61

After a short morning break, John Wiley got his client back on track. There was a clear indication Jessica was almost finished. She had spent nearly three hours on the stand already. Had her direct examination been productive? Had she accomplished putting reasonable doubt into the minds of the jurors?

“When she was being questioned by her attorney,” Carol Robinson later told me, “her demeanor was almost laughable. It was laughable. She was trying to come off as prim and proper, very Pollyannaish—and it just wasn’t working. No one in the courtroom was buying it, and the jury wasn’t, either.”

Jessica testified about how distressed she was after talking to Philip Bates on February 16 and learning of Alan’s disappearance. She mentioned how ill-tempered and disgraceful she perceived the Hoover PD to be when they arrived to serve the first search warrant. She gave the jury the impression that the HPD had ransacked her house, which was, she admitted, a mess, anyway.

Jessica talked about the early-morning hours of Saturday, February 16. How she and Jeff hung around the house. This was a slippery slope for Wiley. On that Saturday, Jessica had been questioned by Kimberly Williams and Sheron Vance. She had to watch what she told the jury about this.

In turn, the best way to deal with the situation, Wiley apparently had decided, was to avoid it completely.

Not long after the lunch break, Wiley introduced several photographs of Jessica with her children. Roger Brown objected. The photos, Brown implied, bore no relevance to the case. They had been introduced to present Jessica as a maternal type. She was trying to show the jury she was a loving, doting mother.

The judge said they’d discuss it during lunch recess.

“Thank you,” Brown said.

“Jessica,” Wiley asked, “did you kill Alan Bates?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you kill Terra Bates?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Thank you.”

Roger Brown had held his tongue long enough. Now Brown stood and, with a measured tone, said, “You told us just before lunch that when the police asked about searching your car and your husband’s SUV, you volunteered it. . . . Is that what you said?”

“They did.”

“I didn’t ask you that,” Brown said. And this was where Jessica was going to run into trouble: On direct she could dance around the issues and answer questions at will; here, on cross, she would have to answer Brown’s questions frankly. Brown was not going to allow scripted answers that served Jessica’s agenda.

“Isn’t that what you said?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have anything to hide?” he posed.

“No.”

“You were going to be very cooperative with police, right?”

“I allowed them to look through my vehicles, yes,” Jessica agreed.

“Sure, because you didn’t have anything to hide, right?”

“I allowed them to look through my vehicles because they asked.”

“Did you have something to hide?” Brown questioned.

“No.”

For the next few minutes, they went at it: back and forth. Jessica said she did this. Brown said no, you did that.

“That’s not true,” Brown said.

“Yes, it is,” Jessica replied.

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

Brown had an easy way about him. His colleagues showed him the respect he deserved. Definitely a trial lawyer’s lawyer. “Roger is fun to watch in a courtroom,” Carol Robinson said later, “and always has been. He is an incredibly strong presence and just inspires confidence. He is intimidating. . . . He’s always sort of reminded me of Harrison Ford. He’s not flamboyant, just steady, dry and sarcastic. A force to be reckoned with, if you will.”

Jessica skated on the questions she didn’t want to answer and talked in circles around those she did. It was not hard to tell she was afraid to answer certain questions, for fear of getting caught in a lie. She had told so many untruths it was difficult to keep track. Brown knew this—and started to chip away at it.

The fact that Jessica had allowed police to search her vehicles, Brown pointed out, yet she would not allow them to search her house without a warrant, spoke volumes as to where her loyalties were in the investigation. This told police she knew something. Her ex-husband and his wife were missing—murdered. Jessica claimed not to have had anything to do with it. Yet, all that aside, she was unwilling to do everything in her power to help.

Sure it made her an immediate suspect. Why wouldn’t it?

Brown asked, “So [you made] a telephone call . . . at what time? Six-forty?”

“Six-thirty to six-forty, something like that.”

“So you said, ‘Thanks for coming by’?”

“I said, ‘Thanks a lot for’—I think I said, ‘Thanks a lot for not showing up.’”

“Oh, okay. And you also said, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on, Alan, but we’re here waiting for you,’ didn’t you?”

Jessica studied Roger Brown like the opponent he was. Her facial expression told the room what she was thinking: Where are you going with this ?

“Yes,” she finally answered.

“Well, that was a lie, wasn’t it?” Brown said.

“Kelley and I were there.”

“He wasn’t picking you up for visitation.”

“Kelley and I meant ‘we.’”

“Oh, I see,” Brown said. “But the fact of the matter, Mrs. McCord, is that Alan and Terra’s lifeless, dead, bullet-riddled bodies were down on that couch in your den, and you made this call to set up some kind of an alibi?”

“No!”

“‘We’re waiting for you and we have movie plans. We need to go. I wish you would hurry up.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

“I don’t remember the exact words.”

“Well,” Brown said, poise and experience oozing from each word, “there certainly wouldn’t be any reason for you to sit around and wait. That wasn’t interfering with your movie plans, was it?”

“I’m sorry, could you restate that?”

Brown repeated the question.

“What wasn’t interfering with my movie plans?” Jessica made it sound as if she was confused.

“Alan’s not coming by.”

“We had to wait on Alan because that was where he was supposed to come.”

“You told us this morning that sometimes he would come there, and he would always go to both places.”

Which was it?

The exchange was heated and accusatory. Brown knew she was lying. He asked Jessica about that phone call she made to her mother from the pay phone near the theater. Jessica claimed to “step out” of the movie while it was playing, leaving Jeff by himself, so she could go around the corner and call her mother.

Brown made her pinpoint an exact location.

She did.

The smart prosecutor then pointed out that the pay phone Jessica made the call from was “two miles” from the movie theater.

Two miles.

“And you went down there,” Brown said, recalling a statement Jessica gave during her direct testimony, “because you needed to get some Pepto-Bismol?”

“I had an upset stomach all day.”

“So the drugstore that is approximately a hundred yards from the movie theater in the same shopping center . . . that was too inconvenient?” Sarcasm bled from Brown’s inflection.

“What drugstore is that?”

“I don’t remember the name of it. . . . You didn’t go there?”

Jessica was caught in a bit of a sticky situation. Brown made it clear there was also a grocery store nearby, which she could have walked to in minutes. Someone with a stomachache would not likely go to the farthest store away to seek a quick remedy like Pepto. But Jessica had testified that she walked past a grocery store and drove two miles to a pharmacy.

Logically speaking, it made no sense.

“Then you went back to the movie with your Pepto-Bismol?”

“I went back to the movie theater, yes.”