Everything She Ever Wanted (109 page)

County into Clayton County, one of the tires exploded.
 
By that point,

she had lost sight of the car that looked like Debbie's.
 
She kept the

heavily loaded truck in her lane only with difficulty and drove on the

rim onto a feeder road, limping to a service station.

"I was afraid I didn't even have enough money left to pay to have the

tire changed," Susan remembered.
 
"And then this man came up and helped

me.
 
I call him 'My Black Angel."
 
He just appeared out of nowhere at

the Erron and said he'd help.
 
He put the spare tire on and then he

looked at the tread on the bad one and told me it was too thick to

blow.
 
He said, 'Take it back where you bought it, and have them look

it over."

" Susan recalled guiltily that the man was shabbily dressed.

"He was the kind of guy I would have looked at twice if I was working a

store, and that made me feel awful later.
 
He told me, 'Everything will

be okay now."
 
I guess he could see I was beside myself.
 
I offered him

the few dollars I had, and he closed my hand over it.
 
I said, 'Please

take it,' and he just smiled and said, 'There are still some good

people left in this world.
 
You just take care of those kids."

" Susan made her way onto the freeway again.
 
As she took the exit ramp

a few miles further, there was no one behind her.
 
When she brought the

bad tire back to the dealer the next day to ask why a practically new

tire should blow the way it had, the mechanic looked at it and

scratched his head.
 
"Lady, if I didn't know better, I'd say somebody

shot this out."

afterword.

Looking back over Patricia Vann Radcliffe Taylor Allanson's life, it is

only natural to wonder why she behaved as she did, why she seemed

compelled to cause so much pain for the people who loved her.
 
Was she

given to periods of insanity, or was she simply a supremely selfish

woman who would resort to anything, even attempted murder, to get what

she wanted?
 
There may never be definitive answers to these

questions.

Unlike many felons, Pat Taylor apparently never did undergo

psychological testing.
 
Aside from the diagnosis of Dr. Ray Loring

Johnsonthe psychiatrist who examined her after she slashed her wrists

and ran wildly through the woods in the spring of 1975-no psychiatric

or psychological reports exist in her court records.
 
Dr. Johnson's

assessment was that Pat suffered from "Agitated Depression with

possible thought disorder."
 
She was placed on antipsychotic medication

at that time, medication that she discontinued soon after she was

released from the clinic.
 
She did not regress.

It was unlikely that Pat was ever insane.
 
Often hysterical, yes.

From the time she was a tiny girl, she whipped herself into emotional

tizzies to have her own way.
 
No one ever put limits on her behavior.

When Patty cried, the adults in her life gave in.

She grew up believing that that was the way the world operated.

She viewed herself as special, and why wouldn't she?
 
All of her life,

Patty, Patricia, and then Pat was encouraged to believe she was

extraordinary.
 
Beginning with "Mama" Siler, who "next to God, loved

Patty the most," who gave her granddaughter the last Coca Cola, who

could not bring herself to spank her precious baby, and who allowed her

to subsist on pancakes, Pat never heard the word "No."
 
When she was

five, her mother married Clifford Radcliffe and continued to give Patty

everything she asked for-possibly to ease her own guilt at having

allowed Mama Siler to raise her child for her first years.

Margureitte's indulgence never faltered, not over the next fifty

years.

Throughout those years, Pat lied, stole, contrived, manipulated,

seduced, and betrayed.
 
She married twice and even attempted murder to

get what she wanted.
 
She wanted love and happiness, she wanted money

and the things that money can buy, and she usually found someone to

give them to her.
 
If not, she set out to get them for herself.
 
No one

else mattered; people were merely the means to an end.
 
Yet nothing she

attained was enough to fill up the emptiness in her life.
 
She was like

a vessel with holes in the bottom; love and things and people and money

and happiness seeped away.
 
As Boppo once said, "I can't understand why

anyone in this whole wide world would think Pat got whatever she

wanted-she never got anything she wanted.
 
Her whole life has been

tragic.
 
Why can't people understand that?"

In the beginning Pat got her way because the family loved her so;

later, they dreaded her sharp tongue, her wrath, and her temper

tantrums.
 
