Munchausen’s goes far beyond hypochondria, whose sufferers imagine symptoms of practically every disease they hear about. Munchausen’s often involves actual self-mutilation. Susan had seen her mother beat herself with pots and pans until she was badly bruised. The deep fissured scar on Pat’s right buttock was the result of her own deliberate and repeated probing at an initially small wound with bacteria-covered instruments. The pain involved must have been almost unbearable—yet she craved attention and excitement so much that she exacerbated that wound over and over and over. At one point, she came perilously close to death from blood poisoning. And she had done it to herself.
Pat’s history of illnesses and injuries was lengthy and unique. She cried “Rape!” so often that she eventually became laughable. She collapsed and had to be rushed to hospitals time and again. Only Pat would have almost welcomed the bite of the brown recluse spider. It meant she could spend weeks in a hospital, a pleasant alternative to prison. And, like many who love being hospitalized, she was addicted to drugs—Demerol for one; even Margureitte testified to that. The true state of Pat’s physical and emotional health may never be completely known or understood. She herself might have been powerless to control it. But it was among the strongest weapons in her arsenal to exert control over others.
Pat never seemed comfortable in her own skin. Indeed, she attempted to literally destroy her own body. And despite the control she wielded over others, it was quite possible she felt no power at all—except with her dolls. Her dolls always did what she wanted them to do. She was the center of their universe, just as she would be the center of the world she had hoped to create for herself— Zebulon. There she could be Scarlett and Tom her rich and blindly devoted Rhett. Perhaps because her world did not give her everything she ever wanted, Pat could not stand being herself. Scarlett had been full of strength, a woman who could stand alone and fight for what she wanted. In the end, Pat was only a pale imitation.
Pat's effect on what was once a solid—if slightly eccentric—family was devastating. Even when she was in prison, she called the tunes and kept her mother bound to her. Back in Hardwick for the second time in 1991, Pat was not doing well—according to Boppo, who reported that she had had another stroke and was in a wheelchair, unable to walk or talk. Also in a wheelchair, Boppo was far more worried about her child than she was about her own imminent death. And all around them lay the evidence of the destruction of a family, caused not by the neglect of a child—but by the utter, complete, almost mindless, indulgence of a child.
The only member to survive with dignity was the one they had all reviled—the one who had the courage to do what she knew was right even if it went against the family: Susan. They all quoted Mary Siler, but no one but Susan had listened to her words:
“What we have done will soon be a sealed book. If it’s been good or bad, we can’t change it. It will stand as it is. It is sad, for some of us will have marked up pages in our book from many unkind words to someone, or maybe we did not try hard to make others’ lives happy. . . .
Mary Valli Siler
UPDATE: SUMMER 1993
***
Pat has been moved to the Augusta Correctional and Medical Institution in Grovetown, Georgia. With high walls, and four guard towers, A.C.M.I. looks more like a prison than it does a hospital. Pat granted one interview to a local reporter—about her volunteerism in the prison hospital. She smiled as she worked on an AIDS memorial quilt and talked about “People Who Care,” P.W.C., a hospice group she had helped found. “We have about sixty patches,” Pat said, showing her exquisite embroidery of an AIDS victim’s name. “Of course it will never be finished . . .”
She explained that she had suffered two major strokes and that she felt she would not survive a third. “I don’t think I have but one more coming to me,” she said. “That’s what they say . . .”
Pat preferred to talk about P.W.C., and the gifts and cheerful cards she made for other patients, some of them “serious offenders . . . That doesn’t matter now,” she said fervently. “I never ask them what they’ve done. That doesn’t mean you deserve a terrible death and to be ostracized.” She explained that she herself was in prison for a minor “assault stemming from a domestic dispute.” Reporter Gayla Moore took her at her word. Her article described a kind, soft-spoken woman with gentle eyes and a warm smile, a woman who “looked like someone’s grandmother.”
“I am someone’s great-grandmother,” Pat had corrected.
