The jury voted to have Varsity hot dogs sent in.
Susan winced. Her mother loved Varsity chili dogs. Pat was so childlike in her food preferences, and so picky too. My Lord, Susan thought, if her mother went to prison, there probably wouldn’t be anything she could stomach. Sonja Salo agreed. She thought Pat was one of the nicest and the most fragile people she had ever met. She had seen only bright fragments of Pat’s personality; when she visited Pat in the hospital, she had found her very brave. Sonja idolized Pat. Although Sonja herself had very little money, she had eaten peanut butter sandwiches so that she could buy a dinner of steak, baked potato, and salad to carry into the hospital for Pat. She was as worried as Susan was. It seemed incredible that the woman who was so near death a year and a half before was even well enough to go on trial.
They waited. Outside, it was Friday evening, the beginning of the weekend. Inside, time took forever. Boppo smoked steadily and so did Debbie, lighting each cigarette from the one before it. But then, Boppo always smoked a lot; it was part of her. Television crews waited with them, poised and ready.
It had been a little more than seven hours since the jury was charged, but they had taken time out for lunch and supper. They had deliberated for only about four hours. At five minutes to nine, Judge Holt called them into his courtroom to see if they could reach a decision that evening. If not, he would dismiss them until morning.
Robert Hassler had been elected foreman. He said that they were just about to ask a question. They needed some explication of the terms “circumstantial evidence” and “hypothesis” as listed in the fifth instruction to the jury: “To warrant a conviction on circumstantial evidence, the proved facts shall not only be consistent with the hypothesis of guilt, but shall exclude every other reasonable hypothesis save that of the guilt of the accused.”
Judge Holt reread the instruction and explained it to them.
Susan felt icy sweat trickle down her back. She knew. Maybe it was the expression on the jurors' faces. Maybe it was the question. They were asking about how they could be sure someone was guilty.
Boppo lit another cigarette and Papa paced.
At 9:08, the jury buzzed for the bailiff. At 9:10, they returned to the courtroom. They had their verdicts, Mr. Hassler passed the handwritten ballot to the bailiff, who in turn handed it to Judge Holt. The jurist’s face was empty of expression as he glanced over the piece of paper. Then he said, “These haven’t been dated.” The spectators in the gallery let their breath out slowly as the vital document went back to the jury. Robert Hassler dated it, “May 6, 1977.”
It was passed through two hands again, and then to Andy Weathers. Pat Allanson stood, her back rigid, her eyes straight ahead as the prosecutor prepared to read the verdicts. Only a pulse in her neck gave her away, her heart beating so violently that the precious cameo on the gold chain around her neck bounced delicately.
Weathers cleared his throat. “As to Count I: We the jury find the defendant guilty.”
Pat showed no expression at all. She didn’t sway. She didn’t faint.
“As to Count II: We the jury find the defendant guilty.”
Debbie broke into loud sobs and shouted, “No!” Boppo, as she always had, pushed back her own emotions and hugged her granddaughter in a vain attempt to comfort her, Susan cried more softly and Sonja Salo turned to help her. Colonel Radcliffe looked thunder struck. Courtroom 808 was full of sobbing and anguished cries, but the convicted woman seemed to be in shock. Pat, who had always crumpled to the ground at the slightest emotional pressure, stood like a tree, unmoving.
Judge Holt issued a stern warning. “Anyone who cannot control himself or herself must leave the courtroom now.” No one left, but the crying was muffled. Judge Holt was ready to sentence Pat immediately. Dunham McAllister rose to ask for a delay. He needed time. He was sure there would be leniency in the sentencing guidelines, but he had to have time to do some research. He was not presently prepared to go forward.
Judge Holt was not amused. “You must have anticipated this,” he said.
“I have no excuse. I do ask your forbearance in granting a delay.”
“I can't do it Monday. I've got two weeks of civil cases. Sentencing will be on May 16.”
McAllister started to ask if his client could be free awaiting sentence, but Judge Holt was ahead of him, even before he got the request completely out. “No. If I did it for one, I'd have to do it for all of them. I won't do it. It creates red tape for my office, the district attorney's office, and every other office involved. The defendant is in custody. Do you understand that?”
