Everything She Ever Wanted (77 page)

Dunham McAllister rose to ask for a needed time.
 
He was sure there

would be leniency in delay.
 
He .

the sentencing guidelines, but he had to have time to do some

research.

He was not presently prepared to go forward.

judge Holt was not amused.
 
"You must have anticipated this," he

said.

"I have no excuse.
 
I do ask your forbearance in granting a delay."

weeks of civil cases.
 
"I can't do it Monday.
 
I've got two sentencing

will be on May 16."

McAllister started to ask if his client could be free awaiting even

before he got sentence, but judge Holt was ahead of him, the request

completely out.
 
"No.
 
if I did it for one, I'd have to do it for all

of them."won't do it.
 
It creates red tape for everyone.
 
If my do it

for you and every other office inoffice, the district attorney's

office, a stand that?"
 
volved.
 
The defendant is in custody.
 
Do you

understand?
 
Deputies moved toward Pat, handcuffs ready.
 
She turned

back toward her sobbing family as she woodenly allowed herself to be

cuffed.
 
She looked so lovely in the dress she had made, s wide and

this one of avocado and cream, her green eye tark white skin.
 
Her

daughters cried frightened against her s ed, but they did not, of

openly.
 
The Radcliffes were stunned disappear.

It simply course, break down.
 
They only watched Pat d' could not be

that their daughter was going to jail, not to stay all nigh t.

jean and Homer Boggs congratulated Andy Weathers and the lawyers began

to gather up their papers.
 
As Weathers turned to leave, Boppo ran

after him.
 
"Sir!
 
Sir!"
 
she cried.
 
"You have made a terrible

mistake!"
 
Weathers acknowledged her with a half shake of his head, but

kept on walking.

The television cameras rolled, catching all the emotion, but Pat's

family didn't know that until they saw their images caught on the

eleven o'clock news I felt like someone had died, " Susan ing to lead

me out of the courtremembered, "and Sonja was try' room."
 
The bailiff

was turning the Already, at judge Holt's order, lights out.

On May 16, Andy Weathers urged judge Holt to give Pat 'able "She took

from them [the Allanson the stiffest sentence possi Allansons]

everything they had-as well as their mental capacities.

. . . Arsenic poisoning is one of the most painful ways for a human

being to die.
 
. . . This is a brutal scheme.
 
She showed not one ounce

of mercy to these two people she tried to kill one day at a time.
 
And

they would have died if the scheme had not been detected.
 
I don't

think the defendant is due any points.
 
It's a cold scheme.
 
It's a

calculated scheme.
 
It's carried out where they would die an inch at a

time.
 
They suffered great pain.
 
. . .

I'd ask the court to set a sentence that is consistent with this

brutality.

Dunham McAllister reminded the judge that "the evidence only clearly

established at least one poisoning episode for Mrs. Allanson and two

for Mr. Allanson.
 
There was no evidence other than that."
 
He asked

that Pat's medical problems be taken into consideration.
 
"I would ask

the court to consider a lenient sentence, to consider probation, that

Mrs. Allanson is a person who can benefit from a period of

probation."

Judge Holt apparently did not agree.
 
He sentenced Patricia Vann

Radcliffe Taylor Allanson to two ten-year prison terms, to be served

consecutively.
 
Under Georgia statute, it was the harshest sentence he

could impose.
 
Pat stared at her attorney as if she didn't

understand.

Surely this was a mistake.
 
Surely the judge was only saying what he

could give her; he couldn't mean that he was actually going to send her

to prison.

Grimly, Dunham McAllister gave notice of appeal.

"I can't hear it now," Holt said.
 
"You can file it.
 
I'll hear it as

soon as I can."

Only three years had passed since Pat had married into the Allanson

clan, and in that space of time the family had been well nigh

annihilated.
 
Walter and Carolyn were dead; Tom was locked in prison,

convicted of their murders; and his children had been adopted, lost to

him.
 
Paw and Nona would have arsenic in their bones until they died.

They would never be the same.
 
Jean had been forced outside the circle

of her own family.
 
The few Allansons who were alive and walking free

were full of doubts and recriminations.
 
