by Ann Rule
“I don’t have any reason to live,” Pat said. “You are the only reason I have to live. You said life is being concerned with the things that we can feel and touch. We can’t feel or touch or see each other.”
“Pat, you know what I’m talking about—”
“It’s nice to hear you talk about things that you know we can never do,” Pat whispered sarcastically. “Like going to other countries or different places. . . . I have a right to tell you how I feel.”
“Every conversation, every letter, you talk about the very same thing—about you not wanting to get well, not wanting to live.” Tom’s voice wasn’t angry; he was pleading with his wife to keep trying.
“Are you telling me that you are with me and taking care of me and looking after me and all that?” Pat began to sob. “I just know I can't feel you because I can’t touch you. You act like I can feel you—but I can’t. I know you love me and 'that’s all that matters.’ See, Tom—you talk about our life later, but that’s going to be your life.”
“You agree with the part when I said that you’re young and still living?”
“Will you talk that way fifteen years from now?”
“Pat. You’ll be here thirty years from now.”
“Not without you, I can’t. Oh, I can do anything with you, but I can't exist without you.”
Behind Tom, the sounds of caged men reverberated against the walls. It took tremendous effort for him to maintain a calm voice, as if he were talking to a child, willing her to live.
“How am I going to support myself?” Pat cried. “How am I going to live?”
Tom was finally defeated. “I don’t know.”
It was true, he didn’t. He was locked up, with no real hope of being outside prison walls for the next decade. Tom tried to tell Pat she could get her horse business back together again. She was still living with her parents; she had a roof over her head and food to eat. She wasn’t a destitute teenager. She was almost thirty-nine, and her parents still stood firmly behind her.
“You know you are going to prison, Tom,” she accused, as if he were choosing to be in prison.
“. . . I’m coming home,” he promised.
“You may be home in ten or twelve years, Tom—but you won’t be coming home to me.”
“. . . I’m coming home to you. I just hope you’ll be there.”
One theme and one theme alone began to emerge when Pat talked with her husband as he waited to go on the chain to Jackson Prison. Tom was going away and it would kill her. He might as well accept it; she could not live without him. If he ever wanted to be with her again, and he assured her he did, it would have to be in some other, better world. In death, they might be together; in life, they no longer had any hope at all.
“Shug, you don’t know what happens after we die, and neither do I,” Tom argued.
She blamed herself. “I wish you could understand how terrible I feel because you’re there and I know it is my fault.”
Pat had never before alluded to the possibility that she had any fault in Tom’s alleged crimes—not in their private conversations; certainly not to Tom’s attorneys. But Tom wouldn’t let her think about feeling guilty. He didn’t blame her for any of this. He had hope for his appeal.
“Our lives are dwindling away,” Pat cried. She told him that she was fighting his own lawyers to try to keep him close to her.
“Pat, you’re not physically able to do that.”
“It’s the most important thing in our lives. Tom, what good is it if you’re gone?”
“Don’t you think I’m ever coming home? . . . I’m coming home to you, Pat. I promise you. . . . We’ll start over and we’ll make it okay.”
“I won’t even be walking by the time you come home. I won’t be much good for anything but companionship.”
“. . . You’re good for everything. You’re good for being my wife, you’re good for being my Pat. You’re my lover. You’re my super kind of woman. . . . Age doesn’t have a thing to do with it. . . . It doesn’t make any difference as far as my love goes whether you’re in a wheel chair or you’re up running around.”
“Are you going to be able to say that twelve years from now?”
“I sure am. . . .”
“I won’t live that long in a wheelchair.”
Pat always used the wheelchair when she visited Tom, even though she could have gotten by with a cane. The wheelchair meant they would be allowed to meet in the attorneys’ cubicles on the second floor, where they could have some contact. Tom didn’t realize that Pat could get around just fine with a cane, or that she had no trouble driving her own car.
