Tedford had laid out the case for D.A. Lewis Slaton, and Slaton had grasped the need for rapid action. “You’ve got whatever permission you need. Don’t worry about papers. Get that lady in the hospital now!”
Tedford had called an ambulance and it was speeding toward Washington Road.
It was 4:00 in the afternoon on Monday, June 28, 1976. And then 4:30. The minutes crept by agonizingly. Then, suddenly, there was a loud pounding on the front door. Jean jumped. She wondered who else Pat might have called for backup. She heard footsteps approaching and was tremendously relieved to see Bob Tedford and another detective walk into the living room.
Tedford made no attempt to soften his announcement to Pat Allanson. “Arsenic has been found in Mr. Allanson’s system and we need to take Mrs. Allanson to the hospital for tests.”
Pat looked at him without changing expression, not so much as the flickering of an eye. She turned on her heel and headed for Nona’s bedroom. Tedford was right behind her.
The little house on Washington Road erupted into chaos. Nona Allanson was already nearly hysterical, unable to grasp what was going on. When Tedford informed Pat that an ambulance was on the way for Mrs. Allanson, she was incensed. Her voice rose, whipping the old lady into a froth of panic. She bombarded her husband’s grandmother with dire warnings, every word making the paralyzed woman more terrified.
Nona’s mouth worked ineffectively as she tried to form questions, and Pat just kept on shouting at her. “They’re going to take you to the hospital for some silly tests! They’ll be giving you shots all the time. You can’t let them. Your insurance won’t pay for it,” Pat ranted. “You’ll be deep in debt, Ma. I won’t be able to come see you. They won’t let you have any visitors.”
Tedford feared the old lady was about to have another stroke. She looked utterly panicked and begged to stay in her home. Pat kept after her, predicting all manner of disasters if Nona let them take her in the ambulance. Finally Tedford had had enough. He pulled Pat aside and spoke through gritted teeth. “I’ve heard all I want to hear from you. If you keep this up, I’m going to ask you to leave.”
Jean Boggs was the blood relative: she had the law on her side, Tedford told Pat, and she would decide whether her mother would go to the hospital or not. Pat was seething. The hatred in the room rose around them like an almost palpable miasma.
Colonel Radcliffe got his attorney on the phone and handed the receiver to Tedford. The attorney threatened Tedford with a lawsuit, and the detective replied that that would be just fine. The real defendant would be the Fulton County district attorney, Lewis Slaton—officially, it was Slaton who had ordered that Mrs. Walter Allanson be removed from her home for tests. Nobody in his right mind sued Lewis Slaton.
“Colonel Radcliffe,” Tedford continued easily, “since you're here, would you mind showing me where it was that you saw Mr. Allanson taking all those pills on that Saturday?”
The two men now stood in the hallway near the kitchen. “I don’t remember any pills,” Radcliffe said.
Tedford jerked his head around as if he’d been struck. “What?"
“I don’t remember any pills.”
“Well, Colonel Radcliffe,” Tedford began quietly. “This is how the whole case of the overdose got started. It was all based upon your statement to me, Pat Allanson’s statement to me, and your wife was there at the hospital too when you told me. All three of you were agreeing at the time. Now you’re saying that you didn’t see him take any pills?”
“That is correct.”
“But you told me about the pills. You described the way he was tossing them down.”
“You’re confused, Sergeant. You’re lying.”
“Fine, then,” Tedford said grimly. He knew what he had heard the first time, and he found it interesting that Pat’s stepfather had had such a sudden loss of memory.
Mercifully, the ambulance finally arrived, and a still-protesting Nona Allanson was carried out on a stretcher. Pat hopped on the jump seat in the back beside her, and Jean sat next to the driver. The old lady was the object of a tug-of-war between them, and neither of them had done much to calm her down. Nona didn’t believe what Jean had told her, that Paw had been poisoned. Sadly, she no longer trusted her own daughter. Pat had convinced her that she was going off for some terrible tests, that her insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, and that she would be barred from seeing anyone she trusted and loved.
