by Ann Rule
“Once she used an instrument that was a leather tooling device. It’s with a metal thing about this long [demonstrating]. . . . She was scratching herself with that. Other times, she used a small forceps—about so large—that she had.”
“Did you on any occasion have Pat committed to a psychiatric hospital?”
This had to be agony for Margureitte. She had sat in this very courthouse two and a half years earlier and painted the picture of “Mrs. Allanson,” her daughter, the near-saint who had devoted herself to the tender care of Paw and Nona—a woman who was above reproach. She had never wanted anyone to discover that her perfect daughter had engaged in self-mutilation. Margureitte would have said anything to get Pat out of prison, but her words at long last had the ring of truth.
She continued to describe the daughter she had tried to hide from the world, the headstrong, histrionics-prone woman who took whatever she wanted. “On one evening, she had cut her wrists and I knew certainly that I couldn’t get her to go on her own free will. . . I talked with her doctor . . . and I saw Judge Gunby, and I signed the papers and they picked her up and took her to Metropolitan.”
“Did Pat ever try to inflict pain upon herself in any other way?” Sonja asked.
“Yes . . . this same abscessed area, eventually the doctors decided to do plastic surgery. I thought she had put acid on it—because it turned black. . . . She would not let herself heal up . . . I did not see her scratch herself. She would have places all over her, on her wrists, and on her body.”
And then there were the drugs. Margureitte had tried so hard, she said, to wean her daughter off Demerol, but it didn’t work. “She wanted Demerol . . . I was asked to give her the drugs and then to gradually reduce them. . . . Eventually, I was adding so much distilled water to the Demerol, and then once, when I no longer had any phenocain—which you could tell has a little burn when this is injected—she knew . . . she was not getting it. She became very agitated. . . . Dr. Gandhi gave me enough so that I could add a little bit of phenocain. . . . I was never really able to get her off it. Somebody would give it to her.”
Margureitte described a night when Pat had come home from Crawford Long Hospital after treatment for the abscess. “Colonel Radcliffe was out of state and it was sleeting outside and rainy.” She said she thought Pat was safely tucked in bed. “I went back and she was gone.”
Margureitte said she had tracked her daughter “like an animal” out there behind the house on Tell Road. “She wouldn’t let me come near her . . . she said . . . she would take the same instrument that she had used on her right hip and she would plunge it into her heart.” Margureitte sat straight and unflinching as she unveiled one histrionic scene after another, her crystal gaze fixed, daring anyone to think less of her and her daughter.
Sonja Salo maintained that Margureitte’s testimony was newly discovered evidence that Dunham McAllister had not known about during Pat’s trial. “I think under the law that if she was, in fact, legally insane at the time, she could not be held criminally responsible for a crime.”
Judge Hicks seemed a little puzzled. “Doesn’t that take some adjudication, to declare one legally insane? She has not ever, I assume . . . been declared legally insane, has she?”
Sonja said that that could be decided prior to any new trial Pat would have, but she certainly felt the question of Pat’s insanity made a new trial necessary.
“Of course,” the judge pointed out, “all of the information you had Mrs. Radcliffe testify to so far today was known by Mrs. Radcliffe way back in 1975 and ’76 and she was in touch with the attorney, Mr. McAllister, and testified as a witness in the trial. . . . None of that information is anything new, is it?”
Sonja explained that this was all new, not only to Dunham McAllister, but to everyone else. Margureitte Radcliffe had not known what to do with her knowledge that her daughter was “insane,” so she told no one. “Mrs. Radcliffe is under no legal obligation, if she has problems with her child, to be telling an attorney or anyone else that problem.”
Judge Hicks was baffled and a little annoyed. “Well, who is the moving party in this case today? Is it the same Patricia Allanson? Is it her guardian? Is it a legal fiction —or who is the court reviewing?”
Sonja Salo believed so much in her cause that she may not have seen how specious her arguments were. She had had no psychiatric tests done on Pat, who was the “movant,” because “I do not believe Patricia Allanson today is legally insane. This is a very strange situation.”
