How about bail? On March 11, Judge Mittelstadt set bail. Remember the DA had asked for $65,000 and her own attorneys requested $25,000? The judge set her bail at $15,000. I find it strange that in a capital case the judge would grant bail below what her own attorneys asked for. The judge evidently took pity on her, even though he immediately defended himself, saying he’d probably be criticized in some quarters, but that in such “domestic crimes, the chances of repetition are negligent.” How many other husbands did she currently have whom she could kill? Defense attorney Orchard said Mrs. Stordock’s financial situation was in a “muddle” because “she is accused of killing the individual from whose estate she would stand to benefit.” So that’s your defense, counselor? That she should be treated with care because she might get a heap of money from killing someone? It took her just thirteen days to raise the money and she was out of jail and back into the hospital on March 24.
Her attorney requested a delay (which the DA opposed) for the April 7 hearing, saying that some unnamed psychiatrists opposed subjecting Mrs. Stordock to the “trauma of a hearing.” When I first read that, my heart stopped. What about the trauma that my uncle experienced?
There were more delays. The preliminary hearing went off on April 21. It started with Suzanne’s attorney demanding copies of forensic photographs, which he claimed were taken at the request of the defense. In the hearing DA Boll objected, saying they were police photographs, but he didn’t know, six weeks later, if they were even developed. Suzanne’s attorney said some of the pictures were taken without Suzanne’s permission. I thought, What? Sue just killed her husband, and when the police showed up, she kindly asked them to take pictures from a certain angle, so she’ll have her Kodak moment?
Next we hear from Dane County’s sheriff, Vernon “Jack” Leslie, who testified that the phone rang in his house at 2:30 A.M. (he knew this because he looked at the clock) on Sunday, March 1, and he let his wife answer. She handed the phone to him across the bed and he heard a female voice say, “This is Mrs. Stordock and I just shot my husband.” Sheriff Leslie asked her to repeat her words and she said, “This is Suzi and I just shot Vern.” The sheriff said he jumped out of bed within one to two seconds and headed toward the crime scene. But when he called the dispatcher from his car, he was informed that Mrs. Stordock and the detectives were on their way to the City-County Building. This makes it sound like perhaps Suzanne called both the sheriff’s office and his home. In one of my interviews with Suzanne, she was immensely proud of herself that the first call she made was to Sheriff Leslie’s home, as if no one else would have been that smart or that bold. According to police reports I got later, Sheriff Leslie phoned the dispatcher at 2:23, so Suzanne must have called him some minutes earlier, as he was outside already. Police reports have Suzanne calling the station at 2:19, so I surmise she called the sheriff at 2:17.
Later in the hearing an Officer Krupke (I am not making this up) said he got the call from the dispatcher around 2:20 A.M. and proceeded to the house with Officer Kenneth Pledger.
Krupke and his partner, Pledger, arrived at 2:28 A.M. Suzanne and David were waiting by the back door and let the officers in, and because the kitchen is the first room from the back door and the porch, I assume they stood in that room. Krupke asked where the person was and David said upstairs, so Krupke asked if it was a gunshot wound and Suzanne responded affirmatively. When Krupke asked if it was in the arm or leg or where, there was no response. So the officer said, “Take me to the person,” and David started leading them up the closest stairway, the one right off the kitchen.
Now, it’s important to understand that this house was the grandest home in town, placed on the Historic Register of Homes in 2007. An ornate Queen Anne with lots of original woodwork, its back stairs are very plain, with hardwood stairs and plain white plaster walls. Most likely, these were servant stairs back when the home was constructed in 1906. But if you walk through the kitchen and then the hallway that divides the dining room and the den, you enter the living room and, around to the other side of that room, you find the elegant half-open stairway bordered by a series of intricately carved spindles all the way up to the second floor. So, when Officer Krupke asked where the injured person was, and David took him to the closest stairway, Suzanne said, “No, you use the other stairway. It’s better.”
