by Ann Rule
“Was it typed?”
“Yes, sir, it was. . . . My mother typed it, because I can't type—except one finger.”
“Now,” McAllister continued, “between the time it was stipulated and June 13 of last year, what was your contact with the Allanson home?”
“Between the time this was signed and the thirteenth?”
“Yes.”
“Very few, because I was afraid to go back. I would say probably four or five times at the most. Instead of going every day, I only went those times when Ma called me and begged me to come. I always went—but I always took someone with me, from the very day that he told me that. . . . From that date on, I never went back to that house alone.”
Pat recalled the unsettling weekend of June 12-13, shuddering at the memory. Her facial expressions and gestures were very dramatic. “Ma had called us that morning. She was hysterical. She said Paw tried to kill her. [That] he was drinking, that he had gone crazy. . . . She didn’t know what to do and she was frightened.”
Pat and her parents went to her rescue, of course, she said. Once inside the house, someone had called Dr. Jones, and “against my wishes,” Pat explained, the old man had remained out of the hospital. She asked her good friend, Fanny K. Cash, to stay the night for protection, as if a sixty-seven-year-old woman would be much protection against the out-of-control admitted killer Pat had described.
On Sunday morning, Pat said, she had to call Dr. Jones again.
“What were you doing when Dr. Jones arrived?”
“When he arrived that Sunday morning?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I remember,” Pat said suddenly. “I was bathing Ma, and because I knew I had left her only partially clothed in the bathroom and it was cool, I had to hurry back to her. So I just ran up real quick and answered the door and Dr. Jones followed me back, and I showed him which room Paw was in.”
McAllister had a most important point he had to get across to the jury. He wanted to show, through Pat’s testimony, that she had nothing to gain, and much to lose, if Paw Allanson died. If Paw had died, he submitted, she might never have been able to use his confession to free Tom.
Weathers would not let him ask that directly. He maintained in objection after objection that McAllister’s questions on the matter were all leading. When the defense attorney tried through another door, Weathers objected again. At length, Judge Holt allowed McAllister to get at the subject in a roundabout way.
“Did I give you certain legal advice concerning your husband’s case?” he asked Pat.
“Yes, sir. You did.”
“Would you tell the jury what that advice was?”
“Well, you told me that the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for Mr. Allanson to die from his heart or anything else, because it was very important that he be alive and that he be able to testify to what he told me. . . .”
“Do you know anything about how arsenic got into the body of Nona Allanson or Walter Allanson?”
“No, sir."
Pat said she had heard nothing about anyone suffering from arsenic poisoning until June 28, when they had come with an ambulance to take Nona away. “There was a lot of confusion going on. And I don’t know whether I overheard it or whether it was said directly to me. It seems like Mr. Tedford is the one who said it—it seems.”
“Do you know anything about the presence of arsenic on or about the premises of Walter Allanson’s place?”
“No, sir. He didn’t let people ramble around his house.”
“Who prepared the food?”
“Oh, Paw did all the cooking . . . he wouldn’t let any one else.”
“Was that true on every occasion?”
“Every one until he went to the hospital. Then, of course, there were different nurses who cooked and everything.”
“Thank you.”
Andy Weathers rose to cross-examine. Questioning a defendant who was attractive, intelligent, and frail—with her cane next to her chair—was not going to be the easiest thing in the world. He knew that even Bob Tedford had initially felt sorry for Pat. Weathers had studied her during this trial and watched emotions flicker across her face. Concern. Boredom. Pain. Fear. Confidence. And sometimes a kind of supercilious annoyance—even with her own attorney. Pat strove, it appeared, to come across as an almost royal presence who, for God only knew what reason, found herself in a temporarily untenable and distasteful situation.
“You just stated . . . ,” Weathers began without preamble, “that Mr. McAllister gave you some legal advice as your attorney. I assume by this you mean he was already retained as your attorney at this time, and gave you legal advice about this document not being any good. Is that correct?”
Pat blinked. “Pardon, sir? I couldn’t hear.”
“You just stated to the jury, did you not, that Mr. McAllister gave you some legal advice concerning the validity . . . of State’s Exhibit No. 1 . . . ?”
“Yes, sir. . . . I don’t quite understand the question—”
Weathers repeated his question, which emphasized that the confession was worthless. Pat explained that it had not existed when she first went to McAllister in March. At that point, Paw had only told her verbally that he was the real killer of his son and daughter-in-law.
Answering Weathers’s questions about her marriage, Pat agreed cautiously that she and Tom were “very close . . . very, very close.”
“You’re stating to the jury that Tom Allanson never told you one word about his innocence in this case.”
“Yes, sir . . . he told me he was innocent and I knew that if he said he was innocent, he was innocent.”
“In fact, you knew a lot more,” Weathers said, moving closer. “Isn't it a fact when Mr. and Mrs. Allanson were killed, the police saw you directly outside the house when Tom Allanson ran outside the house?”
“No, sir. I was not.” Pat’s face flushed, and she watched Weathers warily.
