Everything She Ever Wanted (96 page)

Crist's pills one time, and it zonked Debbie out .
 
. . she slept for

the whole night when she was supposed to be up.
 
When she woke up, both

of them were hollering for her."

"Who is both of them?"

"Mr.
 
Crist and Mrs.
 
Crist."

Susan said that although she had worried enough about the small items

her mother and sister had brought home from their nursing jobs, and by

the money they flashed, it had never occurred to her that they had been

dispensing medicine on their own.
 
Don Stoop and Michelle Berry could

see the revival of an old nightmare reflected in her dark eyes.

Don and Michelle had thoroughly familiarized themselves with Pat's

earlier encounters with the Georgia justice system.
 
They recognized

the eerie similarity between what had happened to the Crists and to Paw

and Nona Allanson.
 
When Pat told Jim Crist about his mother's

"drinking," she had repeated almost verbatim what she had said about

Paw Allanson a dozen years earlier.

Susan and Bill Alford had led Don and Michelle back through the

eighties and into the seventies, reprising the horrible double murder

of Walter and Carolyn Allanson, the near-fatal poisonings of Paw and

Nona Allanson, and the glory that was once Zebulon.

The investigators were eager to take a closer look at those cases.

Pat had been convicted in the latter case-but she had walked away free

as a butterfly in the double murder.

But first they had to deal with the current case.
 
It didn't matter how

many people said that Pat and Debbie were no more registered nurses

than they were brain surgeons; Stoop and Berry had to prove it.
 
They

had to trace and identify the medications used to render Betty Crist

almost immobile and find out how they were obtained.
 
And, perhaps the

most difficult task of all, they had to try to find the myriad

treasures that had disappeared from the Crist mansion on Nancy Creek

Road.

It was now almost two years after the fact in the most recent case

involving Pat.
 
The D.A."s detectives didn't even want to think about

what it would be like to go back two decades on the homicides.

. . .

Don Stoop began by checking with the Naval Investigative Service, the

Department of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, the Georgia

Board of Nursing, the Georgia Board of Licensed Practical Nurses, the

Florida Board of Nursing, and the North Carolina Board of Nursing.
 
He

was not particularly surprised to find that neither Pat Taylor nor

Debbie Cole Alexander was licensed in any of those venues as a

registered nurse, licensed practical nurse, or even licensed nurse's

aide.
 
One doctor in Florida that Debbie had given as a reference,

claiming she had assisted him as an RN in the operating room,

apparently didn't exist at all; at least, no one by that name had ever

been licensed to practice medicine in Florida.

Pat Taylor had been trained at Horizon House to empty bedpans give

sponge baths, and keep her elderly charges company.
 
Debbie Cole had

worked in a number of physicians' offices and had often called in

prescriptions to drugstores on her employers' instructions.

Don Stoop obtained permission to speak to the Crists' attending

physicians.
 
Dr. Fred Hardin, their dermatologist, said that he had

indeed prescribed a lotion for Jim Crist's rash.
 
He had not, however,

seen Elizabeth Crist as a patient since March 1988.

"Would you have drawn blood from either of them in the treatment you

provided?"
 
Stoop asked.
 
"Did you ever prescribe medication that would

be considered a controlled substance?"

"No, not at any time.
 
Dr. Watson is their internist.
 
He would have

done all blood tests-and prescribed that kind of medication, if it was

needed."

Dr. David Watson knew the Crists well.
 
Like everyone connected to the

case, the internist had found Pat Taylor competent Ad enough on first

assessment.
 
She seemed conversant with the proper medical phraseology

and, in an insurance assessment conference, she had spoken out

confidently about her worries for her patient.
 
She explained that she

kept a monitor with her at all times so she could hear Mr. Crist if he

needed her.
 
She seemed very protective of her patient and

refused to allow anyone else to prepare his meals.
 
She felt that the

weekend nurses ctagitated" him, and that she was far more capable of

assessing his needs.
 
She watched him constantly because she feared he

was suffering "small strokes" and might fall and hurt himself.

Dr.
 
Watson's early favorable impression of Pat Taylor had in 1988.

She wavered, however, when he saw Elizabeth Crist had been his patient

since April 1985.
 
She was a vibrant woman who had always seemed years

younger than her age.
 
It was Mr. Crist who was ill; his wife was,

naturally, stressed by her husband's condition, but she usually managed

to keep cheerful.

