We talked on the phone a few days later and among conversations about the Holy Spirit and Eternal Life, I asked him who Danny’s father was, because I had not been able to find any information. Irv Gast, he told me, quickly saying he hadn’t been in their lives long. And what about Vernie? When did he start coming around? David thought about ten years before he died, which put it at 1960, the year Danny was born. Could my über-responsible uncle have fathered a child out of wedlock and later adopted him? I called Shannon and asked her.
“That would make sense,” she said. “My parents were having problems back around 1960. Maybe the affair started sooner than we thought.” But when I talked to David again, he had spoken to Louisa, which I came to realize was his modus operandi on everything we shared. And usually it would include discussions with Suzanne. In a way it was really a four-way conversation every time David and I connected. And that was fine with me, because the more information I got, the better. Sometimes when David’s story changed, I knew I had to be wary, because most likely Suzanne or Louisa had set him “straight.” David gave me the revised version.
I was wrong when we spoke last time. Louisa said Vernie was only in our lives for six, maybe seven years. That meant Louisa was saying she was aware of their relationship in 1962. So where was the truth? Would I ever figure out this complicated web of marriages, affairs, and births?
I was grateful David loved to connect with me, and I was growing fonder of him each week. Why didn’t I go there and see him again? I get angry each time I ask myself that question.
In our e-mails David kept trying to push working for me, and I wondered: Could someone with an obsolete operating system be cutting-edge in marketing and PR?
Around this time my first grandchild was born in Montana. During flights back and forth I had lots of time to think about the murder. As I reread David’s e-mails and thought about the discussions that first night with Suzanne, Louisa, and David, floods of memories came back to me about my own family’s experience with a sudden death and how it changed my perception of the living versus the dead.
* * *
I was thirteen and home alone on Wednesday, May 9, 1962, with my older brother, Raymond, the thin, six-foot-four, handsome, crew-cut-styled star athlete of basketball and baseball. In fact, the Milwaukee Braves had scheduled a scout to come and watch him pitch the following week. That night our parents were gone and I had no idea where my other brother was. My sister was out with her boyfriend. Raymond and I had just finished eating the dinner our mother prepared and left for us hours ago. I had little time to savor the memory of our favorite dish, chop suey and white rice, that was so sticky it seemed more like the three-hour-old oatmeal they serve at Shoney’s.
Raymond was having an asthma attack. His face was tight and pale; his lips were alternating between pursed up and wide canoes as he tried to get more oxygen. Ever since I could remember, Raymond got these periodic attacks where he could hardly breathe, so he was never without the green inhaler with the round white mouthpiece. In between sucks on that contraption he gasped, “Put your hand over your nose, Dorothy” as he demonstrated for me and then quickly pushed the inhaler into his mouth again. “That’s what it’s like for me to breathe. I can’t get any air. Please find Mama.”
What could I do? There was no 911 back then. In fact, Wisconsin didn’t even mandate it to be instituted everywhere until 1987, and this was all happening in 1962. There I was, a young girl, brought up in a home with serial and serious abuse. My mother had been battered regularly like meat being tenderized, and my brothers were often pounded into bloody and bruised bodies until my father ran out of energy or rage, whichever came last. What lesson did I learn from this? In times of crisis, do nothing. I know it is hard to imagine being like that, so dependent on my mother, who was eminently undependable. Why didn’t I call an ambulance? Raymond had had plenty of asthma attacks before, and my mother would always come home and fix them. What reason did I have to think otherwise? And no one in my family had ever called an ambulance or the police before. In fact, until just before, we never even had a phone, so this calling around was a whole habit pattern, not part of my repertoire. Even though I was thirteen, because of all the abuse, poverty, and neglect in my family, my emotional age was much younger. I didn’t have the faculties required to take meaningful action beyond trying to get my mother home from the taverns. That was one skill I had mastered and I did it that afternoon with the diligence of a soldier facing battle.
