by Ann Rule
Rat poison came in liquid form—in six-ounce bottles. There were no dusty medicine bottles out in Paw Allanson’s barn or shed. If he had ever used old-fashioned preparations to treat his animals, medicines containing arsenic, they were no longer on his premises.
***
The news media had heard rumors about “poisonings” in East Point. On July 8, Detective Sergeant Tedford was closemouthed, hinting only that “as many as four persons might be arrested.” He refused to name those persons. There were too many missing elements of the case yet to be revealed.
One very large segment was added when the investigators learned from Paw Allanson’s attorneys, Fred Reeves and Bill Hamner, that there had been no fewer than three codicils to the elder Allansons’ wills in a relatively short time. The original wills, drawn on September 11, 1974— two months after Walter and Carolyn were murdered— named Tom and his aunt Jean Boggs as co-executors of Paw and Nona’s estates. On March 4 of 1975, after Pat had made herself indispensable to the old couple, the first codicils added Pat as a co-executor, in case Tom could not serve. The attorneys said they had gone to the Allansons’ home and no one else was present as Paw and Nona signed the documents.
The second codicils came on August 1, 1975. Jean Boggs was removed completely as an executor, although she still received certain assets under terms of her parents’ wills. Reeves and Hamner had been very careful to see that both Allansons read and understood each section of the codicils. If Pat Allanson was in the house at the time, she was not present at the signing.
On January 20, 1976, after Paw had his heart attack, Pat was given a sweeping power of attorney. And finally, on February 4, 1976, when Nona and Paw were both hospitalized for extended care at South Fulton, the third codicils changed the distribution of the elderly Allansons’ fortune completely. Jean was eliminated altogether as an heir. Paw and Nona Allanson’s current wills dictated that their assets would be distributed thusly:
Fifty percent (50%) of the trust estate; or all real estate, farm animals, jewelry, clothing, household goods, furniture and furnishings, pictures, silverware, objects of art and automobiles . . . shall be distributed to my grandson, Tom Allanson, if he be in life. If my grandson, Tom Allanson, be not in life and is married to Patricia R. Allanson at his death [a clause that Hamner and Reeves had insisted on] then the property named in this subparagraph shall pass and be distributed to Patricia R. Allanson.
The remaining portion of my trust estate shall be divided equally between my grandson, Tom Allanson, my grandson, David Byron Boggs, and my grand-daughter Nona Lisa Boggs.
I have specifically excluded my daughter, Jean Elizabeth Boggs, from any distribution of my estate. I have done this as my daughter has adequately provided for herself and I have further decided that recent changes and events concerning the Allanson family situation dictate that my estate could best be utilized and would be more beneficial to the aforenamed individuals.
Tom Allanson was, indeed, “in life" but he was also in for life. What the third codicils to his grandparents’ wills really meant was that, should they die, his wife, Pat, would control 66 percent of a very healthy inheritance. She would have Tom’s half of the entire trust, plus Tom’s third of the half that he shared equally with his two cousins. She would also be the executor. Anything the old couple had beyond the trust assets would also go to Pat.
As long as Tom was in prison.
Tom was cut off from his family; his information was controlled by his wife. Her letters and infrequent visits were his only window on the world outside, and she didn’t fill him in on all the boring details of wills and codicils. She kept assuring him that she was fighting to get him out. His last chance would be coming up in November.
Tom had no idea how dicey things were at home.
CHAPTER 33
***
All through the melting-hot July of 1976, Pat and the Radcliffes waited for the other shoe to drop. The damnable East Point police were snooping into every facet of Pat's life, asking questions, and testing everything they carted out of Paw and Nona’s house. The police were so rude; they clearly had no breeding at all. They had been rude to her mother and the colonel too, and it was unnerving to hear Bob Tedford tell the newspapers that four people might be arrested.
