by Ann Rule
Judge Holt again ordered the jury to disregard her statements. But Fanny Kate would be heard. She was, she announced, a witness to Paw’s confession to Pat. If not an eyewitness, she was most certainly an “earwitness.” She said she had been with Pat the very day Paw dictated his confession. “Mrs. Allanson got restless and wanted to know what they were doing out back, and I went to see. And as I stood at the jalousie door that goes to the garage, I overheard the conversation. Pat begging him to slow down—that she couldn’t take the notes so fast. And he become irritable with her and spoke up. His voice raised and says, ‘I killed Walter and Carolyn. I didn’t intend to kill Carolyn. But I did it in self defense!’ ” Fanny Kate said she didn’t hang around to listen but had gone back to Nona Allanson’s room.
On cross-examination, Weathers asked Fanny Kate about her allegiance to the Radcliffes and Pat Allanson. She allowed she was “close” to Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe, and “very close” to Pat.
“How long after you heard someone admit to . . . a double murder case was it that you called the local law officials?”
“I didn’t understand the question.”
“How long . . . from the time you heard this did you contact any law enforcement official?”
“I didn’t contact any law enforcement at all.”
“When is the first time since this date in 1976 that you have furnished this information to any law enforcement?”
“I furnished it to Mr. McAllister, the lawyer.”
“That is not my question. When was it, please, ma’am, that you have given this information for a double murder case to anyone in law enforcement?”
“I didn’t give it to any law enforcement at all.”
“When is the first time you gave it to anyone in the district attorney’s office?”
“Not at all.”
“When is the first time you tried to contact any judge or any superior court?”
Fanny Kate wasn’t catching on yet. “Not at all.”
“Well then, this is the first time that any of these people have had any opportunity to hear this today, is it not?”
“I turned it over to Mr. McAllister.”
“That is not my question.”
“I haven’t told anyone.”
“That is my question. . . . No further questions.”
It was clear to the most casual observer that Fanny Kate Cash would do anything possible to help Pat out of a jam. She was not nearly as subtle as the other defense witnesses, and she tended to embroider, but her loyalty was unquestionable. Dunham McAllister could see the problems inherent in his witness. He approached her warily for redirect examination and was rewarded with an incredible story that he would just as soon not have heard.
She said she and Pat had gone to the house on Washington Road with a message from Tom “warning Grandma to be careful. Her life was in danger. . . .”
“And that night, between eleven-thirty and twelve o’clock, [my] phone rang and I answered it. And it was a disguised voice—”
“Miss Cash,’’ McAllister said quickly, “I don't want to go into that. I think Mr. Weathers probably would object to that.”
Mr. Weathers objected to Mr. McAllister’s assumption of what he might object to.
“Go ahead,” McAllister said, a trace of apprehension in his voice.
“I answered the phone and there was a disguised voice, saying, ‘What did you tell Mama?’ The word ‘Mama’ gave the voice away. And I coolly answered, and said, ‘What did I tell—what did I tell Mama?’ and the phone went up. I recognized that voice, and it was Walter Allanson’s!"
Fanny Kate had a scenario of her own. If the case on trial had not been so serious, her testimony would have been hilarious. But no one laughed.
Andy Weathers caught her again on recross. If Miss Cash had been so fearful for Nona Allanson’s life, if she had gone there to deliver an alleged message from Tom warning her that her life was in danger—this pathetic old woman in a wheelchair with the use of only one of her limbs—then when had she called anyone in law enforcement to warn them of the great danger this invalid lady was in? Had she told anyone?
“No one, no,” Fanny Kate responded. “Not at all.”
McAllister demanded to see all of Tom’s letters to his grandparents and asked for time to analyze them. Judge Holt would not pause. He had warned the attorneys that he had only a week for this trial. He suggested that McAllister’s wife, Margo—his co-counsel—could go over the letters.
They moved ahead, the trial staying afloat but getting bulkier and bulkier, listing to port with its heavy load of objections and legal arguments.
***
Deborah Taylor Cole was the next witness for the defense. She was Pat’s second daughter, the one who had married at fifteen and never left Georgia. At twenty-one, she was a slender young woman with brown hair, pretty—but without a vestige of the regal carriage of her mother and grandmother. Debbie spoke so softly that it was hard to hear her beyond the first row of the gallery. She answered with as few words as possible. In Debbie, Dunham McAllister had yet another witness who had spent time in Walter and Nona Allanson’s home, and who could verify Pat’s statements.
“I worked for them . . . [for] three weeks.” Debbie wasn’t sure just when she had worked for Nona and Paw Allanson. “It was summer. It had to have been June—somewhere around there.” She remembered that she had been there the day before Paw was taken to the hospital. Yes, she had had several conversations with Nona.
“Did she say anything about Mr. Walter Allanson?”
“About which incident?” Debbie asked. “I mean there is a lot of things she told me about her husband.”
“Did she say anything on that day about anything that he had done to her?” McAllister encouraged.
“Well, she’s—I came in and she was crying . . . and you have to get up real close to listen to her because she has—she can’t talk very well. So I went real close and asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘Paw tried to smother me.’ And. I said, ‘Well, how did he do that?’ She says, ‘He just did.’ ”
Debbie’s recall was remarkably similar to her mother’s, her grandparents’, and Fanny Kate Cash’s.