“You were not in the car?”
“I was in —a car not far from there. Not a car, I’m sorry—in a jeep.”
“Not far from the murder scene?”
“Depends on what you call far.” Pat was slowly regaining her composure.
“Okay. You tell me how far.”
“A block, block and a half. That is where my doctor was. I had just come from the doctor.”
“At the time Walter and Carolyn Allanson were killed, you were approximately one block from that place?”
“More like two.” Pat backpedaled and decided that she probably had been more than two blocks away from the double murder scene.
“Did you see Tom Allanson run down the street right after the two people were killed?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you aware that he was seen running down the street?”
“I was afterwards, yes.”
“So that puts both of you all within two blocks of the murders.”
“It puts me in the doctor’s office two and a half blocks away, yes.”
“I believe you said a minute ago you were in a jeep?"
“Yes.”
Weathers was tripping Pat up on details, the “minutiae” that he knew he had to have, the string of small lies, exaggerations, the minimizations.
“Now, I believe you stated that this document [the confession] is verbatim—I believe the word you used—exactly what Walter Allanson told you about how he went about killing his son and his son’s wife? Is that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I believe you just testified to this jury that your mother typed this because you couldn’t type?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why does it say in the first sentence, ‘My name is Walter Allanson, and I’m telling this to my granddaughter, Tommy’s wife, Pat Allanson, and she’s doing it on the typewriter because I don’t write so good anymore’?”
Pat looked at the prosecutor as if he were totally dense. She explained that Paw had said exactly that—that he had
assumed she would be the one to type it.
Weathers switched to the third codicil to the elderly Allansons’ wills, dated February 4, 1976. “You heard Mr. Reeves and Mr. Hamner testify that if Walter Allanson died first; and Nona Allanson died, that everything they had would be left to you and Tom?”
“I heard him testify that is the way it was—but I was not aware of it at the time.”
“Well, didn’t you also hear him state you were present there when this explanation was made?”
She shook her head with slight irritation. “I was present part of the time. I was not present the entire time in the [hospital] room because the attorney got there before I did, and he was explaining the document to Paw.”
“Did you hear Mr. Hamner say you were present in the room when he explained it?” Weathers pushed.
“I will have to beg to differ with Mr. Hamner,” Pat said firmly.
While she claimed that her memory was better than the attorney’s, Pat was actually quite vague about the details of the Allansons’ wills, knowing only that the “percentages” were to be divided up between her husband and the other grandchildren. She insisted that most of what she knew about the wills and codicils she had learned only during the current trial.
“Didn’t you hear him say there was a catchall provision that if the estate was worth more than the trust, everything in that estate—Mr. Hamner testified—would go to Tom Allanson? [That] if he was married to you at the time, and if something happened to him and he was not able to inherit, everything in that estate would go to you? Did you hear that testimony?”
“I heard the testimony, yes, sir. I have been sitting here.”
Pat clearly wanted the jury to believe that she had had no interest in or understanding of the final disbursement of Paw and Nona’s considerable assets. Indeed, she professed to be basically ignorant of such folderol as wills and codicils.
Weathers asked Pat if she recalled using her power of attorney over the Allansons’ assets. “You don’t recall withdrawing anything from these people’s account?”
“There was no necessity to use it,” Pat replied.
“Do you recall withdrawing . . . money [from] Fulton Federal Savings and Loan Association [by writing a check] made payable to Walter and Mrs. Nona Allanson dated June 23, 1976, in the amount of one thousand dollars?”
Pat could not really recall putting that amount into her own account the next day, signing Walter Allanson and Patricia Allanson on the back—but she did admit the endorsement was her writing.
Finally she said, “All right. Yes, I did.” But she had, she insisted, done it for Nona. Nona wanted cash. Pat refused to admit that she had used the thousand dollars to pay for Tom’s legal costs.
Weathers changed tactics and returned again to the way Walter Allanson’s confession had been recorded. “Is this an exact account of what Walter Allanson told you transpired?”
“It was as exact as I could possibly get,” Pat said. “I don’t think I missed too many words. I just—I’m just a slow writer.”
“Don’t you think,” Weathers said in his deep, resonant voice, “it’s rather unusual that . . . [when] Fred and all these lawyers you know personally—that [with] something of this significance, you take this to a bank in front of people you had never seen and have it notarized after a long day of shopping? Just stop by to have a murder confession notarized? Isn’t this stretching things?”
Pat sighed. “It was not a long day, because we started the day late in the afternoon, and it was only to get groceries and take care of having that signed.”
“So, in having it signed, you go to people who don’t know any of you-all and just say, ‘Sign, Paw. Sign, Paw’?”
“I did not say that.”
“Then Mrs. Tichenor’s memory is incorrect?”
“Yes, I am afraid her memory is.”
So far in her testimony, Pat had found many prior witnesses’ memories to be faulty, including Bill Hamner’s, Fred Reeves’s, and Bob Tedford’s. Now, finally, she questioned the testimony of notary Joyce Tichenor. Everyone was out of step save Pat.
