by Ann Rule
Little Carolyn Allanson was probably the biggest gun the prosecution had. She was right next door to an eye witness, and television mysteries had made eyewitness testimony seem infallible. Carolyn had never said she saw Tom that rainy night in July, but in her third interview with George Zellner, she had recalled that she heard her ex-mother-in-law scream out, “Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!” She was on the witness stand for much of the third day of trial, examined and cross-examined.
The Allansons’ next-door neighbors, the Ducketts, and Officer McBurnett were, of course, true eyewitnesses to a tall running man who fled the crime scene. All of them pinned Tom Allanson a little tighter to the wall.
Hampered as he was by Pat’s refusal to allow her husband to plead guilty to lesser charges, Ed Garland could only try to stem the damage. He was good. He elicited an admission from McBurnett that he had glimpsed Tom in the police station before he identified him in the lineup. McBurnett had, like most of the East Point officers, made it a habit to glance into the identification room to wave to a particularly attractive female clerk who worked there. On June 6, Tom had been sitting in the ID room as McBurnett passed.
Several of the investigating officers had not saved their notes or reduced their interviews to written reports. Garland was agile, a fencer poking tiny holes in the fabric of the state’s case with his rapier. But only tiny holes. The state’s eyewitnesses included a police officer and a fire fighter. The Ducketts both described the huge man who had run past their house even as the first sirens howled through the Norman Berry neighborhood. It would be a herculean task for any attorney to overcome that kind of testimony. Ed Garland was further handicapped by Pat’s courtroom behavior and her continued insistence that she and not her husband’s attorney should decide how his defense would be handled. When Pat was dissatisfied with the way things were going, she punched Tom in the ribs. She seemed to hover just at the edge of hysteria, watching and listening for some danger to Tom. It drove Garland nuts.
On Wednesday morning, October 16, Ed Garland, his jaw tight, asked Judge Wofford for a conference in chambers out of the jury’s hearing. The opposing attorneys were both present, as was the court stenographer.
“Judge, I think it’s necessary, to protect my reputation and the integrity of the judicial process,” Garland began, “[to note] that I find substantial disagreements between the defendant's wife and myself concerning how the case . . . should be conducted. . . . There are certain witnesses that I decline to put on the stand, will not put on the stand . . . because of my investigation in the case.
“I also find there’s an inability to communicate with my client effectively because of his desire to have his wife present, and I find that his wife is unstable. His wife is affecting his judgment insofar as my ability to communicate with him.”
His exasperation obvious, Garland told the judge that Pat wanted to select which witnesses would testify, and that she was telling Tom that he must testify. Almost always, a competent criminal defense attorney chooses not to put his client on the stand; once he does that, he opens the defendant up to cross-examination from the prosecution and devastating questions often ensue. Pat apparently felt she could coach Tom in the proper way to testify.
“I want the record to show," Garland continued, “that I requested that she remain out of the courtroom during the case. She has refused, and the defendant has demanded that she be allowed to be present . . . I feel like the approach I have taken is the best I know how to do. That’s all I wanted to put on the record. Judge.”
“Would you like me to bring her in here—have Mrs. Allanson brought in?”
“I think it will just get into her crying and gnashing of teeth, Judge,” Garland sighed.
“Colonel Garland, I have watched her—her facial expressions—a number of times,” Judge Wofford said. “Now, she has not made any audible statements in the courtroom. . . . She’s made no truly noticeable gestures —unless you were watching her carefully. . . . I have felt for the days this has been proceeding that she has been a detriment to the trial, but she committed no action that was sufficiently overt . . . for the court to take action. I recognize that her presence is definitely a stumbling block to the harmonious proceedings that we still have ahead.”
Ed Garland, fighting for his client, was truly stymied. “What has occurred has occurred outside the presence of the jury and the court,” he said. “I asked her to leave yesterday where I could talk to him alone, to remove him from her suggestive influences. . . . She went across the courtroom and faked a heart attack—in my opinion—to get the attention.”
