The arrest warrants were next. Out in McDonough, the household of Colonel and Mrs. Clifford Radcliffe was once again braced for another legal shoe to drop. Their little girl was now fifty-three years old and they had pampered and protected her for all those years. Their home had always been her home, her trouble and pain their trouble and pain. They had sacrificed everything to make her life perfect. Pat could do no wrong in their eyes, and yet the world continued to hound her. When would she be happy?
When in God’s name would it ever end?
CHAPTER 54
***
Lewis R. Slaton, district attorney of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit, issued bench warrants on April 17, 1991, for Pat Taylor Allanson and Debbie Cole Alexander. Don Stoop and Michelle Berry would make the arrests. Susan had told them that it would be better to arrest her mother and her sister separately. Debbie would be the weak partner in the duo. “If you talk to her without my mother around,” Susan said, “she may be honest with you. If my mother is there, Debbie will say whatever Mom wants her to.”
It was five minutes to eleven on the morning of April 17, when the D.A.’s investigators drove up to Dr. Villanueva’s office in Riverdale, Georgia. They found Debbie at work, standing at a file, dressed in shorts and a halter. Michelle Berry noted that Debbie was very thin; she had huge dark circles under her eyes and a large purpling bruise on one thigh. She didn’t resist arrest. Rather, she seemed chastened and frightened. Stoop read the charges against her and advised her of her rights under Miranda. Debbie immediately blurted, “The nursing idea was my mother’s!”
“Are you a registered nurse?” Berry asked.
“No. I never have been.”
One of the charges noted the missing Rolex watch, and Debbie said that she had, in fact, picked up the watch. She refused to say where the late Mr. Crist’s watch was presently. She denied administering any drugs to Mrs. Crist. “Mrs. Crist was an alcoholic,” she said. “She took all that medicine herself. Besides, my mother was in charge of that. I only gave Mr. Crist his medicine.”
Deborah Taylor Cole Alexander was booked into the Fulton County jail.
They found her mother at the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough, a historic red brick building that had stood there on the town square since 1831. Ironically, Pat had gone to testify in Magistrate Court as a complaining witness in a case against a shoplifter at Golden Memories. As Stoop and Berry approached, she turned to look at them without interest, with no sign of recognition of why they were there. The colonel and Margureitte Radcliffe were with their daughter in the courthouse. They recognized the two detectives instantly and watched them warily.
Again, Don Stoop read the charges and the Miranda warning. Pat stared at him blankly, then quietly asked him to reread the charges, feigning shock. She told him she knew why she was being arrested; it was all because of Susan and Bill Alford. “Susan is mentally ill, you know. She needs psychiatric care. Both of them have been making threatening phone calls to me. Bill and Susan are sick people. Bill called Mrs. Crist, and he has threatened my life—I can’t tell you how many times.”
Debbie had paid no attention to the part in the Miranda warning about remaining silent. Nor did Pat. She, however, was much more indignant and considerably more talkative than her daughter had been. “Mrs. Crist was an alcoholic, you know,” she told Stoop. “They wanted me to sign the insurance claim documents as though I was a registered nurse. I could not do that—I would not do that; that would be wrong, wouldn’t it?”
With Boppo hovering nearby, Pat sat down and stared out the window, silent for a moment or two. She had already slipped and didn’t realize it. Neither Berry nor Stoop had mentioned anything at all about insurance forms being signed by “Pat Taylor, RN.” Pat herself had brought it up. “But, gosh,” Pat said, almost childlike as she turned to Boppo, “that was three or four years ago, wasn’t it, Mom?”
The past had always been negligible to Pat; she erased yesterday continually, save for slights or imagined assaults on herself. Stoop and Berry had not been surprised to see that Pat was accompanied by her parents. Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe stood beside their daughter, the expressions on their faces almost identical, a subtle blend of indignation and concern. How many years had they done this, Stoop wondered, how many decades of being there for Pat?