It was indeed.
Andy Weathers cross-examined Margureitte Radcliffe. He quickly elicited the information that she had known that Dunham McAllister was her daughter’s attorney for ten months before her trial, but she said she had been so unsure of her legal rights that she had never mentioned to him that she felt Pat was insane. Nor had either she or her husband felt they should bring that out in trial.
To date, Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe had presented many faces to the world. But, never, ever had they appeared timid and unsure. Weathers’s voice was thinly edged with sarcasm as he questioned the witness and drew forth only repetitions of how awed she had been by the Georgia judicial system. Margureitte said she had had no idea in the whole wide world that she should have mentioned her daughter’s craziness to anyone, or even that she had the legal right to do that.
Sonja Salo introduced an affidavit from Dr. Ray Loring Johnson, a psychiatrist who had treated Pat at the Metropolitan Psychiatric Center in April of 1975, but who had lost track of her between June and December. He had not seen her again until the next October. He’d seen Pat twice in December 1976, and seven times in early 1977, as she awaited trial. He had diagnosed her initially as having “severe personality disorientation” when she slashed her wrists after being struck by Colonel Radcliffe. She had been obsessed with getting Tom out of jail and felt she and her husband were being mistreated. At that time, Johnson saw agitation, disorganization, and “much paranoid ideation.”
Essentially, Dr. Johnson could not diagnose what Pat’s mental state might have been at the time of the arsenic poisonings. He hadn’t seen her at all during that phase of her life. “It is impossible for me to make definite statements about her sanity at the time of the offense, since this was three or four months after I saw her in December 1975, and six to seven months before I saw her again in October 1976. I can say that she was disorganized, suspicious, mistrustful, and, on several occasions, had seemed out of touch with reality during my earlier work with her . . . I believe that it was quite probable that she was out of touch with reality at the time of the offense.” Dr. Johnson did, however, say that he felt Pat had been “unable to collaborate effectively with her attorney in the preparation of her defense. At no time did she question her own sanity, or entertain the idea of making it an issue at her trial.”
Next came an affidavit from Dunham McAllister to the effect that he had not been aware that Patricia Allanson was “harboring any legal mental defect.” Andy Weathers bought none of it. He argued that it was ridiculous to think that McAllister could have spent almost a year with Pat preparing for trial and failed to notice that she was insane. It was even more ridiculous that she could testify at length at her own trial and that no one from Judge Holt, to Weathers himself, to the jury had found her even marginally mentally incompetent. “Now, the other sort of a shotgun defense that is being raised here is that she didn’t know what she was doing at the time she did the act,” Weathers argued. “The defense in this case was that she did not do it, and she very clearly took part in that defense and testified to that effect.”
Pat Taylor’s current appeal was based on one of the most familiar defense postures ever used: I didn’t do it— but if I did do it, I was crazy at the time. And now I’m not crazy anymore.
It seldom worked.
Weathers would allow only that Pat “might not have been operating mentally at peak capacity.” That didn’t make her crazy.
The family hoped and prayed
that Pat would be home with them by Christmas. It was not to be. On December 9, 1980, Judge Ralph Hicks rendered his decision. “It is hereby ADJUDGED, ORDERED and DECREED that said Motion be and the same is DENIED.” Hicks did not find that the evidence was “newly discovered.” He was not convinced that Pat Allanson had suddenly come to her senses and discovered that she had been insane from 1975 to 1977.
Sonja Salo was a very nice young woman. She had done the best she could for Pat and the Radcliffes, and they had lost. Years later, she acknowledged how gullible she had been to believe Pat’s stories; she had even believed in the sociopathic sister hidden away in North Carolina. “I can say now,” she concluded wryly, “that Pat Taylor is the most manipulative human being I ever met in my life.”
