“I hate . . .” she began, her eyes still bright with unshed tears, “I hate to know something that will get someone out of trouble but will get somebody else into a lot of trouble.”
She looked so forlorn that Tedford felt sorry for her; she was struggling with suppressed secrets that she didn’t want to tell him. And yet at the same time, he knew, she did want to.
Finally she blurted it out. “When Paw got out of the hospital—after his heart attack—I was finally able to set him down one day, and I just outright asked him would he tell me again what he told his lawyers. I guess I needed it down on paper—in case . . . in case anything happened to Paw.”
The detectives leaned forward, fascinated to hear what had happened next. What was it that old Mr. Allanson had confessed to? But that was all Pat was going to tell them. She wiped her eyes with her little lace handkerchief and forced a bright smile.
“Oh, never mind,” she said. “I guess I was just thinking out loud. I’m just so concerned about Paw coming back to this house. I’m sorry to say I don’t want him back here with Ma. I’m scared to death he really will hurt her next time. ...”
***
Pat Allanson was certainly a handsome woman; the cane made her seem frail, but she had a perfect, full breasted figure, and she dressed to show it off. Her thick auburn hair was coiled and twisted in what women called a French roll. The detectives knew that her husband was down in Jackson Prison for murder. No wonder she teared up so easily. She must have been through hell.
It was easier—in the beginning, at least—to talk with Pat Allanson, with her sweet, sad manner, than it was to deal with Jean Boggs. Jean was an attractive woman too, slender and tall with silky black hair. She was immaculately groomed right down to her long scarlet fingernails. But she was an angry, bitter woman in a hurry, and she seemed to have little faith in the justice system. She knew the brass in the East Point Police Department, and she wasn’t averse to going over the detectives’ heads to demand a quicker resolution to her suspicions about her father’s illness.
Jean was incensed that the contents of her father’s stomach had been thrown out. How were they ever going to prove now what she suspected—that Pat had given him something to make him so sick? She had seen the old-fashioned whiskey bottle that Paw was supposed to have been drinking out of. There was just no way. Years ago, her father had made blackberry wine from the wild berries on his farm, but he hardly even tasted it himself—he gave it away. He was almost eighty years old. Why would he start drinking at this age?
On Sunday afternoon after leaving the hospital, Jean and her neighbor, Sherry Allen, had dropped by the Washington Road house to check on Nona Allanson. They found Pat there, feeding the old lady lunch and fussing over her. Pat asked Jean how Paw was, and Jean said he was still unconscious but unless he got pneumonia or another heart attack or something, he was going to pull through.
Pat shook her head, disagreeing. “It doesn’t look like he’ll make it.”
“Well, we really don’t know yet,” Jean answered slowly.
Pat had fixed her green eyes on Jean and told her that Jean had no idea in the whole wide world what a dirty old man Paw really was. “You don’t know that old man,” she said. “He’s done things you wouldn’t believe. He’s not good and kind like you think.”
Jean started to shake her head in warning as she glanced at her mother, but Nona just sat there and let Pat rave on about her husband. Although she couldn’t speak, Nona was sharp enough. It seemed to Jean that her mother had heard accusations like this before. Nona made no move to correct Pat; she apparently believed what Pat was saying.
Jean could not understand Pat’s vitriolic attack on her father; he had always been so good to her. Why was she savaging him with her words while he might be dying?
Pat complained about having to get up with him the night before he had taken sick. “It was two-thirty in the morning and he wanted some ginger ale. I took it to him, and damn him, he wouldn’t drink it! He decided he wanted half-and-half and I took him that.”
Pat suddenly changed the direction of her conversation. “I talked with him about death—you know, about funeral arrangements and all. He said he wanted to be put away in a casket with pink satin to lie on. I’ve got his clothes all picked out. Your boy will be one of the pallbearers.”
None of that sounded a bit like Paw, Jean thought. Pink satin indeed.
As Jean and Sherry walked down the front steps, Pat suddenly appeared on the porch. She leaned across the railing and said flatly, “I hope he dies.”
