17
Though she had one year left of high school, Jessica Callis seemed overjoyed at the notion of being a mother. She had that glow about her face—a mother-to-be plumpness suited Jessica’s large frame. To top it off, she had hooked herself a responsible high schooler and dedicated “family man.” To boot, Alan was an active Christian. In addition to all that, a self-imposed shotgun to his back or not, Alan Bates planned to marry his pregnant girlfriend and make things proper.
The Bateses were a little taken aback by this new—sudden—fresh face in the family. Alan had known Jessica all of approximately six weeks. She was pregnant. She was having the child. They were getting married. The plan, for now, was Jessica would quit school and move into Alan’s parents’ house. All this, and no one really knew the first thing about the girl.
“What do we know about this person?” Kevin and Robert Bates later said the family asked themselves. Not necessarily in a derogatory fashion, but more out of curiosity and desire. “Who is she? We really don’t know anything about her, and she is going to now become part of our everyday lives?”
It wasn’t such a shock to the family that Jessica was into Alan as much as she seemed. Alan had a string of girls, throughout his junior-high and high-school years, vying for his attention. He never played into it, however, or abused the privilege of being popular with the ladies. Alan would just as well smile and be on his way. He dated—sure, he did. But dating was not something Alan focused on, as it was for so many of the other young men his age. Alan was busy with the bands he played in, studying, school politics, the theater. Girls were definitely not first on his teenage list of priorities.
“Our parents were young to become grandparents,” Kevin remembered. “But they were smart enough to know that Jessica was still a kid, too. She had some growing up to do.” No one in the family ever asked outright: “Was this the right girl for Alan?”
They simply accepted Alan’s choice and trusted his judgment.
Jessica was a kid. Of course, she came across immature and a bit obsessive at times. Many teenage girls can be that way. This was a period before text messaging and the Internet and cell phones. Teenagers filled their days and nights with other things. That said, neither time, space nor electronic gadgets could curb what postpuberty hormones inevitably forced on kids: the need for companionship. Jessica wanted more than anything else what she herself never had: a stable environment. Someone to love her unconditionally. It was not hard for Jessica to tell that the Bates family could provide it all.
“You see red flags,” Kevin said, commenting on those small outbursts in the beginning of Jessica’s more bizarre behaviors, and the stories she began to tell about her own family, “and you think part of it’s immaturity or her coming from a different background or different family.”
Diversity. America was built on it. Part of the fabric and DNA of every community.
The bottom line for the Bateses was that they weren’t about to judge this girl based on the fact that she had allowed herself to get pregnant. Or that she shared a few crazy anecdotes about growing up in the Callis household. Alan was not the type of person to have fallen for the blond, blue-eyed cheerleader, anyway, even though she might have fallen for him. In Jessica, Alan was attracted to what he viewed as her intellect. Jessica came across as very smart and intellectual. Alan liked that. She was also confident and wouldn’t back down. Strong. He liked that, too. And then, on top of all that, she put out.
“She talked a big game,” Kevin added later. “She had been, at one time, in the honors high school.” She had the foundation of aptitude there, a chance to broaden her opportunities, even though she was raised—again, according to what Jessica claimed—in such a disturbing, violent, abusive environment.
As Jessica moved in and commingled with the Bates family, nursing her growing belly, complaining about the difficulty of carrying the child, Alan continued at Shades Valley, working toward finishing his senior year. Jessica stayed home, sat around telling the stories of her life. Philip Bates was fairly diligent about keeping a family log of every important event in the children’s lives: baseball, soccer, football, whatever special occasion depicted the children growing up. When those albums came out and Alan shared the experiences of his formative years with Jessica, she countered with what were some of the most peculiar family tales of her own.
Jessica had tears in her eyes. They were sitting around, going through a large binder of Bates childhood memories, bringing Jessica into the fold of the Bateses’ lives.
“What is it?” Alan asked, concerned about the pain Jessica had apparently been whisked back into while thinking about how well the Bates family got along. How “normal” their family seemed.
“My father, he was so abusive. . . . When he left the house, he burned all of our family photographs,” Jessica said, according to Bates family members. “We have no pictures of any of us left.”
Alan and the others were drawn into this. Whether it was true or not, Kevin Bates later pointed out, “We never knew or questioned, not until years later.”
Alan felt a pang of sympathy for Jessica rise in him as she told these stories. He was falling deeper in love with her. Which was, many later speculated, the way Jessica had planned it. She used the sympathies of others to manipulate her way—“or worm, actually,” one source put it—into the good graces of the Bates household. She saw an opening and went for it.
“Alan felt—I know he did—that he could give Jessica a better life,” Kevin said.
Alan developed deep compassion for Jessica as she took on the role of motherhood, acting like she was born for it. With the new family they were creating together, Alan said more than once, he could provide Jessica with the stability she’d never had. They’d break the cycle. With their child. Their marriage.
Make it work.
Together.