***
Pat’s story seemed to be over. She was a middle-aged woman, confined to prison for many, many years, her beauty blurred by too much fasting and gorging and by the passing of those years. She found her pleasure in the pages of a craft store catalog and in bombarding her grandchildren—except for Ashlynne—with handmade presents. She sent Sean dainty, hand-painted handkerchiefs to carry to school. He thanked her dutifully, and put them in a drawer. She promised him she would buy him a pony as soon as she was free. (She never did.) Pat had never gone into any phase of her life halfway. She became completely obsessed with Victorian needlework. Her letters could still prickle at the consciences of those who loved her. She moved in their minds always, a pitiful creature who lived a desperate existence while they went about enjoying their lives. “Please remember,” Pat wrote to apologize for slow progress on a petit point picture in April of 1982, “my day starts at 4 am & I work from 7am-8 or 9 pm. Then when I do get in at night, I do have to shower, hand wash & iron my clothes for next day. (I only have 2 uniforms.) Then usually I have a little dress to smock or hem, etc. But I usually spend every available moment (that I have any light) on it.”
Pat was horrified to hear that Susan and Bill were moving away from Georgia again. She worried about how it would affect her grandchildren.
“I realize that I have no right to voice an opinion or offer advice; for who am I? I’m a prisoner but I’m also your mother. . . . Yes, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Let me say one thing—if I lived to be a 100, I am paying. I’m paying for anything I ever did, or thought of doing or would ever do. It’s Hell enough to not know if I did or did not attempt to harm those two people. But that’s something I have to live with & get straight with God. I know I’ll never take another pill (narcotic) for you can be turned into a monster & not even know it & then everyone & everything that comes into contact with you is harmed in some form or another. That’s a form of Hell in itself, to know that you’ve done this (& to people whom you love & who love you) & yet you have no real memory of it . . . If anyone ever has any doubt that I’m not suffering sufficiently, I assure them I am & will continue to do so until the day I die. And the worst suffering is not the incarceration, but the knowledge that I’m responsible for destroying the stability of my family.”
Pat finally acknowledged to her elder daughter that she herself took complete responsibility for everything that had happened; she only wondered if she would ever have a life again. She had been locked up for five years. If ever a woman voiced regret and appeared sincerely rehabilitated, it was Pat Taylor.
Her letters made her children cry.
CHAPTER 41
***
Tom Allanson had been locked up for six and a half years when Pat’s appeal for a new trial was denied. The staffs at both Jackson and Buford prisons and the parole board had labeled him a model prisoner. He had served many terms as president of Buford’s chapter of the Junior Chamber of Commerce—the Rock Quarry Jaycees— been the executive state director of the Jaycees, and for several years was chairman of the Institutional Beautification Project. He organized a picnic the Rock Quarry Jaycees put on for the mentally retarded. He was voted the most valuable player on the All-Tournament football team. He wrote a column and articles and took photographs for the prison paper. He was vice-president of the Full Gospel Association, sang in the church choir twice each Sunday, and, most important, on July 31, 1981, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.
Tom was no longer completely alone in the world. Liz Price, his old neighbor in Zebulon, the woman he had had a crush on when he was sixteen years old, the woman who had carried feed and water to his animals after he was arrested, had written to him for most of the years he was in prison. His abandoned horseshoeing trailer was, in fact, still parked on her farm. It was locked and Pat had lost the key long ago. He had no idea if his tools were still inside, but Liz told him she was keeping the trailer safe for him.
She and Tom exchanged newsy, friendly letters at first; he was still legally married to Pat. “I wrote to Liz first,” he remembered. “I was so depressed. I had no idea what was happening at home, and it seemed like everybody had turned their back on me—and she answered, and she would come to see me once in a while down at Jackson.”
Liz left Georgia, moved to Florida, and vowed to forget Tom. Unknown to him, she had always loved Tom—at least somewhere in the back of her mind—and she needed to leave behind her all the sad reminders of what had happened. She didn’t want him to know how she felt about him, not as long as he was a married man.
For a long time Tom had no idea where Liz was. He missed her letters; she was different from any woman he had ever known. She didn’t seem to want anything from him—Liz was simply his friend.
