They next discussed the fact that Jessica could not deny that she and Jeff made a dump run that Saturday morning. So Jessica’s response to it was that they had made the trip to toss out some old toys. She claimed the call from Philip Bates about Alan being missing had upset her. But Brown was quick to make the connection that “rather than waiting there [at the house] for a phone call to hear anything, you took broken toys . . . to the dump, thirty miles away from your house.”

There was a dump site within a few miles, Brown let the jury know. Yet she and Jeff, Jessica testified, drove to a dump more than a half hour away.

“I waited for quite a while,” she said.

“Ma’am, is that true?”

“I waited for quite a while,” Jessica responded again.

“Ma’am?”

Finally, “A while later, yes, I went.”

Brown mentioned the bullet found in the garage. He wanted to know what Jessica thought about that little piece of damning evidence.

“What is your explanation for how it got there? Did the police plant it? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know how it got there. I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t know,” Jessica replied.

Brown introduced State’s Exhibit Number 94. He showed the photograph to Jessica. “Do you recognize that?”

Jessica played stupid, mumbling more than answering. “Do you mind if I look at it to see what—I recognize the author, but I don’t recognize the—I’m reading the summary on the back of the book. I don’t necessarily remember this particular book, but I recognize the author.”

“You don’t recognize it? So, is this another ‘I don’t think I read it,’ or ‘I don’t remember it,’ or ‘I don’t know’?”

The photograph was of W.E.B. Griffin’s The Murderers. It was taken from inside the McCord home. It was a brilliant move on Brown’s part. He wanted the jury to understand that Jessica might have gotten the idea from that book to murder Alan and cover it up.

Brown asked several more questions over a fifteen-minute blitz, for which Jessica would not answer with any type of accountability, no matter how insignificant or irrelevant to the case the question turned out to be. Finally, accusing Jessica of being a flat-out liar, Brown leaned down and whispered something into Laura Hodge’s ear.

Then: “No further questions, Your Honor.”

Mopping the floor came to the minds of most in the courtroom.

Wiley cleared a few things up over redirect and sat back down.

Jessica was released from the witness stand.

62

Since day one of the trial, the courtroom had been packed. There was a certain “energy” in the room, as one person later described it. It wasn’t “somber,” or terribly sad, “though there were definitely times that were more solemn than others.” Still, the subtle tone simmering in the background hummed with the feeling that everyone was present because two people had been brutally murdered. It was sometimes easy to forget there were victims—the dead. Trials become about suspects. Victims often get lost in the shuffle of testimony and evidence. Kevin and Robert Bates, as well as friends of the Bates and Klugh families, were there to remind everyone that victims should never be forgotten.

Even though Jessica had finished testifying, the day was far from over. The accused double murderer had spent upward of four hours in the witness-box. As she sat down at the table, with her family—including a brother dressed in his U.S. Navy uniform—there in the front row to support her, Jessica had to feel somewhat wounded. At times she had been impatient and argumentative with Roger Brown. At others, well, she sounded desperate and unwilling to tell the truth in spite of implicating herself. This was not going to sit well with the jury.

As Jessica settled in her chair, her mother, Dian Bailey, stood and walked toward the witness stand. What would soon prove to be an important part of the trial—something most everyone would overlook as a mere formality—Dian raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth.

“The whole truth and nothing but . . .”

Dian spoke in a low monotone. She was not comfortable in the witness stand, testifying at her daughter’s murder trial. What mother would be?

After Wiley had Dian talk about where she worked inside the court system of collecting money from deadbeat dads, she talked about Jessica moving into her house after Jessica and Alan had divorced. The point of it was to clarify that Alan’s kids—all of Jessica’s kids, for that matter—were frequent guests at the Bailey household.

The next several questions focused on how Dian and her late husband, Albert, had made a second home for Jessica’s kids. They had clothes for the children at their house. There was a bedroom “denominated” (Dian’s word) specifically as the children’s.

Some sat and wondered where this line of questioning was leading. But that was made clear when Wiley asked, “Had there ever been times, to your knowledge, that Alan was scheduled to pick up the girls for visitation and failed to do so?”

“Yes.”

“Few or many times?”

“There would be a lot of times that you would find out he wasn’t coming, yes.”

Another round of slapping a dead man across the face was under way.

“Would it be safe to say that it got to the point where no one was surprised that he didn’t show up?”

“Yeah. For me, yes.”

As she continued, Dian painted a gloomy and stressful picture of her life at the time Jessica and Alan were fighting for custody, saying, “My father was—we put him in a nursing home on Valentine’s Day, the day before [the deposition]. My mother was at home ill with pneumonia.”

Dian testified that she got home from work on Friday, February 15, 2002, at “five-thirty [P.M.] or so. . . . My husband and grandchildren were [there].” She said she understood Alan was going to pick the kids up at Jessica’s Myrtlewood Drive home that evening. But Alan had picked up the kids at her house in the past “many times.” He would also come by her house to “look for them.”

Wiley asked if Jessica came by that evening.

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you what she was doing or intending to do, or anything?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She was going to go to dinner and a movie [with Jeff].”

Wiley asked about a phone call Dian had received from Jessica later that night. She said it was somewhere near eight o’clock (during the movie, when Jessica said she had stepped out for the Pepto-Bismol).

“She wanted to remind me to give [the youngest] his medicine.”

“Later on that night, did you have a conversation with Jessica?”

“Yes,” Dian answered.

“And do you know about what time that was?”

“It was after twelve-thirty.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I had just given [the youngest] his bottle. Just finished giving [him] his evening bottle.”

“And what was the gist of—was that a telephone conversation?”

Dian did not hesitate: “No. She came to the house and she was going to pick up the kids. And I told her, I said, ‘The kids are asleep—let them stay here.’”

Roger Brown whispered something to Laura Hodge. What Dian had just testified to was in stark contrast with the state’s findings. Dian was saying, in effect, that Jessica had stopped by the house after midnight. Brown and Hodge knew that was impossible if Jessica and Jeff were in Georgia, driving to Rutledge to dump the bodies and to torch Alan’s car. Either Dian Bailey had just committed perjury, or Jeff and Jessica were not responsible for the murders of Alan and Terra.

“Do you know whether or not her husband was with her?” Wiley asked.

“Yes, he was. He was in the car.”

Brown wrote something down on the legal pad in front of him.