When Andy Weathers approached to cross-examine Debbie, she watched him the way a possum watches a hunting dog. He asked her about Nona’s condition. Was she not very weak, capable of using only one hand? And wasn’t Walter very strong, able to carry his wife from room to room?
Debbie insisted that the old woman was “very strong as far as her side that she could move. She was very strong on that side.”
“She would be unable—if she was on the bed—to get up?”
“She was also able to answer the phone if it rang,” Debbie added, without answering the question.
“She would be unable to get out of bed?”
“No, she can't get out of bed.”
“Don't you really think that if that man wanted to do something to hurt that woman—a man of his strength, a woman weighing less than a hundred pounds, a woman who’d suffered a massive stroke—if he wanted to do something to harm her, he could have done it with the greatest of ease?”
Debbie looked trapped, and she ducked. “I really can’t answer that question.”
Weathers didn’t push her. His point was made. In response to further questions, Debbie Cole described the people present in the Washington Road home on June 12, the day before Paw was hospitalized. “I think I was with my mother . . . Mrs. Allanson and Mr. Allanson . . . my little girl.”
“Any other people there?”
“No.”
“Are you positive?”
“Not to my knowledge,” she replied, giving the standard Radcliffe answer.
Amazingly, Debbie had forgotten the bombastic presence of Fanny Kate Cash, who had sworn right in that courtroom that she had been there that day to protect Pat and “Grandma.”
“No further questions.”
There was redirect and recross, but it
was apparent that Debbie was not a very good witness. She often answered, “Huh?” or “I don’t remember.
***
Debbie Cole was the last witness. The defense rested without calling Tom Allanson to the stand. Although the gallery had held stubbornly onto their seats in the expectation of seeing Tom, he had long since been returned to Jackson Prison.
Dunham McAllister wanted nothing or no one who could tie his client, however tenuously, to the 1974 double murders on Norman Berry Drive. If Tom had appeared on the stand, Andy Weathers would have had a field day on cross-examination.
To the defense team’s chagrin, Weathers did the next best thing by calling a former Fulton County assistant district attorney to the stand on rebuttal. Tom would not be in the courtroom to relive the night of July 3—but William Weller, the D.A. who had prosecuted Tom, was. Weller had recently left the D.A.’s office for private practice and was currently the chairman of the criminal law section for the Atlanta Bar Association.
Although Paw Allanson’s confession had already been fairly well discredited, Weathers wanted the jury to see that he could not possibly have shot his son and daughter-in-law, and that Pat had tried to sacrifice the old man to free her husband. Over McAllister’s vigorous objections, Weller sketched a rough depiction of the basement on Norman Berry Drive, pointing out the kitchen steps and the “hole.” He recalled examining the interior of that aperture and seeing the bullet marks all over the inside.
Bill Weller said that the “window” into the hole was at least as high as his own waist. “It wasn’t an easy chore for me—as a young man—to lift myself up and get inside that hole," Weller said. “The basement was very difficult to walk around in—just so much debris. About the only area where you could walk, there were rugs and kinds of planks and things all over the floor.”
He had made his point. There was no way that Paw, close to eighty, could have physically done what the confession said—run around that basement jammed with junk and then lift himself on the weight of his arms and jump nimbly in and out of the hole. As an expert in criminal law, Weller testified that he “did not buy” the document purported to be Paw Allanson’s confession.
“Could this [confession] possibly be used to get a new trial?” McAllister asked him on recross.
“Yes, sir.’’
“Your answer was yes. It’s your opinion that this could be used to get a new trial?”
“Almost anything can be used to get a new trial.”
McAllister tried again; he didn’t want to leave the jury with the impression that Paw’s confession would really have helped Tom get out of prison. He needed desperately to remove this motive from Pat’s case. “If the person who made this were dead,” he asked Weller, “would this be admissible at that new trial?”
“If the judge wants to hear it,” Weller said implacably, dashing McAllister’s thrust that a dead Paw Allanson would be useless to Pat. “He [the judge] has full discretion to do what he wants to do in a new trial.”
Weathers stepped forward to box the defense in further. “If a trial judge wished to accept this document as being true, Mr. Weller, and Mr. Walter Allanson was not there to object, is it not a fact that all charges could have been dismissed that day, and he [Tom] could walk out of the penitentiary the next day, if the trial court judge saw fit to do it?”
“If he wanted to do it,” Weller agreed.
McAllister would not give up. “What you’re saying then is that, under the law in Georgia, a Superior Court judge has infinite power in the trial of a case?”
“Yes, sir,” Weller agreed.
“But such a statement as this is inadmissible, is it not?”
“As a general principle of law,” Weller said, “it’s inadmissible. But it depends on what you’re using it for. If you are using it for impeachment, it may be admissible. If you are using it as direct evidence, it would probably be inadmissible, depending on the circumstances.”
***
Testimony in Pat Allanson’s trial ended near 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 5.
