Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule Page B

bags full of nails.   With
    flashlights held at an oblique angle, the investigators could see seven
    marks on the bricks inside the hole that had been left by ricocheting
    bullets.   Fragments of those bullets were also visible, along with
    chips of concrete.
     
    And yet they found no blood at all in the hole.   There was blood on the
    wall outside the hole, and the trail of blood on the floor led from the
    opening in the wall all the way to the bottom of the steps eighteen
    feet away, where blood had spurted and cascaded until the body that
    contained it could no longer stand upright.   They scraped samples for
    typing, but it seemed obvious that it was Walter Allanson who had bled
    here.   His wife had never moved after she sat down on the stairs.
     
    Carefully, Matthews and Callahan bagged the fractured chunks of bullets
    they found on the dirt floor of the hole.   There were no bullet casings
    in the hole itself, but a dark blue shotgun cartridge lay on the floor
    just outside the rectangular aperture.
     
    Vance found one shotgun pellet inside the hole too.   And when Matthews
    lifted a piece of wood in front of the hole in the wall, he found a
    second 20-gauge shotgun cartridge.   This one was yellow.
     
    The one vital bullet they never found was the single round that had
    been fired from the .45/70 Marlin rifle that Big Carolyn had carried
    down the stairs, obeying, as she always had, her husband's orders.   The
    spent casing was there all right, next to the rifle itself.   The slug
    was gone.
     
    The detectives were also puzzled that there was no blood inside the
    hole; firing into that hole would be akin to shooting fish in a
    barrel.
     
    And hadn't Little Carolyn Allanson said that Daddy Allanson had called
    out, "I've got him trapped in the hole"?
     
    If Tom Allanson was the one in the hole, he was lucky to be alive.
     
    In fact, he had no wounds, nothing beyond a quartersized abrasion on
    his left leg.
     
    Ballistics-bullets, cartridges, casings, fragments, line of fire,
    angles, ricochets-were tedious, but in a case like this one, they were
    essential to finding the truth.   This basement had been a shooting
    gallery where two people died, and it was highly unlikely that they had
    shot each other.   That meant that at least one person had survived.   To
    reconstruct, the East Point detectives had to find everything they
    could, everything-tangible and intangible-left behind by the guns
    involved.
     
    It seemed obvious that the Excel shotgun had been fired two times, the
    .32 pistol six times, and the new Marlin .45/70 rifle only once.   The
    question was, who had shot which weapons?
     
    And why?
     
    Belatedly, Pat Allanson was given a paraffin test on her hands to see
    if she had recently fired a gun.   The test was designed to turn up
    primer residue-if the subject had not washed her hands, smoked a
    cigarette, used toilet tissue, or performed other normal human
    functions.   It was not the most accurate test for gunshot residue, and
    Pat was not given the test until early July 4.
     
    The test results were negative.
     
    Tom Allanson was also tested for gunshot residue.   He remarked to the
    officers who were administering the test that he had done some target
    shooting a few days before.   Even so, his testlike his wife's-was
    negative.
     
    Tom was being held in the East Point jail and Pat was staying with her
    parents on their Tell Road farm.   Their neighbor Liz Price and Pat's
    son, Ronnie, tended to the animals at Kentwood Farm, the paradise Tom
    and Pat had created in Zebulon.   They had been married only fifty-four
    days.   It was perhaps inevitable that when the Griffin Daily News
    printed the story of the Allanson murders under the headline NEW
    RESIDENT OF PIKE COUNTY HELD IN DEATH OF HIS PARENTS, it once again
    featured the picture of Pat and Tom on their wedding day, dressed as
    Scarlett and