Judge Wofford nodded. Pat Allanson had gasped and fainted the moment he had walked out of the courtroom, and the sheriffs deputy had informed him of it.
Ed Garland explained further. “When I tried to talk with him . . . gave him my uninterrupted counsel, and got him to reflect on it, she pulled a heart attack . . . and demanded that she be present with him in all my discussions. . . . I find that with her acting the way she acts, that he doesn't think clearly.”
Nobody in Judge Wofford's chambers could argue with that. But there didn't seem to be anything they could do about it. In her near-hysterical fight to save Tom, Pat continued to disrupt his trial, but she always managed to stay just within the bounds of courtroom propriety. The judge had warned against demonstrations, and her grimacing and whispering remained on the edge of what he would allow, barely restrained. Her visits to Tom left him unsettled and worried. She wanted him to testify; she warned him Ed Garland wasn’t doing right by him. Outside the courtroom, Pat often fainted and clutched her heart. On one occasion during a break, she pointed out a policeman to Tom and whispered desperately, “Oh my God, Tom! That man raped me!'’
And then she fainted once again.
“What did she expect me to do?” Tom later asked futilely. “Deck a cop right there in the courthouse hall way? I couldn’t do anything.”
Tom Allanson descended further into his own private hell. The way things were going, he now figured he would probably be found guilty and executed. Who would look after Pat? He was so in love with his wife that his biggest worry was not his own bleak future, but hers. What would she ever do in this world without him?
***
Ed Garland trudged on, feeling Pat Allanson around his neck like an albatross. He attempted to have her description of what Tom was wearing on the day of the shootings excluded. It didn’t help his client’s case one bit to have his own wife corroborate the state’s eyewitnesses. Garland’s objections were overruled.
The jury saw dozens of pictures of the blood-drenched basement and heard Sergeant Callahan describe the scene he had found on the night of July 3. But had Tom been one of the people in the basement? If Garland could convince Pat that he had to keep Tom off the stand, the case would come down to ballistics. Ballistics were not nearly as emotional or fraught with danger as Tom’s testimony could be.
Three guns had been present: a .32 revolver, a brand-new Marlin deer rifle—really an “elephant gun,” high-powered as they come—and a 20-gauge shotgun. Could anyone prove who had fired which guns? Garland was able to establish on cross-examination that Tom’s hands had been clean of gunpowder residue when he was tested, and that no fingerprints had been found on any of the weapons.
Kelly Fite, a criminalist and microanalyst from the Georgia State Crime Lab, was called to the stand as an expert witness for the prosecution. He testified that the shotgun cartridges, one blue and one yellow, found in the “hole” itself and on the basement floor just beneath it had come from the Excel shotgun, the “stolen” gun. They had once contained approximately twenty pellets—No. 3 buckshot, the same gauge as those found in Walter and Carolyn Allanson. The buckshot itself was consistent with the type used in the empty cartridges, although lead pellets, unlike bullets, bear no definitive markings that can identify the weapon from which they have been fired.
Fite’s laboratory tests indicated that the shotgun had been about forty feet from Caroly
n when it was fired. Whoever shot Walter Allanson had been over ten feet away, and the angle of the deadly buckshot had been from left to right. Some of the pellets had “skipped" as they hit a flashlight Walter had carried and the overhead light fixture. The closer a shotgun is to a target, the smaller the circle of damage it will leave in the target—or in the victim. Carolyn Allanson’s wounds had been centered in her left chest area; Walter’s wounds were widely scattered from his face to his hand, wrist, and abdomen.
Fite concluded that only two shots had been fired from the Excel shotgun in the Allanson basement, one hitting Carolyn and one striking Walter. He had test-fired the gun and found that a cartridge would eject directly back about six to eight inches and fall at the feet of the shooter. Reconstructing from the physical evidence, he could speculate with accuracy what had happened. Someone had fired the shotgun from the hole or just in front of the hole. Someone had fired a pistol into the hole, not once but six or seven times. Someone had fired the Marlin once—from an area near the stairs. Fite had determined that the empty casing found near Walter and Carolyn was from the Marlin .45/70—the “elephant gun"—but the slug itself had never been found.