Bob Tedford was completely exasperated with Pat. “I can’t stop you from going with her,” he stated flatly, “but I don’t want you talking to her on the way to the hospital. Do you understand that?” Pat looked back at him defiantly. No one had ever shut her up when she had something to say, and she wasn’t about to obey commands now. By this time, Nona Allanson believed everything Pat told her.
Everything.
Over Pat’s objections, Jean asked Lieutenant Thornhill to padlock her parents’ home the moment the Radcliffes vacated it. Pat insisted that it was her duty to live there, that that would make Nona feel more secure, but Jean just pursed her lips and shook her head. She didn’t know what it was about Pat that had mesmerized her parents, but she was going to find out. In the meantime, she would try to protect whatever assets they had left.
“Padlock those doors, Gus,” she pleaded. “And don’t let anybody in unless I say so.”
Pat talked continually to Nona on the short ride to the hospital, but once there, the old woman was whisked off to the emergency room, where no one could see her but hospital personnel.
If someone had adulterated Nona’s food or beverages with arsenic, it would show up in tests. As doctors worked over Nona, Jean hurried to her father’s room to let him know that his cherished wife was now safe in the hospital, only a few doors away from his own room. His attorney, Bill Hamner, was visiting him. Jean demanded that Pat’s power of attorney over Nona and Paw’s affairs be terminated at once. “She’s still using it.”
Hamner agreed to see that Pat’s control over the elderly Allansons’ estate was stopped. Just like Dr. Jones, Hamner and his partner, Fred Reeves, had been impressed with Pat, finding her almost martyr-like in her steadfast care of the old couple. Whenever she had approached their offices, it had always been on matters seemingly instigated by Paw Allanson. She appeared so ill herself, but she never complained, spending her slight energy in caring for the Allansons. Even now, a moment or two after Jean had warned Hamner about Pat, she limped into Paw’s room and motioned the lawyer over for a private consultation.
At first Bill Hamner found himself between a rock and a hard place. Jean watched with crossed arms and a baleful glare as he talked to Pat. She thought Pat was an evil, manipulative force in her parents' lives. Pat considered Jean a money-grabbing, ungrateful daughter. In the end, the choice was simple for the attorneys. Hamner and Reeves represented the elder Allansons, and they would do what seemed best for them.
CHAPTER 32
***
On June 29, Paw Allanson gave Bob Tedford a written Consent to Search waiver for his home and property. Accompanied by W.L. Jackson and Jean Boggs, Tedford searched the padlocked house. They removed six liquor and wine bottles, some empty and some full and still sealed. Jean identified some expensive whiskey as long-ago Christmas gifts, and the blackberry wines Paw had made decades before.
“Spirits” had always been kept out in the shed, but these were found in the kitchen and the bedroom areas. They also cleaned out the refrigerator of liquids: tea, ice water, prune juice. A syringe was removed from the bathroom and labeled.
None of the items taken proved positive for arsenic.
***
On July 1, Colonel Radcliffe appeared at the East Point police headquarters at Bob Tedford’s request. Tedford said calmly, “You are a suspect in an attempted murder,” and advised Radcliffe of his rights under Miranda.
The ramrod-straight ex-colonel’s face blanched, reflecting shock, denial, and perhaps just a trace of apprehension. Tedford didn’t yet know enough about Pat Allanson t
o be aware of the blanket of protection that had been spread tenderly over her by her family from the moment she was born. He didn’t realize that Colonel Radcliffe and his wife, Margureitte, had spent much of their married life saving Pat from the pickles, messes, and downright catastrophes she had managed to provoke. Tedford had seen Pat as a tearful, helpless, beautiful woman who made a man want to protect her—then had watched her change in an instant into a strident harridan. She had been outrageous as she frightened the old lady to keep her out of the hospital, but she had been completely convincing when he and Turner talked to her and she sobbed out her fears and losses. Tedford wasn’t sure which woman Pat really was. The more he knew about her, the more elusive she became.
