Copyright © 2013, 1992, by Ann Rule
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
This edition published in 2013 by:
Planet Ann Rule, LLC
http://www.PlanetAnnRule.com
Seattle, WA
MOBI ISBN 978-1-940018-47-8
Cover Art by Leslie Rule
First Printing: Pocket Books January 1999
The names of some individuals in this book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the book.
DEDICATION
To My Best Friend
In Loving Memory
Richard W. “Dick" Reed, Seattle Police Department Homicide Unit (Retired)
Express Malice is that deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature which is manifested by external circumstances capable of proof.
Malice shall be implied where no considerable provocation appears, and where all the circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.
—Georgia statute
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE: ZEBULON
PART TWO: TOM
PART THREE: PAT
PART FOUR: JAIL
PART FIVE: NONA AND PAW
PART SIX: PAT’S TRIAL
PART SEVEN: SUSAN
PART EIGHT: OLD SECRETS
AFTERWORD
UPDATE: SUMMER 1993
AFTERWORD: 2002
PART ONE
ZEBULON
Zebulon, the seat of Pike County, fifty miles south of Atlanta, is little more than a town square, the four streets surrounding it, and some houses radiating beyond. Like scores of other small towns in this part of Georgia, it is sheltered by a green blur of trees—pine, dogwood, magnolia, and oak. On a hot summer's day, their branches form a leafy dome that traps the sodden heat, and everything beneath grows as if in a hothouse. Shade gives only an illusive promise of surcease from the sweltering summer temperatures. Cosseted in a perfect environment, the kudzu vine creeps along the orange earth, smothering each thing it covers, an innocuous-looking blanket of pointed leaves, an emerald parasite.
The courthouse in Zebulon is red brick, with white gingerbread trim and an alabaster bell tower gleaming against the sky. Magnolias, oaks, and maple trees dot the broad lawn, and each of the courthouse’s four entrances is flanked by blood red geraniums in stone urns. A tilted, graying stone memorial sits in one corner of the courthouse grounds, its purpose to honor seventeen white Zebulon boys who died in World War II, including two Marshalls, two Pressleys, and a Pike. Only one name is listed under the chiseled colored in the lower right corner. E. R. Parks remains segregated even on a heroes’ memorial.
The businesses across from the courthouse hide behind contiguous—but totally different—stone facades with squared-off rooflines of varying heights: a clothing outlet store, some antique shops, a furniture store, a hardware store. The Reporter, Zebulon’s weekly newspaper, has its offices at the end of the block. There are Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper machines every seventy-five feet or so along the sidewalks. Vehicles—mostly pickup trucks—park diagonally along the street. A yellow dog, in no danger, ambles casually across the carless road.
When Hollywood producers were looking for a typical southern town as a filming site for Murder in Coweta County starring Andy Griffith and Johnny Cash, they chose Zebulon.
Pat Taylor and Tom Allanson also chose Zebulon to live out a fantasy of their own. It was 1973 when they came to town, first living as lovers, then as man and wife. She was a slender woman with emerald green eyes and a pile of bouffant curls. He was a tall, tanned man. She was beautiful, he was handsome, and together they seemed to have the kind of love that could survive any adversity. Pat described her feelings in a note she wrote to Tom on the back of their wedding picture:
We are joined together as one for life—What greater thing is there for 2 human souls than to be joined together for life, to strengthen each other in all our labor, to lean on each other in time of need, to rest on each other in time of sorrow, to minister to each other in time of pain, to be with each other always with our memories and our ONENESS LOVE to sustain us . . . I feel that in loving My Tom I am nearest to heaven . . . When I came to you, My Tom, I put me—within your hand—my body, heart, and soul. You are my love, and you make me wholly yours in all the ways there are; this sweet bondage is more enduring than locks or bars. I will never leave your breast to dream of other things for I have found in My Tom the “end-of-my-quest” . . . My body blooms all over from every vien [sic] because I’m Tom's Pat. Behold, I left the old me far behind and shed my old life leaf by leaf . . .