Tedford talked to one of Nona Allanson’s nurses, Juanita Jackson, who had cared for the elderly woman after Paw was hospitalized. Juanita had noticed that Nona seemed inordinately drowsy, and Pat had explained that she was taking some pills and needed one every twenty-four hours. She showed Juanita a bottle of green and gray capsules. But the old woman slept so much that the practical nurse had suggested to Pat, “Let’s don’t give her any more of this medication.” She didn’t know whether Pat had taken her advice or not. Mrs. Allanson remained quite groggy.
The sedative Vistaril came in a green and gray capsule in twenty-five-milligram doses, usually given three or four times a day. It had been prescribed for Paw—not Nona—and it was to be given cautiously as it had a depressive effect, particularly when combined with other medications.
“Who cooked?” Tedford asked.
“Pat did some, and sometimes she brought in food. I did some, and the night nurse did some.”
The only visitor Juanita recalled in the weeks between June 15 and June 28 was a pleasant, heavyset woman named Fanny K. Cash. But there was another visitor. Mrs. Amelia Estes had been Nona and Paw’s neighbor for nineteen years. She was appalled to find her old friend in a sorry state when she called on Nona one day after Paw was hospitalized.
“I found her different from what I had ever seen before,” she told Tedford. “You could tell something was wrong because she looked . . . drugged. She didn’t really know anybody or know what she was doing or saying. . . . Pat asked her if she wanted to go out on the porch, and we rolled her out there. Pat went to the mailbox and I sat there with her, but she could not hold her head up for any length of time . . . and if she came up, her eyes were rolling and wallowing around. There was something desperately wrong someway.”
Mrs. Estes had also been let in on Paw’s supposed confession. “I started to leave and Pat asked me if I had a few minutes. . . . She wanted to tell me about Mr. Allanson signing a confession to the murder of Walter and Carolyn! Of course it was a terrible shock to me to think that such had been done. . . . She said she had a terrible time getting him to sign it because he thought if he lived through this, they couldn't pin anything on him. She said that he had confessed to her while he was in the hospital—and she was crying—and said she had to live with this without telling anybody for so long, and nobody would ever know what she had gone through after getting the confession and having to keep it to herself.”
***
On July 20, Tedford left a call for Colonel Radcliffe, asking for another interview. Radcliffe returned the call and pointedly asked, “Are you going to be advising me of my rights again?”
“Yes, I will be.”
“Well, then I’m not coming in.”
“You can have your attorney present during any interview.”
“I can’t afford an attorney. You’ll have to provide one. No, I don’t believe I will consent to an interview.”
On July 26, Colonel Radcliffe changed his mind. He and his wife came in with their attorney and gave a formal statement to Tedford and Investigator Richard Daniell. As always, the Radcliffes were very proper, very precise in their speaking patterns, and they maintained their position of annoyed dignity, as if it were patently ridiculous for people of their social standing to actually speak with the police. Margureitte Radcliffe was the more talkative—as she always was. Her husband began most of his answers with “To the best of my knowledge” . . . and “Not to my knowledge.”
Everything—everything—they said dovetailed with their daughter’s recall of events at Paw and Nona Allanson’s home. Yes, the old woman had most assuredly been terrified of “Big Allanson” and had begged them to come and save her from Paw. They had done what decen
t Christian people would do.
Margureitte recalled that the bad weekend in June had really begun on Wednesday afternoon, June 9. Nona had called the Radcliffe home on Tell Road to say she had had nothing to eat, she had wet herself, and needed help. “I said I had no transportation at the moment, but whoever got to the house first would come over,” Margureitte said. “My husband and I went . . . and gave her some water. . . . I cleaned her up. . . . Mr. Allanson said he was feeling not so good, his legs were a little weak and had been bothering him, and he had not been able to do anything for her.”
Margureitte and Pat had stayed that night with the old couple. Things had, of course, been worse on Saturday morning when the colonel had to break into the house. Neither of them had actually seen Paw swallow any pills. Colonel Radcliffe thought it might have been Tang, and not orange juice, that Paw had been drinking. They had both seen the old whiskey bottle.
