Up in Buford, Tom decided to do the best he could; he had accepted the bleak fact that he would be in prison for a very long time and that he would be alone.
***
In January 1978, Pat suffered a painful insect bite that turned out—at least given her proclivities—to be a stroke of luck. She was bitten by a brown recluse spider, whose venom is often deadly. Tissue surrounding the bite is subject to necrosis, dies, and sloughs off. With Pat’s history of intractable infections, she was sent to the state hospital in Milledgeville, which had facilities for treating prisoners. It was a huge, venerable complex, so old it made Hardwick look like something from the space age. For months, she scarcely had to acknowledge that she was serving time. She was allowed to wear her own negligees, and her relatives could come and go whenever they wanted to visit; Boppo and her aunts brought all manner of delicacies. It was not like being in prison at all, and her family loved having her there. Pat stayed as long as she could. When she recovered from the spider bite, she developed other symptoms and it took the doctors a long time to do all the tests they needed to be sure that she was in no danger of a stroke or a fatal embolism.
Initially, the Radcliffes had planned to sue the state of Georgia for the pain and suffering Pat had endured because of the brown recluse bite, but they eventually dropped the idea. Pat did so much better in the hospital than she had done in prison. She always had seemed to enjoy her hospital stays. Finally, though, she had to go back to Hardwick. It was almost worse to go back than it had been to go to prison in the first place.
***
There is a saying among convicts: “No one does more than a year of hard time. After that, you adjust.”
Pat Taylor (she quickly dropped the Allanson after she and Tom were divorced) adjusted. Her parents and her children were loyal and supportive, although Pat was shocked when Susan and Bill Alford were moved to Houston in 1978 by Bill's company. Although Bill never went to law school as he had hoped, Susan had worked until he graduated with a B.A. from Mercer University. She resigned from Eastern when Bill became very successful as a sales executive in office supplies. Pat could not believe that Susan could be so cruel as to desert her.
The Alfords would be transferred to Tampa in 1979, and then back to Atlanta in 1981. But Boppo and Papa were steadfast. They planned all their weekends around Pat. They posed for pictures with their daughter, a service offered by prisons in Georgia on visiting days: for a small price, employees took Polaroid snapshots of inmates with their families.
Despite her complaints about the inhumanity of the Georgia prison system, Pat fared amazingly well. She was still very beautiful, and her hair and makeup were always exquisite. She had to wear the tan uniform, but she did clever things with scarves and brooches and made it look as if it were a hundred-dollar dress. She carried the cane that she would use all through her years in prison. In the slightly blurry photographs, Pat's parents stood beside her and smiled as proudly as if she had just graduated with a P.H.D.
Susan and Debbie and the grandchildren had posed too when they visited, a family united. “In a way, I was relieved. I believed that, without drugs, my mother would be all right,” Susan remembered. “I was happy to see her healthy and responding so well. She had had a problem, but now things were going to be all right. I loved my mother, and some of the happiest moments of my life had been spent with her. I just can’t describe how good she could make you feel when things were going all right. I told my whole family back in 1977 when she was convicted that, if I ever saw any signs of something like that happening again, I would stop it, and I reminded Mom of that in prison. I knew she was all right when she said, ‘Well, I certainly hope somebody would!’ and Boppo agreed.”
For Margureitte Radcliffe, there may have been an irony in having her daughter in prison. For the first time in a long, long time she could plan her life. She could play cards and go out to lunch with friends. She had always had a passion for bingo. She was a natural, able to play a whole tableful of cards all by herself, and she thoroughly enjoyed gambling benignly at Fort Mac.
The weekends were Pat's, of course, but the time between belonged to Margureitte. Her granddaughters marveled that they had never seen Boppo so happy. She was still at her daughter’s beck and call, and there were myriad things that upset Pat, but her phone calls home could only come in the evening at Hardwick’s pleasure. There had always been emergencies with Pat. But now, at least Margureitte knew where she was and that she was safe. She talked often about her “poor, innocent daughter” locked up in prison through a “terrible injustice.”
