* * *
I arrived early enough to go to Louisa and Bobby’s house before the service. Everyone had sadness in their eyes. I went into Suzanne’s room to give my condolences, and she looked at me once again with that piercing gaze. When I told her how sorry I was that David was gone, I think I saw a tear starting to form, but I wasn’t sure, because I felt no pain coming from her, not like everyone else was feeling. Suzanne was collected and calm and talked a little about how much David liked to discuss family history.
Louisa’s three grown children would be there. One of them had recently moved into the house and was working nearby, one had come up from Florida, and her son was due in from Alaska any minute. All of us went to the grave site, in a nearby town, where the funeral was to be. That’s the town David’s grandparents and his father had grown up in, and where David had lived until a few years earlier. Maybe it was because of the rush of getting from Berlin and New York, or maybe because I’d lived in Tennessee for more than fifteen years, but I hadn’t paid attention to the weather. Even though Tennessee has generally milder weather in the winter, it was still December 23 and that day was chilly, hovering in the high forties and low fifties. So there we all were, about thirty of us, standing (not a chair in sight) outside in the cemetery, waiting for the service to start. I had only brought a light jacket, as I never imagined being outside for the funeral. Louisa got a call saying her son’s plane was going to be another forty-five minutes late, and we, of course, had to wait for him. I finally asked to sit in the car to warm up, as we’d already been outside for about a half hour, but I noticed most people stayed near the grave site. But they were wearing warmer clothes than I was. It was mostly people from David’s churches, the one in the town where he’d once lived, and the one he’d started going to about a year ago when he’d moved here.
Finally Louisa’s tall and good-looking son arrived and the service began. A stocky man in a black suit and white clerical collar walked carefully up to the casket. The pastor at David’s Methodist church gave a lovely talk about David, his love of Jesus, and his fascination with science, particularly quantum physics. After this, Louisa introduced the rabbi, who looked very similar but was just slightly taller than the minister. The rabbi was going to speak in honor of David’s Jewish mother. But where was the mother, by the way? I knew she was an invalid, but I’d seen her stand up and take some steps both times I’d been there, and there was a fold-up wheelchair in the corner of her bedroom. And why was this all suddenly about Suzanne’s religion? It felt awfully uncomfortable for me, and I imagine for the other mostly Christians there, who were too loving to say anything, when the rabbi took over the service and talked longer than David’s pastor. His thoughts were inspiring and he told us about how Jews used the back side of a shovel to show reluctance in having to bury a loved one, which was so touching that most of us were in tears. Or were we just crying because we had lost someone we loved?
It made me wonder if the funeral was really for David. Then I remembered reading Danny Stordock’s obituary and looking at his gravestone, which was all written in Hebrew, despite my understanding that Danny was not really Jewish. Louisa had told me something about Danny accepting Jesus toward the end of his life. And in the obituary there was no mention of the man (LaVerne Stordock) who gave Danny his last name, which would have allowed Suzanne to collect SSI survivor’s benefits from Social Security for Danny, and more benefits as his mother.
Vernie is absent from any obituary listing of Danny I could find, even in the official death certificate from Dane County, where Ronald Aaronson is listed as Danny’s father. Ronald never adopted Danny, who was twenty-three and had been out on his own for years when Suzanne and Ronald got married. When I met Danny’s half brother (an older son from the first marriage of Suzanne’s third husband) and his wife in Madison, he talked wistfully about the brother he’d never met. “Do you have any pictures of him?” he asked pleadingly. His voice broke from pain when he recounted the shock he’d experienced when reading Danny’s obituary and how no one from his birth family was mentioned at all.
Even if Suzanne never showed up at David’s funeral, she made sure her stamp was on it. The same as it was in her fifth husband Ronald Aaronson’s obituary, which listed David Briggs and Louisa Chappington as his surviving stepchildren and predeceased stepchildren as Danny and Jocelyn—neither with last names. Did she not want anyone to see the name of Stordock, lest it send off some signals she wanted no one to pursue? And would Jocelyn’s last names (which came in so many different varieties) cause people to ask too many questions?