In the house, which I’ve visited multiple times in the past three years and many times before the murder, the two stairways are not close. You can see on the crime drawing (Figure 1) that the back stairs, shown on the top of the drawing, are quite close to the kitchen. In order to get to the front-room stairs, someone in the kitchen would have to walk around past the kitchen stairway, into the dining room, go all the way through the living room, to the other side of the house, to get up the ornate stairway. You’d need a guide, which they had in David.
You can interpret this behavior in a number of ways. If you don’t know the people, it would be reasonable to assume Suzanne was in a state of shock. But remember, this is the person who just a few minutes previously had the mental capacity to look in her address book for the sheriff’s home number and call him. This was a woman who cared about status and appearances. In this moment of absolute chaos, what prompted her to direct the police to the beautiful staircase?
Figure 1. (Re-creation of police diagram by Maxim Zhelev)
Upstairs in the master bedroom the officers found the nude body, in a heap next to the bed, with a bullet hole in the headboard and the wall behind it. They saw no signs of life and tried to get a doctor to come and pronounce him dead, but no one was available. The officers spotted a rifle on the floor, a military weapon converted for hunting, with its bolt drawn completely back and one cartridge on the floor. The muzzle of the rifle was pointing toward the body. The bed, headboard, and walls were splattered with flesh and blood. Even the laundry basket near the door had pieces of brain in it.
According to police and coroner’s reports, Vernie was sitting at the edge of his bed, looking slightly to the right, which would place him with his face towards the corner of the room. The only things in the corner were two chests of drawers whose front edges almost butted up against each other. One 8mm bullet came from a 30-degree angle and hit him on the left side, just above the temple, exploding the right side of his head (blood, skull and brain tissue) over the walls, headboard, bed and floor. The police estimated the distance from the shooter to the victim to be at least 8 feet, which would put the shooter just outside the door to the bedroom or a little farther. The weapon was held at what would be hip-height, which means the shooter either had to hold the gun below the waist or crouch down on one knee.
* * *
Under cross-examination Krupke said he got the call from the dispatcher at 2:20 A.M. This fits with the theory that Suzanne called the sheriff at 2:17, the police at 2:19, and then the sheriff called the dispatcher at 2:23 and learned the officers were already on their way.
After Krupke talked about finding the weapon, defense attorney Van Metre asked Krupke if the rifle wasn’t in fact an 8mm Mauser. In my research I learned this was an extremely exact weapon, sometimes referred to as a “sniper’s rifle.” Vernie was a former cop and kept guns around. My aunt Maxine, Vernie’s sister-in-law, explained to me that Vernie kept everything locked up in a gun case, and only he knew where they key was, though Maxine was pretty certain Suzanne knew where to find that key.
The coroner testified that a high-velocity missile (translation: bullet) wound to the head caused death, that the bullet entered the left side of the head, pretty close to the temple, and it went out in the same place on the right side, though much of that side of the head was blown off in the process. He was able to determine the angle from parts of the skull that remained. No powder burns were found, so it could not have been close range, and he estimated the rifle had been several feet away when the trigger was pulled. Death was instantaneous, and Vernie would not have been able to even move slightly after the shot. The coroner said the of
ficers had informed him they found Vernie dead at 2:15 A.M.
Finally they called David to the stand. He testified he had been out that night on a date, getting home at 1:30 A.M., at which time his mother let him in the locked back door. He went to bed and couldn’t sleep because his parents were arguing about a cigarette burn. So he called his girlfriend at 1:35 A.M., in bed, in his underwear. He said he was “on top of the bed with the covers over me.” How can someone be both on top of the bed and with covers over him? It might sound innocuous, but the question of whether he was actually in bed was crucial to knowing what happened that night, though the DA never explored this aspect.