In the end, perhaps they could not bring themselves to

examine her crimes in a bright light, fearing that they too were in

some way responsible.
 
The Radcliffes and Silers always seemed to treat

ugly truths like an elephant in their midst.
 
They might comment on the

gleam of its eye or the fine ivory in its tusk, but they never

acknowledged all of it, only the parts they could deal with

comfortably.

Every family maintains a balancing act; some members need more

attention, more affirmation.
 
Others are independent or just plain

loners.
 
Usually, individual needs change frequently and different

family members become the current "burden" to be kept aloft until the

balance shifts once again.
 
In a functional family, problems eventually

work out and everyone takes a turn at being the bearing wall or the

burden.
 
Pat was never the "bearing wall."
 
She was never allowed to

take responsibility for her own life.
 
At the first sign of trouble,

someone-usually Boppo and Papa-rushed forward to save her.

Pat was always the burden, but as bizarre as her behavior sometimes

was, she was far from crazy.
 
When she seemed so, it was a contrived

aberrance, which she could slip into when it suited her purposes.
 
Her

taped voice in her conversations with Tom, clear over seventeen years

of time, alternately imperious and kittenish, and full of throaty

laughter, demonstrated the roles she played to manipulate everyone in

her life.

If she was not crazy, however, Pat quite likely suffered from a melange

of personality disorders.
 
She did not view the world or her

relationship to it the way most people do.
 
She knew the difference

between right and wrong, but it didn't matter.
 
She had been raised to

believe that rules were for other people and what mattered was that she

got what she wanted.

A personality disorder, once established in the mind, clings like an

intractable fungus.
 
It becomes part of the thought processes, and

trying to remove it would be akin to cutting down a tree to eliminate a

fungus.
 
It is better to be "crazy" because crazy can be cured.

Personality disorders die with the host, entangled for life in the

brain's functioning.

No one knows for certain where personality disorders come from.
 
Most

psychiatrists agree, however, that they are not present at birth but,

rather, take root in the first few years of life.
 
Normally, a child of

three or four will begin to understand that his or her actions can

cause pain to a parent, to another child or a pet-that other creatures

hurt too.
 
This understanding and awareness leads to the development of

the conscience, the still small voice inside that warns humans that

certain actions are cruel, insensitive, and against the mores of their

society.

It is the conscience that provokes guilt, a much maligned emotion that

is actually vital to the survival of humanity.

Abused and humiliated children are too busy merely trying to survive to

"grow" a conscience or take the first baby steps to empathy.
 
Perhaps

children who are never chastised or punished sidestep the

conscience-growing process too.
 
Reverend Tasso Siler and his gentle

wife Mary were kindness personified and so according to herself-was

Margureitte.
 
Still, one wonders if too much "kindness" cannot warp a

child as surely as, abuse.

Whatever stunted her emotional development, it is clear from viewing

her behavior that Pat was an antisocial personality.
 
Put simply, she

had no conscience.
 
That was why she could goad Tom into a disastrous

confrontation with his parents.
 
That was why she could feed arsenic to

Paw and Nona and could dose Elizabeth Crist with enough Halcion to

leave her virtually unconscious day after day.
 
That was why she could

drive her own parents into bankruptcy with her ceaseless demands for

money.
 
And why she could concoct accusations against her own daughter,

a woman in the grip of clinical depression, and drive her out of the

house.

She could also write the kind of letters that made Susan cry and filled

Tom's heart with love.
 
When there is no real feeling and no empathy

for the feelings of other people, it is quite easy to play games with

their emotions and their lives.
 
Pat had not the faintest inkling of

what they were suffering.
 
She had no desire or ability to connect with

other peoples' emotions.
 
Her suffering-even that which she inflicted

on herself-was all that mattered, and she used her pain as another

weapon to make the people who loved her suffer even more.

A number of personality disorders often go hand in hand, and Pat was

probably also a narcissistic personality.
 
Like Narcissus of the Greek

myth, who idolized his own image in a pond, she was quite literally in

love with herself.
 
She believed that she deserved whatever she

desired.
 
She was shocked when she didn't always get it.
 
Because she