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
all.
If Pat had told Tom his father had done that, she had made a terrible,
tragic mistake.
The doorbell rang again and Paul Vaughan, Walter's law clerk,
arrived.
Roberts asked Vaughan to go out with him for a glass of iced tea.
He
was perplexed-shocked-by this woman Tommy had married.
Vaughan verified Roberts's recall; he had seen Walter on June 28 too.
They discussed the Lake Lanier ambush, but there were things Al Roberts
hadn't heard about.
Vaughan said that Walter had told him his boat
engine had suddenly exploded but that he had managed to get to shore
without sinking.
The clerk also recalled a phone message left for
Carolyn and Walter from a man identifying himself as their son.
"He
said to tell them he had missed thembut that he would get them."
Al Roberts didn't know what to think.
Pat Allanson and her mother,
Mrs. Radcliffe, seemed so at home in Paw and Nona's house, and Pat
herself had seemed overcome alternately with grief and hysteria, a
woman not quite in control.
She had been almost vulgarly specific
about the exposing incident and then had forced herself to be coldly
businesslike.
Perhaps she had been so shocked that she couldn't see
what effect her words were having on the old couple who had just lost
their only son.
Mrs. Radcliffe dressed and acted like a proper lady.
But Pat was
something else again.
She was a fine-looking woman, all right, but she
was obviously older than Tommy, and her clothing was flamboyant; the
dead man's partner saw why Walter Allanson had not approved of her.
It was also apparent that Pat and her mother were a teamthat no matter
what Tommy's wife said, Mrs.
Radcliffe backed her up.
Her head began to nod almost from the moment Pat opened her mouth.
As their investigation continued, Detective Zellner and Sergeant
Callahan followed up on the ambush shooting in Forsyth County on the
Saturday before the Allansons were killed.
In fact, Mary Rena Jones,
who ran the J. C. Jones store with her husband, was sure she had seen
Tom near the gas pumps, standing next to his blue pickup truck, on
Friday the twenty-eighth, around 5:30 P.m. She had seen the Kentwood
Morgan emblem on the door, and, of course, both Joneses remembered
seeing Walter Allanson the next morning after he had been shot at.
He
and his wife had come in with cuts all over their arms.
"I told him that before I'd let someone shoot me, I'd shoot them
first," J. C. put in.
"He told us it was his son who had shot at
him."
Mary Jones picked Tom's picture out of a laydown of suspects.
Zellner and Callahan knew about the sugar in the Allansons' gas tank.
They knew about the exploding boat, the phone calls.
Either Tom Allanson was guilty of it all, or someone had done a dandy
job of setting him up to look guilty.
On July 5, George Zellner typed up a probable-cause affidavit
requesting a search warrant in Pike County.
The East Point
investigators wanted to search the premises of Kent'wood Farm and a
1971 GMC pickup truck (license plate RL 7223) for certain items: One
.22-caliber semi-automatic rifle; One man's shirt, color brown and
green striped; Blue jean pants; Boots having soil and blood stains.
The investigators located several pairs of jeans, but none with
bloodstains.
Two pairs of jeans were in the washing machine with a
still-damp load of otherwise white items of clothing.
A woman would
never have mixed the jeans with white clothes.
A i man might
have-especially a man trying to wash blood away.
The Allansons had a
gun rack at Kentwood Farm with several rifles and shotguns.
The
investigators found a .22-caliber Remington Model 66 rifle, loaded with
Federal copper-clad bullets.
The empty cartridges recovered in the
shooting at Lake Lanier had been the same type.
They didn't find the striped shirt.
When a neighbor told them that he
had seen Tom walk down the road in the wee hours of July 4 and that he
had been wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, they figured they would
never locate the green and brown shirt; it could be anywhere between
East Point and Zebulon.
Elizabeth Thomason, a forensic serologist with the Georgia State Crime
Laboratory, received blood samples from Dr. Stivers on July 5. The
vials of blood retrieved at autopsy showed that both the Allansons had
the same type of blood: 0 positive.
All the blood samples from the
basement-from the floor, light switch, gun, holster, boards-were type 0
positive.
But then the prime suspectthe man who waited in the East
Point jailwas the natural son of Walter and Carolyn Allanson.