“I saw a pint bottle,” Margureitte explained, “and I haven’t the remotest idea of what it was. . . . By the freezer, there’s a mangle thing—there was a bottle . . . and the doctor had said, ‘Get everything out of his way.’ Mrs. Allanson [Pat] said, ‘Pour it out,’ and before I could say ‘beans’, my husband took it in the bathroom and politely turned it up and poured it out. I said, ‘Maybe you shouldn't have poured it out—because Dr. Jones possibly will want to look at it.’ ”
Both the Radcliffes stressed that it was Dr. Jones who had planted the idea of an “overdose" in their minds. Margureitte added some details, however, to Paw’s bizarrely assaultive behavior. “She [Nona] . . . said at one point he [Paw] held her mouth and said, ‘Drink this coffee!’ But it wasn't coffee!’ ” Her voice lowered to a dramatic whisper. “Now I said to her, ‘Ma, you mean he didn’t have anything?’ And she said, ‘I mean it wasn't coffee.’. . . Then she said he had pulled her hair and tried to smother her with a pillow. She said at one point, he had tried to wrap her up in the sheets!”
“Were you aware,” Richard Daniell asked suddenly, “that Tom Allanson and your daughter, Pat, at the time back in June—in the event of either Mr. or Mrs. Allanson dying—that they would get almost everything according to the wills?”
Margureitte sighed deeply. “I know Nona’s told me that she wanted to change her will. I don't know what the feelings are in that family, and, frankly, I wish I’d never heard of any of them! I’ll be perfectly honest with you, they’ve really just torn us apart. They don’t even like each other—can’t even tolerate each other.”
The detectives were fascinated to hear the Radcliffes backing off on vital specifics and filling in dramatic details elsewhere in their statements. Most of all, they were interested to see just the slightest fraying at the edges of this couple’s facade of elegant detachment. They were protesting too much.
The Radcliffes announced that they had a witness outside the family who could back up their recall of old Walter Allanson’s aggressive behavior: Fanny K. Cash, their good neighbor on Tell Road. Fanny had, in fact, accompanied them to the East Point Police Department. She too was advised of her rights under Miranda and didn’t bat an eye.
Although Fanny had not seen the elderly Allansons for a month, Pat and the Radcliffes had prevailed upon her to spend that Saturday night at the Allanson home, so that Pat wouldn’t be alone. She had agreed to go, as long as they would see she got to church on Sunday morning. She was very active, she explained, in church activities and ladies’ circle meetings.
Fanny Kate had packed up her bag, and Pat had picked her up. It must have been somewhat crowded in the Washington Road house; there were only two bedrooms, and Nona was in hers and Paw was in the guest room. Pat had said she had slept in bed with Nona. Fanny K. would have had to bunk on a couch.
Fanny said she had been told that Paw had been taking something that put him “to sleep.” “Mrs. Radcliffe is a trained nurse, and she knows when she sees some of these things.”
Asked about liquor bottles, Fanny recalled seeing only one. “It was just a plain old liquor bottle with no label on it—and what was in it smelt enough. It would have knocked a polecat down to have smelt it, whatever it was. And I said, ‘Well, if anybody drank that, they were bad off with something!’ ”
“Who told you he [Paw] had been drinking out of this bottle?” Tedford asked.
“Mrs. Allanson did—Grandma—did. I asked her plainly. She said she thought he had quit drinking; he had promised her that. And she seemed to be very much disturbed because he had taken it behind her back. . . .”
“In other words, the Radcliffes or Pat Allanson didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Where did you see this bottle?”
“It was there in the laundry room.”
Fanny K. Cash said she had known the Radcliffes for almost ten years. “There are no finer people nowhere than they are,” she added.
***
July in Atlanta was so hot that even the kudzu vines drooped, and the days passed sluggishly, the only sound on a hot afternoon the buzz of flies and cicadas. The big news in Georgia was the nomination of Jimmy Carter on July 14 as the Democratic candidate for president, with Walter Mondale as his running mate. Carter would be the first major party nominee from the Deep South since the ill-fated Zachary Taylor ran in 1848. Political news eclipsed crime news in the Atlanta papers. Still, for those involved in the Allanson investigation—or fearful of involvement—there was only one story.
