Tom denied that he had a bad temper. He had never had a fight or hit anyone—“off a football field.”
“Paw called me tonight,” Tom said, recalling his conversation with his grandfather. “I asked him to call the sheriffs back there, and let them know I was here. He said, ‘Are you all right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, except for I’m going to jail.’ He said he heard I was shot, and I said, ‘Well, I’m not.’ ”
Tom had a scrape on one leg. That was all. He figured he had got that somewhere while he was walking home from East Point. Sixty miles. A very, very long walk.
Tom was adamant that he had not been at his parents’ home earlier in the evening, or anytime in the past several months. He himself had begun to wonder—after talking to Margureitte Radcliffe—if maybe somebody was trying to set both him and his father up, some unknown enemy stalking them. Both Tom and Walter had been getting weird, threatening phone calls.
Could that be possible? Was there someone who didn’t care if both Tom and Walter Allanson died, someone who might even have something to gain from their deaths? It was a far-out theory. Too far out. A dozen hours after the murder, the East Point detectives were almost positive that they had the right man in custody.
Tom Allanson.
As soon as Tom arrived in East Point, he learned that Pat had hired an attorney for him: Calhoun Long. On his attorney’s—and his wife’s—advice, he had nothing more to say to detectives.
***
All murder seems senseless. But this double murder seemed more so than most. Two responsible, well-known citizens of East Point were dead and their son was in jail. He wasn’t a man with a criminal background, nor a man on drugs or on the street. He was a man with a new marriage, a fine farm, a good reputation among horse people and with everyone he had worked for. He was a good old boy, easygoing, likable, and kind. Nobody but his ex-wife and his parents had ever had a bad word to say about him. Why would Tom Allanson throw all of that away in a moment of blind rage?
Even Tom’s demeanor on the long ride back from Zebulon warred with the image of a man given to blind rages. Rather, he had showed no emotion at all. His parents had not been dead twelve hours, and yet the three detectives had seen no tears nor heard any choking up in his voice as he discussed their deaths.
That bothered them.
***
Susan and Bill Alford were far away from Atlanta when they heard the devastating news of the double murder of Pat’s in-laws. They were headed to Colorado to pick up some prize Morgan horses for Kentwood Morgan Farm. Before dawn, they received a call at their motel telling them to come back home at once; there had been a tragedy.
Both Susan and her great-aunt Alma had had some foreboding of disaster, a sense that “something bad was fixing to happen,” but this news was beyond anything they might have envisioned in their worst nightmares. Pulling a still-empty horse trailer, Bill and Susan Alford turned around and headed home.
***
The East Point police investigators would not sleep for another day. Nor would they celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional way. At the first clear light of day, they were back at the crime scene. Detective George Zellner, Sergeants Maulin Humphrey and C.T. Callahan, searched the interior of the house, and Sergeant Bill Vance and a uniformed squad combed the sodden yard.
As Vance and his crew worked their way through ivy and underbrush between the Allansons’ house and the house to the east, Vance found a shotgun 135 feet from the basement steps. It lay where it had apparently been dropped, its stock protruding along the fence line on a dirt path that ran between the Allansons’ side yard and that of Paul and Harriett Duckett, who lived next door. The gun was 40 feet from the sidewalk. It was an Excel single-shot shotgun, exactly like the gun that Walter Allanson had reported stolen when Callahan answered Allanson’s first complaint the night before.
It was fully cocked and loaded.
As they were searching the area, the officers moved into the Ducketts’ yard. “There’s no need for you to be pulling up geraniums and stomping through there,” Harriett Duckett scolded. Vance and Patrolman Bob Matthews apologized, but geraniums were expendable at the moment.
The Ducketts said they had both seen a tall man running down the dirt path about 8:00 the night before. Their dog Roman had barked frantically. Later, Paul Duckett had attempted to alert the police swarming over his neighbors’ property, but the scene had been one of such confusion that he had been waved back toward his own house.
