by Ann Rule
“Let me ask you this,” Weathers continued. “If someone were taking . . . arsenic in their system—bearing in mind respective ages of the people . . . would this have any effect whatsoever on their mental stability?”
“It could,” Burton replied. “Arsenic has been proven to cause changes in one’s mental attitude, capability, thinking, and reasoning; it can cause neurological complaints and GI symptoms, headaches, muscular aching, weakness, affect peripheral nerves and changes in sensation of the legs and feet.”
“With the type you found, would that be consistent with arsenic being ingested through milk, orange juice, food preparation?”
“It can be ingested through any number of mechanisms or methods. In most forms, it is an odorless, colorless, tasteless process where one does not know that they are ingesting arsenic.”
Asked if he had ever seen a case of suicide by chronic arsenic ingestion, Burton shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Never?” probed Weathers.
“No, sir . . . I have never seen one documented. Several people have committed suicide by the acute ingestion of arsenic, but each individual's susceptibility to arsenic varies. It would be hard to predict on a chronic basis how much one would have to take to induce sickness or death. . . . Oftentimes, an individual becomes very sick and it’s a very unpleasant . . . If one got very sick, he might be hospitalized. He might be treated and survive . . . unpredictable.”
“Is not pain one of the manifestations of chronic ingestion of arsenic?”
“Yes, sir.” If a would-be suicide chose to end his life in one gulp, Burton stressed, the pain would be intense, even unbearable. It would be prolonged agony when administered slowly.
On cross-examination, Dunham McAllister did his best to shake Dr. Burton, to show that arsenic is all around, everywhere, easy to ingest accidentally, easily misdiagnosed. He maintained that many diseases might have the same symptoms as arsenic poisoning. Burton did not dispute that.
“So it’s possible,” McAllister said, “that arsenic poisoning can be misdiagnosed for different ailments?”
“Yes, sir.”
“More than a dozen?”
“Possibly, yes.”
“What about a stroke? Could it be misdiagnosed as a stroke?”
“Yes . . . ”
Paw was wheeled back in to testify. “Mr. Allanson,” Weathers began. “I am going to ask you just a few questions, please, sir. Can you understand me, sir . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“Did you give yourself arsenic?”
“Nope.”
“Did you give any to your wife?”
“No."
“Do you know how it got into your system?”
“Nope.”
“I have no further questions.”
“Never seen any . . . ” Paw trailed off.
On cross-examination, McAllister tried to connect Paw’s long history of farming with the supposition that there must have been poison on his property. But he didn’t seem to have the heart to bear down. Cross-examination fell flat, showing only the tremendously hard labor old Walter Allanson had performed for six decades. The witness could never remember using or seeing arsenic preparations.
“No further questions.”
Jean Boggs took the stand next, and if she felt a certain triumph to find herself in a courtroom where Pat Allanson was being prosecuted, it was understandable. She allowed her eyes to flicker over the defense table from time to time.
Andy Weathers used Jean’s answers to catch the jury up on the violent history of the Allanson family. “You know, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Allanson?”
“Yes, sir, my mother and father.”
“Now, I believe you also had a brother?”
“Yes, sir . . . Walter O’Neal Allanson.”
“And was he murdered in Fulton County?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Trial held in Superior Court of Fulton County?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who was convicted in your presence?”
Dunham McAllister objected. “It’s irrelevant to the trial in this case.”
“I intend to show motive,” Weathers argued. “I intend to stand by that.”
“[There's] been absolutely no testimony about motive at this point,” McAllister countered.
“Fixing to be some,” Weathers said agreeably. “That is why I am offering it.”
The defense’s objection was overruled. Jean was allowed to say that Pat was the third wife of the man convicted of his parents' murders—Tom Allanson.
