Everything She Ever Wanted (30 page)

placed a call to Ed Garland and Bill Weller.
 
No one had expected a

verdict so soon.
 
Tom was brought over from jail, and the colonel and

Margureitte supported Pat with their arms as they entered the

courtroom.

By 8:44 P.m all the principals were present.
 
Pat stared at the jury,

her face full of hope.

"Mr. Foreman," Judge Wofford asked, "has the jury reached a

verdict?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

"Mr. Weller, will you receive and publish the verdict, and Mr.

Allanson, will you and your attorney stand right out here, please, and

face the jury?"

Assistant District Attorney Weller unfolded the piece of paper and

began to read, "Dated October 18, 1974.
 
We the jury find for the

defendant-" Tom sighed with relief, and Ed Garland started to smilebut

only as long as it took to take half a breath.
 
Weller continued to

read.
 
"We the jury find for the defendant guilty on both counts of

murder The jurors had mistakenly used the wrong terminology.
 
They had

found Tom guilty, but the term "find for the defendant" meant, of

course, that he had been acquitted.
 
The relief and then the letdown

were excruciating.

"You will go back in the jury room and correct your verdict," Judge

Wofford explained to the jury.
 
"It will be, 'We the jury find the

defendant guilty."
 
In other words, you have one word too many in

there."
 
They returned with the word deleted.

Ed Garland asked for a polling of the jury.
 
Tom stood as if made of

stone, as pale as marble, showing no emotion at all.
 
Pat watched the

jury in utter disbelief, her chin trembling and her eyes filling with

tears.
 
As each juror spoke the word "guilty" aloud, she swayed as if

she could collapse at any moment.

Georgia justice was swift; there would be no wait before sentencing.

Tom Allanson would know his fate before he left the courtroom.
 
He

could be sentenced to death-twice.
 
He might now be facing the electric

chair.

Weller asked to address the court.
 
Those watching expected to hear him

ask for the death penalty.
 
Instead, he began, "I have spoken to the

family of the late Mr. Allanson and .
 
. . I think I can state that

they do not wish the state to press for the death penalty in this case

because of the emotional involvement between the defendant and his late

parents.
 
Because.
 
of the family's wishes, we will waive the death

penalty and request the court to direct the jury to sentence the

defendant to two concurrent life sentences.

A few moments later foreman Thackston handed the sentence to Bill

Weller.
 
On the judge's orders, he had hastily written in his own hand

the words that charted Tom Allanson's future.

"Your Honor, shall I publish the sentence?"

"If you will, please, Mr.
 
Weller."

"We the jury," Weller read, "fix the sentence of the defendant at life

imprisonment on both counts, the sentence under Count II to be served

concurrently with the sentence on Count I.

Tom and Ed Garland stood before Judge Wofford as he read the sentence

again.
 
"It is hereby the verdict of this court that these be your

sentences, a life sentence on Count I of Indictment No.
 
A-22765, and

to run concurrently with that, a life sentence on Count II of

Indictment No.
 
A-22765, and may God's love sustain you now and in the

days that are to come.
 
The court is no w adjourned."

It was 9:00 P.m only sixteen minutes since they had all been summoned

there.

Pat threw herself into Tom's arms and kissed him on the mouth, clinging

to him desperately until deputies stepped in to handcuff Tom and lead

him away.

"Tom?"
 
she called after him, and he stopped and looked back at her,

his expression one of blank despair.

She blew him a kiss and said, "I'll see you tomorrow?"

He nodded.

"Good."
 
Pat smiled brilliantly-for Tom's sake.

Margureitte, who sat in the front row of the courtroom watching, called

out, "I love you, Tommy!"

He had been so thankful when he became involved with Pat and the

Radcliffes and they had welcomed him into their home and their

hearts.

They had transformed his life.
 
How could everything have gone so

terribly wrong?

Technically, Tom would become eligible for parole in seven years.
 
It

didn't matter.
 
Seven years without Pat was like imagining a thousand

years without air.
 
Puling slightly against his handcuffs, he struggled

to get one more glimpse of her.
 
If he had wanted to, Tom could have

flung the deputies beside him against the wall, but he never thought of

it.
 
He watched Pat walk out of the courtroom, borne on her

parents'arms, and then let his guards lead him away.

