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A fine middle-class community of hardworking, good-natured people, Cahaba Heights, Alabama, is located in Jefferson County, inside the confines of the Birmingham-Hoover metropolitan area. Birmingham was one of several central locales during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by the late American hero Dr. Martin Luther King. In fact, at one time, early in the movement, Birmingham was called “Bomb-ingham,” being the violent stage for eighteen unsolved bombings in black neighborhoods over a six-year period. This, mind you, on top of what became known as the “vicious mob attack,” which was centered on the Freedom Riders on Mother’s Day, 1961. There is a long history of violence in Birmingham; but also, perhaps more relevant to the peace Dr. King inspired, there is an air of redemption and civil obedience, there inside the internal framework of the community. Wrongs being righted. People being treated as the human beings they are, regardless of the color of their skin.
The Cahaba Heights section of Birmingham is just about in the middle of the state. The name was born from a Native American settlement originally located in the southeastern United States, the Choctaw (“water above”). Cahaba Heights has always been small-town. In the year 2000, there were some five thousand people living in this particular section of Birmingham, a metropolis with a population (including its suburbs) consisting of 1,079,089 people, making Birmingham the largest city in the state. Many of the people are assiduous, churchgoing, true-to-heart Southerners, living out the honorable moral virtues instilled in them by their ancestors. Cahaba has an ideal relation to the city, set on a perfectly placed cross section of Interstate 459 and Route 38.
Shades Valley High School has been part of Irondale’s landscape, on Old Leeds Road, since 1996. Irondale is another fine Birmingham suburb that built itself up into a community of fun-loving, caring, pious people. One of its most famous residents is actress-turned-author Fannie Flagg, who brought fame to the town of just under ten thousand via her Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café novel and a later Hollywood film version, starring Kathy Bates, Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker.
Comparatively speaking, Shades Valley has a reputation among students and parents as being one of the best schools in the region, if not the state. Of course, this is an open-ended argument, rooted in the deep feelings locals in the South have for their high-school football and basketball teams. Yet, maybe a little bit of God’s grace and goodness seeps into the pores of the people in Irondale, no matter what their take on reglion or spirituality is. The most recent Shades Valley location on Old Leeds Road is a literal neighbor to Mother Angelica’s successful Catholic-based Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) studios, where Catholic programming is aired worldwide to upward of 160 million households, twenty-four hours a day.
Alan Bates grew up as the middle child in a household of three boys. Alan and his brother Robert both attended Shades Valley when it was located in Homewood, just off Route 31, near the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Alan excelled in high school. He was one of those kids every mother prayed their daughter would drag in through the door one day after school and announce as her boyfriend. Alan took Southern hospitality to new heights, learning all he conveyed from two fine and loving parents. Alan was an honor student. He was voted class president three years running, beginning his freshman year, in the tenth grade. (Shades Valley ran things differently than most schools. Junior high was seventh grade through ninth; high school tenth through twelfth.) Not only was Alan an active member of his church and his family, a God-fearing unit of reverent Christians, but Alan played drums in various bands, including gospel and Christian.
“[Alan] picked up an interest along the way,” his father, Philip, later said, “in technical theater and was responsible for . . . his senior class having a stage production at Shades Valley, which they hadn’t in years. But he was interested in the lights and the sound and the set design and the behind-the-scenes things that make a theater production go. He wasn’t interested in the drama. But he loved that!”
Alan loved the theater so much, it wasn’t uncommon for friends to stop by the Shades Valley auditorium during lunch hour and find Alan sitting there, eating, relishing the feel and smell of just being around the stage. One such friend, Marley Franklin (pseudonym), who had known Alan and the Bates boys since they were all in diapers, often sat and ate with her buddy.
“Alan and I,” Marley said later, “were raised like brother and sister. He loved the theater, even then, in high school. He just felt so at home there.”
