Everything She Ever Wanted (103 page)

Judge Sandra Harrison of the Magistrate Court of Henry County, where

the village of McDonough was located, gave Don Stoop and Michelle Berry

a search warrant for the little red brick house on Bryan Street.

Accompanied by McDonough's police chief, M.

Gilmer, and his assistant chief, E. Moore, Don Stoop and Michelle Berry

knocked on the front door of the Radcliffes' residence.

They hoped to find missing jewelry, perhaps more antique Williamsburg

cookbooks, the miniature crystal chandelier, the hand-stitched linen,

the antique Civil War books and artifactssomething they could tie to

the Crists' long list of missing belongings.
 
But they were also

realistic enough to know that those items probably had long since been

sold on consignment through Golden Memories or out of the back of Pat's

car at a swap meet.

Approaching Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe in their own home and

asking to search their premises was akin to confronting Queen Elizabeth

and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace.
 
Colonel Radcliffe accepted the

search warrant with glacial civility.

Margureitte and her sister, Thelma, stared at the interlopers.
 
It was

apparent that Don Stoop would take most of the heat, an it bothered him

not at all.
 
Michelle Berry, who was just as much a sworn officer of

the D.A."s office as Stoop was, was viewed as a sweet young lady who had

the misfortune to accompany him on his rude errand.

They started searching slowly through the immaculate house.

There were so many antiques, artifacts, mementos, photographs, and

pieces of jewelry, it seemed well nigh impossible to sort out what they

were looking for.
 
And time had been on Pat's side.
 
Stoop glanced

sideways at Colonel Radcliffe's hand and saw that he no longer wore the

lapis stone ring that he had worn in the videos and photographs of his

seventy-fifth birthday party.

They moved through the kitchen, the dinette, the recreation room into

the "doll room" and stopped, astonished.
 
Susan had tried to prepare

them for this room, but they could see now that it would be hard for

anyone to describe.
 
"My mother is, in many ways, like a child," Susan

had explained.
 
"Her dolls are her children because they don't mess

up.

They can have their tea parties, but they don't make a mess."

The doll room was every little girl's dream-and every collector's.

There were dozens of dolls, scores of dolls.
 
They sat in wicker,

wooden, velvet, and silk chairs.
 
They sat in rocking chairs, high

chairs, chair swings.
 
They lay in cradles, beds, buggies, and

hammocks.
 
Some of them had plates and spoons, some had blocks, some

had their own dolls or teddy bears.
 
Not one of them had been

manufactured before 1930, certainly, and some looked to be over 150

years old.
 
They were dressed in the finest white cotton and linen,

lace and dimity, satin and silk.
 
Their little hats were of straw,

ribbon, and crocheted wool.
 
There were rocking horses, carved horses,

wooden horses, stuffed horses.

Everything was in doll scale from the tiny piano to the stools, steamer

trunks, and hall trees.
 
The pictures on the walls were of idyllic

little children and, of course, dolls.
 
There were tea sets, music

boxes, tops, hoops, and fans.

Don Stoop and the McDonough officers stepped lightly, truly bulls in a

china shop, and Michelle Berry turned around and around, bemused by the

huge collection.
 
She could not imagine how much money and how many

years it had taken Pat to gather this perfect doll family around her.

When they began I to open the drawers and cupboards, they jumped back

in surprise.
 
There were body parts there: dolls' arms and legs and

heads, dolls' wigs, every conceivable part needed to refurbish and

repair.
 
There were big swatches of fabric and tiny, tiny precious bits

of cloth.

Buttons.
 
Eyes.

There was a sensation of eyes throughout the room, glass eyes and

painted eyes following the intruders who had interrupted their naps and

their play.
 
It was daylight on a warm spring morning, and it shouldn't

have been spooky.
 
And yet it was.
 
The investigators could not help

but consider, if only briefly, what human misery must have been

inflicted while gaining the means for this collection.

Pat's sewing room was in the closet off the main room.
 
It too was

packed with doll parts and squares of cloth.
 
"Everything you might

ever need to make a doll," Michelle Berry remembered.

"Even eyelashes."

The search warrant listed items that were so small that the searchers

had the legal right to look into drawers and cupboards wherever the

stolen treasures might be hidden.

"If we were looking for a nineteen-inch television set," Berry

explained, "we couldn't look into a dresser drawer.
 