Then David went to sleep and the next thing he remembered was his mother coming into his room and waking him up, probably at 2:05 A.M. She said something about Vern, and because his parents had previously been arguing, he went to the bedroom and saw the body. He bolted downstairs, where his mother had gone, and she said something about a gun, so he ran back upstairs and saw the gun on the floor, picked it up to eject the shell, then went back downstairs, where his mother was on the phone. The DA asked David where the ammunition for the gun was kept, but he wasn’t sure, which was not the same answer he gave to the police, but I didn’t know that until months later. David was asked if he made his bed after all the commotion, and he replied that he hadn’t.
I remember being a teenager and getting on the phone with my friends, male or female, and staying on for hours, so long that my stepfather threatened to pull the wall phone from its socket. So it makes no sense to me that a seventeen-year-old boy got home at 1:30 A.M., went all the way upstairs, took off his clothes, and got into bed within thirty seconds, then decided after five minutes he couldn’t sleep. So he called his girlfriend, but he didn’t talk for very long. He hung up, and fell so deeply asleep that he didn’t hear a rifle blast that was more like cannon fire from the room right across the hall? All of this occurred while he was in his underwear, but not really under the covers. I remember that frigid Wisconsin night all too clearly. The howling wind, the temperature so cold your breath would freeze. And there was David, in that huge, old, drafty home that was built before anyone knew the word “insulation,” and he didn’t do anything to keep warm? And why did the DA ask him if he made his bed, but then did not follow up with it? How could David’s bed been perfectly made, as the police (and Suzanne’s brother to me) reported, when he testified he had been sleeping in it when his mother came to his door, after the shooting? Wouldn’t they want to know why he evidently had not been in his bed? If he hadn’t, that would call into question his testimony about the phone call while in bed. And where was any evidence about fingerprints on the weapon, gunshot residue on hands, or blood splatters, or angle of shooting to get a position on where the murderer was standing?
The final question DA Boll asked David was “You didn’t shoot your father, did you?” To which he replied, “No, I didn’t.” A man is murdered in cold blood and the DA asked the only other person in the house that night—who, by the way, was known to have a facility with guns—whether he was the shooter, and then took him at his word.
The next day Boll was quoted in the Capital Times as saying that David answered that last question in such a hateful manner, he had to be telling the truth. I guess I missed that show on Law & Order where the DAs start assessing someone’s guilt by the tone of his voice. Maybe they call it the “Modulation Defense.”
* * *
After the preliminary hearing there were four delays, including one to change judges and another to change the prosecutor to an assistant district attorney (ADA). Boll was going off to army reserve camp and couldn’t handle the case. My stepfather went to those summer camps and they were always two weeks long. With all these delays so far, he couldn’t wait two weeks? ADA Victor Mussallem took the case. At the same time the DA dropped the first-degree murder charge down to first-degree manslaughter. The law had changed to become easier for mental insanity pleas, but only for cases charged from July 1, 1970. So dropping one charge and bringing another allowed Suzanne to fall under the more lenient guidelines. There were more delays until the final court session was scheduled for January 1971.
As I was going through the voluminous reports that I have in notebooks, and these take up one whole bookshelf in my office, I kept coming upon dates in July 1970. First was the idea that the law changed on July 1, as mentioned above. A motion of prejudice was filed against Judge Bardwell on July 13, resulting in Judge Norris Maloney being appointed. I spent two years puzzling over why the attorneys filed that motion against Judge Bardwell, and why did they wait months, until July, to do so? After rereading most of the court documents in 2017, I saw a new connection. Judge Bardwell had been the presiding judge at the murder trial of Hope Privett, mentioned previously. Despite two psychiatrists testifying that Privett could not have formed an intent to kill, on June 6, 1970, she was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
One month later Suzanne’s attorneys said she could not have a fair trial under Bardwell, the reason being that seven psychiatrists had evaluated her and that they were going to get charges reduced to manslaughter. Let’s unpack this. What do the number of psychiatrists and an alteration in charges have to do with Bardwell? The court documents gave no reason that made any sense. Was it because Hope Privett had not received the insanity plea she had hoped for? And if her lawyers already knew the charges were to be changed, what deal had been made behind the scenes? As much as I searched, I never could find out why the original presider, Judge Mittelstadt, was replaced by Judge Bardwell.
