Everything She Ever Wanted (66 page)

anything."
 
His.
 
Radcliffe has found that persons of all ages like the

cards and are interested in having them done authentically.
 
In making

the cards, the Tell Road resident relies on books that show the various

types of cards, as well as the help of an older friend, Fanny Kate

Cash.... His.
 
Radcliffe uses tweezers to put lace around the edges of

cards and spends hours cutting out the tiny roses and other appliques

on the cards.... For a couple celebrating their 50th wedding

anniversary, His.
 
Radcliffe has fashioned a round card made out of

satin and lace from the woman's wedding gown.
 
In the center, hands

reach out for a yellow rose, which has a special meaning to the

couple.

Apparently, "His.
 
Radcliffe" was being deluged with requests for her

work, and the feature writer marveled that she also found time to

create handmade bookmarks and hand-painted handkerchiefs.

The local resident, a former Hallmark Card employee, puts a message or

one of the handkerchiefs in the back pocket of a card or fan.
 
She also

letters a verse on the front of the greeting card.

Pat explained that she did her own verses to suit.

Her grandchildren, Sean, 4, and Dawn, 5, also help her out by cutting

things out for her and "gluing the simpler things.".

"There are no two alike.
 
People come to ask for something special.

I consider them special cards for special people."

Pat had always loved the romance of bygone eras, and she was extremely

artistic, although she had never worked for Hallmark as she told the

reporter.

She had been making dainty cards to surprise Tom ever since he was

arrested.

He had tons of cards and letters with tiny roses, lace, hearts, and

intertwined hands.

Lisa Richardson, the reporter who interviewed Pat, had not asked Pat

about other interesting aspects of her life, and Pat had not seen fit

to mention that her card making might be interrupted soon when she went

on trial in Fulton County Superior Court for attempted murder.
 
She

was, in fact, terrified of going to trial.
 
She spent her time making

cards, sewing dresses that she would wear to court, and placing phone

calls to her beloved aunts in North Carolina.
 
She begged them all to

come to Atlanta too and Papa would be and be with her during her

trial.

Bopp Susan and Debbie.
 
But she wanted there, of course, and her.
 
The

prosecutor was needed-her whole family around going to be rude-she was

sure of it.

Susan, having had no luck at all convincing her mother's attorney to

pursue an insanity defense, did whatever she could to help Pat.
 
She

delivered the old-fashioned greeting cards to her mother's customers,

found new customers among her fellow employees at Eastern Airlines, and

listened as Pat talked far into the night about her fears for the

future.

The holiday season of 1976 was not a happy time on Tell Road, no matter

how hard anyone tried to make things seem festive, at least for the

sake of Sean and Dawn.
 
Boppo and Papa had always made so much of

Christmas, even dressing up like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus- But the

specter of the trial ahead hovered over them, and the knowledge that

bankruptcy for the Radcliffes was not far behind haunted them too.

Still, nobody blamed Pat.
 
They saw her, as always, as the victim of

cruel circumstance.

Largely due to Pat, the Radcliffes' lives had been fraught with loss,

change, and upheaval.
 
After staving off creditors for so long, they

finally went bankrupt.
 
The house on Tell Road was due to go on the

block, a public humiliation that they narrowly avoided when a man who

had worked with t their orses came forward the day before the sheriff's

sale and bought the property.

Margureitte's perfect home on Dodson Drive was only a distant memory

now; they were no longer homeowners at all.
 
Margureitte and the

colonel rented a house at 6438 Peacock Boulevard in Morrow, Georgia, a

hamlet south on I-85.
 
There would be no room for horses, no orchards

or rose gardens.
 
Just a plain house.

Pat moved with them, of course.

PART SIX.

Dunham McAllister had originally been retained to represent Tom

Allanson in his last chance for an appeal.
 
But Tom had come to the end

of his road.
 
It was now Pat who needed all the lawyers she could

afford.
 
McAllister, a bearded, rumpled man in his thirties, and his

wife, Margo, practiced law together in Jonesboro, Georgia.
 
Because

Pat's case was inextricably tangled with Tom's and because her life

story was so filled with extraordinary events, McAllister had to

immerse himself in research to prepare for trial.
 
