“Can you describe the man you saw?” he asked.
“Yes,’’ she began slowly. “Of course—I mean I knew it was his father . . . There he stood wearing that same kind of hat that he wears, that kind of floppy hat, and his shirtsleeves rolled up like he does, and just dropping his pants. Yet at the same time I was thinking, How could it be his father? You know? But I know it was him.”
The Pike County deputy managed to calm Pat down and suggested that she talk with her husband about whether they wanted to bring charges against his father. Pat seemed composed enough when he had to leave on another call.
This was, in fact, Riggins’s second visit to Kentwood Morgan Farm. In early April, Tom Allanson had called him to report that somebody had shot one of his cars full of .22 bullet holes. The car was parked out in back of the barn, and it looked as if somebody had used it for target practice. Riggins had never been able to pin the shooting on a suspect, and Tom had had no suggestions. There were a lot of visitors coming and going at Kentwood, and then there was fifteen-year-old Ronnie Taylor living there with his mother and stepfather, and from time to time his teenage friends. But this time, a suspect had been positively identified.
When Tom got home a few minutes after Riggins left, he listened in icy shock to Pat’s accusations against his father. His father was a mean SOB on occasion, but Tom couldn’t even imagine Walter Allanson as an exposer. His father was much too controlled to do such a thing, or had always seemed so to Tom. Still, his dad had done about everything else he could to make their lives miserable.
Tom called his father’s law offices and no one answered. His life seemed to be spinning out of control. It was one thing to have his father angry with him. Lord knew he was used to it. But every day brought some new shock. Margureitte had told him his father didn’t care if he lived or died and wouldn’t even spit on his grave if he did. His father had accused him of putting poison in his own baby’s milk and of stealing guns from him. And Pat believed his father had ruined him in the job market, and would actually kill him if he got the chance. That was exactly what he had told Mrs. Radcliffe. Even Nona and Paw had warned Tom that he might be in danger.
But this. His father had done the unforgivable. Walter Allanson, an attorney at law, candidate for judge, had exposed himself to his wife.
Tom was enraged. Poor Pat was so sick she could barely move, her collarbone hurt her all the time, and still she had been out there trying to help by mowing the lawn. How dare his father frighten and shock her that way? It made Tom realize that Pat had been right; he couldn’t let his father get away with it. Neither of them could stand for such shabby treatment. As much as he dreaded the prospect, Tom knew that he would have to confront his father.
CHAPTER 5
***
Walter O’Neal Allanson and his wife, Milford—but called Carolyn—were both fifty-one in late June of 1974. They had been married for thirty-two years, more than half of their lives. They lived in East Point, a gracious suburb adjacent to Atlanta’s southwest border. Theirs was by all accounts a comfortable marriage, although some said that Walter had strayed a bit in his forties. If he had, Carolyn had let it go. The woman involved was long dead. In his fifties, Walter Allanson had grown almost puritan in his opinions about the sanctity of marriage, as virtuous as a reformed hooker. If there were children involved, he was inflexibly against divorce—a sometimes difficult stance for an attorney whose practice was general law.
Walter was a handsome man with iron gray hair and clear blue-gray eyes, a compactly trim man—save for a slight falling away of his chin line as he moved through middle age. “Big Carolyn” was a plain woman who rarely wore makeup. Her hair was brown and combed back from her face into nondescript waves. She was neither slender nor fat; rather, her figure was full breasted and solid.
The months ahead promised to be as challenging and exciting as any in the Allansons' lives, ever since Walter had announced his candidacy for a civil judgeship. He had a good reputation, and there was every reason to think he would win in the fall elections. Carolyn truly enjoyed her job as a nurse in a local doctor’s office, but both she and Walter came home for lunch every day. They were always together. If the early fire had gone out of their relationship, they were companionable.
Walter came from simple people, uneducated but with native intelligence. His childhood had been hardscrabble, and it was important to him to have money against tomorrow’s uncertainties. He was shrewd when it came to real estate. He had bought the house at 1458 Norman Berry Drive in East Point for a good price. The neighborhood was prime then, with Norman Berry Drive a pleasant boulevard divided by a green strip of young trees and shrubbery in its center island. Russell High School, Walter’s alma mater, was almost directly across Norman Berry.
