Brown and Hodge were determined to keep their case on a taut leash and not allow it to get out of hand with experts carrying on and on for hours. Juries tired easily from sitting all day. Attention spans became frayed. Attitudes easily touched off by a witness rambling on about this strand of DNA and that mitochondrial definition of blood. Brown didn’t want to alienate the jury by boring them with unneeded forensic nonsense, trying to make his case out to be some sort of hour-long television show that it was not. He had his experts explain the evidence in simple terms that the jury could wrap their minds around without too much added noise.

One of the state’s most impressive—if not substantial—pieces of evidence, Brown and Hodge knew going in, was the information the state had acquired from Terra’s and Alan’s cell phones. Jessica would have been better off leaving the phones alone, but she had to play with them. And that, the prosecution felt, was going to now come back to haunt her.

Brett Trimble sat. Brett was the custodian of records for Spring Communications Company. Here was one of those unbiased witnesses Hodge had brought in to talk about data. Pure, unadulterated information. Brett wasn’t sitting in for either side. The guy was there to talk about the information he had taken from cell phone records. This sort of evidence was ironclad. People lie. Cops sometimes leave things out for their own biased reasons. Friends can have an agenda. But records—documentation like this—speak to a truth no one can taint.

It is what it is, as they say.

Brett went through and described how he had looked at Alan’s and Terra’s cell phone numbers and matched them up to cell towers during that particular period of time the prosecution was interested in—between Friday night, at approximately six o’clock, and the next morning, very early. He did a search for “activations and locations.”

When you make a call on your cell phone, the signal hits the closest tower in the area where you make that call. That transfer of electronic information produces a record. A hit. The company who owns the tower knows which numbers are using which towers, where and at what times.

Brett called it a “cell site.” (Some may want to refer to it as one more addition to the Big Brother family.)

As you drive in your car, for example, away from, say, tower one, and come closer to tower two, your cell phone picks up that second tower site. From the time you start the call, Brett explained to the jury, until the phone call concludes, no matter where you drive or walk, each tower records all your moves.

Bad news for Jessica McCord.

Hodge showed Brett photographs of several cell towers, which covered a range, or radius, of about three miles, Brett said.

After the witness viewed several photographs, Hodge asked Brett to explain how those recordings—of the cell towers—are made.

“Well,” Brett said, “a call is made and it is entered into our computer system. Our computer system looks for the subscriber and locates it, and it is sent through the tower in to the customer.”

“So the subscriber and customer are the same thing?”

“That’s correct, yes.”

“How is a tower going to know where your cell phone is?”

“Well, towers are constantly in contact. They ping your cell phone.”

“What do you mean by ‘ping’?”

“Well, they send tiny bits of information to update your time and your date.”

“Is this like a sort of signal in a way?”

“Yes.”

Jessica was getting antsy in her chair. This information was adding up to a curtain-raiser of some sort, and there was no way that what was behind it was going to work in her favor.

Technology, a lifesaver. Computers are always looking over our shoulders. Recording everything we do. In this case that electronic information was proving to be one of the most powerful pieces of evidence Laura Hodge and Roger Brown had presented. If Alan and Terra were dead at six-thirty on that night, who could have been using their cell phones?

Only their killers.

Hodge asked a series of questions that walked jurors through a few phone calls made on Alan’s cell phone on the night of his murder. One was made at 5:57 P.M., the other at 6:14 P.M. Both calls pinged the same tower, Rocky Ridge Road at Patton Chapel, which is in Hoover, near Route 31.

“At Rocky Ridge Road,” Hodge queried, “. . . at five fifty-seven, we’ve got the north side. But then at six-fifteen, we’re moving to the southeast side. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct,” Brett said. The phone calls were made from different locations, Hodge had Brett point out. More than that, the 6:14 call, Brett explained after being asked, was made from Alan’s phone to Terra’s phone.

“Do your records also show a phone call made from Alan’s phone at eight-thirteen [P.M.] on Friday, February fifteenth?”

“Yes.”

Hodge asked what number Alan’s phone called.

Alan’s phone again called Terra’s phone.

“Did a cell tower receive a signal from Alan’s phone?”

“Yes.”

“Which tower was that?”

It was that same tower, Brett testified.

As they went back and forth, Hodge brought out the fact that at 8:58 P.M. Terra’s phone called its voice mail system and then called Alan’s cell phone again. The tower that recorded those calls was located on Jackson Trace Road, in Lincoln, Alabama, a good forty miles east of Hoover/Birmingham. Thus, the calls were being made by someone traveling east, toward Georgia. That second call, in fact, ended, Hodge pointed out on a map she set up for the jury, in Easta-boga, Alabama, even farther east.

It seemed like compelling evidence—that is, if Hodge and Brown could prove who was using the phones. Because at this point all the evidence showed was that two people were communicating with each other via the Bateses’ phones and checking their voice mail.

After all, those people could have been Terra and Alan. No expert had testified to a time of death.

59

During a break for lunch on Thursday, Brown indicated that he was likely going to wrap up his case by day’s end. He was confident in the few witnesses he and Hodge had left. If you’re Roger Brown, you want to end a trial for double murder on a high note. As a prosecutor, you want the jury to have all the information it needs without clogging up the case with unnecessary odds and ends. “Thank God,” Brown told me later, “this type of crime is so rare. It’s so nonsensical. Ludicrous. One of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my career. All over a child custody battle. Jessica McCord didn’t give a flip about her kids. She used them to torture Alan Bates.”

The trial had gone as Brown had anticipated. “Look,” he added, “I know people expect it to sound like some mystic stuff, but trial preparation and following through is not. After you do it five hundred times, you don’t really think about what you do. It’s kind of instinctual. The Hoover PD and the GBI did a great, terrific job.”

As day two moved into late afternoon, Roger Brown and Laura Hodge had Hoover PD detectives Peyton Zanzour and Rod Glover carry what Birmingham News reporter Carol Robinson, inside the courtroom covering every nuance of the case, called “the star in the courtroom.” But it was not one of Brown and Hodge’s witnesses. Instead, the detectives placed that black leather sofa in front of the jury. The one Albert Bailey had transported around town a day after the murders, only to drop it off in back of a warehouse building next to a Dumpster. The prosecution had the sofa brought into the room to show the jury how it had been stripped of its backing.

This was the couch, Brown insisted, that Alan and Terra sat on as they were shot to death. The backing had been taken off, obviously, because it had bullet holes and blood. Looking at the couch, one could easily figure there would be no other reason to strip it like it had been, other than to hide something. Why would you strip a couch halfway and then discard it? That wasn’t rational behavior.