They walked through the living room, up the beautifully carved staircase, the one her mother had had refinished to its original elegance. Louisa turned to go into what had been her bedroom and froze. How many nights had she lain there, listening to the arguments, the hurtling of words she never, ever wanted to hear again?
Alice asked if she wanted to see the other rooms and Louisa walked behind her until she entered that room and stopped. “No,” she said, “I can’t.” She couldn’t tell her why. Couldn’t make the words come out of her mouth. Just “no,” that’s all. And she couldn’t go into the bathroom where Vernie used to shower. If she did, she might see him shaving his face with that Remington razor and wiping off the shaving cream with the blue towels that she had washed and folded so carefully.
She tried not to remember the time her mother attacked Vernie with the broken bottle. Or where her mother must have stood when she called Louisa on the phone right after “it” happened.
Louisa looked at Alice. “Can I see the attic? It’s where I went to paint, and to hide.” How much should Louisa tell her? She sensed the woman knew what had transpired. Alice said some comforting words and seemed to know not to ask too many difficult questions and instead inquired about her family.
“One of my brothers lives in Tennessee with his wife. Our youngest brother passed nine years ago.” Alice told Louisa how sorry she was, but before she could ask how he died, Louisa started telling her about her mother. “She finished her law degree and is representing battered women in Minneapolis. I’m taking our old antiques up to her place in one of the suburbs.” Louisa walked toward the back porch and saw the car waiting for her. “I didn’t think I’d be able to come inside,” she said. “Thank you for helping me.”
Because of the attached trailer Louisa couldn’t back up and instead went around the whole block, past the cornfields and back onto the highway, heading for the long ride to the Twin Cities, where her mother waited for the furniture.
In the summer of 2015 I got various and sundry court documents, including Vernie and Jenylle’s divorce decree, where they both stipulated that the only piece of furniture Vernie would take was his Aunt Anna’s antique rocking chair. I wondered if Aunt Anna’s keepsake was part of that arduous U-Haul journey, and if that chair now resided in Tennessee.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Law and Openness to Learning
I tried to be open to new information as I researched about Suzanne’s court case, so that I wouldn’t close myself off to new insights. What more was there to learn about the insanity plea? And then I came across state documents that made me gasp. In Wisconsin the legal view of “insanity” changed with two events. The first, and perhaps most important, was a change in the Wisconsin legal statute about how to treat defendants found innocent by reason of insanity. Whereas previously it was very cumbersome and difficult to get out of a legally ordered mental institution commitment, the new statute—Assembly Bill 603, chapter 967–976—allowed more latitude for such people to be able to petition for release within the first year of hospitalization. They needed to assert that they were completely healed, with some backup by hospital personnel. This law was passed December 1969, less than three months before the murder.
Secondly, a landmark case was decided that allowed someone to claim they were overtaken by an insane delusion that led to a criminal act, and it seemed to allow the defendant greater leeway in self-diagnosing such a condition. This case was decided February 3, 1970, less than a month before Vernie was killed.
Are these merely coincidences? One might argue that Suzanne, not being a physician or an attorney, would have no knowledge of these changes. But Suzanne, by her own admission, was a genius Mensa member, and she was married to a powerful man who worked for the State of Wisconsin. Vernie’s work allowed her to develop other powerful relationships.
Take for example the case of the Dane County sheriff. After Vernie was shot, the first thing Suzanne did was call the sheriff on his private number. She bragged to me about this, saying she didn’t call him at the station, but at his home. Court documents depict him testifying that the ringing woke his wife, who then handed the phone to the sheriff. She identified herself as “Suzi,” which indicates a personal relationship.
* * *
Do I think that is the only powerful person she felt comfortable calling on? I do not. She mentioned to me during one of our conversations that she had met one woman to whom she felt very connected and how they understood each other. It was another woman who had murdered her man. Hope Thomas Privett was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
“I really felt I could help her,” Suzanne said in her usual unemotional speech pattern. It wasn’t until some subsequent research that I discovered Hope Privett was the only other female murderer in Dane County during that time period. Privett had also tried to get off on an insanity plea, but she had been convicted of first-degree murder and given a life sentence.
While Suzanne was talking, I was sitting on the chair at the foot of her wooden bed, while she was stroking her small brown-and-white dog, Holstein, and looking past me, as if she was pretending to be gazing my way. “I sent her money and cosmetics. I even talked to the judge about getting her out of prison.”
Wait! What confessed murderer had the kind of relationship to talk to a judge about another murderer? Why didn’t I ask her which judge she meant? Suzanne went on, “She changed her name and was living somewhere in Wisconsin.” Another comment I failed to follow up on. If she changed her name, it had to be after she got out. After I dug for weeks, I lost Privett’s trail at 1980, when the last newspaper article had a Church of Christ minister pleading to let her be released in his care, because she was transformed and was now close to God. When I called the prison, they said she had been released in 1980. I called several of her distant family members, one of whom told me she had nothing to do with Hope anymore, because Hope was mean to everyone, even her own mother, to whom she caused a lot of pain in her final years. When I got hold of the current pastor at the Church of Christ and told him about her, hoping he had some information, he said, “Well, I guess she didn’t really transform, did she?”