“I am not well, Mr. Stoop,” Margureitte said, “and Mrs. Taylor is under a physician's care. She is being treated for hypertension and heart complications and she is on medication.’’
The two investigators had heard this script before, again and again as they pored over the records of Pat’s earlier troubles with the law. She had been “terminally ill” since 1972.
“My mother is dying of cancer,” Pat added, “and I am not well.”
Stoop thought she looked remarkably well. The pictures he had seen of Patricia Taylor Allanson had shown a willowy, beautiful young woman who might well have been in fragile health. The woman he had just arrested must weigh over 250 pounds, her features suffused in fat. Her once exquisitely chiseled jawline hung like a turkey’s wattle, and the neck that “Scarlett” had circled with a ribbon and a cameo was fissured and corrugated with heavy flesh.
“How is Mrs. Crist? How is her health?” Pat asked, with seemingly as much genuine concern as Michelle Berry had ever heard.
“She’s fine.”
“The Crists are very wealthy and influential,” Pat said plaintively. “They can do anything. They have lots of money. I don’t have that kind of money. What are we going to do, Mom?”
“We’ll manage somehow,” Margureitte said, squeezing her daughter’s hand.
Pat’s hands were cuffed behind her and she was led to the government vehicle for transportation to the Fulton County jail. Michelle Berry got into the backseat with Pat, and Don Stoop drove. Pat complained that she was very uncomfortable. She asked Michelle to remove her handcuffs.
“I can’t do that. They’re for your protection and ours.”
“But my back hurts,” Pat whimpered. “And I’m in pain. I don’t have my heart medicine with me.”
Nevertheless, Pat answered their first questions easily enough: her age, the number of her children. Stoop asked her what her legal name was.
“Patricia Radcliffe Taylor.”
“Not Allanson?”
“No.”
He asked her how she had acquired the military ID card she carried for the PX and commissary, and she explained that she had been married for twenty-two years to a man who was in the service. She had added three and a half years to her burdensome marriage to Gil Taylor.
“Were you ever a nurse in the military?”
“I did some practical nursing assistance during those twenty-two years.”
“You’re not a registered nurse?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No. Never.”
But when Don Stoop asked Pat about the circumstances of her 1976 arrest and conviction for the poisonings of Paw and Nona Allanson, she stared out the window at a Waffle House and said, “I think you know all the answers to your questions.”
From that point on, the three rode toward Atlanta in silence.
Pat joined Debbie in the Fulton County jail. It was the second time each had been booked into that facility. Once the two women were together, neither had anything further to say to the investigators.
***
Margureitte Radcliffe knew who had caused all the trouble for Pat. It was Susan, of course—Susan, whose sense of loyalty to family seemed to be completely absent. There was no telling what harm she might cause next. Margureitte called her sister Liz’s son, Bobby, in Warsaw, North Carolina. She wanted to be sure that no one up there had complained to the authorities about Pat’s care of her aunt Lizzie. Bobby Porter said he didn’t feel he could complain to the D.A. in Duplin County, North Carolina, because he hadn’t actually been in the house while his cousin was taking care of his mother. However, he would not go so far as to write a letter to
the Fulton County D.A. extolling his cousin Pat as a nurse second only to Florence Nightingale and praising her wonderful care of his mother. Nor would Aunt Lizzie herself go so far. Boppo would never be close to Liz again; her sister had refused to come to Pat’s rescue.
Shocked and hurt, Boppo also called Bill Alford. “Why in the whole wide world would you talk to the district attorney’s office about Pat?” she demanded to know. “Whatever did you tell them?”
“I talked to them,” Bill replied. “I answered the questions they asked.”
“You had no right. Bill—not after all that the district attorney’s office has done to the family. They had absolutely no right to know about Pat’s life or about Debbie’s life. You know as well as I do that Pat and Debbie never went over to the Crists to kill them. The only thing they did wrong was pretend to be registered nurses.”