The house was built in the forties of dun-colored brick and white siding with peaked dormers. It was a solid house; set on a plateau so high above Norman Berry Drive that a man could get winded just walking up the driveway. Oaks, pines, laurel hedges, and rhododendrons grew thick, shutting out the noise of the street below and separating the Allanson house from neighboring properties.
Carolyn’s mother—“Mae Mama” Lawrence—owned the property to the west of them, but you could hardly see her house through the foliage between them. Walter planted a grape arbor out back, and it thrived. He laid down a strip of concrete smack dab in the middle of the backyard so he could turn around and not have to back up the 194 feet to the street. It didn’t add much aesthetically to the yard but it was practical. And Walter Allanson, if anything, was a most practical man.
His pragmatic view of life had cost him any relationship with his sister Jean, even though she and her husband lived only a few blocks away. And now his rigid moral views had shut his son out too. Walter detested Pat, and he would far rather lose Tom than bend even a little toward his new wife. Walter didn’t need anyone in his life who questioned his authority. Tom had known that since he was a little boy.
A number of people had reason to resent a man like Walter Allanson. Lawyers make enemies, often unaware.
Over the years, he had represented the usual assortment of clients who felt they hadn’t been given proper attention. But Walter didn’t run scared. He had always considered himself fully capable of defending himself. Still, his partner, Al Roberts, his law clerk, and his secretary had noticed that he was jumpy and tense in the last weeks of June 1974—not at all like himself.
***
On Saturday, June 29, 1974, Carolyn and Walter Allanson left the house on Norman Berry Drive a little after nine, driving their 1963 white Ford station wagon. Walter wanted to check on one of his real estate purchases. It was a beautiful morning, with only the edges of the day betraying the heat to come, and they headed northeast of Atlanta toward Lake Lanier in Forsyth County, where Walter had picked up a piece of waterfront property.
There were no buildings on it yet, but the land was prime, and neighboring lots already had attractive cabins and year-round homes. He and Tommy had built a good boat dock up there. Then they had had a bad winter in ’71 and the dock got so much ice on it, it had sunk itself. Tommy dove and dove and put lines on it and they had hauled it up. With the help of Walter’s best friend, Jake Dailey, they had cleaned it off and started all over. Tommy had been there working on the new dock until Walter washed his hands of him over Pat. Now, he would have to finish the last of it himself.
The lake was an hour’s drive at most, but Forsyth County might have been a world away from Atlanta: wherever you went you could find huge platters of fried catfish and hush puppies, collard greens, yams, corn-bread, biscuits, and barbecue for only a few dollars. It was well known that Forsyth County still banned blacks after sunset. The crude warnings weren’t posted any more, but the sentiment was the same. It was said the Ku Klux Klan was active in the county.
The Allansons’ old Ford station wagon, rusting out on the doors, wasn't a suitable vehicle for a hopeful judge-to-be, but it was a good work car. Walter and
Carolyn rode with the windows down, smelling hot pine needles and baked red clay. The kudzu was halfway up telephone poles and creeping higher as it choked out weeds and fences and anything else in its path. They crossed the Chattahoochee and the thickets of spindly pine trees grew denser. Cement spillways waited in the dry earth for a deluge to fill their hollows with rain. In June, they were as useless as Christmas tree ornaments. It was too dry even to remember rain.
The atmosphere changed with each mile beyond Atlanta. There were signs advertising sorghum syrup, boiled peanuts, and chewing tobacco. In Cumming, the county seat, old men in overalls talked of other, better days and spat brown streams of that tobacco from the front porches of the aged red brick buildings of Main Street.
Walter slowed at the four-way stop at Hammond Corners, paused, and went straight ahead on Route 306 until it dead-ended on Highway 53. He had driven this route so many times he barely noticed the signposts. He turned onto 53, and they came to the Y where they would veer off to the left toward the lake on Truman Mountain Road.
