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
reminder of his existence was a picture of him as a shy grade school
boy that Margureitte kept constantly in view.
Margureitte had borne
three children.
Two of them were dead.
She refused tranquilizers.
"Why do I want to numb the pain?"
she asked hopelessly.
"Kent's
dead.
In the morning, he will still be dead.
Nothing will change.
Why numb
the pain?"
Pat grieved dramatically for her brother, sobbing about what a tragedy
it was.
She blamed Cindi.
"She killed him with a broken heart!"
But
Margureitte was not unaware of the rancor that Pat had always felt for
Kent.
She stared blankly at her daughter's tearful face.
Margureitte now devoted all her energies to Pat and Pat's children.
Besides Clifford and her sisters, they were all she had left.
And now
Pat had her mother all to herself.
None of her histrionics and
machinations had done real harm to anyone before.
Rather, she had been just an inadequate young woman, self-absorbed and
hysterical, who seemed her own worst enemy.
But now, with her brother's suicide, her overwhelming selfishness had,
quite literally, drawn blood.
Life went on on Dodson Drive.
It was 1966 and Pat was twenty-nine years old.
The war in Vietnam
raged far away.
Gil Taylor, cut adrift from his family, spent a large
chunk of his life in that war.
"From the time I was eleven or twelve,"
Susan recalled of that year, "we mostly lived on Dodson Drive with my
grandparents.
My father dropped in occasionally and he sent money.
We
kids missed him."
Pat used Gil's money for her own needs; she told her parents that he
contributed nothing to his family's support-a lie.
Boppo and Papa
supported her and the children.
The Taylor family made sporadic attempts to reunite, but they were
always back with Pat's parents within a few months.
Gil signed on for another tour in Vietnam.
On their fifteenth
anniversary, he sent Pat a picture of himself in fatigues standing
outside the mess tent.
On the back he wrote, 6 Sept.
1967.
My Darling, It.
Levine took this
of me this morning.
ANNV.
PRESENT.
Ha!
I love you.
Happy Anniversary, My love.
Pat had not lived with him for more than a fraction of those fifteen
years.
Colonel Radcliffe retired from the army and dabbled in real estate.
Margureitte decorated the Dodson Drive house so that every room pleased
her.
There were three bedrooms a'nd a den.
Ronnie, seven, slept in Pat's room; Susan and Debbie had shared a room
until Kent moved out, and then Susan got his room.
After he died, she
had bad dreams.
She cried for him for a long time.
But no one spoke
about Kent very much.
Certainly no one discussed why he had killed
himself.
What was the point?
Through her granddaughters, Margureitte lived out her old dreams of
being a horsewoman.
She prevailed upon the colonel to invest in a
horse, not much more than a plug.
They named him Sam, and Susan,
Debbie, and Ronnie rode him.
Margureitte's job as a receptionist for a
local dentist provided money for her grandchildren's riding lessons.
Pat took lessons too, reveling in her image, but she had no real flair
for riding.
She could ride sidesaddle and look pretty, no more than
that.
Her children were good-particularly Susan and Debbie.
They
studied with some of the most prestigious trainers in the South, and
learned English-style riding, jumping, and equestrienne.
Seeing her
granddaughters in their jodhpurs, tailed 'jackets, and fedoras, Boppo
beamed.
She never missed a competition if she could help it and was
very proud when they won blue ribbon after blue ribbon.
"My girls
always pinned high," she recalled fondly.
There was r,omething so
refined about this sport; the best people in Georgia participated.
Debbie and Susan got along as well as most teenage sisters.
Susan's two-year advantage in age gave her more privileges, which
Debbie resented mightily.
Neither girl inherited her mother's green
eyes; they had dark brown eyes.
Susan had thick, almost black hair,
and Debbie's was light brown.
They were both very pretty.
Susan
tended to be quiet and Debbie feisty.
Many years later, Colonel Radcliffe laughed when he recalled that Susan
and her girlfriends used to sneak out on the porch so they could peek
at him while he was in the shower.