It appeared that there had been at least two shooters in the basement that night. There could have been three. But if Tom was that third shooter, would he be capable of murdering his own parents?
To establish a pattern of vindictive behavior, Prosecutor Weller continued to focus on the harassment of Walter Allanson—principally the Lake Lanier ambush—before the fatal night, and Ed Garland fought like a tiger to keep it out. Connecting Tom to all those bullet holes in his parents' station wagon would only bury him deeper. Weller, of course, insisted that the ambush shooting was only part of a “total continuous transaction” from June 29 to July 3. And countless hours would be spent arguing over when the Morgan Kentwood seal had been removed from Tom Allanson’s pickup truck. In fact, it had not been there since May, but witnesses from Jones’s store still claimed to have seen Tom driving a truck with that seal on the morning of the ambush. Garland wanted that false identification excluded from the jury’s consideration, but Judge Wofford ruled against him.
And he lost again when he attempted to keep word of Walter and Carolyn’s rancorous wills from the jury’s ears. The jury heard of them in Mary McBride's testimony as Walter Allanson’s secretary.
“They have accomplished their motive,” Garland complained to Judge Wofford. “They wanted to hit the jury over the head with a sledgehammer and then tell them, ‘Now you ignore the headache.’ That’s what we have here. We have thrown horse manure in the jury box and want to ask them not to smell it. . . . We have flashed wills here and said, ‘Oh, there were wills. There must be motive. He must have killed for financial gain.’ ”
Perhaps the biggest defense loss of all was Ed Garland’s attempt to have a mistrial declared over Carolyn Allanson’s altered recollections of what she had heard the night of the murders. Her firm voice testifying that she remembered hearing screams of “Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!” before the fatal shots might well be a death knell for his client.
CHAPTER 16
***
The state rested, and Ed Garland rose to present the case for the defense. It would be an arduous uphill climb and he knew it, but he gave no sign of that as he questioned his first witness.
Garland and his investigators had located a number of people who knew Tom Allanson well, and who had seen him on Saturday, June 29. The shots had hit his parents' car a little after 11:00 a.m. as it headed up Truman Mountain Road. If Garland could show that Tom was some place else at that time, it would neutralize the continual testimony about the man in the blue pickup with a canopy attached and with the Kentwood seal on the door. In the best of all possible worlds, he might even produce someone who had seen Tom on the night of July 3, far, far away from his parents' home.
Garland began with the Saturday before.
James Strickland, a Kayo Oil gas station attendant, saw Tom and Pat Allanson in his station in Barnesville—some ninety miles south of Lake Lanier—on the twenty-ninth between 10:15 and 10:30 a.m. They were driving a blue truck with a green horseshoeing trailer on the back. Strickland remembered no emblem on the truck's door.
Bobby Jackson, a man who had been “rodeoing" with Tom for a dozen years, saw him on June 29. Jackson was on his way to a “jackpot steer roping” in Madison, and heading east on I-20, just east of Atlanta, when he recognized Tom’s shoeing rig pass him. He testified it was between noon and 12:30, and Tom had exited at the Lithonia off ramp.
Edgar Milton Smith, president of Voice Communications, Inc., of Atlanta, had horses pastured in Lithonia, and Tom had arrived shortly after 12:30 the afternoon of June 29 to shoe them. He had stayed until approximately 6:00 that evening.
Robert Warr, Tom and Pat’s next-door neighbor in Zebulon, had seen them come home at eleven o'clock on the night of June 29, driving the blue pickup with the green horseshoeing rig on the back.
Donald Cooper, a potential horse buyer, had been to Kentwood on June 29 and found Tom and Pat gone. He had seen the canopy of the blue truck on blocks in the yard.
Liz Price, Pat and Tom’s neighbor and friend, verified that the Kentwood Morgan emblem had not been on their blue pickup since Pat’s accident just after their wedding.
Garland was doing the best he could with what he had, and yet he hadn't even touched on Tom’s whereabouts on the murder night. Pat had brought Garland the next witness, and the defense attorney approached him warily.
