Everything She Ever Wanted (93 page)

The Crists had had two grown sons and a daughter, a good marriage, and

all the time in the world.
 
He looked forward to playing more golf at

the Peachtree Country Club.
 
Crist remained an advisory director of the

Southern Company until 1977, but as he entered his ninth decade, he

began to show symptoms of Parkinson's disease, a progressive

neurological malady that is sometimes connected to arteriosclerosis in

an elderly patient.
 
Symptoms began with tremors in the limbs, a

masklike expression, a shuffling gait, and a kind of "pill-rolling"

movement in the hands.
 
It was a tragic illness for a man who had been

so active all his life, and in time, Elizabeth Crist needed help in

caring for him.

Jimmy Crist had died in 1988.
 
Elizabeth Crist survived him and was in

excellent health for a woman her age.

Don Stoop and Michelle Berry met with Mrs. Elizabeth Crist, her

daughter, Betsy Chandler, and her sons, Bill and Jim, jr.
 
in the

exquisitely appointed mansion where Mrs. Crist still lived.
 
Betty

Crist was attractive and intelligent and seemed younger than a woman in

her late seventies.
 
The D.A."s investigators knew they would have

to revive painful memories of Jim Crist, they would need his widow to

recall the occasion of her meeting with Pat Taylor, but it was the only

reasonable spot to begin their probe.

Betty Crist told them that Pat Taylor had come to her very highly

recommended.

She had introduced herself as a registered nurse, just retired

from the Army Nurse Corps, and she said she could bring in her daughter

Deborah, who was also an RN, to work the second shift.
 
Like her

mother, Betsy Chandler had found Pat "very likable" during her

employment interview.
 
Pat had explained to Betsy and her brother Jim

that she was so recently t she had not yet received her Georgia retired

from the army that that the requirements for nursing number, but she

assured them her army rank were far stricter than the state of Georgia

required.
 
She gave them her credentials as "U.S. Armed Services

Medical Services: ID No.
 
NA-15-753," and added that she had once

supervised all the nurses at Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital.

Jim Crist recalled that Pat had appeared to be about sixty, a stolid,

no-nonsense type of woman with bobbed brown hair and glasses who

probably weighed about 145 to 150 pounds.
 
She said she lived in

McDonough and gave her phone number.
 
She offered references from

former employers and Jim had checked those, eliciting only glowing

reports.
 
Pat Taylor had struck him as a very "take-charge" kind of

woman, perfect for the role of charge nurse, supervising all of his

parents' aides.
 
He supposed an army nurse would have to be that way.

Pat's duties were to "take care of Jimmy," Betty Crist said, take blood

pressure, temperature, etc and fix the meals.
 
Jimmy was not bedridden

when Pat was first hired."
 
Nor was Betty Crist.

She had been perfectly healthy-but not for long.
 
"I became bedridden

after Pat had been here about one month.
 
Then she had to give me my

medicine and bring trays up to my room to eat."
 
Pat was indeed a

"take-charge" kind of woman.
 
"She would never let me and Jimmy spend

time together," Betty Crist said.
 
"She kept me upstairs, and Jimmy had

a hospital bed set up in the den."

Betsy explained to the investigators that the family's whole purpose in

hiring nurses was so that they could keep her father at home with her

mother where he felt safe and as serene as a man so ill could be.
 
"We

knew he'd die if we put him in a nursing homewe just didn't want to do

that."

"How was Pat paid?"
 
Don Stoop asked.

" I paid her by check every Saturday," Betty Crist said.

"When she first started, the fee was only ten dollars an hour.

Then by the end of it all, I was paying her much more.
 
I was sedated

.

. . and I just wrote the check.
 
I paid for her and Debbie."

Betty Crist said that both Debbie and Pat had worn nurses' uniforms,

and they certainly appeared to know what they were doing.
 
Pat drove a

red pickup truck to work, and Debbie whipped in and out of the Crists'

long circular driveway in a white Camaro.
 
Pat had driven Mrs. Crist

to all of her doctor's appointments in the Crists'vehicle.

Betty Crist still wasn't sure how their prescriptions were obtained;

she had never heard Pat calling them in, but she knew the drugstore

made frequent deliver' room supplies.
 
les of medicines and sick Betty

Crist's eyes clouded as she recalled that her life had changed

drastically almost from the first wee k she hired I Pat Taylor.
 
