by Ann Rule
Two divorce suits would be filed when Tom’s wife and Carolyn’s husband discovered their romance. Tom had yet to distinguish between love and sex. He believed that he had finally found what he was looking for and that Carolyn would make a good wife as soon as their divorces were final.
Despite his romantic misadventures, Tom managed to stay in college and he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1966 with a bachelor of science in agriculture, with emphasis on veterinary medicine. He went to work after graduation for the Beaver Dam Angus Farm in Colbert, Georgia, near Athens, and stayed there for three years as cattle manager over an eighteen-hundred-head herd of Angus. He then attended Graham’s School for Cattlemen and Horsemen in Garnett, Kansas, and was certified to perform artificial insemination. If Tom Allanson didn’t understand women, he most definitely did know horses. He was now a farrier who specialized in “corrective shoeing’’ and worked with quarter horses, thoroughbred Morgans, and Arabians. By this time, he had bred, trained, and shown quarter horses and Morgans in halter, western, trail, reining, and fine harness classes. He was soon a judge in western horse shows. He was a working fool. Stripped to his jeans and an undershirt to offset the heat of a Georgia summer and the flames of his blacksmith rig on wheels, Tom was larger than life. His shoulders were ax-handle wide and his hugely bulging arms matched those of any professional wrestler. But, for all his physical power, he was the gentlest of men, who truly believed the lyrics of romantic country and western songs.
Given the right woman, he would have undoubtedly remained faithful for fifty years. But Tom had an uncanny talent for picking the wrong woman.
Tom and his bride-to-be, who was soon called “Little Carolyn,” were not well matched. He had a college degree and she had left school in tenth grade. He was non-combative and she had a fiery temper. But Carolyn was attractive and sexy, and Tom wanted so much to be married and create a family of his own. He married Carolyn with high hopes on October 25, 1968. “I had this idea,” he said, “that I could change her. I could stop her drinking. I could sober her up and she wouldn’t never have a problem, ’cause I was going to take care of her. You can’t do that if they don’t want to change.”
They moved back to Atlanta and Tom went to work for Ralston Purina. The fourth Walter—Walter Russell Allanson, called Russ—was born in 1970; When he was just a baby, Carolyn and Tom had so much trouble getting along that they separated, and Tom asked his father to file divorce papers for him. He moved Carolyn and Russ up to Athens and figured his second marriage was over. “But I just couldn’t stand being away from my baby boy,” Tom remembered. “I went back up to Athens and got her and brought her back home, and then a year passed and another baby was born. My daddy had the divorce papers in a drawer; he’d never filed them.”
Tom’s second child, Sherry Lynette, was born in 1972. Though Tom’s parents didn’t particularly approve of Carolyn, either as a wife or as a mother, they did want to see him settled down. Big Carolyn and Walter were pleased to have grandchildren. However, when Little Carolyn wrecked her mother-in-law’s car, Walter was livid. Why couldn’t Tom have picked a wife with at least a lick of sense?
Tom himself was beginning to rethink his reconciliation. All he had wanted was a peaceful home to come to after a hard day’s work, but what he got was a complaining nag. The house was messy and the kids were crying. He found it difficult even to remember the pretty little blonde he had fallen in love with.
One night, Carolyn drank too much and, according to Tom, she started waving a gun around. Worried for Russ and Sherry, Tom tucked a baby under each arm and headed out the front door. He was in the doorway when his wife pegged a shot at him with his own .357. The doorframe splintered beside him and he took flight, his long legs landing the three of them beyond the front porch.
Nobody was hurt, but his stomach turned over when he thought of what might have happened. Tom knew he couldn’t go on in the marriage, but he had no idea how he was going to escape it without hurting his kids. He didn’t want to file charges against Little Carolyn, though, and wondered what he was going to do. He wasn’t yet thirty years old, and the love he longed for was still somewhere off in the distance, tantalizing and elusive and always beyond his grasp.
