Georgia justice was swift; there would be no wait before sentencing. Tom Allanson would know his fate before he left the courtroom. He could be sentenced to death—twice. He might now be facing the electric chair.
Weller asked to address the court. Those watching expected to hear him ask for the death penalty. Instead, he began, “I have spoken to the family of the late Mr. Allanson and . . . I think I can state that they do not wish the state to press for the death penalty in this case because of the emotional involvement between the defendant and his late parents. Because of the family’s wishes, we will waive the death penalty and request the court to direct the jury to sentence the defendant to two concurrent life sentences."
A few moments later foreman Thackston handed the sentence to Bill Weller. On the judge’s orders, he had hastily written in his own hand the words that charted Tom Allanson’s future.
“Your Honor, shall I publish the sentence?"
“If you will, please, Mr. Weller."
“We the jury," Weller read, “fix the sentence of the defendant at life imprisonment on both counts, the sentence under Count II to be served concurrently with the sentence on Count I.”
Tom and Ed Garland stood before Judge Wofford as he read the sentence again. “It is hereby the verdict of this court that these be your sentences, a life sentence on Count I of Indictment No. A-22765, and to run concurrently with that, a life sentence on Count II of IndictmentNo. A-22765, and may God’s love sustain you now and in the days that are to come. The court is now adjourned.”
It was 9:00 p.m., only sixteen minutes since they had all been summoned there.
Pat threw herself into Tom’s arms and kissed him on the mouth, clinging to him desperately until deputies stepped in to handcuff Tom and lead him away.
“Tom?” she called after him, and he stopped and looked back at her, his expression one of blank despair.
She blew him a kiss and said, “I'll see you tomorrow?”
He nodded.
“Good.” Pat smiled brilliantly—for Tom’s sake.
Margureitte, who sat in the front row of the courtroom watching, called out, “I love you, Tommy!”
He had been so thankful when he became involved with Pat and the Radcliffes and they had welcomed him into their home and their hearts. They had transformed his life. How could everything have gone so terribly wrong?
Technically, Tom would become eligible for parole in seven years. It didn't matter. Seven years without Pat was like imagining a thousand years without air. Pulling slightly against his handcuffs, he struggled to get one more glimpse of her. If he had wanted to, Tom could have flung the deputies beside him against the wall, but he never thought of it. He watched Pat walk out of the courtroom, borne on her parents’ arms, and then let his guards lead him away.
Tom didn’t know that Judge Wofford himself had come down from his bench to speak with the Radcliffes and Pat's daughter, Susan. Susan Alford had wiped away her own tears and listened as the judge comforted them. “You know, it’s really sad. Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe. That boy didn’t get a fair chance. That boy was there in the basement that day of the killings. Something happened. Maybe a terrible argument. But it wasn’t a premeditated shooting. Why in the world wasn't this done another way?”
Judge Wofford was only echoing the unspoken question on everyone’s lips. How could it be that a nice guy, a good old boy like Tommy Allanson, was on his way to prison for life for the cold-blooded shootings of his own mama and daddy? How could it be that the perfect love he had finally found in his Pat had ended in death and despair.
PART THREE
PAT
CHAPTER 17
Mary Linda Patricia Vann was the name they gave her at birth. She would have many names in her life. Patricia, or rather Pat, was the only one that would stay with her. She was born into a southern family whose roots were so deep in the earth that no hurricane of scandal could tear them loose.
She was a Siler. And Silers took care of their own. They were the Silers for whom Siler City, North Carolina, was named. Her maternal grandfather was Tasso Wirt Siler, born November 3, 1879. He had studied to become a Lutheran minister but changed his religious allegiance and became instead a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. A tall, strong man with an expansive wit and a kindly heart, he combed his thick white hair into a subdued pompadour and wore round wire eyeglasses. Tasso Siler was highly respected in the close-knit community he served. A truly good man.
