by Ann Rule
It was nightmarish. It wasn’t happening. Carolyn’s woven straw purse still sat open on the dining room table. The case of Coca-Cola was there too. The inflatable blue dinosaur shivered and bounced as they walked near it.
But it was real enough. Reporters from the Atlanta papers pushed to get in and take pictures, and perfect strangers walked up the driveway, trying to peek in the windows to see what they could see. They acted as if they had every right to be there. Didn’t people have any consideration at all? Jean and the preacher got Paw and Nona out of there as soon as they could.
***
Al Roberts, Walter’s law partner and his friend since high school, called at the elder Allansons’ home on Washington Road to offer his condolences. After speaking with Paw and Nona, he and his wife and daughter moved on to the den. The doorbell rang and Roberts saw two women walk in. The younger woman immediately began to sob and scream.
“Paw!” she cried, clutching at the old man. “He didn’t do it!”
Roberts’s daughter, Martha, spoke to the newest visitors, calling them by name. “Hey, Miz Taylor—er, Allanson. Hey, Miz Radcliffe.” She explained to her father that this was Tom’s new wife and her mother. Margureitte and Pat walked back to Nona’s bedroom, and Pat’s hysterical sobbing could be heard all over the house.
Roberts knew Walter’s mother couldn’t stand much more, and he hurried back to urge Pat Taylor Allanson to leave Nona’s room. After his second, more urgent request, Pat walked to the kitchen, where the table was laden with pies, cakes, and covered-dish casseroles from the Allansons’ friends and fellow church members.
Pat answered the kitchen phone, spoke briefly, and then, apparently recovered from her hysterics, dialed a number herself. Roberts, who sat a few feet away, was astounded as he heard Pat’s conversation with Calhoun Long, apparently Tom’s attorney. Oblivious of her surroundings, Pat said in a loud voice, “He did not do it—he went to the doctor with me. When I came out of the doctor’s office, he was gone. He walked to Zebulon.”
And then, right in front of the late Walter Allanson’s law partner, Pat told her husband’s legal counsel about the incident of the previous Friday. As Paw sat at the kitchen table trying to eat some soup, Pat rattled on about how his dead son had exposed himself to her only six days earlier, on June 28. She recalled her terror to Calhoun Long, and then proceeded to give alibis for Tom for the ambush incident at Lake Lanier the next day. “My mother, Mrs. Radcliffe, is on the extension in the bedroom, and she will tell you the very same things I have.”
Tommy’s new wife certainly had no sense of time and place, and Al Roberts wondered how she could even imagine that Walter had exposed himself to her. Roberts knew Walter Allanson would be incapable of such an act, and furthermore he knew exactly where Walter had been on the day she was talking about—right there in their law offices with him. Walter had arrived for work at 9:10 on that morning and had stayed there all day long—with the exception of the fifteen minutes around 3:00 p.m. when he went to pick up the deer rifle. If Tom Allanson had shot his own father because he was outraged that Walter had exposed himself to Pat, it was all for naught. There was no way he could have been showing his penis to his daughter-in-law in the hedgerow at the plantation in Zebulon, sixty miles away, on June 28. No way at all. If Pat had told Tom his father had done that, she had made a terrible, tragic mistake.
The doorbell rang again and Paul Vaughan, Walter’s law clerk, arrived. Roberts asked Vaughan to go out with him for a glass of iced tea. He was perplexed—shocked —by this woman Tommy had married.
Vaughan verified Roberts’s recall; he had seen Walter on June 28 too. They discussed the Lake Lanier ambush, but there were things Al Roberts hadn't heard about. Vaughan said that Walter had told him his boat engine had suddenly exploded but that he had managed to get to shore without sinking. The clerk also recalled a phone message left for Carolyn and Walter from a man identifying himself as their son. “He said to tell them he had missed them—but that he would get them.”
Al Roberts didn’t know what to think. Pat Allanson and her mother, Mrs. Radcliffe, seemed so at home in Paw and Nona’s house, and Pat herself had seemed overcome alternately with grief and hysteria, a woman not quite in control. She had been almost vulgarly specific about the exposing incident and then had forced herself to be coldly businesslike. Perhaps she had been so shocked that she couldn’t see what effect her words were having on the old couple who had just lost their only son.