And so she had.
Pat and Tom set out to create from their perfect love a perfect world. And yet, within that paradise lurked the possibility of jealousy and rage, of adultery, fornication, incest, rape, and even murder, grim and violent intrusions from the real world. Each of them had family ties far too strong to let loving commitment grow unstunted. Back and back and back, old slights magnified rather than diminished. Pride, like the kudzu covering the dry earth, only scabbed over deep and painful wounds that had never healed. Untangling the story of their lives is akin to following the verdant convolutions of that parasitic vine that eventually kills every living thing that sustains it.
CHAPTER 2
***
They had come to each other from the cold ashes of failed marriages. At thirty, Tom was younger than Pat by six years; he had two short, bad marriages behind him and she had one long one in which she had felt trapped and smothered. Both of them had sought perfect love most of their lives. Despite the odds, they truly seemed to have found it in each other, although—at least on the surface—they had nothing more in common than potent sexual passion.
Tom was strong as an ox, and Pat was tiny boned and fragile, often ill. He was a blacksmith; she loved doing dainty handwork, embroidery and painting. He had a college education, and she had married first when she was in the tenth grade and dropped out of school. He was calm and soothing, and she sometimes seemed anxious and frightened.
It didn’t matter. All he had to do was open up his huge arms, and she would crawl up on his lap and hide in the safety of his strength. Tom always told Pat, “Remember, Shug, ‘First things first’—and the first, most important thing is that I love you more than anything in this world.”
And she would answer in the soft little girl’s voice that belied her thirty-six years, “I love you, Sugar. I love you, Shug.”
Pat Taylor had known Tom for years before she really saw him. Her whole family—her parents, retired army colonel Clifford Radcliffe and his wife, Margureitte; her children, Susan, Deborah, and Ronnie; as well as Pat herself—was deeply involved in the horse show world of Atlanta. The Radcliffes’ stables boasted some of the area’s finest horses. Pat, who was living with her parents, taught riding to an exclusive clientele, and both her daughters were champion equestriennes.
Tom Allanson had worked with their horses and sold them feed when he was employed by Ralston Purina. The son of an attorney, he had set out to be a veterinarian, although he had not quite reached that goal. Tom had been a friend to Pat’s family, nothing more, but any woman who watched him at work, naked to the waist, his muscular torso glistening with sweat, would have noticed him. Shoeing the Radcliffes' prize Morgan horses, he lifted their hooves in his hand as easily as if they were lambs’ feet.
And then, a series of events in the fall of 1973 brought Tom and Pat together. Pat was free of romantic commitments, and Tom, who was seeking a divorce from his second wife, needed a temporary place to live. The Radcliffes had plenty of room at their horse farm on Tell Road in Eas
t Point south of Atlanta, and they invited him to stay. He could sleep on the sofa in their den, and they could use his help with their horses.
To a pragmatist, their coming together was expedient; to a romantic, it was fate. Whichever, Tom Allanson and Pat Taylor soon spent every waking moment together.
He loved everything about her, and she continually surprised him. He knew almost nothing of her life before he met her and didn’t care to. She, however, was insatiably curious—about his family and the women whom Tom had loved before he loved her.
In spite of the fact that Tom was still married, they had a wonderfully romantic courtship. Tom could not believe his good fortune at having found Pat, and he was awed that she loved him back. His biggest fear was that her health would completely break down and he would lose her. When she was taken with one of her fainting spells and hospitalized, he was desolate, standing helplessly beside her bed with her pale hand in his huge work-gnarled fist. He laid single roses on her pillow and gazed at her with tears in his eyes.
Pat tried to send him away, warning Tom she wouldn’t be good for him, that he deserved a “whole woman.” She begged him to face the truth. “You don’t want me, Tom,” she sobbed. “I can never give you children—I’ve had a hysterectomy. I’m just an old woman with a scar down my stomach. Nobody would want me."
