Everything She Ever Wanted (65 page)

through the prison.
 
"He came over to me and he told me, 'Tom, you're

doing a good job and everything, but your wife is creating one hell of

a lot of waves downtown.
 
She's not helping you.
 
Would you please calm

her down?"
 
That was easier said than done.

Pat's accusations were familiar.
 
Nobody really cared about her, she

loved him so, and she tried so hard.
 
She was doing her best for him,

even though she was sick and scared to death that they were trying to

send her to prison too.
 
If that happened, who would care about him

anymore?

It got worse and worse.
 
"She claimed some of the corrections officers

raped her," Tom remembered.
 
"One of them supposedly did, anyway.
 
She

said they followed her in a state car .
 
. . to the expressway, and

handcuffed her and raped her.
 
. . . She even came back and said one of

them cut her up with a knife."

Tom had seen the marks.
 
Pat indeed had bruises that appeared to be

from handcuffs, and numerous cuts on her back, legs, and breasts.

Superficial cuts.
 
Tom might have been a fool for love, but he wasn't a

plain fool.
 
He had to question Pat's outrageous stories.
 
He wondered

how so many terrible things could happen to one woman.
 
When he looked

at the wounds she showed him, he wondered even more.

"Every one of them you could tell was self-inflicted-from the direction

it went and how deep it was," he later said.
 
"You know, even at the

time I didn't believe her because I knew those officers and they were

good men.
 
They wouldn't do something like that, but I just passed it

off as one of 'Pat's things."

Not long ago, back when he was free-or even when he had a slight hope

of being free-Tom had found Pat's dramatic ways endearing, possibly a

little exciting.
 
She fainted the way old-time southern women did,

slipping to the ground in a heap.
 
He had liked bringing a single rose

to his pale, stricken love as she lay in bed, gently suffering from

some mysterious, womanly ailment.

But "Pat's things" weren't so endearing anymore.
 
Not to anyone.
 
She

had always used sexual attacks as an attention-getting device.
 
She had

screamed rape at the slightest provocation for the past two decades.

She had told Susan and Debbie that she had been molested when she was a

child.
 
And then there were all the rapes in Germany.
 
Her obsession

with sexual assaults was growing shopworn and, in the aftermath of her

arrest, she seemed to be getting worse.

One evening in the summer of 1976, when Debbie and Susan had taken Dawn

to the emergency room at South Fulton Hospital-she had been wedged

between Debbie's car door and the carport-Pat suddenly appeared in the

waiting room with her panty hose around her ankles, sobbing and

screaming that she had been raped.
 
This time, she accused the East

Point police detectives; she said they had pretended they were going to

question her, but instead they had handcuffed her and sexually abused

her.
 
"How can you do this?"

Debbie cried.
 
"Get out of here!

With Boppo on her heels, Pat had leaped into her watermelon red Cougar

and driven along the hospital sidewalk.
 
Susan and Debbie were

mortified, but nobody took Pat's cries of rape seriously anymore.

Not even Tom.

He still loved Pat, but his head was beginning to clear.
 
His true love

now meant only pain.
 
He did fine in between his wife's visits, but

every time she came to see him or he talked to her on the phone, he was

desolate."His counselor monitored the phone calls-with Tom's

knowledge-and wondered how Tom could do his time with any degree of

acceptance at all when his wife kept pulling at him with her siren

songs.
 
He recommended that Tom stop talking to his wife on the phone

and Tom was surprised that he felt mostly relief that there would be no

more hysterical conversations.

The letters did not stop; during the fall of 1976 Pat kept up her

voluminous correspondence with Tom, holding on to him with stamps

and.

scribbled lines, clinging for dear life.
 
She wanted him to have her

letters as quickly after she wrote them as possible.
 
Almost every

evening she drove east from the Tell Road ranch to some all-night

restaurant along the freeway toward Jackson-a Denny's or a Shoney's or

one of the waffle houses.
 
Pat spent hours sipping coffee or a Coke as

she wrote love letters on the Formica tabletops, oblivious to the

bustle around her.

Country and western ballads played in the background over the Muzak

systems.
 