Deputies moved toward Pat, handcuffs ready. She turned back toward her sobbing family as she woodenly allowed herself to be cuffed. She looked so lovely in the dress she had made, this one of avocado and cream, her green eyes wide and frightened against her stark white skin. Her daughters cried openly. The Radcliffes were stunned, but they did not, of course, break down. They only watched Pat disappear. It simply could not be that their daughter was going to jail, not to stay all night.
Jean and Homer Boggs congratulated Andy Weathers and the lawyers began to gather up their papers. As Weathers turned to leave, Boppo ran after him. “Sir! Sir!” she cried. “You have made a terrible mistake!” Weathers acknowledged her with a half shake of his head, but kept on walking.
The television cameras rolled, catching all the emotion, but Pat’s family didn't know that until they saw their images caught on the eleven o’clock news. “I felt like someone had died,” Susan remembered, “and Sonja was trying to lead me out of the courtroom.”
Already, at Judge Holt’s order, the bailiff was turning the lights out.
***
On May 16, Andy Weathers urged Judge Holt to give Pat Allanson the stiffest sentence possible. “She took from them [the Allansons] everything they had—as well as their mental capacities. . . . Arsenic poisoning is one of the most painful ways for a human being to die. . . . This is a brutal scheme. She showed not one ounce of mercy to these two people she tried to kill one day at a time. And they would have died if the scheme had not been detected. I don’t think the defendant is due any points. It’s a cold scheme. It’s a calculated scheme. It’s carried out where they would die an inch at a time. They suffered great pain. . . . I’d ask the court to set a sentence that is consistent with this brutality.”
Dunham McAllister reminded the judge that “the evidence only clearly established at least one poisoning episode for Mrs. Allanson and two for Mr. Allanson. There was no evidence other than that.” He asked that Pat’s medical problems be taken into consideration. “I would ask the court to consider a lenient sentence, to consider probation, that Mrs. Allanson is a person who can benefit from a period of probation.”
Judge Holt apparently did not agree. He sentenced Patricia Vann Radcliffe Taylor Allanson to two ten-year prison terms, to be served consecutively. Under Georgia statute, it was the harshest sentence he could impose. Pat stared at her attorney as if she didn’t understand. Surely this was a mistake. Surely the judge was only saying what he could give her; he couldn’t mean that he was actually going to send her to prison.
Grimly, Dunham McAllister gave notice of appeal.
“I can’t hear it now,” Holt said. “You can file it. I’ll hear it as soon as I can.”
Only three years had passed since Pat had married into the Allanson clan, and in that space of time the family had been well nigh annihilated. Walter and Carolyn were dead; Tom was locked in prison, convicted of their murders; and his children had been adopted, lost to him. Paw and Nona would have arsenic in their bones until they died. They would never be the same. Jean had been forced outside the circle of her own family. The few Allansons who were alive and walking free were full of doubts and recriminations.
Pat had seemed to be a frail, dependent woman when she insinuated herself into their midst, but she had fanned each faint spark of disagreement into glowing coals of hostility and distrust that needed only a faint bre
eze to burst into flames.
She had promised Tom love unlike any he had ever known before. Believing he saw paradise in her transparent green eyes, Tom had taken her as his wife. And she had come close to destroying him and everything he loved. He might better have flung himself into a volcano.
Tom’s parents had detested Pat, but her own family loved her beyond reason. Margureitte’s devotion was all-encompassing, all-forgiving, blind. And it wasn’t just Margureitte. Pat had found love and acceptance wherever she turned from the moment she was born. Mama Siler and all her aunts adored her. Gil still loved her even though she had banished him without giving him a reason. Susan and Debbie and Ronnie cherished their mother and overlooked her eccentricities and her demands for more. Always more.
