Would she run? Had she already left the Atlanta area? She must have known that she was the main target of their investigation, that something was going to come down. Still, the detectives reasoned that Pat Allanson’s whole world was contained in Georgia and North Carolina. She had her mother and stepfather, her doting aunts, her three children, her grandchildren, and, of course, her husband, Tom. No. She wouldn’t leave.
They didn’t realize how right they were. Pat had never been on her own. She had to be close to her parents. Even though she was nearly forty, she still needed them to be there, to straighten things out whenever they got out of control. But now her life had finally spun completely off its track and her machinations would not be easy to smooth over and deny.
At 7:00 p.m., Tedford and Daniell drove slowly down Tell Road, turned right onto the rutted drive, and passed Fanny K. Cash's cabin. They drove by the empty stables on the left, and then headed down past the show ring toward the two conjoined houses that Gil Taylor had once tried to make into a grand plantation for Pat.
Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe stood in the front yard. They stared coldly at the two investigators but grudgingly accepted the warrant Tedford held out. “We are here to arrest your daughter on two charges of criminal attempt to commit murder. Is she here?"
Colonel Radcliffe led Daniell and Tedford into the house and pointed toward Pat's bedroom. She was home. She listened sullenly as the charges against her were read.
“May I call my attorney?” Pat asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Pat’s bubble-cut hair was as carefully coiffed as always. Her makeup was in place. She wore a short pink-and-black plaid sundress, a necklace, and hoop earrings.
While Tedford radioed for a female officer to accompany them on the ride to jail, Pat phoned Dunham McAllister. She spoke to him for about fifteen minutes, and then Daniell and Tedford and Officer Bebe Mozeman left the Radcliffes’ house at 7:35 and proceeded to the Fulton County jail, where Pat was fingerprinted, photographed, searched, and booked.
She looked straight ahead defiantly as she faced the jail camera, but she bent her head and appeared ready to cry when she was instructed to “look at the wall to your left.” The woman who had wanted so much, who had aspired to a life of perfect love, gracious living, wealth, and social acceptance, was—at least for the moment—Prisoner No. 10747 in the Fulton County jail.
She would not stay in jail long. Already her mother and stepfather were rallying around her, arranging for money to bail her out, to bring her back to her room in their home. She was their child, their precious daughter, the focus of their lives. It was unthinkable that she should be exposed to the sort of women who ended up in jail. She was a special person.
Pat didn’t even spend the night in jail. She was released on twenty thousand dollars’ bond that evening. Somewhere, Boppo and Colonel Radcliffe had found the two thousand dollars necessary to guarantee that amount.
CHAPTER 34
***
His wife’s arrest came as a tremendous shock to Tom. She was his sole source of information about the outside world, and Pat had continued to assure him that she was moving heaven and earth to free him. He had been relieved and proud that she had taken over the care of his grandparents. From all her reports, things were going as well as they could hope for, considering how old Paw and Nona were. Tom had been told about Paw’s supposed overdose, but not about the crime lab’s findings. Pat had convinced him that it was not unusual for an old man, depressed by his diminishing strength after a heart attack, to turn to liquor and pills.
Tom loved his grandparents; at the same time, he was compelled to see them as his sole source of financial rescue. Given Pat’s illnesses and inability to work and the Radcliffes’ near bankruptcy, there was no one else with financial assets who might help him. Tom had written Paw and Nona scores of letters urging them to trust Pat and to put all their affairs into her hands. He had trusted Pat, and he had survived in prison by dreaming about the time they would all live together on a good farm. He had needed his grandfather’s backing—but he had every intention of paying him back.
Pat had assured him she felt the same way.
Tom was doing well in prison. Everybody liked him, and he was much in demand as a clerk. He was college educated, smart, and never complained about the workload. He needed the work. He had lost damn near everything in his life—except for Pat and his grandparents.
If Tom believed that the charges against Pat were true, it would mean the end of all his dreams. He would be left with no one. He tried to find some other reason for what was happening to her. It was hard going.
Tom had written to his uncle Seaborn and begged that Pat at least be allowed to see his children whenever she could; she was Tom’s only link to them. He didn't know that he had already lost his children, perhaps forever. Seaborn had realized he was too old to raise young children, and Little Carolyn refused to conform to the state's requirements for a custodial parent. Pat didn’t want the children, and she had already used Tom’s power of attorney to sign away all his links to Russ and Sherry. She had convinced him that they were being placed only temporarily in a good Christian home—“for their sake.” But she had really agreed to put them out for permanent adoption.
All he had left was Pat. From the moment he first became intimate with her, Tom had committed himself to her, to her beliefs, her advice, her plans and dreams. But by the late summer of 1976, even Tom saw that her perfect facade had begun to erode. Resolutely, he fought his doubts back. If Pat was not his one true love, he would have to admit that he had let his whole life slip away for nothing.
