“Would it be unusual for Jessica to ask you to let the kids just stay over like that?”

“Oh no, no.”

“Would it be safe to say, really, your house was just like a second home for those kids?”

“Definitely a second home for the kids.”

“That’s all I have, Your Honor.”

Roger Brown didn’t waste any time. “More like a first home, Mrs. Bailey?” the prosecutor said, standing, looking down at his legal pad.

“I’m sorry?” Dian asked.

“It was more like a first home, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

Two questions later, “The evening Mr. Wiley asked you about when you said she came by your house or, excuse me, called you on the phone, I’m not sure which it was, and told you her plans were to go to dinner and a movie.”

“Right,” Dian answered.

“Was that on the telephone or at your house?”

“That was at my house.”

“What time was it?”

“I want to say it was sometime after six-thirty or so.”

“Sometime after six-thirty?”

“Yeah.”

After Dian said she believed Jeff and Jessica were driving the family van during that six-thirty visit, Brown asked what vehicle they were driving when they returned to the house early the next morning, at or around twelve-thirty.

“I didn’t get up and look.”

“You didn’t notice when they came inside?”

“No.”

Through extensive questioning, Brown made a point to the jury that while Jessica was hiding out from Alan and the court, Alan’s lawyer, Frank Head, had hired someone to serve Dian with an order to take a deposition, but Dian had lied to that man when he came to her door. She told him she was someone else. Then one day when the same man came upon her while she was outside at work, smoking a cigarette, she ran inside the building to avoid him.

“In fact,” Brown added, “he followed you into the building and tried to engage you in conversation, and you went into a secure employee area where he couldn’t come back there, right? Is that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

Brown wanted to keep his cross brief. Hit Jessica’s mother with the facts and let her fall on her sword.

“Finally, Mrs. Bailey, do you recall in the spring of 2002, I invited you by subpoena to come to the grand jury and tell the grand jury what you knew about the situation, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“And you did come to the grand jury, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Dian replied.

“And when you came in there, when I began to ask you questions, you invoked your right against self-incrimination, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And refused to answer my questions?” Brown asked.

“Yes.”

“Thank you. That’s all.”

Wiley concluded his case with one more witness, bringing the grand total to three. Brown called a few rebuttal witnesses. It was late in the day. After Brown had rested his case, and Wiley waved his hand indicating he was also finished, the judge said it had been a long day. It was a good time to end proceedings. But everyone was expected back in court the following morning—a Saturday—by nine.

The judge gave the jury its familiar warning regarding discussing the case among themselves. After all, each side still had closing arguments left to give.

63

First thing Saturday morning, a year to the day Alan and Terra were murdered, Roger Brown, looking confident and prepared, began his closing by paying homage to the jury. He said there was no way he could drive a forklift, work as an engineer, “manage” homes or be a nurse—all jobs held by the jurors—and yet, “Any one of you,” Brown said humbly, “can come down here and do what I’m about to do—argue this case on behalf of the state of Alabama, and Alan and Terra.”

Brown talked about the obvious: every murder was senseless. He spoke of the questions one might have when confronted with such horror: namely, why?

“What did they ever do to her?” Brown asked, pointing to Jessica. He went through the visitation and custody matters in brief, not spending too much time rehashing what his witnesses had testified to already. Just about every point Brown made hit on target to rebut what Jessica had said on the witness stand.

“It’s all about her,” Brown said in a loud voice.

He talked about how Jessica and Jeff got rid of the couch because it was likely covered with blood and bullet holes. Finally, just ten minutes later, Brown challenged Jessica’s defense team to “get up here and tell you what is a plausible, reasonable theory consistent with her innocence on these facts.”

Brown was done.

Bill Neumann had been part of Jessica’s defense team from the beginning of the trial. Yet Neumann had been invisible. Now he stood and made a point to note his absence in the case. “I know you haven’t heard my voice,” Neumann said, “since about Monday, and . . . I guess you were wondering if I had a voice left.” He explained how he had caught a cold that was “getting progressively worse.”

It took Neumann some time to get his thoughts in order. He apologized for anything “inappropriate” he might say in defense of Jessica—especially those things that the jury might consider an insult “to the memory of Alan and Terra Bates.” But it was his and John Wiley’s duty as officers of the court to defend their client’s rights. Part of such a defense, apparently, was going to include a walk over the graves of these two murdered people.

Regarding all of the fighting that went on between Alan and Jessica, Neumann said, there was one constant. “Do you remember what the attorneys said? That [Alan and Jessica] were moving toward an agreement . . . and she was going to likely keep custody.”

He disputed those witnesses who claimed Jessica had said she’d kill Alan before she let him have the kids. He talked about those witnesses’ arrest records. Their drug habits. He mentioned the lack of forensic evidence the state had, not giving a clear indication as to why Terra’s blood might have been found on the McCord coffee table—seeing that Jessica herself testified that neither Alan nor Terra had ever been inside her house and had even failed to show up on the night in question.

From there, Neumann beat the drum of circumstantial evidence and how one might think twice about convicting someone on it alone.

“It’s circumstances, and that’s all it is. There are many explanations for a set of circumstances. . . .”

Indeed, there were—and Brown had done a great job of pointing them out.

He then moved on to the bullet, which he believed to be the definitive piece of evidence of the state’s case. There was only one way to attack its credibility.

“But what [the scientist] said also was that the projectile was markedly deformed.” Setting that trap, Neumann explained that ballistics, in his opinion, was not the same as DNA. “Not quite at the same level as what you perhaps had some expectations of before you walked in here.”

For the next ten minutes, Neumann talked about speculative matters: Where was all the blood? he asked. If Alan and Terra were murdered inside the McCord home, why wasn’t there more blood? Then he called the murders an “elaborate scheme” the Hoover PD fit into a box wrapped around Jeff and Jessica. He said Jeff could have very well fired his gun in the house. But then gave no explanation as to how a matching bullet ended up underneath Alan’s body in the trunk of his rental car—that is, other than saying ballistic experts were wrong.

Did the fact that Jessica left the movies and went to a store two miles away make her a murderer?

Of course not.

What about presuming a suspect innocent? Where was the benefit of the doubt? In a facetious tone, mocking Brown’s assumptions, Neumann added, “You know, Mrs. McCord’s mother must be lying about Jessica coming by the house around, I believe she said, twelve-thirty. She must be lying about talking to her on the phone . . . and if she’s lying, Mrs. McCord is guilty of murder. They want you to take a lot of little things and, just for the lack of a better expression, make a mountain out of a molehill. . . .”