by Ann Rule
“Did you tell Detective Tedford?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Ma’am,” Weathers asked with exasperation in his voice, “how in the world could Dr. Jones have said this? He wasn’t even there. Didn’t you recall his testimony was based on what you-all told him at the hospital? He stated he had trouble getting the man to take pills. Don’t you recall that?”
“I recall that in testimony. . . . Perhaps I didn’t understand your question.”
“Did you tell Detective Tedford this man—Mr. Walter Allanson—was taking handfuls of pills and drinking whiskey?”
“Words to that effect—I had told him at one time, yes.”
“And do you recall telling Jean Boggs on the fourteenth day of June, out there in front of that house, that you hoped this man died?”
“No, sir. I did not say that.”
Nor had she told Tedford—on the very day that hospital personnel felt Paw was going to die—that her husband’s grandfather had tried to run her off the road, and that she lived in fear for her very life. “Not running off the road,” she said querulously. “I told him something else—but not running off the road.”
“And—as to the death of Walter and Carolyn . . . ,” Weathers asked, “isn’t it a fact that shortly before Walter Allanson died, you made a complaint that Walter Allanson exposed himself to you?”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“We are speaking of the dead man. Do you recall doing that?”
“Yes, I think I did.”
“You think you did. . . . You make the complaint and your husband said, ‘I’m going to kill that son of a bitch’?”
“No, sir . . . He didn’t say anything except to say what could be done about it legally.”
“And it is a fact in summation—my last question to you—at the time both of these people were killed, back in 74, you were in a jeep within two blocks of that area?”
“I was either in a jeep or in a doctor’s office.”
Weathers turned away. “I have no further questions.”
CHAPTER 37
***
Margureitte Radcliffe followed her daughter to the witness stand. Everywhere Pat went, her mother was close behind her, supporting, mopping up, fixing, rearranging. If Pat had been queenly in her bearing, Margureitte was an empress. Serene and self-contained, she gazed down at her daughter’s attorney almost benevolently.
The five-page confession looked perfectly familiar to her, she told McAllister. She had typed it herself, approximately a year earlier. She recalled that she had typed it just after she and her husband, Colonel Radcliffe, had returned from the funeral of his brother-in-law in New York State. They had been preparing to leave for a happier celebration, the fiftieth anniversary of one of her brothers. The Radcliffes were clearly family people, involved and supportive.
There was not a scintilla of Pat’s testimony that her mother did not substantiate. Margureitte remembered each facet with crystalline clarity. Certainly Nona Allanson had called them, panicked, needing help on June 12, 1976. Absolutely Nona had said Paw had tried to smother her and then had tried to force her to drink something— something not coffee.
Margureitte herself had witnessed it all.
On cross-examination, Weathers wondered why the dates on the confession had been so disparate. It was her fault, Margureitte admitted; she had not bothered to check a calendar when she began to type page one. The anniversary they were headed for was on a Sunday, but the celebration was on a Saturday. If Mr. Weathers had a 1976 calendar, she could probably figure it out.
Perhaps not. A glance at a 1976 calendar showed that the sixteenth of April—the day the confession was notarized—was a Friday.
“Do you think this was more than a few days off? . . . Do you think it was above or behind?” Weathers asked.
“It was prior to—it was ahead of time.”
“You mean like starting back eighteen, seventeen ...”
“Yes,” Margureitte answered, oblivious of the jury’s puzzled looks. “It was more than—in other words, I didn’t date it. It was like a—postdated, I would say, would be the proper word. That date is postdated. Is that not correct to be forward?”
She never gave a good reason why the confession had two different dates. The unspoken supposition was, of course, that Paw Allanson had been told to sign some vital documents on April 16, and the confession had been typed in three days later by a mother and daughter working together.
Margureitte had typed the confession in the study of the Tell Road house. In April of 1976. She was definitely sure it had been April.
“And how did you go about reducing—Did you reduce this from notes?”
“I didn’t reduce it. I wrote it verbatim.”
“You took it from something else and put it on here?”
“That is correct. Yes.”
“And who provided you with—”
“My daughter, Mrs. Allanson.”
“My question is this,” Weathers continued. “Everything there that you put in these papers was provided to you by Pat Allanson?”
“I didn’t change it, if that is what you mean.”
“I am not trying to imply that at all . . . In other words, everything you know about what’s on here is through information provided by your daughter?”
“No—I knew that Mr. Allanson had confessed prior to that, yes.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mrs. Allanson.”
“Mrs. Allanson told you that also?”
“Yes.”
“When did you have this conversation with Mrs. Allanson?”
“I can’t give you a date on that. I have to be very truthful. I have to be perfectly honest.”
Margureitte Radcliffe was fifty-six, only seventeen years older than the daughter she was trying, as always, to protect. She was still beautiful, and she lifted her chin ever so slightly and surveyed the courtroom with her “crystal gaze.” It was essential that she be perceived as very truthful, perfectly honest, and always, always correct.
