Everything She Ever Wanted (63 page)

pulled her hair and tried to smother her with a pillow.
 
She said at

one point, he had tried to wrap her up in the sheets!"

"Were you aware," Richard Daniell asked suddenly, "that Tom Allanson

and your daughter, Pat, at the time back in June -in the event of

either Mr. or Mrs. Allanson dying-that they would get almost

everything according to the wills?"

Margureitte sighed deeply.
 
"I know Nona's told me that she wanted to

change her will.
 
I don't know what the feelings are in that family,

and, frankly, I wish I'd never heard of any of them!

I'll be perfectly honest with you; they've really just torn us apart.

They don't even like each other-can't even tolerate each other."

The detectives were fascinated to hear the Radcliffes backing off on

vital specifics and filling in dramatic details elsewhere in their

statements.
 
Most of all, they were interested to see just the

slightest fraying at the edges of this couple's facade of elegant

detachment.
 
They were protesting too much.

The Radcliffes announced that they had a witness outside the family who

could back up their recall of old Walter Allanson's aggressive

behavior: Fanny K. Cash, their good neighbor on Tell Road.
 
Fanny had,

in fact, accompanied them to the East Point Police Department.
 
She too

was advised of her rights under Miranda and didn't bat an eye.

Although Fanny had not seen the elderly Allansons for a month, Pat and

the Radcliffes had prevailed upon her to spend that Saturday night at

the Allanson home, so that Pat wouldn't be alone.
 
She had agreed to

go, as long as they would see she got to church on Sunday morning.
 
She

was very active, she explained, in church activities and ladies'circle

meetings.

Fanny Kate had packed up her bag, and Pat had picked her up.
 
It must

have been somewhat crowded in the Washington Road house; there were

only two bedrooms, and Nona was in hers and Paw was in the guest

room.

Pat had said she had slept in bed with Nona.
 
Fanny K. would have had

to bunk on a couch.

Fanny said she had been told that Paw had been taking something that

put him "to sleep."

"Mrs. Radcliffe is a trained nurse, and she knows when she sees some

of these things."

Asked about liquor bottles, Fanny recalled seeing only one.

"It was just a plain old liquor bottle with no label on it-and what was

in it smelt enough.
 
It would have knocked a polecat down to have smelt

it, whatever it was.
 
And I said, 'Well, if anybody drank that, they

were bad off with something "Who told you he [Paw] had been drinking

out of this bottle?"

Tedford asked.

"Mrs. Allanson did-Grandma-did.
 
I asked her plainly.
 
She said she

thought he had quit drinking; he had promised her that.

And she seemed to be very much disturbed because he had taken it behind

her back.

"In other words, the Radcliffes or Pat Allanson didn't tell you.

"No.

'Where did you see this bottle?"

"It was there in the laundry room."

Fanny K. Cash said she had known the Radcliffes for almost ten years.

"There are no finer people nowhere than they are," she added.

July in Atlanta was so hot that even the kudzu vines drooped, and the

days passed sluggishly, the only sound on a hot afternoon the buzz of

flies and cicadas.
 
The big news in Georgia was the nomination of Jimmy

Carter on July 14 as the Democratic candidate for president, with

Walter Mondale as his running mate.
 
Carter would be the first major

party nominee from the Deep South since the ill-fated Zachary Taylor

ran in 1848.
 
Political news eclipsed crime news in the Atlanta

papers.

Still, for those involved in the Allanson investigation-or fearful of

involvement-there was only one story.

Everybody was jumpy.
 
Martha Foster, one of the Allansons' 16

Pat and Tom's Gone With the Wind wedding on May 9, 1974.
 
She was

"Searlett" and he was "Rhett."

Susan (left) and Debbie together again at the Alfords'new home in

Atlanta in 1981.
 
Pat's daughters were as different as night from

day.

Posing on a beach in Florida during a stay with Bill and Susan Alford

in 1980, Debbie looked' very much like her mother fifteen or so years

before.

practical nurses from the Quality Care referral service, had been

staying in the empty Washington Road house, in case either of the

Allansons could come home from the hospital.
 
In late July, she went to

the emergency room of the South Fulton Hospital, vomiting and

complaining of terrible pains in her abdomen.
 