He would
have type 0 positive too.
It was a moot point.
The only wound Tom had was the scrape on his left
calf, and it had barely bled.
The normal physical evidence that is usually so helpful to homicide
detectives-hairs, fibers, blood, fingerprints-has greatly diminished
worth in a "family murder."
Both the victims and the accused have
reason to occupy the premises where the crimes take place.
Their
fingerprints could be expected, and so could their clothing fibers,
hairs, blood, urine, saliva, even semen.
It didn't matter that Tom
Allanson had not lived in the Norman Berry Drive home for six months;
fingerprints last for years, even for decades.
Alien physical evidence
would be of use in this case if the killer proved to be someone outside
the family and not a regular visitor to the Allansons' home.
The fingerprint question didn't matter anyway; Detective Marlin
Humphrey, Jr had dusted for prints in the Allansons' basement to little
avail.
He failed to raise any prints on the fuse box, basement doors,
or furnace.
Walter's borrowed .32 revolver had a partial latent as did
a light bulb; both proved to be those of East Point police officers, an
embarrassing discovery but not surprising in light of the chaotic
terror that had reigned in that basement on the night of July 3.
The mystery behind the deaths of Walter and Carolyn Allanson probably
would not be unraveled through forensic science; the answers would come
from a more imprecise area: human behavior.
The Saturday after the murders was a day that seemed forty-eight hours
long.
Tom Allanson appeared in a lineup at the East ; Point police
station on July 6. He was by far the tallest man present.
All the
subjects wore white T-shirts and either jeans or work pants.
Some were
fire fighters, some were cops, and one was a friend of Tom's, a tall
man who volunteered to join the lineup so that Tom wouldn't stand out
so conspicuously.
Viewing the lineup were Harriett and Paul Beauregard Duckett and Patrol
Officer C. L. McBurnett, Jr the only eyewitnesses who had seen the
fleeing man just after the murders.
The Ducketts and McBurnett walked
in separately, checked off the form without speaking, and left the
lineup room.
Each had checked space No.
2: Tom Allanson.
Things looked bad for Tom.
His aunt jean was offering to help, but he
didn't dare tell his wife about that.
Pat assured him continually that
she was taking care of everything.
He wasn't to worry; she would see
that he had the best legal defense money could buy.
He just had to
remember not to talk to anyone but her.
When he argued with her that to him the truth seemed the best route,
Pat shushed him.
No, he must not even suggest such a thing; anybody
knew that a man who tried to handle his own defense was a fool.
He had
to believe in her, she explained, because no one loved him the way that
she loved him.
And no one ever would.
That same Saturday, Walter and Carolyn Allanson had a 'mint funeral in
the chapel at Hemperley's in East Point.
Their caskets were side by
side, and they were closed.
Mae Mama Lawrence's insistence on a blue
dress with long sleeves for her daughter was moot; no one could tell
what Carolyn wore.
Mae Mama commented tearfully that it was just as
well that her daughter and son-inlaw had "gone together.
They were
always together.
Neither one of them could have lived without the
other."
The chapel was full to overflowing, and floral tributes filled it with
an almost suffocating sweetness.
Pat was too ill to go, but she wanted her family to be represented at
the chapel.
She called her daughters, Susan Alford and Deborah Cole,
and begged them to go to the Allansons' funeral.
Susan was twenty-one and Deborah was nineteen and they were horrified
at the thought of walking into Hemperley's in front of the deceased's
friends and relatives.
They hadn't even known the Allansons.
"You're going to be there for Tom," Pat insisted."
If you don't go,
I'll have to get up out of this sickbed and go myself.
You just walk right in with your heads up high, and you show him you
care-that we all care."
As far as Margureitte and Colonel Radcliffe were concerned, they backed
Tom to the limit, but they felt no allegiance to his parents.
They had
issued gracious invitations to the Allansons in life and all their
overtures had been rudely refused.
They did not now feel it was
incumbent upon them to join the mourners for people who were virtual
strangers-by their own choice.
Pat's two daughters went to Hemperley's, their faces aflame with
embarrassment when they realized there was no way they were going to go
unrecognized.
They were further mortified when the chapel began to
buzz and heads turned to gawk at them.
Their arrival had actually produced a massive gasp.
They could feel