Table Of ContentEverything She Ever Wanted
by: Ann Rule
Synopsis:
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ann Rule, a true story of
obsessive love, murder, and betrayal. A series of brilliantly
manipulated crimes brings two families to ruin, and at the center of it
all is a sociopath whose evil hides behind her soft words and gentle
manners. To be the subject of a two-hour ABC-TV miniseries.
This portrait of Pat Allanson, a seemingly proper Southern belle,
reveals a sociopath with a history of misguided love, denial, and guilt
who destroyed those closest to her.
Pocket Books
ISBN: 067169071X
Copyright 1993
Zebulon, the seat of Pike County, fifty miles south of Atlanta, is
little more than a town square, the four streets surrounding it, and
some houses radiating beyond. Like scores of other small towns in this
part of Georgia, it is sheltered by a green blur of trees-pine,
dogwood, magnolia, and oak. On a hot summer's day, their branches form
a leafy dome that traps the sodden heat, and everything beneath grows
as if in a hothouse. Shade gives only an illusive promise of surcease
from the sweltering summer temperatures. Cosseted in a perfect
environment, the kudzu vine creeps along the orange earth, smothering
each thing it covers, an innocuous-looking blanket of pointed leaves,
an emerald parasite.
The courthouse in Zebulon is red brick, with white gingerbread trim and
an alabaster bell tower gleaming against the sky. Magnolias, oaks, and
maple trees dot the broad lawn, and each of the courthouse's four
entrances is flanked by blood red geraniums in stone urns. A tilted,
graying stone memorial sits in one corner of the courthouse grounds,
its purpose to honor seventeen white Zebulon boys who died in World War
I, including two Marshalls, two Pressleys, and a Pike. Only one name
is listed under the chiseled COLORED in the lower right corner.
E. R. Parks remains segregated even on a heroes' memorial.
The businesses across from the courthouse hide behind contiguousbut
totally different-stone facades with squared-off rooflines of varying
heights: a clothing outlet store, some antique shops, a furniture
store, a hardware store. The Reporter, Zebulon's weekly newspaper, has
its offices at the end of the block. There are Coca-Cola and Dr.
Pepper machines every seventy-five feet or so along the sidewalks.
Vehicles-mostly pickup trucks-park diagonally along the street. A
earless yellow dog, in no danger, ambles casually across the road.
When Hollywood producers were looking for a typical southern town as a
filming site for Murder in Coweta County starring Andy Griffith and
Johnn Cash, they chose Zebulon. Pat Taylor and Tom Allanson also chose
Zebulon to live out a fantasy of their own.
It was 1973 when they came to town, first living as lovers, then as man
and wife. She was a slender woman with emerald green eyes and a pile
of bouffant curls. He was a tall, tanned man. She was beautiful, he
was handsome, and together they seemed to have the kind of love that
could survive any adversity. Pat described her feelings in a note she
wrote to Tom on the back of their wedding picture: We are joined
together as one for life-what greater thing is there for 2 human souls
than to be twined together for life, to strengthen each other in all
our labor, to lean on each other in time of need, to rest on each other
in time of sorrow, to minister to each other in time of pain, to be
with each other always with our memories and our ONENESS LOVE to
sustain us....
I feel that in loving My Tom I am nearest to heaven.... When I came to
you, Tom, I put me within your hand-my body, heart, and soul. You are
my love, and you make me wholly yours in all the ways there are; this
sweet bondage is more enduing than locks or bars. I will never leave
your breast to dream of other things for I have found in My Tom the
"end-of-my-quest. My body blooms all over from every vien [sic]
because I'm Tom's Pat. Behold, I left the old me far behind and shed
my old life leaf by leaf...
And so she had.
Pat and Tom set out to create from their perfect love a perfect
world.
And yet, within that paradise lurked the possibility of jealousy and
rage, of adultery, fornication, incest, rape, and even murder, grim and
violent intrusions from the real world.
