Everything She Ever Wanted (72 page)

Pat was not shaken by the obvious discrepancies between her testimony

and the testimonies of a number of prosecution witnesses.
 
She looked

petulant and occasionally glanced toward her parents for their support,

but she wasn't ruffled.
 
Weathers's skillful questioning had built the

"basement" of his "house," and he was working on the superstructure.
 
A

pattern of behavior was emerging.
 
Even when he caught Pat in an

outrageous, inappropriate response, she simply denied that black was

black.
 
She stepped away from this messy business of a trial.
 
Her

memory -the memory she bragged about-was suddenly full of gaping empty

spaces.

Weathers forced her back again.
 
Sighing, she related that the

confession had been given to her three times-in the garage on and in

his Washington Road, in the old man's hospital room, home.
 
She had

written it down in her own hand.

"You have that writing with you?"
 
Weathers asked suddenly.
 
"Gosh, no,

sir.
 
I don't."

,You don't have it?"

"No."

"Where is it?"
 
ere it is.
 
It's "Thrown away, I guess.
 
I don't really

recall wh probably thrown away because it was only my own writing."

"A confession to a murder in your writing as a man dictates it.

You threw it away?"

Pat didn't know where it was.
 
"He could not read my writing d up.
 
And

until then, I didn't see that it that well, so it was type made any

difference the way I wrote it out.
 
So long as it was typed properly.

It was used to type that document you have in your hand.
 
It was taken

from mine."

"The last page of this document has the signature 'Walter Allanson' on

it," Weathers said.
 
'Why did you take this out of the typewriter and

then reinsert it?"

"I told you, sir.
 
I didn ) t type it."
 
eitte typed Pat denied that

she was in the room when Margur the confession, at least not "the

entire time."
 
The last page had been typed on some old stationery left

over from when her mother was secretary for the Dixie Cup Morgan Horse

Show, but Pat had no idea why that final page had been dated and the

first page was typed.
 
Asked if notarized three days before the she

thought Paw had tried to commit suicide, Pat said it was quite

possible.

But if he had been suicidal as she hinted, she could not explain why a

man who had as many guns as Walter Allanson had not killed himself with

one.

"Doesn't it seem strange a man would kill himself with the ingestion of

arsenic over a six-month period of time?"
 
Weathers asked.

seems strange with him a she said crisply, "Nothing nymore, her voice

edged with irony.

The witness stand was no longer a comfortable place for Pat.

She stared coldly at Weathers as she said she had no idea why Paw might

have chosen to kill his beloved wife of forty-nine years slowly with

arsenic.
 
She did not, after all, know that much about arsenic.

Weathers walked away from her, then turned back suddenly.
 
"I almost

forgot to ask you something, ma'am.
 
You are the one that told

Detective Tedford that what was wrong with Mr. Allanson was he had

been swallowing pills by the handful?"

"I might have repeated this to him after Dr. Jones repeated it to

me.)@ "Did you tell Detective Tedford?"

"I don't recall."

"Ma'am," Weathers asked with exasperation in his voice, "how in the

world could Dr.
 
Jones have said this?
 
He wasn't even there.

Didn't you recall his testimony was based on what you-all told him at

the hospital?
 
He stated he had trouble getting the man to take

pills.

Don't you recall that?"

"I recall that in testimony.
 
. . . Perhaps I didn't understand your

question."

"Did you tell Detective Tedford this man-Mr. Walter Allanson-was

taking handfuls of pills and drinking whiskey?"

"Words to that effect-I had told him at one time, yes."

"And do you recall telling Jean Boggs on the fourteenth day of June,

out there in front of that house, that you hoped this man died?"

"No, sir.
 
I did not say that."

Nor had she told Tedford-on the very day that hospital personnel felt

Paw was going to die-that her husband's grandfather had tried to run

her off the road, and that she lived in fear for her very life.
 
"Not

running off the road," she said querulously.

"I told him something else-but not running off the road.

