Everything She Ever Wanted (11 page)

downstairs.

At 8:04 p.m.-almost exactly an hour after he had first responded to a

call from the Allanson residence-Sergeant Callahan's radio crackled and

he heard a familiar address.
 
Too familiar.

This time, the complainant was a neighbor: Mary Dorton.

"Car 26-Evening: Signal 6-Holding: 1458 Norman Berry Drive."

"I'll take it, " Callahan responded.
 
"I was just there an hour ago.)$

To the East Point police, "Signal 6" meant there was a burglar in the

house, and "Holding" meant that a citizen was detaining the suspect by

physically holding on to him.
 
It was definitely an emergency

designation, intended for the B (burglary) car on the evening watch.

Other cars moved in to back that unit up.

Callahan arrived in two or three minutes-his was the first car on the

scene.
 
As he pulled up the driveway and around to the rear of the

Allansons' house, a young woman came running toward him, her eyes wide

open, screaming.
 
Callahan couldn't make any sense out of what she was

saying; she was a hair away from complete hysteria.

He called for backup, and for detectives.
 
Lieutenant Gus Thornhill, Jr

a nine-year veteran with East Point, was supervising the evening

watch.

He headed for the scene, right behind the patrol units that had been

dispatched.

Callahan edged cautiously around the house.
 
There were two cars parked

out in back, a 1963 Ford station wagon with several shattered windows,

and a 1964 Chevrolet sedan.
 
Most of the windows of the house were six

or eight feet above ground, but in the rear there were several

ground-level windows in the basement.

The cellar door was a'ar, but Callahan avoided that entry until he had

some backup.
 
Instead, he crouched down and shielded his eyes as he

peered into one of the basement windows.

He gasped involuntarily at what he saw.
 
A middle-aged woman dressed in

some kind of white uniform sat upright near the bottom of the steps

descending into the middle of the basement.
 
There was a great splotch

of blood across her breasts, and she didn't move at all.

Had she been there all along?
 
Callahan wondered.
 
No, she couldn't

have been-not unless Walter Allanson had shot her and that was why he

hadn't allowed him to search the house on the prior call.
 
The first

rule of crime scene investigation was "Don't assume anything."

Callahan had no more time to ponder what might have happened.

There was a cacophony of sirens approaching, and East Point police

units raced up the driveway and parked along Norman Berry Drive.

Officers surrounded the house.
 
They had no idea who might be inside,

alive or dead.
 
They knew only that there was a burglar in the house

and a dead woman was sitting on the basement steps.

Officers peering in the basement windows could make out sprays and

droplets of blood on many walls and items in the cellar.
 
There was

blood everywhere.
 
Whatever had happened in this house, it had been

horrific.

Patrol Officer Cecil McBurnett, Jr was working a "wreck car" (accident

investigation) that evening and heard the Signal 6 go out on the

burglary on Norman Berry.
 
He was only three blocks away, so he

responded to give backup to Callahan.
 
He turned off Martin and headed

east on Norman Berry.
 
He was checking house numbers when he saw a man

leap from the lawn near Mae Mama Lawrence's house and hit the sidewalk

running.
 
The man turned to look at the patrol car, not once but

several times, and McBurnett saw him full-faced.

McBurnett did not yet have a description of the burglary suspect, but a

running man near a crime scene couldn't be ignored.

He had just spun his car around and was heading back to apprehend the

man when he heard a "Help the officer" call on the radio: "I've got a

woman shot.
 
The perpetrator is in the basement holding a hostage."

McBurnett's natural response was to go to the aid of his fellow

officer, so he left off his pursuit of the running man and turned into

the Allansons' driveway just behind another patrol unit.
 
Still, the

image of that man stayed in his mind.
 
He was wearing Levi's, boots,

and a green and brown striped shirt.

McBurnett had no fix on the man's size; he had been running hunched

over.
 
He could have been five feet ten inches tall-or six feet six.

When McBurnett arrived at the Allansons' house, he found incredible

chaos.
 
A young woman was screaming and out of control; more and more

police and EMTs were arriving, with their blue and red whirling bubble

lights giving the night a psychedelic glow; and the falling rain made

it seem like anything but the eve of the Fourth of July in the suburbs

of Atlanta.