Mrs. Radcliffe dressed and acted like a proper lady. But Pat was something else again. She was a fine-looking woman, all right, but she was obviously older than Tommy, and her clothing was flamboyant; the dead man’s partner saw why Walter Allanson had not approved of her.
It was also apparent that Pat and her mother were a team—that no matter what Tommy’s wife said, Mrs. Radcliffe backed her up. Her head began to nod almost from the moment Pat opened her mouth.
CHAPTER 11
***
As their investigation continued, Detective Zellner and Sergeant Callahan followed up on the ambush shooting in Forsyth County on the Saturday before the Allansons were killed. In fact, Mary Rena Jones, who ran the J.C. Jones store with her husband, was sure she had seen Tom near the gas pumps, standing next to his blue pickup truck, on Friday the twenty-eighth, around 5:30 p.m. She had seen the Kentwood Morgan emblem on the door, and, of course, both Joneses remembered seeing Walter Allanson the next morning after he had been shot at. He and his wife had come in with cuts all over their arms.
“I told him that before I’d let someone shoot me. I’d shoot them first,” J.C. put in. “He told us it was his son who had shot at him.”
Mary Jones picked Tom’s picture out of a laydown of suspects.
Zellner and Callahan knew about the sugar in the Allansons’ gas tank. They knew about the exploding boat, the phone calls. Either Tom Allanson was guilty of it all, or someone had done a dandy job of setting him up to look guilty.
***
On July 5, George Zellner typed up a probable-cause affidavit requesting a search warrant in Pike County. The East Point investigators wanted to search the premises of Kentwood Farm and a 1971 GMC pickup truck (license plate RL 7223) for certain items:
One .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle;
One man’s shirt, color brown and green striped;
Blue jean pants;
Boots having soil and blood stains.
The investigators located several pairs of jeans, but none with bloodstains. Two pairs of jeans were in the washing machine with a still-damp load of otherwise white items of clothing. A woman would never have mixed the jeans with white clothes. A man might have—especially a man trying to wash blood away. The Allansons had a gun rack at Kentwood Farm with several rifles and shotguns. The investigators found a .22-caliber Remington Model 66 rifle, loaded with Federal copper-clad bullets. The empty cartridges recovered in the shooting at Lake Lanier had been the same type.
They didn’t find the striped shirt. When a neighbor told them that he had seen Tom walk down the road in the wee hours of July 4 and that he had been wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, they figured they would never locate the green and brown shirt; it could be anywhere between East Point and Zebulon.
***
Elizabeth Thomason, a forensic serologist with the Georgia State Crime Laboratory, received blood samples from Dr. Stivers on July 5. The vials of blood retrieved at autopsy showed that both the Allansons had the same type of blood: O positive. All the blood samples from the basement—from the floor, light switch, gun, holster, boards—were type O positive. But then the prime suspect—the man who waited in the East Point jail—was the natural son of Walter and Carolyn Allanson. He would have type O positive too.
It was a moot point. The only wound Tom had was the scrape on his left calf, and it had barely bled.
The normal physical evidence that is usually so helpful to homicide detectives—hairs, fibers, blood, fingerprints—has greatly diminished worth
in a “family murder.” Both the victims and the accused have reason to occupy the premises where the crimes take place. Their fingerprints could be expected, and so could their clothing fibers, hairs, blood, urine, saliva, even semen. It didn’t matter that Tom Allanson had not lived in the Norman Berry Drive home for six months; fingerprints last for years, even for decades. Alien physical evidence would be of use in this case if the killer proved to be someone outside the family and not a regular visitor to the Allansons’ home.
The fingerprint question didn’t matter anyway; Detective Marlin Humphrey, Jr., had dusted for prints in the Allansons’ basement to little avail. He failed to raise any prints on the fuse box, basement doors, or furnace. Walter’s borrowed .32 revolver had a partial latent as did a light bulb; both proved to be those of East Point police officers, an embarrassing discovery but not surprising in light of the chaotic terror that had reigned in that basement on the night of July 3.