Jean went on to describe her growing suspicion that something was wrong in her parents' home. Dr. Jones had alerted her that her father had been drinking moonshine whiskey. “My father doesn't drink," Jean said. She also recalled her conversation with Pat on the front porch of the Washington Road house. “She [said she] knew what funeral arrangements that he wanted and that he wanted to be put away in a pink satin interior casket, which didn't sound like my father. She picked out the clothes and my son was [to be] one of the pallbearers, it didn’t make sense to me. . . . When I started to leave . . . she leaned across the rails and said this to me, says, ‘I hope he dies.’ ”
The prosecutor was also able to elicit testimony from Jean that showed the utter devotion Walter had shown toward Nona, the confusion and upheaval that Pat Allanson had brought to their household, and the fact that the old man neither drank nor took pills.
“Have you ever seen your father—has he beaten your mother?”
“Oh, my goodness. No,” Jean gasped.
McAllister suggested on cross-examination that Jean had neglected her parents, visited them infrequently. She explained that she too had been ill in 1973 and unable to drive. No, she had not visited often after she recovered. She admitted that it had not been pleasant visiting her parents. There had been “a coldness” after Tom's trial in 1974. No, she had never been close to her brother, Walter—not even from early childhood. “We were just two different personalities.”
When Weathers objected to the line of questioning, McAllister said he was striving for materiality. “It is a most complex family. . . . I'm trying to elicit from this witness some illumination of this family, some explanation of this family."
They wrangled, and Judge Holt finally ruled that Jean’s relationship with a brother who had been dead for two years was irrelevant and sustained Weathers’s objection. McAllister pounced. Based on the judge's ruling, he again insisted that no allusions at all to the double murder or Tom Allanson should be made in this trial.
Judge Holt ruled against him again.
McAllister kept Jean Boggs on the stand for a long time, drawing forth the information that she and her husband were now serving as her parents’ guardians, paying their bills, hiring their nurses. He ended his cross with “You asked the police—or I believe you said you instructed the police—to carry out a full investigation, to go to the crime lab with it? Is that correct?”
Jean sat up straighter. “Certainly.”
Andy Weathers had only three questions on redirect. “Since Pat Allanson left that house—answer this question ‘Yes’ or ‘No’—has there been any problem with your father as far as overdose of alcohol?”
“No, sir.”
“Any problem as far as overdose of pills?”
“No, sir.”
“Any problem of arsenic?”
“No, sir.”
“No further questions.’’
Jean had done well, but this trial would, in the end, cause her pain. She would be portrayed again and again as a neglectful daughter. Perhaps if relationships had not been so strained in her family, all this would never have happened.
***
They recessed for the day at 6:45 p.m. and began again on Wednesday morning, May 4, at 9:30. Pat wore a lilac-colored dress that day. She listened as Bill Hamner described the steady progression of documents that ultimately disinherited virtually everyone but Tom and Pat. The old people had been very c
losemouthed about exactly what their assets were, but Hamner knew they had been in excess of two hundred thousand dollars at the time of the first wills. No one knew what remained. Jean Boggs’s children’s portion had dwindled to one-sixth, and that was under Pat’s control.
If the spectators had expected titillating revelations, they were disappointed on the third day of trial. The witnesses were dry, and their testimony was rife with dull detail about technicalities. Hamner and his partner, Fred Reeves, went through the many, many changes and codicils to the elderly Allansons’ wills. Joyce Tichenor, who had notarized Paw’s supposed confession, and her bank manager, Gus Yosue, testified about the single time they had encountered the defendant and her grandfather-in-law.
The evening of April 16 was not totally clear in their memories; there was no reason for them to remember it. Yosue recalled the young woman helping the elderly man into the bank, and her insistence that he didn’t want people knowing his business. Tichenor remembered that the top papers on the stack that she notarized had appeared to be warranty deeds with plats, blocks, lots, and measurements on them. She remembered six or seven sheets of paper that were “just turned up from the bottom a little way by her [Pat], and she would say at each sheet, ‘Sign here. Paw.’ ”
Tichenor had not used her seal, but had merely stamped the pages. “The date and the signature were my writing,” she said. “I did not write that ‘Sworn and subscribed to before me' on there.” She had routinely jotted down the specifics of the ten-minute transaction in her log and forgotten about it—until subpoenaed as a witness. She had had no idea she had notarized a confession to double murder.