Final arguments began Friday morning with Andy Weathers painting a devastating picture of a conscienceless woman who had planned a double murder deliberately. He offered no eye-witnesses.
“Ladies and gentlemen . . . when somebody plans a murder and is cold enough to put arsenic in people’s food and drink, the state can never bring in someone who watched them do it. They are far too careful.”
Weathers listed the outright lies, the evasions, the omissions that permeated Pat Allanson’s explanations for everything. A prosecutor who usually argued only for “about five minutes,” he talked much longer. So many segments of the defense case didn’t match up.
Dunham McAllister argued that the state had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Why had Nona not testified? Where were the tests of Paw’s gastric juices? Why weren't they saved? Was Walter Allanson weak or strong? Since Tom’s cousins still got one-sixth of the elderly Allansons’ estate, albeit with Pat as the executor, didn’t that prove she wasn’t behind changing their wills three times?
McAllister fought hard, striking at relatively minor points to deflect attention from the glaring gaps in Pat’s testimony. He even went so far as to suggest that, according to the experts, no one knew if arsenic was a poison or a drug, and that it was possible that the poisoning of the Allansons “was just a pure and simple accident.” He enlarged on that bizarre theory: “. . . and then he [Paw] takes an overdose of drugs and does strange things and tries to feed Mrs. Allanson something. Maybe tries to feed her liquor that’s got arsenic in it. That’s just one possibility.”
McAllister was an excellent criminal defense attorney, reminding the jury again and again that they had to be sure. “Twelve people have got to cut everyone off and say the only thing that could be in this case is the guilt of that lady over there. You have got to decide whether they have cut those things off or not.” He submitted that the state had failed to prove Pat Allanson guilty to a moral certainty. If the jury agreed with him, Pat would walk free.
It was almost over. Andy Weathers rose to speak for the final time. It was patently ridiculous, he maintained, to consider old Walter Allanson a killer—by shotgun or by poison. Pat Allanson was the guilty party, a woman who had first tried to foist off a phony confession to free her husband from prison and then attempted murder so that she could inherit a fortune. And a fortune it was. In the best light, the Boggs children would receive a small portion of the trust portion of the Allansons’ estate. “She has the power of attorney. She has to make no accounting. If she depletes the trust estate, this paragraph number two here only comes into effect if there is anything remaining in the trust estate.”
“The motive she had is right here,” Weathers concluded. “She inherits the whole thing. . . . Pat Allanson is guilty of what she’s charged with doing. She’s guilty now. She was one block away when her husband was in that basement doing that killing. And you have this confession [Paw’s]. . . . You will note in here that Tom Allanson . . . is caught right close by. It says he’s there while his grandfather does the killing. Now ladies and gentlemen, if Tom Allanson was there and could refute this, and his wife is on trial, why in the name of God didn’t they put him up?”
Why indeed? It was likely that Tom had not been put on the witness stand because he had refused to lie about his grandfather. Yes, he wanted out of prison terribly. He would hate to see his wife convicted and sent to prison. But he loved old Paw, and he would not get up and lie and say his grandfather was a killer—not even to save his own skin and Pat’s.
Perhaps the woman on trial had underestimated her husband.
Dunham McAllister was outraged by Weathers’s final statement. He asked that the question about why Tom hadn’t testified be stricken from the record and that the jury be instructed to disregard it.
Once again, the two attorneys turned to the law books.
Andy Weathers won.
“I am going to let the Supreme Cour
t say it,” Judge Holt barked. “I’m not going to say. I overrule your objection.”
“For the record,” McAllister asked, “might I also make a motion for a mistrial?”
“Yes, sir—and I overrule your motion for a mistrial.”
The jury went to lunch. They would begin deliberating at 2:45 on Friday afternoon, May 6, 1977.
CHAPTER 38
***
Susan Alford was terrified that they were going to send her mother to prison; she was angry with Dunham McAllister for not pursuing a defense of mental illness.
She believed that her mother was addicted to drugs and should be in a hospital, not in prison. But it was too late now. The young Eastern Airlines flight attendant, her friend, Sonja Salo—who was also an Eastern flight attendant, but who was saving to go to law school—and her sister, Debbie, waited with Pat, Boppo, and Papa for the jury’s decision. Mr. McAllister had warned them that it might take a long time, and if it did, that would be good. If a jury came back quickly, it usually found the defendant guilty. The longer the better.
Susan had a presentiment of doom.
Pat, Sonja, and Susan went over to the Underground to have something to eat. Pat ordered lunch and iced tea, but Susan and Sonja, unable to choke down food, ordered drinks. “We were scared shitless,” Susan recalled, “terrified of what was about to happen. I felt in my bones that this was going to be the last time—maybe ever—that we would be together like that. I kept thinking that my mother might be sleeping in jail that night. I didn’t see how she could survive if they found her guilty.”
As for Pat, she seemed oblivious of the fact that her fate was being decided across the street and eight floors up.
They hurried back to the corridor outside courtroom 808. Two hours into deliberation, Judge Holt called the jury in and asked them if they were making any reasonable progress toward a verdict. They felt that they were. He offered them a choice about supper. If they went out to eat, they would have to go together on a bus; it would take almost two hours. Or they could order food in.
