by Ann Rule
He also denied Tom’s application for bail.
Pat had never hired a new attorney. Much to her chagrin, Ed Garland assured Pat that he wasn’t going to quit. Getting Tom a new trial had become a “personal vendetta” for him. Having to deal with his client’s wife was a cross he bore stoically.
Tom wrote to his grandparents:
I know the disappointing news of the hearing was up setting, but don’t eat my steak. I am going to be home soon, and I can assure you I will devour it. I am just so thankful that my two women and you, Paw, are holding up out there for me. I really have to commend Ma and Pat for being so strong. It has been so hard on both of them. I guess it has been physical hardships on top of all this mental strain that has been so rough.
I sure am glad you and Ma love Pat and she loves the both of you so much. I know she has been a real blessing and support to you and Ma. She always seems to gain strength from somewhere when Ma is upset and calms everything down. Paw, I really love that woman. She is so wonderful.
In late July 1975, Pat Allanson called Bill Hamner, Paw Allanson’s attorney, and told him that the elder Allansons wished to add a second codicil to their wills. This codicil, dated August 1, removed Jean Boggs completely as executor or trustee of her parents’ wills, leaving Pat and Tom Allanson as the sole executors. If Tom were still incarcerated at the time of the Allansons’ deaths, then Pat alone would distribute their assets.
Nona and Paw were deemed of sound mind, and they knew what they wanted to do. Nona was confined to bed much of the time, her speech was garbled, and she had little use of one hand. Paw took wonderful care of her, lifting her tenderly and seeing that she was always well groomed. He was a good cook and in relatively good health for a man of seventy-eight. They could manage on their own, but they had come to depend on Pat for backup. Her presence was comforting. Visits from Pat and Debbie, and often Margureitte Radcliffe, brightened their days. There were errands to run and things difficult for Paw to do. It was hard for Pat too. Her abscess was getting worse again.
Pat had long since stopped taking the Mellaril, although she was receiving fifty milligrams of Demerol four times a day for the pain from her abscess. Demerol is a narcotic drug, and two hundred milligrams a day is a high dosage for anyone to take regularly. Demerol is not routinely prescribed, anyway, for more than ten days for an outpatient.
To her doctors’ consternation, Pat’s abscess grew larger, deeper, and more purulent during the summer. They could find no reason for this, save the possibility that she was simply a “poor healer.” Pat had to use a wheelchair now when she came to visit Tom, and the jail authorities allowed them to visit downstairs in the lawyers’ cubicles to save her the agonizing trip to the regular visiting area.
In September, Pat’s abscess became an out-of-control volcano. It was as big as a fist, extending three or four inches down into her right buttock. The odor from the wound was nauseatingly putrid. She was in constant danger of going into septic shock from blood poisoning.
On September 12, Pat went to the Bolton Road Hospital in Atlanta. She complained of severe radiating pain and was no longer able to walk. When physicians lifted the dressing from the open wound, they gasped. The thing seemed to have a life of its own. How could this slender woman have stood the pain of such an angry-looking pus-filled lesion?
Pat was admitted to the hospital at once. She would undoubtedly need surgical intervention if she was to survive. For years Pat had complained to everyone who would listen that she was a sick woman, a woman who was not long for this world.
And now that might be true. The doctors at Bolton were puzzled as to the cause of such a deep festering wound, especially when their patient had been taking four capsules a day of the potent antibiotic Keflex.
Pat was released from the hospital but only on a temporary basis; she was readmitted pending surgery two weeks later. During this period she sometimes appeared delusional. She became fixated on religion. Lying in her bed in her filmy negligees, she would often rise up suddenly, point her finger at whoever was visiting, and cry out, “May the Lord have mercy on your soul!” Other than that bizarre affectation, she seemed relatively stable mentally. Susan and Debbie, who were often at her bedside, grimly compared their mother to Regan in The Exorcist.
