Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule Page A

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.
     
    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
    droplets stung the eyes of the investigators.   In the daylight
    filtaring from the windows, Sergeant Callahan and Patrolman Bob
    Matthews could see that most of the bloodshed was near the stairway
    where both victims had been found and back at "the hole" in the brick
    fireplace wall.   The basement floor was spattered brown-red with
    now-dried blood all around the furnace and the area in front of the
    hole.   The hole in the brick wall led to an area about six feet by ten
    feet, large enough for a man to hide in-not comfortably, but it was
    possible.   Looking out, the line of sight would be straight ahead to
    the stairway down from the kitchen.
     
    The hole itself had a dirt floor and was partially filled with jun,- an
    old lemonade cooler, burlap sacks, paper