48
Right on time, 6:00 P.M., Alan and Terra pulled up in front of the McCord home. Alan drove a Grand Am he had picked up from the Avis terminal that morning. Jessica and Jeff were inside the house, upstairs, waiting, looking out the window. They had a new plan. It didn’t involve the sign on the front door anymore.
Jessica spied Alan’s car. Then she ran outside to greet them.
Alan wanted to park on the street. Not ever being allowed in the house before today, he looked quizzically at the house, until he saw Jessica in the driveway waving at him. She was motioning for Alan to pull into the driveway.
Park here.
Jeff sat on a stool in the den, eight feet away from the couch Terra and Alan were going to be told to sit on. He had his Beretta tucked inside his waistband. By now, Jeff and Jessica had come up with what they believed was a foolproof plan to get Terra and Alan to sit on the couch. It couldn’t miss. There was no way Alan would refuse when Jessica told him what was going on. Jessica knew how to address Alan’s sensibilities. Using the kids as a ploy was the key. He’d fall for it without a second thought.
Terra walked in first. She looked bright and chipper, maybe even a little curious. This hospitality was so unlike Jessica. She had never wanted Alan inside her home before. Why now? Why had she changed her mind?
Alan walked toward the door while eyeing the dog.
“He barks. . . . He might bite,” Jessica warned.
The dog went nuts. “Come on,” Alan said. He was in fear of the dog. What is this? What’s going on? Get that damn dog to calm down.
“Don’t be afraid, Alan,” Jessica said. “Come on in.”
Jessica walked in last, behind Alan and Terra.
Entering the den, Jessica told Alan and Terra to have a seat on the couch. Why? “The girls are upstairs. They’ve been preparing a play for you.” She smiled. Alan seemed a bit confused until Jessica mentioned the play. The girls were always putting on plays and puppet shows and pretending. Alan was all about the theater. “They want to show it to you quickly before y’all leave, okay?” Jessica added.
Jessica walked up the stairs toward the bedrooms to make it look good. The kids were supposedly waiting there.
“Okay,” Alan said. He sat down. Terra sat on the other side of the couch. “Fine, fine.”
Not even two minutes later, Jessica returned. Alan and Terra were sitting together, facing Jessica, who now stood in front of them. There was an uncomfortable moment of silence and staring.
“The girls have been sick,” Jessica said.
“Really?” Alan responded.
“They don’t need to be out in this weather.”
“Well, we need to get going.”
“What do you plan on doing this weekend?”
“Don’t know.”
“Sam’s been having problems with math. Philip might be able to help him, being an engineer, you know.”
“Yeah,” Alan said.
This was strange: Alan and his ex-wife in her den talking about the kids like normal human beings.
Jeff finally spoke up. “Maybe it’s something Sam can pursue, you know, mathematics. What, Alan, with your expertise in physics as far as weights and balances from your theater experience.”
“Where are the girls?”
“Oh, they’re still getting ready for the play,” Jessica said. “They’ll be down soon.”
Jeff stood. He had been sitting on the hearth area of the brick fireplace inside the den. Terra was directly opposite from where Jeff now stood in front of her. Alan moved away from Terra for no apparent reason and sat at the other end of the couch.
Without a word Jeff reached around to the back of his waistband, pulled out his Beretta and shot Terra near her head.
“I can’t remember if I double-tapped her,” Jeff said later. Meaning, “You know, obviously, two rounds in the same mass.”
Terra fell forward. Dropped to the floor.
Of course, startled and shocked by this, Alan went to stand.
Jeff pointed his weapon at Alan as he moved and fired at him twice.
Both shots hit Alan.
He tried to get up on his feet, according to Jeff, while saying, “You fuckhead.”
So Jeff shot him again, a third time, saying, “You’re the fuckhead!”
“I put a round in him and he stumbles to the floor,” Jeff explained later.
After disabling Alan from doing anything, something Jeff said he had learned from being a police officer, he put two more rounds into Terra, to make sure she was dead.
Terra had not said a word. Or moved.
“The way you’re taught, if you’ve got multiple targets you—you know—at least try to wound one, move to the other, ideally, you know, if you double-tap, fine. Put one down and then move to the other.”
The words of a trained killer.
Jeff described killing two human beings as methodical and calculating. It was as if he was talking about someone else, or a movie he had seen. He made it sound so common, so unrealistic. However, what was also clear from his description of that day was that Jeff McCord knew exactly what he was doing. The only consolation one can speculate from all of this is knowing that Terra, at least, had presumably no idea what was happening. She didn’t have to suffer the horror of thinking about dying.
“I don’t think she had time to assess the threat,” Jeff explained, “or recognize, Oh, damn, something’s about to happen.”
Murder was now a something.
While Jeff killed Jessica’s ex-husband and his wife, Jessica sat on the second step of the stairs in front of them, watching, looking on as if it was some sort of staged play. She was calm and collected. It was as if every wish Jessica had was coming true in front of her eyes.
She might have even enjoyed it.
“Go move the car,” Jeff ordered.
Jessica snapped out of the moment and jumped up. Walked over to Alan’s body and rummaged through his coat, looking for his car keys.
“Where are the keys?”
They needed to bring Alan’s car up to the back door so they could load the bodies into the trunk as planned.
Jeff walked over. Checked to see if Alan and Terra were still alive. There was blood now soaking into the carpet, like spilled juice. There were tiny spots of blood on the coffee table. The couch, too.
“Visual assessment,” Jeff said later, describing his next move as if he were an army medic out on the battlefield communicating via walkie-talkie. “No signs of breathing.” The ability Jeff had to detach himself emotionally from the telling of this horrific event was truly frightening. Here was a guy describing how he had murdered two innocent people in cold blood, and he spoke of it as though he was being questioned as part of an exam. No compassion or remorse whatsoever was present in Jeff’s demeanor.
Just facts, one after the next.
Jeff reached down and checked Terra’s and Alan’s carotid artery—neck—pulses, as he coldly put it later, to “make sure.”
Confident they were both dead, Jeff went around the room, knelt down and picked up all the shell casings. In his head he kept repeating how many shots he had fired—six rounds . . . six . . . six—and he knew he needed to find that number of casings.
After pocketing the casing shells, Jeff broke the gun apart. Then he began to think about what else needed to be done.
Yet in all of it, Jeff was wrong. The coroner later reported finding eight wounds.