But there was so

much we were searching for.
 
It was an older house, with all these

cubbyholes and closets-and all of them were packed with things.
 
And

Pat's parents weren't being cooperative.
 
They weren't telling us where

the cubbyholes were, so we had to find them ourselves."

Pat's room was up a narrow stairway over the doll room.
 
It too seemed

to have come from another era, with a spool bed with a lace spread,

ruffled chintz curtains and lampshades, and the wicker dressmaker's

form with the bride's dress on it.
 
Michelle searched through a big old

brown leather suitcase.
 
It was packed with Pat's mementos-horse show

pictures and ribbons and certificates.
 
"There were report cards for

Debbie and for Ronnie, old birthday cards and Mother's Day cards from

them -but I didn't find anything of Susan's.
 
In that brown suitcase,

at least, it was as if Susan didn't exist, as if Pat had only two

children."
 
Berry and Stoop made a good team; he was abrasive and

businesslike, and she was soft-spoken and ladylike.
 
"People usually

warm up to me before they do Don," Berry said.
 
"I don't know if it's

because I'm a woman, or because I talk softer.
 
Mrs. Radcliffe was

very distant at first, but she finally began to talk to me.
 
She told

me how they took care of the dolls.
 
She said that every week, she and

the colonel and Pat spent hours changing the diapers on every doll.
 
I

didn't ask her why.
 
I guess it ' just seemed so peculiar that I didn't

want to know."

While Michelle Berry was going through an armoire in the dining room,

an old plaster picture fell out and broke.
 
Colonel Radcliffe was

incensed.
 
"He said he was going to sue me, and Mrs. Radcliffe stuck

up for me.
 
She told him, 'Colonel, she couldn't help it, and you don't

need to report it, and it wasn't anything anyway."
 
But if Don had

broken it, hell would have broken loose because they did not see eye to

eye at all.
 
She complained to him that in all her years of living, she

had never seen anybody come in and take over someone's personal

property and ransack it.
 
And we weren't, of course."

It must have been a terribly demeaning experience for Margureitte

Radcliffe, too close to the reenactment of her worst nightmare, accused

by the police of a crime.
 
Don Stoop had become the focal point of all

the years of accumulated rage she felt toward people who had threatened

her Pat and her own dignity.
 
She was a lady, and Stoop was, she would

say later, "a terrible, terrible, rude man."

In the end, the investigators found nothing they sought.

They took away with them a blue photograph album, a brown leather

photograph album, hand-stitched linen cloths, a pair of lace gloves,

some letters, an antique dictionary, and a pearl necklace in a Ziploc

bag.

Mrs.
 
Crist could identify none of them.
 
They were returned.

Whatever items Pat and Debbie might have taken from the Crist home had

disappeared.
 
Everything was gone, save the pearls and the cookbook

that Pat had given to Susan.

As it turned out, it didn't really matter.
 
Based on the commonality of

circumstances, and the physical evidence the D.A."s office did have, on

April 17, 1991, nineteen grand jurors of Fulton County charged and

accused Pat Taylor Allanson and Debbie Cole Alexander with seven

counts: aggravated assault with intent to murder; aggravated assault;

violation of the Georgia Controlled Substances Act, Count 1; violation

of the Georgia Controlled Substances Act, Count 11; theft by taking,

Count I; theft by taking, Count 11; and violation of O.C.G.A Section

43-26-12.

The seventh charge involved the accuseds'impersonating registered

nurses.

The arrest warrants were next.
 
Out in McDonough, the household of

Colonel and Mrs. Clifford Radcliffe was once again braced for another

legal shoe to drop.
 
Their little girl was now fifty-three years old

and they had pampered and protected her for all those years.
 
Their

home had always been her home, her trouble and pain their trouble and

pain.
 
They had sacrificed everything to make her life perfect.
 
Pat

could do no wrong in their eyes, and yet the world continued to hound

her.
 
When would she be happy?

When in God's name would it ever end?

u Lewis R. Slaton, district attorney of the Atlanta judicial Circult,

issued bench warrants on April 17, 1991, for Pat Taylor Allanson and

Debbie Cole Alexander.
 
Don Stoop and Michelle Berry would make the

arrests.
 
Susan had told them that it would be better to arrest her

mother and her sister separately.
 
Debbie would be the weak partner in

the duo.
 
"If you talk to her without my mother around," Susan said,