by Ann Rule
They didn’t see each other as often as they would have liked. Cindi worked in Alabama and Kent worked in Atlanta, but they wrote all the time and exchanged photographs. Kent sent her a picture of himself pensively staring into the distance. He had pasted the words “Love” and “Future!” over the snapshot.
In November of 1964, he sent a picture and wrote on the back,
Cindi,
Your long slim “Echo” continues to look for that very special day! The day of beginning our lives together—May it come soon and bring us our happiness.
Loving you!
Kent
Another time he wrote, “I am missing you very much, Cindi. Hurry home—so I can smile again.”
One weekend when they were together, they put ten dollars worth of quarters into a “Three Photos for a Dollar” booth and posed together, with Cindi perched on Kent’s lap.
The last picture was of a tender kiss.
They talked about getting married and even planned on having a little girl. They would call her Jessica. Sometimes when Kent wrote to Cindi, he sent a message to “Jessica,” their secret child of the future. “Jessica, I know you are somewhere waiting out there. . . . ”
A local paper featured a picture of Kent and Cindi and her parents on the society page. The copy read:
Cindi Alan of Birmingham, Alabama, who has been visiting her parents, Lt. Col. and Mrs. Bertram Alan* in Atlanta, was invited by a reporter to pose for a picture. She in turn invited her date, Kent Radcliffe, to stand by her side. Just as the camera shutter snapped, she extended her hand, displaying a handsome ring.
And that is how the Alans learned that their daughter was engaged!
It was the stuff that warms the hearts of society reporters, but things were not exactly as they seemed. Cindi wanted so much to love Kent completely, and she did love him, but not in the way he needed. She had kept a secret side of her life away from him. She thought she could make the relationship work and she tried, but she couldn’t. Without telling Kent the real reason, she gently broke their engagement. They were still friends and he still loved her. He tried pleading and he even got angry at her, but nothing worked. He could not understand how she could just walk away from everything they had planned. He was desolate.
Kent went to Houston to stay with his uncle Frazier—to get away and to find a job he could lose himself in. As always, Kent assumed it was some defect in him that had made still another romance crumble. He was in as vulnerable a state as he could possibly be. He was trying to put the torn seams of his life back together when he received two oddly urgent messages. One was a phone call from a female voice he couldn't place and the other was a letter.
The message was the same: “Get back on the bus and get back to Atlanta.”
Kent did not know who initiated the call and letter, but when he returned to Atlanta, he walked into an onslaught of crushing news. His sister Pat told him an ugly, unbelievable story. If Kent had harbored even the slightest hope that he and Cindi would get back together, she smashed it. “Your girlfriend prefers women,” she said flatly. “I don’t know why she ever got engaged to you—maybe to cover up her real life. She’s a lesbian.”
It was true, but Cindi had never wanted Kent to know. This was 1965, and she loved him enough to let him go with less devastating truths.
Reeling from that disclosure, Kent was in despair. And yet within a short time Pat chose to hit him with an even more stunning revelation. Kent had always believed that he was the natural son of Clifford Radcliffe, and no one had even hinted otherwise. Although Kent had yet to prove himself to the man he admired so much, he was proud to be his son. But, of course, he was not. According to his birth certificate, he had been born out of wedlock long before Margureitte ever met Radcliffe.
Again it was his sister who lacerated him with the truth. In a moment of rage, Pat turned her fury on her brother and spat out, “You’re not our kind, you know. You don’t even know who you are! You think Papa’s your father but he isn’t. You’re a bastard, and you’re so stupid you don’t even know it!”
It was such a cruel thing for her to do. The little boy who had endured deafness, the teenager who had survived a broken heart, the man who saw one marriage and his hopes for another fail, had everything he believed in taken away from him in those appalling sentences.
Pat could hardly have believed that she was Clifford Radcliffe’s true issue. She was older than Kent; in all likelihood, she and Kent had both been fathered by the same man. However, she clearly saw herself as superior to Kent; in her mind, she was aristocracy and he was an interloper from a lower stratum of society. Once she had opened the Pandora’s box of Kent’s genetic heritage, she reminded him of his true roots every chance she got. There were witnesses who heard her do it.
