Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule Read Free Book Online

could get winded just walking
    up the driveway.   Oaks, pines, laurel hedges, and rhododendrons grew
    thick, shutting out the noise of the street below and separating the
    Allanson house from neighboring properties.
     
    Carolyn's mother-"Mae Mama" Lawrence-owned the property to the west of
    them, but you could hardly see her house through the foliage between
    them.   Walter planted a grape arbor out back, and it thrived.   He laid
    down a strip of concrete smac dab in the middle of the backyard so he
    could turn around and not have to back up the 194 feet to the street.
     
    It didn't add much aesthetically to the yard but it was practical.   And
    Walter Allanson, if anything, was a most practical man.
     
    His pragmatic view of life had cost him any relationship with his
    sister jean, even though she and her husband lived only a few blocks
    away.   And now his rigid moral views had shut his son out too.   Walter
    detested Pat, and he would far rather lose Tom than bend even a little
    toward his new wife.   Walter didn't need anyone in his life who
    questioned his authority.   Tom had known that since he was a little
    boy.
     
    A number of people had reason to resent a man like Walter Allanson.
     
    Lawyers make enemies, often unaware.   Over the :E years, he had
    represented the usual assortment of clients who felt they hadn't been
    given proper attention.   But Walter didn't run scared.   He had always
    considered himself fully capable of defending himself.   Still, his
    partner, Al Roberts, his law clerk, and his secretary had noticed that
    he was jumpy and tense in the last weeks of June 1974-not at all like
    himself.
     
    On Saturday, June 29, 1974, Carolyn and Walter Allanson left the house
    on Norman Berry Drive a little after nine, driving their 1963 white
    Ford station wagon.   Walter wanted to check on one of his real estate
    purchases.   It was a beautiful morning, with only the edges of the day
    betraying the heat to come, and they headed northeast of Atlanta toward
    Lake Lanier in Forsyth County, where Walter had picked up a piece of
    waterfront property.   There were no buildings on it yet, but the land s
    and earround homes.   He and Tommy had built a good boat dock up
    there.
     
    Then they had had a bad winter in '71 and the dock got so much ice on
    it, it had sunk itself.   Tommy dove and dove and put lines on it and
    they had hauled it up.   With the help of Walter's best friend, Jake
    Dailey, they had cleaned it off and started all over.   Tommy had been
    there working on the new dock until Walter washed his hands of him over
    Pat.   Now, he would have to finish the last of it himself.
     
    The lake was an hour's drive at most, but Forsyth County might have
    been a world away from Atlanta: wherever you went you could find huge
    platters of fried catfish and hush puppies, collard greens, yams,
    cornbread, biscuits, and barbecue for only a few dollars.   It was well
    known that Forsyth County still banned blacks after sunset.   The crude
    warnings weren't posted anymore, but the sentiment was the same.   It
    was said the Ku Klux Klan was active in the county.
     
    The Allansons' old Ford station wagon, rusting out on the doors, wasn't
    a suitable vehicle for a hopeful judge-to-be, but it was a good work
    car.   Walter and Carolyn rode with the windows down, smelling hot pine
    needles and baked red clay.   The kudzu was halfway up telephone poles
    and creeping higher as it choked out weeds and fences and anything else
    in its path.   They crossed the Chattahoochee and the thickets of
    spindly pine trees grew denser.   Cement spillways waited in the dry
    earth for a deluge to fill their hollows with rain.   In June, they were
    as useless as Christmas tree ornaments.
     
    It was too dry even to remember rain.
     
    The atmosphere changed with each mile beyond Atlanta.   There were signs
    advertising sorghum syrup, boiled peanuts, and chewing tobacco.   In
    Cumming, the county seat,