After his divorce from Pat in the spring of 1979, they got back in touch again; Liz had moved back to Forsyth County and taken a clerical job in the sheriff’s office. Gradually, their letters became more personal. Tom told her he had little hope that he would be out of prison soon, if ever. He expected to serve at least fourteen years. That meant a probable parole date sometime in 1989.
It didn’t matter to Liz. She visited Tom regularly, never missing a Sunday evening.
After a year or so, they knew they wanted to be married, but the only way they could do that while Tom was in prison was by common law. (Later—too late for them—prison marriages were permitted at Buford.) They presented papers to prison authorities for a common-law marriage. It took persistence, but they finally got permission to get married. There were no conjugal visits in Buford Prison. That didn’t matter either. They had a common-law prison wedding in late 1980, and promised each other they would have another wedding when Tom was free.
Although Tom’s applications for parole were turned down all through the early 1980s, he gained a sense of freedom inside prison. He vowed that he would not let the years behind bars destroy him. “Prison . . . doesn’t mean it has to be torture or like the movies,” he wrote to a friend. “Actually, it all depends on the individual’s attitude and what they are made of. There are many that are miserable here and do everything they can to make everybody else miserable. Personally, I try to live right and follow the rules and make the best of this time.”
Buford’s warden paid for Tom to take correspondence courses from Clemson, and he received a state of Georgia certificate and license as a water and wastewater treatment plant operator and laboratory analyst. Later, he was certified for South Carolina too. He paid for his own correspondence course from Cal State-Sacramento to upgrade his skills even more. He soon ran Buford’s water and sewage treatment plant and Tom was the only trusty working outside the plant who had a driver’s license. He was outside regularly, running errands as far as seventy-five miles away. He was always back on time, to the minute.
Later, he grinned as he remembered one amusing incident. “One time, we had a busload of prisoners over at the warden’s place to help him move—and he got an emergency call that his wife had been in an accident. He took off, running, and yells, ‘Tom, take the guys back.’ So I come driving up to the prison with a whole busload of prisoners, delivering them all safe and sound.”
Since he never had anyone to send him money to buy even the smal
lest necessities, like shaving cream and toothpaste, in the prison commissary, Tom worked with leather to make belts, purses, and billfolds to sell, and he was good at it—so good that he could even help Liz out from time to time. After a while, he even had his own “house” of sorts—the control building for the treatment plant. It was air-conditioned and had hot water, a shower, a carpet on the floor, a couple of big old comfortable chairs, and a radio. He added a hot plate and adopted two stray kittens for company.
It wasn’t a real house, and Tom couldn’t stay there at night, but he was on his own from 6:45 in the morning until dark, with breaks for meals at the prison. He wasn’t required to work that long, but he much preferred being outside working to being inside. Sometimes, in the early evenings, he cooked up a pot of greens and sat listening to the radio with his two cats asleep on his lap. He had long since learned to appreciate and savor small pleasures. He could have walked away from prison easily. He never did; he never really thought about it. He visited with Liz on Sunday evenings and hoped for the day he might be paroled.
As he later described it, Tom Allanson “was the farm” at Buford. He did all the plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting by himself on the three-quarter-acre plot they gave him. He bought his own seeds. When his crops ripened, he gave away produce to the warden, officers, teachers, and secretaries and, of course, to Liz.
He grew watermelons, corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, and sweet potatoes in the summer and turnips, mustard greens, collards, and cabbage in the winter. There was an arbor of muscadine grapes. He was most serene when he was out alone “bush-hogging” a watermelon field, working under the Georgia sun until the sweat glistened and rolled off his bare back.
Tom had marked a decade at Buford in August of 1987. He was a middle-aged man. He cautiously hoped to make parole. He had three jobs waiting for him on the outside; his expertise in wastewater treatment was much sought after. But once again he was disappointed. After his ten years at Buford, on November 6, 1987, he was suddenly transferred back to Jackson Prison. They needed him to run the sewage treatment plant; it was due to open December 1 and would be five times bigger than the one at Buford. Jackson had no one left to operate a Class II treatment plant. One of their few trained men had tried to escape and been transferred out, and another was due to be released.