“My first sight of him was nothing but legs because of the dogwood trees,” Duckett said. He weighed close to 250 himself, so he was a good judge of size when he described the man’s appearance as he broke into the open. “I saw his right profile when he hit the street. There was a police car there, kind of keeping pace with him. Then it turned around and came back next door. The man was tall, probably weighed over two thirty, and he had on dark pants and a light shirt. He was holding on to himself.”
Duckett demonstrated by clutching his own side.
Harriett Duckett, who was still surveying the damage to her garden, had seen the man too. He had run off the path, breaking into the clearing right at their driveway, and then headed east past the Pilgrim Press Building on the corner.
Both of them were a little annoyed that their tips to the police had been ignored, and Harriett recalled that she had finally managed to get a patrolman’s attention about 10:30 the night before and said, “Look, you missed your man. He went around the corner on Harris Street.”
Neither of the Ducketts had met the Allansons, so they had no idea if it was Tom they had seen. They had heard no shouts or shots before they saw the running man; only later, when the tear gas was fired into the Allansons’ house, did they hear a sound of shots.
They agreed to attend a lineup on July 6.
***
Inside the Allansons’ basement, the lingering smell of tear gas droplets stung the eyes of the investigators. In the daylight filtering from the windows, Sergeant Callahan and Patrolman Bob Matthews could see that most of the bloodshed was near the stairway where both victims had been found and back at “the hole” in the brick fireplace wall. The basement floor was spattered brown-red with now-dried blood all around the furnace and the area in front of the hole. The hole in the brick wall led to an area about six feet by ten feet, large enough for a man to hide in—not comfortably, but it was possible. Looking out, the line of sight would be straight ahead to the stairway down from the kitchen.
The hole itself had a dirt floor and was partially filled with junk—an old lemonade cooler, burlap sacks, paper bags full of nails. With flashlights held at an oblique angle, the investigators could see seven marks on the bricks inside the hole that had been left by ricocheting bullets. Fragments of those bullets were also visible, along with chips of concrete.
And yet they found no blood at all in the hole. There was blood on the wall outside the hole, and the trail of blood on the floor led from the opening in the wall all the way to the bottom of the steps eighteen feet away, where blood had spurted and cascaded until the body that contained it could no longer stand upright. They scraped samples for typing, but it seemed obvious that it was Walter Allanson who had bled here. His wife had never moved after she sat down on the stairs.
Carefully, Matthews and Callahan bagged the fractured chunks of bullets they found on the dirt floor of the hole. There were no bullet casings in the hole itself, but a dark blue shotgun cartridge lay on the floor just outside the rectangular aperture. Vance found one shotgun pellet inside the hole too. And when Matthews lifted a piece of wood in front of the hole in the wall, he found a second 20-gauge shotgun cartridge. This one was yellow.
The one vital bullet they never found was the single round that had been fired from the .45/70 Marlin rifle that Big Carolyn had carried down the stairs, obeying, as she always had, her husband’s orders. The spent casing was there all right, next to the rifle itself. The slug was gone.
The detectives were also
puzzled that there was no blood inside the hole; firing into that hole would be akin to shooting fish in a barrel. And hadn’t Little Carolyn Allanson said that Daddy Allanson had called out, “I’ve got him trapped in the hole!” If Tom Allanson was the one in the hole, he was lucky to be alive. In fact, he had no wounds, nothing beyond a quarter-sized abrasion on his left leg.
Ballistics—bullets, cartridges, casings, fragments, line of fire, angles, ricochets—were tedious, but in a case like this one, they were essential to finding the truth. This basement had been a shooting gallery where two people died, and it was highly unlikely that they had shot each other. That meant that at least one person had survived. To reconstruct, the East Point detectives had to find everything they could, everything—tangible and intangible—left behind by the guns involved.
It seemed obvious that the Excel shotgun had been fired two times, the .32 pistol six times, and the new Marlin .45/70 rifle only once. The question was, who had shot which weapons?
And why?
