From there, she simply decided not to enroll them in another school.

During this same time period, Jeff explained, he never witnessed any animosity between Alan and Jessica regarding the kids or visitations. This was an important point for Roger Brown. The problems leading up to the murders began, by Jeff McCord’s account, during the fall of 2000, a year and a half before he and Jessica murdered Alan and Terra.

After Jeff gave a detailed account of the murders, placing himself behind the murder weapon, Brown asked him to go through how he and Jessica disposed of the bodies. It was clear to Brown that Jeff was following Jessica’s lead during the entire ordeal. She directed. Jeff listened. Whenever she panicked or lost her head, it was Jeff who took over. The Hoover PD had been close in putting together the murder and cleanup afterward—90 percent of the department’s theory proved accurate, as far as Jeff’s explanation of that day and night went.

Jeff said that as they were on the way to the dump that Saturday morning to get rid of some of the evidence, his chief phoned.

“I get a call. . . . I get a call from . . . work.” He was told either to phone the GBI himself or have his attorney do it. “We get back to the house, I call this number I’m given . . . and as it turns out . . . I spoke with [someone from the GBI], identified myself, and he told me he had no clue why I would need to call him.”

Brown confirmed with Jeff that Jessica’s high-school friend in Montevallo—the house where they had stayed on the night before they were arrested—a guy who was now facing perjury charges for lying during his grand jury testimony—did know where the storage facility was that Jessica had placed some of the evidence in. According to another source that police had interviewed, a cellmate of Jessica’s said that Jessica and Jeff rented a storage facility. Inside the small unit Jessica had apparently put plastic bags containing “bloody stuff,” along with furniture and the luggage Terra and Alan had with them. Jessica was said to have arranged for her high-school friend Michael Upton and her stepfather to “clean out the storage unit” in exchange for $500 cash to split.

Upton turned around and, according to prosecutors, lied during his grand jury testimony when asked about this same incident.

He, along with another person closely tied to the case, were about to be indicted, Brown told Jeff.

Jeff laughed at that.

As the interview drew to a close, Jeff seemed more relaxed and even in a good mood. Not once during the interview did Jeff McCord express any sorrow for the victims—nor any remorse whatsoever for killing them. He came across cold and calculating, as if he were the one walking away with a win. There were times, as chilling as it sounded, when Jeff laughed out loud. The man had shot at point-blank range two people he had no connection to, two people he did not know the slightest about, and he laughed when telling portions of that story.

Regardless of what family and former friends would later say, that behavior alone said a lot about who Jeff McCord was.

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On April 25, 2003, shortly after Jeff formally pleaded guilty, Jessica was sentenced to life without parole. In the end the judge took the advice of the jury and signed the Sheriff’s Commitment Order, sending Jessica to prison for the remainder of her natural life. She was never going to see freedom again. After Judge Vinson handed down the sentence, she asked Jessica if there was anything she had to say for herself. Maybe some explanation? Sorrow? Remorse?

Jessica declined.

Asked later on by a reporter if she wanted to make a comment, Jessica “smiled,” Carol Robinson noted, and said, “Not hardly.”

Before being whisked off to prison, Jessica was allowed to spend some time with friends and family, including her mother and grandmother, who were in court for the sentencing. Jessica laughed as she chatted with her family. What was so funny, no one actually knew. But the fact that she would appeal her case was probably fueling Jessica’s hostile, defiant attitude. It was still all a joke to Jessica McCord. There’s no doubt she saw herself getting out of prison one day when the appeals court heard her plea.

John Wiley was a bit more grounded in reality. He showed professionalism as he left the court, telling reporters, “The death penalty is wrong in any case and this case is no exception, so we’re very pleased and relieved that Mrs. McCord is delivered of that possibility of being killed by the state of Alabama. “She gets to turn her attention now to her appeal, and, hopefully, one day she’ll have a new trial and a more favorable outcome.”

Jeff and Jessica McCord ended up on the same bus heading out to prison later that day. There was one bus. All prisoners boarded. The males were separated from the females by a fence, but they could still speak to one another.

As Jessica stepped up onto the bus, shackles clanking, a cocky smile across her face, she noticed her husband sitting in the back among a group of inmates.

In her sarcastic way, quite mean-spirited and vile, Jessica stopped, smiled and looked at Jeff. By this time she knew Jeff had come clean with his version of the murders and had cut himself a deal. Up until this point Jessica had had nothing but good things to say about Jeff.

“Hey, everyone,” Jessica said as loud as she could, the entire bus stopping to look up, “that’s my husband.” She pointed Jeff out. “He’s a cop!”

Jessica sat down and faced the front.

Due to how high profile my case was, it is rather safe to say that virtually everyone in metro-Birmingham knew that I was a police officer, Jeff McCord wrote to me after he was asked if this verbal assault against his character by Jessica had caused him any problems later on when he got to prison. It’s no secret that inmates are not too fond of cops as cellmates.

Overall, I have had no real problems as a result of it or in relation to my former profession. . . . I have been housed in either protective custody or administrative segregation depending on my placement.

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Roger Brown was convinced Dian Bailey had lied to him while testifying during her daughter’s trial. A grand jury believed the evidence Brown had presented in relation to those charges. Now Brown was determined to prosecute Dian Bailey and the McCords’ friend, Michael Upton, who, the prosecutor’s office believed, had lied during his grand jury testimony. How dare these people think they can lie to the police and prosecutors investigating a double homicide? For what? To protect murderers? Reaffirming Brown’s contention that Upton lied about the storage facility, Brown got the results of Jeff McCord’s polygraph, and the examiner felt Jeff was telling the truth.

On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, Michael Upton was in court facing a jury on charges of hindering prosecution and perjury for his role in lying during the investigation into the deaths of Alan and Terra Bates. Upton was said to have told varying stories regarding that storage facility and the possibility of potential evidence Jessica had hidden.

Investigators never found the storage unit or the evidence. Still, Upton, a man in his early thirties, sat and listened as prosecutor Doug Davis explained to a jury the state’s case against him.

Davis said Upton repeatedly changed his story, which led police to believe he was lying. More than that, Davis was firm in his personal belief that Upton had “decided loyalty to his friends [was] more important than the truth. He chose to cross the line of criminality.”

Richard Poff, Michael Upton’s lawyer, explained that his client had no idea a storage facility existed; he only knew of a storage unit that Albert Bailey had rented. Apparently, Upton got mixed up in the fiasco when Jessica asked him to help her stepfather move some furniture from Bailey’s storage unit over to her mother’s house so the kids would have something to sleep on while she was in jail.