“There was the whole package that Alan brought to her,” Robert later said. Alan’s oldest brother had been out of college for several years when Jessica moved in. “There was nothing spectacular about her.”
White picket fence. Three-bedroom house. Two-point-two kids. Two cars. A dog. Maybe a boat. Family walks in the park after Alan got out of work.
It all sounded so good. So warm and fuzzy. Jessica could envision it all, as if writing the script of her life—all centered, of course, around the birth of her first child.
The day Samantha was born, March 20, 1990, was full of joy and love and caring in the hospital for everyone. Dian Bailey was there, as was Albert. Kevin and Robert, along with new grandparents Joan and Philip, were beside themselves with pride and adoration. Here was this new child in their lives. Such a tremendous bundle of joy. A gurgling, pudgy, red-faced gift from God, dropped from Heaven into their laps.
What a blessing.
“It was a shared family moment,” Kevin said, recalling that day in the hospital. “An exciting first grandchild for both families.”
This was the first time the two families had gotten together in the same room since the wedding back on January 26, 1990. There was a mild strain of awkwardness. Everyone was still getting to know each other. But things were okay. They all got along. Albert Bailey explained that he was a handyman, a local contractor with a small business. “If it was a deck to be built, he could build it,” Jessica said of Albert. “If it was a water heater to be replaced, he could do it.” He was a “very handy guy.”
If Alan ever needed work, Albert suggested, he could throw the boy some hours, here and there.
Every dollar would help.
And so, they were an American family making the best of this unplanned situation. Alan was determined to be a great father, and he very likely would be, considering his pedigree. Jessica was steadfast in her desire to raise her children in stark contrast to her own upbringing. She was going to give the kid everything she never had.
Philip Bates lived by the common affirmation that “two wrongs never made a right.” The family was happy to have Jessica and the child in their home. That traditional Christian upbringing, whereby you got married first, had children, climbed up the ladder of your career, had cookouts and birthday parties on Saturdays, attended church on Sundays, and subliminally counted down the moments until your death, was but a pipe dream. Yet, Alan was a traditionalist. Getting Jessica pregnant, he was determined to do whatever he had to do to give her and his child the life they deserved.
“My parents were worried that Alan felt pressured from his conventional upbringing to marry Jessica and be an honest man and father, and all those things,” Kevin said.
Indeed, just like that, Alan was an adult. He was seventeen years old. Still in high school. It was the beginning of a new decade. The 1980s were history. Alan had a bright, prosperous future ahead of him.
Now he had a wife and child.
How things could change overnight.
Alan never viewed any of this as having a shotgun poked in his back, forcing him into a Las Vegas chapel. He embraced the idea of marriage and fatherhood. Took on the role as if he had been born to do it.
By April 1990, Alan and Jessica had lived with his parents for nearly two months. They decided to move, however. The best place was Hoover, into Jessica’s mother and stepfather’s house. Sam was a month old. Living in Hoover would be more convenient for Alan and school. Dian could help out with the baby. Jessica could begin to think about her future.
That lasted a month. It was said that a fight erupted between Jessica and her mother. Whatever the case might be, Alan and Jessica were back at the Bates house in Cahaba Heights four weeks after leaving.
Jessica was different this time around. She pulled Joan Bates aside one day, for example, shortly after moving back in, and said, “Listen, you are not to answer the phone if my mother calls. You cannot invite my mother over to this house. I will say when she can see her granddaughter.”
It was a control issue: Jessica had the power—the baby—to refuse her mother something she had apparently wanted. Payback was a bitch. It was as if Jessica was proving to her own mother how she had felt—the pain she had experienced growing up, being shuffled between her biological father and mother, and being put in the middle of what was a war between her parents.
Jessica was very much in the driver’s seat of her life now. It was as if, as soon as she had a little bit of power over someone, she wielded it. And because of the tenuous relationship she’d had with her mother throughout the years already, Jessica was calling the shots now that she was a mother.
An eye for an eye.
For all those in the Bates household, the situation became volatile, not to mention uncomfortable and, at times, embarrassing. They had no real chance of seeing or understanding it at the time, but a pattern was developing in front of their eyes.
Robert was out of the house. He came home from time to time. Being away from the situation—distanced—Robert could see things the others couldn’t. It was like not seeing your cousin for a year—you instantly noticed how much she had grown.
“I noticed immediately,” Robert said, “that as Alan finished high school, things for him and Jessica were slowly beginning to become out of balance.”
Out of balance, the family would soon come to understand, would turn into the understatement of Alan and Jessica’s life together. From the moment Alan married Jessica, his life would be thrown into chaos. Because beneath a seemingly composed veneer that Jessica presented when around the Bates clan, coming out of her shell every once in a while to tell a tale of horror or to try to gain sympathy, lay an incredible brewing drama. Inside Jessica’s soul, one could argue, she kept hidden an incapacitating, silent rage that would expose itself as she became more comfortable in her role as Mrs. Alan Bates. It was a fury, maybe even a woman’s wrath, about to come to life.