***
By the Christmas season, a month later, Debbie was divorced and remarried—to Mike Alexander, who had finally divorced his wife. Ronnie was married to Kathy and collecting state industrial insurance from an injury suffered on a construction job. He had suffered a number of such injuries on the job, which, fortunately, had always been covered by state industrial insurance. Susan and Bill were fighting simply to stay afloat.
In December, Susan got a bizarre phone call from her sister. It took her a minute to figure out what Debbie was talking about. Debbie and Pat hadn’t worked for the Crist family since June of 1988, but two and a half years later, Debbie was calling Susan to blame her for their dismissal. “You ruined it for us,” Debbie said angrily. “We know that you called Mrs. Crist and told her lies about us. You made us lose our jobs. And I’ll never forgive you.”
Susan was baffled. As far as she knew, her mother and sister had been let go because the Crists’ medical insurance ran out. That was what her mother had said. Why on earth would she have called the Crists? She didn’t know them. And she and Bill weren’t even living in the Atlanta area at the time.
The more Susan thought about Debbie’s phone call, the more she felt an ominous sense that a Pandora’s box had been opened—and she didn’t want to know what was inside. When she told Bill, he stared back at her, puzzled. Susan wanted to forget it, but she knew that if Bill were pushed, he wouldn’t look away. He would find out what the hell was going on. One thing they both knew. Neither of them had ever called the Crists.
On December 26, all unaware, Bill called Dawn Slinkard, Debbie’s daughter, to ask that an antique crib that the Alfords had lent her be returned. Debbie answered the phone, and she was still furious with her sister. She told Bill never to call again. “You and Susan have ruined my life. Susan made the Crists fire us. Susan has always ruined my life.”
Bill looked in the directory for the Crists’ listing and punched in the number. Elizabeth Crist answered the phone. Bill didn’t know that the date was special to her; if her husband had lived, it would have been his ninetieth birthday.
“Mrs. Crist,” Bill began, “have you ever received a phone call from my wife, Susan Alford?”
“I’ve never heard the name.”
“Well, let me explain. My wife’s mother and sister worked for you a few years ago. What I really wanted to ask was whether my wife ever called you about her mother, Pat Taylor Allanson. You may know her as Pat Taylor?”
There was a long silence at the end of the line, and then Betty Crist began to tell Bill Alford “things I didn’t want to hear.”
When Bill told Susan what Mrs. Crist had said, she was sick at heart. Despite the way her mother had treated her, she still hoped the “trouble” was all over. “But sometimes,” she recalled, “there had been things said over the past few years—even the jokes that Sean made, or some question my grandmother would ask—and in spite of myself, I would wonder if my mother was still dangerous. I’d wanted so much for her to be normal that I overlooked a lot of things. But I had told myself—and my mother and my grandmother—that if I ever felt my mother was hurting someone else, maybe even trying to kill someone else, I would have to go to the authorities. I swore that before she killed somebody, I would stop it—even if I was disowned from the family, with nobody wanting anything to do with me. I guess I always knew that it would blow the family completely apart.”
Susan placed a call to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.
PART EIGHT
OLD SECRETS
CHAPTER 47
Don Stoop got all the oddball cases in Fulton County. He was the only investigator in the D.A.’s office eager to dig into cases that seemed, at the outset, to be fairly routine, but might take interesting detours. He was remarkably adept at exposing what lay under the surface.
Stoop was a walking paradox. Nobody ever knew exactly what he was thinking at any given moment. He was a wiseass with a sentimental streak. Most of the time, he appeared to be the ultimate macho cop—and yet, he knew exactly when to stop pushing and the precise moment to listen attentively. An irrepressible tease, he knew when to quit.
Stoop was anathema to crooked cops on the take; he had cleaned out a half-dozen corrupt police departments around Atlanta. His office was upstairs over a restaurant, kitty-corner from the Fulton County Courthouse; nobody could find it without a map and an invitation. It was just large enough to hold a desk and a bookcase, but he was never there, so it didn’t matter. A connoisseur of beer, he also kept a candy dish on his desk for his sweet tooth, but he jogged calorie for calorie and never had a spare inch around his middle. He sported a moustache that would be the envy of any member of a barbershop quartet and his ties were hardly inconspicuous.
