“She said the only way to do it,” Jeff said later, “the only way to handle it, was to kill him, or have him killed. . . .”

After another meeting with her attorney, Jessica came home, and she was fuming. Jeff wasn’t home when she walked in. So she called Naomi.

“He’s trying to get custody of the girls,” Jessica said. She knew how to change her demeanor to suit the situation. She needed sympathy from Naomi.

“Just let him see the girls, Jess.”

“He has no rights. He doesn’t know the girls. There’s no way he is going to get those girls from me.”

“How are you going to go about it?” Naomi wondered.

Jessica laughed. “He is not seeing those kids.”

“He has visitation rights, Jess. Just let him see the kids. You should let him have the kids so he knows what it’s like to have them full-time.”

Jessica explained how she and Alan were set to give depositions in a matter of days. “At the time,” Naomi recalled, “you couldn’t hear the desperation in her voice, but all I could hear was anger.”

“She was very adamant,” Jeff added, “about what was the only option [left].”

Jessica approached Jeff the next morning. This time with a plan. Entice Alan out onto the interstate and run him off the road. It would be easy. His death would be ruled an accident, or tied to an incident of road rage.

Brush your hands off, walk away with the children.

No court.

When Jessica mentioned this idea, “I figured she was just pissed off,” Jeff said, “because of the way the court [was going].” Jeff still didn’t want to believe she was being real. He took her seriously, and then he didn’t.

It needed to happen that night, Jessica insisted. Alan was in town. She knew where he was staying. All they had to do was follow him and make sure he didn’t make it to his destination.

“I have to work tonight,” Jeff said. His shift started in a few hours.

When they got home later that day, Jeff said he “made a point of getting ready as quickly as I could, and with [our youngest child] being at the house, he couldn’t be left, obviously he couldn’t be left by himself.” Jessica would never take the kids with her to do it, Jeff believed.

So the plan to run Alan off the road was thwarted.

Jeff left for work, forgot about it, and Jessica stayed home.

Jessica sat and thought about it. She was going to be grilled hard by Alan’s attorney during the deposition. Fingers would be pointed in her face, the spotlight would shine on her behavior. He was going to ask tough questions she’d have to come up with answers for, on the spot.

“We need to do this,” Jessica said to Jeff that night when he returned home from his shift.

Here we go again. . . .

Jeff knew by now what she meant. Something, though, told him not to face it directly. Is she actually serious? he repeatedly wondered.

Some days she sounded as if it were all a joke; others, she was as serious as Jeff had ever heard her.

“He’s going to get the girls otherwise, Kelley,” Jessica said.

“Relax. We’ll do what we need to do.”

“There’s no other way to take care of this.”

Jeff thought about it at work the next night. Was she really going to do this? He decided to confront Jessica about how serious she was regarding actually going through with it. No more talk. No more threats.

The next morning Jeff didn’t have to say anything. Jessica brought it up. They were in the den. Then upstairs in the master bedroom.

“Well, we need to do this,” Jessica suggested.

“All right,” Jeff agreed, calling his wife on it. “If you can come up with a doable plan, we’ll, you know, see what can happen.”

Alan Bates didn’t know it, but his life had come down to two people discussing his death as if it were part of a proposal to build an addition onto the house. The rest of the man’s life had been distilled down to a police officer telling his wife: “We’ll, you know, see what can happen.”

Jeff later admitted that although Jessica kept pushing him and insisting that someone kill Alan, something told him she would never go through with it. No matter what she said.

The day progressed. “It needs to be done,” Jessica said again. She wasn’t letting up.

“Okay!”

“We really need to do this.”

The deposition was here, Jessica reminded Jeff.

Jeff recalled later: “I don’t know if this is true or not, but she was looking at potentially more time . . . from Shelby County for . . . contempt.”

Not true.

Jessica told Jeff that she was going back to jail if Alan got the kids. She’d apparently hoped it would somehow convince him that killing was the only answer left.

Then Jessica came out and explained what type of plan she had been thinking about: “There’s not going to be a better day.”

Better day than what? Jeff wondered.

She explained.

He thought about it. She was right. The day of the deposition, February 15. “In her mind,” Jeff recalled, “the fifteenth was the opportune or the best time to do it.”

“Friday,” Jessica said.

Jeff nodded. He worked that day. The night shift. If he was going to help, he needed the night off.

Jeff and Jessica came up with a solution together.

Jeff got hold of a fellow officer, a friend of his. Jeff asked him if he could switch days off. It was a deal that gave Jeff both Friday and the entire weekend to himself.

Perfect, Jessica knew.

They would need the extra time to clean up all the blood.

45

As he began to consider the idea of killing Alan, playing the deadly scene over in his head like a movie, Jeff McCord realized several problems with his wife’s plan—which was now a carefully thought-out sketch she had explained to Jeff in full on Valentine’s Day, fewer than twenty-four hours before the deposition.

“Alan is supposed to be at the house at six or six-thirty,” Jeff said to Jessica after she explained what to do.

“Right,” Jessica said. She didn’t see the problem.

“Okay, what do we do then?”

If they killed Alan and he failed to return home to Terra and his parents—or wherever he was going after picking up the kids—what would happen? The last place Alan was supposed to be was at Jeff and Jessica’s picking up the kids. They would be instant suspects, Jeff pointed out.

“We burn the body and torch his car,” Jessica suggested, as if she were an old pro at committing homicides.

“All of which, obviously from my background,” Jeff recalled later, “I know is a pretty good way to do away with evidence, and really do away with a lot of trace evidence, and a good way to mess up some crime-scene stuff.”

An officer of the law explaining how to cover up a murder by referring to it as “a good way to mess up some crime-scene stuff.”

Apparently, the murder plan now made sense to Jeff. Jessica had thought this thing through quite methodically.

Jeff wanted to make sure that their plan was infallible. They shouldn’t take chances. They were too close to the victim. As a cop, Jeff said, he knew the center of the bull’s -eye when investigating a murder was the place all cops started: family, friends, acquaintances (especially those having problems with the deceased).

It wasn’t rocket science.

Jeff then asked Jessica several questions, playing devil’s advocate, testing her.

“Okay, if you’re going . . . if you’re going to torch the car and burn the [body], how are you going to do it?”

Jessica looked at him. “It’s not definite,” she said. Jessica was still tossing other ideas around. The bottom line, she made clear, was that they had to get rid of the body. The way in which they did that was beside the point. The fact of the matter was: no body, no case.

“Leaving [the body] in the trunk and ditching the car,” Jeff pointed out, “is not a good idea, Jess.”