She would look up when she heard one of their special

songs-especially Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner in their duet "Is

Forever Longer Than Always?"

Sometimes, she drove all the way to Jackson to mail the letters.

That way, Tom would have them the very next, morning.

Those evenings may have helped Pat forget what was looming ahead-that

this time the trial was her own.
 
It took so many country love songs,

so many letters, so many long drives east to Jackson through the hot

Georgia nights for her to force it to the back of her mind.
 
It was

unthinkable-but there it was.
 
She was scheduled to go on trial the

first week of November 1976.

Susan Taylor Alford had been on a plane with her toddler son, Sean,

flying back to Atlanta after a wonderful vacation in Key Biscayne at

the moment her mother was arrested.
 
The twenty-three-year-old Eastern

Airlines flight attendant landed and soon learned the terrible news

that the charge was attempted murder.
 
More than the rest of the

family, Susan had acknowledged that her mother had a real problem with

prescription drugs, a long-standing addiction.

Nobody else wanted to say it out loud.
 
Heaven knows, Susan had seen

her mother out of control on more than one occasion in recent years.

But chasing someone with her crutch, or even running away hysterically

in her nightgown, was far, far different from attempted murder.

"I thought that, if my mother had done what they said she did," Susan

remembered, "then she was terribly, terribly ill.
 
She couldn't be in

her right mind.
 
The drugs were telling her what to do.
 
That couldn't

be my mother.
 
I kept thinking about the times she told me I was her

friend, and how she was so proud of me-that I could do anything I set

out to do.
 
My mother could be the most wonderful person in the world

when she wanted to."

Susan went to Dunham McAllister and pleaded with him to help Pat.
 
She

was convinced that Pat should not be tried on the merits of the case

against her; she couldn't have known what she was doing.
 
Someone had

to step in and see that Pat was committed to a mental hospital where

she could get help.
 
"I thought my mother was sick," Susan later

said.

"I was so angry with Mr. McAllister when he wouldn't listen to me,

when he wouldn't use my mother's illness as a defense.
 
No one-no

one-could convince me that my mother would have hurt anyone if she was

in her right mind."

On October 28, 1976, Tom had his last chance for a new trial.

judge Wofford listened to McAllister's motion for a writ of error coram

nobis, asking for a hearing requesting a new trial.
 
Wofford read over

the alleged confession of Paw Allanson and Paw's signed affidavit

swearing that the confession was fake and that he had signed it only

"through the deceit of Patricia R. Allanson."

Wofford denied McAllister's motion.

Tom had now exhausted all of his appeals.
 
The U. S. Supreme Court had

refused to hear his case.
 
He was desolate.
 
He expected to serve "at

least fourteen years on each of my two convictions."

The Allansons were no longer relegated to the inside pages of Atlanta

area newspapers.
 
Their continuing saga made them frontpage, headline

news.
 
Each story about Tom included a summary of Pat's pending

trial.

And each article concerning Pat included Tom's legal history.

But then the December 15, 1976, issue of South Fulton Today, a daily

paper, featured an article on Pat that made no allusion at all to her

postponed trial (it had been put off to January 1977), and had no

reference to Tom, arsenic, murder, or anything embarrassing.
 
That may

have been because Pat had in Pat Radquietly dropped her married name.

She was once again a Radcliffe, and a staff photo showed a pretty woman

in profile, gazing at two dainty paper nosegays in her hand.
 
In the

ultimate rejection of reality, Pat Radcliffe was the subject of only a

pleasant little feature story: A Real Card Local Resident Sends

Old-Style Greetings South Fulton resident Pat Radcliffe has a solution

for persons who can't find the right card for that special person.

His.

Radcliffe designs and makes 18th-Century greeting cards that put most

storebought cards to shame.

A former horse trainer and instructor at Woodward Academy, His.

Radcliffe has always liked "old-fashioned things" and has an artistic

flair.
 
While recuperating from an illness that left her unable to

pursue her greatest love horses-His.
 
Radcliffe began making replicas

of the 18th-Century cards to give to friends and various charitable

organizations.

The article explained that Pat had formerly done portrait painting but

had just begun to design her special cards'.

"I didn't have any idea in two weeks' time that it would come to