Colonel Radcliffe offered no more information on Pat. He stared glacially at Tedford when the detective said he wanted to talk more about the Saturday morning of June 12, the day Pat and the Radcliffes had rushed to save Nona from her “berserk” husband. Radcliffe’s memory of that day was not nearly as precise as it once had been.
“Let me ask you, Colonel Radcliffe,” Tedford said. “Have you ever gone with your daughter and Nona Allanson to see an attorney, or been present when either of the senior Allansons signed papers?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Does Pat have powers of attorney from Paw and Nona Allanson?”
“Yes, I believe she does. You would have to ask Pat about that. I don’t get involved.”
“Have you seen Pat lately?”
The colonel looked vague. “Not for a couple of days.”
“Where is she?”
“You would, of course, have to ask her attorney. Look, Sergeant, I have to go back to work.” Colonel Radcliffe had taken a civil service desk job at Fort Mac to help stem the burgeoning financial costs of Pat’s “problems.” “Am I under arrest or not?”
“No, you can go.”
The next day, July 2, the results were in on the tests done on Nona Allanson. Her urine samples proved positive for arsenic, although the concentration was only one-sixth the amount found in her husband’s system. Her hair samples also showed the presence of the deadly poison. Her urine had 100 micrograms of arsenic per milligram, and her hair tested 3.5 micrograms per milligrams of arsenic.
Nona had been bedridden, unable to prepare food for herself, certainly unable to go outside her tiny home. Everything she ingested had been given to her by Pat, or by the nurse hired by Pat. Her other regular visitors were Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe; Pat’s daughter, Debbie Taylor Cole; and the Radcliffes’ neighbor, Fanny K. Cash. Nona had lost all contact with her own blood relatives.
She had not fared well with her new “family.”
George “Homer” Boggs stopped by the East Point police station that same afternoon. He had with him a check drawn on the Allansons’ account at First National Bank in the amount of a thousand dollars, signed by Pat Allanson under her power of attorney and deposited immediately in her own account. She had no legal right to do that; the papers giving her power of attorney over the elder Allansons’ considerable assets specifically designated that she was to use their money only to take care of them, or with special permission.
When Tedford asked him later, Paw Allanson said that he had not given his consent for this check. He had gone with Pat to the C&S Bank in late May or early June and arranged a thousand-dollar loan to Pat to help Tommy. That check had its purpose written right on it: “For Tom’s Life.” The second check for a thousand dollars, however, was news to Paw.
Tom had needed that thousand-dollar loan; he had one last appeal left to him, and Dunham McAllister was trying to see that he got it. It had been almost exactly two years since Walter and Carolyn Allanson were shot to death. For East Point detectives on this new case, it would be the second Fourth of July they had spent investigating the Allanson family while the rest of Atlanta was celebrating Independence Day.
A few days later, Lieutenant Jackson and Sergeant Tedford were poring over the confession for the twentieth time. Suddenly, they noticed that on the last page of the statement, something had been x-ed out. Reading carefully through the x’s, they could make out the phrase “Dixie Cup Morgan Classic, Stone Mountain.” The first seven lines on the last page appeared to have been typed at a different time than the rest of the text. They were indented more than the others and typed at a different margin setting.
James H. Kelly, chief document examiner for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s crime laboratory, verified that the last page of the confession had not been typed continuously with the other text on the page. “After the first paragraph was typed,” he wrote, “the paper was adjusted by either taking it out of the carriage and reinserting it, or it was moved while in the carriage.”
That would make sense; if the notary public had glanced over the page she stamped, she would have seen only sentences about . . . “If Mama dies before I do,” and nothing at all about guns and murder.
Now the detectives had to find someone who was connected with Morgan horses. And they already knew who that was.
***
Both Paw and Nona Allanson had ingested arsenic, given to them in some way that they could not detect. The East Point police and the Fulton County D.A.’s investigators hoped to trace the source of that arsenic. They began by checking through the myriad prescription drugs that Dr. Jones had gathered up at the Allansons’ home. There were over fifty vials, packets, boxes, and bottles. Some of them went back to August 1950, and there were also the drugs that Dr. Jones had prescribed recently. Apparently, the old couple never threw a container of medicine out as long as there were a few pills left.
