Everything She Ever Wanted: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder, and Betrayal

by Ann Rule

  Allanson stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. “Mrs. Radcliffe,” he sighed. “As a Mason and a gentleman, I swear I did not come out to Pike County on Friday and expose myself to your daughter. I have not been in Pike County for some time. . . . Lady, I have high blood pressure and I am under a doctor’s care. I take medicine for that, and when you do this it affects your sexual life. I have not had sex for some time. So why in the world would I go out there and expose myself to your daughter? In fact, Mrs. Radcliffe, if I were going to be on display at a flower show, I would have to go as a dried arrangement!”

  As Margureitte Radcliffe retold it later, the whole meeting with Tom’s father was thoroughly shocking, horrifying, and distasteful to a woman with tender sensitivities. But she was fighting for her child, and her child's marriage. She could scarcely force herself to keep talking to Allanson after his crude revelations about sex, but she did it.

  “Then just as I had to go, he turned around to me and said, ‘Mrs. Radcliffe, you tell Tommy that I will get him because in my heart I know that no matter what you say, no matter what witnesses he’s had, that he is the one that is doing these things. And I will kill him the first chance that I get. You know what? I think it will be this weekend. I think he’ll try to get me. Tell him that he had better be able to duck better than he can shoot, because I’m not afraid to die. Yes, I think the whole thing will be finalized this weekend.”

  Margureitte returned to her office and informed her fellow workers that she felt Walter Allanson was a sick man, that he probably had a tumor, and that he was very, very dangerous.

  That was Margureitte’s way. If she could not reconcile other people’s behavior with her view of the world, she invariably suggested “professional help.” Now the only thing “in the whole wide world’’ she wanted to do was to protect Pat, and she had just spent an hour of “absolute terror” with a person she considered a madman. Perhaps Pat should have waited before marrying into such a family. But even so, Margureitte would fight to the death to protect her child. There wasn’t a thing she wouldn’t do to see that Pat was happy.

  Not one thing.

  ***

  Margureitte reported this latest encounter to Pat and Tom, but despite all the uproar, or maybe because she and Tom needed a diversion so desperately, Pat continued to look forward to an Independence Day parade in which she and Tom were scheduled to ride, in costume, on two of their finest Morgans. She loved pageantry. Tom smiled at how childlike she could be sometimes, how she enjoyed dressing up and pretending.

  To please Pat, he had agreed to ride beside her, but by July 3 Tom was fully expecting to die in the Atlanta parade, to be held July 6, the Saturday after the official holiday. He felt in his gut that his father was going to shoot him right off his horse and all of Atlanta was going to see it. It didn’t make any kind of sense—especially not with his daddy running for judge—but what else could Tom think? Mrs. Radcliffe said his father wanted him dead, Pat said his father wanted him dead, and Nona and Paw were of the same mind.

  Tom was thirty-one years old, and he was deeply, desperately in love with Pat. But after only seven weeks of marriage, what the hell good did it do him? His life was draining away from him because of his father. He was probably going to be the top story on the weekend news, only he wouldn’t be around to watch it.

  CHAPTER 6

  ***

  July 3, 1974, was a coolish rainy day in Zebulon, hardly propitious for the holiday ahead. On the one hand, things seemed completely normal; Pat measured Tom for alterations to his costume for the parade and tacked together the long skirt and bodice she would wear. She chattered happily about what a great showcase the parade would be for Kentwood Morgan Farm. But on the other hand, nothing was normal. Pat and Tom had gone down to Pike County to get a restraining order against his father. But the police and sheriff in Zebulon didn’t take them seriously. “Everybody knew him in these parts,” Tom said later. “So that went nowhere.’’

  Tom no longer felt safe in leaving Pat alone on the farm. She had him just about convinced to go see his father and have it out. They had to find some way to come to a meeting of the minds. Tom dreaded the prospect. He knew for a certainty his father would try to kill him, but Pat kept urging him to do something. They couldn’t go on the way they were.