She was transferred to

Grady Hospital, where Bob Tedford found her.

He asked her how long she had been staying at the Allansons' house.

"I've been out there since last Wednesday-the twenty-first."

"When did you get sick?"

"Sunday, yesterday."

"What did you eat there?"

"Just some frozen hot dogs that were in the freezer.
 
The only other

thing I had there was the coffee and the Pream-that powdered cream

substitute stuff."

Mrs. Foster's urine was checked for arsenic.
 
It was negative.
 
The

hot dogs were gone.
 
The coffee and Pream were analyzed.
 
Arsenic in

powder form can be white or brownish or yellow-or even red.
 
Test

samples proved to be only coffee and Pream.
 
However, another vial of

pills was found, a prescription with Nona Allanson's name on the

label.

There was one capsule inside that was different from the rest.

The capsule had a pill inside; analysis of the pill showed it was

mercury.
 
In some forms, mercury can be a deadly poison.
 
Liquid

mercury, however, is not as lethal.
 
The investigators learned that it

had once been an accepted treatment for constipotion, way back in the

twenties and thirties.
 
Since the old couple had kept pills for

twenty-five years, it was possible that they had kept some even

longer.

But the pill-within-a-capsule was not liquid; it was compressed

powder.

Deadly.
 
Why was there a single capsule with mercury in it in a modern

prescription container?

On July 26, Nona Allanson was released from the hospital and returned

to the house on Washington Road.
 
Her daughter Jean would henceforth be

in charge of her care.
 
Paw Allanson remained in South Fulton Hospital

in fair condition.

+ + Dunham McAllister was using old Walter Allanson's confession as the

focal point of his strategy to free Tom.
 
On July 30, McAllister filed

a motion requesting a hearing in Fulton County Superior Court to

determine whether a new trial was warranted for Walter Thomas Allanson,

since someone else had confessed to the crimes for which he had been

convicted.
 
The Fulton County D.A."s Office denounced the confession

as' worthless.
 
They had Paw's affidavit repudiating it.

Still, the new activity gave Tom the first hope he had had in a long

time.
 
There was an irony here; if Tom should be freed, would he be

reunited with his wife?
 
Or would they be like the old fable-the fox,

the goose, and the grain-where one was always onshore and the others in

the boat?
 
It was beginning to look as if Pat might go to prison

herself.

The time had come to fish or cut bait.
 
Andy Weathers of the D.A."s

office believed that they could get convictions.
 
At least it was worth

a try; to simply walk away from a case where two elderly people had

nearly died would be unconscionable.
 
How many names would be on the

indictments?
 
Four?
 
Three?
 
More than four?

On August 6, 1976, Bob Tedford appeared before the grand jury and

presented the evidence his team of detectives had gathered on the

arsenic poisonings of Nona and Walter Allanson.
 
Much of it was

circumstantial, and it would be a squeaker.
 
He had to show motive,

method, and opportunity on the part of someone with murder in his or

her heart.

Pat Allanson had had the motive to want her husband's grandparents

dead-two motives really: she was both heir and executor of their wills

and she needed money to live the life she longed for and to get "her

Tom" out of prison.
 
She had had the opportunity: she had the victims'

total trust.
 
And she could very easily have had the means.
 
The

arsenic in that old whiskey bottle had, perhaps, been "squirreled away"

out in the barn, way back in the days when Paw was an active farmer.

Or perhaps it had recently been purchased, supposedly to kill rats.

The prosecution team couldn't prove either theory; they had never found

the actual source of the arsenic.
 
As for what had taken place in the

house on Washington Road, four stories matched much too closely-Pat's,

Margureitte Radcliffe's, Colonel Radcliffe's, and Fanny K. Cash's.

Meanwhile, the stories of Amelia Estes, Jean Boggs, and her friend

Sherry Allen were diametrically opposed to the first story.

No one knew what might happen behind the closed doors of the grand

jury, but that very day in the first week of August, the Fulton County

grand jury returned an indictment.

Only one.

The Fulton County District Attorney's Office immediately issued an

arrest warrant charging Patricia Radcliffe Taylor Allanson with two