“What did you say?” Jean breathed softly.
“I said I hope he dies.”
Jean walked to her car, stunned.
***
On Tuesday, Paw Allanson's blood pressure dropped so low it barely registered, but medication slowly boosted it back up. He was a very old man, but he was made of tough Georgia stock. He remained in a deep coma for a week, caught somewhere between living and dying.
Jean was sitting by his bedside as he slowly regained consciousness on Saturday. “Do you recognize me?” she asked, truly believing that he would not.
“Sure,” he grumbled.
“Who am I?”
“Jean,” he said, as if she had taken leave of her senses. Of course he recognized her.
“How do you feel, Daddy?”
He looked at her. “I think I’ll be all right when I get over this stroke.”
“Is that what you think you had, Daddy?”
“Yes—I feel like I'm taking the flu too. My legs ache me so bad. . . .”
***
Pat maintained her position that Paw Allanson was a dangerous man, octogenarian or not. She insisted that he had tried to kill his wife, and that she had no idea what he might do next. She had retained a new attorney, Dunham McAllister, to work on Tom s latest appeal. She had also asked Paw's attorneys, Fred Reeves and Bill Hamner, to fight any attempt Jean Boggs might make to become her parents’ guardian.
Pat told McAllister that she feared for her life; she had in her possession a document that made her very vulnerable. McAllister contacted the East Point police and informed the investigators that Pat had overheard Paw give his attorneys a confession to the murders of his son and daughter-in-law. At the time, Pat had explained, Paw had believed that he would not survive his heart attack.
McAllister was concerned about Pat. If Paw remembered how much Pat knew, and if he survived his current illness, her life was most certainly in danger. McAllister was very worried about Nona Allanson’s safety too, citing the alleged smothering attempt only a day or so before Paw overdosed. Pat had confided to the lawyer—just as she had to Tedford—that Paw had treated her coldly ever since he had come home from the hospital in February. She could deal with that—he was an old man and cantankerous—but it was far more than that. When Paw tried to run Pat off the road, she had been hampered by her weak leg and hip. It was all she could do to keep from crashing into a tree or slipping over a gully. She told McAllister that she had received harassing phone calls asking her where she had been, what she was doing, whom she had talked to. She hinted that the old man had watched her constantly to see if she would tell anybody about his confession. If he thought she might, he would kill her without warning.
McAllister’s next meeting was with Bill Weller, the assistant D.A. who had successfully prosecuted Tom Allanson. If Paw’s confession was true, then Tom had been wrongly convicted. Dunham McAllister handed over what Pat had told him were her roughly typed recollections of “the confession.” The actual confession was alleged to be in the possession of Paw Allanson’s attorneys.
Although such scenarios are common to TV courtrooms, they rarely happen in real life: a convicted killer proved to be innocent after all, exonerated when someone else confesses to the crime. But it could happen. Maybe Tom Allanson was doing hard time for crimes he had not committed. But Paw Allanson a killer? If the old man was guilty, he would certainly be one of the most unlikely murderers ever
to surface in Georgia.
CHAPTER 30
***
On June 21, Investigator R. A. Harris of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office went to the First Palmetto Bank in East Point. According to Pat, officers of this bank had witnessed and notarized Paw’s signature on a typed reduction of her own notes on the old man’s admission of murder.
An assistant vice-president of the bank, A. V. “Gus” Yosue, remembered a rather odd incident. A woman had come into his bank around six in the evening on a Friday a few months back, asking if she could get some papers notarized. She had explained that all the other banks were closed and that “Daddy”—her grandfather—didn’t want everyone knowing his business anyway. Yosue had never seen her before—or since, for that matter. “Daddy” was out in the car when the woman first came in, and Yosue had explained that the old gentleman would have to come inside to have his documents notarized.
Joyce Tichenor, the head teller of the First Palmetto Bank, told Investigator Harris that Mr. Yosue had helped an elderly man to her window. He and his granddaughter had a stack of papers, and Tichenor’s cursory glance had told her they seemed to be some type of real estate documents—warranty deeds and the like—most of them apparently standard forms.
