by Ann Rule
CHAPTER 8
***
Gus Thornhill called Detective George Zellner at home at 9:30 p.m. on the night of July 3 and asked him to come in to the station to interview two subjects: Carolyn Allanson the younger and Patricia Taylor Allanson. When Zellner arrived at East Point police headquarters, he was given a rundown on what was known so far about the double murder—which wasn’t much. Zellner had been with the East Point department for two and a half years, and he had been a detective for only a year. He was a thin—but muscled—young man.
It was ten minutes to eleven before Zellner could turn his attention to Patricia Allanson, who was waiting nervously on one of the station’s long oak benches. He saw a very attractive woman with startling green eyes. She wasn’t crying; she looked exhausted and apprehensive. The older couple with her were being very solicitous.
Zellner explained to Pat that under the Miranda decision he had to read her her rights as she was—at least nominally—a suspect and/or a material witness in the shooting deaths of her husband’s parents. Pat signed the waiver with only a trace of concern.
With Detective Lambert standing by as a witness, Zellner began to interview Pat. “Mrs. Allanson, I wonder if you would start with this afternoon?” he asked. “What happened leading up to your husband’s disappearance?”
Pat spoke rapidly and breathlessly; she had waited so long to talk to someone. Zellner had only to ask a short question here and there to keep the flow of her thoughts channeled into some sort of order.
She began with her own numerous physical problems, her sleep deprivation, and Tom’s absolute insistence that she see a doctor. “We finished shoeing horses in the morning. . . . Then Tom brought me in and took me to Dr. Thompson’s office like he always does, ’cause I can t drive without it hurting me. . . . He walked up to the door with me like always . . . It must have been three-thirty—something like that. I got through at the doctor's and Tom still wasn’t in the waiting room, so I went outside and the jeep was there. . . . When he left me, he walked in the opposite direction toward the C&S Bank. I thought he was going up there to talk to them about a loan he has there. He was trying to get an extension on it because he had been having to pay so much alimony and so much court costs and all and his father had made him lose a couple of jobs he had, and he had been begging and pleading with his father to leave us alone. His father would call and make threats and his father came out to our house last Friday when I was cutting grass . . . and exposed himself! . . . Then he [Walter] called and told my mother to tell Tom that he was going to kill him. . . . Tom had said several times he was going to see him, and I said, ‘No, just leave him alone . . .’ ”
Pat shifted gears suddenly. “I waited and waited for Tom and he didn’t come, and he has never left me like that.”
“What time did you come out of the doctor’s office?”
“They took me so soon . . . they weren't very busy today. I went in and he took the X ray of my shoulder. I don’t think I was in the doctor’s office over an hour at the very most. . . . I went outside and Tom wasn't in the jeep . . . and I had the skirt for the costume and I started working on it. I kept looking at my watch and I went back in the office and asked if I could use the phone. I was going to call over to my daughter’s. . . . It wasn't like him at all and I was beginning to get worried about him because of the threats his father had made to him. The first thing that entered my mind was that just maybe . . . his mother and father had driven by and maybe he was talking to them, or maybe he had gone to talk to them. . . . I waited and waited and waited. Then I really started getting nervous. . . . It was really getting late. . . . It must have been six because all those cars from across the street in the professional buildings—everybody was coming out of there. I was trying to figure where there was a telephone. . . . The only telephone I knew of was in the King Professional Building. I got in the jeep and drove there. . . . Tom knew I couldn’t drive that thing any great distance without it hurting me. So I tried to call his mother’s office and there was no answer—”
“Where does she work?”
“At Dr. Tucker’s office. I looked that number up. I had to go into that chicken place and get some change . . . I was so nervous . . . I didn’t know whether he got run over by a car or something! I started thinking, Now just stop and think. I called the hospital first to see if there had been anybody hit by a car or anything. I knew he had his wallet in his pocket. . . . He had his jeans on.”
“Were there any guns with him or anything?” Zellner asked.
“He didn’t have any guns with him. . . . Tom couldn’t kill anybody.”
Pat explained that Tom’s parents and maternal grandmother lived very close to her doctor’s office. “Tom . . . told me he was going to talk to them one more time: ‘I am going to beg and plead with them,’ [he said]. I said, ‘Don’t beg and plead with your father. Just leave him alone. Maybe if we just leave them alone, they will leave us alone.’ All we were trying to do was just start over again.”
Pat said she had called everyone she could think of—Tom’s parents’ house, his mother’s office—but she didn’t know Mae Mama’s number, so she had gotten in the jeep and driven around looking for Tom, becoming more and more concerned. She called her own house in Zebulon, although Tom would scarcely have had time to travel all the way to Pike County. She even called Liz Price and told her Tom was missing. Pat said she had finally called her mother and father to come and help her.
Zellner noted that Pat Allanson was highly dramatic as she described her terror.
“I sat there and started working on the skirt . . . out in the open lot. I didn’t want to get too close to the building. I knew it would get dark up there, and I didn’t know anything about who might be hanging around up there.”
“You never did actually go to his mother and father’s house?”