During her visits, Pat continued to chip away at Tom’s belief in the future. When he was down, she pulled him further into the pit of despair. Again and again she told him her own death was imminent. She talked of their perfect love, now broken and hopeless with prison bars about to separate them. There was only one way they would ever be together. They would both have to be dead. Man and the law were going to keep them apart.
Tom didn’t really take her seriously; it sounded like more of her depression.
***
Pat had always been consumed with an almost unnatural curiosity about what jail was like for Tom. She questioned him continually about what he thought, who shared his cell, what they talked about, and she focused most intently on humiliations he might have suffered, reinforcing those embarrassments in the process. Even locked away from her, he had no privacy with his own thoughts. To his chagrin, she asked him if he masturbated, phrasing it obliquely: “Do you do—you know—what men do in prison when they’re locked away from their women? You know what I mean?”
“Pat!” Tom barked into the phone. “No. Don’t ask things like that.”
Pat quizzed him about “the chain,” and about the strip searches he would endure, commenting how humiliating they would be for him. She didn’t seem to have much sense of tact about how Tom might feel. It seemed like the further down he got, the more she picked away at him. Tom put it down to her own unhappiness; she had no idea what she was doing to him.
To be sure that she was taken care of while he was in prison, Tom willingly acceded to Pat’s request that he sign over his power of attorney to her. That way she could handle their affairs and parcel out what little money they had left without having to travel down to Jackson to get his signature. That way she would be making decisions about his children.
***
Before the dogwoods budded out in the spring of 1976, Tom was on his way to Jackson, handcuffed to another prisoner, both of them chained to another pair of prisoners in the bus seat behind them. That was “the chain,” and it was as long or as short as the number of prisoners shuffling off to “the walls.”
Once Tom was in Jackson, Pat made sure that she would be his primary source of information. She told everyone that only “immediate family members” were allowed to write to him. No one else wrote to him for a long time, believing it was forbidden. Tom viewed all events through his wife’s letters. The state of Georgia and his wife controlled his life.
Although Pat's doctors had doubted she would be able to stand the fifty-mile trip down to Jackson, she managed amazingly well. While Tom was still in the “fish tank”—the diagnostic testing that all new prisoners go through—he was allowed no visitors for six weeks. After that, Pat visited, in a setting where they could touch. There, Pat spoke openly for the first time of a plan she had been hinting at. Since Tom would be locked up for so long, she had come to realize that the only way they could be reunited was to pledge to commit suicide.
Initially, he didn’t take her seriously.
When Tom finished his diagnostic tests in Jackson, he was put to work as an inmate clerk and became “a pretty good secretary.” He did well. Somehow, finally being in prison wasn’t nearly as bad as the two years of waiting in the Fulton County jail.
Whenever he and Pat visited or talked on the phone, she would mention the suicide pact. Tom always refu
sed to discuss it. Talking softly and fervently to his wife from a pay phone in Jackson, he murmured, “Shug, don’t say we’ll never be together again. Never—that’s like a steel door. ‘Never gonna come home. Never gonna do this. Never gonna do that. . . .’ I’ve gotta have hope, Shug. Pat, I would do anything in this world for you—”
“Almost, Shug,” she said, so quietly that he could barely hear her.
“What?”
“Almost. Almost anything.”
He knew what she meant, and he realized she had trapped him.
She kept talking. “Can you do something for me? Say you love me more than anyone, but don’t say you love me more than anything.”
“Why don’t you want me to say it?”
“Because it’s not anything.”
He sighed.
“I know you love me more than anybody, she argued. “But not more than any thing. You love life more than any thing.”
Gently, Pat reminded him that he had betrayed her in the most basic way. But as she kept talking about it, he had the odd sense that a rabbit had run over his grave. It was not fair, she complained, that he was not willing to kill himself so that he could be with her in eternity. She had no one to take care of her and he was thoughtless and uncaring to expect her to go on alone when, if he truly loved her, they could be together in death. Her quiet sobs echoing in his ears, Tom went back to his cell feeling useless and depressed.
