“Busy, ma’am.”

“I need to speak with him. Please . . . now.”

“No. You can’t right now. He’s busy.”

Getting nowhere, Jessica decided to pack up the children and head down to the HPD.

Back inside the interrogation room, one of the investigators asked again, “Jeff, where is the carpet?”

“I think she took it to the dump.” Jeff named two different “public dumps in Alabama.”

“Which one?”

He went quiet.

“We need to know which dump.”

“Am I free to leave?” he asked at that point.

“Sure.”

The interview was over. Jeff sat as they got the paperwork for the search warrant together and gave him copies.

“I need my gun and belt so I can turn it into Pelham,” Jeff said. “I suspect I’ll be placed on administrative leave until the outcome of this investigation.”

McDanal left the room to go get Jeff’s gun belt.

When he returned (phrasing it as though there was bad news, that same report indicated), McDanal told Jeff, “There’s a problem with the evidence room door—we cannot retrieve the gun belt at this time.”

Jeff went into a laughing fit in response to McDanal’s explanation: After learning what the actual news was, McCord laughed uncontrollably and then noticeably, physically relaxed, the report noted.

Up and down. An emotional roller coaster for Jeff McCord. He didn’t know how to feel. Or how to act.

Jeff was told he could leave. Jessica was waiting outside in the parking lot.

“There was just so much going on, so much to be done at this point,” Detective Brignac said later, “we had our hands full. We were all working sixteen-hour days by then. . . .”

Jessica sat in the family van with the children and their clothes. Jeff got in. They were heading to Pensacola, Florida, to drop the kids off at Jessica’s sister’s and maybe wait out the investigation down there.

Jeff made no promise he’d be back in town anytime soon.

“If they stay in Florida,” one investigator said, “we’re going to have big problems because of jurisdiction issues.”

As Jessica and Jeff pulled out of the parking lot, two officers in an unmarked vehicle got behind the van and followed them.

25

They lived in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Cullowhee is a quaint little village in between Rich Mountain and Pumpkintown, located at the base of Western Carolina University. Throughout the past half-century, Cullowhee has housed anywhere between two thousand and three thousand people. This is Blue Ridge–Smoky Mountain territory; Small-Town, USA, where neighbors watch one another’s backs.

It was the early 1970s. Terra Klugh was three years old. It rained hard that morning, on and off. The torrential downpours were enough to swell the creeks in the region into fiercely powerful moving streams that could swoop in and swallow up a child of Terra’s age in an instant. As an adult, Terra loved to travel. As a child, she was one of those kids who liked to go outside and explore—take off on her own and wander about, pick dandelions and blow them into the wind, maybe roll around in fields of flowers. Her parents were kids themselves, only in their early twenties then. Four years older than his wife, Tom was studying psychology at a nearby graduate school.

Terra’s mother was busy doing some things around the house one afternoon. Tom was at school, but he called to say he’d be home soon. At some point Terra’s mother happened to call out Terra’s name.

No answer.

Uh-oh. There was that honest-to-goodness heart-pounding panic alarm every parent experiences at one time or another. A pain burst and throbbed in her chest as anxiety fueled a search.

“Sweetie? Sweetie?” Terra’s mom said, walking hurriedly around the house.

Nothing.

She went from room to room.

Terra!

“Sweetie?”

Not a peep.

Walking toward the front of the house, Terra’s mother realized the front door was open.

Terra was gone.

And then the real panic set in.

“When I got home,” Tom said later, “Terra’s mom told me what happened.”

Tom walked down by a barn about a quarter mile from the house.

“I saw some boot prints.”

Terra had just gotten a pair of red rubber rain boots, the shiny kind that a Hallmark card depicts kids wearing while splashing around in summer puddles. Because it rained so hard that morning, Terra decided to put on her new boots and go out on one of her adventurous walks.

Down by the fast-moving creek, Tom spied those boot prints again—tiny molds in the mud stamped all over the place. They led down to the creek, where the embankment dropped off sharply into the water.

Then he saw barefoot prints walking away from the water on the other side of the boot prints. They were heading in the opposite direction. Little tiny feet that Tom knew in his heart were his daughter’s.

He took a look at the water. How fast the current moved. Shook his head.

If she fell in there, she doesn’t have a chance.

“Terra . . . my goodness,” Tom said to himself.

“It looked as though she had walked down to the creek and threw her boots into the water. If she would have fallen in the water . . . Terra was gone.”

Tom headed back to the house.

As it turned out, a neighbor found Terra wandering around and brought her back home.

For Tom, the story epitomized what is, he says, “the evidence of God.” His wife had a hard time with the memory, thinking she’d done something wrong. But Tom (and later Terra) knew it was nothing more than a curious child. The mother wasn’t to blame. There was no room for guilt or liability.

“It just happened.”

One of those things.

Beyond that, “it wasn’t Terra’s time to part with the world,” Tom told me years later. “It would have been an easy time for her to have parted the world, but there was more for her to do.”

Indeed, Tom Klugh’s young princess, so stubbornly foolish in her adolescence, so free-spirited and colorful, had other plans in life to fulfill.

In nearly every way that mattered, Terra Klugh was the polar opposite of Jessica McCord. Terra was all that Alan’s first wife wasn’t: quiet, kind, self-reliant, warm, compassionate.

“She really, really liked Alan,” Marley Franklin said later. “What a doll of a girl. Just as sweet as you can imagine.”

Terra’s formative years were spent in Clemson, South Carolina. She studied for a short time in London, where she pursued a degree in art history. Her minor was mathematics, which she pursued at Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia. Terra spent four years as an architectural historian for the Historic American Building Survey, and then became a project historian for the Alabama Theatre. One of Terra’s goals was to begin work on her master of arts in historic preservation, an area of history she adored. Historic preservation was Terra’s passion, and one of her primary focuses was to attend Goucher College, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Terra was conscientious, pretty, smart and extremely mature when, in 1995, as Alan and Jessica entered into a tumultuous, postdivorce phase of their lives, she started working at the Alabama Theatre. At twenty-five, Terra was career-minded, same as Alan. By then, Alan was in charge of “everything [technical] that happened on the stage . . . ,” Alabama Theatre’s executive director, Cecil Whitmire, said later. Whitmire was single-handedly responsible for saving the Alabama Theatre from destruction. Like everyone who met Alan, Whitmire thought the world of him.

Terra was sent to the Alabama Theatre as part of a restoration team put together by the Department of the Interior (DOI). The team traveled from D.C. to Birmingham to document the theater for the Library of Congress. Terra was living near Washington, D.C., at the time, and working for the government in one of its historic American buildings and structures programs. The last thing Terra was looking for was love. Her career was soaring. Plus, Terra had a way about her when it came to men. She was extremely private about this part of her life.