It was during the summer break of 1988, Alan heading from his junior to senior year, that he met Jessica Callis, a local Hoover girl. Jessica was every bit the polar opposite of Alan. On paper they should not have clicked. However, they seemed to get along and shared several things in common (what, exactly, no one really could pinpoint, even years later). Jessica grew up the oldest of three children in what was a broken home, over in the Whiting Road section of Hoover. According to Jessica years later, violence was one way to solve problems in the Callis household. Sure, the family sought solace in God’s word on Sundays in the form of the Edgewood Presbyterian Church on Oxmoor Road in Birmingham. But it was obvious the values preached from the pulpit by Pastor Sid Burgess must have gone in one ear and out the other of big daddy George Callis. There were beatings, Jessica later claimed, on top of openhanded slaps that left red marks and bruises; a week hardly went by without her parents getting into some sort of heated confrontation that ended in her mother crying, her dad taking off to go get drunker than he was already.
Jessica was a third-generation Edgewood Presbyterian churchgoer (though she rarely attended services as she grew older); her grandmother was a member of the church for some sixty years. “One of the saints of God’s Kingdom,” Pastor Burgess said of Jessica’s grandpappy in one of his 2002 sermons. Jessica’s mother, Dian, was the church treasurer at one time. Dian’s second husband, Albert Bailey, was “an active elder” on the council of the church. It was inside Edgewood that Jessica was baptized and given the Christian name Jessica Inez, after her grandmother—a name Jessica would use for the rest of her life whenever asked.
The church—or religion, in general—was one of the fundamental differences Alan and Jessica shared. As Jessica later put it, “Alan was brought up in the Church of Christ, which is not my, I mean, it’s Christian but, you know, the basic tenets are different than mine.” Edgewood was more of a “liberal church,” she said. “And the whole theory, different views on how girls should be treated, especially within the confines of the church. And I disagreed vehemently with [Alan’s] family on that. . . .”
And so it would seem, at least in the realm of schoolgirl crushes and teen romances, that as “an item,” Alan and Jessica would have not made a good match. Still, all that piety and good living was the social, public side of life Jessica led as a child. Living inside her home—keep in mind, this is according to Jessica herself—was a bit like stepping down into the fires of hell every day. And in that sense, unbeknownst to either of them, Alan and Jessica were like two magnets trying to stick together. Kids from vastly different upbringings, with vastly different values and vastly different views of life, trying to come together.
A positive and a negative.
Sparks.
Nevertheless, Alan saw something in the young, auburn-haired girl with the cute smile, pudgy cheeks and boisterous, look-at-me disposition. Jessica was no knockout, like the more popular girls in school Alan could have snapped a finger and took out, but she had something. Maybe a twinkle in her eye Alan was attracted to. A flare for life. A subtle vulnerability. Perhaps a calming voice that made him feel at the same time both comfortable and defenseless.
Whatever it was, Alan liked the package.
Marley Franklin, who was hanging around with Alan every day during that period when he met Jessica, later said, “Jessica hated my guts.”
As soon as she transferred to Shades Valley, Jessica made sure that people noticed her. Jessica did have a subtle beauty about her in high school; she stood out. Still, she craved and almost demanded attention.
“She latched onto Alan pretty quick, pretty hard and heavy,” one old friend said. “She loved the fact that [Alan] was a ‘band guy.’”
As Jessica and Alan became closer, Jessica pulled Alan aside one day and told him, “You stop hanging out with [Marley]. You never speak to her again.”
It was about control. Jessica was stepping in and taking charge of Alan’s life.
Marley got an uneasy vibe from Jessica and felt she and Alan were headed for trouble. Still, to Marley, Alan could make his own choices; he was a brother, not a lover. Marley wanted nothing to do with him romantically, or “in that way.” Then again, it was unnerving for her that this new girl in Alan’s life was telling him what people he could and could not hang out with.
“I got a really bad read of her,” Marley said. “I mean, everybody that knew her got a bad read of Jessica. You could just tell she carried with her a negative energy.”
It was like a cloud, former friends said. An aura about Jessica.
Perhaps Jessica fed a wild side of Alan that he rarely ever allowed to come out. She was aggressive. She was “different.” Heck, Jessica was more than willing to put out.
“She was fun,” said a former high-school classmate, “you know, and I am sure that was appealing to Alan.”