Sergeant William Vance and Detective J. E. Lambert noted gouge marks on

the open basement door; it had probably been jimmied.
 
They also saw a

light on at the top of the steps, the bulb eerily spotlighting the body

of the dead woman.
 
The rest of the basement was bathed in shadows of

black and gray.
 
Lambert peered toward the heating and air-conditioning

unit and thought he saw an arm protruding from behind it.
 
Spooked, he

fired his pistol in that direction.

The round hit something metal and clanged loudly, but there was no

human movement.
 
The arm had been only a shadow.

Captain J. D. Lynn ordered a canister of tear gas to be thrown into the

basement, and all the doors were sealed.
 
If there had been a burglar

in the house on Callahan's first visit an hour before, he might very

well still be inside.
 
The men surrounding the house fully believed

they had a hostage situation.

They waited, officers poised at each of three exterior doors of the

house and at all the windows.
 
Five minutes.
 
Ten minutes.

No one bolted from the house, vomiting and blinded by the gas.

After fifteen minutes, Lieutenant Thornhill, Detective Lambert, and

Sergeant Vance donned oxygen masks provided by the East Point Fire

Department and edged into the basement.

It was so hard to see; tears ran down their faces despite their masks

and the fans the fire fighters had set up to air out the cellar.
 
They

stumbled over lumber and tools, a half-finished boat, a surfboard, a

miniature railroad track mounted on a sheet of plywood.
 
It was like

anyone's cellar, a repository for things to be used later, or things

once used and no longer needed.

They could make out the white-clad body sitting on the basement steps,

and, just opposite, behind the heating system, there was the brick base

of a fireplace.
 
It had a large rectangular hole in it-three feet high

by about a foot and a half wide-easily large enough for a man to hide

in.
 
They had no idea how far back it went.

Outside the hole they found a bloodstained flashlight, turned off, and

a .32-caliber pistol wedged between a surfboard and the plywood that

held the electric train.
 
Their own flashlights picked up a profusion

of still-liquid puddles and droplets of blood on the floor around the

hole in the base of the fireplace.

Back toward the stairs they located a .45/70 rifle and a crowbar near a

stack of interior doors.
 
Their tear-gassed eyes burned and blurred,

but behind the doors they discerned what looked like a leg clad in blue

pants.

They moved closer with their guns drawn.

Ca tain L nn ordered the uniformed division to fan out on foot to check

the neighborhood for a suspect.
 
At that point, they knew only that an

older woman was dead.
 
The young woman on the scene was too hysterical

to be of much help, although they knew now that she was Carolyn

Allanson, the ex-daughter-inlaw of Walter Allanson.
 
She repeated over

and over that someone had been in the basement and Daddy Allanson had

gone down to "get him."
 
She continued to babble about "Daddy" and

"Mother."

Daddy had had someone "caught in the hole" and she had begged Mother

Allanson not to go down in the cellar.
 
Almost as an aside, the

distraught woman said that she had seen "Tom's new wife" driving around

the block in her blue jeep.
 
Beyond that, she was no help at all.

When they tried to probe deeper, she lost control again.

They couldn't count on much of anything the woman said in her current

state.

It was no secret to the East Point police that Walter Allanson and his

son, Tom, had been feuding.
 
They had heard rumors about an ambush up

at Lake Lanier and Tom and Pat had been in to the police station only a

few days before, trying to charge his father with indecent exposure.

If Pat Allanson was in the neighborhood, the East Point police wanted

to find her as quickly as possible.
 
They had so little to go on as

Captain Lynn, Sergeant R. W. Jones, and Sergeant Callahan drove their

police cruisers in ever-widening circles around Norman Berry Drive,

looking for anything that seemed unusual, for someone running, and for

either Tom Allanson's blue pickup truck or the blue jeep Pat had been

seen driving. from the Allanson house.

The King Professional Building occupied the triangle of land just

between Bayard Street and the point where Norman Berry drive intersects

eve avenue.
 
It was new

construction, a manystoried concrete structure whose white fretwork

panels made it resemble an out-of-place mosque.
 
The wide cement

parking apron was almost empty of cars at 8:20 on a rainy night, but

the East Point officers spotted the blue jeep they were looking for

parked there.

They suspected this was the vehicle Carolyn Allanson said she had seen;