There were stacks of

court transcripts to read, medical records, dozens of people to

interview.

McAllister requested delays several times.
 
Pat didn't go to trial in

November, or in January.
 
Indeed, it would be spring again before the

proceedings to be known as The State of Georgia v. Patricia R. Allanson

began on May 2, 1977, in the Honorable Elmo Holt's courtroom.
 
That

day, there was an ironic juxtaposition of items in South Fulton Today:

the defendant's old world next to her present arena.
 
Pictures of the

Palmetto High School Horse Show featuring a pretty young rider on a

Morgan horse, abutted a column headed, ALLANSON TRIAL SET FOR TODAY.

Andy Weathers, assistant district attorney for Fulton County, had been

relieved by the long delays requested by the defense.

The case against Pat Allanson was no sure thing.
 
Not at all.
 
He had

had his own research to do.
 
Weathers, like his opposing counsel, was

in his thirties.
 
He had a thick shock of black hair and penetrating

dark eyes.
 
His voice was as deep and rumbling as thunder, and his mind

lightning quick.
 
He knew he had to be ready when he went into court.

Judge Holt's trials were juggernauts; once they got going, nobody dared

ask for delays.
 
The Fulton County judicial system was overladen as it

was.
 
Caseseven murder cases-usually went in on Monday and got spat out

to a jury by Friday, even if it meant that court was in session until

long after sundown.
 
Judge Elmo Holt could be a curmudgeon, especially

if he was trying to keep within his own tight time schedules.

"That trial," Andy Weathers recalled, "was a very unusual situation, a

very volatile situation.
 
All the different family members there.
 
The

Boggses.
 
The Radcliffes.
 
Everybody.
 
I always expected the best

defense was going to be, 'How could anyone do this?
 
How [can you

believe she would] do that to elderly people who trusted her?"

" Weathers felt that normal, caring people would find the charge so

outrageous that it should have been its own defense.

"But they didn't go for that-the defense just went for trying to prove

that Pat Allanson had not done it, period," Weathers said, still

somewhat bemused by that decision.
 
It was, in fact, the same approach

that Pat had insisted on in Tom's earlier trial.

Deny everything.

"We had to hammer in on small details and inconsistencies," Weathers

recalled of the prosecution's case against Pat.
 
"We had no history on

her behavior-at least she had no criminal history.

We had to look for very small things, trying to do a probing

examination.
 
But you couldn't look at it without looking at the first

case-where Tom killed his parents.
 
That put everything in context.
 
No

one really knew exactly what her [Pat's] part was in that-not from

watching her and watching Tom-but she had the type of personality that

it seemed that she would call the shots.

"But the deal about the arsenic was so outside what we usually dealt

with.
 
What we usually have here in the Atlanta area is passion

killings.
 
When you have a situation where someone actually plans to

commit a murder-really gets down on it-you have situations where you

don't have any witnesses.
 
We had no eyewitnesses in this case.
 
What I

was trying to do was like building a house-trying to lay a foundation

about what had been going on.

"Pat Allanson had a two-pronged motive.
 
There were two things she was

trying to accomplish, I thought.
 
She was trying to lay it off on the

elder Mr. Allanson, as being the original killer.
 
. . . If he had

died, they would have gotten the money and gotten Tom out of p I

r'son.

I think that was the thrust of what she was trying to do."

After studying the case that Bob Tedford, the East Point investigators,

and the D.A."s investigators had put together, Weathers concluded that

there had been almost perfect planning on the part of the defendant.

"The experts told me there was a lot of similarity between arsenic

poisoning and the normal aging process.
 
jean Boggs was the one who

began to see and notice the things that only a member of the family

would notice.
 
If you weren't sp 'fically looking for this, it probably

would never eci have been found.
 
Tedford got on things then, and we

worked on that case for a long, long time.
 
We got Joe Burton-who's now

the medical examiner in DeKalb County-and he knew a lot about arsenic,

and there's a toxicologist named McGurdy in the GBI lab.
 
Their

testimony was critical."

Even so, most prosecutors wouldn't have taken on the case.

It wasn't a sure thing.
 
It was the kind of case that could rapidly

lower the percentages on an assistant D.A."s conviction record.