***
Belatedly, Pat Allanson was given a paraffin test on her hands to see if she had recently fired a gun. The test was designed to turn up primer residue—if the subject had not washed her hands, smoked a cigarette, used toilet tissue, or performed other normal human functions. It was not the most accurate test for gunshot residue, and Pat was not given the test until early July 4.
The test results were negative.
Tom Allanson was also tested for gunshot residue. He remarked to the officers who were administering the test that he had done some target shooting a few days before. Even so, his test—like his wife’s—was negative.
***
Tom was being held in the East Point jail and Pat was staying with her parents on their Tell Road farm. Their neighbor Liz Price and Pat's son, Ronnie, tended to the animals at Kentwood Farm, the paradise Tom and Pat had created in Zebulon. They had been married only fifty-four days. It was perhaps inevitable that when the Griffin Daily News printed the story of the Allanson murders under the headline: NEW RESIDENT OF PIKE COUNTY HELD IN DEATH OF HIS PARENTS, it once again featured the picture of Pat and Tom on their wedding day, dressed as Scarlett and Rhett.
CHAPTER 10
***
While investigators swarmed over their home, the late Walter and Carolyn Allanson awaited autopsy by Dr. Robert Rutherford Stivers, chief medical examiner of Fulton County. In the six years since Stivers had come to Fulton County, he had performed some thirty-eight hundred autopsies, and on this gloomy Independence Day, he set about to do two more.
He noted that Walter O’Neal Allanson weighed two hundred pounds and measured sixty-nine inches tall; like most humans in late middle age, he had shrunk a few inches since his youth. Dictating into a tape recorder as he worked, Stivers described what he found:
“The body is clothed in a white shirt, blue and white pants and underwear, black shoes and socks. . . . The body temperature is cold and rigor mortis is present in the extremities. The examination of the exterior . . . shows multiple entrance gunshot wounds. These are present in three rather distinct patterns. They number twenty entrance wounds altogether. . . . There is a cluster of wounds within a five-inch-in-diameter circle on the left side of the face and neck, with the center of this circle overlying the angle of the mandible [the back edge of the jaw], and there are ten entrance wounds in the left side of the face extending from the area of the nose and the upper lip and down across the neck. . . . There is, secondly, a cluster of wounds in the back of the left wrist and hand extending for a total distance of four inches. . . . These number five wounds.
“Then there are five wounds in a scatter pattern over the chest of the decedent, one each in both shoulders, one over the lower portion of the sternum—ahh, central upper abdomen—and then one each in the right and left abdominal quadrants . . .”
Dr. Stivers determined that the wounds to the hand, the shoulders, and the abdomen had not passed through any vital organs. The deadly trauma had come from the wounds to the face and neck.
“There is a path of destruction extending . . . in a slightly upward from left to right direction . . . passing through the left carotid artery and causing massive hemorrhage into the left side of the neck and into the larynx [voice box] . . . with destruction at the base of the tongue. Death was caused by gunshot wounds to the face and chest.”
Walter Allanson had bled to death when the carotid artery, which ran up the left side of his neck, was severed. But in Dr. Stivers’s opinion, he could have moved about, walked forty or fifty feet, and even fired a pistol after he sustained the wounds he did. He could not, however, have spoken or shouted. His tongue and larynx had been virtually obliterated.
Carolyn Allanson, Dr. Stivers recorded, had been five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 160 pounds. She wore a white nurse's uniform, blouse and pants.
“There are perforations of the clothing of the left upper and anterior panel of the blouse. . . . Upon examination . . . there are multiple perforating wounds of the left upper chest within a four-inch-diameter circle with fourteen entrance wounds . . . [that] include the left breast of the decedent. . . . There are multiple missile tracts of destruction which pass through the tissue of the left breast, the sternum, the upper heart, and the right lung. . . . Death is determined to have been caused by a shotgun wound to the chest.”
Carolyn Allanson had died almost instantly. “The upper portion of the heart is totally destroyed, as well as a portion of the right lung. . . . There may have been a moment or so of consciousness until the lack of oxygen to the brain cells would take place, but for all practical purposes, she died immediately. The top of the heart is essentially missing.”
