“Caught in the middle?” Zellner offered.
She nodded. “Right. But I’ll tell you—perfectly frankly—that I don’t feel like there’s one way in this whole wide world that Tom Allanson could, would, kill his parents. . . . I have two theories on him. Am I supposed to tell my theories?”
Zellner nodded. “You can if you want to, yes.” Margureitte Radcliffe hinted broadly—and incredibly —that she suspected the dead man and his daughter-in-law might have been romantically involved. It was, of course, only her own theory.
“I really and truly feel like this thing was set up and I feel like Mr. Allanson and Carolyn planned to do something to Mrs. Allanson and blame it on Tom and perhaps—at the last minute—it backfired on him and that Carolyn did the whole bit.”
Mrs. Radcliffe was confident that there was no way “in the whole wide world” that Tom could be guilty of murder. If that should be true, she would be “the most absolutely shocked person in the entire world.”
“But you said earlier,” Zellner reminded Margureitte Radcliffe, “that it is your nature to see the good side of everybody.”
“Well, I was trying to see the good side when I was speaking to Mr. Allanson. . . . I still don’t feel that anybody can be that hard—”
“Pretty much changed your mind at the end, didn’t you?”
“That’s why I came to the police department, and I said [to myself], Oh my God, I hope that nothing happens to that man, because if it does . . . Tom will be the one that will be blamed for it. . . . I was terrified of that man . . . and I think his parents—the elder Mr. and Mrs. Allanson—were afraid of him too. . . . Yesterday, she [Nona] said she could say it for the first time—she never could say it while they were alive—that they were never parents, never ‘mother’ and ‘father’ to Tommy. I’ve heard a lot of [other] things, but they were hearsay.”
Zellner asked about Pat’s first marriage, and Margureitte explained that she had been married very young and that it had never worked out. “Her father and I—Colonel Radcliffe and I—supported them for sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years. Right, honey? She got nothing out of the divorce. . . . She’s got fine children too. I’ll tell you that.”
It had been quite a day. A lineup with a positive ID of Tom Allanson. A double funeral. And a long, long interview with Mrs. Clifford Radcliffe. According to her, the late Walter Allanson had been a monstrous, fearful man with a heart as cold as death. And “Tommy,” like herself, saw only the good in everyone. He had been a dutiful son, a fine son-in-law, and had alibis for every incident his father accused him of.
For all but that very last, fatal encounter.
***
In the weeks that followed, the investigators learned that Tom would inherit nothing from his parents. Tom had known that for months. He knew that both his father and mother had cut him out of their wills the previous Valentine’s Day. In fact, Tom was specifically eliminated in codicils to their existing wills. He had tried to explain that to Pat, but she never seemed to understand; she thought that he would, of course, be declared their natural heir. Each of his parents’ wills had designated Carolyn’s brother, Seaborn Lawrence, as their executor. Walter and Carolyn were each other’s heirs and then they stipulated that, should they die together, their estate would go to Tom’s children. Item Eight of Walter Allanson’s will read:
The provisions of this Will are made for the purpose of omitting my son, Seaborn Walter Thomas Allanson, completely, due to his disowning of the family and his failure to support his children, and I figure that his part of my estate was [already] used [by me] for the purpose of supporting his children. The trustee and executors are specifically instructed that, under no circumstances, is he to receive anything from my estate, and they are to oppose his appointment as Guardian of these children by any Court whatsoever, and in the event that he should succeed in being appointed as Guardian, then the trustee is not to pay any funds whatsoever to the grandchildren or to him as Guardian, but shall retain the funds until the payment age of twenty-five (25) is reached by the grandchildren.
It was a slap from beyond the grave. Tom had been paying five hundred dollars a month toward his children’s support, and he would dearly have loved to have them back with him. He had had high hopes that one day soon he would be able to raise them on the grounds of Kentwood. He had left their mother in desperation—sick at heart in a loveless marriage.