Tom had quickly realized that nobody in Jackson— from the guards to the administrative staff—liked Pat. He loved her enough that he could ignore the snide remarks and the smirks when he received her daily letters. He took the lacy, fancy-decorated envelopes in his big hands and hurried to read his mail in privacy. But later he would remember that her letters caused him all manner of problems. “We were allowed to get legal mail uncensored, so Pat would get some lawyer’s letterhead envelopes and then she’d put personal mail inside. They caught onto that quick enough, and they’d call me in and say, ‘This is marked legal mail, but we’re going to open it in front of you.’ Sure enough, there would be personal mail inside, and I’d get chewed out.”
Pat’s visits were even more difficult for Tom. She wore her skirts cut up to here, and her blouses cut down to there, and no man in the area could resist swiftly turning his eyes in her direction. She was as inappropriate as she was beautiful. It was agonizing enough for Tom to be shut off from her; her provocative clothes and her Jungle Gardenia perfume about drove him nuts. And then she always had stories to tell him about men who were bothering her. He questioned her—gently—suggesting that a woman as attractive as she was had to be careful of even the appearance of availability. That only made her angry. She demanded to know how he could even imagine that she cared one fig for any other man? Was he trying to say she was a slut?
Tom sighed. Pat never saw anything in gradations of meaning; she saw white or black—more often black— and was quick to take offense.
He didn’t believe that she would deliberately hurt Paw and Nona. He couldn't believe that. The police had been quick enough to jump on him, and he remembered how he had been a free man one day and a convict the next. He knew what had really happened that July night two years ago—or he thought he did. The law could twist things and make them seem more menacing than they really were. Pat was only one frail, little woman. She had a temper and she sure wasn’t the most reasonable woman in the world, but he could not visualize her really hurting anyone. He did not want to think of her actually putting poison in his own grandparents’ food. That was a scenario that shut itself off in his mind the moment he tried to visualize it. He was barely maintaining his equilibrium as it was, and the rush of guilt that came with thinking about Pat hurting Paw and Nona almost knocked the wind out of him.
***
As Pat awaited her own trial, free on bail, she grew more frenetic and querulous. Her prison visits to Tom always meant trouble of one kind or another. Tom both longed to see her and dreaded what she might do next. She wasn’t helping his case. Even the warden at Jackson took an interest in Tom and his incorrigible wife. Tom remembered one day when the warden was leading a tour through the prison. “He came over to me and he told me, ‘Tom, you’re doing a good job and everything, but your wife is creating one hell of a lot of waves downtown. She’s not helping you. Would you please calm her down?’ ”
That was easier said than done.
Pat’s accusations were familiar. Nobody really cared about her, she loved him so, and she tried so hard. She was doing her best for him, even though she was sick and scared to death that they were trying to send her to prison too. If that happened, who would care about him any more?
It got worse and worse. “She claimed some of the corrections officers raped her,” Tom remembered. “One of them supposedly did, anyway. She said they followed her in a state car . . . to the expressway, and handcuffed her and raped her. . . . She even came back and said one of them cut her up with a knife.”
Tom had seen the marks. Pat indeed had bruises that appeared to be from handcuffs, and numerous cuts on her back, legs, and breasts. Superficial cuts. Tom might have been a fool for love, but he wasn’t a plain fool. He had to question Pat’s outrageous stories. He wondered how so many terrible things could happen to one woman. When he looked at the wounds she showed him, he wondered even more.
“Every one of them you could tell was self-inflicted—from the direction it went and how deep it was,” he later said. “You know, even at the time I didn’t believe her because I knew those officers and they were good men. They wouldn’t do something like that, but I just passed it off as one of ‘Pat’s things.’ ”
Not long ago, back when he was free—or even when he had a slight hope of being free—Tom had found Pat’s dramatic ways endearing, possibly a little exciting. She fainted the way old-time southern women did, slipping to the ground in a heap. He had liked bringing a single rose to his pale, stricken love as she lay in bed, gently suffering from some mysterious, womanly ailment.
But “Pat’s things” weren’t so endearing anymore. Not to anyone. She had always used sexual attacks as an attention-getting device. She had screamed rape at the slightest provocation for the past two decades. She had told Susan and Debbie that she had been molested when she was a child. And then there were all the rapes in Germany. Her obsession with sexual assaults was growing shopworn and, in the aftermath of her arrest, she seemed to be getting worse.
One evening in the summer of 1976, when Debbie and Susan had taken Dawn to the emergency room at South Fulton Hospital—she had been wedged between Debbie’s car door and the carport—Pat suddenly appeared in the waiting room with her panty hose around her ankles, sobbing and screaming that she had been raped. This time, she accused the East Point police detectives; she said they had pretended they were going to question her, but instead they had handcuffed her and sexually abused her. “How can you do this?” Debbie cried. “Get out of here!”
With Boppo on her heels, Pat had leaped into her watermelon red Cougar and driven along the hospital side walk. Susan and Debbie were mortified, but nobody took Pat’s cries of rape seriously anymore.
Not even Tom.
He still loved Pat, but his head was beginning to clear. His true love now meant only pain. He did fine in between his wife’s visits, but every time she came to see him or he talked to her on the phone, he was desolate. His counselor monitored the phone calls—with Tom’s knowledge—and wondered how Tom could do his time with any degree of acceptance at all when his wife kept pulling at him with her siren songs. He recommended that Tom stop talking to his wife on the phone and Tom was surprised that he felt mostly relief that there would be no more hysterical conversations.
