CHAPTER 51
***
Despite setbacks and disappointments, the case against Pat Taylor and Debbie Alexander moved forward. Don Stoop and Michelle Berry worked relentlessly, gathering a bit of evidence here, another interview there. Their spirits rose when Elizabeth Crist and her daughter, Betsy, positively identified the pearl necklace and bracelet set that Pat had given to Susan. They both recognized at once the gold flower clasp with the single pearl in the center. It was the same with a leather-bound antique cookbook, another thoughtful gift from Pat to her daughter. It had not been hers to give; it was part of Mrs. Crist’s Williamsburg cookbook collection.
There were still myriad items missing. Sooner or later, Stoop knew he would have to get a search warrant for the little red brick house in McDonough—Boppo and Papa’s house.
***
Susan Alford had some bizarre documentation of the way her mother’s mind worked, something she had never sought out, something she was hesitant to turn over to Don Stoop. But the knowledge that it existed burned in her mind.
Years before, in 1977, as Boppo was sorting through hastily packed possessions from the Tell Road house, she had come across a grocery sack with an old tape recorder in it. She gave it to Sean, who, at five, wasn't enthused about the gift. The Alfords had carted the bag and the tape recorder around with them in their many moves from Houston to Florida and back to Atlanta. No one ever bothered to check what was rattling around in the bag.
One day, they were unpacking after yet another move, and Susan lifted the old-fashioned recorder and saw that the bottom of the bag was full of old tapes. “Let’s put some country music on,” she said to Bill, “and get into the spirit of unpacking.”
When the first sounds filtered into the room, they stared at each other, almost embarrassed. They recognized the voices on the tapes, and realized they were inadvertently eavesdropping on an intimate conversation of long ago.
“ . . . I love you more than anything in this whole wide world, Sugar.”
“Don’t say that, Tom.”
“Huh?”
“You love me more than anyone. You don’t love me more than anything. You love life more than you love me—”
The tapes Pat had routinely made of her phone calls in the mid-seventies crackled with age and the dust of more than a decade, but the human emotions were still caught there. Pat and Tom’s conversations were as filled with manipulation and frustration as the day the words were first said, the male voice deep and laced with pain, the woman’s light and full of unshed tears. Bill and Susan felt like voyeurs. They switched the recorder off.
They hadn’t really listened to the tapes—only long enough to see what they were: Pat’s phone calls from Tom in the Fulton County jail. Susan hadn’t wanted to hear more; the voices brought back so much hurt.
“A long time later,” Susan eventually said, “I got them out and listened to all of them. And they were frightening. I hadn’t known that my mother tried to get Tom to commit suicide. There were so many things I had never known.”
At the time, Susan said, she had managed to deal with the content of the fifteen tapes by reminding herself that her mother had been under the influence of drugs, that this wasn’t her real mother talking and conniving and playing with Tom Allanson’s emotions. This was a stranger addicted to mind-altering drugs.
Now she could no longer retreat to that theory. Until she learned of the episode at the Crists’, Susan had always believed her mother’s claims that she had no memory of the period when Tom’s parents were murdered and when Paw and Nona were poisoned. Susan didn’t believe that any longer. She believed that her mother remembered everything, and that she had no regrets at all.
Susan turned the tapes over to Don Stoop and Michelle Berry. Most of them were Realistic Supertapes and there were some old J.C. Penney labels too. “Tom” and the dates—mostly in 1975—were written in Pat’s hand on the labels. That they had survived the Alfords’ numerous moves, the heat of sixteen summers, and the cold of as many winters defied explanation. A few were twisted, but they still played. Hesitant to risk breaking the precious tapes, Stoop took them to an expert to have them copied and enhanced for clarity before he allowed himself to listen.
It was all there, all caught on the thin brownish plastic strips, winding round and round. For years, Susan and Bill had packed and unpacked, moved again and again, and they had always carried with them, unawares, the sounds that finally explained exactly how the mind of a woman without conscience worked.
