Clearly, Tom saw the tragedy from the viewpoint of a man who had never deliberately set out to hurt anyone. He was not a devious man. He was not a man who understood willful cruelty to other human beings.
Don Stoop pointed out all the antagonizing, all the real or imagined slights aggravated to major proportions— just as Pat had exacerbated the terrible wound in her own buttock. She had been brilliant at driving the wedge between Tom and his father, and then at setting the little fires of worry and rage that would certainly grow to a conflagration no one could stop.
Quietly, Don Stoop wondered aloud if maybe Pat hadn’t believed that she had seen her husband alive for the last time when she kissed him goodbye at the doctor’s office.
“She could have possibly watched you walk away, given you ten or fifteen minutes, called, and all of a sudden, your father showed up—knowing good and well how you and your father were getting along. And then. . . . boom.
“BOOM!”
The three of them sat there in silence, the two detectives and the very tall man who had given Pat Taylor Allanson two decades of his life. The clock on the wall ticked so loudly that it too might have been going, “Boom BOOM!”
***
Finally, Tom was ready to talk about what had happened in the basement. He began by saying that he had told Pat exactly what had happened, and he had explained the layout of the basement. Against Pat’s wishes, he had told Ed Garland too, but by then it was far too late for his attorney to change his defense tactics. No one would have believed that the man on trial wasn’t a liar— a man who had lied once might lie again. Tom and Ed Garland were trapped in the legal maze Pat had forced them into.
Tom’s deep, pleasant Georgia voice began the story, and Stoop and Berry listened. Tom hadn’t been much of a talker until now, but his mind had temporarily stepped out of this interview room into the dampness of an old basement in a time long gone by, and his words continued in a stream of consciousness, remembering.
“He came down with the pistol to look around in the basement, and he went over to this area . . . where he stored all his camping stuff, and he just kind of stepped off and walked in there. And there is one light in there— which didn't work—and I guess I might have been standing there breathing hard or something, and he comes over and hollers upstairs, ‘I got him cornered in the hole!’
“And he sticks the pistol in that little area, which is not much bigger than a walk-in closet, and starts shooting all the way around the wall, and not far from me. And he starts over here, and the next one is over here, and the next one is over here, and he ran out of bullets before he got completely around. Pieces of concrete and pieces of bullets were flying and everything. I'm thinking all this stuff hit, plus I’m looking at this gun, and he hollers to my mother to bring down the rifle. Right before the steps, there is a big light bulb—two-hundred-watt light bulb— that hangs down. If you look when you come down the steps, you can see it across the room. And I had no idea where he was at or anything, and I just stumbled across this shotgun in there [in the hole] in the meantime—that he had reported stolen—and it was just sitting up against the wall. It was a single-shot shotgun.”
“Was it loaded?”
“Yeah, he always kept it loaded in the house.”
“Even with the grandchildren around?”
“Well, he always had this shotgun in his closet—even with me around when I was a little kid.”
“Why did it all of a sudden end up in the basement?”
“Well, he reported it stolen along with his other pistol.” Tom had no idea why it had ended up in the hole in the basement.
“Okay,” Tom went on, putting his memories into a flood of words. “So he had emptied his pistol right in there, and by this time it’s like being in a barrel and somebody shooting in a barrel, you know, and I stumbled across the shotgun, and I said, ‘Man, it’s time for me to get out of here, ’cause he done called for that rifle.’ My mother never shot a rifle in her life. So she comes down the steps panicking and everything—’cause she hears the shooting down there—and she runs down there and she throws the rifle up just as I’m coming out the door, and I got the shotgun down here, not shooting or anything. Just as I come out the door [the hole entrance], this big flash goes and I jump back and [my] shotgun goes off. I had no idea that I even hit them. I surely wasn’t shooting at her. . . . Evidently, she [shot] something and it hit my daddy, because there was blood from right there at the door and around the basement. I didn’t shoot him. . . . And [my] shotgun didn’t hit him, because he was not standing in front of the door. [And at that range, the shotgun Tom found in the hole would have literally blown Walter Allanson apart.] So evidently she hit him. And so everything is ringing up here [Tom tapped his head]. I just reached down on the floor and picked up another shell, and loaded back, and poked it out the door. I don’t know how long this was. It may have been a minute; it might not have been that long. And just as I started out the door, he was standing up, throwing the rifle up over there, and I just shot in that direction. Then, at the same time, when I looked out the door, I saw my mother laying on the step, . . . and I see the movement of him over there.”
