With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  “What do you mean?” I asked, thinking he was going to tell me about how Vernie had a committed resolve to change his life, or perhaps that he had instead given up on life.

  “He found Jesus.”

  I did not see that coming. “What kinds of behaviors did he have that made you think he found Jesus?”

  “He just laid around on the couch all the time and wouldn’t talk much.”

  “That sounds like a depressed person to me,” I replied, hoping I wasn’t challenging him so much he’d stop talking.

  “Yeah, Vernie was the biggest smartass on the planet, and when he finally faced the real Big One, that would make anyone depressed.” It still didn’t make sense, but I didn’t want to spend more time on Jesus talk right then.

  “The laws on insanity pleas were changed while my mom was in the mental hospital, so she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life locked up,” David said, switching topics. No kidding, as the eleven months she spent in the hospital was a huge difference from the rest of her life, I thought. He continued, “When she got out, she went back to school, finished her bachelor’s, got a master’s, a law degree, and a doctorate, none of which she’d have done otherwise.” I took that to mean that murdering my uncle gave her a new lease on life, and she was finally successful in a way that had eluded her previously. This dichotomy between assassin and academic was intriguing.

  David told me he had started college but bounced around, living in California, Florida, and other places. “My father died of a heart attack a while after Vernie’s death, and I got an inheritance, which I lived off for some years. But I was really into alcohol and women and drugs and motorcycles. And it would have all killed me, except then I found Jesus and got salvation.” He looked at me and smiled for the first time in a couple of hours. “And I’m going to work on you, Dorothy. Or, I mean, I’m going to talk to the Holy Spirit and He’ll come into your life and change everything for the better.”

  I wasn’t sure if my idea of “better” was the same as his, but I let him go on. “Then I moved to Tennessee, where my father’s family was from, where I used to spend summers as a kid. I got married. We met at church and it was . . . Well, we got divorced later on. But I did have a successful business doing online marketing. Maybe I could help you in your work,” he offered, but I didn’t respond. Was he asking for money, or just wanting to connect with me? It was almost midnight and I couldn’t deal with job concerns right then. “Everything really fell apart for me when I got chronic fatigue syndrome and couldn’t work hard enough to keep the business going and it collapsed. A few months after Louisa and my mom moved to Tennessee, I lost my house, so I moved here”—he pointed to the house behind us—“and took over Louisa’s basement bedroom.”

  This was a real dilemma for me. I could stay out in the dark, cold night and learn more from David, but I was really afraid that if I didn’t leave right then, I’d fall asleep while driving back. If I had known this would be the last time I’d see him alive, I would have stayed all night long talking. Why is it we think we will always have another chance, when, in fact, we often do not?

  “Talking with you brings closure for me, too,” he said with what I took as satisfaction as we cautiously hugged and I got into my car.

  * * *

  I noticed right away the light on the dash indicated one of my tires was low. Here I was in “Pithole,” Tennessee, at 12:30 A.M. on a Sunday and had to drive four or five hours with a tire that might blow? Going toward the interstate seemed the best bet. I stopped at four gas stations, none of which had working air pumps. Then I found a semitruck garage and begged the woman behind the desk to have someone fix my tire. We only do trucks, she kept saying, no matter what I said. Finally, when I told her I was afraid I’d get in an accident, she took pity on me and filled the tire with air herself, even though she was dressed in a floral skirt and high heels.

  Finally I felt safe enough to e-mail Shannon to tell her I was still alive and all had gone well, that I’d call her later Sunday morning. I could have called her then, because Eugene, Oregon’s time zone is three hours earlier, but I was too physically and emotionally spent, and I had to pay attention to driving those four hours through the Smoky Mountains over what turned out to be roads so dark it felt like driving in the outer circles of hell. I got back around 5:00 A.M. Around noon I called Shannon.

  “I feel pretty confident Suzanne shot your father,” I said, more than a little proud of myself for what a great detective I was. I explained that based on David’s detailed story about the argument and the shooting, and Louisa’s version of the “psychotic” episode, and that they both had more or less agreed, I thought it was definitely Suzanne. I also mentioned Suzanne’s claim about the cigarette burns, and Shannon got very upset, something I had never seen in her.

  “My father never lifted a finger against anyone. Nothing that I ever saw or heard about,” she said. I told her David doubted his own mother’s story about the history of that type of abuse, which, I think, eased the pain for Shannon.

  We talked about other possible scenarios. “I always considered the possibility that it was a ‘hit,’ ” Shannon said somberly. “He’d worked undercover with the Mafia and other dangerous elements, and his life had been threatened more than once. But if that were true, then Suzanne and David would have had to be involved in it, so it just didn’t seem as probable.”

  Shannon said she was relieved to know the truth, but was still bothered by the fact that Suzanne had spent only eleven months in the state hospital and then got out and cashed in Vernie’s life insurance policy. Shannon had sued the insurance company, saying that by virtue of the fact Suzanne confessed to killing Vernie, she should not benefit from the death. Shannon lost. Her lawyer said they would probably win on appeal, but he needed a $1,500 retainer.