It only made him love her more. He didn’t need more children; he and Pat would raise his two children and, of course, her boy, Ronnie, was still only in his teens.
Pat and her family became everything to Tom. They had given him shelter—and love—when no one else would. Pat’s mother, Margureitte, was the kindest woman he had ever known; she would do anything to help her children and grandchildren, and Tom respected the colonel for his army service and for his dignity and military bearing. He pleaded with Pat to marry him as soon as his divorce was final.
Pat couldn’t take stress or dissension or disappointments. When Tom listened to her speak of her longings, he realized that what she wanted in this world wasn’t that much; she just wanted it so badly. He vowed to do whatever he could to make her life so happy and calm that she would regain her health.
Pat had one special dream—a dream that no man yet had been able to make come true. She longed to live on her own plantation. More than a century had passed since the Civil War, but Pat yearned for the genteel life of a southern belle as it was evoked in Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind. She wanted her own Tara; she wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. Somehow, someday she believed Tom was going to get her her own place, a spread of land where she could hold her head up proudly. A place where she could grow the roses she loved so.
“I’m like a rose, Tom,” she explained softly. “And like a rose, I’m selfish. I want all the sun for myself, all the rain. Roses need everything so that they can bloom and be beautiful.”
She wasn’t really selfish, he knew. It was only her appetite for life, for love, she spoke of. That was one of the things he admired about her: she reached out for life with her two hands, grasping all its wonder and clasping it to her breasts. She made him see what could be— should be—for them.
Together, that first October, they came across a place that seemed meant just for them. Pat was having a good week, feeling strong and healthy, and she and Tom went deer hunting. He was so proud of her. The way she tramped around the woods with him, cooked over a campfire, and loaded her own gun, shouldering it as well as any man, amazed him. “She knew more about guns than most men,” he said later. “She had me buy a .44 carbine so she could go deer hunting with me—that’s a powerful carbine.”
She was such a remarkable woman. Pat could do just about anything. They cuddled together through the long cool Georgia nights, warming themselves with a sexual fervor that had not diminished with familiarity, but had only grown more intense. So it seemed a good omen for their future together when they found the red brick house with a porch all around it in Zebulon during their hunting trip. There was a For Sale sign on it, and they learned it was the old “Hoyt Waller place” and that Waller was selling it because he was divesting himself of some of his many real estate holdings.
After Pat pointed out the tremendous potential just waiting to be tapped in the sprawling farm, what they could do with it, Tom was as wild to have it as she was. The place was right on Highway 19 a few miles north of Zebulon. Its four hundred feet of road frontage was fenced in with freshly painted white horizontal boards. There were soaring pine trees beyond the roadside meadow and a curving drive wound between tall Georgia holly bushes all the way back to the brick house and the barn.
“It was just perfect,” Tom remembered. “I wanted to stay there until the day I died. It had everything I ever wanted. The house was a brick ranch-style house. It had a twenty-five-acre pecan grove plus twenty-seven more acres. It had everything you could ask for. It was the most beautifully landscaped place. It had the orchards. It had the garden spots. It had the vineyards. Apple trees. Pecan trees. Pear trees. Catalpa trees. Rose gardens. It had a beaver pond on the back side of it, and the pastures, the deer, the quail. It was just a beautiful place. . . .”
All they had to do was figure out a way to buy it. Waller wanted forty-two-thousand dollars for the spread, and it would take some fancy financing for Pat and Tom to swing that. There was money in Tom’s family, all right. His father was a successful East Point attorney who had made a bundle of money in land deals. Still, Tom knew his father wasn’t likely to help him out. He couldn’t remember the last time he had done anything his parents approved of. They were still so angry about his second divorce, there was no point in even asking them for help. Anyway, it seemed that his father enjoyed watching him fail.