After weeks of hunting down any possible lead, I discovered the location of Hope’s daughter, who was only two years old when her mother was arrested for murder. I tried to call the daughter, but she wouldn’t pick up her phone or call me back. So I sent a text, explaining what I was doing and why I wanted to talk to Hope, if possible, but got no response. It did not surprise me. Why would this woman, who seemed from my research to be living an exemplary life, want to bring back painful memories?
Bonnie Privett called back about two weeks later and we talked for almost ninety minutes. “I do know where my mother is,” she stated with a disarming warmth in her voice, which seemed to erase the distance between New York City and Maryland, where she lived. “But I won’t tell you, because I want to protect you.” I wanted to say, “Please don’t protect me,” but I felt that would be violating a boundary with this woman who had obviously had more pain in her life than I could imagine:
My mother is a bitter, nasty woman who carries deep resentment for all that happened and hatred for everyone in her life. She didn’t raise me. My sister and I were brought up in foster homes, though I know when I was with my mother it was endless neglect. I didn’t meet my biological father until I was twenty-one.
When my mother got out of prison after eleven years, when I was fourteen, I got scared that maybe she’d come after me. Still, she was my mother and I was curious. Maybe she wasn’t as bad as people said. Maybe I needed to give her a chance. Eventually I moved in with her. What I learned was that she is someone with major temper issues who angers quicker than an atomic reaction and will take whatever objects are in her reach—dishes, books, steam iron, pool ball—and throw it at the person she is raging at.
I know little to nothing about the stabbing back in 1969, but I do know she is capable of murder. Picking up a kn
ife and plunging it into someone is on her normal continuum of violence, and she wouldn’t have any regrets.
As Bonnie and I talked, I saw the similarities of both Hope and Suzanne having vicious tempers, yet both were able to charm when needed. They both saw themselves as victims of abuse and felt completely justified in the murders. Both women had hurt their mothers deeply and had left toxic chaos in their children’s lives.
And this was the woman, Hope Thomas Privett, whom Suzanne had felt closest to and had evidently kept up with for years, since she knew she had changed her name and was living somewhere in Wisconsin. All that had to be after 1980. The daughter told me that after Hope murdered her lover, she successfully pleaded with her recently divorced husband to hide the murder weapon, a knife.
Bonnie Privett, who had a wonderful husband and six children, said with great strength, “I was told as a child that I would grow up to neglect and hurt my children and be a lousy person, but I prayed to God and told myself that I was going to make my children have a much better life than I did. And I feel proud that I was able to accomplish that goal.” While talking on the phone with her, I was brought to tears at the courage of this woman, whom I would later meet. Even now it makes my heart swell when I think of how she has built a life, starting with such overwhelming hardships. She has so consciously made her life pure and good. It reminded me of Suzanne’s daughter, Louisa, who found God and has tried so hard to be a loving and thoughtful person. She followed this life path, even if she didn’t consciously see that she was being the opposite of her own mother, as Bonnie was able to conceive.
“My mother got away with murder,” said Bonnie. “Even though she served eleven years, that is nothing compared to taking someone’s life.” And I’m thinking, well, what about serving only 11 months? What I also didn’t tell the daughter was how I’d contacted a number of family members of the murdered man, a father of seven. After all these forty-plus years, they were still in too much pain to want to talk about what had happened.
* * *
It was lore in my family that Suzanne got away with murder. Another Madison attorney said it was very clear from reading the court transcripts that there was some behind-the-scenes deal made. We had always assumed so, and thought she walked away for one of the following reasons: She knew secrets that high-ranking officials did not want divulged, or else she had an affair with someone very powerful, someone who she knew would protect her. But how could I prove either of these?
Though I felt very certain that Suzanne had engaged in extramarital affairs when she was with Vernie, I needed evidence. Suzanne would never admit to it. And how do you find documentation of something so hidden that happened forty-five years ago?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
David and Connections
I knew I had to build a strong relationship with David. As I got to know him and could see the good and honest person he was inside, this became more and more pleasant. It did cross my mind more than occasionally that this might be the guy who shot my uncle, and I don’t even know how to explain it, but I loved him and felt no need to even work toward forgiveness. It was already there.
My psych-nurse cousin Donna’s theory was that if David pulled the trigger, it was not of his own volition, that Suzanne had somehow manipulated him. But even if he did it on his own, he was young and immature and later had decades to reflect on it. But then again, he actually wasn’t reflecting on it much, or he might have remembered my uncle or me sooner when I called that first time.
David always initiated the calls with me. At first, it was just e-mail; then when he got his computer fixed, we did Skype, every few weeks once we got started.