Later, when it was just family, and we were all sitting around the family table, one of Louisa’s kids asked me how I was related. Silence as Louisa and I looked at each other. I had no idea what Louisa’s children knew and did not want to be the person who told them their grandmother was a confessed murderer, so I just replied, “Your grandma used to be married to my uncle Vernie.”
Louisa’s three children all looked well-scrubbed, though I found out later one of them was battling with personal problems. At the time I just marveled at how well-balanced they seemed. Then I started telling some funny stories about Vernie and how much he loved being a cop. I could see the relief on Louisa’s face. She later told me how grateful she was that I had reminded her how Vernie had some good qualities, because she mostly thought of him as a monster who tortured her mother. Bobby asked Louisa later if her children knew what had happened with Vernie, and Louisa said yes, but she did not sound convincing.
I asked Louisa what was wrong with Suzanne that she was confined to her bed. Louisa said no one was able to find any medical reason. After her fifth husband, Ronald, died, she moved to Alaska so Louisa could take care of her and she started walking with a cane. Suzanne was so insistent they move to Tennessee to be near David, Louisa finally complied and gave up her forty years of life in Alaska with her three kids, who all lived there, Bobby left his grown children, and they moved to Tennessee. Louisa told me at a later time that she would have never heard the end of it from her mother if they’d stayed in Alaska. By the time they had moved to the farm outside Chattanooga, Suzanne was gradually spending more time in bed. I asked Louisa if doctors had tried to cure Suzanne, but Louisa said many had, with no success. Suzanne had some story about how she and Ronald were on a Doctors Without Borders trip ten years previously and she picked up some bug that no one else in the group got, and she blamed it on her unwillingness to drink the firewater that the witch doctor had offered everyone. And that led to her being an invalid, from no apparent medical cause. Louisa had told me previously about a urinary tract infection of Suzanne’s that would not be healed, because the doctor could not find any infection. Louisa had taken her multiple times to the clinic, to no avail.
That night after the funeral I thought it was a good time to get more information. So I asked Louisa when they had moved to Oregon, Wisconsin, and she said it was the school year that Kennedy was shot, after she had already started in her Madison high school. Based on research I did at the Oregon Historical Society and local newspapers, I think they moved into the Oregon mansion between December 1963 and January 1964.
* * *
It was getting late and very dark outside. Louisa and Bobby were pressing me to sleep there, but I still was skittish to be unconscious in the same house as my uncle’s confessed murderer. Whereas I saw her as a murderer or, at minimum, a conspirator/instigator of the killing, to them she was the beloved mother who was cruelly and unjustly confined to her bed. So I made up some excuse about preferring to sleep in hotels. I sensed I was hurting their feelings, but I couldn’t get past my fears. Was I being unreasonable? I didn’t really care. I just wanted to sleep without any worries. Fear creates unusual ripple effects, which I was not interested in exploring that evening.
That night in Tennessee, as I was heading for the door to leave, I asked Louisa about Danny and how he died. She said he’d come out as gay and had a boyfriend who was really into drugs,
something they did together. Then the guy broke up with him, and Danny wanted to scare him and took what he thought was only a slight overdose, so that he’d survive and be taken to the hospital and his boyfriend would come back. How she knew this was in Danny’s mind, I forgot to ask, but she did say she prayed with Danny not long before he died, so she felt his soul was saved and close to Jesus.
Louisa then said I could ask her anything, so I thought I’d better take this opportunity. What about the cigarette burn, I asked. Was there a pattern of Vernie abusing your mom?
