Everything She Ever Wanted (16 page)

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 patio, 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

filtaring 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 jun,- 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 quartersized 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 testlike 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.

                                               
 
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.

' @ i 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 offourinches.
 
. . . 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.