“And they let you in without a ticket?”

“Who says I didn’t have a ticket?” Jessica sassed back.

“The ticket stubs were in your husband’s wallet.” She herself had testified to this fact.

But Jessica had an answer for that, too. “They were in his wallet later.”

“Well, how did they get from you to his wallet?”

“I’m sorry?”

Brown repeated the question.

“I assume at some point I gave them to him.”

“Oh, so you took them so that you could get back in?”

For the next few minutes, the prosecutor and the defendant sparred, going back and forth on the same points: the strip club, times, where they went after the movie, the ticket stubs. They discussed the front door at the house. Brown wondered why they never replaced it.

Jessica said they couldn’t afford it.

The problem Brown had with the door was that if it was not working on the Friday night Alan was supposed to pick up the kids, and they had gone to the trouble of leaving that note on the door, why did she walk out the front door several times that Saturday and Sunday? She had just admitted they couldn’t afford to fix it.

“We did go out the front door, yes.”

“So, obviously, this blanket (covering the door) and this sign and all of this problem with the front door was down by then, wasn’t it?”

“No.”

Brown moved on to the Contempt of Court Arrest Warrant. He suggested that Jessica had called three different people—two of them lawyers—to find out if there was a warrant out for her arrest; yet she testified that she had no idea the warrant existed.

“You talked about [killing Alan] so much,” Brown said near the end of his cross-examination, “that when you were about to get out [of jail after the ten-day sentence, one of the inmates] said to you, ‘You’re going to kill that man, aren’t you?’”

“[She] hardly spoke to me while I was there. No, she didn’t say that to me.”

“And your response was to laugh, wasn’t it?”

“Again, I just said she didn’t make the statement to me!”

“So [she] didn’t say that, either?”

“[She] said she hated police officers and their wives and hoped they all die. [She] did not make the statement to me.”

Brown asked about another inmate whom Jessica had supposedly said the same thing to.

“I don’t know who [she] is,” Jessica answered.

Brown went through Jessica’s previous statements regarding her not allowing Alan visitation based mostly on the fact that scheduling was sometimes off. It had nothing to do with her denying him an opportunity to see his kids.

If that was the case, Brown suggested, why wasn’t Jessica more upset over the contempt charge? Why not show up in court to fight it? Why ignore it and then serve time in jail without kicking and screaming? “And knowing that there was absolutely no basis for that, you were outraged,” Brown asked rhetorically, phrasing it more as a statement, though.

“No,” she said, “‘outraged’ is not the right word.”

“Well, we’ll use yours then. What is it?”

“I was upset.”

“Upset? Angry?”

“Not at that point, no.”

“No?”

“Not at that point,” Jessica answered.

“Just upset?”

“I was upset.”

“Upset emotionally so that you cried?” Brown posited.

“Oh, I’m sure I did.”

“Upset so that you vented your anger? Did you scream and yell?”

“You mean upon finding out?” Jessica countered.

“Yes.”

“Did I stand there and scream and yell?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe so, no,” Jessica answered.

“What did you say?”

“I don’t recall the exact moment I found out. You know, I—”

“Now, Mrs. McCord,” Brown said, interrupting, “you have portrayed yourself all morning to these ladies and gentlemen as being a very cooperative and nice Martha Stewart–type mother who was doing everything you reasonably could to allow Alan to visit with his children. Now, all of a sudden, here comes a piece of paper with all of these lies in there that says you’re denying his visitation rights. That didn’t make you mad?”

Jessica had no response. She kept dancing around the issue, and looked worse for it. She was so noncompliant and arrogant in her replies that Brown actually snapped back at one point: “Alan made phone call after phone call after phone call to you to try to arrange visitation, and you uniformly ignored his messages, didn’t you?”

“Phone calls to where?”

“To you!” Brown responded.

“Again, where?”

“I’ll ask the questions, Mrs. McCord. It doesn’t matter where. Did he make a phone call to you to try to arrange visitation?”

“At what time?” Jessica asked.

The judge had heard enough. She leaned over and said, “Mrs. McCord, just answer the question.”

“He has in the past called me regarding visitation . . . ,” she finally agreed.

Brown brought up the point of the missing mailbox.

“It kept getting knocked over,” Jessica said. “There didn’t seem to be much point. We were running behind on bills because if they cannot deliver the mail, your bills are late. So [Jeff] got a PO box and the mail wasn’t late.” It just happened they did this when Alan and the court were looking for Jessica.

Then they discussed schooling for the kids. Jessica said she took the kids out of school—not to hide them, but because she had been “unhappy with the Hoover schools for quite some time.”

“Pathetic” was the word that came to mind when those in the courtroom later recalled Jessica’s answers. She seemed to have an excuse for everything. Her answers were beyond transparent and reprehensible.

Brown took a few deep breaths. He realized the best way to attack the lies Jessica spewed was to use her own words.

“You didn’t have any problem with Terra?”

Jessica hesitated. “Not”—she started to say, then thought better of it and stopped midsentence before changing direction—“. . . we never had a fight, no.” The phrasing of her answer was obvious. It left things open-ended. Brown had some ammo in the chamber, though. The look on Jessica’s face spoke to how sure of it she was.

“Well,” Brown said, “how about explaining the incident when you went storming into the Alabama Theatre and said to Alan, ‘If you think you and that slut, Terra, are going to get my kids, it will be over my dead body!’ Tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury about that occasion.”

Jessica shifted in her seat. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about or who told you that, that was said. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So you deny ever doing that?”

“I don’t remember ever making that statement to anybody.”

“Well, do you deny calling Terra a slut?” Brown queried.

“I don’t think I’ve ever called her a slut.”

“You don’t think?”

“I don’t think I have.”

“Well, you don’t think you have. Is that the best answer you can give me on that? You don’t think you have. Okay. That’s fine,” Brown stated.

“I answered you at least twice!”

“Yes, you certainly have. . . .”

After touching briefly on the various men Jessica had been with, in between Alan and Jeff, Jessica calling them all liars, Brown asked what she and Jeff bought at Home Depot that morning. She testified to purchasing a carpet knife.

“You bought some heavy plastic, didn’t you?” he asked. The Hoover PD believed they had used it to wrap up the bodies.

“No,” she said. “I bought a carpet knife. As a matter of fact, I think I offered the receipt to the police.”

Brown said, “Oh, you did, sure.”

“I think I did.”

“You did! Because they already had the records, didn’t they? They already had the records where you had bought some sheet plastic, and then you realized you had forgot something and then went back and got that knife!” Brown asserted.

“I didn’t buy sheet plastic that morning and—”

“Did your husband buy it?”

“Not that I am aware of, no.”