The woman, in her thirties and very attractive, had seemed most solicitous of the old man. She had pointed her finger at the bottom of several pages, saying, “Sign this paper, Daddy,” or “Daddy, sign here on this line.”
Tichenor had notarized the signatures. She had no idea what the documents really were; it was not, she explained, her business to read documents brought to her. Neither she nor Yosue had read the papers. The elderly man had simply followed the directions of his granddaughter, signing without question.
Pat had told Bob Tedford that Paw’s attorneys held a white envelope that contained vital information, but she had been tearfully hesitant to say more. Tedford wanted to see what was in that envelope. The East Point detective called Hamner and Reeves and asked if they had such a document. They did, and promised to meet Tedford with the envelope in Paw Allanson’s hospital room.
Bill Hamner had wrestled with the question of legal ethics and the plain white envelope he had held, he thought, for old Mr. Allanson. Should he have come forward earlier? Should he have waited longer? Hamner explained that it was Pat Allanson who had brought the envelope to his firm. The envelope bore only a few words, scribbled in a shaky hand:
Mr. Walter Allanson
plese dont open untill I pass out
“I thought it was sort of strange,” Hamner said, “but the envelope was sealed. I just stuck it in the file . . . I probably had the confession six . . . maybe eight weeks total. . . .
Pat came up to the office one day. . . . She said she had been riding with ‘Daddy’ and he had tried to run the car into a tree. He was driving and she was in the passenger seat, and he had tried to hit the tree on the passenger side. . . . [S]he grabbed the steering wheel to keep him from hitting the tree, and she thought . . . he was trying to kill her, maybe. She said this would tie in with the envelope.”
Hamner was a civil, not a criminal, attorney and he had urged her to give that information to Dunham McAllister, who would better know what to do about it. Bill Hamner and Fred Reeves had reason to expect some startling revelation in the envelope, but they had adhered to the instructions on the front and hadn't opened it until old Walter Allanson had truly “passed out” and slipped into his mysterious coma.
On June 24, Investigator Harris, Sergeant Bob Tedford, and George Boggs, Jean’s husband, went to Paw Allanson’s hospital room to ask him about his “confession.” Apparently Paw hadn’t seen any version of his so-called confession. He was only ten days past a critical coma, but he would have to read the confession before he could confirm or refute it.
Paw was rapidly returning to his old self and was absolutely lucid now, with a keen memory. With his permission, Hamner gave Sergeant Tedford the opened white envelope. He showed it to Paw and asked him if he remembered writing on it. He nodded. “Yeah. I was cooking supper one night, and Pat came into the kitchen and told me that my lawyers wanted me to write that on the envelope.”
“Was there anything in it?”
“Nope.”
There was something in it now. Five legal-sized sheets of paper on which a very bad typist and speller had typed what appeared to be a confession. Bob Tedford read the contents without speaking, and then handed the pages to the old man in the bed. “Did you write this?”
Paw scanned it, beginning to shake his head almost immediately.
April 19, 1976
My name is Walter Allanson, and I'm telling this to my granddaughter, Tommy's wife, Pat Allanson, and she's doing it on the type-writer cause I don't write so good anymore since I had the heart attack. This is so if I have a heart attack before Mama dies Tommy won't have to stay in jail for what he didn't do. If Mama dies first then I'll tell what I did. I told all this to pat, Tommy's wife, at the hospital. . . . I thought I was going to die, and I knew nobbody would beleive Tommy if he told em the truth. Then I got better and Pat didn't say nothing, so I didn't say nothing . . . [but] I told her that if Jean didn't quit Bothering Mama I'd shoot her like I did Walter. . . . Pat started to cry and said I shoudn't talk like that. . . . I said it was the truth, but she didn't beleive me. . . .
The writer of the confession tended to ramble a good deal, hinting that “Tommy” had known the truth all along but had agreed to protect his grandfather and to tell no one. He also took several swipes at lawyers in general, and Ed Garland in particular.
. . . I never figured they'd be able to keep Tommy locked up.
