Ann Rule Everything_She_Ever

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awakened, they immediately felt guilty; it meant so much to Pat to be
in daily touch with them. It was such a luxury for her to be able to
call them whenever she wanted. Susan, especially, devoted herself to
helping her mother readjust to the world. She saw Pat as almost
childlike; she had been cut off from everyone and everything for so
long that she grabbed at life with both hands.
"I'd come get Mom at the halfway house and take her to the
Varsity-that's Atlanta's favorite place for hot dogs; they're real
greasy but they're so good-and she'd get chili dogs," Susan recalled.
"When she came to our house for supper, she liked to have me fix her
chicken cordon bleu, but even so she always wanted to stop and get a
Varsity hot dog on the way home!"
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Although Susan and Bill Alford were living in Atlanta in 1984, Bill was
about to be transferred once again, the standard peripatetic pattern of
the young executive in America. The Alfords were moving to Marion,
Indiana, in June, and Susan visited with her mother as much as possible
before they left.
As always, Pat was furious with Bill for agreeing to a transfer. "How
can Bill do this to me?" she implored. But Pat had made an error in
judgment when she put Bill Alford in the category of men she could
manipulate. She liked his strength and assumed she could harness it
just as she had leaned on Gil, Tom, and Papa. Indeed, in times of
trouble she had often cried, "I want my Bill!"
But Pat took Bill Alford's good nature for weakness and never saw that
he could be pushed only as far as he was willing. Thereafter, he was an
immovable object.
"Just when I finally get home," Pat complained to Susan. the children
away from "How can Bill deliberately take you and me?"
Of course, he had no choice-save resigning. In vain, Susan tried to
explain that. She didn't tell her mother Bill preferred to have at
least a thousand miles between himself and Pat. In the out to lunch
time they had left together, she took her mother and shopping as much
as possible. Despite her huge appetite, Pat had lost a great deal of
weight since her release from Hardwick. Susan took her to the Lenox
Square shopping mall in the Buckhead neighborhood and bought her all
new clothes. Pat was thrilled.
"The last time I saw her before we moved," Susan remembered, "I took
her to the bus stop so she could go to work, and we both started to
cry. She looked so lost. I hated to leave her."
With the often inexplicable reasoning of the parole system, Pat, who
now called herself Pat Taylor, was assigned to work as a companion to
the elderly-a "sitter." It had been stipulated in her parole papers
that She would work at the Fountainview Convalescent Home in Atlanta.
Apparently, no one had researched the crimes that had sent her to
prison in the first place. She now cared for wealthy elderly people
who lived in their own apartments in the retirement center. She helped
them bathe and eat and supervised their medications. On occasion, she
even gave atients. Her clients all spoke highly of insulin shots to
diabetic p her; she became like part of their own families. She seemed
to have no emotional life of her own, although she later confessed pal
priest who had supervised to Susan her feelings for an Episco New
Horizons. "He was probably the only man I could ever have really
loved," Pat said wistfully. "But of course, he wasn't free to love
me." the halfway In November 1984, when Pat was released from house
and officially paroled, she was forty-seven years old. She had "maxed
out." Under Georgia sentencing guidelines, she had been incarcerated
as long as she legally could be. The conditions of her parole dictated
that she report to a parole officer in jonesboro, Georgia, and live
with Boppo and Papa on Arrowhead Boulevard in Jonesboro. But Pat told
her mother she wouldn't live in the Radcliffes' townhouse. "There are
too many niggers around here," she said flatly. "I won't live
here."
So the moved 'y to a little red brick house in the tiny hamlet of
McDonough, Georgia. There was an upstairs room with a small bathroom
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