“No. I drove into his grandmother’s drive . . . I was going to try to talk to her but I chickened out at the last minute. . . . I thought, No, this is stupid. They won’t talk to me anyway. They will probably just shoot me because they have threatened to kill us both.”
The picture Pat painted was of two young people in love, besieged by wicked in-laws and a vindictive former wife. Zellner heard at least a half-dozen times about the “excessive” alimony, the lecherous exposing father-in-law, the threats and the strange calls in the middle of the night. It sounded as if she had been living in hell. She appeared to be a helpless, ill, and injured woman who had spent hours gripped by anxiety when her husband failed to meet her at her doctor’s office.
“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” Zellner asked about Tom.
“I don’t know unless he has gone home. But how could he go home. I don’t know how—”
“Where are you-all living now?”
“We have a farm in Zebulon. I bought a farm down there. When Tom and I were married, we moved out there. . . . Everybody knows it by ‘the Pat Allanson farm.’ I have had a Morgan farm for over fifteen years in Georgia and I am known for my horses. I moved down there to get away from up here—for us to start again.”
“Is anybody at home now?”
“No. In fact, the farm is unlocked. Everything is wide open because we expected to come right on back. We have horses that haven’t been fed, cows—or anything.”
“Did you say you don’t think Tom would be capable of anything like that?” he asked, meaning murder.
“Listen to me," Pat said fervently. “The only way Tom could hurt anybody is if they tried to hurt him first. Tom couldn’t go in there and do something to somebody just out of the clear blue sky. No way. Not Tom.”
“Even if all this back pressure had built up on him?” Pat shook her head impatiently. The police were wasting time by not questioning Tom’s ex-wife Carolyn Allanson further.
“Tom wouldn't have gone off and left me there unless it was vitally important or unless he was forced to go . . . or they did something to him. I don’t know. But if he we
nt back to their house with them, I’ll guarantee Carolyn would not have wanted them to talk. . . . If they listened to Tom, then they would have found out that she parties and that she leaves those children—and all kinds of things that she didn’t want them to know. . . . Tom didn't shoot anybody unless somebody tried to hurt him first, and I still don't believe he even shot anybody then!” But she said she would not put it past Carolyn to use a gun. She has shot at Tom before—when they were living together . . . I still remember him being late to shoe horses at my place because of that. . . . But if he was caught in the middle of it—if everything has tried to be pinned on him—”
Pat drew herself up as if she were about to make a most important pronouncement. “If he is running, he is running because he is scared because somebody is going to try to put it on him.”
“Would you have any idea where we might find him?”
“Where would a man go with no money—if he even has a dollar? He would listen to me, but I don’t know where to look for him. Do you think I don't want to find him?”
“If you should hear from him, be sure and let us know.”
“Listen,” Pat said earnestly. “Is there any way? I don't know if he is near a radio or television. Isn’t there any way? If I could just tell him to come in!”
“We’ll see what we can work out,” Zellner said. “If we can do it.”
Pat Allanson was eager to go on television to give a dramatic plea to her fugitive husband—if that was what it would take to get him back. “If they haven’t killed him,” she said bitterly, and Zellner wasn’t sure whether she was referring to his parents or the police.
“No,” Zellner assured her. “Nothing like that—yet. But it could come to that if we don’t get him.”
Pat, supported tenderly by the Radcliffes, was allowed to leave the East Point police station after Colonel Radcliffe posted a thousand-dollar bond. She would be staying with her parents at their Tell Road stables until Tom was found.
Zellner interviewed Carolyn Allanson next and failed to make much sense out of her story. She was still in shock. She kept repeating that Daddy Allanson had been searching for a burglar in the house, that he had gone down to the cellar and called to Mother Allanson to bring down his new rifle. Through tears, Carolyn told Zellner that Daddy had saved her life and her babies’ lives by ordering them out of the house. She did not mention a shooter—or shooters—by name. Zellner decided to talk with her again when she had regained a modicum of control.
CHAPTER 9
***
Deputy Billy Riggins of the Pike County Sheriff’s Office was at home late in the evening of July 3, 1974. Five days before, he had shown a panicky Pat Allanson how to load a gun to protect herself from further sexual advances from her father-in-law. Her complaint was certainly peculiar, but it hadn’t seemed to be a major incident, and Riggins hadn’t expected to hear from the Kentwood Morgan Farm again soon, although the sheriffs office had received an inordinate number of calls from the Allansons in the short time they had occupied the property. Riggins had half a suspicion that the lady was one of those nervous types. For all he knew, she’d seen a stalk of corn waving in the wind and imagined an ear of corn right into a man’s pecker.
But then it had been the very next day, just four days ago, when Riggins went out to Kentwood again at the request of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office. Walter O'Neal Allanson, the alleged exposer, and his wife had been ambushed near Lake Lanier in that county. Riggins had checked out the Allanson farm on June 29 and reported back that no one was home.
The new residents were proving to be anything but boring. Nevertheless, Riggins was shocked on this rainy Wednesday night when he got a call forwarded by the Pike County dispatch center. The East Point police wanted him to send deputies out to Kentwood Farm and see if there was any activity there. Most particularly, they asked him to be on the lookout for Walter Thomas Allanson, the owner, who was being sought for questioning in the murder of his parents.