While

before she had dealt with her husband's illness with tragic acceptance,

spending long quiet hours sitting beside him, she had suddenly found

herself almost totally blocked off from him.
 
There were always "good"

reasons why they should stay apart, and as Betty Crist grew weaker, she

had less strength to argue with her charge nurse.

Pat worked days, and her daughter Debbie soon had the evening shift, so

one or the other of them was in the Crists' home from seven in the

morning until eleven at night.
 
Mrs. Crist had noticed that she grew

terribly sleepy after she had eaten.
 
"Pat would always tell me to just

stay in bed and sleep.
 
. . . For some reason, I grew very afraid of

Pat and what she might do.
 
Jimmy and I were always separate and we

could never have visitors.
 
Pat complained about being hired to care

for one person and having to care for two."

Alone with her two elderly charges, Pat had ruled the Crist household

and made her displeasure at small things apparent.
 
She had conveyed

her anger with a look, a sharp intake of breath, o When she was truly

annoyed r a shuddering sigh.
 
upboard doors which had been often-she

slammed the kitchen c and banged pots and pans together.
 
become Jim

Crist said that he and his brother and sister had concerned about Pat

Taylor's care of their parents because it seemed extremely

"regulated."

Visitors were discouraged.

When ways told their the Crists'grandchildren telephoned, they were al

grandparents were "too tired to talk."
 
At first, when Betsy or Bill or

Jim, jr called to visit, and Pat explained their parents were napping

and she hated to disturb them, they found her conscientious and caring

and said they would come back another time.
 
Later, they tried to pop

in at unexpected times and were IW Y ndisposeddistressed to find that

their parents were a a s i Pat had not gotten along at all with the

rest of the nursing staff, hired to fill in on her weekends off and on

the graveyard shift.
 
One way or another9 they had all failed to meet

her standards.
 
At her insistenceg most of them were fired.
 
The Crist

children had assumed that the negative remarks the fired nurses made

about Pat were sour grapes.
 
Pat always seemed so efficient, so

knowledgeable, and so concerned about their parents'welfare.

They had expected that their father's health would grow progressively

worse, and that he might be confused from time to time, but there were

incidents that were unsettling.
 
One day, Jim Crist received a phone

call from his father.
 
That was highly unusual; his father couldn't ha

. ve reached a phone without help.
 
He could no longer walk unaided.

"I've been thinking about giving away our Civil War relics," his father

began.
 
"They're just taking up space."
 
i "Give them away?"
 
Jim Crist

asked, amazed.
 
"Give them away to who?"

His father said that the nurses would like to have them.
 
Jim explained

that the priceless artifacts were already listed in his father's will,

earmarked for his grandchildren.
 
He thought privately that someone

must have deliberately urged the old man to call, the same someone who

had helped him to the phone.
 
His father had mentioned giving the

artifacts to Debbie a few times after that bizarre call.
 
Betty Crist

nodded.
 
Her husband had called her once when she was in the hospital

for tests and horrified her by saying he thought Debbie should have the

Civil War pieces.

In January or February of 1988, Jim Crist, Sr."s Rolex watch was taken

to be cleaned.
 
When the shop called to say it was ready, Debbie had

gone in to pick it up, but she had come back without it, explaining

that it wasn't there.
 
"When I called," Jim Crist said, "the jewelers

aid that Deborah Cole had picked it up -and signed for it.
 
I have the

receipt."

Bill Crist told the D.A."s investigators that he had begun to notice a

dramatic change in his mother's behavior early in 1988.

Where she had always been vibrant, she had become sluggish and

befuddled.
 
Her words slurred as she talked to him, and she forgot

things she had always remembered.
 
He was baffled by the changes.

Betsy Chandler saw it too, and wondered sadly whether her mother's age

was catching up with her.
 
That, and her mother's depression over her

husband's condition, could account for her diminished state.

Jimmy Crist wasn't doing well either.
 
The elderly man had developed an

irritating rash that covered his whole body.
 
He had never had anything

like that until Pat and Debbie came to work.

He was totally bedridden by this time, and he complained of terrible,

intractable pain in his feet.
 
His physician told them that

wasn't an expected side effect of Parkinson's disease, although the

rash was.

Georgia nursing registration nUM

Pat had never produced any vouchers for the