Kent was never the same. He dated again, but his heart wasn’t in it. He drank too much and his ability to deal with loss was almost gone. Cindi wept for his pain, but she couldn’t be what he needed.
Christmas of 1965 was tense, no matter how hard Boppo tried to make it festive. Kent was so depressed. He had been to Alabama to see Cindi, and even she found him so changed, so bitter.
Gil was often overseas. He had become a shadow husband and shadow father. The tight little family group on Dodson Drive didn't need him; he was as alienated as Kent was.
Kent was living on Dodson Drive, but only temporarily; he was trying to get into an apartment of his own. Pat’s kids wanted him around, but his sister railed at him constantly. Boppo was torn between the two of them, but as always she sided with her daughter, guessing that Kent was stronger than Pat.
Kent was dating a flight attendant in College Park, Georgia, in the latter part of 1965. She was beautiful and she really cared for him, but Kent could no longer risk trusting any woman enough to fall in love. When the girl became pregnant, she kept the news to herself, sensing that the timing wasn't right and that Kent’s feelings for her weren’t strong enough. She bided her time, waiting for the right moment to tell him.
It never came.
On February 1, 1966, Officer M. C. Faulkner of the East Point Police Department received a Signal 59 directing him to 2555 Stewart Avenue, “just in front of Nalley’s Chevrolet.” A Signal 59 meant a dead body. He expected to see an accident. And, indeed, there was a minor traffic accident on Stewart Avenue. An Oldsmobile sedan parked at the curb had a smashed right front fender and the tire on that side was flat. Nearby, Faulkner saw a station wagon with the tailgate dented.
Officer G. H. Wade told Faulkner that he had been called to the scene by a salesman at Nalley’s. In response to their questions, Mary Schroder said she had been driving her 1962 Ford station wagon south on Stewart Avenue with her attorney husband, James, as a passenger. “I was making a right turn into Nalley's when my car was struck in the rear by that Oldsmobile. I think it’s a ’62 too. The car then passed our car and pulled to the curb.”
James Schroder picked up the strange account. “The driver looked back at us as he passed. I got out and started to walk over to his car and then I saw him slump over in the seat.”
A Nalley’s salesman said he had heard a loud report— “like a gunshot”—just before the accident, but another witness told the officers that the Oldsmobile had passed his car just before the crash and that the driver, a young man, had been smoking a cigarette.
Just when the gunshot had occurred was a moot point. The driver of the Oldsmobile was dead, his body stretched out across the front seat with his head resting near the right front door. His feet, clad in Hush Puppy shoes, still rested next to the accelerator and brake. There was no blood apparent: he might have only fallen asleep. But a .22-caliber pump-action, single-shot rifle lay on the floor on the passenger side on a pile of crushed newspapers. The recoil had left it pointed at the dead man’s knee, but its single shot had done its work.
On the slight chance that the young man might be alive, he was rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital, but he was dead on arrival. A driver’s lic
ense and Social Security card in a wallet found on the dead man identified him as Reginald Kent Radcliffe, twenty-six, of 2378 Dodson Drive.
Sergeant Haines of the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to take charge of the body. The ME’s office classified Kent’s death as “violent” and as a suicide. He had suffered a “pressed contact gunshot wound to the mid-chest through the clothing.” He would have died almost instantly. A blood alcohol test revealed that the percentage of ethyl alcohol in Kent's system was .13. In most states, .10 is the standard for legal intoxication.
Investigators removed Kent’s belongings from his impounded car. His wallet held $2.40. There was an athletic bag, a cigarette lighter, cigarettes, two ballpoint pens, a second lever-action .22 rifle, his glasses (in the backseat), and, also in the rear seat, a partially empty pint bottle of rum.
There was no sophisticated forensic science test that could determine just when Kent had fired a bullet into his heart. Was he dead, or even dying, when he hit the rear of the Schroders’ car with his right front fender? Probably not; James Schroder was sure the driver had glanced back at them after the collision.