Don Stoop was born in 1952. He was an army brat and he never really grew up in one place. The closest thing he had to a hometown was the area around Red Bank, New Jersey. As a towheaded youngster, Donnie Stoop spent vacations there with his favorite uncle, “Fritz” Fitzpatrick, a detective for the Freehold Police Department. Fritz was patient and encouraging, a good cop who could recognize the seeds sprouting in the kid. If there is such a thing as a “born detective—and there is—Don Stoop was destined to become an investigator. He questioned everything; he wanted to know all the whys and hows, all the details of the cases his uncle Fritz worked on. Why did people do bad things, and how did his uncle know they were guilty? He could not imagine that there could be a better job than to be a policeman.
When his uncle Fritz died, he left his badge to Don.
Stoop had a half-dozen years in the service behind him, a B.A. in police science, and two two-year degrees in criminal justice and philosophy. From the first moment he put on a police uniform in Cedar Grove, Florida, he loved it; it was what he had always wanted to do. A few years later, in 1980, he moved up to Georgia and “started policing for the city of Atlanta.” He was still as blond as a Scandinavian, looked about eighteen, and worked a car in the most thickly populated black ghetto areas of the city. The people who lived on Atlanta’s meanest streets liked him. He was a no-bullshit kind of guy. He stayed with the Atlanta Police Department for five and a half years.
While he was working in Atlanta, Stoop met his future wife, Theresa Hempfling, when they worked undercover stakeouts together. A lovely, dark-haired woman, Theresa was a federal agent for the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms branch of federal law enforcement. She was in charge of the Zone 6 Project in Atlanta, seeking out “armed career criminals.” She was as good at her job as Stoop was at his, and could trade quips with him toe to toe. Stoop was making 92 percent of the arrests in the Zone 6 campaign, and Theresa was seeing the cases through to conviction.
But what Stoop really wanted—what he had always wanted—was to be a detective like his uncle Fritz. The Fulton County D.A.’s investigative unit gave him plenty of opportunity to do just that. He had occasion more than once to “rethink” dispositions of cases marked closed by local police departments. One was the bloody death of a fifty-year-old man whose case had been closed as a suicide by the investigating agency. But there were aspects of the case that disturbed the dead man’s family and they asked for an investigation by the D.A.’s office.
Reading over the autopsy report, Stoop saw that the victim had succumbed to several bullets in the chest, fired by an old .445 Webley cavalry pistol. The city detective investigating the case had surmised that the dead man had shot himself many times in the chest, walked around the living room, and then gone out into the hall way, where he shot himself a final time. That, the report read, would account for the proliferation of blood all over the floor.
That it would, Stoop agreed, if a man with his chest full of bullets were capable of walking around. Stoop recalled asking the detective, “Would it surprise you that all that blood in the living room isn’t his blood?”
The city detective didn't believe the D.A.’s investigator.
“Look at his shoes, then,” Stoop suggest
ed.
The victim’s shoes didn’t have a speck of blood on them. “I think he died right here in the hallway,” Stoop said. “And I think somebody else shot him.”
***
Stoop’s investigation unearthed the fact that the dead man’s girlfriend had been stopped by a patrol unit for erratic driving late on the night of the shooting. She had bandages on both wrists. “She told them she’d cut her self accidentally,” Stoop recalled later with a grim smile. “And they let her go. She had tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists after she shot him. That was her blood that was all over his living room; the lab identified two different types of blood left in his hallway and living room. Evidently, the girlfriend changed her mind about wanting to die—and went to Grady Hospital and got sewed up. We thought we had a case. But they acquitted her. The jury felt if it was murder, then the first investigators should have known it. It didn’t make sense, but you can’t second-guess a jury’s reasoning.”
