Everything She Ever Wanted (92 page)

Grove, Florida, he loved it; it was what he had always wanted to do.
 
A

few years later, in 1980, he moved up to Georgia and "started policing

for the city of Atlanta."
 
He was still as blond as a Scandinavian,

looked about eighteen, and worked a car in the most thickly populated

black ghetto areas of the city.
 
The people who lived on Atlanta's

meanest streets liked him.
 
He was a no-bullshit kind of guy.
 
He

stayed with the Atlanta Police Department for five and a half years.

While he was working in Atlanta, Stoop met his future wife, Theresa

Hempfling, when they worked undercover stakeouts together.
 
A lovely,

darkhaired woman, Theresa was a federal agent for the Alcohol, Tobacco,

and Firearms branch of federal law enforcement.
 
She was in charge of

the Zone 6

Pro'ect in Atlanta, seeking out "armed career criminals."
 
She was as

good at her job as Stoop was at his, and could trade quips with him toe

to toe.
 
Stoop was making 92 percent of the arrests in the Zone 6

campaign, and Theresa was seeing the cases through to conviction.

But what Stoop really wanted-what he had always wantedwas to be a

detective like his uncle Fritz.
 
The Fulton County D.A."s investigative

unit gave him plenty of opportunity to do just that.
 
He had occasion

more than once to 'rethink" dispositions of cases marked closed by

local police departments.

One was the bloody death of a fifty-year-old man whose case had been

closed as a suicide by the investigating agency.
 
But there were

aspects of the case that disturbed the dead man's family and they asked

for an investigation by the D.A."s office Reading over the autopsy

report, Stoop saw that the victim had succumbed to several bullets in

the chest, fired by an old .445

Webley cavalry pistol.
 
The city detective investigating the case had

surmised that the dead man

had shot himself many times in the chest, walked around the living

room, and then gone out into the hallway, where he shot himself a final

time.
 
That, the report read, would account for the proliferation of

blood all over the floor.

Stoop recalled asking if a man with his chest full of bullets were

capable of walking od in the the

That it would, Stoop agreed,

around.

detective, "Would it surprise you that all that blood in the living room isn't

his blood?"

The city detective didn't believe the D.A."s investigator.

"Look at his shoes, then," Stoop suzlested The victim's shoes didn't

have a speck of blood on them.
 
"I think he died right here in the

hallway , Stoop said.
 
"And I think somebody else shot him."

Stoop's investigation unearthed the fact that the dead man's girlfriend

had been stopped by a patrol unit for erratic driving late on the night

of the shooting.
 
She had bandages on both wrists.
 
"She told them

she'd cut herself accidentally," Stoop recalled later with a grim

smile.
 
"And they let her go.

She had tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists after she shot

him.

That was her blood that was all over his living room; the lab

identified two different types of blood left in his hallway and living

room.
 
Evidently, the girlfriend changed her mind about wanting to

die-and went to Grady Hospital and got sewed up.
 
We thought we had a

case.
 
But they acquitted her.
 
The jury felt if it was murder, then

the first investigators should have known it.
 
It didn't make sense,

but you can't second-guess a jury S reasoning.

Stoop was a busy man.
 
Not only was he working for the Fulton County

D.A."s Office, but he was available to other agencies that didn't have

investigators.
 
On top of that, he still worked with two federal task

forces: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the FBI's

Drug Task Force.
 
But he was never too busy to take on another oddball

case.

When Susan Alford called the Fulton County District Attorney's Office,

she had asked to talk to anyone who might know about a current case

charging Patricia Taylor Allanson with crimes involving the James Crist

family.
 
She was still hoping that maybe Mrs.
 
Crist had exaggerated.

Her call was taken by Chief Investigator Ron Harris, who remembered Pat

only too well from her 1976 conviction.
 
He had worked on the case.

The bizarre situation of a husband and a wife going to trial separately

for murder and attempted murder within the space of a few years was

hard to forget.
 
No one in the D.A."s office had ever settled the

question of Pat Taylor Allanson's actual involvement in the murder of

her in-laws.

"You aren't Pat Taylor's sister, are you?"
 
Harris asked Susan.