Had Kent intended to kill himself sometime that first day of February? Had he driven around East Point with the gun poised and ready? Or had the traffic accident been only the final straw to a man who believed that his life was without joy? Had he grabbed the gun and fired in a fatally impulsive gesture?
The East Point investigators even considered the possibility that there might have been another passenger, that Kent might have been murdered. His glasses were unbroken in the backseat. He was so nearsighted that he could not have seen to drive without them. No, it was more likely that the force of the blast knocked them from his face and over the seat. They dismissed the murder theory. Too many people had observed Kent’s car after the accident, and no one had emerged and run away.
Kent had destroyed himself.
***
It was early evening when the notifying officer knocked on the front door at Dodson Drive. Margureitte answered, feeling a premonition: no one but strangers ever came to the front door. When she saw the uniform and before the officer spoke a word, she cried out, “My God! Kent’s killed himself!”
Pat stood down the hall, watching. She tried to hug her mother, but Margureitte pushed her away, inconsolable. Colonel Radcliffe went to the morgue to make the formal identification.
Kent’s death made no headlines: there was only a short article on the back pages of the Atlanta Journal. His obituary was even shorter. No mention was made of the manner of his death. Survivors were listed as his parents, Colonel and Mrs. Clifford B. Radcliffe, East Point, and a sister, Mrs. G. H. Taylor, East Point. On Thursday, February 3, 1966, services were held in Hemperley’s Funeral Parlor and Kent was buried in Onslow Memorial Park in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Cindi Alan slipped a ring on his finger before his casket was closed. It was engraved, “To Kent from Jessica.”
But there would never be a Jessica. Nor would there be another baby, one that Kent had not known about. The flight attendant who had been carrying his child had an abortion. She grieved terribly, but not for very long. Six months later she was a passenger in a two-seater private plane. It crashed, killing her and the pilot on impact.
Pat was an only child now. Kent was gone forever. The only obvious reminder of his existence was a picture of him as a shy grade school boy that Margureitte kept constantly in view. Margureitte had borne three children. Two of them were dead. She refused tranquilizers. “Why do I want to numb the pain?” she asked hopelessly. “Kent’s dead. In the morning, he will still be dead. Nothing will change. Why numb the pain?”
Pat grieved dramatically for her brother, sobbing about what a tragedy it was. She blamed Cindi. “She killed him with a broken heart!” But Margureitte was not unaware of the rancor that Pat had always felt for Kent. She stared blankly at her daughter’s tearful face.
Margureitte now devoted all her energies to Pat and Pat’s children. Besides Clifford and her sisters, they were all she had left. And now Pat had her mother all to herself. None of her histrionics and machinations had done real harm to anyone before. Rather, she had been just an inadequate young woman, self-absorbed and hysterical, who seemed her own worst enemy. But now, with her brother’s suicide, her overwhelming selfishness had, quite literally, drawn blood.
CHAPTER 22
***
Life went on on Dodson Drive.
It was 1966 and Pat was twenty-nine years old. The war in Vietnam raged far away. Gil Taylor, cut adrift from his family, spent a large chunk of his life in that war. “From the time I was eleven or twelve,” Susan recalled of that year, “we mostly lived on Dodson Drive with my grandparents. My father dropped in occasionally and he sent money. We kids missed him.”
Pat used Gil’s money for her own needs; she told her parents that he contributed nothing to his family’s support—a lie. Boppo and Papa supported her and the children. The Taylor family made sporadic attempts to reunite, but they were always back with Pat’s parents within a few months. Gil signed on for another tour in Vietnam. On their fifteenth anniversary, he sent Pat a picture of himself in fatigues standing outside the mess tent. On the back he wrote,
6 Sept. 1967. My Darling, Lt. Levine took this of me this morning. ANNV. PRESENT. Ha! I love you. Happy Anniversary, My love.
Pat had not lived with him for more than a fraction of those fifteen years.
