Allanson was born in 1937 in Georgia. In 1974 her husband Tom Allanson was convicted of shooting his parents, Walter and Carolyn Allanson, at their Atlanta house. Patricia was subsequently convicted of attempting to poison Walter's parents, her husband's grandparents, with arsenic while she was nursing them, and served time for it. The Georgia press called her the Deadly Magnolia.
She was later prosecuted again, in 1991, in connection with the poisoning of James Crist Sr., and received a further sentence. The roster records different sentences of eight years, which reflects those separate convictions.
The important point, and the roster states it correctly, is that she was never convicted of murder. Her range of one to three reflects deaths and near-deaths connected to her over nearly two decades, none of which produced a murder conviction.
The case is known almost entirely through Ann Rule's book Everything She Ever Wanted, published in 1992, which is a work of narrative true crime built on court records and interviews. That book is the source for most of what circulates about her, and anyone using this entry should know that the account and the framing both originate there rather than in a judgment for murder.