Andy Weathers hated to do it, but it was necessary. An ambulance was sent to bring eighty-year-old Walter Allanson back to testify. He denied that he had any part in the murders of his son and daughter-in-law. He remembered the murder day of July 3, 1974, well. He did not clearly remember signing the papers at the bank, or, rather, he remembered that April night in mismatched segments. He recalled “signing papers for Pat,” but he felt sure that he had never gone into the bank itself. “I never talked to no lady—just a man come out to the car.”
Jim Kelly of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's crime lab, chief document examiner and handwriting expert for the state, was called to the stand by the prosecution to explain the peculiarities in the confession. Only the last of the five pages had been signed, and that last page had not been typed continuously. The confession was rife with typographical and grammatical errors, although someone had gone through it with a blue ballpoint pen, correcting some of them. Kelly pointed out that, while the date of the notary’s signature on the last page was April 16, the date typed at the beginning of the alleged confession was April 19.
Odd. And suspect.
McAllister asked only one question: “How many pages were in the confession?” The answer was “five.”
Wisely, the defense attorney left it at that.
Weathers then recalled Dr. Everett Solomons of the crime lab and asked him about the liquid found in the antique whiskey bottle. “Say, right here in front of this jury, I took normal swallows of this arsenic—are you with me so far?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What would happen?”
“I would expect you to have to be hospitalized in order to live.”
“How many swallows of this would kill you—normally, how many?”
“I would expect two swallows.”
Weathers was so intent that he did not see the incongruity of “normal” swallows of arsenic. Solomons was adamant that two swallows was a lethal dose. No human would live six months, or four months—or four minutes—if he did that.
***
Pat drooped like a wilted rose as the trial progressed beyond 5:00 p.m. that day. During a jury recess, McAllister asked if they might stop. “Your Honor, at this point I would move that we recess for the day based upon the fact that my client is suffering from certain physical disabilities. At the late hour yesterday, she suffered from dizziness. Double vision. She has told me today she has a problem with blood clotting. I know she has problems with her heart. She’s been in the hospital three times since the first of this year. She is not in any condition, in my professional opinion, to continue in this trial and to continue to aid me. It is my expectation that we will be ready to go forward tomorrow morning.”
Judge Holt peered balefully at Pat. “What is the problem with your client that at five o'clock in the afternoon she can’t go on?”
McAllister was stumped. He didn’t know the specifics of Pat’s sinking spells. “I do not know if there is anything inherent about five o’clock or not. But I do know she’s unable to continue today in a meaningful way to assist me.”
Holt suppressed a snort. “What do you mean she’s not able to continue in a meaningful way?”
“Your Honor . . . it’s impossible for me . . . to really converse with her.”
“You have been conversing with her.”
McAllister referred to the physical strain on Pat, who, according to Colonel Radcliffe was suffering from a “severe blood clot.”
“Being on trial would put anyone under a physical strain, Counselor,” Judge Holt said. “We can get a doctor up here to look at her.”
McAllister backed down. His client had her own doctor.
Holt was not about to rein in his speedy trial. He had trial commitments the next week. But not long after his decision, the state rested its case. It was near 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 4. Although he wasn’t happy about it, Holt recessed for the day. They would go longer tomorrow—unless the defendant was truly ill. If she was, she would have to let him know.
The defendant looked surprised. No one had ever doubted her frail health before.
CHAPTER 36
***
Dunham McAllister rose to begin the case for the defense. “Your Honor, I call Patricia Allanson to the stand.”
The gallery murmured. Whatever Pat’s physical disabilities of the night before, she had apparently made a miraculous recovery. She wore the emerald green sheath again. She had gained weight and the cap sleeves showed her plump short arms, the bodice tight across her full breasts. She seemed calm and self-possessed, not at all nervous.
