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
lived without Tom, she seemed to be thriving.
When she left Hardwick
in 1984, she went to New Horizons, a halfway house for paroled females
in Atlanta, where counseling and training would prepare her to merge
gradually back into the world she had left in 1977.
Fans were mourning
Elvis Presley the summer Pat went to prison, and the world she returned
to had made Boy George a star.
Miniskirts and big hair were no longer
in style, astronauts were floating free in space, Ronald Reagan was
president, and, for the first time, a woman-Geraldine Ferraro-was
nominated for vice-president.
The romantic, Victorian world that Pat had always aspired to was
further away than ever.
But she was free-or almost-and her family
delighted in her return to Atlanta.
She could go on weekend passes
from the halfway house, and soon she would really be home, back with
Boppo and Papa.
Susan, Debbie, Ronnie, Boppothe whole family-believed
that Pat was on the brink of a wonderful new life.
Her involvement
with drugs was years behind her, and she was young enough to enjoy her
life.
She was still beautiful, albeit possessed of a more mature
beauty.
Even so, she looked far younger than her true age.
Pat habitually called her mother and daughters before 7:00
A.M. from New Horizons.
If they were a little grouchy at being
awakened, they immediately felt guilty; it meant so much to Pat to be
in daily touch with them.
It was such a luxury for her to be able to
call them whenever she wanted.
Susan, especially, devoted herself to
helping her mother readjust to the world.
She saw Pat as almost
childlike; she had been cut off from everyone and everything for so
long that she grabbed at life with both hands.
"I'd come get Mom at the halfway house and take her to the
Varsity-that's Atlanta's favorite place for hot dogs; they're real
greasy but they're so good-and she'd get chili dogs," Susan recalled.
"When she came to our house for supper, she liked to have me fix her
chicken cordon bleu, but even so she always wanted to stop and get a
Varsity hot dog on the way home!"
Although Susan and Bill Alford were living in Atlanta in 1984, Bill was
about to be transferred once again, the standard peripatetic pattern of
the young executive in America.
The Alfords were moving to Marion,
Indiana, in June, and Susan visited with her mother as much as possible
before they left.
As always, Pat was furious with Bill for agreeing to a transfer.
"How
can Bill do this to me?"
she implored.
But Pat had made an error in
judgment when she put Bill Alford in the category of men she could
manipulate.
She liked his strength and assumed she could harness it
just as she had leaned on Gil, Tom, and Papa.
Indeed, in times of
trouble she had often cried, "I want my Bill!"
But Pat took Bill Alford's good nature for weakness and never saw that
he could be pushed only as far as he was willing.
Thereafter, he was an
immovable object.
"Just when I finally get home," Pat complained to Susan.
the children
away from "How can Bill deliberately take you and me?"
Of course, he had no choice-save resigning.
In vain, Susan tried to
explain that.
She didn't tell her mother Bill preferred to have at
least a thousand miles between himself and Pat.
In the out to lunch
time they had left together, she took her mother and shopping as much
as possible.
Despite her huge appetite, Pat had lost a great deal of
weight since her release from Hardwick.
Susan took her to the Lenox
Square shopping mall in the Buckhead neighborhood and bought her all
new clothes.
Pat was thrilled.
"The last time I saw her before we moved," Susan remembered, "I took
her to the bus stop so she could go to work, and we both started to
cry.
She looked so lost.
I hated to leave her."
With the often inexplicable reasoning of the parole system, Pat, who
now called herself Pat Taylor, was assigned to work as a companion to
the elderly-a "sitter."
It had been stipulated in her parole papers
that She would work at the Fountainview Convalescent Home in Atlanta.
Apparently, no one had researched the crimes that had sent her to
prison in the first place.
She now cared for wealthy elderly people
who lived in their own apartments in the retirement center.
She helped
them bathe and eat and supervised their medications.
On occasion, she
even gave atients.
Her clients all spoke highly of insulin shots to
diabetic p her; she became like part of their own families.
She seemed
to have no emotional life of her own, although she later confessed pal
priest who had supervised to Susan her feelings for an Episco New
Horizons.
"He was probably the only man I could ever have really
loved," Pat said wistfully.