Pat had harassed Eastern Airlines until Susan was transferred from Newark, New Jersey, “for compassionate reasons.” She needed all of her family nearby. One evening that September, Susan was on call for Eastern, and she planned to stay the night at the Tell Road farm because it was much closer to the Hartsfield-Atlanta Airport than the Alfords’ home in Marietta. She carried with her the uniform of an Eastern flight attendant—a blue skirt, blue and white plaid blouse, and fitted red vest with gold buttons and wings over her left breast.
“They called me in the afternoon for a flight,” Susan recalled. “And, out of the blue, my mother decided she didn’t want me to go. I had my uniform on and I was trying to get out the door when she came after me with her crutch. People never realized it, but my mother was physically very, very strong. She would get right up in your face, so close that it seemed like she could walk right through you. She had me backed up in a corner, poking her crutch in my stomach, when Boppo showed up. Papa had called her. Boppo could control Mom. Boppo almost never got angry, but this was one of the times she did. Mom let me go, but she’d accomplished what she wanted. She wanted Boppo to come home from work—and Boppo was there. I missed my flight, but I managed to make the next one and wasn’t disciplined.”
Susan recalled that her mother’s behavior that summer became increasingly assaultive. Pat turned on her stepfather often. She never drew blood, but it was a frightening time. The only person who had any control over her was her mother; Margureitte could stare Pat down. And, if need be, Margureitte could draw on a few histrionics herself.
“If you keep this up, Pat, I’ll kill myself . . . ” Boppo would cry. It was her final weapon. That threat always worked. Emotions were so chaotic among the Radcliffe women that suicide threats were omnipresent. And they were all given to sporadic bouts of melancholy: Susan, Debbie, Pat, of course, and eventually even Boppo.
Thorazine, a potent antipsychotic drug, was prescribed for Pat. For a time, things got somewhat better.
***
Tom and Pat argued in late September; she was interfering in his case, overriding his attorneys again, and it worried him. She had attempted to see police records of the Athens and Atlanta police departments hoping to find some record on Little Carolyn. It was illegal for Pat to do that. When Tom told her that, she flew at him.
As always, he was contrite when he phoned the next evening. “Sometimes you do the wrong thing, darling,” he tried to explain. “Do you really expect me to go along with you when I know it’s wrong? Can’t I correct you some? Don’t you understand it doesn’t affect our love? . . . I’m trying to keep you from making a mistake. It’s not got a thing to do with our love.”
“. . . The other day, you said you were so proud of me,” she sulked. “You can’t be when you call me things like you did yesterday.”
Pat told her husband she was going into the hospital but she would send him a picture first. “I'm standing [in the picture] without the crutches,” she said. “I have a painful look on my face. . . . Did you stay up long enough to hear all the songs I asked for last night? ‘I Want You in My Dreams’ and ‘Blue Eyes’? I did it special because of the way you felt about me yesterday.”
To make him even more ashamed of questioning her actions, Pat confided that he had upset her so much that she had had her first blood clot in a long time after their argument, and that she had lost the use of one arm. Neither was true.
“Tom, if I was dead, do you think you would ever be able to find out what’s going on? . . . I don’t have much longer, Tom.”
“I just don’t understand,” he groaned. “. . . Did the doctors just wash their hands?”
“I’m fighting like crazy when the doctors tell me it’
s hopeless.”
“. . . I don’t believe that,” he said desperately.
“I told you you weren’t ready for the truth. . . . I told you what the doctor said. They say there is nothing they can do.”
“How long do they give you to live?”
“It depends on how fast it eats up the tissues.”
“Nothing can stop it?”
“Nothing. They can’t do any blood transfers ’cause they’ve got an open place that won’t close, and it never will close because it gets deeper and deeper. . . . Now you can understand the pressure I’ve been under. You are the only thing that gave my life real meaning. If I do something that hurts you, it tears me up. I been laying here torn up all afternoon,” she said softly. “I come up there smiling, Shug, even though I hurt.”