Again the room was silent.
Finally, Don Stoop asked Tom if he had ever heard his father mention his name.
“All I heard was, ‘I got him cornered in the hole.’ . . . I don’t think my mother knew I was down there.”
“Do you think your father knew . . . ?”
“Yep. ’Cause that is what he told the police—that he knew who it was that broke into his house and he was going to take care of it.”
Stoop asked Tom several times, in several ways, why he thought his father’s shotgun and the shells had been down in that basement cubbyhole. And he had no idea, no explanation. His grandfather had called him two weeks before the shoot-out and asked him if he knew who had stolen his father’s shotgun and pistol, and he had been just as bewildered then. He had a whole rack of his own guns; Tom had no interest in his father’s guns.
Don Stoop switched back to Pat’s adamant refusal to let Tom tell his attorney about the way the shootings had really happened. “Did you ever ask her why she was upset about the truth?”
“Well,” Tom said, “because it was contradicting to the story she told. I mean, she started building the lies from that night, and once you build, you can’t remember every lie. You forget it. Of course, I don't think she ever forgot anything. But, you know, if she is telling one thing to the lawyers and everything, and I’m coming up telling them something else, then the lawyer’s gonna say, ‘Wait a minute.’ A lawyer’s got any sense, he would sit there and figure out who was behind all this stuff. And I guess you could say that’s why she didn't want it brought out.”
But Tom had never betrayed Pat. He had taken the whole punishment. Until this interview, he had never told anyone that he had talked to his wife moments after the shoot-out, and she certainly had told no one. Pat had not offered to drive him home—or anywhere. She had let him run, alone, through the rainy Georgia night, to make his way home sixty miles away, anyway he could. And she had waited for her mother and father, for Boppo and Papa, to come pick up the pieces just as they always had.
Don Stoop and Michelle Berry were quite sure that for Pat the sight of Tom running toward her in the rain must have seemed like a ghost materializing through the twilight. They both believed that she had set him up to be shot dead. She had never expected to see him again that night.
Or any other.
***
There were still unanswered questions, even after the interview with Tom Allanson. There always would be. Stoop had his own theories on how Walter Allanson’s shotgun and shells got in the hole in his basement. He knew Tom hadn’t carried them with him on that July day as he went to try to work things out with his mother. The East Point fire fighter who knew Tom well had seen him walking down the street toward his parents’ home. He had seen no shotgun.
It was possible that Walt
er Allanson himself had put the old shotgun in his basement. He was a man running scared, just as his son was—each of them convinced that the other was plotting bloody murder. Walter could have stashed the gun in the hole so that it would be handy if he were attacked while he was in the basement. It could have been his “downstairs gun” and the new high-powered rifle his “upstairs gun.” The borrowed pistol would have been a gun to carry with him at all times.
Why then would Walter have reported the pistol, shot gun, and a suitcase as missing in a burglary? That was a hard one. He was so bitterly angry at Tom. Would he have reported him as a burglar out of revenge? Stoop even pondered the possibility that Walter Allanson had cut his own telephone line and thrown the circuit breaker. If he then called the police about Tom, as he had, it would have given him some concrete example of Tom’s culpability, perhaps assuring that he would be thrown in jail and would no longer be the threat his father believed him to be.
It was just as possible that someone outside the home had stolen the guns and the suitcase. The same person or persons might have cut the phone line and thrown the circuit breaker.
Pat? Hardly. In all the mysterious fires—conflagrations that in some way benefited Pat—she had been able to prove that she was nowhere near the house and barns when they burst into flames. She was far away when the ambush at Lake Lanier occurred. It had not been Pat herself who placed harassing phone calls to Hap Brown’s wife, but rather a friend. The purported plan to have her son-in-law killed was by contract.
