Everything She Ever Wanted (80 page)

leave
 
and

emotiona and brought from Hardwick to visit Boppo.
 
Boppo turned her

face to the wall and wished, if only for the moment, that they would

all just go away Of course, they didn t. Boppo's children,

grandchildren, and husband were her very life.
 
In the main, she

thrived on their disasters in need of fixing more than she ever needed

peace and t time in the hospital and then she quiet.
 
She spent her

shor y to do battle for her walked out the doors, head high, read

family once more.

+ + + Pat had written an eleven-page letter to Susan in 1979 that

displayed a curious mixture of concerns and rationalizations.
 
She

didn't appear to grieve at all over her divorce the previous he might

never have known Tom at all.
 
Her life was so spring; s s teaching

busy, and she was doing so much for others.
 
She wa classes to her

fellow inmates.
 
She worked all day, she wrote, sewing and filling

orders for the matrons.
 
She had achieved the status of trusty.

"With 28 women to teach (and babysit), I don't have much time.
 
. . . Most of

the women are old, physically handicapped and illitorate sick too.

I'm mostly concentrating on Therapy things for them & I do the wood

carving & burning needle work & crochetto make the money.
 
Plus all the

fancying."

Susan felt optimistic.
 
This was the mother she had always longed

for.

Susan's friend Sonja Salo now had her law degree and was seeking a

hearing for Pat for a reduction of sentence.
 
When her mother was

paroled, Susan believed, they would all start over.

"Susan," Pat wrote in the same letter, "before I go any farther, Deb

told me what she did.
 
I knew something was terribly wrong & Boppo did

too.
 
. . . I know you've about been crazy over it, for I sure have &

so has Boppo.
 
And most of all Debbie has.
 
She needs proffesional

[sic] help."

Pat blamed all her own previous problems on diet pills, Valium, and

sleeping pills.
 
"You don't even realize it when it's happening.
 
I

know I didn't.
 
I have about 2 years of my life that I'm really unsure

of & really to this day don't know how much I really remember & how

much has been told to me so many times that I think I remember."

Pat explained why Tom had deserted her.
 
"It's for the best, Shug, so

don't feel sorry for me.
 
Tom made it very clear that, quote, (1) being

married to me will keep him from making parole, (2) being married to me

will keep him from making Trusty, (3) even writting to me is harmful to

him & (4) that no one in the family cares about him .
 
. . so it's

better to sever it now & I only wish to God it had never been."

Pat listed the dozens of things she was sewing and crocheting for

Susan's family, and asked her daughter to "Pray hard that all this

nightmare will soon be over & we'll all be together again."

Pat had truly acclimated.
 
With realizing it, she had slipped into a

common convict affectation-drawing little circles with smiling faces

instead of periods, and a circle-face with the word "Smile!"
 
For men

and women behind prison bars in every prison in America, the smiling

circle is second nature, and a dead giveaway.

Pat commented to her daughter that she had written the long letter

under "duress"-fights were breaking out all around her, and the

mobile-home dorm was full of the angry screams of too many women locked

up together too long.

"HELP!"
 
she wrote.
 
"I need to get out of this madhouse!"

After a careful study of the case, Sonja Salo was attempting to file an

Extraordinary Motion for New Trial based on her belief that newly

discovered evidence would prove that Pat had been e of her offense

against Paw and Nona legally insane at the tim al in May 1977.
 
Pat had

confided to and at the time of her tri Sonja that she could remember

nothing of the prior two years, that she had only recently come back to

being herself.
 
Sonja she visited believed her and was gratified to see

that the woman adjusted.

at Hardwick seemed so wonderfully together and we So normal.

If Pat had been insane, she was no longer out of touch with I ew

woman.

She told her new attorney reality.
 
She was a who e n that she knew all

too well how much damage heartless people could do.
 
"We don't talk

about it much," she said softly.
 
"But I have a sister in North

Carolina who has no conscience at all.
 
She doesn't care who she

hurts."

Sonja never mentioned Pat's sister to Boppo.
 
Lord knows, the woman had

borne enough pain.
 
The young attorney didn't know that Pat had no

sister at all-only the poor dedd baby, Roberta, who had never taken a

breath in this world.
 