No one dared phone Margureitte on the nights Pat was due to call. She still had to report all her activities to Pat, who wanted to know every detail of her mother’s days. But with Pat in prison, Margureitte’s obsessive concern for her daughter could be compartmentalized; for a time, it didn’t override everything else in her life.
Margureitte had always had certain self-indulgences, small things that perhaps allowed her to devote herself so slavishly to her family. She adored peanuts—she was never without a jar of them—and she drank coffee and smoked from morning until night. “I want to be buried with my cigarettes, my peanuts, and my coffee,” she often said laughingly.
Margureitte’s preferred dishes disgusted her daughter: fried liver, scrambled pork brains and eggs, escargot, chicken gizzards, and smoked oysters. While Pat was in prison, she could cook whatever she wanted, she could sip her coffee, smoke, and watch her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives.
The Radcliffes moved from their rented house to a townhouse. It didn’t take a lot of upkeep, and they were able to relax. Far away in Texas, Susan was pregnant again. Debbie was giving her marriage another go. A year later, Ronnie married too, and he and his wife expected a baby. Without Pat, all the Radcliffes achieved a degree of normalcy in their lives, something that had been very rare.
It would also be very brief.
***
For the most part, the guards and matrons at Hardwick liked Pat. She was a perfect lady, and she gave them little trouble. She was gracious and concerned about their lives, remembering to ask about their children and grandchildren, and her sewing and fancywork were flawless. They admired the little smocked dresses and knit things she made for Susan’s new baby, Courtney, and they lined up to have Pat make dainty things for their special babies, bringing her all the thread, lace, and cloth she needed. Later, when she had earned the privilege, they drove Pat all the way to Atlanta to a crafts store to pick out the materials herself.
In prison, Pat found a way to shine. Her manners were cordial, but she held herself clearly above the mass of women who languished behind bars. Many of the other prisoners were illiterate blacks, and she often alluded to the fact that she was the daughter of a colonel from Atlanta; she had never really associated with blacks. Now that she bunked with a trailerful of black women, she tried to keep her own space inviolate—without letting them see her distaste.
Heretofore, Pat had insisted that she was not prejudiced. She had regaled her daughters with a story of the time she had defied the Ku Klux Klan, marched into a midnight gathering, and shouted at them that they were wrong, even as they circled a burning cross in a North Carolina field. Locked up, she used derisive racial slang.
Pat confided to her family that she had been approached by lesbian prisoners; she had been frightened, but she had managed to stay free of any involvement. A woman utterly obsessed with men for years, she no longer spoke of love or even the possibility of love. Actually, she seemed more fulfilled by her knitting, sewing, and craft projects than she ever had been by her passionate sexual affairs.
***
Margureitte and Clifford tried to keep worrisome news from Pat. Ronnie and his wife divorced, and he was given custody of his tiny daughter, Ashlynne. The tradition of the Siler women continued. Mama Siler had raised Pat for her first five years, Boppo had always been there for Pat’s children, and now she stepped in to raise her grandson’s child. Ashly
nne was a darling baby and the Radcliffes doted on her. Papa had always preferred dainty little girls in ruffly dresses, and he carried Ashlynne around, proudly showing her off. When she cried, he and Boppo tucked her into bed between them.
Pat did not approve of Boppo and Papa having Ashlynne. Like Dawn, Sean, and Courtney, this baby was her grandchild, but she didn’t appear to have any feelings toward her. It may have been because she was in prison and didn’t have a chance to really know the baby; it may have been because Ashlynne had taken her place at home. And she ruined Boppo’s visits too; Boppo brought the baby along all the time and fussed over her instead of over Pat.
Margureitte idolized that baby. Just as Mama Siler had doted on Patty, Margureitte loved Ashlynne with a fierceness that was almost visceral. When Pat called home and heard Ashlynne in the background, her voice took on a hard edge and she asked, “What is she doing there?” Even though her mother played down how much Ashlynne meant to her, Pat was suspicious.