  Walter Allanson and his friends were edgy too, and had been for months. Jake Dailey had lent Walter his own .32-caliber pistol earlier that spring—just in case there was trouble. At 10:00 on that Wednesday morning, July 3, Jake had driven up the Allansons’ driveway with a new battery for one of Walter’s boat engines. He wasn’t there more than a minute or so when Lee and Mary Dorton— who lived two doors down—hurried over. They hadn’t recognized his truck and they knew Walter and Carolyn were at work.

  Everybody was jumpy. Dailey and the Dortons grinned nervously as they recognized each other, but they decided to check the house out as long as they were there. Lee Dorton and Jake Dailey noticed that there was a light on in the basement. That was peculiar, and Jake suggested that they walk around the house and check all the doors. They did that, and found them all locked. Everything seemed as usual.

  At Kentwood Farm in Zebulon, the atmosphere was also laced with apprehension. Pat had been ill all during the night of July 2. She told Tom she had exacerbated the injuries to her collarbone trying to saddle a horse. And she had a new torment. “Your father—or if it wasn’t him, someone—called all night long and just breathed on the phone. Didn't you hear it ringing?” she asked Tom incredulously. “Between that crazy man and my collar bone, I didn’t get any sleep.”

  They had a horse show to go to on Friday and the parade on Saturday, and Tom insisted that Pat see a doctor. She demurred at first—she had to finish her parade costume—but Tom insisted and Pat finally agreed. “I hadn’t had any sleep since his father had started threatening our lives,” she said later. “Tom said I just couldn't keep going on like this, not with the high blood pressure and all the other problems I had.”

  Pat couldn’t get an appointment with her regular doctor, but Tom said she should go to her orthopedist, Dr. Thompson, anyway. His office was on Cleveland Avenue just off Norman Berry Drive, not more than two blocks from Tom’s parents’ house, but almost sixty miles from their place in Zebulon. Pat said she would call there.

  Tom finished his horseshoeing that morning before they left for East Point, and he made a decision. The way to make peace with his father would be to talk with his mother. But that wouldn’t be easy either. He had tried to call her at the doctor’s office where she worked and she just got upset with him. He couldn’t call her at home because his father was usually home when she was. Tom would have to go to see her before his father got home from work. If he was lucky, he would have perhaps an hour's window of time to try to talk some sense to her.

  ***

  Exactly what happened on Norman Berry Drive on July 3, 1974, would be the subject of conjecture for almost two decades. Certain things were unarguable: Big Carolyn and Walter went, as usual, to their jobs that Wednesday, she in her white nurse’s uniform and he in bluish gray striped trousers, a white business shirt, and a dark gray tie. They ate lunch together as always, promptly at noon. Big Carolyn got off work shortly after four, and Walter was supposed to leave his office by six.

  The only thing unusual on that day was that Walter had left his office from 2:45 to 3:00 p.m. When he returned, he showed his secretary, Mary McBride, what he had purchased. It was a Marlin .45/70 lever-action rifle with a box of ammunition to go with it—the largest caliber made. He had paid Berryman’s Sports Center in East Point $201.15 for the gun. In the space of just a few months, Walter had obtained two weapons—the .32 pistol Jake Dailey had lent him and the new, powerful rifle.

  It was an hour’s drive or more from Zebulon to East Point and Pat and Tom left Kentwood well before midafternoon, with Tom driving carefully because the rain had brought up the oil slick on the roads; he didn't want to risk any further
injury to Pat. Pat said goodbye to Tom at Dr. Thompson’s office on Cleveland Avenue about 3:30 p.m. and watched him walk off toward his bank, where he had some business.

  At about the same time, Horace Smith, a fire fighter with the East Point Fire Department, was driving one of the department’s fire rigs on a test run down Norman Berry Drive. He noticed the tall man striding along the south side of the street, a man with long light brown hair who wore Levi’s and cowboy boots. Suddenly, Smith recognized the man; he was an old friend.

  Smith yelled, “Hey, Tom!”

  But the tall man didn’t answer.

  A second unusual event took place that afternoon, varying Walter Allanson’s heretofore precise schedule once more. First he had bought the rifle, and then he left for home early. His staff recalled that he had received a call at his office sometime around 5:30 from a woman who didn’t give her name. She had been brusque. “You’d better tell Mr. Allanson.to get home as fast as he can,” she said. “His son is headed over there to cause trouble.”

