“We still can,” Tom argued.
“I can’t touch you, Tom. You are healthy and you know, in all probability, you’ve got a number of years ahead of you. So therefore, you can hold up if it took ten or twelve years. You will live through that. But let’s be realistic. It’s wonderful to dream and wonderful for me to say, ‘Tom, I’ll wait for you forever,’ because you know in your heart if I were strong, and if I were well, I could wait for you forever, Tom.”
“You’re not going to die anytime soon. . . .”
“The reason I would, would be just from heartbreak and being lonely. . . . I have no one to help me now.”
“You’ve still got me. If you don’t think I’m right there with you, look around you . . . look at the letters.”
“I know that, Tom,” she said softly. “ . . . The letters, the flowers, the cards, the statues, the pictures I’m looking at—all of those things cannot hold me when I’m sick. They can’t support me when I have to be supported. They can’t pay the bills. They can’t reach out for me. They cannot protect me. They cannot keep me secure. They can’t get me any support or protection at all.”
There was a silence. What could he answer? “Pat,” he groaned. “You know it’s hard for me to be here.”
“What you don’t understand, Tom, is that before—when I had just accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to live very long—I did what I wanted to do and that was it because I didn’t worry about it. Then, when you came, I had a desire because you were there, and each time that I felt like death was going to come and grab hold of me, you were there for me to take hold of, but you aren’t here anymore. ...”
Tom pleaded with Pat to let him give her the will to live.
“. . . For what?”
“For me. For us!"
“There is no me—or us—not now, Tom. . . . There is me—or us—in the fact that we love each other, but we’re not together.”
The conversation stretched on for twenty minutes more, and when it was over, Tom was convinced his wife was dying. He believed every word she said. He was losing her and he felt completely helpless as she slipped away from him.
CHAPTER 25
***
Pat was ill. She had painful sores on her thigh, and a larger lesion on her right buttock that had abscessed. They had appeared suddenly and her doctors were baffled about what caused them. And she seemed to be edging once again toward hysteria. She wanted her mother around all the time and that wasn’t possible. Boppo had to work, her job more important now than ever as the Radcliffes’ finances were strained to the limit. She was an excellent receptionist and popular with both the dentists she worked for and their staffs. But over the years she had lost too many jobs; it was hard for her to concentrate at work because her family had so many emergencies and called her continually.
Pat was thirty-seven and her problems were still the focal point for everyone in the family, the star they danced around, the burden they bore even as their own strength waned. Boppo and Papa, Ronnie, Susan, Debbie, Tom, and all the aunts were the ponies in a merry-go-round endlessly circling the brightly painted mirrors in the center. And all the mirrors reflected Pat. It was as if floodlights played over her always. She called the shots, alternately preening, sobbing, arguing, and smiling beatifically.
Boppo and the colonel were so involved in saving her from the disappointments of life that they had no time to evaluate what they themselves had lost in the struggle. If they had, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Everything had gone to rescue Pat—houses, horses, money, credit ratings, furniture, antiques, and, if it came down to it, human beings. They had come so far—all the while dedicating their lives to her—that they never thought of shifting the balance.
Tom had always believed his wife was delicate, but in truth Pat was very strong physically. She could lift heavy saddles, and her hand around a wrist was like a vise. Boppo was the only one who dared confront Pat when she started acting out physically. She scared the rest of her family half to death. But Paw and Nona never saw that side of Pat. Her bearing with them was so loving and refined, so caring and helpful that they had come to think of her as a daughter, just as Tom was like a son to them.
Tom’s grandparents had each drawn up a will on September 11, 1974, two months after the murders. Utilizing the “marital deduction,” which in Georgia divides the estate into two parts for tax purposes, each left his estate to the other. In the event, however, that both should die, their assets were to be divided equally between Tom and Jean Boggs’s two children—that is, Tom would get half and his cousins each half of the remaining half. Tom and his aunt Jean were to be co-executors of that estate.
