by Ann Rule
“Did he say anything in response to your statement that Tommy didn’t do it [the ambush]? . . . Did he say anything about whether it could be anybody else that could have done it?”
“Your Honor,” Weller objected. “I think we are leading a little bit.”
Garland grinned ruefully. “I think we are, Your Honor.”
Bill Weller questioned the defendant’s mother-in-law. Even on cross-examination, Margureitte Radcliffe was a most forthcoming witness. She was, however, disturbed by quotations attributed to her from her July 6 interview with Detective Zellner. Even when told that they had come directly from a transcription of an audiotape, she felt sure that words had been added or left out. A comparison to the original tape showed no such omissions or additions. “[The night Pat called you] she had no idea where her husband, Tom, was at that time, did she?” “She said he had gone to talk with his mother,” Margureitte replied.
“Oh, she told you that?” Weller sounded surprised.
“Yes.”
“She didn’t tell you that she didn’t know where he was and she was frantic waiting on him?”
“No.”
“She told you that he had gone—”
“He had gone there . . . I was frightened.”
Garland fought back with hearsay objections and was sustained.
“Now, Mrs. Radcliffe,” Weller continued. “Tom Allanson’s final decree on his divorce from the second wife, Carolyn, was on the ninth of May, 1974, wasn’t it?”
“To my knowledge, yes, sir.”
“And they [Tom and Pat] got married when—the latter part of May 1974?” Weller led the witness smoothly into a trap.
“They were married on the evening of May 9.”
“Oh, they got married the very evening that the divorce decree went into effect?”
“That is correct.” Margureitte sat up straighter and fixed the prosecutor with a thin smile.
“Now, isn’t it a fact that the late Mr. and Mrs. Allanson would not accept your daughter?”
“I don’t know. They did not know her.”
“Well, I didn’t say that. I said, they did not accept her as a daughter-in-law, would they?”
“He said that . . . he didn’t have a son, so therefore, how could he have a daughter-in-law?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s right.” Margureitte fixed her eyes triumphantly on a chastened-appearing Weller. She was a disaster as a witness on cross; she offered too much information and she came across as supercilious. On balance, Garland’s case would have been better off without Margureitte’s testimony. She was more help to the prosecution.
It had been a very long day, this fourth day of trial, and Judge Wofford released the jury at 6:00 p.m. Ed Garland asked for yet another mistrial and was again denied. Each request, of course, would add to the likelihood that an appeal for a new trial would be granted. He was a cunning attorney; he knew exactly what he was doing. The lawyers wrangled over legal points in chambers long after the jury had dispersed.
***
On Friday morning, October 18, the first witness was Fred Benson, a blacksmith and longtime friend of Tom Allanson’s. Garland hoped to throw doubt on Tom’s identification in the police lineup three days after the murders. Benson had been a voluntary participant in the lineup of July 6. He explained why. “I went in to see Tom, see, and Detective Thornhill was real nice—took me back to the cell to talk to Tom. . . . All these officers were in there [the police station] . . . and they were fixing to have a lineup. They brought these two car theft boys out. They were little bitty short guys, looked criminal—criminal-type-looking people—with moustaches.”
“You don’t mean to say that just because they had a moustache—” Garland cut in quickly. Several of the jurors had moustaches.
“You know. What I’m trying to say—they didn’t look like Tom. If you’ve seen Tom, he’s twelve foot tall, only man in the world I have to look up to.”
Two other lineup members were fire fighters, who had stripped down to their T-shirts and trousers. Benson volunteered to stand in the lineup so that Tom would have a better chance. He was a big man too, and he figured he would offset the “little bitty” criminal types.
Benson had also known Tom’s ex-wife for many years, and Garland elicited his opinion of her. “Mr. Benson,” he asked. “Do you—from your knowledge of Carolyn Allanson of Athens, Georgia—Did you hear what people generally said about her in reference to her reputation for truthfulness and honesty?”
“Most anybody in Athens—”
“Answer yes or no.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was that reputation good or bad?”
“It was very bad.”
“And based on that reputation, would you believe her on her oath?”
“I wouldn’t believe her if she was standing on a stack of Bibles. I told Tom—” Benson was just getting warmed up.
“Just answer the questions,” Garland stopped him. “All right, your witness.”
Weller dispatched Tom's fellow farrier quickly. Looking chagrined, Fred Benson turned to the judge. “Your Honor. I didn’t get to say all I wanted to say—”
“You have said all they will allow you to,” Judge Wofford explained.
Pursuing his strategy to cast doubt on Tom’s identification in the lineup. Garland called Hugh Maples, a private investigator working for the defense team, to the stand. He recalled the circus atmosphere that Fourth of July weekend at the East Point police station.
“Did you have occasion,” Garland asked, “to be at the East Point jail in the presence of Tom Allanson on an occasion when there was a disrobed hippie girl?”
The jurors exchanged glances. Every day there seemed to be a surprise or two in the testimony.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell the jury about that incident.”
“This was on a Saturday prior to the lineup . . . Pat was back there . . . talking with Tom. . . . Chief of Police Godfrey was up at the other end of the hall talking with this hippie girl . . . she had just taken a shower and was complaining about no towels.”
