Read Everything She Ever Wanted Online
Authors: Ann Rule
Tags: #General, #Murder, #Social Science, #Case studies, #True Crime, #Criminology, #Serial Killers, #Georgia, #Murder Georgia Pike County Case Studies, #Pike County
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 t,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 selfdefense.
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."
tiyou just went by it.
And you looked up and
you sawer.
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 went 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
allowed 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 I 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."
Clearly, Tom saw the tragedy from the viewpoint of a man who had never
deliberately set out to hurt anyone.
He was not a devious man.
He was
not a man who understood willful cruelty to other human beings.
Don Stoop pointed out all the antagonizing, all the real or imagined
slights aggravated to major proportions-just as Pat had exacerbated the
terrible wound in her own buttock.
She had been brilliant at driving
the wedge between Tom and his father, and then at setting the little
fires of worry and rage that would certainly grow to a conflagration no
one could stop.
Quietly, Don Stoop wondered aloud if maybe Pat hadn't believed that she
had seen her husband alive for the last time when she kissed him
goodbye at the doctor's office.
"She could have possibly watched you
walk away, given you ten or fifteen minutes, called, and all of a
sudden, your father showed up-knowing good and well how you and your
father were getting along.
And then.
. . .
boom.
"BOOMI" The three of them sat there in silence, the two detectives and
the very tall man who had given Pat Taylor Allanson two decades of his
life.
The clock on the wall ticked so loudly that it too might have
been going, "Boom BOOM!"
+ + + Finally, Tom was ready to talk about what had happened in the
basement.
He began by saying that he had told Pat exactly what had happened, and
he had explained the layout of the basement.
Against Pat's wishes, he
had told Ed Garland too, but by then it was far too late for his
attorney to change his defense tactics.
No one would have believed
that the man on trial wasn't a liar-a man who had lied once might lie
again.
Tom and Ed Garland were trapped in the legal maze Pat had
forced them into.
Tom's deep, pleasant Georgia voice began the story, and Stoop and Berry
listened.
Tom hadn't been much of a talker until 'i now, but his mind
had temporarily stepped out of this interview room into the dampness of
an old basement in a time long gone by, and his words continued in a