In 1900, when he was twenty-one, Tasso Siler married Mary Vallie Phillips, five years his junior. She was a slender, almost ethereal girl, quite beautiful, who seemed too frail to serve her husband and the Lord as a preacher's wife. Mary Siler seldom betrayed her own deepest emotions. She was given instead to reciting optimistic sayings and poems, and to recording her journal. “. . . We were so happy,” she wrote of her days as a bride, “it did not seem our lives could be made so sad in times to come. But it’s best that people can’t see ahead. If so, some of us might give up.”
Six decades later, she lamented the passing of another year. “What we have done will soon be a sealed book. If it’s been good or bad, we can’t change it. It will stand as it is. It is sad, for some of us will have marked up pages in our book from many unkind words to someone, or maybe [we] did not try hard to make others’ lives happy.”
The Rev. Siler would live in countless parsonages around Wilmington and Warsaw, North Carolina, in their more than fifty years together. Mary was dutiful, dedicated, and fecund. She gave birth to thirteen children. Later to be dubbed “the Righteous Sisters” by an irreverent younger generation, the girls were Edna Earl, Swannie Lee, Florence Elizabeth, Alma Mehetibel, Mary Louise, Thelma Blanche, Myrtle Margureitte—subsequently just Margureitte—and Agnes Fay. The boys were named Mark Hanna, Wade Hampton, Robert Winship, and Floyd Frazier. Mark died in infancy, as did an unnamed infant girl. When a minister’s salary could no longer stretch to feed more children, the Silers chose the only certain birth control available to them in the 1920s; Mary moved into a separate bedroom and their conjugal pleasures ceased. She was only thirty-seven and Tasso just forty-two.
Margureitte was particularly attentive to Siler family history. By 1991, she would proudly list her parents’ 241 descendants—down to the sixth generation. They had 13 children, 47 grandchildren, 95 great-grandchildren, 84 great-great-grandchildren, and 2 great-great-great-grand- children. Over the years, tragedies occurred, as they do in all families; babies died, young soldiers never came back from war, and children succumbed to cancer and rheumatic fever and, one, impalement on a bedpost. A young wife disappeared, leaving her children to be raised by whomever, another threw her baby away in a trash can (it survived), and a few descendants—or their mates—went to prison for violent crimes. Such negative minutiae were never officially acknowledged, and bad marriages were simply ignored in the recitation of the family tree.
“We are all so fortunate,” Margureitte wrote in a booklet she typed herself in 1991 to give out at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Siler Family Reunion, “to have had such a wonderful heritage. None of we children can blame any of our mistakes on our childhood. . . . I remember when we had a bad storm how Mother would gather us all around and sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’ while Daddy went to the door and watched the storm. Mother said Dad was daring the Lord to hit him.”
Perhaps more than most families, the Silers had their idiosyncrasies, and they were all very strong-minded. Thelma, who was a perfectly healthy child, refused to walk until she was five years old. When the Rev. Tasso Siler dropped dead in his own yard in 1960 at the age of eighty-one, hundreds of mourners attended his funeral and his widow took to a wheelchair in her grief. She was not ill; like Thelma, she simply decided not to walk. Although she eventually got back on her feet, she never got over his death. But while there might be eccentricities, arguments, recriminations, and even banishments that took place inside the Siler family, no one on the outside must know. Under the most intense press
ure, the Siler women stared back at the world with a look of inflexible serenity that was inviolable: “the crystal gaze.”
***
Myrtle Margureitte was next to last in birth order, and arguably the most beautiful of the Reverend and Mrs. Siler’s children. She had a heart-shaped face with a high rounded forehead, huge blue eyes, and full lips. Coming into puberty in the darkest years of the Great Depression in the sexually repressed household of a Baptist minister, Margureitte was something of a rebel. Her rebellion and her fertility would cause her gentle and loyal mother pain.
According to family lore, Margureitte ran off to Wilmington with Robert Lee Vann when she was only fifteen and became pregnant. Vann was a slight youth, some five years older than Margureitte. It is not clear whether they ever lived together, but on March 16, 1936, when Margureitte was sixteen, she gave birth in her parents’ house to her first child, a ten-pound stillborn girl.
She wept and named her dead baby Roberta.