An adult Susan shook her head in
bewilderment.
"We never did that.
Why would we?
Why would he say
that?
Maybe my girlfriends would have liked to peek at Kent-but they
never did.
And they sure didn't want to see my grandfather naked."
Ronnie's seizures continued sporadically, and many times his andparents
and his mother held a tongue depressor between gr his teeth, wrapped
him in blankets, and sped away to the hospital.
"They would never tell
us what was wrong with him," Susan said.
"And, after a while, it
didn't happen anymore."
The girls' weekends were taken up with riding lessons and shows.
Sam
was relegated to pasture, and they rode their own Morgan horses now: La
Petite and Biscayne.
Debbie and Susan were so good that they rode in
shows for other owners too.
They went to the best tack shops for their
English riding uniforms and had them tailored to fit.
Pat drove them
to their lessons and competitions and Boppo and Papa paid for
everything.
They @ I bought the horses and took care of their board
and vet bills.
"I was the Georgia youth champion for riding Morgans when I was
fourteen," Debbie remembered.
"And then the world youth champion.
I
was riding someone else's horse when I won; it was Lippit Moro Alert,
owned by Ronald Blackman."
But Biscayne threw Debbie and she broke her
arm.
Despite the pressure at home, she refused to ride her again.
usan e t the pus to win too.
Although she loved the jumping events
because they made her feel "free," she was often frightened on the
obstacle courses.
"I faked it once-if my mother had found out, she
would have killed me because it was a very elite show in Atlanta.
Biscayne and I made the first few jumps, but we were coming up on a
solid brick wall and I just knew she couldn't spread out enough to make
it.
I was terrified, and I clamped my knees down and made it look like
she'd balked.
Everybody blamed her but I was the one who was scared.
I felt guilty about humiliating her that way."
With time, the pain from Kent's suicide became less acute for
Margureitte, although she never truly recovered from the loss.
But she
still had Pat and the colonel, who accepted her grandchildren as his
own.
He called Susan "Poogie," Debbie "Diddie," and Ronnie "Sam
Houston Texas Taylor."
As for Pat, she was so much more serene when
she lived with her parents.
Her own parenting sometimes seemed
quixotic.
She continued to sew for her daughters, wonderful special
dresses that would have cost hundreds of dollars in a store, and she
encouraged their efforts.
"She was always telling me I could do
anything," Susan said.
"She was so proud of us when we did well."
But there were times when Pat's maternal talents were not quite so
genteel.
Susan recalled riding in a car with her mother when she was
twelve or thirteen and asking a question about sex.
"We were driving in the car and my class had been studying the
population explosion.
I didn't know the first thing ibout sex, and I
said, 'Well, nobody should blame somebody because God put a baby in her
stomach."
My mother laughed and said, 'Don't you know anything?
The
man puts his penis in the woman's hole and wiggles up and down."
She
went on telling me about sex in the ugliest, most graphic terms.
There
was nothing about love or no birds or bees-just a blunt explanation of
what men did to women.
I was stunned.
I don't know why she told me
that way.
When I was older, I told Boppo about it and we both
laughed.
All in all, the years living with Boppo and Papa were good.
Neither Debbie nor Susan remembered them as unusual in any way.
They adored Boppo.
And Boppo told them constantly how much she loved
them.
Boppo herself was happy.
She had her daughter and her
grandchildren.
Her sisters were an easy drive away and she saw them
often.
Mama Siler was eighty-six and frail-but still with them.
The
Silers continued to meet every August at White Lake, North Carolina,
for the annual reunion.
Aside from missing Kent, life was as good as
it had ever been for Boppo.
She had never had a house she loved as
much as the one on Dodson Drive.
She never wanted to leave it-and, apparently, neither did Pat.
Sergeant Gilbert Taylor was nothing if not persistent.
He still loved
Pat, and in his mind, it was only a matter of time until he gathered
his family around him again.
He knew what it would take, and when he
transferred back to Fort McPherson in 1969, he was prepared to give his