Dr. Stivers speculated that Carolyn Allanson might have had some spasmodic muscular movement for a short period of time. Could she have cocked a rifle? Possibly. Could she have pulled the trigger? Possibly.
***
Pat went to the East Point jail and insisted on seeing her husband. She was led into a visiting area and was disappointed because she had intended to give him a big hug to show him that everything was all right. Instead, the officers pointed to a chair in front of a glass panel. She would not be allowed to touch Tom; she could only talk to him on the phone that hung on the cubicle wall.
Tom looked terrible. He had stubbly whiskers and she could tell he hadn’t slept.
“I have everything taken care of, Shug,” she began. “Now you just remember that I’m handling this. Don’t say anything. I’ve got you a good lawyer. You just trust me and you don’t talk to anyone else, you hear me, Sugar?”
He nodded. She was so brave. When he began to ask her something, she glanced sideways at the cops and put her finger to her lips, shushing him.
“Shug, just you hush. I’ll be back.”
***
Still reeling from shock, Jean Boggs struggled to hold what was left of her family together. She was an attractive, slender brunette, but her face was drawn with tension now. She went to the East Point city jail a little later in the day on July 4. The police were not eager to let her see Tom, but finally George Zellner told her she could do so—if he was allowed to be in attendance.
Jean had not seen her nephew Tommy in a year or two—an indication of how alienated this family had become. She offered to get him an attorney, and Tom replied, “Well, you will have to get in touch with Pat. She’ll be handling all that. She probably already has someone picked out.”
“Pat? Pat who?” Jean asked, mystified.
“My wife.”
“Aren’t you married to Carolyn?”
“No. We got divorced, and I married Pat Taylor.”
For the moment, Jean was dumbfounded. Just as Mary McBride, Walter’s secretary, hadn’t known Tom was remarried, neither had his own aunt.
Tears rolled down Tom’s cheeks as he assured his aunt he had not killed his parents. “You know how it was. I was frightened to death of Daddy, but I would have no reason to shoot and kill Mother.”
&
nbsp; Tom explained to his aunt—as he had to the three detectives on the long ride back from Zebulon the night before—that he had walked away from his new wife be cause he felt he only brought her unhappiness. “I made up my mind that I was leaving her, so I hitchhiked.” He didn’t know how many rides he had gotten or how many miles he had walked as he headed south to Zebulon. Later in their conversation, Tom was adamant that he didn’t want to take a lie detector test. He didn’t trust their results.
Jean Boggs was deeply troubled, but she believed in Tommy. She loved him; he had grown up with her own children. She could not fathom that he would hurt his parents.
She wondered what kind of person Pat was, this new wife whom she had never heard of.
The rest of Jean Boggs’s day was taken up with arranging for her brother and sister-in-law’s funeral. They would be buried out of Hemperley’s Funeral Parlor, just as Kent had been, and just as almost everyone who lived in East Point was. Mae Mama inexplicably demanded that her daughter be buried in a blue dress in long sleeves.
“I won’t look at her otherwise,” the old lady said.
***
A solemn party went to Walter and Carolyn’s house: Jean Boggs, Nona (in a wheelchair), Paw, their preacher, and their doctor. The house was locked, but Jean steeled herself and went down the outside steps into the basement, averted her eyes from the profusion of bloodstains, and climbed to the kitchen up the stairs where her sister- in-law had died. All those doors were unlocked.
The house still reeked of tear gas. Choking, she saw that all the storm windows were in place, trapping the gas despite the fire department’s fans. Frantically, she kicked out two storm windows to get air, cutting her heel. Then she let her parents in. Jean maneuvered her mother's wheelchair to the open front door, where she could breathe, and then carried Walter’s suits to Nona and let her choose which one to bury him in. Jean couldn't find anything blue for her late sister-in-law to wear; she would have to buy a new dress in a color Big Carolyn apparently had never worn.