CHAPTER 13
***
By the summer of 1973, Tom had finally come to a place where he knew he had to walk away from his five-year-old marriage or die trying, literally die. In his mind at least, that was well within the realm of possibility. The fragile blonde he had married who “looked like Grace Kelly” regarded him with unveiled disinterest if not frank malice. Anytime a woman sights down on a man and pulls the trigger, he has to figure the magic has gone out of their relationship. Tom was going to have to stop picking his women for the way they looked and concentrate on more permanent attributes. He acknowledged that he had made another major mistake with Carolyn. Their marriage had been dead for a long time.
On September 23, 1973, Tom left Carolyn. He couldn't support two households; he had nowhere to go for the moment but back to his boyhood home on Norman Berry Drive. He dreaded it. He was a head taller than his father, but Walter could still diminish him with a word or even a scornful glance. Tom didn’t expect to find shoulders there to cry on or someone who felt concern for his situation. The most he hoped for was some breathing space to get his feet on the ground and figure out his future. He didn’t find what he needed.
Tom’s parents had not been much upset by his first divorce. He was a college boy then, and the marriage was over quickly. But when he went to his father asking for legal advice about his plans to divorce Carolyn, he found that the rules had changed. Walter disapproved mightily.
Tom had children, and that made it a completely different situation. Walter leveled his cool blue-gray eyes at his son and intoned, “You can get a divorce any day in the week as long as you don’t have children. If you have children, you live in it [your marriage]—no matter what the circumstances are. I don’t care if your life is threatened, you live in it.”
Walter refused to listen to any of Tom's quite cogent reasons for wanting to be free. He didn't care if Carolyn sometimes drank too much, and he didn't care if she had fired a gun at Tom. Hell, he didn't care if she ran over him with a truck. Tom was a big boy and he should have been able to handle his wife.
“I want no part of a divorce case for Tom,” Walter confided to a lifelong friend. “I wouldn't touch it. I told Tom's wife, ‘You’re twenty-one years old. Get you an attorney of your own. I won’t have a voice in it this way or that.’ ”
At length, Walter had grudgingly said he would look into the divorce matter for his son. But in truth, Walter did everything he could to block a divorce, even while he kept promising Tom he would file for him. He was actually trying to delay long enough so that his son might change his mind. He had spent more than half his life supporting Tom, and he didn’t relish supporting Tom's ex and his two children. Walter knew it would come to that; he wasn’t the kind of man who let his kin go on welfare, and Little Carolyn surely couldn't keep herself and the kids afloat alone. Walter would take care of his own if he had to, or at least those who couldn’t do for themselves. His grandchildren would never go hungry, but he would seethe at the imposition and resent the son he blamed for it.
He hadn’t been happy to have Tom back in their house anyway. His son was thirty years old—a grown man. Tom tried to help around the place, and he had gone up to Lake Lanier and worked on the dock “just like a horse,” according to Jake Dailey, Walter’s old friend. But almost everything else Tom did aggravated his father.
Tom’s only emotional support came from his grandparents—Paw and Nona. And when he found out that his father had done nothing about his divorce papers, he went to another attorney, who filed for his divorce. His father was furious. Still working for Ralston Purina selling feed, and shoeing horses in a second job, Tom contributed as much as he felt he could to his family, but not enough, in his father’s estimation.
&nb
sp; Just before Thanksgiving, 1973, Walter ordered Tom to move out of his house. After saying he would not take sides in his son’s dispute with his estranged wife, it was apparent that he had done just that. Tom’s parents declared Little Carolyn the injured party and rallied around her.
Fortunately—or so it seemed at the time—Tom had had somewhere to go. He had known and worked for the Radcliffes for several years, but until recently he had known their married daughter, Pat, only slightly. Now she was unmarried, and he had been pleasantly surprised when she let him know that she was interested in him. They had begun to date. Tom liked her whole family. The Radcliffes approved of him, probably more so because they felt the need for some kind of stability in Pat’s life. Tom wasn’t literally single, but he was the next best thing to it.
