Ann Rule Everything_She_Ever

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no body to exhume and test for arsenic.
James Crist had been cremated just before the New Year, 1989, two years
before.
In checking with criminalists, Stoop learned that arsenic is one of the
very, very few poisons that can still be detected in the cremains of a
human being. Because it Is so insidious, leaching I ims, into the
hair, nails, and eventually the bones of its vict' arsenic remains long
after the person is reduced to ashes. The Crist family had been
through so much pain. When Don Stoop approached them about the
possibility of having James Crist's ashes tested for arsenic, they
could not do it. It seemed a sacrilege.
No one would ever know if the old man had been sedated, tranquilized,
Poisoned.
Despite setbacks and disappointments, the case against Pat Taylor and
Debbie Alexander moved forward. Don Stoop and Michelle Berry worked
relentlessly, gathering a bit of evidence here, another interview
there. Their spirits rose when Elizabeth Crist and her daughter,
Betsy, positively identified the pearl necklace and bracelet set that
Pat had given to Susan. They both recognized at once the gold flower
clasp with the single pearl in the center. It was the same with a
leather-bound antique cookbook, another thoughtful gift from Pat to her
daughter. It had not been hers to give; it was part of Mrs. Crist's
Williamsburg cookbook collection.
There were still myriad items missing. Sooner or later, Stoop knew he
would have to get a search warrant for the little red brick house in
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McDonoughBoppo and Papa's house.
+ + + Susan Alford had some bizarre documentation of the way her
mother's mind worked, something she had never sought out, something she
was hesitant to turn over to Don Stoop. But the knowledge that it
existed burned in her mind.
Years before, in 1977, as Boppo was sorting through hastily packed
possessions from the Tell Road house, she had come across a grocery
sack with an old tape recorder in it. She gave it to Sean, who, at
five, wasn't enthused about the gift. The Alfords had carted the bag
and the tape recorder around with them in their many moves from Houston
to Florida and back to Atlanta. No one ever bothered to check what was
rattling around in the bag.
One day, they were unpacking after yet another move, and Susan lifted
the old-fashioned recorder and saw that the bottom of the bag was full
of old tapes. "Let's put some country music on," she said to Bill,
"and get into the spirit of unpacking."
When the first sounds filtered into the room, they stared at each
other, almost embarrassed. They recognized the voices on the tapes,
and realized they were inadvertently eavesdropping on an intimate
conversation of long ago.
I love you more than anything in this whole wide world, Sugar."
"Don't say that, Tom."
It Huh?"
"You love me more than anyone. You don't love me more than anything.
You love life more than you love me-" The tapes Pat had routinely made
of her phone calls in the mid-seventies crackled with age and the dust
of more than a decade, but the human
emotions were still caught there. Pat and Tom's conversations were as
filled with manipulation
and frustration as the day the words were first said, the male voice
deep and shed tears. and laced with pain, the woman's light and full of
uns Bill and Susan felt like voyeurs. They switched the recorder
off.
They hadn't really listened to the tapes-only long enough to see what
they were: Pat's phone calls from Tom in the Fulton County jail. Susan
hadn't wanted to hear more; the voices brought back so much hurt.
"A long time later," Susan eventually said, "I got them out and
listened to all of them. And they were frightening. I hadn't known
that my mother tried to get Tom to commit suicide. There were so many
things I had never known."
At the time, Susan said, she had managed to deal with the content of
the fifteen tapes by reminding herself that her mother had been under
the influence of drugs, that this wasn't her real mother talking and
conniving and playing with Tom Allanson's emotions. This was a
stranger addicted to mind-altering drugs. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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