It took me several hours of dialing by memory every tavern in Pewaukee before she miraculously appeared the fourth time I tried the Shore Bowl. Within minutes she was home and called the ambulance.
When I woke the next morning, my stepfather told me Raymond was in a coma, but I should still go to school. All day I wondered how he was doing. That afternoon I got off the school bus and saw way too many cars in our driveway. I knew what had happened as I walked through the front door.
“Raymond died,” my mother said, as if in a catatonic state, sitting with some friends around our brown Formica kitchen table. Her short hair was barely combed and she was dressed in an old white blouse with tan pedal pushers. I had just walked in the same door through which my brother had been carried out, and as I looked behind me, I remembered seeing him take those desperate breaths.
We found out after the autopsy that he died from aspirating the rice. Because of my brother’s history the medics assumed he was having another asthma attack and treated it accordingly. My mother never cooked chop suey or rice again. And that summer I had to learn even more tavern phone numbers as my mother and stepfather sank further into the abyss of alcohol. Only years later did I learn that she had already lost one son, a boy born out of wedlock and handed over by the family to a barren aunt, a loss she suffered deeply, and quietly, until the day she died.
I found none of this regret or longing in Suzanne, Louisa, and certainly not David’s cheerful remembrances of Vernie, though I did sense David really loved Vernie and wanted some redemption from all that had happened. He showed such an eagerness to connect with me. One of my friends said it was David’s version of “the compulsion to confess,” first described by the psychologist Theodor Reik. Later on, when I showed David’s e-mails to a psychologist, she said David had a “strange attachment” to me. Was he working his way to telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Within six weeks of my visit to their farm, David had his computer outfitted so we could talk, which we did every week or two. He started every conversation with something like:
“Has the Holy Spirit visited you yet? I’ve been talking with Him about you and you should feel it soon.
“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? We pray for you every morning, Dorothy, so that your soul will be saved.”
After a few Skype sessions I noticed David’s newly posted bio on Skype:
I am new to Skype and looking for people in advanced sciences to chat with. Currently I am the Founder and Chief Science and Technology Officer at Special Time Energy and Publicity. My science, engineering and mechanics career started at the tender age of 16 years.
He was sixteen the year before Vernie was murdered. In David’s life I think you can divide all that went before March 1, 1970, as the “tender” and innocent years, which came to a quantum-reaction halt on that violent night, when he began his descent into hell.
CHAPTER FOUR
Suzanne’s Strategy
Vernie and Suzanne met in the Congress Bar, where they both went for drinks after work, probably in January 1962, which would have been a frigid day, not unlike the weather the night he was murdered.
Suzanne had long since grown tired of husband number three, who, by all accounts, was not a good provider, relying on his wealthy father to give him jobs and bail him out financially. And except for his rich family, that husband did not offer Suzanne the chance to move up socially, so she must have been transported to another realm when she met this thirty-s
ix-year-old, handsome, ambitious, longtime police chief, who now had his eye on a prestigious state job.
From what I have gathered, Vernie was well-known in Wisconsin law enforcement circles and was likely working as a consultant in Madison. He was charming, competent, and surely convinced of his ultimate success in the career ladder he was pursuing, so I am certain he exuded a kind of over-the-rainbow, winning-lottery-ticket appeal to a woman who wanted to live big and proud. And sure enough, before long, he would be selected to be part of an elite group of investigators for a new division under the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office.
Vernie dressed well and was tall, handsome, and full of personality and ambition—a man to latch onto, which Suzanne did, like one side of Velcro to the other. Before long, they were in a scorching adulterous affair. Suzanne, who many people told me “was not unattractive” and “didn’t dress particularly sexy,” somehow managed to have men constantly circle around. By her own admission she had been with many men (“You dated everyone,” her fifth husband often told her), including three husbands before my uncle, and she evidently knew how to get Vernie to hang out his tongue when she looked at him sideways and took a deep breath. And the fact that he was married was not the kind of obstacle she couldn’t overcome.