Pat had seemed to be a frail,

dependent woman when she insinuated herself into their midst, but she

had fanned each faint spark of disagreement into glowing coals of

hostility and distrust that needed only a faint breeze to burst into

flames.

She had promised Tom love unlike any he had ever known before.

Believing he saw paradise in her transparent green eyes, Tom had taken

her as his wife.
 
And she had come close to destroying him and

everything he loved.
 
He might better have flung himself into a

volcano.

Tom's parents had detested Pat, but her own family loved her beyond

reason.
 
Margureitte's devotion was all-encompassing, Pat had

an-forgiving, blind.
 
And it wasn't just Margureitte found love and

acceptance wherever she turned from the moSiler and all her aunts

adored her.

moment she was born.
 
Mama Gil still loved her even though she had

banished him without giving him a reason.
 
Susan and Debbie and Ronnie

cherished their mother and overlooked her eccentricities and her

demands for more.

Always more.

Pat's family had crumbled at its center, the structure weakening with

each new disaster until it was as friable as a cheap Christmas

ornament.
 
Everywhere Pat walked she left tears and as a catalyst to

tragedy, dissension and death in her wake.

She was a flawed genius who recognized vulnerability in others.

Unerringly, she fixed on weakness and burrowed and twisted until

something or someone broke.
 
If she could not be happy, then she would

not have anyone find JOY.

Mama Siler had neglected the other grandchildren so that c 'de, Patty

could have the best of everything.
 
Kent was a suicide and for more than

a decade.
 
Boppo and Papa had never really had a life of their own;

they had lost the house on Dodson Drive, and now even the Tell Road

farm.
 
They were bankrupt.
 
Ronnie had been kept from Gil when he

needed a father most, and Pat gave him anything he wanted as long as he

was there for her.
 
Pat had meddled in Debbie's marriage until it was

hopelessly broken.

Seeing the danger, Bill Alford hoped to get Susan and Sean away before

it was too late for them too.

Until this moment, Pat had walked away unscathed from the havoc she

wrought, so self-involved that she never even saw the being forced to

deal with wreckage behind her.
 
But now she was what she had done.
 
She

was thirty-nine years old and she was going to prison.

That couldn't be.
 
it wasn't fair.
 
It was, as her mother had cried out

to Mr. Weather "a terrible mistake."
 
s, Pat would serve her sentence

at the Hardwick Correctional Institute n Milledgeville, Georgia, the

site of Georgia's first state capital.

Southeast of Atlanta and sandwiched between the Oconee National Forest

and Lake Sinclair, Hardwick was, indeed, a prison, even though it

looked from the exterior like a fine southern girls' school set in

green rolling countryside.
 
A huge tree grew in front, rhading picnic

tables and softening the effect of the fence topped with razor wire.

It was new construction, made of beige stucco whose hue was not unlike

the tan uniforms itr inmates wore.

The custodial complex was small-too small, really; many of the inmates

slept in dormr, in mobile homes on the back side of the prison.
 
There

was no free movement from place to place, and Pat's days were regulated

by rules and other people's time schedules.
 
The food was heavy and

starchy, the sheets were rough, and the other prisoners were not from

the kind of life she had known.

She hated it.

"Even though the walls are painted pretty and it looks nice outside,"

she told her family, "don't let them fool you.
 
It's still a prison.

They degrade you."

Margureitte and Clifford Radcliffe made the eighty-mile drive to

Hardwick faithfully each weekend.
 
They would not dream of missing a

visitors' day.
 
When the Radcliffes or Pat's children came to visit,

they were searched and anything they brought with them had to be

checked by a matron.
 
When Pat was ushered down to see them, the

matrons had her step into a small bathroom off the visiting area before

and after for a body search -as if she were a "common criminal," she

said.
 
She had been &scinated with the indignities Tom suffered in

prison, urging him to tell her details; now she was learning what it

was like to d.

be cage Pat quickly convinced prison authorities that her health

problems made it impossible for her to work in the kitchen.
 
She

couldn't lift anything heavy and the smells of institutional food

sickened her.
 
The prison kitchen served a lot of fish from nearby Lake