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
placed a call to Ed Garland and Bill Weller.
No one had expected a
verdict so soon.
Tom was brought over from jail, and the colonel and
Margureitte supported Pat with their arms as they entered the
courtroom.
By 8:44 P.m all the principals were present.
Pat stared at the jury,
her face full of hope.
"Mr. Foreman," Judge Wofford asked, "has the jury reached a
verdict?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Mr. Weller, will you receive and publish the verdict, and Mr.
Allanson, will you and your attorney stand right out here, please, and
face the jury?"
Assistant District Attorney Weller unfolded the piece of paper and
began to read, "Dated October 18, 1974.
We the jury find for the
defendant-" Tom sighed with relief, and Ed Garland started to smilebut
only as long as it took to take half a breath.
Weller continued to
read.
"We the jury find for the defendant guilty on both counts of
murder The jurors had mistakenly used the wrong terminology.
They had
found Tom guilty, but the term "find for the defendant" meant, of
course, that he had been acquitted.
The relief and then the letdown
were excruciating.
"You will go back in the jury room and correct your verdict," Judge
Wofford explained to the jury.
"It will be, 'We the jury find the
defendant guilty."
In other words, you have one word too many in
there."
They returned with the word deleted.
Ed Garland asked for a polling of the jury.
Tom stood as if made of
stone, as pale as marble, showing no emotion at all.
Pat watched the
jury in utter disbelief, her chin trembling and her eyes filling with
tears.
As each juror spoke the word "guilty" aloud, she swayed as if
she could collapse at any moment.
Georgia justice was swift; there would be no wait before sentencing.
Tom Allanson would know his fate before he left the courtroom.
He
could be sentenced to death-twice.
He might now be facing the electric
chair.
Weller asked to address the court.
Those watching expected to hear him
ask for the death penalty.
Instead, he began, "I have spoken to the
family of the late Mr. Allanson and .
. . I think I can state that
they do not wish the state to press for the death penalty in this case
because of the emotional involvement between the defendant and his late
parents.
Because.
of the family's wishes, we will waive the death
penalty and request the court to direct the jury to sentence the
defendant to two concurrent life sentences.
A few moments later foreman Thackston handed the sentence to Bill
Weller.
On the judge's orders, he had hastily written in his own hand
the words that charted Tom Allanson's future.
"Your Honor, shall I publish the sentence?"
"If you will, please, Mr.
Weller."
"We the jury," Weller read, "fix the sentence of the defendant at life
imprisonment on both counts, the sentence under Count II to be served
concurrently with the sentence on Count I.
Tom and Ed Garland stood before Judge Wofford as he read the sentence
again.
"It is hereby the verdict of this court that these be your
sentences, a life sentence on Count I of Indictment No.
A-22765, and
to run concurrently with that, a life sentence on Count II of
Indictment No.
A-22765, and may God's love sustain you now and in the
days that are to come.
The court is no w adjourned."
It was 9:00 P.m only sixteen minutes since they had all been summoned
there.
Pat threw herself into Tom's arms and kissed him on the mouth, clinging
to him desperately until deputies stepped in to handcuff Tom and lead
him away.
"Tom?"
she called after him, and he stopped and looked back at her,
his expression one of blank despair.
She blew him a kiss and said, "I'll see you tomorrow?"
He nodded.
"Good."
Pat smiled brilliantly-for Tom's sake.
Margureitte, who sat in the front row of the courtroom watching, called
out, "I love you, Tommy!"
He had been so thankful when he became involved with Pat and the
Radcliffes and they had welcomed him into their home and their
hearts.
They had transformed his life.
How could everything have gone so
terribly wrong?
Technically, Tom would become eligible for parole in seven years.
It
didn't matter.
Seven years without Pat was like imagining a thousand
years without air.
Puling slightly against his handcuffs, he struggled
to get one more glimpse of her.
If he had wanted to, Tom could have
flung the deputies beside him against the wall, but he never thought of
it.
He watched Pat walk out of the courtroom, borne on her
parents'arms, and then let his guards lead him away.