Another asset Vernie offered to Suzanne was status. Did Suzanne know this was once and for all her chance at some kind of fame? Because after the complicated divorces, when they became known as Mr. and Mrs. Stordock, she finally got her name in the paper for events other than marriages and dissolutions. Now she could be on the Society pages, with news of visiting relatives, or dinner parties, or her children’s international trips.
Was she also calculating the demise of this relationship as well, or was she blindsided by Vernie wanting to go back to Jenylle (Shannon had been told by several of Vernie’s Beloit friends that he had shared with them his plans to reunite with Jenylle)? Having been through three divorces already, it perhaps crossed her mind that having to share assets was tiresome. Wouldn’t there be a way she could get everything?
CHAPTER FIVE
A New Family Member—Dealing with the Unexpected
In summer 2014 I was on a four-hour train ride back to New York from Washington, DC, where I had traveled on business. Normally, I would read a book, or write, but that evening I was exhausted from conducting two days of intense training, so I searched the Internet for more clues about Suzanne and her history. Because I had recently purchased the subscriptions to archived newspapers and genealogical sites, I had more access than I’d ever had. But I was not prepared for the shocking information I found. In fact, at first, I thought I was mistaken and retraced my steps.
During those hours I searched for Suzanne Stordock, Sue Stordock, Suzi Chappington, Suzanne Briggs, Suzanne Brandon. After about two hours a 2009 obituary popped up for a “Jocelyn Brandon Freeman” of Madison, Wisconsin, whose parents were Norman and Claudia Rhoades and Suzanne Brandon. Right away it was confusing. How many obituaries have three parents listed?
I thought this must be a different Suzanne Brandon, but it listed her husband, Ronald Aaronson (husband number five), and some of Jocelyn’s siblings as David Briggs and Louisa Chappington, so this must be Suzanne’s “daughter.” I dug around some more to find out who Norman and Claudia Rhoades were. The 1940 census showed them in Madison, with one son, aged fifteen. Scrolling down, I saw it listed their race as Negro. Other newspaper articles I discovered told stories about how they had adopted several children, including a “Jocelyn.” Then I got it. Jocelyn was born in 1945, when Suzanne would have been sixteen. Was this some illegitimate daughter to Suzanne, who had found Suzanne later on, like in that movie Secrets and Lies? I had never seen an African American woman hanging around their house, nor had I heard any talk about her, so this revelation had to be post-Vernie, because this did not conform with how she had tried to portray herself.
I remembered Suzanne as someone always wanting to be admired. Looking back now, I can see she was her own PR agent, managing numerous times to get her and Vernie’s names in the newspaper for hosting dinner parties or for visiting family in another city. Then she’d buy dozens of copies of the newspapers and send each of us all the clippings. One story was about a party for Louisa, who was setting off for several months in Europe, including Germany, and then also traveling to Israel. That was one write-up Suzanne did not share with the family. I only found out about Louisa’s trip recently as I was doing research (in the archived service I subscribed to) on newspaper articles back then where Suzanne or Vernie were listed.
* * *
I remember desperately wanting to go to Germany for about ten years. One of my uncles was stationed in the army there for a long time and I thought it would be heavenly to visit and had chosen German as the foreign language I’d study. One winter day, when I was sixteen and in my brown wool coat, which was frayed in two places on the collar, I walked the three blocks from Central High School to a travel agency in downtown Waukesha. Surrounding the door were large windows filled with pictures of Bermuda, Mexico, London, and Spain. I pushed the heavy door open and walked up the four carpeted steps.
Two women were sitting behind desks, talking fast on telephones seemingly grafted to their ears. One of them was finishing up and she motioned to me to sit in the chair next to her desk. She wore a navy blue dress and a dour look. I’d never been in a travel agency before and felt very out of place, but my desire to go to Europe pushed me forward.
