Skip to main content
The largest online newspaper archive
A Publisher Extra® Newspaper

The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 122

Location:
Atlanta, Georgia
Issue Date:
Page:
122
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

M4 Sunday, December 6, 199? DIXIE LIVING The Afanta Journal Tfa CoRsKhon POISON SCARLETT Taylor: Southern-belle image proved a deadly snare: f(, m- 7 A i Y-t i if "V-i I lii i i i I -i I I 1 6 i i. Chronology May 9, 1 974: Pat Taylor and--Tom Allanson are married. July 3, 1 974: Walter and A Carolyn Allanson are shot to death In their home; Tom Allan- son is charged with the Oct. 18, 1974: Tom Allanson is found guilty on two counts of murder and sentenced to con- current life terms in prison. Aug.

6, 1976: Pat Taylor is I arrested on two counts of at-tempted murder for administer-ing arsenic to Tom's grandpar- ents, Walter Thomas and Nona Allanson. May 16, 1977: Pat Taylor is sentenced to two consecutive 1 0 year prison terms. November 1 984: Pat Taylor is released from a halfway house and officially paroled. Spring 1987: Pat Taylor and her daughter, Debbie Cole, go to work as nurses for the James Crists in Atlanta. June 1 988: Pat Taylor and 1 Debbie Cole are fired by the Crists' son, James.

April 17, 1991: Pat Taylor A and Debbie Cole are arrested and charged with attempting to 1 murder Mrs. Crist by administer- ing drugs, theft by taking, unlaw- ful acquisition of drugs and prac- tidng nursing without a license. June 12, 1991: Pat Taylor pleads guilty to all charges and is sentenced to eight years in pris-- on; Debbie Cole is placed in a'v pretrial intervention program. Simon Schuster A highlight of Pat Taylor's life was riding costumed in velvet with Gov. Jimmy Carter (left) in one of the Kentwood farm surreys.

Ann Rule's book details Taylor's political connections. x- i 4 7 1 i 'T-, 1 Continued from I "The book is full of untruths," Mrs. Radcliff says. "I'm not contest-; ing the court documents, but there are several things in there in regards to me personally that are not true." i Mrs. Radcliff insists that her daughter is too ill to talk now.

"She's paralyzed from two strokes and in a i wheelchair." Through a prison spokesperson, Taylor said she did not want to be in-! terviewed about the book, i Taylor apparently has adapted, i well to prison. In an August article in The Augusta Chronicle, she was fea-; tured as a kindly great-grandmother who is one of the founding members of People Who Care, a program started in January to help sick inmates deal with isolation, rejection and illness. At the time, Taylor was embroi-! dering a swatch of cloth that eventual-! ly would become part of a massive i quilt with the names of inmates killed by AIDS. The reporter described her as having "gentle eyes and a warm smile" and remarked that she looks "like someone's grandmother." "I am someone's great-grand- mother," Taylor replied. i The old-fashioned image Ms.

Rule said in an interview that i Taylor "was an old-fashioned image of what a Southern woman should be. i For some men, she was exactly what they were looking for." This was particularly true for Tom Allanson. A tall, strapping, college-; educated blacksmith, Allanson came along when Pat then 36 had abruptly divorced her husband of 20; years in an attempt to pursue the ro- mance and wealth she felt cheated out of in her marriage. When her affair I with a married member of Gov. Jim-I my Carter's Cabinet, who is not named in the book, ended in rejection, she set her sights on Allanson, Ms.

Rule writes. Allanson, who was still married to his second wife, Carolyn, fell hopelessly in love with the Southern charmer despite objections from his parents, Walter and Carolyn Allanson. Allanson's divorce eventually became final, and in the weeks after the wedding, relations between father and son soured even more, fueling strange incidents. Tom's father's guns were stolen; the elder Allansons were ambushed in their car in a barrage of Tom's ex-wife found poison in her children's milk; and Pat Taylor Allan-son accused Tom's father a respected East Point lawyer of sexually exposing himself to her. Throughout all this turmoil, Taylor, irate at being excluded socially by the Allansons, continued to prod her husband into a showdown with his father, according to Taylor's daughter.

