by Ann Rule
Apparently, “Ms. Radcliffe,” was being deluged with requests for her work, and the feature writer marveled that she also found time to create handmade bookmarks and hand-painted handkerchiefs.
The local resident, a former Hallmark Card employee, puts a message or one of the handkerchiefs in the back pocket of a card or fan. She also letters a verse on the front of the greeting card.
Pat explained that she did her own verses to suit.
Her grandchildren, Sean, 4, and Dawn, 5, also help her out by cutting things out for her and “gluing the simpler things.”
“There are no two alike. People come to ask for something special. I consider them special cards for special people.”
Pat had always loved the romance of bygone eras, and she was extremely artistic, although she had never worked for Hallmark as she told the reporter. She had been making dainty cards to surprise Tom ever since he was arrested. He had tons of cards and letters with tiny roses, lace, hearts, and intertwined hands.
Lisa Richardson, the reporter who interviewed Pat, had not asked Pat about other interesting aspects of her life, and Pat had not seen fit to mention that her card making might be interrupted soon when she went on trial in Fulton County Superior Court for attempted murder. She was, in fact, terrified of going to trial. She spent her time making cards, sewing dresses that she would wear to court, and placing phone calls to her beloved aunts in North Carolina. She begged them all to come to Atlanta and be with her during her trial. Boppo and Papa would be there, of course, and Susan and Debbie. But she wanted—needed—her whole family around her. The prosecutor was going to be rude—she was sure of it.
Susan, having had no luck at all convincing her mother’s attorney to pursue an insanity defense, did whatever she could to help Pat. She delivered the old-fashioned greeting cards to her mother’s customers, found new customers among her fellow employees at Eastern Airlines, and listened as Pat talked far into the night about her fears for the future.
The holiday season of 1976 was not a happy time on Tell Road, no matter how hard anyone tried to make things seem festive, at least for the sake of Sean and Dawn. Boppo and Papa had always made so much of Christmas, even dressing up like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. But the specter of the trial ahead hovered over them, and the knowledge that bankruptcy for the Radcliffes was not far behind haunted them too.
Still, nobody blamed Pat. They saw her, as always, as the victim of cruel circumstance.
Largely due to Pat, the Radcliffes’ lives had been fraught with loss, change, and upheaval. After staving off creditors for so long, they finally went bankrupt. The house on Tell Road was due to go on the block, a public humiliation that they narrowly avoided when a man who had worked with their horses came forward the day before the sheriff’s sale and bought the property. Margureitte’s perfect home on Dodson Drive was only a distant memory now; they were no longer homeowners at all. Margureitte and the colonel rented a house at 6438 Peacock Boulevard in Morrow, Georgia, a hamlet south on I-85. There would be no room for horses, no orchards or rose gardens. Just a plain house.
Pat moved with them, of course.
PART SIX
PAT’S TRIAL
CHAPTER 35
Dunham McAllister had originally been retained to represent Tom Allanson in his last chance for an appeal. But Tom had come to the end of his road. It was now Pat who needed all the lawyers she could afford. McAllister, a bearded, rumpled man in his thirties, and his wife, Margo, practiced law together in Jonesboro, Georgia. Because Pat’s case was inextricably tangled with Tom’s and because her life story was so filled with extraordinary events, McAllister had to immerse himself in research to prepare for trial. There were stacks of court transcripts to read, medical records, dozens of people to interview.
McAllister requested delays several times. Pat didn’t go to trial in November, or in January. Indeed, it would be spring again before the proceedings to be known as The State of Georgia v. Patricia R. Allanson began on May 2, 1977, in the Honorable Elmo Holt’s courtroom. That day, there was an ironic juxtaposition of items in South Fulton Today: the defendant’s old world next to her present arena. Pictures of the Palmetto High School Horse Show, featuring a pretty young rider on a Morgan horse, abutted a column headed, ALLANSON TRIAL SET FOR TODAY.