Clearly, his father had never forgiven him. The only thing that Walter had forgotten about was an insurance policy in which Tom was still named as beneficiary—but Tom wouldn’t know about that until months after his parents had died.
The house on Norman Berry Drive was cleaned and put up for sale. Despite the horror that had exploded there, it sold rather quickly. Paul and Harriett Duckett, right next door—and eyewitnesses to the fleeing gunman —bought it.
None of the financial mopping up mattered to Tom; all he had ever dreamed of had come true when he married Pat and they lived together at Kentwood. As it turned out, he had lived with her on that wonderful spread of land for less than a year; their time as man and wife had ended in less than two months. Tom would celebrate their two-month anniversary in court—being arraigned for double murder.
Their love had burned as white hot as any iron ingot, and now their lives were as cold and gray as the steel such an ingot might become. The glory was all gone, and he could not, for the life of him, fathom why.
PART TWO
TOM
CHAPTER 12
Seaborn Walter Thomas Allanson—Tom—was born out of time, if not place. He would have made a far more satisfactory son for his grandfather than he ever had for his own father. Paw Allanson had never known quite what to make of his son, the austere and ambitious Walter O’Neal Allanson, and Walter always seemed to look at his Tommy as an impediment and an irritant.
Actually, Carolyn and Walter had been reluctant parents to begin with, not thrilled when Carolyn became pregnant in 1942. Both Carolyn and Walter were only nineteen and he was in the Army Air Corps, serving in World War II. Perhaps they had not planned to have any child, and they would never have another. Carolyn gave birth to Tommy on April 22, 1943, in Ocilla, Georgia, where Paw and Nona lived at the time. The baby was very large, a precursor of the size he would be as a grown man.
In their early years, it often seemed to Walter and Carolyn that every possible obstacle had been placed in their way. Like so many young men who graduated from high school in 1940, Walter had to go to war. When the war was over, he came home and went to Georgia State University. Next, he received his law degree from Atlanta Law School and his master’s in law from John Marshall Law School. Carolyn worked as a nurse to put him through.
Just when Walter was finally ready to practice on his own, the Korean War came along and he was called up again. He was over thirty before he could really begin his life. A decade of his prime years gone, he was home and in practice in East Point, with offices across the hall from his high school friend, Al Roberts. Walter and Carolyn had a lot of catching up to do. Walter worked as a justice of the peace in East Point from 1952 to 1956, and he joined all the organizations that a young man in a hurry needed: the East Point Masonic Lodge, the Optimist Club, the American Legion, the First United Methodist Church of East Point.
Carolyn was the choir director and taught piano to students at home. One Sunday, it was Walter’s turn to teach the young marrieds' Sunday school class, and he rose and surveyed the group somberly before he said, "I'm Scotch, I'm stubborn, and I want things my way.”
It was a disclaimer, a prelude to his lesson that morning on how Christians could be all different kinds of people. You could, he explained, be stubborn or meek or aggressive or a darned fool and still be a good Christian. Stubborn was as apt a description of Walter Allanson as anyone could ask for. No excuses. No apologies or promises to change. He was who he was.
Carolyn kept on working full-time for Dr. Tucker in East Point, and things gradually got better and b
etter for them. They made up for all the wasted years. In March 1959, Walter and Al Roberts moved into a larger suite of offices and continued their law practice. They did well. Walter wasn't a rich lawyer with an estate in Atlanta's exclusive Haines Manor section, but he made a comfortable living. He practiced general law: wills, divorces, contracts. His staff found him almost unfailingly cheerful and pleasant to work with. He joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary and worked his way up in the East Point Masonic Lodge No. 88 to become a Thirty-second Degree Mason. He loved boats and he liked to fish but he liked to do it in solitude, without the nuisance of taking Tommy along.
From young Tommy’s viewpoint, his father had been either studying or working his whole life. Indeed, both his parents had worked for as long as he could remember. Walter was a man who seldom showed emotion. Tommy was humiliated the few times he tried to relate to him. His father was closed in and rigid. He had a set way of doing things. His expectations for his son were just as unyielding. Carolyn Allanson was warmer, but she deferred to her husband when it came to dealing with Tommy and in the matter of getting ahead in the world. Their home wasn’t built around the boy; the boy would have to fit in wherever he could.