  “George [Hecht] and I were just college students then and fifteen hundred dollars was like a million is to us now. But looking back on it, I wish we had borrowed the money, because it just wasn’t right for the woman who murdered my father to collect the thirteen thousand dollars of his life insurance.”

  When I got back to New York a couple of days later, I researched what that $13,000 translated to in 2018 dollars, because by this time I had moved into heavy research and started to consider financial implications. It came to almost $80,000. I also started tracking down newspaper articles about the shooting. I bought a subscription to one of those archive services in order to get access. I was getting obsessed. Why? My mind kept going to the time I spent in Oregon with Vernie and his new family when I was in college, when Vernie would pick me up Friday nights after work and take me back to his home. He called me, asked me how my classes were going, and was always encouraging, in between his frequent teasing.

  I think it was only after my frantic search through endless files of voluminous news clippings as thick as an old phone book that I realized why his murder had hung over me so unflinchingly all those years, why I just couldn’t let go, and why I knew I was committed to investigating the crime no matter how long it took. Spending all that time researching and inquiring stimulated a great deal of self-reflection on my part. Not until months into my research did I realize how that one night changed everything for my family, as if the pH balance in the ocean shifted and all life forms were forced to adapt. For me, it was intensely personal.

  * * *

  Vernie had been like a father to me. My own father, who was always physically fit and looked like a top gangster when he dressed up and flashed his Franklin Delano Roosevelt smile, was a wife- and son-beating compulsive gambler who had to ask me how old I was. Though I did have a few positive memories of him taking me a couple of times to see the Milwaukee Braves (this was before they moved to Atlanta), or bowling, most of what I remember is two behaviors: how he wasn’t there to notice we had no food in the house—forcing my mother, who was tall, thin, and quite beautiful back then, to beg from the neighbors so we could eat breakfast—and how he pummeled my mom and bro
thers, Raymond and the physically handicapped Johnny Ray, with a rage I have rarely seen since. He never touched my sister or me.

  Thankfully, my mother divorced my father and remarried when I was ten. My stepfather was a good man, bald and several inches shorter than my mother, but no one cared. He was on the plump side, and I think his heart was plump, too, with love for my mother and us kids. He was kind and supported all of us, though we were still quite poor. At least we had running water, both cold and hot, whenever we turned on the tap. And there was a telephone on the wall in the kitchen and a toaster on the counter. But my stepfather and mother spent a lot of time in the taverns—especially after my brother Raymond died when I was thirteen—so I was left alone most of the time.

  Vernie was interested in me as his niece. He picked me up when he said he would, which is something my mother never quite learned how to do, and he spent time at home, even if he and Suzanne drank a lot. With Vernie, I knew I could ask him to do something and he would actually do it. Did he feel more than an obligatory connection to me, too? I imagine he missed Shannon with a loneliness I cannot fathom, and he no doubt missed the whole family. He and Jenylle had lived only a few blocks from his parents and brother. Perhaps I was the stand-in for them all.

  I also knew Vernie was especially close to my mother, eight years older, who had practically raised him. Because my grandmother was a single working mother (with an alcoholic husband) during the Depression, with five children to feed, two of whom were sick with diabetes and rheumatic fever, it was left to my mother to look after Vernie.

  Since my uncle Vernie was a senior official in the state government, the killing made headlines all over newspapers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, not only that week but for years. Reports continued to appear about hearing delays, the judge and district attorney being changed, charges reduced from first-degree murder to manslaughter, and, with the final hearing, the court accepting her insanity plea. But one thing surprised me, and I wondered why I hadn’t read these articles before. As the twelve articles the following day in various newspapers recounted what was deemed a first-degree murder, most reported that La Verne Stordock had been shot in his sleep by a high-powered military rifle.

  In his sleep? David had been adamant about an argument immediately preceding the shot, and Louisa had hinted at that, too. Had they all talked before I came and decided on a common narrative?

  I thought some more about it. If David had been involved in the shooting and they had covered it up, what would be a motivation to tell the truth now? How could they trust me, not having seen me for more than forty years? Even though I told myself I had no interest in anyone getting arrested or going to prison, they didn’t know my intentions and must have realized there is no statute of limitations on murder.

  A few weeks later I called Shannon again and sheepishly said, “I think I was played, Shannon, and that makes me want to find the truth even more.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  David’s Communications

  I got the first e-mail from David one day after my visit, telling me how amazed he was that the forty-year-old memories just poured out of him: I think it was good for both of us to talk about Vernie.

  He then offered to answer any questions I had via e-mail. I wish now I had been less reticent in asking him those questions, and I can hardly forgive myself that it took me many months to get to the difficult issues surrounding the murder. Did I think I had years? Maybe it was the fear of talking about the really violent issues, which I learned from growing up in a battering household.

  Because David reached out to me so quickly, I was touched, and it only made me feel closer to him. At the same time I knew how important it was to keep the exchange going.