Andy Weathers, assistant district attorney for Fulton County, had been relieved by the long delays requested by the defense. The case against Pat Allanson was no sure thing. Not at all. He had had his own research to do. Weathers, like his opposing counsel, was in his thirties. He had a thick shock of black hair and penetrating dark eyes. His voice was as deep and rumbling as thunder, and his mind lightning quick. He knew he had to be ready when he went into court. Judge Holt’s trials were juggernauts; once they got going, nobody dared ask for delays. The Fulton County judicial system was overladen as it was. Cases—even murder cases—usually went in on Monday and got spat out to a jury by Friday, even if it meant that court was in session until long after sundown. Judge Elmo Holt could be a curmudgeon, especially if he was trying to keep within his own tight time schedules.
“That trial,” Andy Weathers recalled, “was a very unusual situation, a very volatile situation. All the different family members there. The Boggses. The Radcliffes. Everybody. I always expected the best defense was going to be, ‘How could anyone do this? How [can you believe she would] do that to elderly people who trusted her?’ ’’ Weathers felt that normal, caring people would find the charge so outrageous that it should have been its own defense.
“But they didn’t go for that—the defense just went for trying to prove that Pat Allanson had not done it, period,” Weathers said, still somewhat bemused by that decision. It was, in fact, the same approach that Pat had insisted on in Tom’s earlier trial. Deny everything.
“We had to hammer in on small details and inconsistencies,” Weathers recalled of the prosecution's case against Pat. “We had no history on her behavior—at least she had no criminal history. We had to look for very small things, trying to do a probing examination. But you couldn't look at it without looking at the first case—where Tom killed his parents. That put everything in context. No one really knew exactly what her [Pat’s] part was in that—not from watching her and watching Tom—but she had the type of personality that it seemed that she would call the shots.
“But the deal about the arsenic was so outside what we usually dealt with. What we usually have here in the Atlanta area is passion killings. When you have a situation where someone actually plans to commit a murder—really gets down on it—you have situations where you don’t have any witnesses. We had no eyewitnesses in this case. What I was trying to do was like building a house—trying to lay a foundation about what had been going on.
“Pat Allanson had a two-pronged motive. There were two things she was trying to accomplish, I thought. She was trying to lay it off on the elder Mr. Allanson, as being the original killer. . . . If he had died, they would have gotten the money and gotten Tom out of prison. I think that was the thrust of what she was trying to do.”
After studying the case that Bob Tedford, the East Point investigators, and the D.A.’s investigators had put together, Weathers concluded that there had been almost perfect planning on the part of the defendant. “The experts told me there was a lot of similarity between arsenic poisoning and the normal aging process. Jean Boggs was the one who began to see and notice the things that only a member of the family would notice. If you weren’t specifically looking for this, it probably would never have been found. Tedford got on things then, and we worked on that case for a long, long time. We got Joe Burton—who’s now the medical examiner in DeKalb County—and he knew a lot about arsenic, and there’s a toxicologist named McGurdy in the GBI lab. Their testimony was critical.”
Even so, most prosecutors wouldn’t have taken on the case. It wasn’t a sure thing. It was the kind of case that could rapidly lower the percentages on an assistant D.A.’s conviction record.
&
nbsp; “Obviously,” Weathers later said, “I was convinced in my own mind that Patricia Allanson did it or I would never have tried the case . . . but I was still trying to get it in the form of tangible proof. It took going back and looking at the old liquor bottle, the nuances—just building on minutiae to try to put together a chain of facts. If you looked at each fact independently—if you looked at the wills being changed—”
With his new knowledge about the action of arsenic poisoning, Weathers hoped to be able to pick up on the ‘‘little mistakes” made by the defendant.
If, indeed, she had made any.
***
The white marble Fulton County Courthouse took up the entire block and was constantly being refurbished and expanded, so that its bulk hunkered over sidewalks and seemed about to burst into lanes of traffic. There were six huge columns on the Pryor Street side and wide steps leading to three double doors. Bronze pedestals supported a profusion of round white lights, and sheriffs cars and vans nudged the curb in front.
