What? Come on, Jess, Naomi thought. She knew it was a lie. Alan loved those kids. If he could help it, he never missed seeing them. Especially since Jessica was so volatile and unpredictable when it came to allowing visitations.

There came a day when Jessica showed up at Naomi’s house out of the blue. Unexpected, uninvited, there she was. It was dinnertime. Middle of the week. Naomi looked out the window and saw Jessica pulling in the driveway. No call. No warning. It was the first of what would be many unexpected visits, or pop-ins, by a woman hiding her kids from their natural father.

Jessica and the kids stayed for hours. Naomi and her husband fed them (they certainly didn’t mind). They sat around after dinner. It seemed they were just staring at each other. Twiddling their thumbs.

Naomi finally asked, “What’s up, Jess?”

“Nothing particular.”

It was eight or nine o’clock at night before Jessica left.

Naomi thought about it later. These surprise visits were so strange—even for Jessica. Naomi would come to find out that Jessica was hiding out with the kids. Keeping them from Alan. He had a scheduled visitation, and Jessica didn’t want to be home when he showed up.

For Alan, by June 1999, it got to the point where he was forced to ask Frank Head to file a grievance against Jessica. The motion outlined the nature of Jessica’s disregard for the Final Judgment of Divorce. She wasn’t following the court’s ruling. She was playing games again. Same as she had for most of her adult life, Jessica was making up rules as she went along.

But Alan wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. It was time to let the courts decide what to do with the woman and her stubborn ideas regarding visitation. Alan had tried. He gave Jessica chance after chance to conform. He put up with her screaming and threats and even violence.

But no more.

Now it was going to be up to a judge.

Jessica met Jeff while working for the Birmingham PD. She called him by his middle name of Kelley. Jeff was sort of an oafish guy. Quiet. Subdued. Easily manageable for Jessica. It was not hard for her to tell immediately that it was going to be effortless to manipulate Jeff any which way she wanted.

Not long after meeting Jeff, Jessica called Naomi, who hadn’t seen Jessica for quite a while because of work and a conflicting, busy schedule.

“How are you? How are the kids?” Naomi asked, excited. It was good to hear from Jessica. She wondered why the pop-in visits had suddenly stopped.

“Good.” Then Jessica went into how she had met this new guy, Kelley. How great he was. They were considering moving to Birmingham and buying a house together, but they didn’t have enough money. She was still living in the house Alan had left her in Montevallo.

“Really?” Naomi said, shocked by this statement. Here’s this new guy in Jessica’s life. Out of nowhere. It was apparently serious. And now they were talking about buying a house together.

Jessica had that schoolgirl-lust quality to her voice. “He’s great,” she explained. “How’s this—we had sex in the living room . . . all over the house.”

Naomi was horrified. “The kids, Jess? What about the kids?”

“They were asleep. Don’t worry.” Jessica laughed. That sarcastic I-know-something-you-don’t-know tone that meant she was holding something back.

Part of Jessica’s excitement was that Jeff McCord was a cop. This gave her a sense of protection, an overpowering feeling that she could play her games with Alan and turn around and say, See, I have a cop to back me up! Alan’s the bad guy. Not me. The other part of it became that Jeff was naïve and could be talked into things. Her own little puppet. Jessica plied the guy with the best sex of his life and he took the bait.

Part of this new relationship spoke to Alan getting serious with Terra. Jessica needed to settle down so, in the eyes of the court, she could appear to have a stable environment in which to raise her children. Jessica had to play up the façade that she was a good mother. That she had a peaceful, family-foundational household. That she could provide for them. With Alan involving the courts now, she knew that social workers would be poking around. She would need to put on a show.

But there was also something else working in the background—a developing storm—something Jeff Kelley McCord could provide to Jessica that, she believed, all the others couldn’t.

30

According to Jeff McCord’s version, on Monday morning, February 18, 2002, he and Jessica took off to Opelika, Alabama, a town about 140 miles, or a 135-minute drive, from Hoover. Born in Tallahassee, Florida, before living in Cairo, Georgia, for a brief spell, Jeff moved to Opelika with his mom after his parents split up (and later divorced). Jeff had graduated from Opelika High School.

As police searched his home back in Hoover that day, Jeff and Jessica cruised the streets of Opelika. At the center of their conversation was what Jeff was going to do about his job: call in sick or show up? His house was in the process of a second search by the HPD. Cops talked, Jeff knew. The Hoover PD had a full report on Jeff, his entire life and career as a police officer. More than that, Jeff heard that his Pelham PD patrol commander was looking for him and wanted to talk before his shift started later that afternoon. Hearing this, Jeff knew darn well what was going on.

At 10:00 A.M. Jeff called work.

“Hold on,” dispatch told him. The call was rerouted to the chief’s office. Jeff had a feeling dispatch had been waiting for his call.

“McCord,” the chief said, “you need to be in my office today at four. Bring in your badge and ID. You’re going on administrative leave for the time being.”

Jeff hung up. Dropped his shoulders. He realized how serious the situation had become. When he met Jessica, she had seemed so boisterous and fun and bossy—which he liked. A woman in charge. She knew what she wanted. That was all well and good when dealing with laundry and food shopping and picking colors of drapes and styles of tile and wallpaper. Maybe even when it came to parenting. Jeff didn’t mind standing aside to let Jessica take the wheel. In many ways, Jeff later said, Jessica was the first “real” relationship he was involved in. He had dated a beautiful woman for two-and-a-half years during college, and for a short time afterward. But that woman, Jeff later told me, was rather “normal,” as compared to the relationship he later got mixed up in with Jessica.

“At the same time,” Jeff added, “if [a] ‘real’ [relationship] means the other person is divorced, has three kids and [a] trainload of baggage, then I guess it may well depend on one’s definition and one’s perspective. I readily concede that cluelessness and ineptitude on my part may well have made things worse or at least different than they were and/or turned out to be. Also,” Jeff cleared up, “Jessica was not the first woman with whom I had had sexual relations.”

Some claimed she had been.

Jessica and Jeff headed back to Hoover from Opelika on Monday. Jeff stopped by the house after dropping Jessica off (one would guess at her mother’s) to pick up his uniforms and badges. Then he took off for Pelham.

A Hoover police officer got behind Jeff as he left the Myrtlewood Drive house and followed him as other officers joined the motorcade. Jeff drove a U-Haul truck he and Jessica had rented (for no apparent reason he could later give—“We just needed it”).

“We weren’t hiding the fact by then that we were following Jeff McCord,” one law enforcement source told me.

Near Route 31 and Lorna Road, the HPD hit their lights.

“Anyway,” Jeff recalled, “I get pulled over by half of Hoover’s evening shift.” It was funny to him that the HPD had no fewer than six officers tailing him.