Each of them had family ties far too strong to let loving commitment
grow unstunted. Back and back and back, old slights magnified rather
than diminished. Pride, like the kudzu covering the dry earth, only
scabbed over deep and painful wounds that had never healed. Untangling
the story of their lives is akin to following the verdant convolutions
of that parasitic vine that eventually kills every living thing that
sustains it.
They had come to each other from the cold ashes of failed marriages.
At thirty, Tom was younger than Pat by six years; he had two short, bad
marriages behind him and she had one long one in which she had felt
trapped and smothered. Both of them had sought perfect love most of
their lives. Despite the odds, they truly seemed to have found it in
each other, although -at least on the surface-they had nothing more in
common than potent sexual passion.
Tom was strong as an ox, and Pat was tiny boned and fragile, often
ill.
He was a blacksmith; she loved doing dainty handwork, embroidery and
painting. He had a college education, and she had married first when
she was in the tenth grade and dropped out of school. He was calm and
soothing, and she sometimes seemed anxious and frightened.
It didn't matter. All he had to do was open up his huge arms, and she
would crawl up on his lap and hide in the safety of his strength. Tom
always told Pat, "Remember, Shug, 'First things first'-and the first,
most important thing is that I love you more than anything in this
world."
And she would answer in the soft little girl's voice that belled her
thirty-six years, "I love you, Sugar. I love you, Shug."
Pat Taylor had known Tom for years before she really saw him.
Her whole family-her parents, retired army Colonel Clifford Radcliffe
and his wife, Margureitte; her children, Susan, Deborah, and Ronnie; as
well as Pat herself-was deeply involved in the horse show world of
Atlanta. The Radcliffes' stables boasted some of the area's finest
horses. Pat, who was living with her parents, taught riding to an
exclusive clientele, and both her daughters were champion
equestriennes.
Tom Allanson had worked with their horses and sold them feed when he
was employed by Ralston Purina. The son of an attorney, he had set out
to be a veterinarian, although he had not quite reached that goal. Tom
had been a friend to Pat's family, nothing more, but any woman who
watched him at work, naked to the waist, his muscular torso glistening
with sweat, would have noticed him.
Shoeing the Radcliffes' prize Morgan horses, he lifted their hooves in
his hand as easily as if they were lambs' feet.
And then, a series of events in the fall of 1973 brought Tom and Pat
together. Pat was free of romantic commitments, and Tom, who was
seeking a divorce from his second wife, needed a temporary place to
live. The Radcliffes had plenty of room at their horse farm on Tell
Road in East Point south of Atlanta, and they invited him to stay. He
could sleep on the sofa in their den, and they could use his help with
their horses.
To a pragmatist, their coming together was expedient; to a romantic, it
was fate. Whichever, Tom Allanson and Pat Taylor soon spent every
waking moment together. He loved everything about her, and she
continually surprised him. He knew almost nothing of her life before
he met her and didn't care to. She, however, was insatiably
curious-about his family and the women whom Tom had loved before he
loved her.
In spite of the fact that Tom was still married, they had a wonderfully
romantic courtship. Tom could not believe his good fortune at having
found Pat, and he was awed that she loved him back. His biggest fear
was that her health would completely break down and he would lose
her.
When she was taken with one of her fainting spells and hospitalized, he
was desolate, standing helplessly beside her bed with her pale hand in
his huge work-gnarled fist. He lay single roses on her pillow and
gazed at her with tears in his eyes.
Pat tried to send him away, warning Tom she wouldn't be good for him,
that he deserved a "whole woman." She begged him to face the truth.
"You don't want me, Tom," she'sobbed. "I can never give you
children-I've had a hysterectomy. I'm just an old woman with a scar
down my stomach. Nobody would want me.
It only made him love her more. He didn't need more children; he and
Pat would raise his two children and, of course, her boy, Ronnie, was
still only in his teens.
Pat and her family became everything to Tom. They had given him
shelter-and love-when no one else would. Pat's mother, Margureitte,
was the kindest woman he had ever known; she would do anything to help
her children and grandchildren, and Tom respected the colonel for his
army service and for his dignity and military bearing. He pleaded with
Pat to marry him as soon as his divorce was final.