Walter stubbed out a cigarette in the glass ashtray that perched precariously on the dashboard and glanced over at J.C. Jones’s store. It was quaint and jerry-built, but it was a gold mine for J.C.: white-painted concrete blocks, gas pumps out front, and the old signs—pepsi, ice, and fish bait. Jones was a shrewd old boy, rotund and cheerful. Walter knew he had bought up a whole mile of land along 53 when it was cheap. He and his pretty wife worked from six in the morning until nearly midnight, selling everything anybody might conceivably need—from fishhooks to thick homemade sandwiches and lemonade. They were always threatening to retire, but hadn’t made any move to do it.
Walter thought about stopping and then figured they could come back down the few miles from the lake if they needed anything. He eased the station wagon left and headed up narrow Truman Mountain Road. The oaks and pin oaks and pines were dense here, enough to throw the road into shadow. The sunlight was only a blurry yellow haze as it was swallowed up in the trees. It was so quiet they could hear the whir of tires two hundred feet away as Highway 53 passed by the back of the narrow strip of woods. Walter lit another cigarette and turned to say something to his wife.
The shots came absolutely without warning—from somewhere in the woods up the six-foot bank to their right. There was no question of defending themselves or of evasive driving. Walter and Carolyn Allanson were helpless, caught in their fishbowl of station wagon windows.
“What!” Carolyn cried out, before her husband pushed her down and gunned the motor.
They were hit, or rather the station wagon was. Once, twice. More. No—they were hit. Walter felt a trickle of blood on his face and had the sense that they were both bleeding. The splat of bullets hit the car again and again. The windshield spiderwebbed in front of Carolyn, then in front of him, and then the wing window struts bulged and the glass inside exploded.
He kept driving and heard the back window disintegrate.
When it was finally quiet, Walter could hear again the wind in the trees. He looked back and saw no one at all in the woods. With a shaky hand, he helped his wife off the floor and kept on driving. Both of them were cut and dappled with blood.
But they were alive.
The call came in to the Forsyth County Sheriffs Office in Cumming at 11:20, and Sheriff Donald Pirkle and Deputies Jim Avery, Randall Parker, and Richard Satterfield responded to J.C. Jones’s store. The station wagon had been hit nine times, and the officers retrieved four bullet fragments from inside the vehicle.
Back up toward the lake, the sheriff and his men located an area that could only be a carefully prepared ambush site. Branches had been cut off a pine tree and arranged as a shield to hide a shooter from the road. There was a beer can on the ground with a half inch of beer, still cool, in the bottom, and six .22-caliber bullet casings. Behind the blind of limbs, the investigators detected a trail through the woods that led back to Highway 53. There were faint tracks in the dirt shoulder of the highway, zigzagging impressions, indicating that a large vehicle had been parked there recently.
Someone had apparently waited quietly in the burgeoning heat of the June morning for this particular vehicle to head up Truman Mountain Road. The space between the severed tree limbs had given the shooter a perfect straight-arrow look down the road toward the Jones’ store. It was a miracle that the Allansons had not been hit by at least one of the bullets. Or maybe the shooter had only meant to scare them.
Whoever it was had certainly done that. Walter Allanson’s hand trembled as he lit a cigarette. Yes, he answered Satterfield’s question. He did have an idea about who had ambushed them. “My son. I think my son did it. We had trouble before. He stole guns from me a few months ago.”
Allanson offered his son’s name: “Tommy. Walter Thomas Allanson. He lives in Zebulon, Georgia.
***
Pat and Tom were having dinner that night with the colonel and Margureitte at their Tell Road horse ranch in East Point around 6:30. It was there that they received the message that Nona and Paw had to talk to them at once, and that was how they learned that someone had shot up Tom’s parents’ station wagon near their Lake Lanier property.
Tom wondered why his life was growing steadily more bizarre and violent. He had no idea who might have wanted to take a bead on his father’s car. It might even have been an accident; some damn fool poaching deer. But Pat wasn’t all that concerned about the ambush incident. Since Walter Allanson treated her like trash, his misfortunes didn’t distress her. He was an evil man, she reminded Tom, and he probably had a lot of enemies. He might even have exposed himself to somebody’s wife or daughter—somebody too angry to waste time going through legal channels to punish him.