Tom’s trial had been held there and now it was Pat’s turn. But Tom had been locked up; at least she was free on bail. The day Pat’s trial began, Monday, May 2, 1977, promised to be hot as summer, and the air was humid and thick. High above bustling Pryor Street, Judge Elmo Holt presided over courtroom 808.
Pat Allanson looked wonderful. She had put on weight once her hip finally began to heal. She had made all new dresses for her trial. She chose a deep garnet-colored sheath for the first day of jury selection, and she wore a large cameo on a gold chain, cameo earrings, and a cameo ring. Her hair was perfect, and her makeup was subdued but elegant. Her cane added just a hint of vulnerability, and she occasionally touched her handkerchief to her forehead and lips as if she felt ill. Although her aunts could not all be with her, Boppo and Papa were there, and so was Susan.
On this first day of his wife’s trial, Tom Allanson was brought over from Jackson and into Judge Holt's courtroom. In exactly one week, Pat and Tom would celebrate—if the word fit considering the circumstances—their third wedding anniversary. They had lived together as man and wife for exactly seven weeks and six days. Their anniversaries since had been marked by disaster rather than happy remembrance.
The jury had yet to be picked and Tom was present to answer possible questions in pretrial motions. It was rumored that he might testify. He stared at Pat and she gazed back. And then Dunham McAllister signaled Pat to follow him. She left the courtroom to meet with her husband and they talked for two hours.
Being together was not the same. It never would be again.
Despite the publicity surrounding Tom's trial only a little over two years earlier, a jury unfamiliar with that case was picked on Monday afternoon—five men and seven women, nine whites and three blacks, white-collar and blue-collar.
The witnesses listed were predictable. For the state, there would be investigators, forensic scientists, toxicologists, Jean Boggs, Paw Allanson’s attorneys, the bankers who had notarized Paw Allanson’s “confession,” and Paw and Nona themselves.
For the defense, there would be those people who had always defended Pat: Mrs. Clifford Radcliffe, Colonel Clifford Radcliffe, Debbie Taylor Cole, and Miss Fanny Kate Cash (who had postponed surgery to be present). There were whispers that said Patricia Radcliffe Taylor Allanson would take the stand in her own defense. With the prospect of such a happening, courtroom 808 was packed. This might not be a “passion killing,” but then again, there were many in the courtroom who remembered Pat at her husband’s trial two years ago. They had wondered then what kind of woman she really was; perhaps now they would find out.
Pat looked even more beautiful the second morning of trial as opening arguments began. She wore an emerald green dress that precisely matched her eyes. She sketched and scribbled on a yellow legal pad as Andy Weathers presented the state's position in opening arguments; her face only occasionally betrayed a slight drift of annoyance.
Weathers had won his plea to introduce to the jury information on Tom Allanson’s conviction—a most important legal coup. Now the jury listened but gave no sign of what they thought as Weathers described Pat’s takeover of the elder Allansons’ affairs following her husband’s conviction for the murder of their son and daughter-in-law. “There will be introduced into court . . .various documents. These documents gave Patricia Allanson complete power of attorney to sign anything as if they themselves were signing it—gave her complete access to all the bank accounts, papers . . .”
“Arsenic.” Saying the name of the poison out loud provoked a ripple in the gallery. Andy Weathers promised the jurors proof—scientific proof—that the old people had had their body fluids and their hair and their fingernails infiltrated with the deadly poison.
Dunham McAllister’s opening statement promised that the evidence would show something entirely different. The confession was real enough, he said, dictated by Mr. Walter Allanson to Pat. “She doesn’t take shorthand, but she wrote it down in longhand, a lengthy statement which we expect the state to introduce. And this statement was, in fact, notarized.
“He signed it,” McAllister said emphatically.
Both the state and the defense were going to utilize the same evidence, but each would maintain that it supported its own case. Yes, McAllister agreed, there was arsenic, a bottle of it, but the liquor in Paw and Nona’s house had come from Jean and Homer Boggs. “We expect that the state will have failed to carry its burden of proof of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Pat Allanson is guilty of anything.”