Bereft, she soon became pregnant again. Margureitte felt that somehow the dead Roberta might have lived if she had only been born in a hospital. She was insistent that her next child would be, and so, indeed, she was. The baby was born on August 22, 1937, in the J.W.M. Hospital in Wilmington, North Carolina, a city that stands just where the Cape Fear River widens into the Cape Fear inlet on the Atlantic Ocean. The baby girl came into the world at 6:18 that morning and her young mother rejoiced that she was alive and healthy. Margureitte labored long to bring forth her second ten-pound female child. This was Patricia, a replacement, some said. The lost Roberta found, some said.
Margureitte gave her maiden name as Myrtle Margureitte Siler on the birth certificate, and her age as twenty. She was really just eighteen when Patty was born. She said that she had been married for three years to the listed father, Robert Lee Vann, twenty-three, and that he was employed in a radio store. But some family members wondered whether the Vann boy was really Patty’s father.
If they ever existed, the records of Margureitte’s marriage and divorce to and from Vann were lost. One of Vann’s brothers, younger by a decade, could not recall that Robert Lee was ever married to Margureitte. He remembered that his brother worked on the railroad but never in a radio store. His memory may well have been faulty; he would have been under ten when his older brother was with Margureitte.
Although Margureitte has said that Vann was her husband and the father of her children, Robert Vann may have been an expedient red herring. Some of her family believed that Margureitte had fallen in love with a married man. He was a farmer and carpenter in Warsaw, North Carolina, and his name was John Cam Prigeon, a huge young man with blond hair, full lips, and protruding ears. And he was a terror. Prigeon was as wild as Margureitte’s father was pious. A drinker of spirits and a brawler on occasion, he walked along any path he chose. His wife knew of Margureitte, the preacher’s beautiful daughter, but she said nothing. Her husband had a violent temper.
In her strict Baptist household, Margureitte’s latest misadventure must have been greeted with dismay. But the family undoubtedly rallied around her, thinking she would get “Cam” out of her system. She was, after all, a Siler, and the teenage mother and her new baby girl returned to Warsaw in that strange blazing summer of 1937 to live with her parents. The headlines had been full of disasters and tragedies for months: five hundred Texas children perished in a school explosion, Amelia Earhart was lost over the Pacific Ocean, the Hindenburg dirigible melted in a fireball of burning hydrogen gas, the king of England abdicated, movie sex queen Jean Harlow succumbed to uremic poison at twenty-six, and war was brewing in Europe and Asia.
It was also the year that Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone With the Wind, at once a historic recreation of the gracious life of the Old South and a terrifying tale of its destruction during the Civil War. Its beautiful heroine, a survivor and woman of intricate wiles, would become Patricia's life model.
Margureitte had to work, and so Mary Siler raised Patty for the first five years of her life. Patty called her “Mama,” and her grandmother Siler doted on little Patty to the point of obsession. Patty shared Mary’s life and Mary’s bed. She had only to voice her every wish and it was granted.
The little girl was exquisite. She grew thick taffy-colored curls and her eyes were bigger even than Margureitte’s and as green as new leaves in April. Mama Siler kept her in ruffly dotted swiss dresses, sunbonnets, and white Mary Janes. Her aunt Edna—who was so much older than Margureitte that she was more like a mother than a sister—sewed every stitch of the child’s clothing. Everyone who saw her said she was much prettier than Shirley Temple.
And she was.
Mary Siler made Patty the center of her life. Each of her own thirteen children paled beside her golden grandchild, “Next to God,” she often said, “I love Patty more than anything in the world.” There was always fruit from the orchard and vegetables brought by parishioners, but Patty would eat nothing but pancakes. Her grandmother gave up trying to feed her vegetables, eggs, and cereal, and served her flapjacks three times a day.
Of all the grandchildren living in or visiting at the parsonage, Patty was special. When the other youngsters clamored for Cokes, Mary explained, “No one can have it—because there’s only one.” And then she would beckon Patty into the back room and surreptitiously give her that single Coca-Cola. When the children were naughty, they were sent out to find their own switch and were whipped. But Patty was never spanked. Instead, her grandmother picked her up gently and whispered, “Now bend over, and be sure and cry real loud.” She could not bring herself to strike Patty, so she only pretended to hit her.