In a sense Pat Taylor has come full circle. Once more, she spends her days sketching, sewing and embroidering. She has always enjoyed making beautiful Victorian greeting cards and handiwork. And, of course, she has never been far from the bedside of one invalid or another.
Susan and Bill Alford’s divorce is final and they now live separate lives. Sean Alford remains estranged from both. But Susan’s father, Gil Taylor, and her cousins Bobby and Charlotte Porter—Aunt Liz’s son and daughter-in-law—have been there for Susan constantly. Susan finally accepted that she could no longer remain in Georgia. The memories were too bittersweet and the anonymous calls that came were chilling. Perhaps the calls were only wrong numbers, random misdialings. Perhaps.
She moved more than a thousand miles away from Atlanta and began a new life. Tom Allanson and his faithful friend Fred Benson drove the rental van to Susan’s new home. It was somehow fitting that it was Tom, still a massively strong man at 50, who helped Susan escape Atlanta once and for all.
As he begins the sixth decade of his life, Tom Allanson sees himself as a most blessed man. Off parole, he no longer has to report to anyone. He is frequently called upon to testify before Full Gospel congregations and meetings. He is a compelling speaker as he recalls the dark times of his life and compares them to his life today. When his son Russ was married last spring, Tom was in proud attendance. For a long time, Russ wondered about the formaldehyde-in-the-milk situation. Tom’s alleged involvement had become a kind of black folktale of his childhood. It was not Tom; there was no way it could have been Tom.
I received scores of letters for Susan—and for Tom. Most of them were from strangers, but a few were from people who had known them years ago. The most compelling, perhaps, was from Dody Rupert, now a screenwriter in Hollywood, but who once was teenaged LaDora Shaffer of East Point, Georgia. Her family lived two blocks from the Allansons.
“Our mother, Miriam Shaffer, worked for twenty-some-odd years at Dr. Robert Tucker’s office with ‘Allie’ [Carolyn Allanson] . . . My mother considered Allie a very close, albeit frustrating friend. Mrs. Allanson was a woman with enormous ambition who had long since given up on achieving her own dreams and had also given up on Walter to achieve them for her. All her hopes were riding on Tommy, and Walter hated Tommy for that very reason. Allie constantly pushed Tommy to new heights, and Walter constantly tore him down to new lows. Mother was stunned by Allie’s murder, but she loathed Walter and had predicted on more than one occasion that ‘he would live to regret his abuse of Tommy.’ ”
Because they attended different schools, Dody and her sisters, Mary and Sara, had never seen Tommy, but one of their most vivid memories concerns a dinner invitation from the Allansons. “Tommy and I were both fourteen years of age at the time . . . I had often heard Mother tell sad anecdotes about ‘poor little Tommy Allanson’, so before we even met him, we all felt sorry for him. His father was unmercifully contemptuous of him, we had heard, and his mother seemed hell-bent on isolating him from any possibility of contamination from ‘inferior peers.’ ”
Dody remembered that Tommy was “already huge, blond and fair and, to my great surprise, attractive.” He was also very shy. “My sister Mary and I flirted with him. It was all done with ladylike decorum of course, and Tommy responded with delight—but like the gentleman he obviously was. Suddenly, Mr. Allanson seemed to come out of a fog, and with the coldest, most frightening voice I had ever heard, he ordered Tommy to the head of the table. Tommy froze with terror, but somehow managed to ri
se and approach his father. Without a word— indeed, without even rising from his chair—Mr. Allanson hauled off and slapped Tommy across the face!”
The Shaffers saw that Tommy was terribly humiliated. They were embarrassed for him, and more so when he turned to leave the room and his father ordered him back to his seat.
“I have never seen my parents so angry. They could hardly stay in their seats. Tommy had to sit back down —across from us girls—with a huge red imprint of his father’s hand across his face.”