A woman who called herself Mrs. Radford hung up and turned toward me, the white lace peeking out from the edges of her black-sleeved top, with a kind of smile that let me know I did not belong in a place that sold tickets to people who actually had considerable assets. “Can I help you, dear?” she asked patronizingly, as a kindergarten teacher would address her new students in the fall.
“I . . . I . . . want to go to Germany,” I stammered, not able to even look her in the eyes, because now I was feeling beneath her.
“Oh, you do, do you?” She looked down at me over her glasses, which had a beaded necklace tied to them so that they rested on her chest when she wasn’t reading, or when she was staring at people who waste her time. “The cheapest way to get there,” she continued, recognizing that I was in the lower-priced categories, “is by steamer ship. It costs six hundred dollars.”
I barely remember anything after that shock, but somehow I managed to get back out on the street. Six hundred dollars? How can I ever come up with that when I earn one dollar an hour babysitting?
And my parents? Forget asking them for more than $50, which was how much they gave me for a wedding present seven years later.
* * *
When Louisa took her international trip, it was a time of escalating fights between Vernie and Suzanne, so I imagine Louisa was happy to get away. If my grandmother had known they were sending Louisa off on such an extravagant trip, she would have said they were spending money like a drunken sailor, a major reason we did not know, I imagine. And my grandmother would have ended her statement with something about “that tramp,” which is what lots of people would have called Suzanne, had they known back in 1945 that she had an illegitimate child. And if that baby was what they used to call “mulatto,” all the worse in those days, especially in totally white Boscobel, Wisconsin, which is still very Middle American and WASPy. No wonder they’d want to keep the birth quiet. I wondered if Vernie even knew about it. Maybe he found out about Jocelyn and threatened to tell everyone, as a means of motivating Suzanne to give him a divorce so he could go back to Jenylle. Even though attitudes were changing by 1970, Suzanne was of the generation that the people she was trying to impress could have thought less of her. Or at least that might have been Suzanne’s assumption.
During my next talk with David, I brought up Jocelyn. He said she was some friend of Louisa’s whom Suzanne had adopted. Louisa had found Jocelyn as a child when they lived in the same neighborhood, because Louisa had been fascinated by Jocelyn’s hair. And
then he told me Jocelyn was a recent widow in 1970, and that she and her children had moved into the Oregon house while Suzanne was in jail and in the hospital. Then I understood the adoption part. Here is this young woman, needy for her birth mother, who gets asked to help out and offered a chance at being adopted by her real mother. Take advantage of Jocelyn’s vulnerability and basically get child care for free for a year. Actually the child-care part turned out to be much, much longer, as I found out later.
Then I wanted to hear Louisa’s story. Louisa quickly began, “Oh, yes, Jocelyn. You know in Wisconsin, they allow adults to adopt other adults, so that’s what Mom did.” How did you all become so close? “I was out walking in the neighborhood one day and found this little girl who had black-springy hair, which I couldn’t stop touching, so I brought her home. And we became friends the rest of our lives.”
A month later, I brought up Jocelyn again, as if I had never heard anything. Louisa said, “I went out one day and found this little girl. She had black-springy hair that fascinated me, so I brought her home, and we’ve been friends ever since.” I thought it odd that I’d never seen or even heard about her those years I hung around Oregon, but I didn’t mention that.
I did some digging to figure out how Louisa and Jocelyn could ever have been friends. They never lived in the same neighborhoods to go to school together. But I did find them living about a block from each other, in a solidly African American neighborhood, during the time Suzanne was divorcing Louisa’s father, which would have put Louisa’s age at a curly-blond two to two-and-a-half. That’s not an age a parent would let a child walk around alone, searching for potential friends. The two families lived at opposite ends of a very long block and across an extremely wide street, which had space enough for parking on both sides and two double lanes, meaning four lanes total.
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