Pat’s abscess was, indeed, growing deeper and deeper and deeper. Back in the hospital on October 1, she went through myriad medical tests. Cultures of Pat’s wound grew out both Proteusmirabilis and Staphaureus bacteria. She required blood transfusions, and she vomited continually. Given gamma globulin, she had a severe anaphylactic reaction, accompanied by hysteria. Since anaphylactic shock—often experienced by those allergic to bee stings or penicillin—can kill quickly by suffocation as the breathing passages and throat swell, Pat’s panic was not abnormal.
Pat had been admitted to Bolton Road Hospital on an emergency basis, and it became evident that the surgery had to be done soon. On October 17, when she was strong enough to withstand an operation, she was given nitrous oxide and a local anesthetic and the huge abscess was excised, along with the granular tissue and the scar tissue surrounding it, leaving a massive permanent indentation in her right buttock. During and after the procedure, the wound was flooded with antibacterial materials.
Judge Wofford signed a judicial order that allowed Tom to go to the Bolton Road Hospital under guard and donate blood; Pat’s surgery had required many transfusions and she would be hospitalized for a month or more.
“Patient had extreme pain and required large doses of narcotics and sedatives, and was very difficult to control under these circumstances, but gradually through the team effort of her mother, Dr. P., Dr. G., and Dr. R.—all working together—we convinced her of the benefits of sticking to one regimen and she gradually got better,” her hospital records noted.
Pat was finally released from Bolton Road Hospital on November 21. She would have to return every week to have her progress monitored and her dressings changed. At her request, her doctor wrote a letter to the Fulton County jail authorities.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
This patient . . . has a deep (3-4 inch) ulcerating lesion of the right buttock which renders her bedfast . . . and, as such, she is in critical condition, and likely to remain so for some time.
Her husband is in the Fulton County jail nearby where she can at least talk to him by telephone and know he is in proximity. It would be extremely beneficial to this patient if he could remain there and possibly if it could be arranged at some point for her to visit him, whereas if he is farther away, she certainly would not be able to. The emotional upset which has accompanied the trials and tribulations of her husband have materially affected her health and continue to. . . . She requires sedation and pain medications. . . . If the problem was compounded by his being removed, it could conceivably have a very detrimental effect on her general physical health, as well as her emotional stability. . . . I believe that this could have a life and death bearing on Mrs. Allanson's case in terms of her mental and physical well-being. . . . The circumstances are most unusual. Her illness is also most unusual. . . .
All of Pat’s physicians were bewitched by the beautiful green-eyed woman who bore such terrible pain. Not one of them ever isolated just what had caused her intractable infection. In lieu of a definitive diagnosis, they marked their records: “Chronic nonhealing abscess, secondary to penicillin injection.”
***
At home, with her physicians’ approval, Margureitte tried to cut Pat’s use of narcotics. She gave her pain shots several times a day as she had for weeks now, but she gradually diluted the Demerol injections with water. Pat noticed the difference almost at once and was furious.
Pat hired a private detective, without consulting Ed Garland, and had him follow Tom’s ex-wife. She suggested that the detective seduce Carolyn to gain more information. “Just pull the ‘old suave’ on her,” Pat urged.
The planned seduction of Little Carolyn never came off. Pat was still operating on Perry Mason plot lines, and the private investigator only humored her. When she told Ed Garland what she was up to, he shook his head. He explained to Pat that the only issues left that might help Tom were: if they could discover new evidence, if they could prove Carolyn had perjured herself, or if they could prove that Tom’s lineup had been contaminated by the presence of the two fire fighters whom “everyone knew.”
Despite all the letters saying that Tom’s departure for Jackson Prison would kill his wife, he was definitely headed in that direction—and soon. For the first time, Pat wondered if she might have called the shots wrong in Tom’s defense plan. It was humbling for her to bring up, because she had never apologized for anything. “Let me ask you something,” she finally said to Ed Garland. “Would we have been better off to drag the cat along and [if we had] told that Tom went there without any weapons and talked to his father?”