  Allanson ran to his car and drove home.

  Big Carolyn was already home with her grandchildren, Russ and Sherry, whom she had picked up at the day care center. She carried in a case of Cokes she had bought for the next day’s picnic—and a blowup plastic blue dinosaur for the kids’ wading pool—and set them down on the dining room table. When Walter walked in, he unwrapped the new rifle and left the box it came in beside the Cokes.

  “Daddy,” Big Carolyn told him, “it’s the oddest thing. It wasn’t lightning at all today, but the lights won’t go on, and the television’s dead.”

  Walter ran down the basement steps and found that someone had pulled the main switch. He pushed the circuit breaker over and back and all the lights came on and the refrigerator started to hum.

  Within minutes, Little Carolyn—or as Walter called her, Junior—arrived. Suspecting that somebody had been in the basement, Big Carolyn stayed upstairs in the kitchen with the youngsters while Walter and Junior searched the house inside and out. They checked all the windows and doors to be sure they were locked, and looked to see if anything was missing.

  That was when they discovered that the phone line had been cut.

  Walter said he also missed two items: an old leather suitcase and an Excel 20-gauge shotgun he had had for years. He went to Lee and Mary Dorton’s house, two doors down, and called the East Point police. The Dortons came back to his house with him, and while they were waiting for the police, he showed them where the telephone line had been neatly sliced in two.

  According to the Dortons, Walter didn’t seem anxious or even very concerned. He was more matter-of-fact about the situation. After all, it was daylight, early on a summer’s evening. And, Lord knows, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been expecting trouble.

  Sergeant C.T. Callahan of the East Point police pulled up the long driveway on Norman Berry at one minute after seven and Walter Allanson met him outside. He wanted to report a burglary. “I can’t tell where he got in,” he said, “but he took a suitcase and my twenty-gauge Excel shotgun—”

  “He?"

  “My son, Walter Thomas Allanson.”

  Callahan moved toward the house and said he would check it out, but Allanson blocked his path. “No need. I did it myself. I’ve checked it once, and there’s no one there.”

  Despite Callahan’s concern about a citizen doing the job he was trained for, Allanson was adamant. He had once served as a reserve police officer himself; he knew what to do. There was no need for the police to bother coming inside. He only wanted official confirmation that the phone line had been cut, and he led Callahan around to the east side of the house and pointed out the dangling wire. It had obviously been cut deliberately; whoever did it would have had to wade through thick rhododendron bushes to get to it.

  Allanson went into the house and returned with the .45 rifle to show Callahan. “I got this rifle here,” he said. “I know who it is, and I’m going to take care of it myself.”

  “Don’t do anything drastic,” Callahan warned. “Call us first.”

  Shaking his head, Callahan backed down the drive. You never could tell about family beefs. But you didn’t argue with Walter O’Neal Allanson; he was an outstanding citizen in East Point. Probably half of the East Point police force knew him. Callahan couldn’t force police protection on him if he didn’t want it.

  Walter walked back in the house and put the new .45 in its box on the dining room table. Then, leaving Big Carolyn and the kids at the house, Little Carolyn drove him over to her nearby apartment to be sure that no one was waiting inside to attack her when she came home, and to see if anything had been stolen. The place was just as she had left it that morning on her way to work.

  They drove back to Norman Berry Drive. On the way, Little Carolyn spotted a blue jeep with a Pike County tag on it in front of them and said, “Daddy, that’s Pat!”

  “Well, just follow her. Junior, and see where she goes.”

  They followed the jeep as it turned onto Norman Berry Drive and then into the driveway right next door to the Allansons’. That was Big Carolyn’s mother’s house. Mae Mama Lawrence was getting on in years, and they certainly didn’t want her upset. The jeep sat there for a moment, but as Walter leaped out of his car and started toward it, Pat quickly backed down Mae Mama’s drive way and disappeared down the street.

  “You go look for her!” Walter called to Little Carolyn. She did as he said and drove slowly around adjacent streets, but the blue jeep had vanished. When she came back, Walter instructed her to stay in the front yard and watch to see if Pat came back again. She walked to the crest of the sloping lawn and scanned both sides of the boulevard for Pat.