"But of course, he wasn't free to love
me."
the halfway In November 1984, when Pat was released from house
and officially paroled, she was forty-seven years old.
She had "maxed
out."
Under Georgia sentencing guidelines, she had been incarcerated
as long as she legally could be.
The conditions of her parole dictated
that she report to a parole officer in jonesboro, Georgia, and live
with Boppo and Papa on Arrowhead Boulevard in Jonesboro.
But Pat told
her mother she wouldn't live in the Radcliffes' townhouse.
"There are
too many niggers around here," she said flatly.
"I won't live
here."
So the moved 'y to a little red brick house in the tiny hamlet of
McDonough, Georgia.
There was an upstairs room with a small bathroom
off of it, and that would be Pat's.
She was coming home at last.
Pat continued with her nursing job at Fountainview, and she I arranged
for her daughter Debbie to work the shifts preceding or following her
own.
Debbie had separated from and reconciled with her husband
innumerable times.
She was not yet thirty and Dawn was almost
fourteen.
Vaguely unhappy with her life, Debbie often came to visit
Susan and Bill in the lovely homes they owned far away from Atlanta,
and Susan listened sympathetically to her younger sister's litany of
troubles.
Debbie had missed her mother acutely while Pat was in
Hardwick, so she was happy they would now be working together.
Neither
Pat nor Debbie had any formal training as licensed practical nurses or
nursing assistants.
They were learning on the job.
Almost from the beginning there were certain problems with Pat's return
to her family.
Maybe they were inevitable.
For so long, the family
had believed that Pat's homecoming would be their happy ending after so
many years of bad times, but things didn't work out that way.
She
still threw tantrums to get what she wanted.
"I thought Pat would be
happy when she got out!"
Boppo cried out to Susan.
"She can never be
happy.
I've done everything I can do for her.
If there was something
else I could do, I would do it.
I just want to live my life now in
peace!"
First of all, there was Ashlynne, Ronnie's daughter.
In prison, Pat
had been annoyed to learn that her youngest granddaughter was living
with Boppo and Papa.
When she came home to live, she had to share her
mother with the child, and she resented it.
There was no question of
sending the little girl to her own mother; two-year-old Ashlynne had
been in terrible condition when Boppo started caring for her-unwashed,
with diapers unchanged for days, and with head lice.
Ronnie lived
nearby, but he had been married three or four times-no one was sure
just how many-and his life was too unstable to care for his daughter
properly.
Ashlynne needed Boppo, and as Boppo said so often, "How can
someone not love a child?"
Ashlynne wet the bed.
Every time she did, Pat removed another of her
toys and put it away in a closet.
Eventually, Ashlynne had no toys
left.
Pat bought Ashlynne clothes at garage sales-and there was
nothing wrong with that, except that she chose the most faded, most
threadbare dresses and little shirts on sale.
To her grandmother,
Ashlynne looked like a refugee.
Dressed by Whe in the rag ban Pat wasn't
looking, Boppo threw the used clothes g. Pat continually insisted that
Ashlynne should go home and live with Ronnie, that she had no business
at all taking up Boppo's time.
All the babies in the family seemed to
threaten Pat, as if she feared she would no longer be loved if there
were too many of them.
After she came home to McDonough?
Pat also became obressed about her
background, nagging at Boppo for proof of who she really was.
Boppo
threw up her hands and cried, "My are you digging up the past, Pat?
I've told you all I know."
Boppo would call Susan or Debbie and
agonize over the situation.
"Your mother is calling all of her aunts
and asking questions about her real father.
Now she doubts I'm her
real mother, and that Kent was her real brother.
All my life I've
loved your mother.
I just don't know what else I can do.
Will she
ever be happy?"
Susan tried to comfort her grandmother, but there was no softening
Boppo's despair at the turmoil in her home.
"Your Boppo's very tired,
Susan," she said softly.
"My body is worn )m just so tired.
I look in
the mirror, and I can't out, and I believe that old lady with the white
hair and lines on her face is me.
One thing I know for sure-your
grandfather and I have been through so much, but we love each other and
always have Boppo and Papa were old now, but with Pat back, their lives