Everybody was jumpy. Martha Foster, one of the Allansons’ practical nurses from the Quality Care referral service, had been staying in the empty Washington Road house, in case either of the Allansons could come home from the hospital. In late July, she went to the emergency room of the South Fulton Hospital, vomiting and complaining of terrible pains in her abdomen. She was transferred to Grady Hospital, where Bob Tedford found her. He asked her how long she had been staying at the Allansons’ house.
“I’ve been out there since last Wednesday—the twenty-first.”
“When did you get sick?”
“Sunday, yesterday.”
“What did you eat there?”
“Just some frozen hot dogs that were in the freezer. The only other thing I had there was the coffee and the Pream—that powdered cream substitute stuff.”
Mrs. Foster’s urine was checked for arsenic. It was negative. The hot dogs were gone. The coffee and Pream were analyzed. Arsenic in powder form can be white or brownish or yellow—or even red. Test samples proved to be only coffee and Pream. However, another vial of pills was found, a prescription with Nona Allanson’s name on the label. There was one capsule inside that was different from the rest.
The capsule had a pill inside; analysis of the pill showed it was mercury. In some forms, mercury can be a deadly poison. Liquid mercury, however, is not as lethal. The investigators learned that it had once been an accepted treatment for constipation, way back in the twenties and thirties. Since the old couple had kept pills for twenty-five years, it was possible that they had kept some even longer. But the pill-within-a-capsule was not liquid; it was compressed powder. Deadly. Why was there a single capsule with mercury in it in a modern prescription container?
On July 26, Nona Allanson was released from the hospital and returned to the house on Washington Road. Her daughter Jean would henceforth be in charge of her care. Paw Allanson remained in South Fulton Hospital in fair condition.
***
Dunham McAllister was using old Walter Allanson’s confession as the focal point of his strategy to free Tom. On July 30, McAllister filed a motion requesting a hearing in Fulton County Superior Court to determine whether a new trial was warranted for Walter Thomas Allanson, since someone else had confessed to the crimes for which he had been convicted. The Fulton County D.A.’s Office denounced the confession as worthless. They had Paw’s affidavit repudiating it.
Still, the new activity gave Tom the first hope he had had in a long time. There was an irony here; if Tom should be freed, would he be reunited with his wife? O
r would they be like the old fable—the fox, the goose, and the grain—where one was always onshore and the others in the boat? It was beginning to look as if Pat might go to prison herself.
The time had come to fish or cut bait. Andy Weathers of the D.A.’s office believed that they could get convictions. At least it was worth a try; to simply walk away from a case where two elderly people had nearly died would be unconscionable. How many names would be on the indictments? Four? Three? More than four ?
On August 6, 1976, Bob Tedford appeared before the grand jury and presented the evidence his team of detectives had gathered on the arsenic poisonings of Nona and Walter Allanson. Much of it was circumstantial, and it would be a squeaker. He had to show motive, method, and opportunity on the part of someone with murder in his or her heart.
Pat Allanson had had the motive to want her husband’s grandparents dead—two motives really: she was both heir and executor of their wills and she needed money to live the life she longed for and to get “her Tom” out of prison. She had had the opportunity: she had the victims’ total trust. And she could very easily have had the means. The arsenic in that old whiskey bottle had, perhaps, been “squirreled away” out in the barn, way back in the days when Paw was an active farmer. Or perhaps it had recently been purchased, supposedly to kill rats. The prosecution team couldn’t prove either theory; they had never found the actual source of the arsenic. As for what had taken place in the house on Washington Road, four stories matched much too closely—Pat’s, Margureitte Radcliffe’s, Colonel Radcliffe’s, and Fanny K. Cash’s. Meanwhile, the stories of Amelia Estes, Jean Boggs, and her friend Sherry Allen were diametrically opposed to the first story.
No one knew what might happen behind the closed doors of the grand jury, but that very day in the first week of August, the Fulton County grand jury returned an indictment.