Several questions later, Wiley asked Jessica about the arrest. How she remembered that day. “And you heard testimony,” he concluded his question, “that you pretended to be your sister?”

For the record the witnesses included sheriffs, cops and attorneys.

Still, according to Jessica, they had it all wrong. “I heard that,” she said, “yes.”

“And you don’t—that’s not exactly what happened, is it?”

Jessica said no.

Wiley asked her to explain.

“Yeah, the day that they came, it was very early in the morning that day. We were all still in bed, you know, in pajamas and everything, watching Martha Stewart on TV.” One big, happy American family, in other words. Enjoying themselves as they woke up. Some were surprised Jessica had not tossed in a story about breakfast in bed to put a nice bow on it all. “And my husband heard some knocking and went around. I was using the restroom. And I could hear them discussing that there was some sort of an order relating to the children and an order for my arrest.” When she told the sheriff she was her sister, Jessica asked the jury to believe, it was more or less in a mocking fashion. She was joking. She claimed she told the children what was about to happen—that she was going to jail—and they became emotional, crying and bawling, begging her to say she was their auntie. So, to humor the kids and save them from the immediate impact of their mom being taken away in handcuffs, Jessica said she told the sheriff she was her sister. But that the sheriffs knew she was joking around.

No one bothered to point out that Jessica had just got done saying she had no idea there was an arrest warrant issued on her behalf—therefore, how could she possibly tell the children there was an order for her arrest if she didn’t know it yet?

It was all just a misunderstanding, Wiley suggested with his questioning. A way to divert the children’s attention for a moment so the impact of the arrest wouldn’t be so bad on them.

“As a matter of fact,” Jessica told the jury with a straight face, “I’m an extremely sarcastic person, and I tend to use it at inappropriate times.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you could pass yourself off as your sister with these police officers?”

“Good Lord, no,” Jessica said, a slight smile, her phony Southern belle demeanor sounding forced. “They’re experienced police officers. If somebody could pull something like that on them, they need to go back to the academy.”

As Brown and Hodge looked on, shaking their heads in disgust, the jury gave indications in their movements that they had seen through Jessica’s narcissistic, self-indulgent lies. She had made no mention of the fact that the sheriff who had arrested her had called into the department for fingerprints and a photograph, and they waited for ten to fifteen minutes in the house before Jessica finally admitted she wasn’t her sister.

Wiley asked Jessica to explain the previous day’s testimony from a woman Jessica had spent some time in jail with during that ten-day stint during Christmas, 2001.

“Did you ever have a conversation . . . about how you could kill your [ex-]husband and get away with it?”

“No,” Jessica said. She sounded flippant. It was as if this, too, was another misunderstanding. The woman had taken what was a joke and turned it around on her. “The longest conversation I had with [that witness] was about when the Pelham PD arrested her and how angry she was about it.” The insinuation was that since Jeff McCord was a Pelham police officer, the witness was getting back at Jessica any way she could. “Everybody down there (in the jail) knew that my husband was a Pelham police officer. Several of the girls had been arrested by Pelham, and I had a picture of my husband there. They all knew who he was.”

Over and over, Jessica bashed Alan whenever the chance arose. At one point she talked about how Alan would come to town but not visit with the children. “[B]ecause he was too busy.” She never mentioned that Alan could not find her or the kids—that she had hid out from him. Jessica said Alan had lied during the deposition, claiming that he had been denied visitation. The fact was, she said, she had never denied him anything.

Clearly, Jessica had an answer for every situation that went against her, and even some that didn’t. The reason for the bullet found in the garage was simple, Jessica explained. Jeff had misfired his gun in the house. After a complete search, however, neither she nor Jeff could find the bullet. She claimed all that talk about her saying she wanted Alan killed was a misinterpretation of the facts. Didn’t matter that three witnesses—none of whom knew each other—had testified that Jessica had said Alan would pay for what he was doing and needed to be killed. What she had actually said, Jessica tried convincing the jury, was that Jeff was a police officer, and most people had the impression that cops are “very, very aggressive” people, “when, in fact, police officers tend to be very controlled and will not just, you know, walk up on you and they’re going to draw their gun and things like that. It’s not the Wild West and people think like that.”

Her answers did not always match the questions.

For a time she played herself off as the caring ex-wife, never once saying anything bad about Alan. She certainly never “boasted and laughed about denying” him what was rightfully his. Witnesses had testified the previous day that Jessica ridiculed and taunted Alan as they left the deposition that Friday afternoon, telling him he would never see the kids again.

“I wasn’t angry at Alan that he was going to see the kids” that weekend of his death, she said. “I thought it would have been nice if his parents had come to town to visit with everyone here. . . .”

“And the children,” Wiley asked, “were aware that he was going to take [them that weekend of his death]?”

“You know,” Jessica said, “I told them. You have to keep in mind that a lot of [the] time, he didn’t come.”

“What do you mean?”

“So I don’t know that the children put a lot of stock in me saying, ‘You’re going with your dad for the weekend. You’re leaving with them at such and such a time.’”

“You mean there were times after the divorce when his visitation time would come and he wouldn’t appear to collect the kids?” Wiley sounded shocked by this. Alan had been portrayed during the state’s portion of the case as a loving father who was being denied visitation.

“Right,” Jessica said without missing a beat. “Again, you know, first and third [weekends] for the longest period of time until April 2000, he had first and third [weekends]. And first and thirds, six o’clock, we’re sitting by the door, waiting, you know.”

“And he’s not there?”

“Many times, he was not. And frequently he wouldn’t call, either. So, you know, I think it was just kind of old hat for the kids [to expect] him to not come.”

Many sat and considered how easy it was for Jessica to sit in that chair and lie. How commonplace it was for her to attack a dead man. The documentation, she must have forgotten, would tell a different story. There was page after page of affidavits, signed by Alan, resolved by judges, describing the polar opposite to what she was now trying to pimp. Yet the most laughable part of her testimony, said one source in the courtroom, was that as Jessica sat and told her tales with a straight face, she was “probably believing half of the lies herself.” She was so vain that she actually believed the jury was going to buy it all.

For a woman facing the death penalty, that could be a fatal oversight.

Jessica agreed that Alan was scheduled to pick the children up that night at her house on Myrtlewood Drive. That fact was never in dispute.

Wiley asked Jessica what she did after leaving David Dorn’s office on deposition day, February 15, 2002.