by Ann Rule
His first questions were about how they had met. The answers were familiar and came in single sentences. Tom obviously didn’t remember dates. He admitted he had been obsessed with marrying Pat all those years ago. “I don’t know if she wanted to marry me or not,” he said. “I was the most insistent one. She kept telling me, ‘No, you don’t want to marry me.’ And I wish I hadn’t. . . . My head wasn’t screwed on right at the time.”
Stoop didn’t comment. Pat had known her quarry well. She knew exactly how much demurring it would take to reel Tom in.
“This is going to be a hard question,” Stoop said, easing into the meat of what he wanted to know, “but I need you to think and answer as precisely and factually as you can. We need to know, what was Pat’s involvement with you in the 1974 murder case? I’m talking about what started it, what led up to it, what transpired during the trial, and after the trial while you were in jail.”
“That is a hard one to answer,” Tom began. “My parents did not like Pat from the very beginning . . . She wasn’t the reason for the divorce. She was the outcome. . . . She hated my parents and they hated her.”
“Okay. At any time did she feed the fire?”
Tom allowed that Pat had gotten his parents worked up and then started on him. He said the shooting at Lake Lanier just about made his father go “crazy.”
“Do you think Pat did it?”
Tom shook his head. “She was with me . . . shoeing horses down in Lithonia. . . . They [the police] took my rifles and checked, and there was no way my rifles could have done that. . . . He [Tom’s father] got all bent out of shape and went out and bought a gun . . . and he told all those people that it was gonna be over by the weekend. I was supposed to be in a parade in Atlanta. The only thing I could figure out was he was planning on shooting me in the parade.”
“What did Pat say about all of this?”
“It was a long time ago.” Tom frowned with the effort to remember. “She just kind of stirred it up and made it worse. . . . Pat was a very headstrong, manipulative type person that would do anything to get what she wanted— and you not know she was doing it. She could take a married man and turn him completely around . . . and talk him out of thirty years of marriage and him not even know it. . . . Unless you’d been there, you couldn’t imagine what it was like. Pat would have some idea in her mind and she was going to get her way. If she came at you one way and you didn’t do what she said, she’d find another way. She’d just keep at you until you gave in to her.”
Tom recalled that it was brought up in his trial that phone calls had been made to his father the afternoon of the murders. “But I didn’t see or hear her make them,” he said.
Stoop asked Tom if he believed now that his father had exposed himself to Pat.
“Naw. My father was not the type of person to do something like that.”
“Why do you think she said that?”
“To get me stirred up.”
“Did it work?”
“Well, it got me upset, but then . . . I was scared to death. I didn’t know what was fixing to happen to me.” Tom’s eyes clouded as he remembered his trial. “It was a farce. She was sitting there punching me in the ribs, and punching Ed in the ribs, and the judge was having to tell her to be quiet and if she didn’t stop trying to run his courtroom, she was gonna have to leave.”
“Okay. Let’s go up to the murder itself,” Stoop said. “You and Pat drove up on that particular day together. Correct?”
“I took her to the doctor.”
Stoop could sense Tom’s retreat; he would have to backpedal on his questions and wait a while on the murders.
“Did she, in fact, go to the doctor?” he asked.
“I guess she did.”
Stoop urged Tom to re-create the rest of that day to the best of his recollection, to take his time.
“Okay. I went over there. My mother and father were very systematic type people. . . . You knew when they were going to get off from work, when they came home. . . . So I went over there late that afternoon to talk to Mother, and I thought she would be home round about then. I didn’t drive over there ’cause I dropped Pat off and she had the car. . . I walked maybe half a block or a block—something like that—I was going to try to get her to talk to him, to get him to calm down a little bit, and I couldn’t talk to her at the office. . . . I definitely couldn’t talk to her on the phone, since he wouldn’t let her talk. . . . He was very hard at the house. He ran the place. . . . And so the only way of trying to get anything done was to talk to my mother without him being there.”
Tom said he sometimes suspected Pat didn’t really want his relationship with his parents resolved. “She was doing everything she could to get them turned against me.”
“Did Pat know you were going to talk to your parents?” Stoop asked.
“Yes.”
“She did know that?” Michelle Berry echoed.
“I believe that I was set up on this.” Tom leaned forward. “I really believe that . . . under normal circumstances, I could have been there and talked to my mother. But my mother was a little late. The backdoor was locked, but the basement door was open, so I just went in the basement door and said, ‘Well, I’ll just wait down here.’ I wasn’t going to sit on the doorstep in case my daddy came home. . . . My ex-wife and my children came over at the same time, and that kind of messed things up a little bit . . . so I just got more or less trapped. They said the basement door was broke into. I did not break in the basement door; it was open.”
Tom was indeed trapped. His ex-wife, whom he described as a “not very rational woman,” was upstairs, his father was due home soon, and he was down in the cellar of a house he had been banned from.
And then, to make matters worse, his father came home early, something he never did.
“What about the lights and the fuse box?” Don Stoop asked.
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“What about the telephone wires?”
“They said [during the trial] that was cut . . . I didn’t cut no wires either.”