It was not surprising that Tommy looked to Paw for the love and attention he didn't get at home. He spent the happiest days of his childhood on his grandparents' farm. He was proud when he went into the feed store with his grandfather and Paw winked at him as he announced to the clerk, “This is my son, Tommy.” He loved to hang around with his grandfather as they worked with the horses and other farm animals. The old man and the husky blond boy both loved animals.
Tommy went to the Harris Street School in East Point until he was nine and then his parents enrolled him in the Georgia Military Academy in College Park. He attended that private and prestigious school until he graduated in 1961. The military discipline wasn’t that different from the rules his father set down. But between the military academy and the many weekends he spent with his grandparents on their farm on Washington Road, Tommy didn’t see that much of his parents. He went hunting with Paw, and Paw cooked breakfast for him. The two of them would scrounge through waste bins in back of the supermarkets for outdated vegetables to give to the cows and pigs. They would tease his grandmother when they came home with their boxes of brown lettuce and mushy tomatoes, saying, “Look what we brought for supper!” Nona was a pretty, green-eyed woman and she ran the household. Paw let her; in his taciturn way, he idolized her. And, like Paw, she loved Tommy and loved having him around.
Paw Allanson was an old-fashioned southern man. He had a fourth-grade education and he had labored as a steelworker for fifty-five years. He had lived through the Great Depression and never really trusted banks again; he salted away most of his cash in hiding places on his property.
Nona and Paw had bought the property on Washington Road in 1934. The house on the property in East Point was little more than a shack then. But the farm proved to be a canny buy, and as the Atlanta area boomed over the years, it appreciated many, many times over its purchase price. Both Walter and his sister Jean were expected to work hard doing farm chores, since their father was often off hefting steel girders for buildings all over America. They had horses, cows, hogs, and chickens and there was always work to do in the fields; they sold their beef, pork, and produce—steel work was sporadic—and the farm took up the slack in their income.
When Walter was about twelve, he contracted rheumatic fever. His survival became the focal point of his parents’ existence. Nona was always exhausted because she was up day and night turning Walter so he wouldn’t get bedsores. Penicillin had yet to be discovered, and strep infections of any kind were often fatal. Paw and Nona didn’t mean to neglect Jean, but her needs took second place in their fight to save their son.
Walter and Jean had never had a solid brother-and- sister relationship. Walter was four years older than Jean, and their personalities were on entirely different tracks. Walter’s illness distanced them even more. When Walter got out of bed after his long siege with rheumatic fever, their parents were so grateful he had survived that they gave him everything he asked for. To Jean’s eye, her brother was always greedy. A greedy boy and a greedy man.
Many years later, when Walter persuaded Paw to sell him the back half of the thirty-four acres he owned on Washington Road, Walter resold it and made a handsome profit. But Jean had asked her father first, and she was both outraged and humiliated when she learned that Paw had sold her brother the acreage she wanted. Her efforts to please her parents had always failed. Walter came first because he was a son, and her father doted on her mother, but Jean was left out.
The Allanson family relationships would always be distant and strained. Paw had become a gnarled, ornery old man, but he was devoted and gentle with his wife, Nona, and he loved Tom. As for his own offspring, he might do business with his son, but he didn’t really care for either Walter or Big Carolyn. He often ignored Jean.
Jean and her husband, George “Homer” Boggs, had two children, David and Nona. They were quite a bit younger than Walter’s Tommy and as cousins they would never be close. The Allanson line had continued, but only grudgingly. Tommy was it for a long time. The last Allanson to carry the name unless he had a son.
Years would go by when Jean wouldn’t see Walter. And yet he was her brother. She may not have liked him very much, but she loved him. She had always assumed that, one day, they would settle their differences.
And then, suddenly, it was too late.