“Did you condone that, Boppo?” Bill asked bluntly. “Didn’t you know that was wrong? That was a very sick old man, and he needed a real nurse.”
There was a very long silence, and finally Boppo said, “I can’t talk to anyone else in the family tonight.”
The phone went dead.
***
On May 13, Bill and Susan received what was intended as an official communiqué “from the desk of Clifford B. Radcliffe.” It was from Margureitte and there was no salutation.
I have been diagnosed as having ‘Squamus’ [sic] non small cell cancer of the left lung. It is inoperable, radiation therapy is complete. The cancer still remains in part. The long term prognosis is poor. Therefore in the event of my death, it is my wish that our granddaughter, Linda Susan Taylor Alford and her husband George Chester (Bill) Alford, be refrained from attending any Funeral, Memorial or other services for me.
They are also excluded from inheriting anything from my estate.
The two of them have caused great tragedy and hurt to so many people, including their son—
Margureitte S. Radcliffe
The letter was signed by a notary public and with it came copies of three letters from her attending physicians verifying that she did indeed have lung cancer.
CHAPTER 55
***
Pat’s and Debbie’s arrests made news in Fulton County. The Atlanta Journal's headline read, TWO WOMEN CHARGED IN ARSENIC POISONING ATTEMPT, a startling, if slightly inaccurate, heading. Although arsenic had been Pat’s poison of choice in the past, the text of the article pointed out that the only drug definitely tied to her in the current case was Halcion. In the Atlanta paper, the arrests were more newsworthy for the prestige of the victims than of the accused; the Crist name was revered in Atlanta. But Pat was the focal point in the Henry County paper: FULTON COUNTY CHARGES MCDONOUGH WOMAN WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER. She was the hometown angle.
All news coverage quoted D.A. Lewis Slaton as saying that the two women were suspected of attempting to overdose Elizabeth Crist with Halcion but were also under a continuing investigation into the possibility that James Crist had died from a drug overdose.
Long before the story hit the media, the word came down in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office that Pat Taylor Allanson and her thirty-five-year-old daughter, Debbie, had been arrested. Andy Weathers hoped that he would catch the case. It would be his second meeting with Pat on the courtroom battlefield, and it would allow him to pursue his own intense curiosity about Pat’s involvement with the murder of Walter and Carolyn Allanson. He had followed Don Stoop’s relentless pursuit of Pat with avid interest and had been pleased with his thoroughness. Weathers had unfinished business with Pat.
But it was not to be. At least, Weathers was not to be the Fulton County assistant D.A. who would prosecute in the continuing saga of Pat Allanson; Fulton County assigned cases by computer, and the next name up was Bill Akins.
Akins was an extremely handsome young lawyer in his late thirties; he was a graduate of The Citadel and, like Don Stoop, had been in junior high when the earlier cases involving Pat Allanson took place. He was impressed by Stoop’s investigation. That single yellow sheet of paper from a legal pad had grown to a thick file full of old police reports, new police reports, witness statements, newspaper clippings, bizarre anecdotes, photographs, and tape recordings. Akins had never seen anything like it.
“Once I began to get a feel for this case,” Akins said, “I realized that, although it wasn't quite on the scale of the William Kennedy Smith case, . . . it was certainly a big case, possibly a case-of-a-lifetime situation. It’s got everything; it’s got the money, the old cases, the murder. ‘Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.’ From a prosecutor’s point of view, it’s got a ‘splendid’ history, a ‘career’ kind of case.
It was tempting for Akins to take it and run with it. If they went to trial, he and everybody connected with the investigation would be front-page news in Atlanta, the South, the eastern seaboard, and possibly the whole country. If still more indictments came down—the first accusing Debbie and Pat of actually murdering Mr. Crist, and others connecting Pat to the murders of Walter and Carolyn Allanson—there wouldn't be a crime reporter in the country who wasn’t beating a path to Atlanta. If they plea-bargained, no one outside Atlanta would know about Pat’s crimes.