“Okay. You stated this was a complete setup. You thought you were set up?”
“That’s what I was getting to. My father don’t usually come home early, and during the trial it said he got a phone call . . . I believe to this day that she called him from the doctor's office and told him I was over there. I have no proof of that. That’s my opinion.”
“When you’re in the basement, you can hear people upstairs talk. Correct?”
“No.”
“So your father didn’t come in yelling, ‘Is Tom here?’ or anything like that?”
“No. He came down in the basement, looked around, and went back upstairs. I was hidden behind some stuff back there, trying to figure a way to get out. Then he called the police . . . ”
“How did he call the police if the telephone wires were cut?”
“Well, we got neighbors. . . . [When the police came] he went out and talked to . . . I think it was Sergeant Callahan—right there—and I heard the conversation then because he wasn’t more than ten yards away. That was the time I was planning on leaving, right then—with the police there. I thought, ‘Well, this would be a good time, until he [Tom’s father] pulled the rifle and the pistol out of his car.”
Tom said he had hunkered down in the basement and heard his father refuse to let the police search his house. He would have been relieved to have the police find him.
Instead, he heard his father tell the officer, “I got this rifle here. I know who it is, and I’m going to take care of it myself.”
Tom sighed. “I don’t think Pat cared whether I got killed or not, to be honest with you. ’Cause she had the car and it was almost paid for. . . . When [my daddy] pulled this gun, I felt like if I run out that door, he was going to shoot me right there. I was in a state of complete panic at the time.”
Stoop planned to wait until Tom was more at ease to discuss the actual shootings. He shifted
the focus of the interview. “I’m getting at Pat’s direct involvement, okay? . . . Were you aware that Pat had been driving around the neighborhood waiting for you?”
“No.”
“She never told you anything?”
“No.”
“You know anything about her going to a liquor store where you stated that you wanted to make a phone call?”
“During the time that I was locked up . . . [in the] East Point jail, I was scared slapped to death. I had no idea what I was going to do . . . I always depended on my parents, and I had never been in trouble before anyway. . . . So she comes to the jail and tells me, ‘I’m taking care of this. I got everything taken care of. Don’t worry about it. You don't tell them.’ What she had done is fabricated a string of people up and down Cleveland Avenue that was supposed to have seen me. . . . She convinced Ed Garland to go on the fact that I was never there because there was no eyewitness. I wished I had gone on self-defense and I wouldn't have spent fifteen years in prison for it. . . . She came up with these people at the liquor store, said they saw me there, and I didn’t go that way. Once you start telling a lie to a lawyer that’s trying to help you, it seems like it snowballs into a mess. . . . Then he'll quit—which he did quit later.”
Stoop asked Tom whether he had expected to go back and meet Pat at her doctor’s office or whether she was supposed to pick him up.
“I was going to stay long enough to talk to my mother. Then I was going to come back to the doctor’s office. This was not even scheduled to take more than fifteen or twenty minutes . . . and it ended up a lot longer than that . . . but as far as her coming to pick me up? Absolutely not.”
After Tom was locked up, he had no information except what Pat told him. “Pat told all my friends that I was not allowed . . . to receive mail from anybody but immediate family. And that’s a lie. ’Cause she didn’t want anybody telling me anything except her.”
“So she controlled what information you got about everything?”
“She controlled everything. The money. I was fool enough to give her power of attorney. She controlled the money. She controlled the lawyers. She controlled the farm. She controlled everything that was stolen and done away with. I had no idea about anything.”
Tom allowed that he had had his doubts when the house and barns in Zebulon burned down. He had no idea there was insurance on them. He didn’t know until Stoop told him that Pat had cashed a check meant for the mortgage holder.
“While you were in jail,” Stoop asked, “was anything mentioned about a ‘suicide pact’ between you and Pat?”
Tom nodded. “You know, she even tried to bring some stuff into Jackson, and she wanted me to commit suicide with her right there. And I said, ‘No way.’ ”
“What did she bring into the prison?”
“I don’t know. She didn't show me. But it was supposed to be some sort of pills or something, but I told her, I ain’t ready to die yet. . . . She told me that she was going to do it the next week, and when she came to visit that next day, I said no. . . . If I had done it, I don’t believe that she would have took an aspirin. See, she had too much to win and I had too much to lose. And if I was gone, she had the farm again and that fifty-two acres.”
The scales had fallen from Tom Allanson’s eyes. It was obvious that he had been seeing his ex-wife clearly for a long time, but he still saw Boppo as a paragon.
“Mrs. Radcliffe—to me—was always a real sweet lady and everything . . . Pat could do anything and she wouldn’t find any fault with it, but I always thought Mrs. Radcliffe was a super person as far as a human being goes . . . I didn’t have any idea what was going on with the family because I was only told one thing, and Pat could walk ten miles to tell a lie, but she couldn’t take two steps to tell the truth. . . . Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but she is a habitual liar.”
Stoop began his next question carefully. “Do you think she’s crazy, or do you think she is calculating every move that she does? . . . Do you feel that she thinks everything out . . . that she calculated your reaction—that she knew how to manipulate you? . . . Correct me if I’m wrong. I think her main goal was to keep you in prison, to keep you shut up as long as you were there.”
