CHAPTER 14
***
There is nothing neat about murder; its untidy ravels can never be woven back into the fabric of time perfectly. Blood can eventually be scrubbed away and property disposed of. But questions seem always to be left begging for an answer. Even with a suspect in jail accused of the murders of Walter and Carolyn Allanson, the East Point police investigators still had a great deal of work to do.
On Sunday evening, July 7, George Zellner received a call from Little Carolyn. She had remembered something that she heard the night of the murders, something she had not told them before. Talking at the police station with Zellner and Gus Thornhill, Carolyn was considerably calmer than she had been in their earlier sessions. Her version of the events just before the shooting had not changed substantially, but she now remembered more. She had heard Daddy Allanson yell upstairs that he had “him” cornered in the hole, but she had never remembered a name for “him” before.
“Did you ever see your father-in-law while he was in the basement?” Zellner asked.
“No, sir.”
“But you heard him?”
“Yes—only when he said for Mother to bring the gun down and when he said, ‘Junior! Get the hell out of here!’ ”
Carolyn recalled that she saw her mother-in-law start down the steps with the gun and that she had wrestled with her, trying to take it away from her.
“Why?”
“I didn’t want her to go—I didn’t want her to get killed.”
Mother Allanson had been distraught. Carolyn had heard her say, “If I see him. I’ll shoot him!” Then she told the detectives that Mother Allanson had said something while she was going down the stairs.
“What?”
“Just before she was shot, she cried out. Tommy! Tommy! Tommy, don’t hurt Daddy!’ ”
The detectives stared at her. How could she forget that for days? And then Zellner asked quietly, “Did you hear anything else?”
She nodded. “I heard a man's voice—not Daddy’s— shouting, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!' "
“Was it Tom’s voice?’’
“I can’t swear that it was.’’
Carolyn said that Mother Allanson had been carrying the hunting rifle in front of her as if she was ready to fire it. It was at that point that everything had exploded. Little Carolyn had started down the steps after Big Carolyn, Walter had shouted to her to “Get the hell out of here,’’ and she had heard a blast. She saw her mother-in-law just sit down, and a burst of red begin to blossom over her left breast. Little Carolyn had known her mother-in-law was dead; there was so much blood and she just sat there like a wax figure.
Carolyn said she had fled, but that she heard what seemed like five or six consecutive shots. “Pop! Pop! Pop! . . .
And then she thought she had heard another blast.
The noose was tightening around Tom Allanson. His former wife must have had reasons to want to incriminate him, but would she deliberately “remember” details to make him look even more guilty, or was she simply coming out of her shock and telling the truth? Detectives doubted that she was the killer herself, despite the Radcliffes’ suspicions.
***
Tom Allanson was arraigned on Monday, July 8, 1974, before East Point Municipal Court Judge R.M. McDuffie. There would be no bail. On August 2, the Fulton County grand jury returned a true bill charging Walter Thomas Allanson with two counts of murder. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
On August 8, Judge Charles Wofford heard arguments over whether bond should be granted to Tom Allanson. Tom had new counsel. Although Cal Long was a perfectly adequate attorney who had successfully represented the Radcliffes in lesser matters in the past, Pat wanted Tom to be represented by the top criminal defense lawyers in Atlanta. But that would take a great deal of money—ironically, it would take more money than she had originally planned to spend to turn Kentwood into a showplace.
Tom had needed four thousand dollars by July 15 to retain a new law firm. His aunt Jean had lent him two thousand dollars, but he had to pay that back within a week. Pat paid Jean back with a check that, to her chagrin and Jean’s anger, bounced. To raise money for Tom’s defense, the Radcliffes mortgaged their Tell Road farm for as much as they could get: thirty-five hundred dollars. Then they put the farm up for sale.
Tom wrote to his grandparents, Nona and Paw, begging them to help Pat. Despite his own predicament, it was Pat’s desperation that seemed to eat at him. “Please help my Pat.” She had no money to pay the utilities on the farm, and no “spending money.” Paw and Nona were slow to respond with money, although they were backing Tom emotionally. The elderly Allansons were the only resource Tom had. Pat had quickly managed to alienate Jean Boggs by dismissing any of her suggestions about how to help Tom. Tom explained to Paw that Pat would go to work in a minute if she could, but a job would kill a woman in such delicate health. She was already selling off her precious antiques to help him.