Louisa said she’d never seen any physical abuse. On the contrary, one time Vernie had come downstairs for breakfast with bandages over his face and she asked what had happened. Suzanne said he’d cut himself shaving, but Vernie hesitated before recounting how Suzanne had come after him with a broken bottle. Suzanne did not contradict him. Another example Louisa gave was when Suzanne took all the dishes out of the kitchen cupboard and vigorously threw them against the wall, breaking them into bits. After hearing all the crashing, Louisa came running downstairs and tried to stop her mother. Vernie told her to please ignore what was going on, that they would work it out themselves. David had also told me that the stories of abuse were things Suzanne had told herself to live with what she had done. Nobody in that family ever used the words “murder” or “killing.”
Then I said David had told my aunt Maxine, maybe forty years ago, that he’d killed Vernie. Louisa became a motionless statue for a couple of seconds, then looked at me and said: “This would explain so much, about how my mother had always protected him and said, ‘We have to make sure David is all right, especially when I’m gone.’” Louisa said that Suzanne was relieved when David died, something neither she nor her husband could understand. About an hour after this comment, when I was standing next to Bobby, he made the same observation: “Suzanne was so relieved when David died.”
As I drove through pouring rain toward the airport at 1:00 A.M. to find a hotel, I was grateful I’d pushed myself to get there for the funeral, and grateful I’d established a connection with Louisa, who had tried valiantly to be a person who loves abundantly, who lives out her religious principles, and who is good. I had mostly remembered her as an artistic hippie and was gratified to see how she’d managed to build a life. She had told me the tragedy of her first marriage, saying she’d realized one day that she’d married a carbon copy of LaVerne: a Swedish alcoholic. I didn’t correct her, because he was actually Norwegian, but I think it showed she didn’t know him well, because Vernie wore his 100 percent Norwegian heritage with great honor. I think from various comments Louisa made that she saw Vernie as just another one of her mother’s string of husbands. Why bother to learn anything about him?
Was Vernie an alcoholic? Definitely not when he was married to Jenylle. His drinking increased during this marriage to Suzanne. Did that make him an alcoholic? Coming from a long line of alcoholics, and having a brother who was in treatment so often that he was on a first-name basis with the intake nurses, and being in more Adult Children of Alcoholics workshops than I can even recall, I think I have some discernment on who is this type of addict. So I can speak with some confidence that Vernie was more likely “alcohol-dependent” than alcoholic. I believe his drinking would have subsided if he had lived long enough to go back to Jenylle.
The rain was relentless the night of the funeral, so I stopped at the first inn I found. A few minutes after I got to my room, a large brown cockroach walked across the smelly, worn-out carpet, and I decided I didn’t want to stay in this place, either. While driving down the highway to find another abode, I wondered some more about why David died just three days after I had confronted him about the blood splatters and the gunshot residue. Turning in to the drive for a more upscale hotel, I realized David had surely told Louisa and his mother about our conversation, because that was his usual practice. And then why was Suzanne so relieved when he passed? What kind of mother is happy when her son dies?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Court Transcripts
It took three months to get the court transcripts. The few surviving forensic pictures didn’t reproduce well, and the psychiatrists’ reports had disappeared, but with those forty-year-old transcriptions of every hearing, including the final one, as well as the probate documents and those from the suit involving Vernie’s life insurance policy, I got much of what I needed.
By the final hearing Suzanne was found not guilty by reason of insanity “at the time of the shooting,” and she was committed to the state hospital. While waiting for the hearings and later to go to the hospital, she had the mental alertness to file for his life insurance, which she got, and to petition the court to give her Vernie’s half of the house as his “widow.” On all the probate documents, where she asked for bank accounts and other assets, she listed “widow,” and I wondered, well, who made you a widow? She got everything. Shannon, Vernie’s only natural child, got nothing.
Vernie’s will listed Suzanne and Danny as the heirs. Knowing Vernie, I have a hard time believing this was his idea. He loved Shannon, and had tried several times to contact her. Because Suzanne would fly into a rage if any of Vernie’s relatives talked to his first wife, Jenylle, I feel certain Suzanne was only too happy to have Shannon out of the way, too. Shannon did sue the insurance company, on the grounds that his confessed killer (Suzanne) was benefiting, but lost the case. It’s hard to imagine such a thing would happen, but the case was described in the December 28, 1971, issue of the Madison Capital Times and the final judgment came three years later, giving all of the insurance money to Suzanne. After reviewing the court transcripts, I found the result to be more complicated. From the transcripts I found Danny was supposed to receive half of the insurance money, as well as half of Vernie’s State Retirement Fund. But still, I wondered, how could the person who admitted to blowing off half my uncle’s head be the very person who got half his life insurance money and most of the other assets?