Tom didn't know that Judge Wofford himself had come down from his bench

to speak with the Radcliffes and Pat's daughter, Susan.

Susan Alford had wiped away her own tears and listened as the judge

comforted them.
 
"You know, it's really sad, Mr. and Mrs.

Radcliffe.

That boy didn't get a fair chance.
 
That boy was there in the basement

that day of the killings.
 
Something happened.

Maybe a terrible argument.
 
But it wasn't a premeditated shooting.

Why in the world wasn't this done another way?"

Judge Wofford was only echoing the unspoken question on ever one's

lips.
 
How could it be that a nice guy, a good old boy like Tommy

Allanson, was on his way to prison for life for the cold blooded

shootings of his own mama and daddy?
 
How could it be that the perfect

love he had finally found in his Pat had ended in death and despair?

try Linda Patricia Vann was the name they gave her at birth.
 
She would

have many names in her life.
 
Patricia, or rather Pat, was the only one

that would stay with her.
 
She was born into a southern family whose

roots were so deep in the earth that no hurricane of scandal could tear

them loose.

She was a Siler.
 
And Silers took care of their own.
 
They were the

Silers for whom Siler City, North Carolina, was named.

Her maternal grandfather was Tasso Wirt Siler, born November 3O 1879.

He had studied to become a Lutheran minister but changed his religious

allegiance and became instead a fire-andbrimstone Baptist preacher.
 
A

tall, strong man with an expansive wit and a kindly heart, he combed

his thick white hair into a subdued pompadour and wore round wire

eyeglasses.
 
Tasso Siler was highly respected in the close-knit

community he served.
 
A truly good man.

In 1900, when he was twenty-one, Tasso Siler married Mary Value

Phillips, five years his junior.
 
She was a slender, almost ethereal

girl, quite beautiful, who seemed too frail to serve her husband and

the Lord as a preacher's wife.
 
Mary Siler seldom betrayed her own

deepest emotions.
 
She was given instead to reciting optimistic sayings

and poems, and to recording her journal.
 
We were so happy," she wrote

of her days as a bride.
 
"It did not seem our lives could be made so

sad in tines to come.
 
But it's best that people can't see ahead.
 
If

so, some of us might give up."

Six decades later, she lamented the passing of another year.

"What we have done will soon be a sealed book.
 
If it's been good or

bad, we can't change it.
 
It will stand as it is.
 
It is sad, for some

of us will have marked up pages in our book from many unkind words to

someone, or maybe [we] did not try hard to make others' lives happy."

The Rev.
 
Silers would live in countless parsonages around Wilmington

and Warsaw, North Carolina, in their more than fifty years together.

Mary was dutiful, dedicated, and fecund.
 
She gave birth to thirteen

children.
 
Later to be dubbed "the Righteous Sisters" by an irreverent

younger generation, the girls were Edna Earl, Swannie Lee, Florence

Elizabeth, Alma Mehetibel, Mary Louise, Thelma Blanche, Myrtle

Margureittesubsequently just Margureitte-and Agnes Fay.
 
The boys were

named Mark Hanna, Wade Hampton, Robert Winship, and Floyd Frazier.

Mark died in infancy, as did an unnamed infant girl.
 
When a minister's

salary could no longer stretch to feed more children, the Silers chose

the only certain birth control available to them in the 1920s; Mary

moved into a separate bedroom and their conjugal pleasures ceased.
 
She

was only thirty-seven and Tasso just forty-two.

Margureitte was particularly attentive to Siler family history.
 
By

1991, she would proudly list her parents' descendantsdown to the sixth

generation.
 
They had 13 children, 47 grandchildren, 95

great-grandchildren, 84 great-greatgrandchildren, and 2

great-great-great-grandchildren.
 
Over the years, tragedies occurred,

as they do in all families: babies died, young soldiers never came back

from war, and children succumbed to cancer and rheumatic fever and,

one, impalement on a bedpost.
 
A young wife disappeared, leaving her

children to be raised by whomever, another threw her baby away in a

trash can (it survived), and a few descendants-or their mates-went to

prison for violent crimes.
 
Such negative minutiae were never

officially acknowledged, and bad marriages were simply ignored in the

recitation of the family tree.