The last few months of 2014, David mentioned often how pretty I was, and how much he enjoyed talking with me. In a December 4 e-mail after a Skype session, he said he loved me, but then quickly said he was not pushing for romance, but just that the connection from so long ago touched his heart, and how he’d love to come visit me in New York, if God would give him that million dollars he’s been praying for.
Around that time he got really enthused as we talked about living in Wisconsin. “Let’s go back and buy that house in Oregon,” he said, “we can get married, and I can run my business out of the basement. Wouldn’t that be great?” I just laughed, hoping I could turn his serious comment into something we both saw as a humorous remark.
He did mention in early December how lonely he was. “I’m the only Christian in this house,” he said. “My mother is Jewish, and Louisa and her husband are Messianic Jews, so I am alone. A minority.”
He talked about how difficult it was for Louisa to have to take care of his mother, who would wake up every hour having to pee, and only Louisa could help her. So Louisa never got any sleep. They did have a home health aide, but she wasn’t there during the nights. Louisa told me later that her mom complained of having a urinary tract infection, but they’d tried many medications and nothing was helping. This meant Louisa was never able to sleep more than sixty minutes at a time.
During that time period I was starting to gather background information on the case, because Shannon and I were still trying to learn who had been the actual murderer. In early November I went online and sent an electronic request for police records of the murder to the Oregon Police Department, and I contacted Dane County Courts on December 2, 2014, to get court transcripts. By December I hadn’t heard anything from Oregon, Wisconsin, so I called the police station. It took several telephone calls for the clerks to figure out that their new digitized records did not go back that far. They had recently updated their computer system and could not retrieve anything before 1990. I was crushed. How in the world would I ever know what happened without the police reports? Why had I waited so long?
* * *
That same day, December 12, David sent me an e-mail, really pushing for a Skype session that weekend. It was a superbusy time for me, as I had Saturday completely booked, morning to night, and Sunday during the day, and Monday I was flying across the Atlantic Ocean to be part of a theater panel in Berlin, Germany. David and I found we could talk at 8:30 P.M. on Sunday, December 14. Normally, I wouldn’t schedule something late on a Sunday, especially after two intense days, and I thought about asking David if we could wait a week until I got back, but I did enjoy talking to him, and it seemed really urgent for him.
“Dorothy, I want to talk to you about two things. God and Vernie.” I told him I was too tired to talk about God, but what was it about Vernie? “You need to know, Dorothy, that Vernie and I fought a lot, I even ran away a few times. That’s one of the reasons the police almost arrested me that night, because they knew about me and Vernie fighting.”
Having just spent considerable time on the phone with the police, I mentioned something about the Oregon police.
“It wasn’t Oregon. It was the Dane County sheriff that came.” He didn’t realize it, but at that moment my spirit leapt with joy. Maybe I could get the police reports, after all. David kept going on about how both his and his mother’s fingerprints were on the gun, and how he almost got arrested. I decided to challenge him, something I hadn’t done before, as I’d previously tried to be the nosy but pleasant cousin. Confrontation was what I intentionally avoided. But that night it was different, and I can’t tell you what happened inside me. Maybe I somehow sensed this was my last chance.
I talked to David about blood splatters and gunshot residue. Those were as important as fingerprints. Which of you had them? I queried.
“Well . . . my mother . . . of course,” he said, and stopped for a moment. I could hear him breathing hard. When he spoke again, his voice quavered.
“Dorothy, you don’t understand how traumatic it was that night for me and my mother!” he spouted, and if he’d been in the same room, I know I would have gotten little droplets of spit all over me.
Yeah, I thought, and how traumatic do you think it was for my uncle who’d just gotten half his head blown off? But I didn’t say it. I considered anot
her revelation: Though he’d confessed the murder to my aunt Maxine, I decided he’d had enough stress for one night. He seemed overwhelmed in some post-traumatic stress disorder moment and I did not want to make it worse. I could always bring up his confession when I got back from Berlin.
David died three days later. I got a Facebook message December 18 from Louisa, telling me about the upcoming funeral and: Much of his last thoughts and prayers were about and for you and your eternal destiny. Please call if you choose. I immediately picked up the phone in my small art deco hotel room in Berlin, where I was staying with my daughter, Solange, and got her on the line. They thought it was likely a heart attack, as he’d had heart problems as a child. The memorial service was the following Tuesday. I thought it impossible for me to get there, as I didn’t get home from Berlin until Monday night and changing the ticket was going to cost more than $1,000, since the return flights were now very expensive. But I realized this was the one and only funeral of David and I had to go. So I kept the transatlantic plane back and booked a flight at 5:30 A.M. Tuesday to Tennessee, coming back to New York the following morning. That meant getting home Monday night, unpacking, repacking, and getting two hours of sleep before I had to leave for the airport at 3:30 A.M.
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