Tom’s voice was deep and concerned, and Pat’s was alternately girlish and seductive. Stoop had not yet spoken to Pat Taylor, but the woman on the tapes sounded nothing at all like the charge nurse he had come to know through others’ descriptions. Almost every call had a single theme: Tom trying to cheer and placate his distraught wife. Tom forcing down his own concerns to keep Pat serene. Tom agonizing over the mysterious infection he was told would soon take Pat’s life. Tom refusing to give up as Pat predicted only doom and despair. And, finally, on one wrenching tape, Tom breaking down at last into sobs that still held so much raw pain this long after.
Pat’s manipulation was skilled, honed, and absolute.
There were other conversations that only pointed up further how she had used Tom. Stoop’s eyes widened as he heard how entirely changed her voice was when she jousted with attorneys—one moment imperious, the next ever-so-slightly flirtatious. He heard Pat veto the possibility that Tom might become a teacher in prison and avoid hard time at Jackson. Voices of the dead were there too: Paw Allanson, who sounded like an aged Tom, calling to inquire about Pat’s health; and then Nona, her speech impaired but sounding worried about Pat.
Stoop knew how Pat’s “fatal” infection had occurred; he had read Boppo’s testimony in her appeal, her description of how Pat herself had continually opened and irritated the wound in her hip. She had used the emotions of all these people who feared for her life; she had bent them and twisted them and squeezed bloody anxiety from them.
She had orchestrated it all.
Stoop heard Pat’s voice threatening Tom’s ex-wife and wondered why she hadn’t bothered to erase the damning evidence. Stoop knew that Little Carolyn Allanson had been scheduled to be one of the strongest witnesses against Tom. It would have been shortly before the trial when Pat dialed the drugstore where Carolyn worked and asked in a light, sexy voice to speak to someone in the hair dye department, Carolyn’s section. Stoop heard Carolyn answer and Pat’s voice drop as she hissed, “Be careful.” Then she slammed the phone down.
This woman had hurt other human beings physically, and Stoop listened to the way she worked insidiously to erode their last vestiges of serenity. He wondered which was worse.
The most devastating tape of all included several twenty-five-minute conversations between Tom and Pat when he was about to be transferred from the Fulton County jail to Jackson Prison. He had borrowed and bought time from the other prisoners so that he could talk longer to his wife. And what did he get in return? A woman who whined, wept, accused, and predicted nothing but doom. She timed her responses meticulously. It was so obvious to a detached listener. When Tom was beaten down too low, she whispered, “I love you, Sugar,” and he managed to come back.
She was like a cat. She let the mouse go just far enough, and then she pounced and impaled her prey on the unsheathed claws of her words. On the rare, rare occasions that Tom spoke firmly or harshly to Pat, reacting to too much jabbing, she burst into sobs and said that he didn’t love her, she was worthless, and she had just wanted him to be proud of her. And he was abjectly apologetic.
Despite her tears, one thing was patently clear. She was enjoying herself. The Pat on the tapes reveled in every minute of her conversations with her husband, listening to him twist in the wind, hearing his voice drained of power. These weren’t phone conversations; they were contests. And she always won. She was Delilah and Tom was Samson. Each day she rendered this man of such strength helpless w
ith her words.
Tom came close to the real truth once, although he was speaking metaphorically. So close that Pat gasped.
“Tom, when they take you away, I won't know if you’re alive or dead.’’
“Pat,” he pleaded, “[in your letters] you’re just so eaten up with hate. You’re just so bitter. . . .’’
“Tom!” she sobbed. “Can't I do anything right any more? You won’t love me—”
“Pat, you’ve got to keep digging at it like a sore; you'll just make it worse—”
“What?” Pat’s voice was shocked from its petulant whimper. Stoop, knowing what he now knew, realized that Tom had inadvertently made Pat believe he had somehow found out about her self-mutilation.
“Sugar," Tom soothed, unaware. “I mean it isn't gonna get any better by your hating everyone."
Stoop could hear Pat release her pent-up breath in relief. She hadn’t been caught at all. Stoop also realized that there must have been secrets that Pat wanted Tom to keep. But what were they?
