24
There was still work to be done inside the McCord home as Monday, February 18, 2002, progressed. Wherever the HPD looked, another piece of incriminating evidence against Jessica and Jeff McCord seemed to pop up. There was now good reason to believe Alan and Terra Bates were murdered inside the McCord home.
Outside the den door, in the garage, a can of gasoline with an inch of liquid was uncovered. More ammo was found. A new bottle of Clorox bleach—empty. Several shards of wallpaper matching the old pattern, which were recently torn off the walls, were found crumpled up.
Empty boxes of tile.
And paper towels. Plenty of used paper towels were unearthed inside garbage cans throughout the house. No one knew then how important these paper towels would become.
Evidence tech Mark Tant, a seventeen-year-veteran law enforcement officer with the HPD, noticed as he took photographs of the outside of the house that there was no mailbox. It was the only house on the block without a mailbox.
Another anomaly. Why no mailbox?
The den was so crowded with stuff, Tant said later in court, “you could barely walk through there. You were stepping on things.”
Boxes. Books. Clothes. Toys. DVDs. Tapes. Old newspapers. And trash.
In the far corner of one room on the main floor was a bookcase, later learned to be Jessica’s. It was full of true crimes and thrillers. Dozens of them.
At some point that day, Tant was summoned to Pro Tow Towing, a service the HPD used to impound vehicles. The garage was located off Route 150, down on Lorna Road, not too far from the McCord home.
The HPD impounded Albert Bailey’s white GMC van, the vehicle he had driven to transport the couch to that Dumpster site in town. The HPD believed Bailey might have transported the carpet, too, either knowingly or unknowingly. And there may well be additional evidence inside the van. Best thing to do was bring it in and process it.
On the back of the window of the beat-up van, Bailey had one bumper sticker, split into two sections: AMERICA, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.
The guy was a patriot.
Inside the body of the van, Tant found several pieces of tile matching those found inside the McCord home.
He took the pieces out of the van and photographed them.
The HPD released the McCord home for the second time in three days. Jessica stayed at the house. Jeff was “escorted” to the HPD after volunteering to give another statement.
Inside the interview room Jeff made it clear that he wasn’t taking much of this all that seriously—which seemed rather odd, considering the stakes. He was cocky. Laughing and joking around. Acting like he had the situation under control.
Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected.
Peyton Zanzour and Tom McDanal started the interview by turning on the videotape recorder. First they asked about the couch. Who had removed it from the house? When? Why? “Who took the cushions off? Where are the cushions?”
This . . . seemed to confuse McCord, a report of the interview noted.
“Look,” Jeff said after thinking about it, “I took the cushions off the thing so they would not blow off when the couch was removed from the house and taken to the dump.”
But the couch was transported inside Albert Bailey’s van.
Another lie.
“Which dump?” one of the investigators asked.
Jeff shrugged.
“Why was the leather stripped from the back of the couch?”
Jeff considered the question. “To make it lighter. And the cushions were actually taken to a charity drop-off at the Wal-Mart in Pelham.”
“Where was the stripped leather disposed?”
Jeff said Jessica tossed it; he had no idea where.
The former cop continued to laugh. Apparently, two dead bodies and evidence pointing toward him and his wife was some sort of a joke. “Him being a police officer,” Detective Brignac, who was in another room watching the interview on a TV monitor, said later, “you’d think he’d want to help us. But he kept saying he didn’t know anything . . . and then he’d sit there and laugh.”
“That carpet,” one of the investigators asked, “when did y’all remove it?”
“Jessica removed that, too. I have no idea where it is.”
As the interview went on, Jessica called the station house repeatedly. “I want to talk to my husband! Where is he? I need to talk to my husband.”
“Busy, ma’am.”
“I need to speak with him. Please . . . now.”
“No. You can’t right now. He’s busy.”
Getting nowhere, Jessica decided to pack up the children and head down to the HPD.
Back inside the interrogation room, one of the investigators asked again, “Jeff, where is the carpet?”
“I think she took it to the dump.” Jeff named two different “public dumps in Alabama.”
“Which one?”
He went quiet.
“We need to know which dump.”
“Am I free to leave?” he asked at that point.
“Sure.”
The interview was over. Jeff sat as they got the paperwork for the search warrant together and gave him copies.
“I need my gun and belt so I can turn it into Pelham,” Jeff said. “I suspect I’ll be placed on administrative leave until the outcome of this investigation.”
McDanal left the room to go get Jeff’s gun belt.
When he returned (phrasing it as though there was bad news, that same report indicated), McDanal told Jeff, “There’s a problem with the evidence room door—we cannot retrieve the gun belt at this time.”
Jeff went into a laughing fit in response to McDanal’s explanation: After learning what the actual news was, McCord laughed uncontrollably and then noticeably, physically relaxed, the report noted.
Up and down. An emotional roller coaster for Jeff McCord. He didn’t know how to feel. Or how to act.
Jeff was told he could leave. Jessica was waiting outside in the parking lot.
“There was just so much going on, so much to be done at this point,” Detective Brignac said later, “we had our hands full. We were all working sixteen-hour days by then. . . .”
Jessica sat in the family van with the children and their clothes. Jeff got in. They were heading to Pensacola, Florida, to drop the kids off at Jessica’s sister’s and maybe wait out the investigation down there.
Jeff made no promise he’d be back in town anytime soon.
“If they stay in Florida,” one investigator said, “we’re going to have big problems because of jurisdiction issues.”
As Jessica and Jeff pulled out of the parking lot, two officers in an unmarked vehicle got behind the van and followed them.