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about him. Why would Tom Allanson throw all of that away in a moment
of blind rage?
Even Tom's demeanor on the long ride back from Zebulon warred with the
image of a man given to blind rages. Rather, he had showed no emotion
at all. His parents had not been dead twelve hours, and yet the three
detectives had seen no tears nor heard any choking up in his voice as
he discussed their deaths.
That bothered them.
Susan and Bill Alford were far away from Atlanta when they heard the
devastating news of the double murder of Pat's in.
laws. They were headed to Colorado to pick up some prize Morgan horses
for Kentwood Morgan Farm. Before dawn, they received a call at their
motel telling them to come back home at once; there had been a
tragedy.
Both Susan and her great-aunt Alma had had some foreboding of disaster,
a sense that "something bad was fixing to happen," but this news was
beyond anything they might have envisioned in their worst nightmares.
Pulling a still-empty horse trailer, Bill and Susan Alford turned
around and headed home.
The East Point police investigators would not sleep for another day.
Nor would they celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional way. At
the first clear light of day, they were back at the crime scene.
Detective George Zellner, Sergeants Maulin Humphrey and C. T. Callahan,
searched the interior of the house, and Sergeant Bill Vance and a
uniformed squad combed the sodden yard.
As Vance and his crew worked their way through ivy and underbrush
between the Allansons' house and the house to the east, Vance found a
shotgun 135 feet from the basement steps. It lay where it had
apparently been dropped, its stock protruding along the fence line on a
dirt path that ran between the Allansons'side yard and that of Paul and
Harriett Duckett, who lived next door.
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The gun was 40 feet from the sidewalk. It was an Excel singleshot
shotgun, exactly like the gun that Walter Allanson had reported stolen
when Callahan answered Allanson's first complaint the night before.
It was fully cocked and loaded.
As they were searching the area, the officers moved into the Ducketts'
yard. "There's no need for you to be pulling up geraniums and stomping
through there," Harriett Duckett scolded.
Vance and Patrolman Bob Matthews apologized, but geraniums were
expendable at the moment.
The Ducketts said they had both seen a tall man running down the dirt
path about 8:00 the night before. Their dog Roman had barked
frantically. Later, Paul Duckett had attempted to alert the police
swarming over his neighbors' property, but the scene had been one of
such confusion that he had been waved back toward his own house.
"My first sight of him was nothing but legs because of the dogwood
trees," Duckett said. He weighed close to 250 himself, so he was a
good judge of size when he described the man's appearance as he broke
into the open. "I saw his right profile when he hit the street. There
was a police car there, kind of keeping pace with him. Then it turned
around and came back next door. The man was tall, probably weighed
over two thirty, and he had on dark pants and a light shirt. He was
holding on to himself - " Duckett demonstrated by clutching his own
side.
Harriett Duckett, who was still surveying the damage to her garden, had
seen the man too. He had run off the patio, into the clearing right at
their driveway, and then headed east past the Pilgrim Press Building on
the corner.
Both of them were a little annoyed that their tips to the police had
been ignored, and Harriett recalled that she had finally managed to get
a patrolman's attention about 10:30 the night before and said, "Look,
you missed your man. He went around the corner on Harris Street."
Neither of the Ducketts had met the Allansons, so they had no idea if
it was Tom they had seen. They had heard no shouts or shots before
they saw the running man; only later, when the tear gas was fired into
the Allansons' house, did they hear a sound of shots.
They agreed to attend a lineup on July 6.
Inside the Allansons' basement, the lingering smell of tear gas [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]