“Were you aware that they were both full of arsenic?” Weathers went on, using phrases that clearly shocked Margureitte. “Were you aware that they had such a level of arsenic in their bodies [as] to alter their human structure, that [it] would have resulted in death if arsenic ingestion continued?”
“I heard the laboratory said that,” Margureitte replied. “I believe last week I saw the lab report, but prior to that I had not.”
Arsenic was not something that Margureitte would have chosen to discuss in detail; it was obviously burdensome for her, but Weathers kept alluding to the poison. He established that Margureitte had had “training in nursing.”
“You would generally be familiar with the fact arsenic would cause death if ingested in sufficient quantities?”
“The only thing I know about arsenic actually is that it is a poison. I have no personal knowledge.”
“I’m not implying for a moment that you do. I'm just asking you as a technical question—would you be aware that arsenic is a poison?”
“I would think it was very dangerous. Yes, very.”
Margureitte blamed the myriad typographical errors in the confession, the occasional lines that were capitalized, on her own inexperience. “I’m really not that good a typist.”
Weathers had another point he wanted to make. Paw’s alleged confession had too many details about the murders of Walter and Carolyn Allanson to be simply guess work. It had to have been written by someone who had been there, or who had been told what had happened that terrible night. Paw had emphatically denied any part in the murders. He had repudiated the confession. Who, then, had written it?
Weathers went about asking that question very subtly. In so many places in the confession, there were references to Paw Allanson's concern for his wife, to his fear that Mama “might have a stroke” if she knew. Why on earth would Paw have told anyone that he was a killer? It could have cost him what he held most dear. N
ona.
Margureitte Radcliffe agreed that Paw Allanson most definitely wanted the document kept secret to spare his wife’s health.
“So,” Weathers asked, “if the knowledge of the confession came to someone . . . it would not come from Walter Allanson. . . . It would have come from some other party?”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Margureitte said slowly. “I’d like for you to make that statement again.”
“Take the position the third party was there in that basement or right outside that area when it took place, knew exactly the details, wasn't concerned about Mrs. Allanson’s health. That third party or whoever else was in that basement could have put something—or everything—down on this piece of paper as to the way this happened. Could they not?”
“I do not follow you at all.” Margureitte flushed as she spoke, wary.
“I withdraw that,” Weathers said.
“I don’t know what the basement has to with what we are talking about, sir!”
Margureitte’s testimony was interrupted by a lunch break that Thursday in May of 1977. It was just as well for the defense. The scarcely acknowledged ghost of another crime haunted Pat’s trial. It was the crux of this trial, really. The double murder of Walter and Carolyn Allanson was what old Paw Allanson had supposedly confessed to; it was the event described in detail in this strange document full of typos and x-ed-out sections. Tom Allanson was in prison for that crime, but Pat Allanson had said on the witness stand that she had been “one,” “one and a half,” “two,” “more than two” blocks away at the moment the fatal shots were fired. She had been a suspect in those murders. She had never been charged, but that old investigation remained alive and rife with dangerous questions. No one on the defense side of this case wished to see those questions arise in courtroom 808.
***
Margureitte Radcliffe’s afternoon testimony was taken up with her typing of the confession, the choice of paper, the crossed-out portions, the manner in which she had inserted the paper into her typewriter—all questions from Andy Weathers. She couldn’t recall why she had made such choices. She had no idea whether one would normally start typing from the very top of a sheet of paper, block out the stationery heading and go on, or whether one would start in the middle, and then type the top of the page.
Did the jury see the significance of the different dates, the different margins, the different paper on Paw’s confession? There was no way of knowing.
Weathers asked Margureitte about July 26, 1976, the day she and her husband had come to East Point police headquarters with her attorney to give a formal statement about their recall of events in the Washington Road house. Their statements were taken just two weeks before Pat was arrested and charged with criminal attempt to commit murder. “Did you at any time in this statement tell the police, the district attorney’s office—or anyone in law enforcement—that you had typed a confession of murder signed by Walter Allanson?”
“No, I did not,” Margureitte said.
“I have no further questions.”
***
Colonel Clifford Radcliffe followed his wife onto the witness stand. In response to a question from McAllister, he recalled finding the whiskey bottle—a whiskey bottle, although he could not say if the bottle in evidence was the same bottle. The color of the cap looked different to him now. He attempted to say that his wife had told him to “dump it out.”
Weathers objected on the grounds the statement was hearsay.
The colonel hastened to explain that Dr. Jones had told Mrs. Radcliffe to tell him to dump out the bottle’s contents.
“Your Honor, that’s hearsay on hearsay.”
After a wrangle between attorneys, Judge Holt allowed the first hearsay but not the second. McAllister asked what the witness had done with the bottle.
“I smelled the contents,” the colonel replied. “I smelled the alcohol . . . I dumped the contents down into the toilet and then I gave the bottle to my daughter to put with the . . . medication we were accumulating in the house to give to Dr. Jones.”
He agreed with his wife and stepdaughter that Nona Allanson had called them for rescue on June 12.
“Did she state anything to you in person when you arrived?” McAllister asked.