The mystery behind the deaths of Walter and Carolyn Allanson probably would not be unraveled through forensic science; the answers would come from a more imprecise area: human behavior.
***
The Saturday after the murders was a day that seemed forty-eight hours long. Tom Allanson appeared in a lineup at the East Point police station on July 6. He was by far the tallest man present. All the subjects wore white T-shirts and either jeans or work pants. Some were fire fighters, some were cops, and one was a friend of Tom’s, a tall man who volunteered to join the lineup so that Tom wouldn’t stand out so conspicuously.
Viewing the lineup were Harriett and Paul Beauregard Duckett and Patrol Officer C.L. McBurnett, Jr., the only eyewitnesses who had seen the fleeing man just after the murders. The Ducketts and McBurnett walked in separately, checked off the form without speaking, and left the lineup room.
Each had checked space No. 2: Tom Allanson.
Things looked bad for Tom. His aunt Jean was offering to help, but he didn’t dare tell his wife about that. Pat assured him continually that she was taking care of everything. He wasn’t to worry; she would see that he had the best legal defense money could buy. He just had to remember not to talk to anyone but her. When he argued with her that to him the truth seemed the best route, Pat shushed him. No, he must not even suggest such a thing; anybody knew that a man who tried to handle his own defense was a fool. He had to believe in her, she explained, because no one loved him the way that she loved him.
And no one ever would.
***
That same Saturday, Walter and Carolyn Allanson had a joint funeral in the chapel at Hemperley’s in East Point. Their caskets were side by side, and they were closed. Mae Mama Lawrence’s insistence on a blue dress with long sleeves for her daughter was moot; no one could tell what Carolyn wore. Mae Mama commented tearfully that it was just as well that her daughter and son-in-law had “gone together. They were always together. Neither one of them could have lived without the other.”
The chapel was full to overflowing, and floral tributes filled it with an almost suffocating sweetness.
Pat was too ill to go, but she wanted her family to be represented at the chapel. She called her daughters, Susan Alford and Deborah Cole, and begged them to go to the Allansons’ funeral. Susan was twenty-one and Deborah was nineteen and they were horrified at the thought of walking into Hemperley’s in front of the deceased’s friends and relatives. They hadn’t even known the Allansons.
“You’re going to be there for Tom,” Pat insisted. “If you don’t go, I’ll have to get up out of this sickbed and go myself. You just walk right in with your heads up high, and you show him you care—that we all care.”
As far as Margureitte and Colonel Radcliffe were concerned, they backed Tom to the limit, but they felt no allegiance to his parents. They had issued gracious invitations to the Allansons in life and all their overtures had been rudely refused. They did not now feel it was incumbent upon them to join the mourners for people who were virtual strangers—by their own choice.
Pat’s two daughters went to Hemperley’s, their faces aflame with embarrassment when they realized there was no way they were going to go unrecognized. They were further mortified when the chapel began to buzz and heads turned to gawk at them. Their arrival had actually produced a massive gasp. They could feel disapproval and curiosity from every side.
Suddenly, there was the sound of chains clanking at the back of the room, and eyes finally turned away from them. Tom Allanson had been allowed to attend his parents’ services, but George Zellner and C.T. Callahan had brought him in both handcuffs and leg-irons. The leg-irons were removed, but still handcuffed, Tom stood with his head bowed. Susan and Deborah saw that tears streamed silently down his cheeks. They managed to catch his eye and smiled wanly. And then they left. Their few minutes in the chapel would remain one of the more hideous memories of their lives.
The Allansons were buried side by side in Westview Cemetery.
***
Shortly before 5:00 p.m. at police headquarters that Saturday, Detective Zellner interviewed Mrs. Clifford B. Radcliffe, the woman Pat Allanson affectionately called “Boppo.” If he had found her daughter talkative, Zellner didn’t know what “stream of consciousness” was until he interviewed Margureitte Radcliffe. There seemed to be no pauses in her conversation, and she had much to tell him. She spoke in a perfectly modulated “society” voice. She was a daunting woman who gave the impression that never, ever, ever had she—or anyone she was related to, or even acquainted with—had occasion to be involved in a criminal investigation. She would be glad to help Zellner, of course, if only to straighten out this ridiculous predicament Tom was in as quickly as possible.
