1sT POST! so what's this about?

Not much different from her is the real-life Patricia Allanson, whom Anne Rule documented in Everything She Ever Wanted. Patricia thought of herself as special. Her parents had always bailed her out and she'd never had to take responsibility for herself. Partly because of that, she felt that her husband ought to be able to give her anything she wanted. She needed constant attention—what some men might call high maintenance---and unqualified love. She first had married an army sergeant and stayed with him long enough to have three children, but got tired of him, so she left him in 1972 to find a better quality of life—what she felt she deserved. She met Tom Allanson, six years younger than her. She had her eye on someone else, but it looked like Tom could give her whatever she wanted.

Patricia Allanson
He had money and as soon as he was divorced, he was quite insistent that Pat marry him. He later recalled that he was the one who pressured her, while she would say, "You don't want to marry me." Yet she could just as easily have been stoking the fire by making herself unobtainable. In 1974, he married her dressed as Rhett Butler, while she played Scarlett, and gave her a heavily-mortgaged, 52-acre home in Zebulon, Georgia, that she referred to as Tara. They set about to raise Morgan horses, and even Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, came to visit. Pat's ambitions of being the proper Southern belle were being realized—or so it seemed. Ann Rule indicates that she had quite another scheme at work that would eventually involve murder.


When Walter Allanson, Tom's father, disapproved of her and angrily tried to force Tom out of his life, Pat filed complaints of sexual harassment against him, claiming that he had exposed himself to her. Tom grew alarmed over this, along with threats that he heard that his father was going to kill him, so he took out a restraining order. Yet his father was taking a defensive stand, believing that his own son was out to kill him. Someone had stolen a pistol and rifle from his home and he was convinced it was his son. The police searched Tom's home and came up empty-handed, yet the intense fear and anger continued to grow on both sides. With no form of communication taking place, it was the perfect set-up for a manipulative psychopath who wanted to get something for herself.

On July 29, 1974, Walter and his wife, Carolyn, were ambushed. As they took a trip in their car, someone began to shoot at them. They survived the inexplicable attack and felt sure that Tom had orchestrated it, although he was far away on that day. The situation between father and son grew more paranoid until August 3. On that day, Tom dropped Pat off at the doctor and then walked over to see his mother when he was sure his father would not be home. Pat had told him that someone had been calling their house all night long and then had just breathed. She felt sure it was Walter, so Tom felt it was time to try to straighten things out. Otherwise, he thought his father might try to shoot him off his horse in the parade that weekend. His mother was not home, although he expected her, so to avoid the possibility of running into Walter, he checked the basement door, found it unlocked, and went to sit inside and wait.

To his surprise, Walter came home—it was later determined that he'd received a call from an unknown woman telling him that Tom was at his house---and began to rant and rave over Tom's presence. The electricity was off, so he went into the basement to look around, found the switch box tampered with, and then went out to call the police. But the phone line had been cut, so he used a neighbor's phone to get the police out there. They arrived, but Walter said he'd take care of the situation himself, so they left. He then went back into the basement and started shooting randomly. Carolyn was home by that time and he called up to her that he had Tom cornered. He needed the gun he'd just purchased, so she grabbed it to bring it to him. Tom later claimed that he panicked, certain that his father would kill him. He could not imagine how he had gotten into such a situation.

When officers arrived once again in response to an emergency call, they found Carolyn Allanson sitting upright on the basement steps, shot dead. Through the basement window, they could see numerous sprays of blood. Not far away inside, Walter lay on the ground. He'd been shot numerous times—it was later determined that there were 20 separate entrance wounds---and the police immediately suspected Tom. He'd been seen there, and a man matching his description had run from the crime scene.

Tom was soon arrested. When Pat told a number of lies to the attorney in an alleged attempt to provide Tom with an alibi, the situation became even more suspicious. Tom had his own story—also a lie—and it didn't match. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. At the time of the murders, he and Pat had been married less than two months, and now Pat had the farm to herself. It wasn't long before she tried to talk Tom into a suicide pact, which he later felt sure was an attempt to get him to die so she would inherit everything.

Pat was left alone, so she began working on Tom's wealthy grandparents until they finally named her in their will as the primary beneficiary. Her house and barns burned down, and she forged Tom's signature to get the insurance payments. Then she laced food with arsenic to feed to Tom's grandparents. However, when they grew ill she was caught and ended up in prison for eight years.

Once she got out, she started up again with her scheming. She persuaded a wealthy couple from Atlanta, Mr. and Mrs. James Crist, to hire her as a nurse. It wasn't long before they, too, got sick and the husband died.

In the meantime, Tom had served 15 and a half years and gotten out on parole. Investigators on the Crist case arranged to see him to find out what had happened the day he had shot his parents. It was their belief that Pat had not only choreographed the entire episode by fanning the flames of paranoia between father and son and then by sending them into a head-on confrontation, but also that she had fully expected Tom to die. The investigators believed Pat had hired someone to ambush Walter and Carolyn and to cut their phone lines, but they couldn't prove anything. Tom's story might solve the riddle.

As they spoke with him, a new piece of information came out: after shooting his parents in self-defense---afraid they meant to trap and kill him---he had run to find Pat and she had told him to find his own way home—60 miles away. He had done so without question. Both of them had denied seeing each other that morning, and even as he protected Pat, it wasn't long before he had wondered if he and his father had both been set up. Pat was a liar, Tom told the investigators. "Pat was a headstrong, manipulative type person that would do anything to get what she wanted—and you do not know she was doing it." He had given her everything: his money, his power of attorney, his home, and his heart, and she had taken full advantage. The tragedy of his life would never have happened, he believed, if he hadn't married Pat.

Once again, Pat was facing prison time. In a shrewd and controversial plea bargain, she agreed to seven charges, including theft, attempted murder, and posing as a registered nurse, with the proviso that she never be charged with the murder of Mr. Crist or investigated for the murder of Tom's parents. One again, she was sentenced to eight years.

In an update on her Web site, Rule writes that Patricia Allanson has been free from prison since 1999 and lives with her stepfather and his new wife.

While it seems evident that Pat was among those women who set other people up to kill, some women do the killing and then deflect the blame to others.