Pat’s family had crumbled at its center, the structure weakening with each new disaster until it was as friable as a cheap Christmas ornament. Everywhere Pat walked she left tears and dissension and death in her wake. She was a catalyst to tragedy, a flawed genius who recognized vulnerability in others. Unerringly, she fixed on weakness and burrowed and twisted until something or someone broke. If she could not be happy, then she would not have anyone find joy.
Mama Siler had neglected the other grandchildren so that Patty could have the best of everything. Kent was a suicide, dead for more than a decade. Boppo and Papa had never really had a life of their own; they had lost the house on Dodson Drive, and now even the Tell Road farm. They were bankrupt. Ronnie had been kept from Gil when he needed a father most, and Pat gave him anything he wanted as long as he was there for her. Pat had meddled in Debbie’s marriage until it was hopelessly broken. Seeing the danger, Bill Alford hoped to get Susan and Sean away before it was too late for them too.
Until this moment, Pat had walked away unscathed from the havoc she wrought, so self-involved that she never even saw the wreckage behind her. But now she was being forced to deal with what she had done. She was thirty-nine years old and she was going to prison.
That couldn’t be. It wasn’t fair. It was, as her mother had cried out to Mr. Weathers, “a terrible mistake.”
CHAPTER 39
***
Pat would serve her sentence at the Hardwick Correctional Institute in Milledgeville, Georgia, the site of Georgia’s first state capital. Southeast of Atlanta and sandwiched between the Oconee National Forest and Lake Sinclair, Hardwick was, indeed, a prison, even though it looked from the exterior like a fine southern girls’ school set in green rolling countryside. A huge tree grew in front, shading picnic tables and softening the effect of the fence topped with razor wire. It was new construction, made of beige stucco whose hue was not unlike the tan uniforms its inmates wore.
The custodial complex was small—too small, really; many of the inmates slept in dorms in mobile homes on the back side of the prison. There was no free movement from place to place, and Pat’s days were regulated by rules and other people’s time schedules. The food was heavy and starchy, the sheets were rough, and the other prisoners were not from the kind of life she had known.
She hated it.
“Even though the walls are painted pretty and it looks nice outside,” she told her family, “don’t let them fool you. It’s still a prison. They degrade you.”
Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe made the eighty-mile drive to Hardwick faithfully each weekend. They would not dream of missing a visitors’ day. When the Radcliffes or Pat’s children came to visit, they were searched and anything they brought with them had to be checked by a matron. When Pat was ushered down to see them, the matrons had her step into a small bathroom off the visiting area before and after for a body search—as if she were a “common criminal,” she said. She had been fascinated with the indignities Tom suffered in prison, urging him to tell her details; now she was learning what it was like to be caged.
Pat quickly convinced prison authorities that her health problems made it impossible for her to work in the kitchen. She couldn’t lift anything heavy and the smells of institutional food sickened her. The prison kitchen served a lot of fish from nearby Lake Sinclair—fish Pat believed were “poisoned” by pollution. The rest of the menu featured all prisons’ ubiquitous oatmeal, grits, potatoes, spaghetti, macaroni, rice, and heavy bread baked by inmates and slathered with greasy margarine.
“It’s nothing but garbage,” she complained to her parents. “I won’t eat it. A lot of the women get sick from eating that fish, and the meat is rotten.” Indeed, Pat told them she fasted until the weekends came. Boppo always brought in a cooler full of food. When the matron occasionally demurred at some container or eating utensil, she would argue, “Surely there’s no harm in that.”
Each visit, Boppo and Papa brought Pat a large steak from a Bonanza franchise, hot dogs from the Dairy Queen, a pizza, and whatever else she had ordered. She ate every bit, even though so much food at once usually left her bloated with indigestion. Later, Pat would earn privileges so that she could keep peanut butter, crackers, and instant coffee in her cell.
Susan and Bill Alford visited as often as they could, Debbie came less frequently, and Ronnie only rarely. Ronnie adored his mother, and her incarceration was a terrible blow for him. His alcohol consumption increased, and he suffered intense grief and loss reactions when he broke up with girlfriends. Sometimes, he injured himself with knives or razor blades, cutting into the skin of his chest. Ever since he was a child, his role in his mother’s life had been to protect her, to run errands for her. Her absence left a huge empty place.