Still Paw held tight to his cash.
Unsure of where the money for legal representation would come from, Pat nevertheless retained the firm of Garland, Nuckolls and Kadish, assuring them that she had adequate funds. She wanted Tom free, and somehow she would find a way. Reuben A. Garland was the canny, grand old man of the firm, and his son, Colonel Edward T.M. Garland, was a brilliant and colorful man in his late thirties. You couldn’t do any better in Atlanta than to have the Garlands represent you.
Father and son would be assisted by John Nuckolls, who now pleaded for Tom's release while he awaited trial. Pat was there in the courtroom, along with Margureitte and the colonel and old Paw Allanson. Nuckolls argued that Tom had absolutely no record of violent behavior prior to the crimes he stood accused of. And he was sorely needed at home. “Your Honor,” he pleaded. “There’s a serious financial problem in connection with that stable [Kentwood] due to a mortgage. The farm was purchased five months ago. It was purchased on a down payment with a balloon and that balloon is coming due, and they are fixing to lose that farm because of the inability to meet the notes.”
Even worse, Nuckolls pointed out, both Tom’s wife and his grandmother were in very poor physical condition, and his continued incarceration wasn’t helping. “Your Honor, I have two letters from doctors concerning his [Tom’s] wife’s condition.” Nuckolls explained that Pat was suffering from pulmonary emboli, a release of clots into the bloodstream that would ultimately pass into her heart and lungs. “She has had open heart surgery and has an umbrella valve implanted in the heart. Her condition is reported by her doctors at Emory Hospital and her private physician, Dr. William J. Taylor, as undoubtedly terminal with a life expectancy of two years or less.”
Pat certainly appeared to be ill. Since the shootings, she had lost so much weight that she looked like a skeleton. Her mother and her aunts had tried everything they could to get her to eat; if she did eat, she threw up. Her aunt Thelma made her special homemade soup, and Pat couldn’t even hold that down.
The defense had a number of prestigious character witnesses, including Colonel and Mrs. Radcliffe, standing by to vouch for Tom’s gentleness. Nona and Paw wanted him out on bond too. If he were to be released, his counsel assured the court that he would go straight to Kentwood and stay there, leaving only to assist his defense team from time to time.
William Weller, for the Fulton County District Attorney's Office, quickly erased the picture of Tom Allanson as gentle, describing him as “a mountain of a man” who was charged with “blowing his mother's heart out.” Although he had known Tom and his family for years, Judge Wofford reluctantly agreed with the state that there would be no bond and that Tom would remain in jail, but he set the earliest trial date possible, the first Monday morning after Labor Day: September 9, 1974.
Tom's defense team had lost only the first round, but already Ed Garland could sense trouble. Although she obviously hadn’t the foggiest grasp of the way the law worked, Pat Allanson clearly didn’t trust her husband’s lawyers. She w
ould not allow Tom to confer with Garland unless she were present. She watched him like a hawk, monitoring and editing his responses even as they emerged from his mouth. She spoke for him whenever possible. Why was she so concerned about what her husband might say? She was almost hysterical about losing “her Tom.”
Garland detected that Tom ached to talk to him alone, that the man had a heavy load on his mind. There might well be extenuating circumstances, something a top defense lawyer could build a case on, but Pat seemed to be afraid to let Tom speak freely. In her zeal to protect him, she became a defense lawyer’s nightmare.
Worse, Ed Garland could see that Tom trusted his wife implicitly. The man was addled by love, consumed by love; he would gladly die for her. Ed Garland sincerely hoped it would not come to that.