Stoop was a busy man. Not only was he working for the Fulton County D.A.’s Office, but he was available to other agencies that didn’t have investigators. On top of that, he still worked with two federal task forces: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the FBI’s Drug Task Force. But he was never too busy to take on another oddball case.
When Susan Alford called the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, she had asked to talk to anyone who might know about a current case charging Patricia Taylor Allanson with crimes involving the James Crist family. She was still hoping that maybe Mrs. Crist had exaggerated. Her call was taken by Chief Investigator Ron Harris, who remembered Pat only too well from her 1976 conviction. He had worked on the case. The bizarre situation of a husband and a wife going to trial separately for murder and attempted murder within the space of a few years was hard to forget. No one in the D.A.’s office had ever settled the question of Pat Taylor Allanson’s actual involvement in the murder of her in-laws.
“You aren’t Pat Taylor’s sister, are you?” Harris asked Susan.
“No,” she said, wondering if her mother was still talking about her “wicked, sociopathic sister”—the imaginary sister who lived in North Carolina.
Susan did not tell Harris who she was in that first call, but he was intrigued. Why would someone be asking about Pat Taylor ? The woman would be—what?—in her fifties by now, and she probably was out of prison. Harris checked the computers and found there was an open case, with a complaint filed by a Mrs. James F. Crist. But there wasn’t much to go on. The only thing that the case file consisted of was a manila folder with one yellow sheet from a legal tablet in it.
Harris called Don Stoop into his office. Stoop had never heard of Pat Taylor, but the single sheet of paper led him to the Atlanta Police Department’s Larceny Unit, which had filed away the Crists’ complaint in 1988, marked “all leads exhausted.” The city dicks had never gotten enough evidence together to charge anyone.
That made it Stoop’s kind of case.
***
It was February 5, 1991, when Don Stoop was officially assigned the Crist case. He was instructed to look into the “possible homicide of an elderly gentleman under the home care of two females who were, allegedly, Registered Nurses.” James Crist had been dead for a little over two years. His death had been considered natural; he had suffered from Parkinson’s disease and he was eighty-eight years old when he died. The question now was: Had someone hurried him along?
Stoop asked for Michelle Berry as his co-investigator. She had no experience as a homicide investigator; the Crist case might give her some. Michelle resembled a college girl more than a working detective. She was in her twenties, but she could easily pass for seventeen, an attribute that made her extremely valuable on her first law enforcement assignments. When she graduated from North Georgia College with a B.A. in criminal justice, she was hired by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as an undercover narcotics investigator and was sent out to buy drugs from some of the seamiest characters in Georgia’s narcotics underworld. She could look like a schoolgirl or a hippie or a confirmed addict. “At the time,” she remembered, “it didn’t even strike me as dangerous. I was a detective on a detail, and that’s what I wanted to be.”
Michelle’s career as a narc went along swimmingly until she fell in love. “My job didn’t sit too well with Jonathan,” she said. “He told me, ‘Either quit and marry me, or keep doing what you’re doing and leave me alone.’ ” She loved him too much to leave him alone, so, reluctantly, she resigned her job with the GBI and they were married in December 1989.
Six months later, Michelle knew she couldn’t give up law enforcement completely; that was what she had studied for. Much like Stoop, helping to keep the law was her life’s ambition. Her husband understood, but he didn’t want her back on the streets. They compromised. “I got a desk job.”
Michelle’s desk—and office—were neater than Stoop’s, and her objets d’art were not nearly as eccentric as his, some of which were unmentionable. They made an interesting team.
Don and Michelle read Pat’s and Debbie’s rap sheets, and then did a little background checking on the Crist family. They learned that James F. “Jimmy” Crist had earned the huge house on Nancy Creek Road. If one single man could be said to epitomize the emergence of electric power in the South in the twentieth century, it was James Crist.