But Tom—Tom did things by the book. On Monday, July 1, Pat and Tom appeared at the East Point Police Department at 5:15 p.m. Pat, extremely agitated and tearful, did most of the talking. She demanded that a warrant be sworn out for the arrest of Walter O. Allanson, charging him with public indecency and threatening telephone calls. Sergeant Charles Butts informed Pat and Tom that he had no jurisdiction over incidents occurring in Zebulon and directed them to either the Pike County sheriff or the Zebulon Police Department.
Tom stood quietly behind Pat until she completely broke down in tears, and then he stepped forward and told Butts, “My father’s running for a judgeship in this county. This kind of man doesn’t need to be running for any office.” Butts swore later that he had heard Tom say softly that “if this kind of stuff keeps up, I’ll kill the bastard.”
Very likely, Tom did say that. And now both father and son had threatened each other. But Tom did not yet know that his father had accused him of the Lake Lanier shooting. Nor did Walter Allanson know that Pat had accused him of indecent exposure.
On Tuesday, July 2, Margureitte was in her office when the phone rang. She was amazed to hear Walter Allanson’s voice. She had not expected him to call her again. Right after her first meeting with him in his office, she was so wary of Allanson that she had gone to the East Point police to try to tell someone he was dangerous—especially to Tom. She had also told the women in her office that she was afraid of Tom’s father. Now, here he was, calling her again.
“This is Mr. Allanson.”
“Yes, Mr. Allanson.”
“Mrs. Radcliffe, what time do you go to lunch?”
She told him that she usually had lunch between twelve and one, depending on the patient load. “I’ll be a little late getting out today.”
“I want to tell you something, and show you something.”
“Well, Mr. Allanson, I’ll be glad to talk with you.”
“You’ll come to my house?”
She agreed to go, but as soon as she hung up, her office staff surrounded her, aghast that she would even consider such a thing. The man was obviously unhinged and she would be putting herself in frightful danger. After all, he had already “shown something” to Pat. “You are not going over to that man’s house,” one fellow wor
ker said vehemently. “If you try to go, I’ll have to call Colonel Radcliffe and tell him.”
As it turned out, Walter Allanson was quite willing to come to the dentist’s office. He drove up in a station wagon whose windshield was crisscrossed with tape. It looked as if it had been through World War II. He motioned to her to look at it, and Margureitte was terrified being so close to such a dangerous man.
Walter told Margureitte that he blamed Tom for the shooting. She quickly replied that she knew for a fact that Tom and Pat had been in Lithonia shoeing horses at the time Allanson gave for the ambush, and that there were witnesses to prove it. “Mr. Allanson, I told you before. Why don’t you look for someone else?”
Allanson opened the station wagon door and beckoned her in.
“I was really shaking inside by that time,” Margureitte said later. “ ‘No sir, Mr. Allanson,’ I told him. ‘It’s hot and I’m not going to have much time to talk with you.’ . . . And then I said, ‘Mr. Allanson, I’ve met Tom’s ex-wife one time, but I’ve talked to her numerous times. . . . Tell me really. What kind of a person is she? Is she a nervous person? Is there any reason she would want to do you harm? Is there any way she would benefit . . . other than to hurt Tom?”
“Well,” Allanson allowed, according to Margureitte, “she’s a nervous person and she has a quick temper, but I don’t know why she would want to do anything like this.”
Margureitte continued to try to help him ferret out the real culprit in the ambush shooting. Fighting to stay calm, she once again suggested that he must have a former client who hated him enough to do these things. And then she brought up the incident at Kentwood the previous Friday, although it was painfully embarrassing for a lady to discuss the exposure of male privates with someone she knew so slightly—much less the alleged exposer himself.
Allanson stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. “Mrs. Radcliffe,” he sighed. “As a Mason and a gentleman, I swear I did not come out to Pike County on Friday and expose myself to your daughter. I have not been in Pike County for some time. . . . Lady, I have high blood pressure and I am under a doctor’s care. I take medicine for that, and when you do this it affects your sexual life. I have not had sex for some time. So why in the world would I go out there and expose myself to your daughter? In fact, Mrs. Radcliffe, if I were going to be on display at a flower show, I would have to go as a dried arrangement!”