Tom was the last of three Walter Allansons. Old “Paw”—Walter Allanson—was the first, and then came Tom's father, Walter O’Neal Allanson, and finally Tom himself, Seaborn Walter Thomas: “Tommy.” Paw and Nona, Tom’s grandparents, were well up in their seventies, but they had always been more like his parents than Walter and Carolyn Allanson ever were. Paw still farmed his place over on Washington Road in East Point. He had made a small fortune over the years and he was frugal— but he wasn’t stingy, the way his son was.
Tom figured and figured until he came up with what might be a way to buy the Waller place for Pat. He had long wanted Nona and Paw to live near him, especially now that they were older. His grandmother was in failing health, and Paw couldn't go on forever. Tom took Pat over to meet them, and left her chatting with Nona while he and Paw went out walking around the farm to discuss “business.”
Paw and Nona were polite to Pat, although they were a little puzzled to see Tommy with his third woman in a decade. She was obviously older than Tommy by several years, and Nona thought she dressed awfully flashy. The old woman was surprised when Pat told her she had three children and that both of her daughters were already married.
Nona, whose speech was compromised by a stroke, and who was too polite to speak what was on her mind anyway, listened quietly as Pat rattled on about her wonderful plans with Tommy. Despite Nona’s earlier misgivings, she couldn’t help but like Pat—and catch her enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Tom explained to Paw about the place in Zebulon: the fifty acres and the house and barn and all that went with it that could be had for only forty- two thousand. It was a buy that Tom couldn’t just walk away from—not without consulting Paw.
The two men worked out a plan. Paw would give Tom the money for twenty-five acres, and that money would serve as a down payment for the whole place. Tom would find a way to make the balloon payments due down the road. Tom said he would like either to build or move a house onto that acreage for his grandparents. That sounded good to Paw; since Nona’s stroke, he had been doing both the outside chores and the inside work. He prided himself on the fact that he took excellent care of his wife, but it would be nice to have a woman around to spell him and cook a meal once in a while. Tom assured Paw that Pat already loved both him and Nona. He had told her how good they had always b
een to him.
Colonel and Mrs. Radcliffe, Pat’s parents, also helped Pat and Tom with the down payment on the Zebulon property. Their only request was that they call their farm Kentwood in memory of Pat’s brother, Kent, who had died when he was in his mid-twenties. Although Pat would have much preferred something more romantic and evocative—like Rose Hill Farm or Holly Hedge Stables, or even Tara Orchards—they called it Kentwood Morgan Farm.
At long last she had her love and her piece of earth, a fine brick house, and a barn big enough for all the horses she and Tom would raise. They would make it a showplace where they could host grand riding competitions. Tom could shoe horses and she could teach riding and, afterwards, they could stroll hand in hand through her own rose garden. There could be nothing more perfect than the hushed twilight of a soft Georgia night, and being in love.
Pat and Tom moved onto the wonderful property on Highway 19 in late 1973, and Tom immediately began to work on the place, sure his divorce from his second wife was imminent. When he was truly free, he would marry “his Pat.”
Making the house just right for her was a labor of love and, as he was able to afford materials, he remodeled and refurbished. “I redid it just like we planned,” he said. “We got lumber out at Fort McPherson and redid the barn and the pastures. I had such great expectations.”
Pat proved to be remarkably unhandy at home improvements and although she picked up a paintbrush from time to time, the bulk of the work was Tom’s. He didn’t mind. He was euphoric just to be with her and to have Kentwood.
Ronnie, fifteen, moved in with his mother and Tom, although he was certainly welcome to stay with his grandparents. Pat loved her son. She indulged him too. She bought him anything he wanted and let him do whatever he asked—except visit his father. He missed a lot of school, and Pat didn’t push him to go. He was both spoiled and neglected. When Tom tried to explain that boys needed some discipline so that they would grow into good men, Pat gently reminded him that Ronnie was her child, and that she knew best.