"And-as to the death of Walter and Carolyn......... Weathers asked,

"isn't it a fact that shortly before Walter Allanson died, you made a

complaint that Walter Allanson exposed himself to you?"

"Yes, I remember that."

"We are speaking of the dead man.
 
Do you recall doing that?"

"Yes, I think I did."

"You think you did.
 
. . . You make the complaint and your husband

said, 'I'm going to kill that son of a bitch'?"
 
what could "No, sir.

. . . He didn't say anything except to say nothing could be done about

it legally."
 
last question to you-at "And it is a fact in summation-at

the time both of these people were killed, back in '74, you were in a

jeep within two blocks of that area?"

"I was either in a jeep or in a doctor's office."

"I have no further questions."

Weathers turned away.

Margureitte Radcliffe followed her daughter to the witners stand.

Everywhere Pat went, her mother was close behind her, supporting,

mopping up, fixing, rearranging.
 
If Pat had been queenly in her

bearing, Margureitte was an empress.
 
Serene and self-contained, she

gazed down at her daughter's attorney almost benevolently.

The five-page confession looked perfectly familiar to her, she told

McAllister.
 
She had typed it herself, approximately a year earlier.

She recalled that she had typed it just after she and her husband,

Colonel Radcliffe, had returned from the funera of his brother-in-law

in New York State.
 
They had been preparing to leave for a happier

celebration, the fiftieth anniversary of one of her brothers.
 
The

Radcliffes were clearly family people, involved and supportive.

There was not a scintilla of Pat's testimony that her mother did not

substantiate.
 
Margureitte remembered each facet with crystalline

clarity.
 
Certainly Nona Allanson had called them, panicked, needing

help on June 12, 1976.
 
Absolutely Nona had said Paw had tried to

smother her and then had tried to force her to drink

something-something not coffee.

Margureitte herself had witnessed it all.

On cross-examination, Weathers wondered why the dates on the confession

had been so disparate.
 
It was her fault, Margureitte admitted; she had

not bothered to check a calendar when she began to type page one.
 
The

anniversary they were headed for was on a Sunday, but the celebration

was on a Saturday.
 
If Mr. Weathers had a 1976 calendar, she could

probably figure it out.

Perhaps not.
 
A glance at a 1976 calendar showed that the sixteenth of

April-the day the confession was notarized-was a Friday.

"Do you think this was more than a few days off?..... Do you think it

was above or behind?"
 
Weathers asked.

"It was prior to-it was ahead of time."

"You mean like starting back eighteen, seventeen.....

"Yes," Margureitte answered, oblivious of the jury's puzzled looks.

"It was more than-in other words, I didn't date it.
 
It was like

a-postdated, I would say, would be the proper word.
 
That date is

postdated.
 
Is that not correct to be forward?"

She never gave a good reason why the confession had two different

dates.
 
The unspoken supposition was, of course, that Paw Allanson had

been told to sign some vital documents on April 16, and the confession

had been typed in three days later by a mother and daughter working

together.

argureitte had typed the confession in the study of the Tell Road

house.
 
In April of 1976.
 
She was definitely sure it had been April.

"And how did you go about reducing- Did you reduce this from notes?"

"I didn't reduce it.
 
I wrote it verbatim."

"You took it from something else and put it on here?"

"That is correct.
 
Yes."

"And who provided you with-" "My daughter, Mrs.
 
Allanson."

"M questionisthis,"Weatherscontinued."Everythingthere y that you put in

these papers was provided to you by Pat Allanson?"

"I didn't change it, if that is what you mean."

"I am not trying to imply that at all.... In other words, everything

you know about what's on here is through information provided by your

daughter?"

"No-I knew that Mr.
 
Allanson had confessed prior to that, yes."

"Who told you that?"

"Mrs.
 
Allanson."

"Mrs.
 
Allanson told you that also?"

"Yes.

"When did you have this conversation with Mrs.
 
Allanson?"