I want to take you through the transcripts. The first one is March 2, 1970, one day after the murder, which was about 2:15 A.M. on Sunday, March 1. Early on, one of Suzanne’s attorneys, Jack van Metre (the other was Kenneth Orchard), recounts how Suzanne’s longtime family physician, Dr. Walter Washburn, showed up at the police station and immediately determined that she was “mentally ill.” After I read this, I looked up Dr. Washburn’s record and found a general practitioner who graduated from medical school around 1950, with no evidence of any psychiatric training. In addition, there is no information on how Dr. Washburn happened to appear at the police station. It was only months later, when I finally got the police reports, that I learned that Suzanne had made many calls from her home while the police were there, telling everyone she’d shot Vernie, and I surmised that Dr. Washburn had been on her call list. Or perhaps she had asked her attorney Orchard to call him, as one of the officers reported she talked to her lawyer while the police were in the home investigating the crime scene. Evidently, her psychotic break had ended.
District Attorney James Boll told the court on Monday morning he had spoken to Dr. Washburn the night before, and that Washburn had recommended Suzanne be examined by Dr. Leigh Roberts, a psychiatrist, and that she be transported from the jail to the university psychiatric hospital, where she stayed until leaving for court that morning, March 2. At first, upon reading the few sentences that described the appearance of Dr. Washburn and his essentially appointing Roberts as the psychiatrist, it all seemed like a normal procedure. Little did I know how the seeming innocence of Dr. Washburn’s behavior would infect the case with a virus from which the district attorney chose not to recover, and that Roberts had a few secrets of his own that would eventually be laid bare.
DA Boll said the prosecution anticipated an insanity defense and, therefore, thought it would be the best for all concerned if she was examined as close to the event as possible. The preliminary hearing would normally have been within ten days, but Jack van Metre requested a delay, because of the ti
me needed for several psychiatric examinations. Everyone agreed on one month hence, with the date of April 7. A court order on March 10 proclaimed that Dr. Leigh Roberts determined Suzanne was legally insane, though the transcript of that hearing has disappeared. I found the court order, but not the transcript.
As for bail, DA Boll said that because this was a serious charge—in fact, the most serious charge in Wisconsin statutes—he recommended no bail. Van Metre said that under the Eighth Amendment, everyone has the right to bail (a prosecutor friend of mine later told me this is preposterous) and he would ask for $25,000. Boll countered that if there had to be bail, it should be $65,000, as it had been in the recent Virnell Hunt case. That translates into about $425,000 in 2018 dollars. Judge Russell Mittelstadt said he would rule on it later.
Newspapers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota were all over the murder case. One of the first articles to appear was in the afternoon Madison Capital Times, which not only listed the crime, but also described Suzanne as appearing in court in a three-piece dress suit and red high heels, and how she was a “tall, willowy blonde who wears her hair on a bun at the top of her head.” This had to have been written by a man, I thought (and I was correct), because I don’t think other women would find someone like Suzanne attractive. I’ve known a number of similar females whom men circle around like planets in orbit. They’re not unattractive, but you wonder, Hey, really? And why would anyone think a five-foot-three woman is tall?
How is it possible that she spent the entire day, March 1, at the police station, then was taken to the state hospital that evening, and showed up in court the following morning in a suit and high heels, as was mentioned in one article? Did she pack a whole suitcase before she was arrested? If she really had been in a psychotic state as she claimed, how could she have managed to choose an outfit that seemed to coordinate and was surely designed to get attention? Which it obviously did.
With One Shot Page 11