On March 4, 1975, the elder Allansons added a codicil to their wills. With Pat’s help, Paw Allanson contacted his attorney and arranged for Pat to be added as an executor to serve in Tom’s place if he was not able to do so. Jean Boggs remained the co-executor.
***
They all waited that spring of 1975 for word of Tom’s new trial. Tom was touched that Pat would attempt the long uphill climb to the visitors’ area on crutches when she was in so much pain. On March 10, when the hearing for Tom’s appeal was delayed again, Pat was desolate. Both her mental and physical condition went downhill; she didn’t seem to take care of herself and Margureitte worried.
On the night of April 9, Wednesday—a visiting night—Pat discovered that Tom had talked to one of his attorneys without her. She was enraged and lit into her husband. How could he even consider doing such a thing? Apparently, Tom had told Ed Garland one thing and she had told him another, and questions had come up that she did not care to answer. “He is a lying son of a bitch,” she exploded, referring to Garland.
“Okay, Pat,” Tom said, trying to gentle her. “You don’t feel any better about the whole case, do you? I'm not in the habit of somebody telling me something and then turning it around.”
“You’re not in the habit of a lot of things,Tom.”
Tom explained to Pat that he was unable to call anyone a liar to his face. He was not about to do that to Ed Garland. He didn’t believe it was true, anyway.
“You don’t have to say they are a liar,” she explained, as if to a dolt. “All you have to do is say, I’m sorry; I can’t see you. We have a rule. That’s it. The whole law firm knows about it . . . Look, we are sitting up here arguing about something we wouldn’t be arguing over if you hadn’t talked to him . . . ‘cause you’ve got one story, and I’ve got another.”
And that was the problem. Tom could not tell his lawyers anything about the murders—she had insisted on that often enough. She felt she had to censor her husband’s every word. She lived in fear of what he might say, of the areas he might venture into with his attorneys when he discussed the shooting of his parents. Tom trusted too many people. He had no sense of self-protection at all, and no sense of how to protect her either.
After Pat had railed at him for half of their visit, she made Tom promise that he would never “do anything like this again.”
“I promise. I promise.”
Then, to make things worse, Pat had left some contraband reading material in a visitors’ waiting room, meaning to go back and hide it in a letter to Tom. It wasn’t there when she went back, and jail authorities abruptly cut short her visit. She turned white with fury. Papa and Boppo were with her that night and tried to stop the storm they knew was coming. Pat was seething and hysterical. She demanded to see the chief of jail operations. Tom watched helplessly. The more she rocked the boat in the Fulton County jail, the more likely he was to be shipped off to prison.
But Pat was completely out of control. With all the histrionics going on in their house, the strain on his wife, the physical confrontations, Colonel Radcliffe temporarily lost his usual detached air and his self-control. Somebody had to shut Pat up. When she continued to rage as they walked down the long passageway from the visitors’ area, he suddenly flung his hand back and caught her full in the face, smacking her in the eye.
Pat was struck dumb, and then she started to sob. All the way home, she threatened to move out and go over to Paw and Nona’s and take Ronnie with her. When Tom called, she sobbed to him about being struck. “He hit me full force before we even got out of the jail,” she complained. “Walking down the hallway . . . He said I was terrible to you and about everything I did to you, and everything was my fault. I just finally went into tears and said, ‘Get off my back.’ He said he was going to have me committed to Metropolitan. I told him it would be over my dead body.”
“I didn’t mean for all that to happen, Sugar.”
“ . . . I worked so hard to get pretty and everything for you.”
“Please forgive me, Shug. First things first, remember.” „
She sobbed into the phone, but she smiled as she hung up, a smile that Tom, of course, could not see.
***
Pat almost convinced Tom that he should fire Ed Garland. Garland was rarely available to her when she called, would not listen to her suggestions, and she detested him. She phoned another attorney and asked to make an appointment with him. She explained that Tom was still represented by Garland, but she saw no reason why she couldn’t hire the second attorney to be her adviser. “My father—who used to be with counterintelligence—told me that.”