Eventually, they were all identified. There were pain pills, tranquilizers, diuretics, antivertigo pills, sleeping pills, allergy pills, decongestants, antacids, and antibiotics. Analyzed at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab, none of them contained arsenic.
A police sweep of the house had also produced a brown bag containing white powder, a jar with a green cap containing brown granular material, a jar with a red cap containing the same, and a glass bottle with a white cap containing white powder.
None of these substances proved to contain arsenic.
The bottle that Paw had allegedly been drinking from on the morning Pat and her parents broke in to “rescue” Nona did contain arsenic. In fact, according to toxicologists Drs. Solomons and McGurdy, it still contained so much arsenic that, if the old man had been drinking from it, a swig or two would have surely killed him where he stood.
Dr. Jones, of course, had never actually seen Paw with that old-timey bottle; Pat had handed it to him.
While arsenic is a poison much beloved by fictional mystery writers, by 1974 it was not nearly as available as it once was. Nor is it a particularly good choice as a murder weapon. Its residue stays in the body for all time. It is also an extremely painful poison. The investigators could not find a case on record where arsenic had been used for suicide; it is just too agonizing and protracted a way to die. If Paw Allanson had planned to kill himself and his ailing wife, there were so many other methods that would have worked more rapidly, and with far less pain.
Bob Tedford began the tedious task of interviewing veterinarians in the East Point area who might have treated the Allansons’ or Radcliffes’ animals. He finally located the vet who treated the Radcliffes’ horses. Asked if he ever used arsenic on horses, the vet replied, “No. Old-timers used to use it to treat horses for worms, but I don’t know anybody who does these days. I use a chemical that serves the same purpose. It takes longer, but it’s easier on the animals.”
The vet did mention a drug used to stimulate appetite in horses: Appitone. As far as he knew, it had been off the market for two years. “It contains arsenic, but I doubt if it has enough to kill anyone. I bought the last dose of it from another doctor because one of my clients requested it.”
“Mrs. Allanson?” Tedford asked quickly.
The vet shook his head. “Nope. Someone else. I had to search
awhile before I located any Appitone.”
Another drug, known as Caco Copper, was used to encourage bone marrow in horses to produce red blood cells. “People say it has arsenic in it,” the vet said, “but it doesn’t.”
“When was the last time you treated Mrs. Allanson’s horses?”
“Let’s see.” The doctor consulted his records. “It was January 29, 1974. I treated one of the girls’ horses for a vitamin deficiency. I never gave Pat—Mrs. Allanson— any medicines. And the only medications I use with arsenic in them are injectables. I never hand them out to anyone else.”
“You know of any doctor still using arsenic routinely?” Tedford asked.
“Nope. It’s really an obsolete treatment.”
Asked how well he knew Pat Allanson, the veterinarian looked away. “I never dated her. She made it clear that she was available, though. She was trouble. All the vets knew that. A couple of years back—before I was married and my present wife and I were just dating—Pat called her up and caused some real problems with what she said.”
Tedford got the same information from a number of local doctors who treated show horses. One vet, who clearly disliked both Tom and Pat, snorted, “She’s a real come-on. She throws herself at every man she sees.” Another veterinarian looked nervous as he said he had never heard of the name Allanson. Tedford learned later from a confidential informant that the doctor knew Pat very well indeed. He had dated her—but he’d been married at the time, and he was still married. His reluctance to discuss her with the investigators was understandable.
Don Birch of the Georgia State Drug Inspector’s Office told a Fulton County D.A.’s investigator that he had checked all the drugstores in Zebulon, Grantville, Griffin, and Barnesville for any arsenic sales to either Pat or Tom Allanson in the prior two years and found no record of such a sale. “Very few of the pharmacies sell arsenic in any form at all,” Birch said. “It’s not sold in powder form anymore. The only thing anybody uses arsenic for is to kill rats, treat dog mange, and heartworms in horses.”