Everything She Ever Wanted (18 page)

all.

If Pat had told Tom his father had done that, she had made a terrible,

tragic mistake.

The doorbell rang again and Paul Vaughan, Walter's law clerk,

arrived.

Roberts asked Vaughan to go out with him for a glass of iced tea.
 
He

was perplexed-shocked-by this woman Tommy had married.

Vaughan verified Roberts's recall; he had seen Walter on June 28 too.

They discussed the Lake Lanier ambush, but there were things Al Roberts

hadn't heard about.
 
Vaughan said that Walter had told him his boat

engine had suddenly exploded but that he had managed to get to shore

without sinking.
 
The clerk also recalled a phone message left for

Carolyn and Walter from a man identifying himself as their son.
 
"He

said to tell them he had missed thembut that he would get them."

Al Roberts didn't know what to think.
 
Pat Allanson and her mother,

Mrs. Radcliffe, seemed so at home in Paw and Nona's house, and Pat

herself had seemed overcome alternately with grief and hysteria, a

woman not quite in control.
 
She had been almost vulgarly specific

about the exposing incident and then had forced herself to be coldly

businesslike.
 
Perhaps she had been so shocked that she couldn't see

what effect her words were having on the old couple who had just lost

their only son.

Mrs. Radcliffe dressed and acted like a proper lady.
 
But Pat was

something else again.
 
She was a fine-looking woman, all right, but she

was obviously older than Tommy, and her clothing was flamboyant; the

dead man's partner saw why Walter Allanson had not approved of her.

It was also apparent that Pat and her mother were a teamthat no matter

what Tommy's wife said, Mrs.
 
Radcliffe backed her up.

Her head began to nod almost from the moment Pat opened her mouth.

As their investigation continued, Detective Zellner and Sergeant

Callahan followed up on the ambush shooting in Forsyth County on the

Saturday before the Allansons were killed.
 
In fact, Mary Rena Jones,

who ran the J. C. Jones store with her husband, was sure she had seen

Tom near the gas pumps, standing next to his blue pickup truck, on

Friday the twenty-eighth, around 5:30 P.m. She had seen the Kentwood

Morgan emblem on the door, and, of course, both Joneses remembered

seeing Walter Allanson the next morning after he had been shot at.
 
He

and his wife had come in with cuts all over their arms.

"I told him that before I'd let someone shoot me, I'd shoot them

first," J. C. put in.
 
"He told us it was his son who had shot at

him."

Mary Jones picked Tom's picture out of a laydown of suspects.

Zellner and Callahan knew about the sugar in the Allansons' gas tank.

They knew about the exploding boat, the phone calls.

Either Tom Allanson was guilty of it all, or someone had done a dandy

job of setting him up to look guilty.

On July 5, George Zellner typed up a probable-cause affidavit

requesting a search warrant in Pike County.
 
The East Point

investigators wanted to search the premises of Kent'wood Farm and a

1971 GMC pickup truck (license plate RL 7223) for certain items: One

.22-caliber semi-automatic rifle; One man's shirt, color brown and

green striped; Blue jean pants; Boots having soil and blood stains.

The investigators located several pairs of jeans, but none with

bloodstains.
 
Two pairs of jeans were in the washing machine with a

still-damp load of otherwise white items of clothing.
 
A woman would

never have mixed the jeans with white clothes.
 
A i man might

have-especially a man trying to wash blood away.
 
The Allansons had a

gun rack at Kentwood Farm with several rifles and shotguns.
 
The

investigators found a .22-caliber Remington Model 66 rifle, loaded with

Federal copper-clad bullets.
 
The empty cartridges recovered in the

shooting at Lake Lanier had been the same type.

They didn't find the striped shirt.
 
When a neighbor told them that he

had seen Tom walk down the road in the wee hours of July 4 and that he

had been wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, they figured they would

never locate the green and brown shirt; it could be anywhere between

East Point and Zebulon.

Elizabeth Thomason, a forensic serologist with the Georgia State Crime

Laboratory, received blood samples from Dr. Stivers on July 5. The

vials of blood retrieved at autopsy showed that both the Allansons had

the same type of blood: 0 positive.
 
All the blood samples from the

basement-from the floor, light switch, gun, holster, boards-were type 0

positive.
 
But then the prime suspectthe man who waited in the East

Point jailwas the natural son of Walter and Carolyn Allanson.
 
