Everything She Ever Wanted (97 page)

wondered why Pat hadn't just let Mrs. Cris the tiny pill, and she

wondered more why she was giving her Halcion, a sleeping pill, in the

morning.
 
"Then too-well, it was strange .
 
Lynn began.

"What?"
 
Stoop prodded.

she was always "Pat told me Mrs. Crist got in her way, that hiding

medication around the house.
 
I mean, I never saw any medicine anywhere

but in the kitchen where it was kept.
 
Pat said she had to search Mrs.

Crist's room for drugs, and she was always hinting that Mrs. Crist was

crazy."

Lynn Battle hadn't lasted long after Jim Crist, jr asked her if she

would like to work full-time.
 
"Pat didn't want that.

She set me up," Lynn said succinctly.
 
Pat had claimed she had lost an

envelope with the money from her paycheck in it.
 
"She called me at t

for it.
 
I did, but it wasn't he Crists' and asked me to look e. She

called on the downstairs dresser where she said it would b early the

next morning, Saturday, and came out to look for it.
 
She checked

everyplace-even the refrigerator."

A day or so later, Lynn's agency called her, brought up the missing

money, and told her she was not wanted back at the Crists' home.
 
And

yet, after Debbie and Pat were fired, she was rehired and worked with

them for the six months until Mr.
 
Crist died.

"It was funny," Lynn said.
 
"All that time after I lost my job, Debbie

and Pat were calling me and telling me that they were trying to talk

Mrs. Crist into hiring me back.
 
But I knew Pat had set me up.
 
She

didn't want any of us there more than two or three days a week."

There appeared to be a good reason for that.

The weekend nurses noticed that when they arrived on Friday, Mrs. Crist

was usually shaky and confused, but she grew steadily more alert while

they were there.
 
By Monday morning, when Pat came to work, she seemed

completely unlike the woman she had left.

But within a few hours after Pat came on duty, Mrs. Crist was napping

all during the day.

Ruth Garrett had worked the evening shift from time to time.

She told Don Stoop that Pat had fired her when she called in sick one

evening.
 
"She told me that Mrs.
 
Crist said I 'bothered her."

" Ruth Garrett hadn't particularly liked the head nurse at the Crists,

finding Pat bossy and unfriendly.
 
"Pat was in charge of all medication

and food.
 
. . . One time, I saw that poor Mrs. Crist looked like

death warmed over.
 
Her eyes were sunken, her skin color was awful, and

she couldn't even hold her own head up.

I told Pat how bad Mrs. Crist looked, and she just said, 'I'll take

care of it,' and she called the doctor's office for some new

medicine.

Pat ordered all the medicine."

As Don Stoop and Michelle Berry continued their questioning of the

Crists, their physicians, and their other employees, it became

tragically, unbelievably, clear what had happened.
 
Betty Crist had

been systematically drugged with medications obtained from forged

prescriptions, and she had been robbed-of her dignity, of her health,

and of her treasured belongings.

But most of all, she had been robbed of the few months of precious time

that remained for her to be with her husband.
 
As she slept away the

days in her stuffy room through the spring of 1988, her Jimmy was far

away from her, and his illness was progressing with those days, taking

him still farther from her.

She would regain her dignity, her health, some of her treasures but she

would never in this world find again those lost days with her dying

husband.

Nor would Don Stoop and Michelle Berry ever be able to prove what they

suspected was true.
 
James Crist had complained of agonizing pain in

his feet, the most classic symptom of arsenic poisoning.
 
But there was

no body to exhume and test for arsenic.

James Crist had been cremated just before the New Year, 1989, two years

before.

In checking with criminalists, Stoop learned that arsenic is one of the

very, very few poisons that can still be detected in the cremains of a

human being.
 
Because it Is so insidious, leaching I ims, into the

hair, nails, and eventually the bones of its vict' arsenic remains long

after the person is reduced to ashes.
 
The Crist family had been

through so much pain.
 
When Don Stoop approached them about the

possibility of having James Crist's ashes tested for arsenic, they

could not do it.
 
It seemed a sacrilege.

No one would ever know if the old man had been sedated, tranquilized,

Poisoned.