There were other things Boppo and Papa didn’t tell Pat. On July 13, 1978, Debbie was arrested by two Atlanta Police Department vice squad members, J.T. Cochran and W.F. Derrick, and charged with two counts of soliciting for sodomy, masturbation for hire, and escort without a permit. Debbie explained that she had merely taken a job as a receptionist for the escort service, and that she had no idea what the real business taking place was.
The officers’ follow-up report was more specific, and far more graphic. Acts of sexual intercourse and oral sex were offered and agreed to by Debbie, representing “Atlanta’s Finest Model Agency,” to be charged at a hundred dollars apiece, with an additional eighty quoted to Officer Cochran for “intentional erotic stimulation of the genital organs . . . by manual contact.” On her booking papers, Debbie listed her relatives as her husband and her brother. She did not mention her mother or her grandparents.
Boppo found out. She found out everything; she always had. But she didn’t tell Pat. Margureitte was a woman who strove to do the “correct” thing, but her equanimity was sorely tried. Her daughter and her ex son-in-law were in prison, and now her granddaughter had been arrested for prostitution. She was nearing sixty, and it didn’t seem fair when she had spent her whole life trying to make her family happy. It was not the way she herself had been raised. “I am a lady,” Boppo said often. “My mother and father brought me up not to lower myself—I am civilized. I am a better and bigger person. I am a lady.”
Debbie requested a jury trial, and the matter was not adjudicated until June 11, 1979. Debbie pleaded nolo contendere. Her grandmother appeared in court, standing proud and tall with Debbie. Boppo addressed the judge, explaining, “Sir, this woman has a child to care for.” Debbie was given twelve months’ probation on all three counts—to run concurrently. She explained she had pressing medical bills and other debts, and the three hundred-dollar fine was suspended.
Debbie’s arrest and the trial were, finally, too much for Margureitte. She, who had always been the stainless steel martyr, finally buckled and was admitted to a local hospital. After juggling countless family problems for so long, she found solace and peace in the quiet, white rooms.
But not for long. Debbie stormed in and pointed an accusing finger at her grandmother: “How could you do this to me?” she cried. Even more upsetting to a woman in the grip of physical and emotional exhaustion, Pat was given a compassionate leave and brought from Hardwick to visit Boppo. Boppo turned her face to the wall and wished, if only for the moment, that they would all just go away.
Of course, they didn’t. Boppo’s children, grandchildren, and husband were her very life. In the main, she thrived on their disasters in need of fixing more than she ever needed peace and quiet. She spent her short time in the hospital and then she walked out the doors, head high, ready to do battle for her family once more.
***
Pat had written an eleven-page letter to Susan in 1979 that displayed a curious mixture of concerns and rationalizations. She didn’t appear to grieve at all over her divorce the previous spring; she might never have known Tom at all. Her life was so busy, and she was doing so much for others. She was teaching classes to her fellow inmates. She worked all day, she wrote, sewing and filling orders for the matrons. She had achieved the status of trusty. “With 28 women to teach (and babysit), I don’t have much time. . . . Most of the women are old, physically handicapped and illitorate [sic] too. I’m mostly concentrating on ‘Therapy’ things for them & I do the wood carving & burning to make the money. Plus all the fancy needle work & crocheting.”
Susan felt optimistic. This was the mother she had always longed for. Susan’s friend Sonja Salo now had her law degree and was seeking a hearing for Pat for a reduction of sentence. When her mother was paroled, Susan believed, they would all start over.
“Susan,” Pat wrote in the same letter, “before I go any farther, Deb told me what she did. I knew something was terribly wrong & Boppo did too . . . I know you’ve about been crazy over it, for I sure have & so has Boppo. And most of all Debbie has. She needs proffesional [sic] help.”
Pat blamed all her own previous problems on diet pills, Valium, and sleeping pills. “You don’t even realize it when it’s happening. I know I didn’t. I have about 2 years of my life that I’m really unsure of & really to this day don't know how much I really remember & how much has been told to me so many times that I think I remember.”