When his father and mother ordered him out, the Radcliffes said Tom could stay at their place temporarily. He could sleep on the sofa in their den. It was, allegedly, an arrangement of convenience. Of course it was a smoke screen. Pat had declared her intention to marry Tom Allanson six months earlier, long before he had any idea of even dating her. She had dedicated herself to seducing him and captivating him and he had been a sitting duck. For all his headlong rushes into marriage, Tom was essentially naive. Pat was six years older than he was, had grown children and a twenty-year marriage behind her, but she knew how to cajole and steer a man over the jumps of any emotional obstacle course she devised.
“I guess you could call her an aggressive/assertive woman,” Tom said many years later. “She was very much aggressive in that she knew what she wanted and she’d go after it. In a way, I kind of admired that in a person.”
Tom had been just about the lonesomest man in Atlanta when Pat decided she wanted him. By his own admission, he was virtually “starving” for affection. “Pat was so cool about the way she did things that you didn’t know what was happening to you,” he remembered. “You were in quicksand really before you realized you’d got your feet wet. Because of the way she did. I'm just sayin’ . . . so nice, so gentle, so calm, and so innocent. And then this little piece went here, this little piece went here, and this one went here, and everything—and then all of a sudden you were not in control. And she turned it a little bit tighter, a little bit tighter. . . . You didn’t feel it as it was turning, but then— And I never knew what hit me.”
During their courtship, Pat displayed an absolute devotion to his needs, and Tom reveled in it.
***
On New Year’s Eve, 1973, Tom and Little Carolyn Allanson’s custody and support hearing was on the court docket. Tom was shocked to find that his parents not only were not going to testify for him, they took the stand on behalf of his wife. They never mentioned Carolyn’s accident that wrecked their vehicle, but Walter hinted on the witness stand that Tom sometimes drank too much. In fact, Tom neither drank nor smoked. He listened incredulously as his own blood relatives convinced a judge that he was at fault, and that he should pay what he considered excessive and impossible support and alimony to his nearly ex-wife.
Later that night, Tom stormed over to Norman Berry Drive to confront his wife and parents. He was no angel; he could be a real hothead when he felt he had been injured. Walter later claimed that Tom had “cussed out” Big Carolyn that night. It was more likely that his epithets were directed toward his father. They had a major blowup, and Walter again ordered him out of the house.
When Tom left that night, it was the end of something. He would never again have even a civil relationship with his own father. It was as if his father had disowned him and adopted the woman who’d tried to blow his head off. Tom couldn’t understand that. Carolyn was the one who had wrecked his mama’s car, but his daddy now seemed to want her around all the time. She had a perfectly good apartment of her own to go to. Tom remembered Little Carolyn’s smug smile as she watched his banishment. He was hurt and he was mad, and his future seemed like a long, grim tunnel ahead of him. All he had left of his blood kin were Paw and Nona. He had no one else he could count on—only Pat and her parents, the Radcliffes—and he was grateful for all of them.
***
The fact that his father had warned him about Pat, had called her a slut and a harlot, only made Tom want her more. He saw his father as a jealous hypocrite. “I wouldn’t listen,” he said. “That was like telling a teenage boy to not think about sex. I’d look at Pat in those little miniskirts and halter tops and . . . all I can say is she would have corrupted a preacher. I was vulnerable. She needed someone that was good with horses, and somebody who could shoe her horses free and somebody who could sell her feed free. I was just an easy mark. Some woman comes along and tells me she loves me, and of course I said, ‘You love me? Well, all right! You’ve got me.’ By that time, I didn’t think anyone would love me ever again.”
And so in 1973, Tom chose to see an entirely different Pat than the woman his father had warned him about. Beyond his recognition that she was a woman who marked her territory and took what she wanted, he had found her kind and gentle and as frail as a rose battered in a storm. She wasn’t well, but she fought desperately to keep going. She fainted easily, slipping to the ground so softly. When that happened, Tom felt helpless and protective. All he could do was pick her up and carry her into the house and lay her down as gently as possible on the sofa.
There was another attraction. Pat had introduced Tom to sex unlike anything he had ever known before. When they were together, she seemed to forget how sick she was and strived only to pleasure him. No other woman had done that for him. He was besotted with Pat.