Pat brought up her sister" so often that Sonja

wondered when she would meet the evil sibling.

Sonja finally argued her case on December 5, 1980, before Superior

Court Judge Ralph H. Hicks.
 
She had only one witness: Margureitte

Radcliffe.
 
The rest of her motion was based on a psychiatrist's

affidavit and several doctors' reports stemming from Pat's first

embolism in 1973.

Andy Weathers objected to Margureitte's testimony, failing to see how

her recall of an illness in 1973 would show that Pat Taylor had lost

her mind and attempted to commit murder in 1977.

Judge Hicks overruled Weathers when Sonja Salo explained that Pat's

drug use had begun with that first illness, and that it was her

position that the drugs had led to Pat's "insanity."

Margureitte recalled the pulmonary embolism and the abscess that would

not heal.
 
She testified that Pat's physical condition was always

fragile, but that it had worsened after her husband was arrested.

"Her personality became entirely different.
 
Slit.

no longer was the person that I knew."

"And how did her personality appear to you?"
 
Sonia asked.

"I'm not a doctor," Margureitte said, pursing her lips.
 
I'm not

qualified in that way.
 
. . . I thought that she was losing her mind.

I wanted her to see a psychiatrist."

What Margureitte Radcliffe had to admit next was not easy.

It was an enormous lie, a terrible secret she had kept for years.

But her words would finally explain what had puzzled Pat's doctors for

so long: the cause of her near-fatal hip abscess.

"On the area where she had the abscess and she'd been treated -in and

out of the hospital-and I was 'trying to change the dressings-"

Margureitte began.
 
She took a deep breath and continued, forcing her

voice to stay firm.
 
"She would take instruments and self-mutilate

herself where it had been trying to heal up.
 
She would damage it

herself."

"Did you see her actually do this?"
 
Sonja asked.

"Yes, I saw her."

"What did she use?"

"Once she used an instrument that was a leather tooling device.
 
It's

with a metal thing about this long [demonstrating].

ù .
 
. he was scratching herself with that.
 
Other times, she used ù

small forceps-about so large-that she had."

"Did you on any occasion have Pat committed to a psychiatric hospital?"

This had to be agony for Margureitte.
 
She had sat in this very

courthouse two and a half years earlier and painted the picture of "Mrs.

Allanson," her daughter, the near-saint who had devoted herself to the

tender care of Paw and Nona-a woman who was above reproach.
 
She had

never wanted anyone to discover that her perfect daughter had engaged

in self-mutilation.

Margureitte would have said anything to get Pat out of prison, but her

words at long last had the ring of truth.

She continued to describe the daughter she had tried to hide from the

world, the headstrong, histrionics-prone woman who took whatever she

wanted.
 
"On one evening, she had cut her wrists and I knew certainly

that I couldn't get her to go on her own free will.
 
. . . I talked

with her doctor .
 
. . and I saw Judge Gunby, and I signed the papers

and they picked her up and took her to Metropolitan."

"Did Pat ever try to inflict pain upon herself in any other way?"

Sonja asked.

"Yes .
 
. . this same abscessed area, eventually the doctors decided to

do plastic surgery.
 
I thought she had put acid on itbecause it turned

black.
 
She would not let herself heal up.
 
. . .

I did not see her scratch herself.
 
She would have places all over her,

on her wrists, and on her bod And then there were the drugs.

Margureitte had tried so hard, she said, to wean her daughter off

Demerol, but it didn't work.
 
"She wanted Demerol.
 
. . . I was asked

to give her the drugs and then to gradually reduce them.
 
. . .

Eventually, I was adding so much distilled water to the Demerol, and

then once, when I no longer had any phenocain-which you could tell has

a little burn when this is injected-she knew .
 
. . she was not getting

it.

She became very'agitated.
 
. . . Dr. Gandhi gave me enough so that I

could add a little bit of phenocain.
 
. . . I was never really able to

get her off it.
 
Somebody would give it to her."

Margureitte described a night when Pat had come home from Crawford Long

Hospital after treatment for the abscess.
 
"Colonel Radcliffe was out