Colonel Radcliffe retired from the army and dabbled in real estate. Margureitte decorated the Dodson Drive house so that every room pleased her. There were three bedrooms and a den. Ronnie, seven, slept in Pat's room; Susan and Debbie had shared a room until Kent moved out, and then Susan got his room. After he died, she had bad dreams. She cried for him for a long time. But no one spoke about Kent very much. Certainly no one discussed why he had killed himself. What was the point?
Through her granddaughters, Margureitte lived out her old dreams of being a horsewoman. She prevailed upon the colonel to invest in a horse, not much more than a plug. They named him Sam, and Susan, Debbie, and Ronnie rode him. Margureitte’s job as a receptionist for a local dentist provided money for her grandchildren’s riding lessons. Pat took lessons too, reveling in her image, but she had no real flair for riding. She could ride sidesaddle and look pretty, no more than that. Her children were good—particularly Susan and Debbie. They studied with some of the most prestigious trainers in the South, and learned English-style riding, jumping, and equestrienne. Seeing her granddaughters in their jodhpurs, tailed jackets, and fedoras, Boppo beamed. She never missed a competition if she could help it and was very proud when they won blue ribbon after blue ribbon. “My girls always pinned high,” she recalled fondly. There was something so refined about this sport; the best people in Georgia participated.
Debbie and Susan got along as well as most teenage sisters. Susan’s two-year advantage in age gave her more privileges, which Debbie resented mightily. Neither girl inherited her mother’s green eyes; they had dark brown eyes. Susan had thick, almost black hair, and Debbie’s was light brown. They were both very pretty. Susan tended to be quiet and Debbie feisty.
Many years later, Colonel Radcliffe laughed when he recalled that Susan and her girlfriends used to sneak out on the porch so they could peek at him while he was in the shower. An adult Susan shook her head in bewilderment. “We never did that. Why would we? Why would he say that? Maybe my girlfriends would have liked to peek at Kent—but they never did. And they sure didn’t want to see my grandfather naked.”
Ronnie’s seizures continued sporadically, and many times his grandparents and his mother held a tongue depressor between his teeth, wrapped him in blankets, and sped away to the hospital. “They would never tell us what was wrong with him,” Susan said. “And, after a while, it didn’t happen anymore.”
The girls’ weekends were taken up with riding lessons and shows. Sam was relegated to pasture, and they rode their own Morgan horses now: La Petite
and Biscayne. Debbie and Susan were so good that they rode in shows for other owners too. They went to the best tack shops for their English riding uniforms and had them tailored to fit. Pat drove them to their lessons and competitions and Boppo and Papa paid for everything. They bought the horses and took care of their board and vet bills.
“I was the Georgia youth champion for riding Morgans when I was fourteen,” Debbie remembered. “And then the world youth champion. I was riding someone else’s horse when I won; it was Lippit Moro Alert, owned by Ronald Blackman.” But Biscayne threw Debbie and she broke her arm. Despite the pressure at home, she refused to ride her again. Susan felt the push to win too. Although she loved the jumping events because they made her feel “free,” she was often frightened on the obstacle courses. “I faked it once—if my mother had found out, she would have killed me because it was a very elite show in Atlanta. Biscayne and I made the first few jumps, but we were coming up on a solid brick wall and I just knew she couldn’t spread out enough to make it. I was terrified, and I clamped my knees down and made it look like she'd balked. Everybody blamed her but I was the one who was scared. I felt guilty about humiliating her that way.”
With time, the pain from Kent’s suicide became less acute for Margureitte, although she never truly recovered from the loss. But she still had Pat and the colonel, who accepted her grandchildren as his own. He called Susan “Poogie,” Debbie “Diddle,” and Ronnie “Sam Houston Texas Taylor.” As for Pat, she was so much more serene when she lived with her parents. Her own parenting sometimes seemed quixotic. She continued to sew for her daughters, wonderful special dresses that would have cost hundreds of dollars in a store, and she encouraged their efforts. “She was always telling me I could do anything,” Susan said. “She was so proud of us when we did well.”