Pat’s daughter, Susan Alford, and her husband, Bill, returned from a trip once to find their apartment occupied. They saw first a huge pair of boots and then a triumphant Pat and a sheepish Tom, who was hastily tucking his shirt into his jeans.
“There, Tom!” Pat said for everyone to hear. “You’ve had sex before, but you’ve never had anyone teach you how to make love until I came along!”
All of them, save Pat, were embarrassed, and Susan bustled around to make iced tea while Bill made awkward conversation. Tom was glowing like a teenager in the grip of a consuming crush.
***
Two days after the New Year’s Eve custody hearing, Tom’s father wrote him a curt letter on his law office stationery.
January 2, 1974
Tommy:
This is to inform you that I talked to Mr. Turner this morning and he informed me that your wife was awarded all of the furniture and household appliances, including the refrigerator and freezer in Mrs. Lawrence's basement, and that you not be allowed to remove the same. Your wife also asked me to look after this refrigerator and freezer for her; so this puts me in the position of being her bailee. Therefore, I have put my own lock on this basement to insure that these two appliances will not be removed until such time as I get a Court Order instructing me to do otherwise.
If you intend to be your usual bull-headed self and remove them . . . I intend to file charges against you and anyone who assists you . . . for breaking and entering and theft. . . .
While you have some help I suggest that you move your junk from the garage and my backyard, and return the fan that was loaned to you. Any of your junk, equipment or otherwise that is left . . . after January 15, 1974, will be placed on the street for the City to pick up.
You will please give Mrs. Lawrence your back door key as you are forbidden to enter the house.
Walter O. Allanson
Allanson also sent a letter to the East Point police, warning them that he would file charges against his son and anyone who might help him try to remove appliances from his grandmother’s basement.
Tom didn’t want furniture and appliances; he wanted only a few of his more portable belongings. But he had to be careful about what he chose to retrieve from his former life. If ever there were an acrimonious divorce, Tom’s divorce from Carolyn was it. According to Margureitte, Carolyn bombarded the house on Tell Road with calls. “I’d only met her once at a horse sho
w some time ago—never thought anything about her one way or the other—and [she] called us and called us at all hours of the night and day.”
Tom didn’t make that much money to begin with, and he had to give five hundred dollars every month to Carolyn, a fact of life that Pat resented fiercely. Carolyn just wouldn’t let them be. Pat and Margureitte complained that if the money didn’t arrive, or even if it did, they were still being plagued with harassing calls from Tom’s ex-wife demanding more money.
Pat detested Little Carolyn because she had once had Tom and because, technically at least, she was still married to him. Pat had begun to call him “my Tom” or “Pat’s Tom.” And Tom thrived on her all-enveloping possessiveness; he had never had a woman love him like that before. He was overwhelmed by the syrupy writings she composed for him. All her o's were carefully traced hearts.
Pat was convinced that Little Carolyn was consumed with jealousy when Tom bought the Zebulon farm for her, and again when they were married at Stone Mountain.
Margureitte agreed with her. Without coming right out and saying it, after the murder Margureitte tried her best to let Detective Zellner know her personal theory about Tom’s daddy and his daughter-in-law. If that wasn’t cause for murder, she didn’t know what was. And that, she felt, would explain why Walter hated Tom enough to just as soon kill him as look at him. Walter had purely terrified Margureitte. She shuddered to think about Pat out there all alone at Kentwood when he had come down and blatantly exposed himself to her.
If ever a man had a right to be bitter and resentful toward his father, it was Tom. But Tom was gentle; his hurt went inside. He would never have murdered his own parents. Never in the whole wide world. It wasn’t fair that he was locked up. If there was anyone behind the shooting of Walter and Big Carolyn, Pat and Margureitte both insisted they saw the fine hand of Little Carolyn Allanson. They could not understand why the police weren’t using the information they had given about her. They were convinced that they had all but handed the investigators a blueprint for murder, and they were annoyed that none of them recognized it.