The witness's name was Bill Jones, and he was employed at a liquor store located on Cleveland Avenue at the I-75 freeway. He recalled that, yes indeed, he had met up with Tom Allanson at twelve minutes to eight on the evening of July 3 when Tom came in to ask for change to make a phone call.
“Some people want change for the telephone—which is outside on the parking lot against the post,” Jones testified, “but ever since I have been there, no one has asked me for change to make a long-distance call. . . . He even added Zebulon, Georgia. . . . The only reason why I would have remembered that—his wife came in the next night after and asked me was there a man in there that evening, and I told her what had happened. . . . See, when he said ‘telephone,’ the light bulb went on in my mind because my wife goes to sleep on the sofa at night—roughly at eight o’clock. I have to call her by eight. . . . When he said ‘telephone,’ I looked at my watch.”
The voluble Mr. Jones estimated that his store was located about two miles from Norman Berry Drive in East Point.
The state demolished Mr. Jones as Weller took over cross-examination. Jones admitted that, while he had told Sergeant Callahan that Tom had been in the store at 4:30 p.m., he had later told a private investigator that he didn’t know if Tom had been in at seven or eight—or nine, for that matter. Jones recalled, after being prodded, that Pat Allanson had been in the liquor store to see him at least three times, and after that he had been visited by defense investigators on several occasions. He denied vigorously that he had seen a reward for information posted in the Atlanta Journal.
He was not a credible witness—undoubtedly one of “Pat’s witnesses” that Ed Garland had told Judge Wofford he did not want to put on the stand. But he was the only witness who placed Tom away from the slaying scene. And he was far from impressive.
Mrs. Clifford B. Radcliffe was. Dressed impeccably, her beautiful gray hair perfectly coiffed, she made her way gracefully to the stand.
Ed Garland approached her, smiling. “And what is your husband’s occupation?”
“My husband is with the federal government with—in a security support branch. He’s a retired lieutenant colonel.”
“He’s here today, is he not?”
“Yes, he is.” She smiled serenely.
“Right there?”
“Yes.”
“The man who just took his glasses off?”
“The most distinguished man in the courtroom,” Margureitte replied proudly.
&nb
sp; Garland had let her go a bit too far. He wanted the jury to see what fine people the Radcliffes were, but he didn’t want to leave them with the impression that they were holier-than-thou. He quickly changed the subject. “All right. Now, Mrs. Radcliffe, is your daughter present in the courtroom?”
“Yes, she is.”
“She’s the defendant’s wife?”
“That is correct. That is our daughter.”
Garland hurried on before the witness could point out that Pat was the “most beautiful woman in the court room.”
Margureitte disputed the ridiculous idea that the Allansons' truck had ever had an emblem like the one the Lake Lanier witnesses described. Next, she verified that Pat and Tom had come for dinner on June 29, and had been summoned from there to Nona and Paw's.
Garland leapt ahead to the evening of July 3. Margureitte testified that Pat had called them, worried sick, around 7:30. “I told her that me and her father would meet her, to stay exactly where she was. . . I told her to stay at the King Professional Building at the parking lot, to park away from the building. . . . We'd be there and we were there.”
Garland moved into Margureitte's two strange and frightening encounters with the late Walter Allanson. Bill Weller objected. “Your Honor, it seems to me we're going into an awful lot of hearsay. . . . It’s too bad I couldn't have poor . . . Mr. Allanson here to come and say what he said or didn't say—but I'm sort of in a peculiar situation . . . Your Honor. . . . If it’s all right for him to go into hearsay of a man resting six feet under, it’s all right for me to go into something the wife said to her also.”
Judge Wofford refused to let either lawyer bargain for future rulings. He nodded to Garland, who asked the witness what Walter Allanson had said to her.
Margureitte’s tone was dramatic as she recalled her last conversation with the late victim. “He said, ‘I think it will all be over by this weekend’, that ‘Tommy will either be jailed or he will be dead,’ and I was terrified.’’