Pat explained why Tom had deserted her. “It’s for the best, Shug, so don’t feel sorry for me. Tom made it very clear that, quote, (1) being married to me will keep him from making parole, (2) being married to me will keep him from making Trusty, (3) even writting to me is harmful to him & (4) that no one in the family cares about him . . . so it’s better to sever it now & I only wish to God it had never been.”
Pat listed the dozens of things she was sewing and crocheting for Susan’s family, and asked her daughter to “Pray hard that all this nightmare will soon be over & we’ll all be together again.”
Pat had truly acclimated. Without realizing it, she had slipped into a common convict affectation—drawing little circles with smiling faces instead of periods, and a circle-face with the word “Smile!” For men and women behind prison bars in every prison in America, the smiling circle is second nature, and a dead giveaway.
Pat commented to her daughter that she had written the long letter under “duress”—fights were breaking out all around her, and the mobile-home dorm was full of the angry screams of too many women locked up together too long.
“HELP!” she wrote. “I need to get out of this mad house!”
CHAPTER 40
***
After a careful study of the case, Sonja Salo was attempting to file an Extraordinary Motion for New Trial based on her belief that newly discovered evidence would prove that Pat had been legally insane at the time of her offense against Paw and Nona and at the time of her trial in May 1977. Pat had confided to Sonja that she could remember nothing of the prior two years; that she had only recently come back to being herself. Sonja believed her and was gratified to see that the woman she visited at Hardwick seemed so wonderfully together and well adjusted. So normal.
If Pat had been insane, she was no longer out of touch with reality. She was a whole new woman. She told her new attorney that she knew all too well how much damage heartless people could do. “We don’t talk about it much,” she said softly. “But I have a sister in North Carolina who has no conscience at all. She doesn’t care who she hurts.”
Sonja never mentioned Pat’s sister to Boppo. Lord knows, the woman had borne enough pain. The young attorney didn’t know that Pat had no sister at all—only the poor dead baby, Roberta, who had never taken a breath in this world. Pat brought up her “sister” so often that Sonja wondered when she would meet the evil sibling.
Sonja finally argued her case on December 5, 1980, before Superior Court Judge Ralph H. Hicks. She had only one witness: Margureitte Radcliffe. The rest of her motion was based on a psych
iatrist’s affidavit and several doctors’ reports stemming from Pat’s first embolism in 1973.
Andy Weathers objected to Margureitte’s testimony, failing to see how her recall of an illness in 1973 would show that Pat Taylor had lost her mind and attempted to commit murder in 1977. Judge Hicks overruled Weathers when Sonja Salo explained that Pat’s drug use had begun with that first illness, and that it was her position that the drugs had led to Pat’s “insanity.”
Margureitte recalled the pulmonary embolism and the abscess that would not heal. She testified that Pat’s physical condition was always fragile, but that it had worsened after her husband was arrested. “Her personality became entirely different. She no longer was the person that I knew.”
“And how did her personality appear to you?” Sonja asked.
“I’m not a doctor,” Margureitte said, pursing her lips. “I’m not qualified in that way. I thought that she was losing her mind. I wanted her to see a psychiatrist.”
What Margureitte Radcliffe had to admit next was not easy. It was an enormous lie, a terrible secret she had kept for years. But her words would finally explain what had puzzled Pat’s doctors for so long: the cause of her near-fatal hip abscess.
“On the area where she had the abscess and she’d been treated—in and out of the hospital—and I was trying to change the dressings—” Margureitte began. She took a deep breath and continued, forcing her voice to stay firm. “She would take instruments and self-mutilate herself where it had been trying to heal up. She would damage it herself.”
“Did you see her actually do this?” Sonja asked.
“Yes, I saw her.”
“What did she use?”
“Once she used an instrument that was a leather tooling device. It’s with a metal thing about this long [demonstrating]. . . . She was scratching herself with that. Other times, she used a small forceps—about so large—that she had.”