Pat did not get her own hands bloody, or dirty or soot-stained, Stoop figured. But she certainly had had a number of people who had practically turned themselves inside out to “help” her. The woman could be charismatic, seductive, threatening, or pathetic—whatever it took to get her way. But no one would be able to prove at this late date that her fine hand had ordered ambushes, burglaries, line cutting, or anything else.
The times that Pat had carried out her own plans, she had been caught. The arsenic poisonings of Paw and Nona had netted her a long prison term. And if Stoop had his way, her machinations at the Crist estate were about to net her another; that crime he could prove. But he wasn’t as solidly grounded trying to prove her involvement in the Allansons’ murders—although he didn’t believe for one moment that their deaths had surprised her.
Her only surprise had been that Tom hadn’t died too.
CHAPTER 53
***
They were getting close to going to the grand jury for an indictment. They knew where their quarry was. Pat was still selling old brooches and necklaces at Golden Memories, and Debbie was working in Dr. Villanueva’s office.
Judge Sandra Harrison of the Magistrate Court of Henry County, where the village of McDonough was located, gave Don Stoop and Michelle Berry a search warrant for the little red brick house on Bryan Street. Accompanied by McDonough's police chief, M. Gilmer, and his assistant chief, E. Moore, Don Stoop and Michelle Berry knocked on the front door of the Radcliffes’ residence. They hoped to find missing jewelry, perhaps more antique Williamsburg cookbooks, the miniature crystal chandelier, the hand-stitched linen, the antique Civil War books and artifacts—something they could tie to the Crists’ long list of missing belongings. But they were also realistic enough to know that those items probably had long since been sold on consignment through Golden Memories or out of the back of Pat’s car at a swap meet.
Approaching Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe in their own home and asking to search their premises was akin to confronting Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. Colonel Radcliffe accepted the search warrant with glacial civility. Margureitte and her sister, Thelma, stared at the interlopers. It was apparent that Don Stoop would take most of the heat, and it bothered him not at all. Michelle Berry, who was just as much a sworn officer of the D.A.’s office as Stoop was, was viewed as a sweet young lady who had the misfortune to accompany him on his rude errand.
They started searching slowly through the immaculate house. There were so many antiques, artifacts, mementos, photographs, and pieces of jewelry, it seemed well nigh impossible to sort out what they were looking for. And time had been on Pat’s side. Stoop glanced sideways at Colonel Radcliffe’s hand and saw that he no longer wore the lapis stone ring that he had worn in the videos and photographs of his seventy-fifth birthday party.
They moved through the kitchen, the dinette, the recreation room into the “doll room” and stopped, astonished. Susan had tried to prepare them for this room, but they could see now that it would be hard for anyone to describe. “My mother is, in many ways, like a child,” Susan had explained. “Her dolls are her children because they don’t mess up. They can have their tea parties, but they don’t make a mess."
The doll room was every little girl’s dream—and every collector’s. There were dozens of dolls, scores of dolls. They sat in wicker, wooden, velvet, and silk chairs. They sat in rocking chairs, high chairs, chair swings. They lay in cradles, beds, buggies, and hammocks. Some of them had plates and spoons, some had blocks, some had their own dolls or teddy bears. Not one of them had been manufactured before 1930, certainly, and some looked to be over 150 years old. They were dressed in the finest white cotton and linen, lace and dimity, satin and silk. Their little hats were of straw, ribbon, and crocheted wool. There were rocking horses, carved horses, wooden horses, stuffed horses. Everything was in doll scale from the tiny piano to the stools, steamer trunks, and hall trees. The pictures on the walls were of idyllic little children and, of course, dolls. There were tea sets, music boxes, tops, hoops, and fans.
Don Stoop and the McDonough officers stepped lightly, truly bulls in a china shop, and Michelle Berry turned around and around, bemused by the huge collection. She could not imagine how much money and how many years it had taken Pat to gather this perfect doll family around her. When they began to open the drawers and cupboards, they jumped back in surprise. There were body parts there: dolls’ arms and legs and heads, dolls’ wigs, every conceivable part needed to refurbish and repair. There were big swatches of fabric and tiny, tiny precious bits of cloth. Buttons. Eyes.