Checking his notes, Watson told Don Stoop that Betty Crist's sons had

brought her to his office on June 6, 1988.
 
"There is a real question,"

he said, looking up from his notes, "of whether she and her husband

were being oversedated by the nurse that was working with them most of

the time."
 
Watson told Don I patient.
 
Betty Stoop he had scarcely

recognized his longtime a slur and lost Crist was dizzy, pale,

nauseated, she spoke with her train of thought often.

He had ordered a blood screen immediately.
 
The medication that he had

prescribed for hypertension would not have done this to her.
 
The test

results were essentially normal-all except for the excessive percentage

of Halcion in her bloodstream.

"Had you prescribed Halcion for Mrs.
 
Crist?"
 
Stoop asked.

Watson nodded.
 
"A single prescription-in April.
 
As I recall, I made a

house call to Mr. Crist, and either Mrs. Crist-or the nurse,

Pat-requested it because Mrs. Crist was having trouble sleeping."
 
nd

Betty Crist had been Halcion was a very potent sedative.
 
A loaded with

it.
 
Her physician said he would never have prescribed so much.
 
At

most he would have had her start with a dosage of a half pill a

day-from a thirty-day supply n checking When Dr. Watson worked with

the Crists' sons i on the number of prescriptions called in to the two

drugstores the family patronized, he said he had found that someone had

ordered 120 Halcion tablets in a thirty-six-day period from just one of

the drugstores.
 
He would never have authorized that many sleeping

pills in so short a time.
 
Never.

Don Stoop found that the procedure used by physicians to call in

prescriptions was fairly standard.
 
Each doctor had a DEA number that

identified his office.
 
His nurses used that number when they called a

pharmacy.
 
Written prescriptions bore the same number.
 
It became clear

to Stoop that anyone who had once been in possession of a written

prescription and who was familiar with office protocol and terminology

could call in a prescription and would probably get away with it-unless

an alert pharmacist picked up on a pattern of excessive use.

Stoop was convinced that either Pat or Debbie had done just that.
 
On

May 11, 1988, someone using Dr. Watson's DEA number had called in a

Halcion prescription (thirty pills) to the Reed Drug Store-with five

refills-for Betty Crist.
 
On April 29, Wender and Roberts Drugs had a

phoned-in thirty-pill prescription, another thirty on May 17, and still

another on June 3.

Someone had had enough Halcion delivered to the Crist home to sprinkle

it in salads, throw it around like confetti, and have more than enough

left to sedate Betty Crist to the point where she would ask no

questions and cause no trouble.

Stoop also knew that Betty Crist, long back to being herself again, had

reached for something in her closet and her hand had il@:, touched a

bottle of pills, hidden far back.
 
Curious, she had stretched to get it

and looked at the label; it was Placidyl, a sleeping pill that had been

prescribed for her three or four years before.
 
The pills were

two-thirds gone.
 
She had always felt that Pat had given her more than

the Halcion; she had been sleepy from the first few weeks Pat came to

work in her home.
 
She had probably been slipped the Placidyl too.

Lord only knew what else.

When the D.A."s investigators talked to the Crists'other nursing

employees-or, rather, former employees-they verified their suspicion

that Pat had been more than the charge nurse of the Crist mansion.
 
She

had been the ruling monarch; none of the other women had lasted long

after Pat was hired, and all of them said that she had been well nigh

impossible to get along with.
 
She had made it clear that she was the

only nurse allowed to interract with the Crists-except for scut

work-and that she would see to all meals and medications.
 
She had

explained that Betty Crist was "senile and crazy," and not in any state

to give orders.
 
Pat would do that.

It appeared quite probable that Mrs. Crist had been heavily drugged

five days a week.
 
From Monday morning to Friday evening she stayed in

bed all the time, and no one but Pat or Debbie saw her when she was, at

least technically, awake.
 
The night nurse saw only a heavily sleeping

patient.

One nurse's aide, Lynn Battle, told Don Stoop that she had been puzzled

when she walked into the kitchen one morning and found Pat dissolving a

blue tablet (Halcion is blue) in Mrs. Crist's juice.
 
Startled, Pat

had recovered quickly.
 
"You couldn't do this.
 
You don't have an order

for it," she said with her usual touch of superiority.
 
t swallow Lynn