Yes, indeed, she had spoken—not once, but twice—with the deceased Mr. Allanson. He had confided in her that he suspected Tom of all manner of mischief and misbehaving—from putting formaldehyde in his own children’s milk to the theft of suitcases. The dead man had made his son’s life utterly miserable. For what reason, she could not say.
Why, even Bill Alford—“my granddaughter’s husband”—had called her from one of Tom’s many divorce hearings as he struggled to be free of Little Carolyn Allanson. “Mr. Alford’s getting ready to study law, you see—and he said, ‘You will not believe what is happening. I'm here and I’m seeing it and hearing it, and I don’t believe it. Tom is not being allowed to present anything. . . . But yet Mr. Allanson is getting on the stand and saying his son is a drunkard!’ All these horrible things about his son, yet he—Tom—doesn’t even drink and he doesn’t even smoke.”
Mrs. Radcliffe explained that Tom had been their feed man for years, “but we have only known him in recent months in the capacity we do now. His wife is our daughter. We have known him as a very nice, clean-cut young man—never anything bad about him from anyone.”
“You ever heard him say anything negative about his father?”
“Never! Never have I! Nor have I heard him say anything about his father at all.”
Mrs. Radcliffe told Zellner that the most unpleasant person she had had contact with through Tom was his ex-wife, who would call constantly at all hours to harass Tom and Pat for money. Sighing, she murmured, “What did she do with all of the money? Because she had gotten a tremendous amount of money—and was [still] getting her money.”
“Did they stay with you often? Tom and his wife, your daughter?” Zellner put in.
“They were there until they were married, in our home. He slept on a sofa in our den.”
Margureitte Radcliffe explained that she had had very little contact with Tom’s parents, who had been quite rude generally. Walter Allanson had frightened her too, she said, as he accused Tom of all manner of theft. In the next breath he had told her he would "get” Tom.
Zellner didn’t have to ask questions. Margureitte seemed eager to get all of her contacts with Walter Allanson out in the open. “He acted to me like he thought I knew something that I didn’t know and that he was trying to justify himself to me—which wasn
’t necessary . . . I came away firmly convinced that this man was dangerous, that he was very devious, that he was very cunning, and I couldn’t figure out why. I could not figure out his purpose.”
Pat’s mother confided that she had been so alarmed by Walter Allanson’s behavior that she had gone to the East Point Police Department and pleaded for advice about what to do. “I told them, ‘I really feel that the man is ill, really and truly ill.’ ”
She had never even seen Big Carolyn Allanson. “I had only one conversation with Mrs. Allanson and that was when I called her at her office—several months ago—hoping she would accept our invitation, at her convenience, for her and Mr. Allanson to have lunch or dinner with Colonel Radcliffe and me.”
Mrs. Radcliffe recalled her fear when Walter Allanson had driven his shot-up station wagon to her place of employment and insisted she view what he said Tom had done. “I saw three places with some kind of tape or something over them on the windshield . . . and there were some shatters around it. . . . He said, ‘Do you know that on Saturday, on our way up to the lake, Tommy got out on that road and built an ambush up on an embankment, and then when Carolyn and I were on [the road], he shot at us?’ I said, ‘No, he didn’t—because he was out shoeing horses.’ He said, ‘Well, it has to be him,’ and I said, ‘No. It does not have to be—because everything you have accused him of, he has had lots of people around him at the time that these things have occurred—’ ”
“Did you really, personally, know where Tom was that day?” Zellner asked.
“On that day?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“He had called us, and there are people who know he shod horses at their place,” she explained.
Colonel Radcliffe sat beside his wife as she explained her unnerving encounters with the late Walter Allanson. “Really and truly,” she confided. “I tell my husband, it seems to be like the Lawrences—all of them—had some kind of feud. I felt like we were kind of in on the tail end of something here.”