He would

have type 0 positive too.

It was a moot point.
 
The only wound Tom had was the scrape on his left

calf, and it had barely bled.

The normal physical evidence that is usually so helpful to homicide

detectives-hairs, fibers, blood, fingerprints-has greatly diminished

worth in a "family murder."
 
Both the victims and the accused have

reason to occupy the premises where the crimes take place.
 
Their

fingerprints could be expected, and so could their clothing fibers,

hairs, blood, urine, saliva, even semen.
 
It didn't matter that Tom

Allanson had not lived in the Norman Berry Drive home for six months;

fingerprints last for years, even for decades.
 
Alien physical evidence

would be of use in this case if the killer proved to be someone outside

the family and not a regular visitor to the Allansons' home.

The fingerprint question didn't matter anyway; Detective Marlin

Humphrey, Jr had dusted for prints in the Allansons' basement to little

avail.
 
He failed to raise any prints on the fuse box, basement doors,

or furnace.
 
Walter's borrowed .32 revolver had a partial latent as did

a light bulb; both proved to be those of East Point police officers, an

embarrassing discovery but not surprising in light of the chaotic

terror that had reigned in that basement on the night of July 3.

The mystery behind the deaths of Walter and Carolyn Allanson probably

would not be unraveled through forensic science; the answers would come

from a more imprecise area: human behavior.

The Saturday after the murders was a day that seemed forty-eight hours

long.
 
Tom Allanson appeared in a lineup at the East ; Point police

station on July 6. He was by far the tallest man present.
 
All the

subjects wore white T-shirts and either jeans or work pants.
 
Some were

fire fighters, some were cops, and one was a friend of Tom's, a tall

man who volunteered to join the lineup so that Tom wouldn't stand out

so conspicuously.

Viewing the lineup were Harriett and Paul Beauregard Duckett and Patrol

Officer C. L. McBurnett, Jr the only eyewitnesses who had seen the

fleeing man just after the murders.
 
The Ducketts and McBurnett walked

in separately, checked off the form without speaking, and left the

lineup room.

Each had checked space No.
 
2: Tom Allanson.

Things looked bad for Tom.
 
His aunt jean was offering to help, but he

didn't dare tell his wife about that.
 
Pat assured him continually that

she was taking care of everything.
 
He wasn't to worry; she would see

that he had the best legal defense money could buy.
 
He just had to

remember not to talk to anyone but her.

When he argued with her that to him the truth seemed the best route,

Pat shushed him.
 
No, he must not even suggest such a thing; anybody

knew that a man who tried to handle his own defense was a fool.
 
He had

to believe in her, she explained, because no one loved him the way that

she loved him.

And no one ever would.

That same Saturday, Walter and Carolyn Allanson had a 'mint funeral in

the chapel at Hemperley's in East Point.
 
Their caskets were side by

side, and they were closed.
 
Mae Mama Lawrence's insistence on a blue

dress with long sleeves for her daughter was moot; no one could tell

what Carolyn wore.
 
Mae Mama commented tearfully that it was just as

well that her daughter and son-inlaw had "gone together.
 
They were

always together.
 
Neither one of them could have lived without the

other."

The chapel was full to overflowing, and floral tributes filled it with

an almost suffocating sweetness.

Pat was too ill to go, but she wanted her family to be represented at

the chapel.
 
She called her daughters, Susan Alford and Deborah Cole,

and begged them to go to the Allansons' funeral.

Susan was twenty-one and Deborah was nineteen and they were horrified

at the thought of walking into Hemperley's in front of the deceased's

friends and relatives.
 
They hadn't even known the Allansons.

"You're going to be there for Tom," Pat insisted."
 
If you don't go,

I'll have to get up out of this sickbed and go myself.

You just walk right in with your heads up high, and you show him you

care-that we all care."

As far as Margureitte and Colonel Radcliffe were concerned, they backed

Tom to the limit, but they felt no allegiance to his parents.
 
They had

issued gracious invitations to the Allansons in life and all their

overtures had been rudely refused.
 
They did not now feel it was

incumbent upon them to join the mourners for people who were virtual

strangers-by their own choice.

Pat's two daughters went to Hemperley's, their faces aflame with

embarrassment when they realized there was no way they were going to go

unrecognized.
 
They were further mortified when the chapel began to

buzz and heads turned to gawk at them.

Their arrival had actually produced a massive gasp.
 
They could feel