CHAPTER 15
***
In less than a year, Pat had fallen in love with Tom, married him, they had purchased Kentwood Morgan Farm, and now it was all gone. She was far too ill to live in Kentwood alone, and she couldn’t possibly do the chores or handle the horses by herself. What was the use? They were probably going to lose Kentwood anyway. Without Tom, she could never meet the balloon payments. When fall came round again, Pat was back living with Margureitte and the colonel on Tell Road, while Ronnie stayed on in Zebulon so the place wouldn’t be empty and a target for vandals. He wouldn’t be sixteen until November, but he had always hastened to help his mother. He never refused anything she asked of him.
Tom Allanson awaited trial in a sweltering jail cell.
***
Margureitte Radcliffe traced all the misery in her family to 1974—to the passionate alliance between Pat and Tom and the violence that followed so soon after. Once things started to slide, it was like an avalanche. A pebble or two at first, and then the flowers and grass from the hillside, and finally the very foundation of their lives.
As it was in most felony cases of such importance, there was a delay in going to trial. Tom’s pretrial motions wouldn’t be heard until October and Pat told him she had hit bottom. She had no money and no strength to go on. She couldn’t bear it that the trial had been delayed. She told him she really needed to be in the hospital. “But I won’t go, Sugar,” she said softly. “Because that would mean I couldn’t see you at all, couldn’t come and visit you—and that would surely kill me. Besides, the premiums on the medical insurance are past due and I can’t pay for that or for my medicine.”
There could have been no more degrading purgatory for a man like Tom than to be caged and see this fragile woman he adored reduced to poverty and illness gone untreated. Pat had become the only person who mattered to him. Her moods, worries, opinions, and well-being determined his own. Her fears and sorrows had the power to leave him twisting in the wind.
Tom’s attorneys would far rather have seen him plead guilty to lesser charges than innocent to murder. Pat would not have it. She came to every lawyer-client conference, attached to her husband's side, it sometimes seemed, like an annoying growth. It was almost as if she had a secret fear that Tom would tell the Garlands and John Nuckolls something that would endanger her. But that was ridiculous.
Ed Garland finally got a chance to talk with Tom alone, and he seized it. “Tom, listen to me. I cannot defend you unless I know the truth. I’ll defend you on what you say to do, but I’ve got to know . . . because all this stuff cannot be true.”
Tom would later admit that he did finally tell Ed Garland what had happened that night in the basement of his parents’ house. But he would not let Garland repeat what he had said—not to anyone. Tom exacted a promise that Garland would not use that information in defending him. He had promised Pat. She, of all people, loved him more than anyone on earth. And they would do it her way. Garland was supremely frustrated; he was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the state of Georgia, and he was ethically bound to proceed with one legal arm tied behind his back.
Pat was distraught when she learned what Tom had told his attorney. “I thought she was going to divorce me right there,” Tom remembered. But they did what Pat wanted. She absolutely refused to consider a plea bargain that would dictate that Tom would go to prison, if only for a few years. She would die without him. He had to be free, and he would be, she promised him. She would brook no compromise.
It was agreed that Tom would plead innocent to all charges. And that left his attorneys precious little ammunition with which to defend him. They had character witnesses who admired Tom, and witnesses who would demean the character of those who testified against him. Hardly the stuff of which a powerful defense is constructed.
Private investigators for the defense had tried to find someone who had seen Tom far away from the shooting scene. They had even advertised for such a witness in the Atlanta Journal personals:
REWARD
ANYONE SEEING TOM A., 6 FT 4, 250 POUNDS, LIGHT HAIR, 2 WEEKS AGO, WEDNESDAY, JULY 3RD, BETWEEN 4:30 AND 9:00 ON CLEVELAND AVENUE BETWEEN S. FULTON HOSPITAL AND I-75 OR GIVING HIM A RIDE ON I-75 FROM CLEVELAND TO CENTRAL, PLEASE CALL 344-5729, 436-8435.
URGENT! URGENT!
The ad backfired, and became State's Exhibit No. 102.
***
It was an endless hot summer and fall as they waited for the trial, and a relief when October 14, 1974, finally came. Both Pat and Tom seemed to believe that he would be found innocent and they would be together again, perhaps in time to save their plantation. Hoyt Waller expected a balloon payment by December or he would repossess their paradise. Tom thought he could find some way to scrape the money together, if only he were free before the end of October.