But, of course, they had.
Little Carolyn and Walter Allanson were castigated on page after page.
I told him he'd never give Tommy a chance, even when he was little. . . . Anyway, Walter just laughed and said he'd clean up all this mess before the week-end and then he'd take care of me and Mama. . . . She told me Walter had said he'd kill her if he found she was helping Tommy, and he was going to put us both in old folks home after he took care of Tommy. . . . If I’divaeve heard Walter when he threatened Mama, then he wouldn't have even lived until the next tuesday. I’d a shot him right there. . . .
The confession was, in its own way, a masterpiece, misspellings and all. Every question a sharp detective might have asked was covered. The writer explained his motive for murder, how he was able to be away from home without raising suspicions on the day Walter and Big Carolyn Allanson had died, how frightened Pat and Nona had been, and then he moved ahead to the actual incident.
I took care of Mama first, and then drove over to where Walter dived . . . went up the driveway. I cut the phone wire with my pocket knife. Then I jimmied the basement door open, and went upstairs to get walters shot gun and some shells. I didn’t know he’d bought that rifle or I'd got it too. Jakes's Pistol wasn't there, so I figured Walter had it. I went back down into the basement, and cut the power off and went to waiting for Walter.
The writer had heard cars come home, people talking, Walter coming down the basement stairs, and he realized, too late, that Tommy was there in the basement too.
I didn't figure on Tommy bein thre. He was telling his Daddy that he just wanted to be left alone . . . he said he wann't mad at nobody. . . . Tommy told his Daddy that Pat was at the Doctor. . . .
The document painted Walter Allanson as a wicked man indeed; Tommy had tried to leave—he had said what he’d come to say—but Walter wouldn’t let him go. He told Tommy to wait in the basement while he calmed down the women upstairs.
I was hoping Tommy would leave right then out the kitchen way, but he was doing what he always done all his life. He was waiting for Walter to come and tell him it was O.K. He always did what his daddy said, and Walter knew he would. . . . I'd already figured out that Walter was not going to let Tommy leave there alive. He was going to kill Tommy like he was going to kill Mama and me. . . .”
Accordin
g to the long, rambling confession, Paw had somehow managed to hoist himself up into the “hole” in his son’s basement and hide there before his grandson crawled up beside him.
I thought he was going to yell out when he found me in there. I think he was too scared. . . . Tommy said, “Let’s get out of here, Paw—Daddy’s going to shoot us both.”
But then they had both heard Walter talk to the policeman and refuse to let the officer search the house, and it had all gone downhill from there. The writer said Walter had come back into the dark basement again, right up to the hole, and shouted that he was going to kill Tom, so he might as well come on out.
Then Walter hollered up for Carolyn to bring down the rifle, “I've got him cornered—he ain't gonna get of here ever.”. . . . I told you he was a coward. . . . He walked away from the hole, and that's when I come up to the opening. Big Carolyn come down the steps hollering, “I’m going to kill him," and cut loose with the rifle, right at where me and Tommy was. I shot back and hit her and she fell. I stepped back to reload, and thats when Walter emptied the pistol in the hole all around Tiommy. . . . Then I shot agian and hit Walter, but he didn't fall right off like Carolyn did. Tommy started saying, “oh my God, oh My God,” and I told him to get the hell out and get away, and he kept falling over stuff and ran out the back door. . . . (I didnt want to kill big Carolyn or little Carolyn, I didn't want to kill nobody) but Walter was mean and greedy and hateful . . . so I had to get him first, before he got Mama and me and Killed us or put us away. . . .
The writer of the confession seemed to know things that only someone who had actually been in that basement could have known. And every so often, he reminded whoever might read it that Tom was innocent, that Pat was innocent and had tried only to protect Tom, Paw, and Nona, and that it had been a matter of kill or be killed. He even tossed in that Tommy had called him from the liquor store after the shootings to say he was hitchhiking home to Zebulon.
Paw—at least the Paw in the confession—couldn’t come forward to get Tommy off the hook because he couldn’t go to prison and leave his wife. He repeated this over and over.