Walter continued his meal, and “Allie” calmly passed the potatoes while the Shaffers sat bewildered. “We . . . looked to our parents for guidance. They just shook their heads helplessly. Tommy was biting back tears with every fiber of his being, but his body began to tremble. Finally, I could stand it no more so I asked my parents if we could ‘skip dessert and go home. We have a lot of homework to do,’ I lied. My sisters quickly nodded their support. And bless my mother’s heart, she ignored convention and seized the moment. ‘It’s too late for you girls to be out alone . . .’ she said, ‘unless Tommy is willing to see you home.’ ”
Tom’s mother answered for him. “Of course he will. Tommy, walk the girls home.” With averted eyes, he slid out of his chair. “He was obviously as grateful as we for the opportunity to get the hell out of there,” Dody recalls.
Walter Allanson warned Tommy to be home in twenty minutes, and the teenagers escaped the dinner table. They turned onto their street in embarrassed silence, uncertain of what to say to ease Tommy’s pain. “Suddenly, Mary blurted our mutual feelings precisely: ‘Personally, I think your father is a bastard!’
“Sara and I burst into nervous, outraged giggles, and finally Tommy began to laugh too.” The sisters blistered the Georgia night air with their opinions of Walter. By the time they got home, Tommy seemed to feel better, but Dody recalls, “I had a powerful urge to grab him and pull him into our house.”
Of course, she didn’t, and their lives touched only briefly after that.
***
For most of her life, Susan Taylor Alford has had a recurring dream . . . “I never knew where I was—but I was drifting along in a little boat. There was sawgrass and trees with moss hanging down and I let my hand trail in the water. I knew there were dangerous creatures swimming in the water, but I wasn’t the least bit afraid of them. I just felt peaceful and safe and happy.”
“When I first saw my new little house, with the soft gray siding and the trees all around and the water beyond, I recognized it. This is the place I visited in my safe dream. This is the place I have looked for all my life.”
AFTERWORD: 2002
***
A few years ago, I returned to Atlanta—and to East Point. A screenwriter from Los Angeles was working on a script for a miniseries of Everything She Ever Wanted. We met with Liz and Tom Allanson so the writer could get a sense of who they really were. We ate at the huge buffet in Stone Mountain and spoke of what it was like for Tom and Liz in the seventies and about their life after Tom was paroled. It was clear that he had long since made his peace with the past, and I was surprised when he suggested that we visit the little brick and white house where his parents had once lived—and died. I never dreamed that he could stand to go back there. As we headed up the familiar driveway, the house looked exactly the same to me. The oak trees were the same and the lawn was still dotted with tiny daisies.
Certainly, the current residents wouldn’t want us to come in. Perhaps they didn’t even know what had once happened there.
But I was wrong. Liz Allanson, the screenwriter and I waited in the car as Tom knocked on the door and spoke with the woman who lived there. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I expected to see the new homeowner shake her head, no. But then she and Tom walked toward the car, smiling. She invited us in and immediately brought out a copy of my book about Tom and his family. She said she had read it twice, and would be glad to have us come in if I would inscribe it to her, which I was happy to do.
Being inside Tom’s boyhood home for the first time was fascinating to me. I glanced around curiously and saw that it was very cozy with small, cheerful rooms. It was almost dream-like to be in these rooms I had seen only in stark police photos, including one where a rifle box and bullets rested on the dining room table. What an odd juxtaposition of time and place, I thought. Tom was more than twenty years older than the frantic young man he had been on the night of July 3, 1974, and he seemed somehow comforted finally to be back, as if he still had a little bit of unfinished business.
Our conversation with the current tenant was warm and casual. Tom recalled good memories of his parents, particularly his mother, and then began to speak of the horrible ending that destroyed his family.
With the owner’s permission, he led us to the basement steps. Part of me didn’t want to walk down that open staircase. As a chronicler of true crime stories, this would be the first—and probably the only—time in my experience when I would actually enter the scene of a long-ago murder. Moreover, I was accompanied by the man convicted of the double homicide. But he was “Tom,” to me now, and a friend whom I believed to be the victim of one of Pat Taylor’s intricate plots, and not a killer in the accepted sense.