***
Weathers was continually surprised at the civility of the cast of characters in this trial. Colonel and Mrs. Radcliffe were gracious, if reserved. “They were there every day, and they’d come up and talk with me,” he recalled. “I really believed that they were sincere in their belief that she didn’t do it—at least I believed the colonel. I believe there was a history of mental—stuff. . . but the defense didn’t know how to use it. Maybe they couldn’t have used it—it doesn’t usually work in a killing for profit, especially when you have chronic arsenic dosage. . . . Still, there was something about the dynamics of that trial,” Weathers mused, remembering that sometimes it seemed like a very proper social reception, despite its real purpose.
Margureitte Radcliffe was, first and foremost, a lady. And the colonel was what he always had been—absolutely correct. In public, they never broke; they never even bent. And above all, they were never rude. To many in the courtroom, it seemed inconceivable that their daughter stood accused of a terrible crime. Pat was a lady too, but as the prosecution moved into witness testimony, the picture evolving of Pat’s complete control of the elderly Allansons’ assets was devastating.
When Dr. Lanier Jones took the stand, Nona and Walter Allanson were wheeled into the courtroom so he could identify them. Nona was used to a wheelchair, but it was an ignominious thing for the old man to have to be wheeled anywhere. His feet and lower legs didn’t work anymore—the nerves were permanently damaged by arsenic poisoning. Nona waved at her doctor with her one good hand, smiling but confused by the courtroom scene. When they had left the courtroom. Dr. Jones compared the robust old man he had known with the comatose patient he had examined on June 13, 1976. He repeated more than once that he had been a “suspicious doctor.”
Dr. Everett Solomons described the corrosive action of arsenic on the human body, and Weathers moved on to the contents of the whiskey bottle Pat had given Dr. Jones.
“Would you state for the jury the results of the test of that bottle?”
“When we received the bottle, it contained approximately half a millimeter of liquid—3.63 milligrams.”
“. . . arsenic?”
“Arsenic.”
Weathers then called the associate chief medical examiner of Fulton County, Dr. Joseph Burton, and asked his opinion on what was wrong with Walter and Nona Allanson at the time of their hospitalization in June 1976.
“Arsenic intoxication. Arsenic . . . when introduced into th
e body—by whatever means, accidental, suicidal, or by a homicidal person—it has certain actions it takes. It’s rapidly absorbed into the GI tract. It appears in the blood twenty-four hours after ingestion. Within twenty-four, forty-eight, fifty-two hours, one will begin to get urinary arsenic excretion, and, if there is a single dose, this may continue for seven to ten days until the arsenic is cleared from the system. After about twenty-four to seventy-two hours, this arsenic also will appear in the hair and nails of the individual.
“Now, the hair grows at approximately a half a millimeter per month. The nails grow approximately a tenth of a millimeter per month. The white part of your nail is the active growing site that the arsenic would be deposited in. . . . If one finds arsenic in the nail tip, that tells you that arsenic has been in the nail long enough to grow from this site to this site here,” he said, demonstrating.
Dr. Burton explained that the same progression was true in human hair. Speaking of Paw Allanson, he said, “There have been two episodes of arsenic introduced into the system. . . . It’s very rare to find a level this high unless someone has introduced into his system a large bolus of arsenic to give you that level. . . . The same is true for Nona Allanson . . . a very high level of arsenic found. There is no way that these amounts that we see in the nails and hair are within any normal range.”
It was Burton’s opinion, given the Allansons’ medical histories and based on his tests, that someone had administered arsenic to the elderly couple about six months before their hospitalizations in June and July, and then again just before they were hospitalized. “This is consistent with chronic arsenic intoxication . . . ” Burton said.
“Let me ask you this,” Weathers continued. “If someone were taking . . . arsenic in their system—bearing in mind respective ages of the people . . . would this have any effect whatsoever on their mental stability?”