  But then Sherry started crying and Little Carolyn hurried into the kitchen to see what was wrong. Later when she tried to reconstruct what came next, Tom’s ex-wife saw the scene in agonizing slow motion. Big Carolyn had turned toward Mary Dorton, who was standing nervously in the dining room. “Well, where’s Walter?” she asked.

  “He went to the basement,” Mary answered.

  “Whatever for?”

  Mary shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Although he had searched the basement before, “Daddy” Allanson, carrying his borrowed pistol, had clomped downstairs again. The three women huddled together with the crying children and thought they heard another man’s voice—or maybe it was just Walter—muttering to himself in the basement.

  Suddenly, Carolyn heard her father-in-law yell up the stairs, “Junior! Get the kids out of the house! I have him cornered in the cubbyhole!”

  Both Carolyns pushed the children toward Mary Dorton, who clutched them in her arms and ran toward her own house.

  Walter called up the stairs once more. “Mother! Bring me that new gun!” Still in slow motion—or so it seemed in retrospect—Big Carolyn took the .45-caliber rifle from the box on the dining room table and headed toward the basement. Little Carolyn begged her not to go down stairs.

  ***

  At 8:04 p.m.—almost exactly an hour after he had first responded to a call from the Allanson residence—Sergeant Callahan’s radio crackled and he heard a familiar address. Too familiar. This time, the complainant was a neighbor: Mary Dorton.

  “Car 26—Evening: Signal 6—Holding: 1458 Norman Berry Drive.”

  “I’ll take it, ” Callahan responded. “I was just there an hour ago.”

  To the East Point police, “Signal 6” meant there was a burglar in the house, and “Holding” meant that a citizen was detaining the suspect by physically holding on to him. It was definitely an emergency designation, intended for the B (burglary) car on the evening watch. Other cars moved in to back that unit up.

  Callahan arrived in two or three minutes—his was the first car on the scene. As he pulled up the driveway and around to the rear of the Allansons’ house, a young woman came running toward him, her eyes wide open, screaming. Callahan couldn’t make any sense out of what she was saying; she was a hair away from compl
ete hysteria.

  He called for backup, and for detectives. Lieutenant Gus Thornhill, Jr., a nine-year veteran with East Point, was supervising the evening watch. He headed for the scene, right behind the patrol units that had been dispatched.

  Callahan edged cautiously around the house. There were two cars parked out in back, a 1963 Ford station wagon with several shattered windows, and a 1964 Chevrolet sedan. Most of the windows of the house were six or eight feet above ground, but in the rear there were several ground-level windows in the basement. The cellar door was ajar, but Callahan avoided that entry until he had some backup. Instead, he crouched down and shielded his eyes as he peered into one of the basement windows.

  He gasped involuntarily at what he saw. A middle-aged woman dressed in some kind of white uniform sat upright near the bottom of the steps descending into the middle of the basement. There was a great splotch of blood across her breasts, and she didn't move at all.

  Had she been there all along? Callahan wondered. No, she couldn’t have been—not unless Walter Allanson had shot her and that was why he hadn’t allowed him to search the house on the prior call. The first rule of crime scene investigation was “Don’t assume anything.”

  Callahan had no more time to ponder what might have happened. There was a cacophony of sirens approaching, and East Point police units raced up the driveway and parked along Norman Berry Drive. Officers surrounded the house. They had no idea who might be inside, alive or dead. They knew only that there was a burglar in the house and a dead woman was sitting on the basement steps. Officers peering in the basement windows could make out sprays and droplets of blood on many walls and items in the cellar. There was blood everywhere. Whatever had happened in this house, it had been horrific.

  ***

  Patrol Officer Cecil McBurnett, Jr., was working a “wreck car” (accident investigation) that evening and heard the Signal 6 go out on the burglary on Norman Berry. He was only three blocks away, so he responded to give backup to Callahan. He turned off Martin and headed east on Norman Berry. He was checking house numbers when he saw a man leap from the lawn near Mae Mama Lawrence’s house and hit the sidewalk running. The man turned to look at the patrol car, not once but several times, and McBurnett saw him full-faced.