As testimony wrapped up on the first day with Pamela Merkel Sayle, the girls’ dance instructor, the jury heard again—this time from a neutral witness who really had no stake in the outcome of the trial—that Jessica had a terrible grievance against Alan. She was consistently angry with him. And this attitude of Jessica’s, so hostile and nasty, only increased after Alan met Terra, Sayle suggested with her testimony.

“She made comments . . . that if he ever tried to get the girls, he would regret it,” Sayle told the jurors.

58

Day two picked up where the previous day had left off. Roger Brown built his case, brick by brick, each witness adding his or her blow to Jessica’s constant plea of innocence. Critics of Brown, however, might be quick to point out that if hatred toward an ex-spouse was motive for murder, coupled with things we said in the heat of anger and under our breath, we would not be able to build enough courthouses to prosecute the accused.

As Brown moved his case forward, he made that hatred Jessica had for Alan, which Brown believed had turned into a thirst for revenge and murder, the center point around which every witness pivoted. By the end of the day, Brown would send nineteen witnesses to the stand. Among them, few could describe that hatred in more depth and detail than Naomi Patterson, Jessica’s longtime friend.

Naomi was nervous, of course. But she was also there to tell the truth, as far as she knew it. She wasn’t looking for vengeance, as Jessica had implied by the look on her face when Naomi raised her right hand and sat down.

Naomi had been there since the beginning; she could offer the jury a complete portrait of Jessica and Alan’s married life before all the trouble started. She could show jurors how much Alan loved his pregnant young girlfriend and wanted to do the right thing by marrying her. And again, how Jessica, after she and Alan divorced, routinely abandoned her kids.

“Y’all were pretty close?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“After they divorced, did you continue to visit with her, to see her?”

“Yes, sir.”

Several questions later, “Did you have discussions with her . . . from time to time, about her living with this man [Brad Tabor] in his apartment, and her children being over there at her mother’s house?”

“Yes, sir. She knew that I didn’t approve of it.”

Brown was smooth in the way he was able to work in various facts surrounding—or leading up to—the point of no return he felt Jessica had ended up at. As she appeared more and more slighted, each man Jessica dated post-Alan saw through her greedy, malicious way of shunning her ex-husband. It was obvious in the way Jessica had pushed the brunt of her troubles on Alan: she blamed him for everything.

Yet the bomb Naomi dropped exploded after Brown asked her to talk about a conversation she’d had with Jessica not long before Alan and Terra were murdered.

“Did she say anything about Alan coming to the house [on February fifteenth] to pick up the children?”

“Yes, sir, she did.”

“What did she tell you . . . ?”

Naomi spoke with a likable earnestness. It was hard not to believe what she said. Her credibility was spotless.

“It got to the point,” Naomi began, “in the conversation, that she stated to me that when Alan came to the house to get the children, she was going to set him up for domestic violence and that she was going to—Kelley was going to hide the car so that Alan would feel that she was home alone with the children, and she was going to provoke him for the domestic violence so that it would help her in her court case.”

The courtroom let out a collective sigh as Naomi told her story. It wasn’t a stretch for most—including the jurors—to take a leap from setting Alan up for domestic violence to murder. If she was capable of planning and carrying out one, why not the other?

“And did she say what was then supposed to happen?”

Naomi paused. Cleared her throat. “And she also stated”—this was harder than she thought—“that if Alan were to touch her, that Kelley would kill him.”

After a few more questions, Brown handed Naomi over to John Wiley, who seemed eager to question the young mother.

“Well . . . you knew Alan, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“And you went to high school with him, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And y’all had been friends for many years?” Wiley’s inflection implied that there was something wrong with all of this. Or that he was perhaps leading up to a zinger of a punch line.

“Yes, sir.”

“But more recently, y’all hadn’t been as close as y’all had been before, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“And, in fact, you’ve never even been to the Myrtlewood Drive house, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“You never even visited there?”

“No, sir.”

“So you and Jessica were not nearly as close friends as you once were?”

“We were fading, yes.”

Brown looked at his coprosecutor, Laura Hodge, wondering where Wiley was going. Brown and Hodge had spent months preparing for trial, searching through documents, putting together witnesses, making sure they understood the custody case inside and out. They had spoken to Naomi themselves. What was Wiley’s strategy here? His questioning seemed to build up to nothing. Sure, Jessica and Naomi weren’t regularly having beers together anymore, attending Bible class or having tea and meeting at the park with their kids. But Naomi and Jessica had talked on the phone enough to be considered very close friends. Naomi was, after all, a sounding board for Jessica, who regularly called to dump her ex-hubby baggage on Naomi.

After a few more questions, Wiley broke a golden rule most defense attorneys will say you never, ever consider doing—unless you’re sure the case has slipped from your hands: attack the victim.

As casual as if he were asking about a shopping trip, Wiley said, “Okay, now, you know Alan used to beat her up when they were married, don’t you?”

A loud gasp filled the courtroom. Courtroom spectators looked at one another with shock. Had the man any evidence of such an accusation? Was he stomping on the grave of a dead man, who was unable to defend himself?

“No, sir.”

“She’s told you that, though, hasn’t she?”

“Not until recently.”

This was where Jessica was headed with her defense. She thought she had covered her tracks by telling Naomi that she’d had some important secret to admit—all that time she and Alan were together, Alan had been violent with her.

“Alan was the last person on earth who could have ever done such a thing,” Naomi said later, clearing up any confusion as to where she stood on the matter.

Jessica’s former attorney, David Dorn, testified later on that same afternoon. The problem for Jessica was that Dorn was an honest man who told the truth—and the truth was what began to hurt Jessica the most as each witness came forward and exposed another mean-spirited, hurtful, threatening remark or threat on her part toward Alan. No one was immune to Jessica’s arrogance and malicious mind-set. She spared no one around her the eruption of her wrath, most of which was focused on Alan. All because, Brown and Laura Hodge proved with each witness, Alan wanted his ex-wife to hold up her end of the divorce decree.

Jessica believed the rules did not apply to her, and each one of the state’s witnesses agreed.

By the end of the second day, Brown had shown the jury graphic photographs of what was left of the badly charred bodies of Alan and Terra. This as a slew of law enforcement witnesses took the stand to talk about what they hoped truly mattered in a court of law: hard evidence.