"She was on his back day and night," Taylor's daughter, Susan Al-ford, said in an interview. "Tom tried to tell her that his father didn't want him over there, but she really thought he needed to go over there and tell his' father a thing or two and get back in his good graces. Tom has to be responsible for what happened with his parents, but if my mom had not entered the picture, it would never have happened." What occurred that night may be as much a mystery to Tom Allanson as it is to the police who investigated the murders. Allanson says he went to his parents' house to talk to his mother and attempt a reconciliation while hisl father was at work. Meanwhile, an unidentified woman called Walter Allan-son at his law office and told him his son was on the way to the house looking for trouble.

An East Point firefighter who saw Tom walking toward the house testified that he had no gun, but moments after he entered the Allansons' darkened basement, a shootout left Tom's parents dead. Was it a setup? Today, Mr. Stoop, the investigator, and Ms. Rule are convinced that Tom was set up by his wife. "Tom admitted his guilt as far as the shooting of his parents," Mr.

Stoop said in an interview. "But his contention is that it never would have happened if it weren't for her. And I kind of believe that. She egged him on, pushed him along, and he wasn't that strong a person to resist what she had to "I think it was set up so there would be an explosion of gunfire in the basement," Ms. Rule says.

"I don't think she ever expected to see Tom alive again." Police found her sitting in her jeep a few blocks from the Allansons' house. Fleeing the scene of the crime, Allanson stopped to tell her what happened, and she replied that she knew; she already had called her parents. Taylor (left) and daughter Debbie Cole at a ballet recital in 1989. interview. "We found out they were fired for posing as registered nurses and robbing the Crists blind.

That's when I decided to call the DA's office to find out if there was an investigation going on." The man she reached was Chief Investigator Ron Harris, who remembered Taylor from her 1976 conviction. Mr. Harris checked the files and found there was an open case with a complaint filed by Mrs. James F. Crist, but there was not much to go bh.

The entire file consisted of a yellow sheet from a legal tablet that read, "all leads exhausted." He immediately assigned it to Don Stoop. Mr. Stoop and fellow investigator Michelle Berry interviewed the Crist family and began digging into Taylor's past The Allanson murder case was examined again, and Mr. Stoop, was convinced that Taylor's involvement was deeper than she had admitted. When Pat and Debbie finally were arrested, they and the rest of the family blamed their daughter and sister, Mrs.

Alford, and even sought and received a legal injunction barring her from having contact with them. The DA's investigator pushed for additional charges against Taylor in connection with the murder of the Allansons in 1974, but Fulton County Assistant District Attorney Bill Akin's opted for a plea bargain, according to the book. "When you start getting a case that old, your proof problems multiply;" Mr. Akins said in an interview "It certainly was something that we could have indicted on, but frankly, it was of more use as a bargaining tool." In the end, Taylor was allowed to plead guilty to aggravated assault with intent to murder, theft, and practicing nursing without a license. In return she received a promise from the DA's office that she would never have to deal with questions about the Allan-son murder case.

Debbie Cole was placed in a pretrial intervention program, and Tay-. lor was sentenced to eight years in prison. Taylor's ex-husband, Tom Allan-son, is now a born-again Christian living in Georgia. He requests that the location not be revealed. ''Pat could turn the planets around and nobody would know the differ- I ence," he said in an interview.

"That's unfortunate, because people were hurt. I'm just sorry she did that to me and my family." Allanson, who praises Ms. Rule's accuracy, says the book helped him see things more clearly. "All I wanted to do was make Taylor happy, and it got to the point where nothing would make her happy. It took me awhile to get my eyes open.