Then on July 31 the case was turned over to Mussallem and the charge was reduced. What a good month July was for Suzanne. After some time, the final hearing was set for the following January.
At the end of that short twenty-minute capital-case final hearing in January 1971, Grandma and Aunt Maxine sat, waiting for the trial to continue, as everyone else got up to leave. They couldn’t believe that the fate of someone’s murder conviction would be so quickly resolved. My grandmother told me many years ago that right before the judge ruled, Suzanne went up and whispered something in the judge’s ear. Grandma thought it was probably Suzanne telling him how her son really did it and she was protecting him, which only reflected our family’s deep suspicion that David had actually pulled the trigger. A minute after that interaction, Suzanne was declared innocent by reason of mental defect at the time of the shooting. Her diagnosis was chronic paranoid schizophrenia.
During the hearing Mussallem said he interviewed all of the police officers who were at the murder scene and they said she was in a trancelike state (a determination not supported by the police reports), which bolstered the conclusion of mental insanity. Again, then, we’ve got key evidence in this case being decided by tone of voice, or modulation. Mussallem also tied his conclusions to the fact that she had between three to five cigarette burns on her back (the sheriff had testified several months previously that he had seen one burn on her back). Plus he had four psychiatrists (none of whom testified) who agreed with this, and one who did not. Dr. Joseph B. Brown—DA Boll’s choice for evaluator—disagreed. He did not think Suzanne exhibited any of the characteristics of schizophrenia. Mussallem must have felt compelled to discredit his boss’s selection, because he spent about half of the twenty minutes showing why Brown must be wrong. Mussallem argued Brown came to this diagnosis because he did not see Suzanne until March 10 (nine days after the murder), and, also, Brown could not possibly be correct, because the officers said she was not sane (this was not what was written in the police reports). But the most compelling reason for Mussallem was that Mrs. Stordock was taken Sunday night (same day as the shooting) to the university hospital for mental evaluation before she was arraigned on Monday morning. He did not think the state could overcome such a detrimental incident.
Even with more psychiatrists on the side of the defense, the biggest problem (“an extremely damaging element”) seemed to be the obstacle that o
n the day of the shooting the defendant was transferred to the psychiatric hospital. And then trying to overcome the defense psychiatrists, Mussallem stated he had all the officers re-interviewed to see if their experience with Suzanne the night of the murder matched what the psychiatrists reported. Below is an excerpt from the transcript. (Note: Capitalization has been adjusted and italics have been added for emphasis.)
MR. MUSSALLEM: . . . [A]ll of their statements are quite consistent with the diagnoses reached by the psychiatrists that the defense would offer, particularly that her behavior was not appropriate to the situation, that she seemed to be unusually calm, almost in a trance-like state. I don’t feel that the testimony of any of these officers would in any way benefit the State’s case. Indeed, it would probably be quite detrimental in that this would bolster up the conclusions reached by the defense psychiatrists.
All the officers said she was in a trancelike state? Which means, I suppose, she had no modulation in her voice. And the case depends, once again, on voice tone? And how about his excuse for not having the officers testify? Because they would bolster the defense case? Isn’t that precisely what Mussallem was doing? How much worse could it possibly be to have a real, live witness who had been on the scene minutes after the murder? I discovered later, in the police reports that officers had described Suzanne as polite, calm, rational, cooperative, in charge of her faculties, and sane.
Musssalem did admit that Dr. Brown found no evidence of schizophrenia. And then the Assistant DA proposed the officers were more knowledgeable about schizophrenia, and by altering their reports to say she was in a trancelike state, he tried to argue she was schizophrenic. But that wasn’t the worst.
With One Shot Page 12