  We e-mailed a couple of times a week from then on. David wanted to talk to me by phone, too, but said Louisa wouldn’t let him use the landline. At the time I thought that was stingy and maybe even mean, but I understood it in a different way some months later when Louisa said, “David can sink easily into his chronic fatigue syndrome victimhood and just lie in bed, which drives my husband crazy. So he has specific chores to do to earn his keep here.”

  After David told me how surprised he was with all the flooding of memories, I told him, You have no idea how important it was for me to talk about Vernie, and I was also surprised that some of those memories were even in my brain! There was a level of comfort in that communication, too.

  David replied, Praise the Lord! A lot of good! And I got a real kick out of you saying it brought you much closure. Then he went on with what became a recurring theme: He wanted to work for me. He said he knew I had a doctorate in business, an area he was interested it, and that he’d been a computer guru for five years, followed by being a broker, during which time he watched the Wall Street Channel all day long for four years. Then he worked in the Green movement on finance deals up to $100 million, until the crash in 2008. During all this time he worked intermittently as a PR executive, personally scheduling over a thousand interviews. He ended with asking if he could send me some biz questions.

  My answer was Sure, ask anything. And I wanted to know more about his illness, such as when had it started, and why? Then I asked him how he managed to be a computer guru, a broker, and a publicity exec, plus the bodybuilding career he had talked about that night. What was his secret? I tried to put it very sincerely, even though I was more than a little skeptical.

  His reply:

  It was great hearing back from you! It is now close of biz for me. I have to turn the computer off around 5 or 6 every day. It has to do with the CFIDS (chronic fatigue) and not stressing too much every day. God Bless you real good. I am praying that the Good Lord starts showing Himself more and more real to you all the time.

  It hadn’t taken David long after I’d seen him in Tennessee to let me know about his illness. I was starting to see his need to keep bringing it up, and he never did answer my questions about his careers.

  The next day, though, he tried to smooth it over, telling how awful he felt that day and he’d have to answer more completely later on. His illness, he said, was the same feeling as when you get the flu. And he hoped he and I would become good friends.

  It was my turn to share and I told him about the year I dropped out of college, from summer of 1968 to summer 1969. My roommate and I had to buy furniture for the place where we lived in Milwaukee. We bought a stove and refrigerator from a small company, but they didn’t deliver it. Always had an excuse. And living without those two appliances is not easy. After a few weeks, I called up Vernie and asked him if he could help. The next day, the fridge and stove were delivered. I asked him how he did it. He said, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” So he knew how to get things done.

  In his reply David apologized again for not answering more fully, and went on with his own Vernie story about how he hated to get out of bed. Vernie warned him, and one day he poured a bucket of water on David’s face and the bed. David got the point and learned the lesson. He then told me writing to me gave him “warm feelings inside,” and told me how Vernie used to say:

  “May the Good Lord take a liking to you but not too soon,” then he had to go lay down.

  David clearly did not want to talk to me about the details of his business, but he had lots of energy to write in generalities about his illness and Vernie and how much he liked communicating with me.

  E-mails back and forth weren’t enough for David. He wanted to talk on the phone, and I wanted that, too. I hoped it was about more than making me a client, because he’d already mentioned several times about working for me.

  After the CFS hit, I lost my career (I was a building contractor at the time). Wait a minute, there’s another profession he mastered? I lost my career, my house, wife, land, fortune and health. So he had a fortune? I know there was an inheritance when his father died. Or did he turn the inheritance into a fortune through his Wall Street skills? I wish I had asked that question. In the passing years, there have
been good times financially, but currently I am just surviving with a few dollars every month from an annuity. Which, I assumed, was from his father, the insurance company executive. Louisa wants me to help her sell her art online, which I’ve been doing. I learned months later from Louisa that David had done a really good job with the online art. Then David explained more about the technical obstacles of our potential collaboration, because the operating system he had would not take Skype and his computer was too old to upgrade, so he was stuck, and he couldn’t afford a new computer.

  An hour later he sent me another message, answering at least some of the questions I had asked about his illness and his jobs.

  The CFID started 22 years ago. Which would have made it sometime in 1992, right in the middle of his married life of 1988 to 1996, and the same year his brother committed suicide. It looks like the reason it happened was mercury poisoning for fillings. He talked about the toxicity of mercury and how it can cause genetic mutations.

  I gasped as I read this, because mercury is dangerous. But I wondered if dentists still did that work in 1992. Wouldn’t they have figured out the dangers by then? According to the World Health Organization, the American Dental Association, the Mayo Clinic, Health Canada, the Alzheimer’s Association, the New England Journal of Medicine—and many others—dental amalgams (which have some mercury) have been used for 150 years and are safe and effective. Can all those organizations be wrong? Or was this more like his mother’s invalidism, which I later found out was supposedly caused by some unknown and untraceable virus she caught in Africa?

  He told me he survived by the grace of God and because he read statistics about suicide rates . . . Wait! Had he considered killing himself, as his younger brother had? . . . and how he learned to keep a positive attitude, largely with the help of God. In all the time I communicated with him, he did have an unusually upbeat orientation. Have a wonderful weekend and God Bless you real good!