Her mother and stepfather looked at her with pride; Margureitte’s chin lifted and the colonel’s bearing was ramrod straight and tall. Only Susan seemed nervous.
Pat answered her attorney’s questions easily, giving her address in Morrow and her former address on Tell Road.
“Have you ever lived at Walter and Nona Allanson’s residence?”
“No, sir. . . . Normally, I went when Mrs. Allanson called me.”
“How often was that?”
“In the earlier . . . period . . . it was not in excess of three times a week because of my own inability to get around. After I got better, she called me an average of about four or five times a week and asked me to come.”
Pat was prepared—even eager—to discuss her own precarious health, but Andy Weathers objected. He could see no bearing on this case. Judge Holt sustained.
McAllister moved ahead to the time of Walter Allanson’s heart attack in January of 1976. Pat rolled her tongue in her mouth, wetting her lips with its tip as she recalled her visit to his hospital room.
“He had a nurse to call the house and say that he had some very important information he wanted to speak to me about. . . . When I got there, I went in and immediately he asked me to call for the nurse. My mother was with me . . . he told the nurse that he had gotten approval from the doctor to have a private conversation with me, and he wanted the curtains closed and everything. . . . That was when Paw—Mr. Allanson—I’m sorry,” she said apologetically, “I can’t help but say ‘Paw’ because I have called him that so long.”
McAllister nodded encouragingly, and Pat continued.
“He thought he was going to die, and he had something that had to be told. . . . He told me that Tommy—he calls my husband Tommy—he said that
Tommy did not do what he was put in jail for. He said, ‘I did it.’ And that is as far as he went because I stopped him. I didn’t believe him in the first place, and in the second place, I had been told by the doctor he didn’t need anything to upset him or excite him, and I thought that was a pretty upsetting and excitable subject—so I didn’t pursue it.”
Even though Pat had been frantic to have her husband free, she had thought first of his grandfather’s health and allowed a confession to murder—which would have saved Tom—to hang in the air, unsaid. From time to time during her testimony she had looked modestly down at her lap. Now, she lifted her green eyes to her attorney.
When Paw returned home, Pat said, he worried about the nurse giving Nona medication. Pat had gone over to help out and they had had another conversation. “He was very, very irate at Mr. and Mrs. Boggs . . . he said [they] had been bothering Maw. He said, ‘I want to keep Jean and them away.’ He said, ‘If they don’t stay away and leave her alone, I’m going to blow her head off just like I did Walter's and Carolyn’s’ . . . So that night, he went into everything. He told me every single thing he done.”
Pat was very earnest, very definite as she described how torn she had been between concern for Paw’s health and her need to know the truth. She had permitted him to give her details “only after he was released from the doctor’s care and I saw that he was all right then.”
As she recalled, she had committed the old man’s statement to paper about three weeks before it was notarized. “Mr. Allanson wanted me to bring the typewriter over to the house and type it up. And I am not a typist in the first place. The typewriter was too heavy for me to move because I was still on crutches.” She said she had explained that to the old man, and he had agreed she could just write down what he told her. “He still said, ‘I’m not going to the police about it. It will upset Mama, make her have a heart attack.’ He had been using this on me a long time to keep me from going to the police after he told me. And he said, ‘I’ll tell it to you now the way it really happened.’ ”
“And did he?”
Pat looked toward the ceiling, as if searching for guidance, and then rolled her tongue again in the familiar gesture. “Yes, sir,” she said with emphasis. “He did . . . I don’t know how to describe it unless you could say . . . that the more he told me, the more I wrote down what he said, the more excited he became as he was telling it . . . I questioned him numerous times throughout it . . . you know, like, ‘How could you have done that, Paw?’. . . I wrote down verbatim every word that he told me. . . . He wanted me to type it up because he could not read the handwriting. . . .”