The basement lay below us, most of it too dark to see.
Tom had told me the story of what happened on the eve of that July 4, but he still wanted to relive it for us. Clearly, it would be a kind of vindication for him. As we descended the rough wooden steps, I could see that the basement was exactly the way it appeared in the crime scene photographs I once perused. A single 100 watt light bulb still hung from a long cord over the stairs, casting dark shadows along with illumination. These were the steps Tom’s mother had hurried down more than two decades earlier, the steps where she had died instantly as blood stained her white nurse’s uniform.
Tom led us to the little hiding place cut out of the basement wall. This was where he had hidden in terror as he heard his father come down the same steps looking for him. As I peered inside, I could see the nicks in the concrete wall where Walter Allanson’s bullets had ricocheted. I counted the marks in the wall and saw that he had emptied his gun. It seemed a miracle that none of them had struck Tom as he crouched there. There was no longer a shotgun leaning against the wall, but otherwise the tiny room cut out of the wall was unchanged. After more than two decades, it seemed remarkable that no one had remodeled the basement. The deadly shootings might well have happened only a day before.
Tom recalled for us how he had leapt out of his hiding place, intent only on getting past his father; he hadn’t even seen his mother coming down the stairs, carrying a second gun at her husband’s command. Yes, he had fired blindly in the general direction of his father, but he would never have shot his mother.
Standing there in the cellar, that moment was suddenly recaptured and Tom Allanson’s eyes filled with tears.
I had no doubt at all that his parents’ deaths occurred exactly as he had described them.
As we drove away down Norman Berry Drive, leaving the house and its memories, the mood lightened.
Tom and Liz have been married more than a dozen years now and they are extremely happy together. Tom still works for the same man who gave him a job right out of prison. He learned almost everything there was to know about wastewater management when he was in prison and came out with very marketable skills and a solid work ethic.
The Allanson’s live near Lake Lanier in a new house. Tom often travels across America as he speaks for the Full Gospel Church, and he feels blessed to be able to use his own experience to help others. He uses this book as a teaching aide to demonstrate that if he can make it, any paroled man can find a good life outside prison walls.
When I first met Tom, he had lost touch with both his children. He, of course, found his son, Russ, in the early nineties. Russ wasn’t living that far away, and father and son bonded and remain good friends. Finding his daughter Sherry wasn’t as easy, but with the help of relati
ves, Tom eventually located her in Colorado. They too are close now. He has his family back.
Tom’s ex-wife—“Little Carolyn”—died recently. Ironically, it was the fight over Tom’s divorce from Little Carolyn that escalated into the horrendous dissension between Tom and his father.
The world has moved on for everyone involved in Pat Taylor’s story. Her mother Margueritte, who was almost always called “Boppo,” died of lung cancer a few years after Pat’s last trial. Clifford Radcliffe, Pat’s stepfather, married Boppo’s younger sister Aggie a few months later. He is nearly ninety today.
For Susan Alford, any sense of permanency or serenity would be fleeting and a long time coming. The perfect house she found, which was close to the Atlantic Ocean, wasn’t as safe a haven as it seemed to be. Severe floods forced her to move on once more. She relocated to Florida for a while. Susan, Courtney and Adam lived there for a few years as she struggled to support them all. Working as a store detective, she was injured badly in a struggle with a shoplifter and it took months for her to recover.
Sean Alford, Susan’s estranged son, married and divorced—but she wasn’t invited to his wedding. He has never reconciled with either Susan or Bill Alford, but he is reportedly very close to the extended family that shut his parents out. Susan has come to accept that she may never see her son again, although it is a bitter thing for a mother to acknowledge.
When Susan contacted the district attorney’s office about her mother’s activities in the Crist home, she knew she might be cut off from her family forever. And so far, that is what has happened. Her grandfather, aunts, sister, brother, son—all of her relatives in Georgia— have refused to forgive her. To them, it is as if she had died. Their loyalty to Pat continues.