Pat couldn't take stress or dissension or disappointments.
When Tom listened to her speak of her longings, he realized that what
she wanted in this world wasn't that much; she just wanted it so
badly.
He vowed to do whatever he could to make her life so happy and calm
that she would regain her health.
Pat had one special dream-a dream that no man yet had been able to make
come true. She longed to live on her own plantation.
More than a century had passed since the Civil War, but Pat yearned for
the genteel life of a southern belle as it was evoked in Margaret
Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind. She wanted her own Tara; she
wanted to be Scarlett O'Hara. Somehow, someday, she believed Tom was
going to get her her own place, a spread of land where she could hold
her head up proudly. A place where she could grow the roses she loved
so.
"I'm like a rose, Tom," she explained softly. "And like a rose, I'm
selfish. I want all the sun for myself, all the rain.
Roses need everything so that they can bloom and be beautiful."
She wasn't really selfish, he knew. It was only her appetite for life,
for love, she spoke of. That was one of the things he admired about
her: she reached out for life with her two hands, grasping all its
wonder and clasping it to her breasts. She made him see what could
be-should be-for them.
Together, that first October, they came across a place that seemed
meant just for them. Pat was having a good week, feeling strong and
healthy, and she and Tom went deer hunting. He was so proud of her.
The way she tramped around the woods with him, cooked over a campfire,
and loaded her own gun, shouldering it as well as any man, amazed
him.
"She knew more about guns than most men," he said later. "She had me
buy a .44 carbine so she could go deer hunting with me-that's a
powerful carbine."
She was such a remarkable woman. Pat could do just about anything.
They cuddled together through the long cool Georgia nights, warming
themselves with a sexual fervor that had not diminished with
familiarity, but had only grown more intense. So it seemed a good omen
for their future together when they found the red brick house with a
porch all around it in Zebulon during their hunting trip. There was a
For Sale sign on it, and they learned it was the old "Hoyt Waller
place" and that Waller was selling it because he was divesting himself
of some of his many real estate holdings.
After Pat pointed out the tremendous potential just waiting to be
tapped in the sprawling farm, what they could do with it, Tom was as
wild to have it as she was. The place was right on Highway 19 a few
miles north of Zebulon. Its four hundred feet of road frontage was
fenced in with freshly painted white horizontal boards. There were
soaring pine trees beyond the roadside meadow and a curving drive wound
between tall Georgia holly bushes all the way back to the brick house
and the barn.
"It was just perfect," Tom remembered. "I wanted to stay there until
the day I died. It had everything I ever wanted. The house was a
brick ranch-style house. It had a twenty-five-acre pecan grove plus
twenty-seven more acres. It had everything you could ask for. It was
the most beautifully landscaped place. It had the orchards. It had
the garden spots. It had the vineyards.
Apple trees. Pecan trees. Pear trees. Catalpa trees. Rose
gardens.
It had a beaver pond on the back side of it, and the pastures, the
deer, the quail. It was just a beautiful place.........
All they had to do was figure out a way to buy it. Waller wanted
forty-two thousand dollars for the spread, and it would take some fancy
financing for Pat and Tom to swing that. There was money in Tom's
family, all right. His father was a successful East Point attorney who
had made a bundle of money in land deals. Still, Tom knew his father
wasn't likely to help him out. He couldn't remember the last time he
had done anything his parents approved of. They were still so angry
about his second divorce, there was no point in even asking them for
help.
Anyway, it seemed that his father enjoyed watching him fail.
Tom was the last of three Walter Allansons. Old "Paw"Walter
Allanson-was the first, and then came Tom's father, Walter O'Neal
Allanson, and finally Tom himself, Seaborn Walter Thomas: "Tommy."
Paw
and Nona, Tom's grandparents, were well up in their seventies, but they
had always been more like his parents than Walter and Carolyn Allanson
ever were. Paw still farmed his place over on Washington Road in East
Point. He had made a small fortune over the years and he was
frugal-but he wasn't stingy, the way his son was.
