“I drove back toward Hoover,” she said. “I went to Chick-fil-A and got something to eat, and I kind of tooled around the subdivision eating it in the car so I didn’t have to share. And then I went home.” She got home around “four-thirtyish.”

According to her version, from that point on, she and Jeff collected the children (from day care and a friend’s house), then got them ready for Alan at her mom’s. As she and Jeff went about doing that, they considered going out that night for a belated Valentine’s Day celebration. It was near six o’clock when she realized that they were all at her mother’s, and Alan was on his way over to her house.

“So what, if anything, did you do then?”

“Well, let’s see . . . I kept getting ready.”

“What was your plan? I mean, the arrangement was for Alan to pick up the kids at Myrtlewood. Yet the kids were all at your mom’s?”

Roger Brown and Laura Hodge were whispering things to each other. Brown was writing viciously on a notepad in front of him.

“Right.”

“What was your plan about that?”

“Well, I had their bags packed there. I just, you know, put some clothes into a backpack of theirs. And in the event that he went to Mom’s home, Mom said she was going to put some stuff together, too, just so, you know, there was no conflict if he came there first. The kids were all playing, you know, and stuff. So it’s possible, if he had driven by, he would have seen them there and stopped there first. But my plan had been, ‘Here’s the bag, go get the kids, see you later, see you Sunday.’”

“You know” seemed to be one of those phrases Jessica leaned on as she figured things out in her mind while in the middle of speaking.

“So, did Alan ever come by your house?”

“Not when I was there, he didn’t.”

“How long did you stay at your house?”

It was 6:30, she said, perhaps 6:40 P.M.

“And then what did you do?”

“Well, before I left, when I left, or what?”

“Well, did you leave the house?”

“Yes, I did leave the house. We went by Mom’s.”

“You say ‘we’?”

“My husband and I. And I stuck my head in the door and said, ‘Is everybody okay? What’s going on?’ And, you know, [Alan’s kids] were still there, and I think they were watching Nickelodeon or something like that. . . .”

Wiley decided to play devil’s advocate. Maybe to interject, one could only speculate, a bit of authenticity into the conversation. Jessica’s testimony was confusing. She sounded casual and removed. She came across as cold and unfeeling. It was as if she was sickened by the idea that no one believed her at face value and she had to explain herself.

“A lot of us are going—well, let me withdraw that.” Wiley paused. Thought about it. “How could you have been so flippant and unconcerned about the fact that there was an arrangement for Alan to come and pick up the kids at six o’clock and, yet, Alan hadn’t done so?”

Wiley was right. Jessica had given the jury a confusing scenario that seemed to cover her tracks—no matter what she was asked later. She was at her mom’s. Then at home. She was back at her mom’s. Then on the road.

Many times juries will consider the parts of the story you leave out as evidence, too. As they would figure out soon enough, neither Jessica nor Wiley had mentioned that Jessica called Alan on his cell phone from her home—a fact telephone records proved—during this time period.

Answering Wiley’s question regarding the arrangement, Jessica took the opportunity to stomp on Alan’s memory some more.

“Because it happened so frequently. I mean,” she repeated just in case no one had heard her the first time, “it happened so frequently. You know, I cannot take you through all of the years we were divorced, but it did happen frequently. . . .”

Wiley moved on to Terra.

“We got along,” Jessica said. “We got along very well. Our big thing was that I cared about my kids, and she cared about my kids. And anybody who cares about my kids, I’m going to try to get along with. And she was very diplomatic and tried really hard to, you know, whatever conflict Alan and I had, to not let that really, you know, get all over the kids. She was real concerned about my kids.”

And then, as if she had rehearsed talking about this portion of the night in preparation for a Broadway role, Jessica told her version of the remainder of the evening and the next morning.

Movies. The Lord of the Rings.

She and Jeff didn’t like it, so they went to the bathroom and snuck into Black Hawk Down.

Didn’t like that, so they left the theater.

“I went back to my mom’s to see—I was hungry. We had not, you know, eaten that evening. And went back to Mom’s to see if she would be up for keeping the kids any longer. Thought maybe we could kind of nudge her into it, since it was so late.”

Although she had a cell phone, Jessica testified that she called her mother from a pay phone near the movie theater earlier that night.

When Wiley asked what time she returned to her mother’s, she had no trouble recalling that it was “midnightish.”

She said they left her mother’s house and went to Southside, the southern half of Birmingham’s downtown district. “We parked and walked . . . and, you know, just talking. I had spent a lot of my teenage years down on Southside, hanging out, and telling [Jeff] all about that. And he wanted to go to a strip club.”

Since she had never been inside a topless bar, Jessica said what the heck. Let’s do it. Why not?

They ended up, according to her testimony, at the PlayLate Club, somewhere near two to two-thirty that next morning, February 16.

They stayed an hour. “It was not my cup of tea.”

The problem with this story, jurors figured out easily enough, was that the bouncer at PlayLate, a man who had testified during the state’s portion of the case, was a former cop who knew Jeff McCord. And that former cop said he would have recognized Jeff if he had walked into the club—especially if Jeff was with a woman, seeing that it was not every night females frequented the PlayLate.

The rest of the early morning, Jessica testified, was a hodgepodge of lies she had a tough time keeping straight. She explained how, tired and beaten down by being up all night, walking hand in hand with Jeff, like two young lovers, they went over to the Home Depot as the sun came up. They looked at carpet samples. She said she wanted the house to look good for “the March court date” with Alan. The state was going to be coming into her house to check things out. Their dog, a black Lab, had ruined the carpet. It “was really nasty and it needed to be replaced.”

They didn’t buy anything, however, Jessica said, except for a carpet “trim knife.”

Then came her excuse for removing the backing on the leather sofa. She and Jeff wanted to reupholster the couch. The backing had cigarette burns on it. She said the dog had chewed up the seat cushions. The mattress, which police never recovered, had been tossed out in back of the yard. They decided to dispose of the sofa after tearing off the backing and realizing it wasn’t worth fixing.

Of course, they replaced the wallpaper in the den because Jeff had mistakenly shot the television out one night, Jessica testified, and then shot at the wall while practicing “night firing” he had to qualify for at the Pelham PD.

So Jeff had practiced his skills with a gun inside the house?

“I was furious with him.”

As the morning break came, Jessica had given answers to just about every question the state posed. Her testimony was designed to chisel away at the state’s case, and she went through, one by one, each piece of evidence, providing an alternative explanation. For those in the gallery who might have believed Jessica, as she implied that the charges were based on conjecture and circumstantial evidence, you’d have to leave the courtroom thinking, Is this not the unluckiest woman in the world?