"No," she said, wondering if her mother was still talking about her

"wicked, sociopathic sister"-the imaginary sister who lived in North

Carolina.

Susan did not tell Harris who she was in that first call, but he was

intrigued.
 
Why would someone be asking about Pat Taylor?

The woman would be-what?-in her fifties by now, and she probably was

out of prison.
 
Harris checked the computers and found there was an

open case, with a complaint filed by a Mrs.
 
James F. Crist.

But there wasn't much to go on.
 
The only thing that the case file

consisted of was a manila folder with one yellow sheet from a legal

tablet in it.

Harris called Don Stoop into his office.
 
Stoop had never heard of Pat

Taylor, but the single sheet of paper led him to the Atlanta Police

Department's Larceny Unit, which had filed away the Crists' complaint

in 1988, marked "all leads exhausted."
 
The city dicks had never gotten

enough evidence together to charge anyone.

That made it Stoop's kind of case.

. . .

It was February 5, 1991, when Don Stoop was officially assigned the

Cr'st case.
 
He was t I o look into the "possible homicide of an

elderly gentleman under the home care of two females who were,

allegedly, Registered Nurses."
 
James Crist had been dead for a little

over two years.
 
His death had been considered natural; he had suffered

from Parkinson's disease and he was eighty-eight years old when he

died.
 
The question now was: Had someone hurried him along?

Stoop asked for Michelle Berry as his co-investigator.
 
She had no experience

as a homicide investigator; the Crist case might give her some.

Michelle resembled a college girl more than a working detective.
 
She

was in her twenties, but she could easily Dass for seventeens an

attribute that made her extremely valuable When she graduated on her

first law enforcement assignments .
 
in criminal justice, she from

North Georgia College with a B.A was hired by the Georgia Bureau of

Investigation as an undercover narcotics investigator and was sent out

to buy drugs from some of the seamiest characters in Georgia's

narcotics underworld.
 
She could look like a schoolgirl or a hippie or

a confirmed addict.

"At the time," she remembered, "it didn't even strike me us.
 
I was a

detective on a detail, and that's what I as dangero wanted to be."

Michelle's career as a narc went along swimmingly until she fell in

love.
 
"My job didn't sit too well with Jonathan," she said.

doing what "He told me, 'Either quit and marry me, or keep you're doing

and leave me alone."

" She loved him too much to leave him- alone, so, reluctantly, she

resigned her job with the GBI and they were married in December 1989.

Six months later, Michelle knew she couldn't give up law enforcement

completely; that was what she had studied for.
 
Much like Stoop,

helping to keep the law was her life's ambition.
 
Her husband

understood, but he didn't want her back on the streets.

They compromised.
 
"I got a desk job."

Michelle's desk-and office-were neater than Stoop's, and her objets

dart were not nearly as eccentric as his, some of which were

unmentionable.
 
They made an interesting team.
 
Don and

Michelle read Pat's and Debbie's rap sheets, and then did a little background

checking on the Crist family.
 
They learned that James F. "Jimmy" Crist

had earned the huge house on Nancy Creek Road.
 
If one single man could

be said to epitomize the emergence of electric power in the South in

the twentieth century, it was James Crist.

Jimmy Crist had started out climbing poles, his spurred boots digging

into swaying shafts of tarred wood in winter storms and in the burning

southern sun.
 
In 1927, he worked as an apprentice lineman for the

Alabama Power Company.
 
He later became a sales representative, and

then moved on to the South Carolina Power Company and stayed nineteen

years.
 
In 1946-47, Crist helped form the Southern Company, which was

incorporated to operate four southern electric companies-Alabama Power

Company, Georgia Power Company, Gulf Power Company, and the Mississippi

Power Company.

Crist was listed in U%o's R%o in America and wrote a book, They

Electrified the South, about the emergence of electrical power in the

first half of the century.

James Crist and his pretty wife, Elizabeth Courtney Boykin Crist, had

belonged to the most exclusive inner circles of Atlanta and Charleston

society.
 
When Crist retired as the executive vice president and

director of the Southern Company on January 1, 1966, he was lauded as a

true pioneer of his industry and given credit for much of the

prosperity of the New South.
 
The thirty thousand employees of the

Southern electric system saluted Jimmy Crist.