, 1994, after almost two years of working on keeping the marriage together, Jessica approached Alan with an idea.

“I need to take a trip to Washington, [D.C.],” she said, “for a class project I am working on in history.” Jessica said she needed to do some research for a paper that was coming due. The trip would serve two purposes: schoolwork and a break from each other. It would help the marriage.

Alan thought about it. “Great,” he said.

“Lots of research. I’ll be by myself.”

Alan believed the trip would do her (and him) a lot of good.

Time apart makes the heart . . .

So Jessica left.

At some point that weekend, while Jessica was in D.C., Alan was rummaging through the house, looking for something. He dug through drawers. Looked in closets. As he did, he came across several missing items in the house belonging to Jessica that made him question whether she had actually taken the trip by herself. He never said what was missing, but one would have to assume it was lingerie and/or female items that would persuade a husband to think his wife planned on having sexual intercourse while she was away.

Alan was hurt, obviously. They were having problems. But an affair was no answer. In his pain and frustration, Alan searched the house and came up with a phone number for that “friend” Jessica had been talking about—the guy she had met in history class.

He dialed the number.

The guy’s mother answered.

“Hi, I was wondering if Steven (pseudonym) is home?”

“No,” the mother said, “he’s in Washington, D.C.”

Alan called Jessica at her hotel later that weekend. Knowing she wasn’t alone, he confronted his wife over the telephone with what he believed to be an affair she had premeditatedly planned and now executed.

Jessica screamed at him. Took to the defensive, as if she had nothing to explain. Nothing to hide. Nothing to talk about.

“I’m on my way home!” she yelled. “You had better be there. . . . This is not over, Alan.”

This being the argument and discussion regarding what she was doing in D.C. How dare Alan question her. The damn nerve of the guy.