WAS SHE A SWEET SOUTHERN CHARMER?
OR A COLD-BLOODED KILLER?
For their wedding portrait, petite Pat Taylor and handsome Tom Allanson posed as Rhett and Scarlett. Both came from fine Southern families, and dreamed of the Tara-like plantation where they would grow roses, raise horses, and move in the genteel circles of Atlanta society. Less than two months later, their dream exploded in terror and murder: their beautiful home mysteriously burned to the ground and Tom was convicted of the brutal slaying of his mother and father.
Pat's only brother had died in a puzzling suicide, her grandparents-in-law were poisoned with arsenic, and no one -- from her wealthy employers to her own children -- was safe when Pat Allanson didn't get her way. It took Georgia lawmen more than two decades to stop her for good -- if indeed they have.
In this fascinating account, Ann Rule delivers a tour de force: a whirlwind of misguided love, denial, guilt, and passions out of control; a series of brilliantly manipulated crimes; the bizarre and horrifying tale of two families brought to ruin; and, at the center of it all, the heartless, supremely selfish sociopath whose evil hid behind soft words and gentle manners, but who destroyed -- without mercy -- those who loved her.
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This account of the life and crimes of Pat Allanson was published 30 years ago but only now appears as an unabridged audiobook — and it's a doozy. Born in 1937 and brought up as the center of the universe by her mother and stepfather, Pat dreamed of becoming a reincarnation of "Gone With the Wind's" Scarlett O'Hara, mistress of plantation estate and mansion and wife to Rhett Butler. After one failed marriage, she seduced Tom Allanson, six years her junior, and the two, tricked out as Scarlett and Rhett, married in 1974, setting themselves up on a hugely mortgaged horse farm. Narrator Cassandra Campbell's sweet, intoxicating voice conveys Pat's seductive powers, her indignant feelings when thwarted and her lethal charisma. Somehow, she managed the shooting deaths of Tom's parents, though it was Tom who paid with a long prison sentence. After that, the enterprising Pat tried arsenic to dispatch inconvenient people. Fast-paced and beautifully narrated in chilling detail, the book has a thriller's momentum and a novel's depth of character. Except it's true.
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Katherine A. Powers