Even so, he was glad for the next call, the next visit. Tom looked forward to seeing his wife on visitors’ day and to getting letters from her.
She was his world—all the world that mattered to him.
Her visits, however, were sometimes as upsetting as her calls. Tom was a little chagrined at Pat’s behavior when she came to Jackson. Pat waged full-scale war on the authorities who controlled her husband’s destiny. She never failed to cause, at the very least, a hassle—and often a scene.
All mail was censored. Tom’s letters to Pat had to be handed unsealed to the guard for mailing, and all of her letters were read before they were given to him. Pat’s letters were full of references to various prison officials, derogatory and inflammatory comments. It was almost as if she were deliberately taunting them. “Here I was doing my best to be a model inmate,” Tom said later, “and she kept making accusations against the system.”
Whatever she did, Tom still longed for Pat with a steady ache, and he went to sleep nights listening to the poignant love songs—their songs—that bespoke unspent passion and endless frustration. It well nigh killed him that he couldn’t be with her—to help her and to take care of Paw and Ma. Pat continued to remind Tom not to talk to anyone. He must remember that he couldn't trust anyone else—not even his lawyers. Sometimes he wondered what the point was. He was in prison, and it looked as if he were going to stay there for a long, long time. His appeals were almost exhausted.
As the months dragged on, Pat was no longer vague about when and how she and Tom should commit suicide. She reminded him constantly that it was the only way for them to be together. “One time, she told me we were going to do it next week,” Tom recalled later, grimacing. “She didn’t show me what she had, but . . . she even tried to bring some stuff into Jackson, and she wanted me to commit suicide with her right there. It was supposed to be some sort of pills or something. I told her, ‘I ain’t ready to die yet.’ She told me to take them, and then she’d go out and take some herself, and we’d both be dead, and we could be together. I couldn’t. It didn’t make any kind of sense. Besides, I didn’t believe in suicide, and that’s what she wanted.”
Pat was asking him to make the supreme sacrifice for their love. She was asking him to die for her—and trust that she would die for him. Tom wouldn’t do it, perhaps because, for the first time, he was beginning to have serious doubts about his wife.
PART FIVE
NONA AND PAW
CHAPTER 28
Dr. R. Lanier Jones had his own practice, specializing in internal medicine, on Church Street in East Point. Nona and Paw Allanson had been his patients for almost a decade. Jones was one of a vanishing breed of doctor; he actually made house calls. On the night of the double murder of Walter and Carolyn, he had gotten out of bed and gone over to see to the elder Allansons.
Old Walter was a brick wall of a man. He had started in steelwork in 1926, farming in his spare time, and didn’t quit until he was over sixty-five. Nona, younger than Paw by seven years, had not enjoyed the same robust health. Dr. Jones had treated her for two massive strokes, in 1968 and 1974. Nona’s right arm and both legs were completely paralyzed, she had only partial use of her left arm, and she had difficulty swallowing. Her speech was slurred so badly that only those close to her could decipher what she was saying. All of her life she had been active, and she was a proud woman. Now, she could do virtually nothing for herself.
Paw and Nona had been married for forty-nine years. Not openly demonstrative people, they were a quiet love match, and Dr. Jones was impressed with Paw’s tender attention to his wife. “He had been extremely strong. . . . He lifted her, turned her frequently through the night, helped her into her chair. [All the] bodily care of her through the years. I thought he was an extremely strong person.”
Paw kept his wife spotlessly clean and well fed. He tempted Nona’s appetite with his corn muffins and coconut-sweet-potato pie. Most stroke patients get bedsores, but Nona didn’t. She needed an enema every night, and Paw took care of that with sensitivity and as little fuss as possible.