Riggins sent deputies out to sit on the place, and they waited in the drizzling rain. They reported back that the house and barn were apparently empty, and that there were no vehicles on the premises. Riggins asked them to call him back the minute they caught sight of Tom Allanson.
Sometime after 2:30 a.m., Riggins’s phone rang. Deputies had just seen Tom walking into his house. Riggins called the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation), the sheriffs office in Spalding County—which adjoined Pike County—and the Griffin Police Department and asked for assistance in apprehending Allanson. Tom had always seemed like a real pleasant fellow, but he was huge and, if the East Point police had their suspicions right, had just blown his mother and father away. Riggins was not about to go in with his tiny squad of men to arrest Allanson. Next, Paw Allanson called Riggins to say Tom was home.
Riggins dialed the Allansons’ number and was more than a little surprised when Tom himself answered the phone. Tom sounded exhausted—but quite rational.
“You know we're good friends, Tom,” Riggins began. “I got a warrant here for your arrest, and your grand-daddy has called us and said you were home. I don’t want any problems or anything.”
“That’s okay,” Tom said. “It was me who told Paw to call. I won’t cause you no problems.”
And he didn’t. Tom Allanson walked out the front door of his house at 3:00 a.m. and was arrested for murder.
Riggins read Tom his rights under Miranda and advised him that there were two warrants charging him with the murder of his parents. He studied Tom Allanson’s face for a reaction. He saw no tears. Nor did he see surprise. The man before him seemed mostly very, very tired— and quite possibly in a state of shock.
Riggins didn’t question Tom. Rather, he held him in the Pike County jail for the hour or so it took for Detective George Zellner and Sergeants C.T. Callahan and Bill Vance to arrive to transport the prisoner back to Atlanta. Outside, the gray rain drummed against the courthouse in Zebulon and the wind scattered scarlet petals from the geraniums in the stone urns.
It was just before dawn in Zebulon when the East Point officers arrived. “You’ve already been advised of your rights, but we have to do it again,” Zellner explained to Tom. “We’ve got two warrants here charging you with the murder of your mother and your father—”
“And that’s about as ridiculous as it can be,” Tom answered, his voice flat with fatigue. He turned around willingly and waited while the East Point investigators looked for a pair of handcuffs big enough to circle his massive wrists.
They drove back to East Point in a deluge. It was officially the Fourth of July now. The tape of the East Point investigators’ conversation with their suspect was blurred by the loud drum of rain on the police unit’s roof and the steady swish-swish-swish of windshield wipers. “What happened this afternoon?” Zellner asked.
Tom explained that he and his bride had had a “big disagreement” two nights before—July 2—and that they had continued their “fussing” during their trip to her doctor’s appointment. “I finally just told her I was gonna leave, give her the money, the house, and everything else —I wasn’t any good for her—I wasn’t doing anything but hurting her—and I just left and started for home.”
Tom estimated he had left Pat about 5:00 p.m. the evening before and walked and hitchhiked his way back to Zebulon. “But I mostly walked.”
Tom told Zellner that he had realized how bad he was for Pat, that it must be him who was making her so unhappy and sick. It didn’t seem to matter how much he loved her. But then he had changed his mind. “About halfway home, I realized that was the worst thing I could do, ’cause she couldn’t get along without me.”
His story was simple. He had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion once he got home. He wasn’t running from anyone, he said, because he had done nothing wrong. He hadn’t even known his parents had been killed until his grandfather had called him.
Tom was voluble about his problems with his father, recounting all the acrimony and in
fighting over his recent divorce. Tom hadn’t seen his father outside a courtroom, he said, since he had been kicked out of the family home the winter before. He hadn’t wanted to see him, and he certainly wouldn’t go over to his parents’ house when his father would just as soon shoot him as say “Howdy.”
He suggested his father had had enemies—someone out to get him ever since he had announced for judge. “But I don't know why anyone would want to kill my mother,” Tom said quietly. “She’s a good woman. She’s always been a good woman.”
Tom told Zellner—just as Pat had—that his ex-wife Carolyn was a woman completely out of control, particularly when she drank. “But they've taken her under their wings—since the divorce. They paid for her lawyer, and she works at the office with Mother. But she gets drunk now and then, and calls and tells me, ‘I want to see you dead.’ ”
For a man in his precarious position, Tom talked too much, coming up with theories and obscure suspects. He couldn’t seem to bear the silences. His drawl was laconic and slow, nothing like Pat’s rapid-fire speech, but he talked a lot.
“There was a girl that committed suicide on my granddaddy’s farm,” he suddenly remembered. “She was an alcoholic. I flat know my daddy was playing around with her. My granddaddy said Daddy got all her stock in her company when she died. But I know for a fact my daddy was playing around with her—that old gal would get drunk and she’d just talk and talk and talk. That’s back when I was in college.”
The woman had been married, Tom explained. “She used to come over to the house all the time, get drunk, and crawl all over him all the time. My mother wasn’t there, and I don’t think [her husband] knew anything about it . . . ”
Tom paused in deep thought. “You know, I still loved him as a father, but it was kinda hard to understand at the same time what he was doin’.”