The letters did not stop; during the fall of 1976 Pat kept up her voluminous correspondence with Tom, holding on to him with stamps and scribbled lines, clinging for dear life. She wanted him to have her letters as quickly after she wrote them as possible. Almost every evening she drove east from the Tell Road ranch to some all-night restaurant along the freeway toward Jackson—a Denny’s or a Shoney’s or one of the waffle houses. Pat spent hours sipping coffee or a Coke as she wrote love letters on the Formica tabletops, oblivious to the bustle around her. Country and western ballads played in the background over the Muzak systems. She would look up when she heard one of their special songs—especially Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner in their duet “Is Forever Longer Than Always?” Sometimes, she drove all the way to Jackson to mail the letters. That way, Tom would have them the very next morning.
Those evenings may have helped Pat forget what was looming ahead—that this time the trial was her own. It took so many country love songs, so many letters, so many long drives east to Jackson through the hot Georgia nights for her to force it to the back of her mind. It was unthinkable—but there it was. She was scheduled to go on trial the first week of November 1976.
***
Susan Taylor Alford had been on a plane with her toddler son, Sean, flying back to Atlanta after a wonderful vacation in Key Biscayne at the moment her mother was arrested. The twenty-three-year-old Eastern Airlines flight attendant landed and soon learned the terrible news that the charge was attempted murder. More than the rest of the family, Susan had acknowledged that her mother had a real problem with prescription drugs, a longstanding addiction. Nobody else wanted to say it out loud. Heaven knows, Susan had seen her mother out of control on more than one occasion in recent years. But chasing someone with her crutch, or even running away hysterically in her nightgown, was far, far different from attempted murder.
“I thought that, if my mother had done what they said she did,” Susan remembered, “then she was terribly, terribly ill. She couldn’t be in her right mind. The drugs were telling her what to do. That couldn’t be my mother. I kept thinking about the times she told me I was her friend, and how she was so proud of me—that I could do anything I set out to do. My mother could be the most wonderful person in the world when she wanted to.” Susan went to Dunham McAllister and pleaded with him to help Pat. She was convinced that Pat should not be tried on the merits of the case against her; she couldn’t have known what she was doing. Someone had to step in and see that Pat was committed to a mental hospital where she could get help. “I thought my mother was sick,” Susan later said. “I was so angry with Mr. McAllister when he wouldn't listen to me, when he wouldn't use my mother’s illness as a defense. No one—no one—could convince me that my mother would have hurt anyone if she was in her right mind.”
On October 28, 1976, Tom had his last chance for a new trial. Judge Wofford listened to McAllister's motion for a writ of error coram nobis, asking for a hearing requesting a new trial. Wofford read over the alleged confession of Paw Allanson and Paw’s signed affidavit swearing that the confession was fake and that he had signed it only “through the deceit of Patricia R. Allanson.” Wofford denied McAllister’s motion.
Tom had now exhausted all of his appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court had refused to hear his case. He was desolate. He expected to serve “at least fourteen years on each of my two convictions.”
***
The Allansons were no longer relegated to the inside pages of Atlanta area newspapers. Their continuing saga made them front-page, headline news. Each story about Tom included a summary of Pat’s pending trial. And each article concerning Pat included Tom’s legal history.
But then the December 15, 1976, issue of South Fulton Today, a daily paper, featured an article on Pat that made no allusion at all to her postponed trial (it had been put off to January 1977), and had no reference to Tom, arsenic, murder, or anything embarrassing. That may have been because Pat had quietly dropped her married name. She was once again Pat Radcliffe, and a staff photo showed a pretty woman in profile, gaz
ing at two dainty paper nosegays in her hand. In the ultimate rejection of reality, Pat Radcliffe was the subject of only a pleasant little feature story:
A Real Card
Local Resident Sends Old-Style Greetings
South Fulton resident Pat Radcliffe has a solution for persons who can't find the right card for that special person. Ms. Radcliffe designs and makes 18th-Century greeting cards that put most store-bought cards to shame.
A former horse trainer and instructor at Woodward Academy, Ms. Radcliffe has always liked “old-fashioned things" and has an artistic flair. While recuperating from an illness that left her unable to pursue her greatest love—horses—Ms. Radcliffe began making replicas of the 18th-Century cards to give to friends and various charitable organizations.
The article explained that Pat had formerly done portrait painting but had just begun to design her special cards.
“I didn't have any idea in two weeks' time that it would come to anything." Ms. Radcliffe has found that persons of all ages like the cards and are interested in having them done authentically. In making the cards, the Tell Road resident relies on books that show the various types of cards, as well as the help of an older friend, Fanny Kate Cash. . . . Ms. Radcliffe uses tweezers to put lace around the edges of cards and spends hours cutting out the tiny roses and other appliques on the cards.
For a couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, Ms. Radcliffe has fashioned a round card made out of satin and lace from the woman’s wedding gown. In the center, hands reach out for a yellow rose, which has a special meaning to the couple.