The attorney said he could represent Tom after he dismissed Garland, but he explained that he could not ethically sue Ed Garland to get back fifteen thousand dollars Pat said she had coming. He also suggested that Tom’s college degree and skill at blacksmithing would make him a natural to teach in prison as part of the new Georgia Youthful Offenders Program. That way, Tom could be outside more, pending any appeal. It would be far easier on him than being locked up in the crowded Fulton County jail. “That would be up at Buford Prison,” he added. “It’s an accredited high school. He could teach, and it would be better for him. It’s only thirty minutes away.”
“My physical condition is quite critical, and while he’s in Fulton County jail I can see him once a week and talk on the phone four times a week,” Pat said, quashing the suggestion at once.
The attorney explained that Tom could have almost unlimited visits and phone calls in Buford.
“His big thing is contact with me,” she countered. “If he has to go to Jackson [prison] first, he’d be down there for six weeks and he couldn’t see me . . . I could go at any minute.”
With a start, the attorney realized this woman was saying she might die at any minute. She sounded healthy enough on the phone. It scarcely seemed possible.
Pat never told Tom that he had a choice to go directly to a teaching job at Buford; she simply explained firmly to the attorney who suggested it that Tom would always choose to be near her—no matter what conditions he himself was in. Nor would she tell that attorney specifically who her doctors were. She had many. She had “specialists.”
***
The climate at the Tell Road farm was not good. The one thing that Clifford Radcliffe would not allow was for anyone to criticize his wife.
“Reit,” as he called her, was the most beautiful woman, the kindest, the most well bred, and his sweetheart. Usually he went along with anything she wanted, and protecting her daughter at all costs was the most important thing she wanted. But Pat’s outbursts were wearing her mother down. Pat had chased after both Boppo and Papa with a knife and an umbrella when she didn’t get her way. Her behavior at the jail had been inexcusable.
The colonel had to make a trip out of state. It was an unfortunate time for him to be gone. Pat continued to insist that she was moving out and going to Nona and Paw’s. Boppo pleaded with her to be reasonable. On April 10, Pat disappeared into her room and slammed the door, and the trouble—at least for that night—seemed to be over.
But then Pat emerged, wearing a diaphanous red nightgown held up with spaghetti straps. She was barefoot, and there were thin crimson stripes of blood welling up on each wrist. Before Boppo could stop her, and despite her crutches, Pat ran from the house and disappeared into the piney woods and quarry area behind. It was April, but it was a nasty evening, full of sleety rain. There was a power company right-of-way back behind the trees, a wide clear swath where the towers that carried the lines pierced the dusk. Pat half-ran, half-hopped, a blur of red in the fading light, over the stubble-cut grass, too fast for her mother who ran behind her, begging her to stop.
Boppo phoned for help and rounded up a number of neighbor men. They hurried to their cars and headed up Tell Road. The only place for Pat to go was along the power lines; a mile or so further on she would come out to railroad tracks and a veterinarian’s clinic. The Radcliffes knew the vet well—he had taken care of their horses—but nobody would be there at that time.
After hollering back and forth in the lowering twilight, they finally found Pat, still running and hobbling, her hair streaming behind her and her wrists dripping blood. She had worked herself into an ultimately hysterical state.
Still dressed in her nightgown, Pat was admitted on a court order to the Metropolitan Psychiatric Center in Atlanta for evaluation of her dangerousness to herself. Pat wouldn’t be staying in a “psycho ward” in some city hospital; Metropolitan was decorated like a fine hotel, and it was very, very expensive. When she was admitted, she had superficial slash marks on her wrists, and she appeared anxious, agitated, and extremely talkative.
She complained that she could not see out of her left eye because her father had struck her. The clinic physician was more aghast at the festering abscess on her right buttock.