There was a sensation of eyes throughout the room, glass eyes and painted eyes following the intruders who had interrupted their naps and their play. It was daylight on a warm spring morning, and it shouldn’t have been spooky. And yet it was. The investigators could not help but consider, if only briefly, what human misery must have been inflicted while gaining the means for this collection.
Pat’s sewing room was in the closet off the main room. It too was packed with doll parts and squares of cloth. “Everything you might ever need to make a doll,” Michelle Berry remembered. “Even eyelashes.”
The search warrant listed items that were so small that the searchers had the legal right to look into drawers and cupboards—wherever the stolen treasures might be hidden.
“If we were looking for a nineteen-inch television set,” Berry explained, “we couldn’t look into a dresser drawer. But there was so much we were searching for. It was an older house, with all these cubbyholes and closets—and all of them were packed with things. And Pat’s parents weren’t being cooperative. They weren’t telling us where the cubbyholes were, so we had to find them ourselves.”
Pat's room was up a narrow stairway over the doll room. It too seemed to have come from another era, with a spool bed with a lace spread, ruffled chintz curtains and lampshades, and the wicker dressmaker’s form with the bride’s dress on it. Michelle searched through a big old brown leather suitcase. It was packed with Pat’s mementos—horse show pictures and ribbons and certificates. “There were report cards for Debbie and for Ronnie, old birthday cards and Mother’s Day cards from them—but I didn’t find anything of Susan’s. In that brown suitcase, at least, it was as if Susan didn’t exist, as if Pat had only two children.”
Berry and Stoop made a good team; he was abrasive and businesslike, and she was soft-spoken and ladylike. “People usually warm up to me before they d
o Don,” Berry said. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m a woman, or because I talk softer. Mrs. Radcliffe was very distant at first, but she finally began to talk to me. She told me how they took care of the dolls. She said that every week, she and the colonel and Pat spent hours changing the diapers on every doll. I didn’t ask her why. I guess it just seemed so peculiar that I didn’t want to know.”
While Michelle Berry was going through an armoire in the dining room, an old plaster picture fell out and broke. Colonel Radcliffe was incensed. “He said he was going to sue me, and Mrs. Radcliffe stuck up for me. She told him, 'Colonel, she couldn’t help it, and you don’t need to report it, and it wasn’t anything anyway.’ But if Don had broken it, hell would have broken loose because they did not see eye to eye at all. She complained to him that in all her years of living, she had never seen anybody come in and take over someone’s personal property and ransack it. And we weren’t, of course.”
It must have been a terribly demeaning experience for Margureitte Radcliffe, too close to the reenactment of her worst nightmare, accused by the police of a crime. Don Stoop had become the focal point of all the years of accumulated rage she felt toward people who had threatened her Pat and her own dignity. She was a lady, and Stoop was, she would say later, “a terrible, terrible, rude man.”
In the end, the investigators found nothing they sought. They took away with them a blue photograph album, a brown leather photograph album, hand-stitched linen cloths, a pair of lace gloves, some letters, an antique dictionary, and a pearl necklace in a Ziploc bag.
Mrs. Crist could identify none of them. They were returned.
Whatever items Pat and Debbie might have taken from the Crist home had disappeared. Everything was gone, save the pearls and the cookbook that Pat had given to Susan.
As it turned out, it didn’t really matter. Based on the commonality of circumstances, and the physical evidence the D.A.’s office did have, on April 17, 1991, nineteen grand jurors of Fulton County charged and accused Pat Taylor Allanson and Debbie Cole Alexander with seven counts: aggravated assault with intent to murder; aggravated assault; violation of the Georgia Controlled Substances Act, Count I; violation of the Georgia Controlled Substances Act, Count II; theft by taking. Count I; theft by taking, Count II; and violation of O.C.G.A., Section 43-26-12. The seventh charge involved the accuseds’ impersonating registered nurses.