“Like I said,” Tom sighed, “she didn’t care whether I was living or dying in there. I don’t think she cared two hoots and a holler about me getting out or anything else.”
Asked about any insurance he might have had on his life, Tom recalled that he had some—New York Life, he thought—but he had no idea what had happened to it.
When he married Pat, Tom said, he could never have foreseen that his problems with his parents would end in violence. “I thought it was just going to be separation from the family. Our family goes through these separations . . . You know, they [my parents] were upset about the divorce, but I didn’t ever think it was going to go this far.”
As for his father’s supposed threats, Tom said they all came down to him through Pat or Boppo. That was how he learned it “was all going to be over by the weekend.”
“In your belief . . . do you think Pat helped kill your parents?”
There was a long silence. Tom looked down at his hands, debating. “I wouldn’t say that she helped kill them, because the only way they died was in a case of about thirty seconds of self-defense. . . . ”
Stoop explained that he was speaking in the broader sense.
“I think,” Tom said slowly, “that if she had never been in the picture, they would still be alive. Put it that way. I mean, if I never got involved with her, dated her, or anything like that . . . I think my father and I probably could have worked out our differences . . . I just wish I’d never met her. I’d be a lot better off.”
Tom still wasn’t ready to talk about the shooting. The investigators could sense that. After all these years, it remained a source of intense pain, and why wouldn’t it be? He did, however, reveal a bit of information that was highly intriguing. Pat had always insisted that she had never seen Tom on July 3, 1974—not after he said goodbye to her at her doctor’s office.
In his panicked state after the shootings, Tom told Stoop and Berry, he had run toward the freeway, toward the King Building. “Pat had parked in the parking lot of the King Building,” Tom said, unaware of the surprised looks on his interviewers’ faces. “I told her what had happened, and I said, ‘I’ve got to go home.’ And she said, ‘My parents are coming.’ She called them or something, and I don’t know what she had called them for.”
“Okay,” Stoop said, struggling to keep the excitement out of his voice. “This is important. Let me back up. You are telling us now that once you ran, you did, in fact, find her parked at the King Building?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you happen to find her at the King Building?”
“I went right by it.”
“You just went by it. And you looked up and you saw her. What was she doing when you went up to her?”
“Sitting in the jeep.”
“What did she say to you?”
“I was telling her what had happened. I said, ‘I got to go. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared and I’m going home.’ And she just said, ‘Well, I called my parents.’ I don’t know why she called her parents. She said they were on the way, and I said, ‘I ain’t waiting. I’m gone.’. . . I don’t know what reason she had to call them. Far as I knew, she already knew about it [the murders] when I got there. From the way it sounded. And so I left and hitchhiked home and I did not go down Cleveland Avenue. I got home and my grandfather called me and told me that these four police had come over and had a warrant for my arrest. I said, ‘Well, call them and tell them where I’m at.’ And I didn’t give them any problems and Sheriff Riggins called me—Mr. Riggins and I was good friends—and he said, ‘I don’t want any problems,’ and I said, ‘I will not cause you no problems. Come over here.’ I just more or less gave myself up.”
There was an electricity in the room. Perhaps Tom had never before a
llowed himself to recognize all the careful planning that must have gone into the apparently spontaneous shoot-out. He had done a lot of thinking in prison. Fifteen and a half years of thinking. And that, combined with Stoop’s and Berry’s questions, had sifted stark truths out of all of Pat’s lies and diversionary techniques.
Slowly, Stoop began to list the “coincidences” involved in Tom’s burgeoning troubles. First, there had been the formaldehyde in Tom’s baby’s milk. Pat hated Little Carolyn and anything that connected her to Tom. “We know that Pat works with horses, like you,” the detective pointed out to Tom. “We know she had access to formaldehyde because you had it to treat your horses.
“Then,” Stoop continued, “she tells you your father drove all the way down there [to Zebulon] and exposed himself. . . . Whether you liked your father or disliked him, you know he would never do anything like that anyway. Eventually it was proven he was still working in his office. You were going to go resolve this with your mother because you knew your father was working, so you felt that was the best time. But Pat didn’t want you to resolve anything. Correct?’’
“I assume so.’’
“You both parked at the doctor’s office. You go one way. She goes the other. You show up at your parents’ house . . . the basement is unlocked. Correct?”
Tom nodded.
“Little Carolyn with the kids comes home. Your mother comes home. You’re stuck in the basement, and suddenly your father shows up. Testimony shows that some woman called your father . . . All of a sudden, the shooting occurs. You run by the King Building. Pat is sitting there, and you tell her what happened, and she says, ‘Don’t worry about it. I already called my parents, and they’re on their way up here.’ She stays and you leave. What do you think all this means to you, now that you’re looking at it?”
In spite of all the thinking Tom had done on the tragedy that had changed his life forever, it was apparent that for the first time it had all come together with a terrible atonal clang in his mind. “It sounds,” he said, “like something she had sat down and planned out, you know—but I don’t know how you could do that as far as the other people involved.”