“But, on the other hand,” Akins recalled, ‘‘one; I am not a newshound D.A. and don’t feel that my ego should dictate what I do with the case. And two; the most important thing was to see that justice was served, and headlines didn’t matter.”
Whichever way he decided to handle it, it wasn’t going to be an easy case. Given the Crist family’s understandable refusal to exhume their husband and father’s cremains for laboratory analysis, it would be rough proving murder in that case. Given the almost total disappearance of their missing belongings, it was going to be difficult—but not impossible—to prove the theft charges. As for the Allansons’ murders, and the very real possibility that Pat had been part of the very first spate of violence, should an indictment ever be brought, that too would be a real squeaker.
Furthermore, Pat had retained an excellent attorney, Steve Roberts of the firm of Garland and Samuel. Roberts was asking for a speedy trial, something any defense attorney has a right to do. He could, legally, force Slaton’s office to go into court within sixty days. A defense attorney could always drag his feet and ask for delays—and most of them did—but a prosecutor had to be ready to go into court within that sixty-day period.
If Akins asked for an indictment charging Pat with involvement in a cover-up after the shootings of Walter and Carolyn Allanson, one of the state’s witnesses would have to be Edward T.M. Garland, the same Ed Garland who had come to detest Pat’s machinations when he tried to defend Tom, the same Ed Garland who had been the object of Pat’s derision and scorn all through Tom’s trial and afterward. And, of course, the same Edward T.M. Garland who was a partner in the firm of her current defense attorney. That could create a very sticky situation. Ed Garland testifying against Pat would not be a happy thing for the defense, but it was a gleeful prospect for Don Stoop and Michelle Berry. They had listened to those tapes, the hours and hours of Pat slowly barbecuing Tom on her emotional spit, when all the time she had known she could have gotten him out years earlier if she had only listened to Ed Garland.
It would be a difficult case to prosecute with only two months’ preparation time. Conversely, the threat of being connected to the death of her ex-husband’s parents was the last thing Pat wanted. For the state, it meant tremendous leverage in eliciting a guilty plea. For that, Akins was grateful to Stoop and Berry. “I have to give an enormous amount of credit to Don and Michelle for doing the investigation which gave me the stick—the real big stick—to hold over Pat’s head—and also the carrot.”
Pat didn’t even want to be associated with the Allanson name. One of Steve Roberts’s first motions was to ask that the charges against her be in her present name: Patricia Taylor, not Patricia Allanson. She most certainly dreaded being charged in that long-ago murder. Akins figured she might very well cho
ose to plea-bargain rather than risk the connection. She might reach for the carrot of relative anonymity and prison time to avoid an even greater danger.
Akins’s posture was to be lenient with Debbie and to lean heavily on Pat. Debbie hadn’t had any arrests since the morals charge years earlier; she seemed to be a follower and not an instigator. No, Pat was the big fish, whose history showed her to be the dominant partner in all her relationships. But would she plead guilty to the seven charges extant, even if it meant a hefty sentence, rather than risk the publicity circus that would erupt if Akins moved to add charges of murder and accessory to murder after the fact to Pat’s grocery list of felonies?
Don Stoop and Michelle Berry wanted to go for broke. That was the way they had always approached this case, working night and day to trace all the raveled and far-flung ends of it. They had relived the terrible events of the spring of 1974 that had led to the murders of Walter and Carolyn Allanson, revisited all the places where the smell of blood seemed still to cling, and believed that Pat Allanson had been right there in the thick of it all—not the shooter, but the prodder, the manipulator, the liar.
The instigator.
They wanted to see all the dark corners of Pat’s life illuminated. They were detectives. Akins was a prosecutor. The relationship in any county or state office is— and always has been—both symbiotic and one of natural enmity. Investigators tread on shaky ground and take chances; prosecutors like to know where they are and they lean toward predictable odds.