While her mother cared for Patty, Margureitte worked at a number of jobs, looking for a career that would lead her into the life-style she sought. Born into the country preacher’s world of meager circumstances and self-sacrifice, she yearned for gracious living, fine things and a lovely home. She was clever and quick, and she had always wondered what it would be like to be part of the horsey set, riding to the hunt, performing in shows with jodhpurs and a well-cut jacket. She longed for romance and true love, but her days were spent working at a dull job as a clerk. As fertile as her mother, Margureitte once again conceived, her third pregnancy before she was twenty.
This time, Margureitte made no pretense of a husband. She agonized over the few choices open to her. She had to work and Mama Siler couldn’t take care of two toddlers. Margureitte would have to give this baby up for adoption. She arranged to stay at the Florence Crittendon Home at 4759 Reservoir Road in Washington, D.C. Required to work both before and after her delivery to pay for her board, room, and medical care, Margureitte chose to take the training the home offered in practical nursing. It was hard work and arduous for a pregnant girl, but she was then and always would be a woman who put the best face on things.
“I have nurse’s training,” she explained confidently even fifty years later. “I’m not a registered nurse, you understand, but I have two years training.” On October 10, 1939, Margureitte was at full term. She was given a shot of Pituitrin to start labor. “Pit” usually triggers hard and frequent contractions. After twenty-four hours, a drained Margureitte gave birth to a nine-pound six-ounce son. The baby's hair was white blond and his features were bold and masculine. He looked nothing at all like her delicately pretty daughter. Some people thought he was the image of Cam. She named him Reginald Kent Vann and would call him Kent.
She loved him, and could not give her baby boy up, not once she had held him. That was so like Margureitte; right or wrong, she would always love her children to distraction, and when her mind was made up she was resolute. No one could legally force her to hand her infant son over for adoption. But she had to stay in Washington and work at Florence Crittendon until she paid off her debt. She carried bedpans and changed sheets until her arms and feet ached—but she kept her baby.
Although Margureitte gave her last name as “Vann" on Kent’s birth certificate, the line for a father's
name was left blank. On the line that asked “Legitimate?” someone had crossed out “Yes” and “Unknown,” leaving “No.” When Margureitte returned to her family in Warsaw, locals who saw the husky blond toddler marveled at his resemblance to John Cam Prigeon and chortled knowingly, “There goes little Cam.”
Margureitte had few assets and no reason to think that her life would be any easier in the future, but she was young and healthy and very beautiful. She was a sweet young woman but determined. Wanting so much to make a home for Kent and Patty, she vowed she would spend her life “helping” her children, creating for them the most perfect of all worlds.
She tried to be with them almost all the time, possibly to make up for the early years when she was not with Patty. They had never had an opportunity to truly bond with each other. She had handed her baby daughter over to her mother, and that had hurt Margureitte even though she idolized her mother. In the world Margureitte grew up in, the perfect woman was long-suffering, patient, soft-spoken, and lived a life of gentle servitude to her family. She sometimes wondered how her mother managed, but vowed to emulate her. Looking back over her years as a mother, Margureitte would murmur, “We're on earth to do for our children—to help them any way we can." She half believed in reincarnation and her own place in a stream of reborn souls. “The doctor I worked for for so many years always told me, ‘You came back to help someone.’ ”
***
At last disillusioned with her love life, Margureitte looked elsewhere and, quite suddenly, her luck changed. Just as the rest of the world was gripped in the bleakness of World War II, Margureitte’s world blossomed.
Whether she met the man who would be her lifetime love in the romantic way they recalled, or in the more mundane manner her sisters remembered, didn’t really matter. Margureitte described meeting Second Lieutenant Clifford Brown Radcliffe in 1942 at a party in Washington, D.C. Her retelling of that encounter makes it as idyllic a meeting as any starry-eyed schoolgirl might envision. “That never happened,” one sister snorted. “Margureitte was working as a waitress at the Lobster House near Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, and Clifford came in, and that was it.”