Weathers moved to the twenty-eighth of June, the day Nona Allanson was rushed to South Fulton Hospital to be tested for arsenic poisoning. Pat had no memory of Bob Tedford telling her that Paw Allanson had arsenic in his body. “Mr. Tedford did not mention arsenic at the time.”
She had just contradicted her own earlier testimony without realizing it.
“Mr. Tedford’s recollection, you say, is incorrect again?”
“I don’t recall what Mr. Tedford’s recollection was. . . . That was not right because I had already found that out earlier at the hospital.”
It was another contradiction of her own memory. Weathers noted it, but let it pass.
“Well. . . . If you knew that that man had arsenic in his body,” he said, “if you loved that woman, the first thing you would want for her . . . would be to get her somewhere where somebody could save her life. It’s possible she had arsenic.”
Again, Pat denied that anyone had told her Nona might be in danger of arsenic poisoning.
Dunham McAllister objected, insisting that Tedford had never mentioned arsenic in his testimony, and asked for a directed verdict of acquittal. He suggested that the state had failed to prove its case.
Weathers responded, “The state thinks this has been a very carefully planned scheme. . . . [She had the] opportunity. She stated to Tedford she was the only one who took care of them. She was the one who had the arsenic. She’s the one who had the most to gain. The statement— the so-called statement—has been completely refuted by Mr. Allanson. He said he never wrote it. He never did anything to his own child or his child’s wife. We think we are far, far beyond a directed verdict in this case, Your Honor.”
Judge Holt ruled against McAllister and the trial ground on. Weathers asked the court reporter to read Bob Tedford’s earlier statements. The court record verified Tedford’s testimony that he had told Pat on June 28 that the old man had been poisoned with arsenic and that the old woman might have been poisoned too.
Pat remained on the witness stand, listening as her testimony was undermined. She seemed unimpressed.
“Do you recollect him telling you that?” Weathers pushed.
“No, sir.”
Weathers pushed even harder. “What possible purpose could be served . . . by telling this nearly eighty-year-old woman that insurance wouldn’t cover her going to the hospital?”
“I never said that.” Nor could Pat see that there was any reason for Nona Allanson’s welfare to be a police matter. She suspected it was a guardianship fight.
“You are stating that he [Tedford] just showed up in the middle of the day and said, ‘We are taking her to the hospital’? Not going to say anything else—just, ‘Let’s go’?”
“That just about sums it up. Yes, sir.”
Pat was not shaken by the obvious discrepancies between her testimony and the testimonies of a number of prosecution witnesses. She looked petulant and occasionally glanced toward her parents for their support, but she wasn’t ruffled. Weathers’s skillful questioning had built the “basement” of his “house,” and he was working on the superstructure. A pattern of behavior was emerging. Even when he caught Pat in an outrageous, inappropriate response, she simply denied that black was black. She stepped away from this messy business of a trial. Her memory—the memory she bragged about—was suddenly full of gaping empty spaces.
Weathers forced her back again. Sighing, she related that the confession had been given to her three times—in the garage on Washington Road, in the old man’s hospital room, and in his home. She had written it down in her own hand.
“You have that writing with you?” Weathers asked suddenly.
“Gosh, no, sir. I don’t.”
“You don’t have it?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“Thrown away, I guess. I don’t really recall where it is. It’s probably throw
n away because it was only my own writing.”
“A confession to a murder in your writing as a man dictates it. You threw it away?”
Pat didn’t know where it was. “He could not read my writing that well, so it was typed up. And until then, I didn’t see that it made any difference the way I wrote it out. So long as it was typed properly. It was used to type that document you have in your hand. It was taken from mine.”
“The last page of this document has the signature ‘Walter Allanson’ on it,” Weathers said. “Why did you take this out of the typewriter and then reinsert it?”
“I told you, sir. I didn’t type it.”
Pat denied that she was in the room when Margureitte typed the confession, at least not “the entire time.” The last page had been typed on some old stationery left over from when her mother was secretary for the Dixie Cup Morgan Horse Show, but Pat had no idea why that final page had been dated and notarized three days before the first page was typed. Asked if she thought Paw had tried to commit suicide, Pat said it was quite possible. But if he had been suicidal as she hinted, she could not explain why a man who had as many guns as Walter Allanson had not killed himself with one.
“Doesn’t it seem strange a man would kill himself with the ingestion of arsenic over a six-month period of time?” Weathers asked.
“Nothing seems strange with him anymore," she said crisply, her voice edged with irony.
The witness stand was no longer a comfortable place for Pat. She stared coldly at Weathers as she said she had no idea why Paw might have chosen to kill his beloved wife of forty-nine years slowly with arsenic. She did not, after all, know that much about arsenic.
Weathers walked away from her, then turned back suddenly. “I almost forgot to ask you something, ma'am. You are the one that told Detective Tedford that what was wrong with Mr. Allanson was he had been swallowing pills by the handful?”
“I might have repeated this to him after Dr. Jones repeated it to me.”