Tom didn't know that Judge Wofford himself had come down from his bench
to speak with the Radcliffes and Pat's daughter, Susan.
Susan Alford had wiped away her own tears and listened as the judge
comforted them.
"You know, it's really sad, Mr. and Mrs.
Radcliffe.
That boy didn't get a fair chance.
That boy was there in the basement
that day of the killings.
Something happened.
Maybe a terrible argument.
But it wasn't a premeditated shooting.
Why in the world wasn't this done another way?"
Judge Wofford was only echoing the unspoken question on ever one's
lips.
How could it be that a nice guy, a good old boy like Tommy
Allanson, was on his way to prison for life for the cold blooded
shootings of his own mama and daddy?
How could it be that the perfect
love he had finally found in his Pat had ended in death and despair?
try Linda Patricia Vann was the name they gave her at birth.
She would
have many names in her life.
Patricia, or rather Pat, was the only one
that would stay with her.
She was born into a southern family whose
roots were so deep in the earth that no hurricane of scandal could tear
them loose.
She was a Siler.
And Silers took care of their own.
They were the
Silers for whom Siler City, North Carolina, was named.
Her maternal grandfather was Tasso Wirt Siler, born November 3O 1879.
He had studied to become a Lutheran minister but changed his religious
allegiance and became instead a fire-andbrimstone Baptist preacher.
A
tall, strong man with an expansive wit and a kindly heart, he combed
his thick white hair into a subdued pompadour and wore round wire
eyeglasses.
Tasso Siler was highly respected in the close-knit
community he served.
A truly good man.
In 1900, when he was twenty-one, Tasso Siler married Mary Value
Phillips, five years his junior.
She was a slender, almost ethereal
girl, quite beautiful, who seemed too frail to serve her husband and
the Lord as a preacher's wife.
Mary Siler seldom betrayed her own
deepest emotions.
She was given instead to reciting optimistic sayings
and poems, and to recording her journal.
We were so happy," she wrote
of her days as a bride.
"It did not seem our lives could be made so
sad in tines to come.
But it's best that people can't see ahead.
If
so, some of us might give up."
Six decades later, she lamented the passing of another year.
"What we have done will soon be a sealed book.
If it's been good or
bad, we can't change it.
It will stand as it is.
It is sad, for some
of us will have marked up pages in our book from many unkind words to
someone, or maybe [we] did not try hard to make others' lives happy."
The Rev.
Silers would live in countless parsonages around Wilmington
and Warsaw, North Carolina, in their more than fifty years together.
Mary was dutiful, dedicated, and fecund.
She gave birth to thirteen
children.
Later to be dubbed "the Righteous Sisters" by an irreverent
younger generation, the girls were Edna Earl, Swannie Lee, Florence
Elizabeth, Alma Mehetibel, Mary Louise, Thelma Blanche, Myrtle
Margureittesubsequently just Margureitte-and Agnes Fay.
The boys were
named Mark Hanna, Wade Hampton, Robert Winship, and Floyd Frazier.
Mark died in infancy, as did an unnamed infant girl.
When a minister's
salary could no longer stretch to feed more children, the Silers chose
the only certain birth control available to them in the 1920s; Mary
moved into a separate bedroom and their conjugal pleasures ceased.
She
was only thirty-seven and Tasso just forty-two.
Margureitte was particularly attentive to Siler family history.
By
1991, she would proudly list her parents' descendantsdown to the sixth
generation.
They had 13 children, 47 grandchildren, 95
great-grandchildren, 84 great-greatgrandchildren, and 2
great-great-great-grandchildren.
Over the years, tragedies occurred,
as they do in all families: babies died, young soldiers never came back
from war, and children succumbed to cancer and rheumatic fever and,
one, impalement on a bedpost.
A young wife disappeared, leaving her
children to be raised by whomever, another threw her baby away in a
trash can (it survived), and a few descendants-or their mates-went to
prison for violent crimes.
Such negative minutiae were never
officially acknowledged, and bad marriages were simply ignored in the
recitation of the family tree.