Debbie was bereft too. Even though she and Susan had complained and laughed at their mother’s peccadilloes, Debbie had no anchor without Pat. Her marriage bounced continually from bad to mediocre, and she left her husband as regularly as the weather changed. When life away from him didn’t meet her expectations, she went back—but grudgingly.
The first Christmas Pat was in prison was very difficult. Susan and Bill decided to stay home in Atlanta and have their own Christmas morning with five-year-old Sean, and Pat took their defection as a blatant omission of love. When Debbie and Dawn didn’t show up for Christmas either, she was crushed.
Her letters home were seldom overtly chiding, but rather masterpieces of artful despair.
“Dear Susan, Bill, & Sean,” she wrote,
Wish I could have been there to see Sean and all his toys. I really was shocked to walk into the visiting room and see Boppo, when I’d expected to see the 3 of you and Debbie and Dawn. . . . I realize it's a long way though and you were probably all tired and just wanted to be home alone. “Alone” is a word I’m very familiar with. It's very “alone” here and the only things that make it bearable are the visits every weekend. . . . Don't think I don't realize the hardship & sacrifice on all of your time, but there are no words to tell you what it means to me. It's the difference between making it & not making it. Handling it or going all to pieces . . . I live for those visits. I need all of you or I'm lost.
I already know I've lost Tom because I can't “do” things for him like I could. Who will be next? All I have to offer is my love & my desperate need for all of you. Every visiting day I am dressed & waiting hours before. Silly? No. Necessary to survive in this place. . . . It's so lonely here. Forgive the teardrops.
Susan felt awful. And guilty. Even though they would have had to take a toddler 210 miles to visit Pat in prison, they should have gone. Her mother had felt all alone on Christmas Day, with only Boppo, Papa, and Ronnie to eat with her at the prison Christmas dinner.
Tom was gone from Pat’s life. And not just in a physical sense. He had been moved to Buford Prison north of Atlanta, where his intelligence and education could be utilized, the opportunity he might have had years before if Pat hadn’t blocked it.
His wife’s interference with the staff had made him do hard time at Jackson Prison, no matter how much he tried to obey the rules and keep his mouth shut. “I had several people tell me, ‘That woman is gonna keep you in here forever’ he remembered later. “I began to believ
e it. Every time I turned around, it was ‘Pat this’ and ‘Pat that’ and conferences in the warden’s office about something else she’d done. When I got transferred up to Buford, I said I was gonna start over. With the prison system, you can’t escape what’s around you, but if you get transferred, you sometimes get an opportunity to get a fresh start.”
Now Pat was also in prison, and trying to deal with his wife, her counselor, his counselor, and four-way phone calls between two prisons was hellish. “Her counselor had to call my counselor and then I got to sit there in front of the counselor and carry on an argument on the phone, and this guy is sitting there writing down, making notes of my reactions and stuff . . . I just didn’t need that.”
What had begun in a blaze of romantic fervor ended as many such liaisons do, flatly and with little emotion. “I told her I can’t handle this up here,” Tom said. “The best thing that we could do is go opposite directions. She agreed to it, and the next thing I know, I got the divorce papers. That was fine, you know. I just cut all ties completely.”
Tom was really alone. His children were gone—he didn’t know where—his family shattered. His grandparents were too sick to visit him, and in his heart he accepted that Pat had done it to them. Although he could not forgive that, some last vestige of loyalty kept him from condemning her out loud. She was paying. He was grateful to be free of her and let her go her way. Pat’s family was gone from him too. Susan and Debbie had liked Tom, but now they backed away. “We had to make a choice,” Susan recalled later, “between sticking by our mother or writing to Tom. She was our mother, so the choice was already made. Debbie and I took Dawn and Sean and went to see Tom once—in 1976, when he was in Jackson—and my mother was so angry with us. She told us she’d called the state police to head us off. I think that was an exaggeration, but I’m not so sure. We were afraid to go back.”