I did a lot of stupid things, but that was because I was so blindly in love." Author Ann Rule and some of Patricia Taylor's relatives will discuss the book on "Sally Jessy Raphael" at 9 cm. Wednesday on Simon Schuster Susan Alford, with husband Bill, provided information to the police that led to the arrest of her mother and sister. Taylor was charged with attempted murder April 17, 1991. verge of death from the poison. She was a model prisoner at the Georgia Women's Correctional Institute at Hardwick cheerful, friendly and endearing to the prison matrons.

She was released in 1984 but in 1991 was arrested again in connection with suspicious circumstances surrounding her job as nurse for a prominent Atlanta couple, the Crists of Nancy Creek Road. Mr. Crist, who had Parkinson's disease, was in declining health. Following the same pattern she had used with the Allansons, the book says, Taylor separated Mr. Crist from his wife and children, told the children Mr.

and Mrs. Crist were asleep and could not see them, drugged Mrs. Crist with enough sleeping pills to make her almost comatose and, according to investigator Stoop, began stealing jewelry, priceless Civil War artifacts and other items. "She had the most beautiful antique lace that was missing from the Crists that she used to make outfits for her dolls," says daughter Susan. In spring 1988, concerned about his mother's worsening health, James Crist's son, Jim, secretly took Mrs.

Crist for a blood test that revealed her system was loaded with the sleeping pill Halcion. That, coupled with pharmacy bills ranging from $700 to $800 a month, resulted in the dismissal of Taylor and her daughter Debbie Cole. Taylor told her family they were let go because the insurance had rim out. And that probably would have been the end of it had it not been for a phone call from Mrs. Cole to her sister, Mrs.

Alford. "She called me and said, 'You've ruined it for us. We know that you called Mrs. Crist and told her lies about us. You made us lose our jobs.

And I'll never forgive Susan was puzzled. When she told her husband, Bill, about the call, Mr. Alford 1 said he had "had it," and called the Crists himself. Posing as nurses "That's when he and I got the' shock of our lives," Susan said in an "Why did she call her parents before she even knew what Ms. Rule asks.

"When Tom came running out of the rain and the mist that night, he must have been like an apparition to her. Why didn't she drive him to the police or drive him home? She let him go running off into the night alone, and then told the police how. worried sick she was about him." During the trial, she insisted that her husband not plead guilty to a lesser charge, and she undermined the defense to the extent that attorney Ed Garland tried to have her barred from the courtroom. The judge refused. Allanson was convicted of the killings and sent to prison for 16 years.

He was released in 1989 and has remarried. During Allanson's early days in prison, Taylor made tapes of her conversations with her husband, his attorneys and his ex-wife. She later gave the tapes to daughter Susan along with some music tapes. "Bill and Susan thought they were all country-and-western tapes, but they weren't," Ms. Rule says.

"They were very revealing. The woman's de-meamjr changed with every phone call. "The most chilling tape was the one in which Tom says, 'I love you more than anything else in the world, And she says, 'Not quite. You love me more than any one in the world, but you don't love me more than any thing in the world. You love life more than you love At one point, she brought poison into prison and asked Tom to take it, Ms.

Rule says, quoting Tom Allanson and prison tape-recordings. "She said, 'The only way we can be together is if we're both dead. You take it, and I'll go out in the parking lot and take it, and we'll meet on the other This was a time when she was in charge of Tom's elderly grandparents and had seen that the will was changed four times to make her executor of an estate worth $200,000, according to the book. If Tom were dead, most of it would go to her. A model prisoner The marriage ended after Taylor, was convicted of attempted murder in! 1976 for feeding arsenic to her husband's grandparents, who were on the.

Get access to Newspapers.com

  • The largest online newspaper archive
  • 300+ newspapers from the 1700's - 2000's
  • Millions of additional pages added every month

Publisher Extra® Newspapers

  • Exclusive licensed content from premium publishers like the The Atlanta Constitution
  • Archives through last month
  • Continually updated

About The Atlanta Constitution Archive

Pages Available:
4,100,324
Years Available:
1868-2024