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Jail was not a place compatible with Jessica McCord’s character. The idea that she was in the same room with common criminals that she looked down upon infuriated the woman. When it came time to make telephone calls, it was Jeff who bore the brunt of his wife’s anger. She berated him on the telephone in front of other prisoners. Cursed at him. Made unrealistic demands. “And,” one fellow inmate later said, “talked to him like he was a five-year-old. . . . You know, she gives the orders.”

“You need to get off your ass and do whatever it is you can to get me out of here,” Jessica snapped during her first call to Jeff. This was before swearing at him and slamming the phone down on its cradle.

She called back a few minutes later. “I’m the one locked up for ten days, and you and my mother are not doing anything out there to help me.”

Jeff asked how things were going. He was concerned.

“How am I doing? How . . . you’re responsible for my being here, Kelley.”

“Basically,” Jeff said later, she made him feel that “I was responsible for all the problems in her life at that particular time.”

Jeff considered that because Jessica was the one sitting in the jail and not him, everything had to be his fault. Jessica’s constant criticizing was, Jeff said later, all part of the manipulation effort on her part to get what she wanted. “She felt that I should have figured out a better or a different way to have handled the so-called ‘problem’ (meaning Alan) before it got to the point where she was hauled off to jail.”

Jessica was livid. Absolutely furious. She ordered Jeff to call someone and get her out of jail before she went mad. All Jeff could do was listen and wonder what in the world he could do. She had violated an order of the court. Why wasn’t she getting that? Sure, Jeff was a cop, but he couldn’t do anything for her now. It was ten days. Suck it up.

“Jessica’s . . . attitude,” a fellow inmate said later, putting it mildly, “was kind of rough.”

 

 

Jeff had been told over and over by Jessica that Alan was abusive. Jessica explained to him that Alan was stuck on getting back at her and had repeatedly hurt her and the kids. And now the court had the nerve to go and side with him and his new wife. Maybe it was Jeff’s fault. Maybe he could have done more for his wife. Maybe there was something to what she had suggested a few weeks back—that the only way to get rid of the problem was to tend to it themselves.

As that conversation had progressed, Jessica talked about the idea of losing the children to Alan. She could not allow that to happen. Alan could never get custody. That was not an option here.

“I’ll do anything to keep those kids, Kelley.”

She sounded desperate, and Jeff knew what she meant.

“I know . . . I know,” he said.

“Kelley, anything. I’ll do anything to keep those kids. You know that.”

She said it “several more times,” Jeff later explained.

 

 

During Jessica’s ten-day stint in jail, Jeff and Dian called Alan and asked if he would allow Jessica to leave the jail for two days—during the Christmas holiday—so she could spend that time with the children. The court wasn’t going to allow her out of jail unless Alan signed off on it.

Without hesitation Alan agreed. For him, it had never been about punishing Jessica. It had never been personal. It had always been about the children.

Before leaving jail after her ten-day stint, a fiery Jessica McCord—even after Alan had allowed her the holiday with the kids—turned to a cellmate and let the woman know how she felt about being locked up.

“Somebody is going to pay,” Jessica snapped.