If Tom mentioned anyone but her, Pat grew petulant and gave orders. “I love you, Tom. I love you, Sugar. I don’t want anyone else in our lives."
Clearly she did not, Stoop realized. If Tom had no one but Pat, then he would do exactly what she instructed. If he believed she alone loved him and was working desperately to set him free, even though she was “near death” herself, then he would do anything she asked. But what did she want him to do—or not do? Stoop realized, too, that if there were secrets that were dangerous to Pat, an isolated Tom would be less likely to give them away. And if he had agreed to her suicide pact and carried out his part, then a dead Tom would have given away no secrets ever.
At some point, Don Stoop knew he would have to talk with Tom. He wondered what the man was like now. He had been locked up for more than fifteen years, and free for only a little over a year. Had prison crushed him? Of one thing Stoop was fairly sure. Tom Allanson wasn’t going to relish talking about Pat and the decade of the seventies.
And who would blame him?
When Don Stoop questioned Debbie Cole Alexander’s ex-husband, Gary, he didn’t care to discuss Pat either—beyond describing his former mother-in-law as a “vicious, scheming, evil bitch.” He recalled all too well when he had been informed that Pat had hired a hit man to kill him. He had believed it at the time, and he still half believed it. Gary Cole wanted nothing to do with Pat and Debbie. He was still afraid of Pat, and he made no excuses for it.
***
By March of 1991, Pat and Debbie were aware that they were being investigated. They were uneasy, apprehensive about someone unseen retracing their lives, and had angrily accused Susan of “betraying” them.
And Boppo, of course, rose up to defend her daughter. She ran into Bill Alford at the riding stable where Ashlynne and Courtney took lessons. Although she had come to think of Susan as the pariah of the Siler clan, and an ultimately evil person, Boppo still looked upon Bill as someone she could count on. While Susan gave away her every emotion in her face, in Boppo’s eyes, Bill was the opposite. His slight, sardonic smile betrayed nothing.
Boppo suggested to her grandson-in-law that he hook up a tape recorder to the Alfords’ phone—his own phone —so that she could keep track of what Susan was doing. She reminded Bill that Susan was undoubtedly crazy; she would have to be to turn on her mother the way she had. Poor Pat. Everyone knew, Boppo said, that Pat had suffered so all her life, and now she had to deal with an ungrateful and treacherous child!
Bill solemnly promised Boppo that he would hurry home and hook up a tape recorder under the house to monitor Susan’s phone conversations. He had no intention of doing any such thing, but he did not want the Radcliffes to become aware of how comprehensive the Fulton County district attorney's investigation was, or that both Bill and Susan were cooperating with Don Stoop and Michelle Berry. If there was any evidence left, any of the items missing from the Crists’ house, Stoop wanted it left right where it was.
***
By the end of March 1991, Stoop had proved to his own satisfaction several of the possible charges against Pat and Debbie in the Crist case, but he ached to connect Pat once and for all to the shooting deaths of Walter and Carolyn Allanson. There was no statute of limitations on murder.
Rounding up witnesses from seventeen years before was not easy. Michelle talked to Jean Boggs, whose memory of Pat was as lucid as if she had seen her only the day before. Jean was very helpful in giving background information, but she had avoided contact with the Radcliffes—and even her nephew Tom—for years. She had no current knowledge of their activities. No one had ever convinced her that Pat was not in some way part of a conspiracy that had ended in the murder of her brother and sister-in-law.
Stoop found the receptionist who had worked for Pat Allanson’s doctor in East Point in July of 1974. In fact, she still worked there, and she promised to check the appointment book for July 3. She remembered seeing Pat that day. It was, after all, a day to remember. Pat had been in the office, just as she told the East Point police the night of the shooting. However, the appointment book proved that she had not had an appointment to see anyone, and records showed that she hadn't had her collarbone Xrayed as she had claimed. To the best of the nurse’s recollection, Pat had merely come into the office, greeted the staff at the desk, and left. She had been seen, Stoop thought. She had made damn sure she had been seen by witnesses.