Tom’s divorce skirmishes had been held in small county courthouses; his murder trial would be held in the Fulton County Courthouse in downtown Atlanta. Outside the massive white marble courthouse, the oak trees of Atlanta glowed golden, the dogwood's leaves were tinged with red, and the maples turned a clear bright coral. Inside, as in all courtrooms, there was no sense of season, only the dust of many seasons, many years.
“The court calls for trial,” Judge Charles A. Wofford, white-haired and benign, intoned, “the case of The State of Georgia v. Walter Thomas Allanson, charged with murder, Indictment No. A-22765, Colonel Edward T.M. Garland for the defendant and Colonel William Weller for the state.”
Customarily, relatives of the accused sat behind the gallery divider, but Pat insisted on sitting at the defense table. That was fine with Tom, but Garland threw up his hands. Dressed in a dazzling new outfit each day, sewn by her own hand, Pat was the picture of the anxious, devoted wife standing by her man. Her vantage point at the trial also allowed her to instruct Garland and to nudge and whisper to Tom.
It took only a day to pick a jury, although they went through more than four dozen candidates before both Ed Garland and William Weller accepted a panel of seven men and five women, eight blacks and four whites, with two alternates. An inordinate number of the prospective jurors had relatives in law enforcement, or knew either the prosecutor or the defense team, or had very strong feelings about the death penalty. In the end, Tom Allanson's fate would be decided by a Sears Roebuck store manager, a retired teacher, two postal employees, an insurance analyst, a grocer, a physical education teacher, a phone company clerk, a retired waitress, a payroll administrator, a housewife, and a retired airline pilot.
***
As Assistant D.A. William Weller called his witnesses one by one, they painted a devastating, unrelenting picture that would be hard for Ed Garland to erase. Sergeant Butts of the East Point Police Department testified that Tom had been so angry two days before the killings—as he sought to charge his father with public indecency— that he had said, “If this kind of stuff keeps up. I’ll kill him!” Deputy Richard Satterfield of Forsyth County, an investigator into the abortive ambush at Lake Lanier four days before the murders, described how Walter and Carolyn Allanson had almost died in a storm of bullets. Mary Rena Jones of the Jones store said she had seen a blue pickup truck with a round decal on the door the morni
ng of the ambush.
Weller called Walter Allanson's employees and neighbors, and then all of the East Point police investigators who had pored over the house and the yard on Norman Berry Drive or who had gone to Zebulon and arrested Tom. Twenty-two convincing witnesses for the state, none of whom had particular axes to grind. Step by step, Weller built his case, implying to the jury that Tom Allanson was not only guilty of shooting his parents on July 3, but that he had been present at all the earlier attacks and harassments.
Tom sat frozen at the defense table, his longish haircut now above his ears and his shoulders straining at a tailored navy blue sport coat. When Mary Jones testified that she had seen him drive by her store on the morning of June 29, 1974, in a blue pickup with a canopy and a Kentwood Morgan Farm circular seal on the door, he shook his head slightly. He knew that seal hadn’t been on the truck since Pat’s accident in Stone Mountain two months before. Pat's reaction was much more obvious to the jury. Frowning and grimacing, she wrote a note and shoved it dramatically across the defense table to Ed Garland.
On cross-examination, Garland got Mrs. Jones to admit she hadn't recognized the driver of the blue truck, nor had she mentioned seeing the truck on the day of the ambush. Her testimony warred with her first police report. She had first recalled seeing Tom the day before the ambush at Lake Lanier. Garland fought to have Mary Jones’s testimony thrown out, but he lost. For the second time in two days, he asked for a mistrial, and for the second time, Judge Wofford denied his request.
There would be many legal tussles between the defense and the prosecution during the trial, times when the jury would be banished from the courtroom. Judge Wofford was an easygoing, folksy jurist. He invited the male members of the jury to remove their jackets and even their shoes if they were pinching. Ashtrays would be provided for those who cared to smoke. He apologized for the delays and explained that “if you're inclined to blame anyone, blame the court.”