Paw was not a smoker or a drinker, and he took few pills. “He just didn’t want it—didn’t need it,” his doctor recalled. The old man had suffered stoically through the loss of his only son and daughter-in-law, the conviction of his grandson, and then had borne much of the cost of Tom’s defense. But at seventy-nine, the burdens had taken their toll. In the middle of January 1976, Paw called his doctor complaining of a tightness in his chest and some pain. Dr. Jones sent his own nurse out to Washington Road to drive Paw back to his office. Paw insisted he was just fine, but Jones determined that he had had a heart attack and sent him immediately to South Fulton Hospital. A blood clot had blocked a coronary artery and a portion of Paw’s heart muscle had died.
Dr. Jones had Nona admitted for temporary care in a nursing home, but she was miserable there without Paw so she was transferred to South Fulton too and placed in a room right next to Paw’s.
Jean Boggs learned belatedly about her father’s heart attack from her minister. The pastor and parishioners from the Westside Christian Church often visited her parents and kept her informed of their progress. That way, she at least knew how they were. She hurried to the hospital and visited her father. Then she went to her parents’ home and found the doors padlocked. When she asked Margureitte Radcliffe about the locks, she was told that her father didn't want anyone inside—not even Jean. Pat was handling all of Paw’s business matters.
Jean was hurt to think that her parents would put a relative stranger above her. She had warned her father that he might be sorry for putting his trust in other people, but he paid little attention to her. Now it was clear that both of her parents had somehow become totally involved with Tom’s wife and her parents.
Paw was a tough old bird, and Dr. Jones released him from the hospital on February 13, four weeks after he was admitted. He wanted to get out so he could take Nona home again. Paw was given a mild antianxiety sedative, Vistaril, after the heart attack. He used it only occasionally. But he knew he wasn’t as strong as he had been, and it was a good thing to have Tom’s wife to spell him. Pat wasn't well, and she reminded him of that often, so it impressed him even more to see her with her cane, trying to help them, smiling through her own pain.
Jean Boggs was effectively shut out of her parents’ life; Tom’s letters and Pat’s continual warnings about Jean had apparently convinced them that she was greedy and that she didn’t care about them at all. Besides, they had Pat now.
When Nona was hospitalized with pneumon
ia in March, Jean went to see her mother and found a note on the door barring all visitors except “granddaughter [Pat] and Mr. Allanson.” Jean was hurt, and she was worried. She had a sense of impending disaster, but nothing she could really prove. She asked her pastor to help her get through to her parents, and she complained to Dr. Jones. Jones was well aware that there was dissension between Jean and her parents. “I didn’t make it my business to find out why,” he said later. All Dr. Jones really knew was that Paw had insisted on several occasions that the doctor was not to call Jean Boggs in an emergency, “I was told to call Pat Allanson.”
Jean was not needed on Washington Road, although she kept trying to be with her parents. She visited them on Mother’s Day in May 1976 and took a gift. Nona barely glanced at it and sniffed, “I already have one of those.” Jean tried to smile and said, “Well, now you have two.”
At the time, she noted how well her father looked, how alert he was; he was fully aware of current affairs. He was the same ornery, closed-in man she had always known, but it was not Paw who was shutting Jean out so completely. It was her mother. Nona plainly didn’t want her there. Theirs was a family in which estrangements were not uncommon, and although Jean was still hurt, she still hoped and expected to make things right with her parents. Jean knew very little about her parents’ financial affairs, but she suspected that Pat and Tom might be eating into their capital with their constant need for money for lawyers, writs, and appeals.
There wasn’t a thing Jean could do about it.
In the spring of 1976, Pat was out on Washington Road almost daily with Nona and Paw; Debbie, her five-year- old daughter, Dawn, and Boppo and Papa were often there too. It was as if the elderly couple had had a “family transplant”—just as Tom himself had had two and a half years before. As refined and ladylike as she was, Margureitte Radcliffe seemed such a warm, selfless woman. She bustled around Paw and Nona’s home, doing the things Pat couldn’t do because she was on crutches. And Pat. Well, Pat was family.