Pat was disheveled and talked a mile a minute, but her response to what was happening around her was flat. She gave the admitting physician a long history of her life. By her own reckoning, she had always been the victim, assailed by bad luck and other people’s insensitivity. Her husband was in jail, she said, convicted of two murders he had not committed. They had only been married eleven months, and right after the wedding, she recalled, she had been in a terrible automobile accident. “I’ve paid my lawyers forty-five thousand dollars and given them property worth thirty-five thousand more to appeal my husband’s case to the highest courts,” she declared.
Margureitte told the doctor that Pat hadn’t been taking care of herself; she was obsessed with getting her husband out of jail. “She’s been talking a lot, and she’s just had a lot of negative thoughts.”
Pat insisted on calling her daughters. “They’re trying to kill me!” she told Susan breathlessly. “I was raped when I was only a child,” she whispered into the phone, and told Susan she would kill her if she didn’t come down and get her out of the hospital. Doctors listening in noted that she was grossly distorting the severity of her injuries to them.
Asked about the abscess on her buttock, Pat said that it and the sores on her thigh had been caused by penicillin shots she had received from her regular doctor, Dr. Taylor. A check with Taylor’s office revealed that Pat had received no penicillin shots, but she had been under treatment for the mysterious sores. She complained of terrible pain and was given injections of Demerol.
Pat was admitted with a tentative diagnosis of “Agitated depression with possible thought disorder.” It was a catchall diagnosis, not to be found in the DSM-II, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of the psychiatric world. Two psychiatrists did concur that she was “not able to take care of herself at this time.”
A physical examination revealed that “the patient is afebrile [has no fever] with no acute infections present. Chronic subcutaneous and muscular cold abscess formations under treatment with incision and drainage, and antibiotic coverage is also noted. . . . There was no evidence of thrombophlebitis . . . there was no evidence of pathological process involving the left eye.”
Papa’s thrown-back hand had done no real damage to Pat’s eye; she could see out of it perfectly well, and even though Pat had convinced Tom that she had only a few years—perhaps months—to live, a complete physical showed that her heart, lungs, blood
, kidneys, and all other systems were completely normal. She had no blood clots. Except for the odd abscesses, she was in good health.
Pat received individual and group psychotherapy. During her stay at Metropolitan she demanded frequently to go to the Fulton County jail to see her husband. A week into her treatment she was allowed to visit Tom with Boppo, and she “tolerated this short leave of absence well.”
After twelve days in the clinic, Pat was discharged with a prescription for fifty milligrams of Mellaril four times a day, the usual initial dosage for treatment of borderline psychotic patients. She was to be followed as an outpatient and her doctors felt the chances were good for “significant return of function.”
CHAPTER 26
***
Once released from the Metropolitan Psychiatric Center, Pat seemed not at all psychotic. She didn’t bother to continue psychiatric counseling. Her abscess had begun to heal while she was in the hospital and, for a time, she looked much better. But it was still painful for her to walk up the long slope to visit Tom, so they worked out a way to “be together” over the phone.
Besides sharing their love songs on the radio, they thumbed through the TV Guide together and decided what they would watch. That way, Pat explained, it would be almost as if they were really together watching the same shows. Pat quizzed Tom later to be sure he had watched the shows they had selected. Sometimes he had to fudge a little; he couldn’t always dictate which channel the jail TV would be turned to. Once he made the mistake of praising Farrah Fawcett Majors’s beauty when she guested on her husband’s show, The Six Million Dollar Man. “Tom!” Pat sulked. “I don't want to talk about her! I want to talk about us.”
***
Summer came again to Atlanta. Tom was still locked in the Fulton County jail. On July 8, 1975, exactly one year to the day since his arrival in that facility, his motion for a new trial, so long postponed, was denied. “Having given said amended motion due consideration in the light of the arguments, the same is hereby overruled on each and every ground and a new trial is denied,” Superior Court Judge Charles Wofford decreed.