Despite setbacks and disappointments, the case against Pat Taylor and

Debbie Alexander moved forward.
 
Don Stoop and Michelle Berry worked

relentlessly, gathering a bit of evidence here, another interview

there.
 
Their spirits rose when Elizabeth Crist and her daughter,

Betsy, positively identified the pearl necklace and bracelet set that

Pat had given to Susan.
 
They both recognized at once the gold flower

clasp with the single pearl in the center.
 
It was the same with a

leather-bound antique cookbook, another thoughtful gift from Pat to her

daughter.
 
It had not been hers to give; it was part of Mrs. Crist's

Williamsburg cookbook collection.

There were still myriad items missing.
 
Sooner or later, Stoop knew he

would have to get a search warrant for the little red brick house in

McDonoughBoppo and Papa's house.

+ + + Susan Alford had some bizarre documentation of the way her

mother's mind worked, something she had never sought out, something she

was hesitant to turn over to Don Stoop.
 
But the knowledge that it

existed burned in her mind.

Years before, in 1977, as Boppo was sorting through hastily packed

possessions from the Tell Road house, she had come across a grocery

sack with an old tape recorder in it.
 
She gave it to Sean, who, at

five, wasn't enthused about the gift.
 
The Alfords had carted the bag

and the tape recorder around with them in their many moves from Houston

to Florida and back to Atlanta.
 
No one ever bothered to check what was

rattling around in the bag.

One day, they were unpacking after yet another move, and Susan lifted

the old-fashioned recorder and saw that the bottom of the bag was full

of old tapes.
 
"Let's put some country music on," she said to Bill,

"and get into the spirit of unpacking."

When the first sounds filtered into the room, they stared at each

other, almost embarrassed.
 
They recognized the voices on the tapes,

and realized they were inadvertently eavesdropping on an intimate

conversation of long ago.

I love you more than anything in this whole wide world, Sugar."

"Don't say that, Tom."

It Huh?"

"You love me more than anyone.
 
You don't love me more than anything.

You love life more than you love me-" The tapes Pat had routinely made

of her phone calls in the mid-seventies crackled with age and the dust

of more than a decade, but the human

emotions were still caught there.
 
Pat and Tom's conversations were as

filled with manipulation

and frustration as the day the words were first said, the male voice

deep and shed tears.
 
and laced with pain, the woman's light and full of

uns Bill and Susan felt like voyeurs.
 
They switched the recorder

off.

They hadn't really listened to the tapes-only long enough to see what

they were: Pat's phone calls from Tom in the Fulton County jail.
 
Susan

hadn't wanted to hear more; the voices brought back so much hurt.

"A long time later," Susan eventually said, "I got them out and

listened to all of them.
 
And they were frightening.
 
I hadn't known

that my mother tried to get Tom to commit suicide.
 
There were so many

things I had never known."

At the time, Susan said, she had managed to deal with the content of

the fifteen tapes by reminding herself that her mother had been under

the influence of drugs, that this wasn't her real mother talking and

conniving and playing with Tom Allanson's emotions.
 
This was a

stranger addicted to mind-altering drugs.

Now she could no longer retreat to that theory.
 
I Until she learned of

the episode at the Crists', Susan had always believed her mother's

claims that she had no memory of the period when Tom's parents were

murdered and when Paw and Nona were poisoned.

Susan didn't believe that any longer.
 
She believed that her mother

remembered everything, and that she had no regrets at all.

Susan turned the tapes over to Don Stoop and Michelle Berry.

Most of them were Realistic Supertapes and there were some old J.

C. Penney labels too.
 
"Tom" and the dates-mostly in 1975-were written

in Pat's hand on the labels.
 
That they had survived the Alfords'

numerous moves, the heat of sixteen summers, and the cold of as many

winters defied explanation.
 
A few were twisted, but they still

played.

Hesitant to risk breaking the precious tapes, Stoop took them to an

expert to have them copied and enhanced for clarity before he allowed

himself to listen.

It was all there, all caught on the thin brownish plastic strips,

winding round and round.
 
For years, Susan and Bill had packed and

unpacked, moved again and again, and they had always carried with them,

unawares, the sounds that finally explained exactly how the mind of a

woman without conscience worked.