“Want my honest opinion?”
“Yes.”
“He would have been better off. . . . It’s been my opinion the whole time, based on all my information. . . . We could have got a manslaughter and ten years out of this case to begin with—if only we’d approached it along those lines,” Garland said firmly.
With time off for good behavior, that ten years would have come down to only a few. Tom could have been out of prison and back with her long before the seventies moved into the eighties. Pat had truly messed up her husband’s defense, and Garland was at a loss to know why. She wasn’t stupid—far from it—and she wasn’t crazy either. Willful, yes, and strangely secretive. Whatever her reasons had been, it was far too late now to change things. Tom was going up for a very long time.
Pat beseeched Garland to find a way to have Tom incarcerated in Atlanta. “I will never be able to travel the distance to see him . . . that’s just like taking a candle and putting out the light. . . . Now, once every four or five days I’m going to be talking to him for ten minutes. That keeps me alive for another four days.”
CHAPTER 27
***
Paw Allanson had a heart attack on January 15, 1976. Pat told Tom when he called her from jail. “Yesterday morning, Paw had a heart attack,” she said. “He’s in South Fulton [Hospital] . . . the doctor is not expecting him to die from it, you know—he’s not paralyzed or it’s not a stroke or anything. It did some damage to the heart walls; when he comes out, he is not going to be able to do heavy lifting. . . . Ma called me yesterday morning to tell me. She was hysterical—she couldn’t tell me anything . . . I told her to stay calm.”
Pat had been confined either to bed or to a wheelchair, but with the news of Paw’s coronary she was suddenly up and about. Almost miraculously, she was able to drive again. She needed a cane to walk, but she was in the hospital visiting Paw, seeing to Nona in the rest home and then in South Fulton where she had been placed temporarily, and generally taking over all their affairs. She refused to let their own daughter, Jean Boggs, have any say in their care.
On February 4, 1976, there was a third and final codicil to the elder Allansons’ wills. This time, the codicil was far more intricate, but when the details were winnowed out, their daughter Jean Boggs had been completely excluded from inheriting, and Tom had become his grandparents’ principal heir. If Tom should predecease Pat, she, as his wife, would inherit almost everything the Allansons owned.
When it was decided that Paw could go home, it was Pat who insisted on being there for Paw and Nona almost every day. She was the liaison between Paw
and his attorney. She was the only one who could translate Nona's garbled speech. Pat Allanson was the indispensable woman.
***
It looked as though Tom was going to Jackson Prison and there wasn’t a thing in the world to stop it. Even though his case was being appealed to the Supreme Court, he would have to await the justices’ decision in prison. Pat had warned him that he might have to go to Reidsville Prison, “where men died all the time.” In comparison, Jackson Diagnostic Center was preferable by far.
Pat’s whole mien had become one of bitter acceptance. She bombarded Tom with negative thoughts. They both might as well be dead. Every time he tried to inject hope into their phone conversations, she deflected it. “I’m trying to explain to you that I don’t have anything to live for,” she sighed.
“Oh you don’t?”
“That’s what I can’t make you understand.”
“You know better, Shug,” Tom said, trying to soothe her.
“You just said you’ve been trying to find something that is important to keep me interested in doing some thing,” she replied softly. “But don’t you understand the only thing that is important to me is you?”
“I know, darling—but I can’t come home right now. So what am I gonna do in the meantime?”
“You can’t come home period,” she countered.
“You really know that is true, don’t you?”
“All I know is that you’ve been sentenced to two life sentences and that is a fact,” Pat said, her voice suddenly harsh.
“. . . I see you want to argue about this, and we’re not ever gonna get anywhere.” Tom’s voice dropped hopelessly.
“I don’t have any reason to live,” Pat said. “You are the only reason I have to live. You said life is being concerned with the things that we can feel and touch. We can’t feel or touch or see each other.”