Jimmy Crist had started out climbing poles, his spurred boots digging into swaying shafts of tarred wood in winter storms and in the burning southern sun. In 1927, he worked as an apprentice lineman for the Alabama Power Company. He later became a sales representative, and then moved on to the South Carolina Power Company and stayed nineteen years. In 1946-47, Crist helped form the Southern Company, which was incorporated to operate four southern electric companies—Alabama Power Company, Georgia Power Company, Gulf Power Company, and the Mississippi Power Company. Crist was listed in Who's Who in America and wrote a book, They Electrified the South, about the emergence of electrical power in the first half of the century.
James Crist and his pretty wife, Elizabeth Courtney Boykin Crist, had belonged to the most exclusive inner circles of Atlanta and Charleston society. When Crist retired as the executive vice president and director of the Southern Company on January 1, 1966, he was lauded as a true pioneer of his industry and given credit for much of the prosperity of the New South. The thirty thousand employees of the Southern electric system saluted Jimmy Crist.
The Crists had had two grown sons and a daughter, a good marriage, and all the time in the world. He looked forward to playing more golf at the Peachtree Country Club. Crist remained an advisory director of the Southern Company until 1977, but as he entered his ninth decade, he began to show symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological malady that is sometimes connected to arteriosclerosis in an elderly patient. Symptoms began with tremors in the limbs, a masklike expression, a shuffling gait, and a kind of “pill-rolling” movement in the hands. It was a tragic illness for a man who had been so active all his life, and in time, Elizabeth Crist needed help in caring for him.
Jimmy Crist had died in 1988. Elizabeth Crist survived him and was in excellent health for a woman her age.
CHAPTER 48
***
Don Stoop and Michelle Berry met with Mrs. Elizabeth Crist, her daughter, Betsy Chandler, and her sons, Bill and Jim, Jr. in the exquisitely appointed mansion where Mrs. Crist still lived. Betty Crist was attractive and intelligent and seemed younger than a woman in her late seventies. The D.A.’s investigators knew they would have to revive painful memories of Jim Crist, Sr.’s death when they asked his widow to recall the occasion of her meeting with Pat Taylor, but it was the only reasonable spot to begin their probe.
Betty Crist told them that Pat Taylor had come to her highly recommended. She had introduced herself as a registered nurse, just retired from the Army Nurse Corps, and she said she could bring in her daughter Deborah, who was also an RN; to work the second shift. Like her mother,
Betsy Chandler had found Pat “very likable” during her employment interview. Pat had explained to Betsy and her brother Jim that she was so recently retired from the army that she had not yet received her Georgia nursing number, but she assured them that the requirements for her army rank were far stricter than the state of Georgia required. She gave them her credentials as “U.S. Armed Services Medical Services: ID No. NA-15- 753,” and added that she had once supervised all the nurses at Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital.
Jim Crist recalled that Pat had appeared to be about sixty, a stolid, no-nonsense type of woman with bobbed brown hair and glasses who probably weighed about 145 to 150 pounds. She said she lived in McDonough and gave her phone number. She offered references from former employers and Jim had checked those, eliciting only glowing reports. Pat Taylor had struck him as a very “take-charge” kind of woman, perfect for the role of charge nurse, supervising all of his parents’ aides. He supposed an army nurse would have to be that way.
Pat’s duties were to “take care of Jimmy,” Betty Crist said, “take blood pressure, temperature, etc., and fix the meals. Jimmy was not bedridden when Pat was first hired.” Nor was Betty Crist. She had been perfectly healthy—but not for long. “I became bedridden after Pat had been here about one month. Then she had to give me my medicine and bring trays up to my room to eat.” Pat was indeed a “take-charge” kind of woman. “She would never let me and Jimmy spend time together,” Betty Crist said. “She kept me upstairs, and Jimmy had a hospital bed set up in the den.”
Betsy explained to the investigators that the family’s whole purpose in hiring nurses was so that they could keep her father at home with her mother where he felt safe and as serene as a man so ill could be. “We knew he’d die if we put him in a nursing home—we just didn’t want to do that.”