“How was she dressed?”
“She wasn’t dressed.”
“Did that attract any attention from the policemen?”
Several jurors smiled and a few gallery members tittered.
“Several. Yes, sir. . . . Detective Zellner leaned around the corner. He called someone to come there, and I turned and saw it was Officer McBurnett.”
“And could Officer McBurnett see the defendant, Tom Allanson?”
“Yes, sir.”
Garland ended his questioning there. Had the jurors understood that this prior viewing would have further contaminated McBurnett’s identification of Tom in the lineup?
Ed Garland knew in his bones that Pat had concocted a story for Tom to tell, believing her version would fly better than what he might say. Garland didn’t want Tom on the stand, and he certainly would not put Pat on the stand; she was so unstable emotionally that he couldn’t predict what she might do. So Garland was left with a defense that only nibbled at the edges of the questions in the jurors’ minds.
Bill Weller kept making sarcastic references to the fact that most of Tom’s witnesses were “horse people,” as if that would automatically make them lie for him. Bill Jones, the liquor store eyewitness, had been pretty well tainted as a defense witness. So Garland could only chip away at the lineup and at Carolyn Allanson’s reputation for honesty.
None of it was really enough to fight double murder charges.
***
There was a hush in the courtroom as an old man made his way to the witness stand. Walter Allanson—Paw—had come to testify for his grandson in a murder trial where his own son and daughter-in-law were the victims.
He had loved Tommy since the day he was born. He didn’t look like a sentimental man. Actually, he appeared to be a weather-beaten old cuss whose expression reflected no discernible emotion.
“Did you h
ave occasion, Mr. Allanson,” Garland asked, “to have a telephone call from Carolyn Allanson?”
“Yeah . . .
“When did Carolyn Allanson call you?"
“About six weeks ago.”
“In that conversation, what did she say to you?”
“She wanted to come out to the house but I had company coming. I asked her to wait till Sunday to come. Then in talking to her, she’s telling me she loved Tom, and I asked her what all went on out at the house at the killings. She said, ‘Mother Allanson got killed.’ That’s what she called her mother-in-law, see, and then [she said], ‘But we didn’t mean for Walter to get killed—’ ”
What could she have meant: that there had been a plot to kill her mother-in-law, and her father-in-law was killed by mistake?
It was doubtful that young Carolyn had been romantically involved with her husband’s father, as Margureitte had suggested. Was this simply the testimony of a very old man who would do anything to save his grandson? Quite possibly. Paw had no further observations or remembrances to offer on Carolyn, and the jury seemed oblivious to any spicy connections his testimony might have evoked.
Weller seemed to think that the old man was fabricating. “Mr. Allanson,” he began on cross-examination. “You want to do everything you can to help your grandson, don’t you?”
“I want to be fair with the world.”
“Yes, sir. You want to help him and do everything you can to help him?”
“If it takes anything to help him, the truth is what I'm telling.”
“And really,” the prosecutor asked, “it’s pretty well your philosophy that the dead are gone and the living are still here, isn't it?”
“Yeah."
“Nothing further.”
On redirect, Garland elicited Paw's opinion of Tom as far as violence went.
“I've known him and he’s a fair, square boy,” he replied.
“Wait a minute. I’m asking you about his reputation for peacefulness.”
“Good.” Paw did not waste words.
While questioning Paw, Bill Weller had, for the third time in the trial, managed to get the information on the record that Tom Allanson was a quick-draw expert. He had, the prosecution maintained, once shot himself in the leg while practicing in college. Paw Allanson agreed that Tom was a “pretty good quick-draw” shooter.
Nona Allanson, who could barely speak due to a stroke, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. She testified that she had heard her son Walter threaten to kill her grandson.
“Did you tell your grandson that?”
“Yes, I told him.”
Weller had no questions. Lawyers rarely make points with the jury by cross-examining such a vulnerable witness.
***
The long week of testimony was over. Next would come the summations. The members of the jury would hear neither Tom nor Pat Allanson speak. They had watched their interplay and wondered about them, seeing the pretty woman whisper passionately to her husband and his attorneys, seeing the man on trial gaze at her with such longing in his eyes. The jury had not seen Tom and Pat kiss and hold each other as they did during court recesses, but they had picked up on the sexual tension between them. They had been curious, and undoubtedly wished they could have heard Tom and Pat testify. There seemed to be so much about this case that remained unexplained. But both sides had been represented by extremely able attorneys, and now it was time for final arguments.
Bill Weller contended that Tom Allanson had killed his parents deliberately. “Everything points to him. He has no reasonable hypothesis. The only reasonable hypothesis, the only reasonable circumstances—this man murdered his mother and his daddy in cold blood. He’s the only one had a motive. No phantom involved in this.”