***
Tom Allanson had often shivered in the emotional chill of his childhood home. “That’s why I grew up being such a sucker for love,” he remembered years later. “I never had any. I can never remember—even once—hearing my parents say ‘I love you’ or feeling them put their arms around me. . . . They showed they cared about me by giving me a good education, they fed me, they took care of me, but that was their form of love. I understood that, although I found out later in life that I wasn’t exactly planned when I came along. I wasn’t exactly a blessing. But I was the kind of kid that thrived off of love. I needed to be told. I needed to be shown."
Tom grew into a huge teenager who towered over his parents. He looked like a big old country boy and that suited him fine. All his life he would hide his intelligence and his education and speak with a deep southern drawl. He was happiest in the country, competing in a rodeo or working in a horse barn. Teenage girls—and not a few grown women—watched Tom Allanson longingly from the rodeo stands. His jeans fit him like second skin, and he exuded masculinity.
One of the women was Liz Price, who would move in and out of his life for years to come, and she laughed as she remembered knowing Tom. “He was my ideal man coming up. A big rodeo star and—oh, how he fit those jeans! You hear about his jeans? I thought he was God’s gift to women. . . . One day I was walking across the horse show grounds with a bucket of water in my hand, and somebody says, ‘There goes Tom!’ and I turned around, looking for him, and I ran right into a guy wire with my neck and I poured all my water in my boots!”
Tom didn’t know women looked at him that way. He had had few compliments in his life and his self-esteem was wrapped up only in his skill with horses. While he was still in high school, he learned to shoe horses and worked as a farrier when he was only sixteen. He had a crush on Liz, who was a few years older than he. But he never mentioned it to her; he was much too shy. “I won’t say I was all that good on my first horse or two,” he remembered. “Liz was my first horseshoe customer and I like to ruined her horse.”
After Tom graduated from the military academy, he enrolled in the University of Georgia in Athens. He played football; he was a line coach’s dream at six foot four and 250 pounds. But he was forced to drop out of football—and the university—in 1963 when a rodeo accident ended his playing career. He transferred to Truett McConnell Community College and graduated with an associate degree in science. Then he returned to the University of Georgia.
D
espite his father’s vehement opposition, Tom married for the first time while he was in college. He was mesmerized by a tall, slender, raven-haired girl with clear blue eyes, Judy Van Meter.
“I fell in love with this young girl up there in Athens,” he said. “She was beautiful. She looked absolutely beautiful—like Lynda Carter, ‘Wonder Woman.’ You couldn’t tell me anything as far as my parents goes. I was in love. My dad said, ‘You can’t get married until you get through with your college.’ And I said, ‘Well, you can’t stop this love I’ve got for this girl.’ He said if I got married, they’d cut off all my funds for college. Well, I got married and he cut it off just like he said he would. There wasn’t another penny. So I had to make it on my own.”
Tom’s marriage to Judy didn’t work out. “She had a champagne appetite,” Tom recalled ruefully. “And I had a beer pocketbook. I was trying to go to vet school and work, and she was working too. She started playing games. . . . If I didn’t do what she wanted me to do, there was no more sex.” He would later admit that it would be a long time before he had good sense about women. When his first wife shut the bedroom door on him, his eye soon wandered to an even more unsuitable choice. “You couldn’t tell me anything then—no more than you can tell any young man in love.”
Tom’s next love was, unfortunately, his wife’s best friend, Carolyn Brooks. Carolyn was a delicate-appearing woman who swept her blond hair back into a chignon. “She looked like Grace Kelly,” Tom said, shaking his head. “All my women were real pretty.”
Carolyn was in her twenties and also married—to a man almost fifteen years her senior.
“She gave me attention, and I wasn’t getting that in my marriage,” Tom said. “My wife was withholding sex and Carolyn was free with it. We started going to the Moose Club together—and that was out of character for me. I didn’t drink—never have.” Tom said Carolyn enjoyed dancing and drinking, and it didn’t concern him in the beginning.