“Yes, sir. . . If I may—not only to me, but several times thereafter to other people who came to the house.”
“What did she state?”
“That her husband had tried to kill her.”
“Thank you, sir.”
During cross-examination, Weathers deliberately allowed the jury to once again hear the story of the terrified old woman, the assaultive husband who was drinking and gulping down pills, the trio of rescuers who left Tell Road and rushed to Nona Allanson’s aid. Colonel Radcliffe explained easily that he had never actually seen Paw taking pills—he might have told detectives that, but he had corrected himself, “I did not actually see him, but there were open pill containers on the counter.”
“I am asking,” Weathers suddenly took the offensive, “did you tell the detectives when they came out there that he was gulping down handfuls of pills?”
“That was my assumption at the time I first saw him.”
Colonel Radcliffe had accused Bob Tedford of lying, of being confused about who said what about the pills. And now, once again, he had reversed himself.
Weathers brought the colonel back to July 26—the day of his formal statement. “Had your wife communicated to you at this time that she had typed a document . . . signed by Walter Allanson admitting the murder of his son and daughter-in-law?”
“At that time, I believe that she had indicated that she was typing a document.”
“Did you see the document?”
“I had seen it, but I had never read it.”
“You were aware that your wife was typing this document purported to be a confession of murder and you never read it?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“You never mentioned that to the police at that time?”
“What, sir?”
“The fact that there was a purported murder confession?”
“I don’t recall that I did.”
Weathers was astonished. He walked a bit closer to the distinguished-looking colonel. “Well now, certainly, sir—I ask you to search your memory. Would you not recall telling the police whether or not you had information to a double murder where a man and his wife had been killed in the basement of a house? You don’t recollect whether or not you told the police?”
“Was this supposed to be included in my statement of the twenty-sixth of July?” Radcliffe asked.
“I’m asking, on that statement you gave the police—did you give this information?”
Colonel Radcliffe was as calm and as flat as a windless lagoon. “I believe I did mention that there had been a confession.”
He had fallen into a prosecution trap and never realized it. He had never mentioned the confession.
***
Fanny Kate Cash was the next witness for the defense. A heavyset, disheveled woman, she peered at the gallery through thick glasses. Fanny Kate explained that she had lived all of her sixty-seven years at 4185 Tell Road. She had not married. She had once been a secretary and a bookkeeper, but when her mother passed away, she had to take care of her father.
Out there, before there were any other houses, Fanny Kate had lived with her aged father, who lay like a man already dead on the chaise lounge on the veranda. She had done sewing and baby-sitting. And then she was alone, except for her church circle. She sold a piece of her acreage to Pat and Gil Taylor. Seeing them tow those two houses in and watching the horse ring and the red and white stables being built must have been a happy thing for Fanny Kate. With the advent of Clifford and Margureitte Radcliffe, and all of Pat's children moving in and out, the neighborhood certainly livened up. Fanny Kate didn’t even mind that Pat had never paid off the land contract.
Fanny Kate had become a part of Boppo’s, Papa’s, an
d Pat’s lives, and she had lumbered down the road to their house often for lemonade or watermelon. They were so gracious to her that she hated to ask about the land payments. Their home was so lovely and clean. Fanny Kate’s life was more basic. Cooking and heating in the cabin where she lived was accomplished by a huge coal stove, belching smoke, and Fanny Kate’s home and person smelled of soot. She didn’t care for Pat’s children, who were terrified of her—their noise and their rambunctiousness set Fanny on edge—but she adored Pat. She had always tried to do her best for that poor, sickly woman. Fanny Kate had almost come to the point where she was going to give Pat her bedroom set, which Pat had long coveted—all carved with cupids and hearts on the headboard.
Fanny Kate testified that she had become a frequent companion and confidante to the Radcliffes and eventually spent much time at the Washington Road home of Paw and Nona Allanson. She substantiated all the testimony given by Pat and the Radcliffes. She had seen it herself.
Fanny Kate was off and running, relishing her place on the witness stand, eager to support her neighbors. She recalled that she had heard Paw Allanson talk strangely about his son and daughter-in-law’s murder way back in March of 1976. “Grandma was saying she had a dream, and he interfered with her about the dream. It was about the murder. And he told her it wasn’t right . . . and so he drew the basement . . . on the back of a magazine and give full details of the basement, where the hole was, where the furnace was, and then the stairway which came down . . . and he said the police never did state the truth about Carolyn and the way she was lying on the steps . . . and at that time, I says, ‘Well, where was the one that shot Walter standing?’ He said, ‘Right there.’ And it was in front of the hole.” Fanny Kate was full of recollections about what Paw had told her.
“Was that the end of the conversation?” McAllister asked.
“He caught himself and realized that he had talked too much, and he shut up then. Shut up like a clam.”
Weathers was on his feet. “Your Honor! This is the most pure conjecture I have ever heard—”
It did sound as if Fanny Kate was, perhaps, embellishing her testimony. But then again, perhaps she was remembering accurately. She was not, however, responsive to questions. She was away and gone on her own, settled into the witness chair as if it had been designed for her.