Weller came as close to naming Pat Allanson as an accomplice as he dared under the law. She had not been formally charged with any crime because the D.A.’s office wasn’t sure just where she fit in—if at all. Weller asked the questions the D.A.’s staff had asked one another. “What’s she doing way up from Zebulon fifty or sixty miles away driving around the Allansons’ home—if not to let him off to do his little deed? Is she the fly in the ointment? Is she the rejected woman that the parents would not accept because they had another daughter-in-law and two children? And the constant needling—constant needling—crying . . . about somebody exposing himself and here she is a grown woman. . . . Every time you hear some witness, ‘Yes, she was with him.’ . . . This wife’s everywhere. She’s here waiting for him. She’s there. She's driving around the house. He’s walking to Zebulon. She’s next door looking for him at his grandmothers house thirty minutes before.”
Weller reminded the jury that Tom had been seen on Norman Berry Drive. “Three eyewitnesses. . . . That policeman looked him flat in the face three or four times. Mr. and Mrs. Duckett saw the police car running down the road with him. They described him, jeans, boots, Tarzan hair, tannish shirt—or brownish green, all the same color scheme.” Weller ended his summation with a call to the jury to simply add up the established facts. It was all there.
Ed Garland contended in his final arguments that the case against Tom Allanson had not been proven to a moral certainty, and that was what was needed to convict. “That is what this case is about. There is no moral certainty in it. There’s no firm piece of evidence you can plant your foot on and say, in fact, in that house that the defendant fired that weapon and killed those two people. It does not exist—but there’s this assumption, speculation. There’s positive proof to the contrary that someone else did the shooting on the twenty-ninth of June. . . .
“There’s not one piece of evidence that puts this defendant in that basement—not one—and if you consider a guilty verdict, you have to speculate—you have to assume. . . . In this case you're dealing with circumstantial evidence. Lots of bits and pieces of circumstances. The law sets an even higher standard. It says this, that the circumstances must exclude every other reasonable theory—must exclude every other one!"
And it was true. There was no physical evidence that placed Tom in that charnel house of a basement.
“It's just not there," Garland continued. "Was there a boot print, a bloody boot print walking from this basement through that blood where the man was lying in the trail of blood? Somebody had to go right through it. Was there . . . one bit of blood on an item of clothing this defendant had?" They went there to his home and arrested him. There was not and there's a reasonable doubt. . . .
“If you can meet the challenge of the law, then you will stand up and write a verdict of not guilty in this case because there are hundreds of reasonable doubts."
Ed Garland's voice dropped as he spoke the final sentences of his argument. He would not be allowed to speak again. Bill Weller would. The onus of proving a case is always on the state and the prosecutor is allowed a rebuttal statement after the defense finishes. “I ask you to write a verdict of not guilty," Garland pleaded. “In this case—not proven—to follow your duty as jurors . . . and return a verdict that says this case has not been proven. . . . I now give the burden of Tom Allanson's life to you. Please look after it."
Step by step, in rebuttal. Weller went over the case the state had built, asserting that the defendant had pried open the door into his parents' basement and then waited coldly for them to come home so he could murder them. It was a good argument, and plausible, and Weller was persuasive. “I want to quote one thing from the Scriptures, from the Book of Proverbs, and I’ll leave it with you," Weller concluded. “ ‘He that curseth his father and mother, his lamp shall be put out in the midst of darkness.’ ”
The jury could find Tom guilty of murder, not guilty of murder but guilty of voluntary manslaughter, or they could find him not guilty, period. In a two-count indictment such as this, they had to return a separate verdict on each count.
The jury retired to deliberate at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, October 18. At 8:27 p.m. they buzzed the courtroom and asked to come before the court. Judge Wof
ford understood that they had a question. But it was not a question. Joseph Thackston, the payroll administrator, had been elected foreman by his fellow jurors, and he said, “We have reached a decision, Your Honor.”
“You have?"
“Yes, sir.”
Judge Wofford immediately sent the jurors back into the jury room and placed a call to Ed Garland and Bill Weller. No one had expected a verdict so soon. Tom was brought over from jail, and the colonel and Margureitte supported Pat with their arms as they entered the courtroom.
By 8:44 p.m., all the principals were present. Pat stared at the jury, her face full of hope.
“Mr. Foreman,” Judge Wofford asked, “has the jury reached a verdict?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Weller, will you receive and publish the verdict, and Mr. Allanson, will you and your attorney stand right out here, please, and face the jury?”
Assistant District Attorney Weller unfolded the piece of paper and began to read, “Dated October 18, 1974. We the jury find for the defendant—”
Tom sighed with relief, and Ed Garland started to smile—but only as long as it took to take half a breath. Weller continued to read. “We the jury find for the defendant guilty on both counts of murder. . . . ”
The jurors had mistakenly used the wrong terminology. They had found Tom guilty, but the term “find for the defendant” meant, of course, that he had been acquitted. The relief and then the letdown were excruciating.
“You will go back in the jury room and correct your verdict," Judge Wofford explained to the jury. “It will be, ‘We the jury find the defendant guilty. In other words, you have one word too many in there." They returned with the word deleted.
Ed Garland asked for a polling of the jury. Tom stood as if made of stone, as pale as marble, showing no emotion at all. Pat watched the jury in utter disbelief, her chin trembling and her eyes filling with tears. As each juror spoke the word “guilty" aloud, she swayed as if she could collapse at any moment.