Stoop read and reread the old Allanson case, completely absorbed. He had little doubt that Tom Allanson had been in that basement on the evening of the shooting, but he wondered who had cut the phone line and pulled the circuit breaker. He wondered how the gun had happened to be in the “hole” in the basement, and he was particularly intrigued by the ubiquitous Pat. She had been as close to the site of the double murders as next door, she had circled the block in her jeep, and she had bought fried chicken to go and waited with it and her Fourth of July costume, sewing in a darkening parking lot just a block down Norman Berry Drive. But she had claimed that she never saw Tom that day after he let her off at the doctor’s office.
What, Stoop asked himself, would Pat have had to gain if her in-laws were dead? And, taking it a step further, what would she have gained if her bridegroom perished in a gunfire storm too?
Zebulon.
The Allansons had disinherited their son, but Pat had never believed that. She had always been convinced that Tom, as their only child, was their true heir. After all, her parents had forgiven her everything. She could not have even imagined parents who didn’t sacrifice for their young. She had to have believed that Boppo and Papa's martyrdom was the way things were in all families. And, if she labored under the premise that Tom would inherit everything Walter and Carolyn Allanson had, she would naturally have believed that she, as Tom’s wife, was Tom’s heir and would inherit whatever came to him.
There had been the huge mortgage on Zebulon, with balloon payments looming on the near horizon. A wealthy widow could handle all of that.
There was another sorry thing to consider, especially after Stoop had heard Tom pledge his love and devotion on fifteen tapes to a whiny, manipulative woman whom most men would have long since grown weary of. Pat was rumored to have been bored with him within weeks of their Gone With the Wind wedding. Susan remembered her mother’s growing disinterest well. Pat had dodged being alone with Tom. Instead of joining him in bed, she had sat on the swing with her aunt. It was only after he was arrested that she had become the complete tragic heroine, pining and mourning for her lover. Stoop suspected Pat would have been just as happy—probably happier, and certainly less apprehensive—if she could have mourned Tom in widow’s weeds.
He grimaced. Victorian widow’s weeds, of course. Stoop had grown to know the lady’s preferences and obsessions all too well. Maybe she even supposed that if she had Zebulon paid off, and if she were a widow, then Hap Brown would leave his wife and come back to her with his hat in his hands.
There was only one oth
er person alive who would know what had actually happened in and around the Allanson home on Norman Berry Drive on July 3, 1974.
And that was Tom Allanson.
CHAPTER 52
***
With the assistance of Tom’s parole officer, Don Stoop and Michelle Berry met with Tom Allanson in the Canton office of the Georgia Board of Prisons and Paroles. Legally, Tom no longer had anything to fear. No matter what had happened on the night of his parents’ murders, he had paid with fifteen and a half years of his life. He could not now be put in double jeopardy. He could never be tried again for those shootings. He didn’t have to talk with the D.A.’s investigators, and they wouldn’t have blamed him much if he had refused, or if he was annoyed at the intrusion into his new life. But he had agreed to be interviewed.
They had seen pictures of a young Tom, and this giant of a man seemed not so different—older, but not as old as they knew he was. He was almost fifty now, but he had scarcely any gray in his hair and his arms were muscular and tanned. If he was not pleased to be called in to talk about the woman who had carved a big chunk out of his life, he was, at least, obliging. He reached out his massive hand to shake with Don Stoop.
Stoop probably knew the story of Tom and Pat as well as anyone did now. He had immersed himself in their lives—from the first interviews with Susan and Bill Alford, the voluminous court transcripts of trials and appeals, newspaper clippings, the endless Pat-and-Tom tapes, from talking with Andy Weathers, and from Michelle Berry’s interviews with Jean Boggs. So many of the players in the old script had told their stories, and at first, the whole scenario had seemed too incredible to be real. Now, Stoop felt as if he had known the story all his life. He threw out a few questions to hear it again, this time from Tom’s angle. Stoop wondered if even now, even after all Pat had done to him, Tom could somehow still be attached to the woman he had loved so desperately, the woman he had sworn to stand by until death—but not, Stoop reminded himself, enough to commit suicide for.