Louisa mentioned a couple of times about how wonderful it would be if I happened to visit at the same time as Ronald’s daughter. The second time she said it, she just stopped, looked at me, and said, “You need to understand that Jeremiah and Alexandra don’t know anything about what happened [code for the murder]. Mom and Ronald thought it was best to make a fresh start in their new life.” Her face registered a sternness that was not normal for the tenderhearted Louisa. I got her message: If you want to meet Alexandra, you have to accept our version of reality. I didn’t say anything. But I wondered: What if my father remarried a woman who had murdered her previous husband? Wouldn’t I want to know his new wife was a confessed killer?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Franklin, with Key Information
After fourteen months into my research I realized that I had to talk to Suzanne’s brother. My heart beat fast as I dialed Franklin’s phone number, the one it had taken me months to find. Franklin had lived in numerous places after Wisconsin, including Las Vegas, Montana, and now, Washington State, but there were also various other Franklin Brandons scattered around the country. His wife had died, but I had no idea if he had a girlfriend, or had remarried, and I certainly did not know if he’d want to talk about a crime his sister admittedly committed some forty-five years previously. What if he started cussing at me and hung up?
Franklin lived in the Pacific Time Zone, which was three hours earlier for me, so I waited until very late at night to call, thinking I could catch him even if he’d been out and about during the day. It was May 1, 2015, and he answered on the third ring. His voice was deep and smooth, and I imagined in other circumstances he could have been a radio announcer, and that he surely must have had women swoon just by hearing him speak. He knew right away who Vernie was, and we both had some faint recollection of meeting one another at a family gathering ages ago. I told him I was doing some research for a writing project about my uncle and his murder. He did not hesitate and answered readily, but in a slow, deliberate voice that suggested he was not covering up anything. Here are some of his comments:
That murder’s been a mystery ever since it happened. And the killing was so unexpected. Vernie and Suzanne seemed to get along great. I went and visited her in the hospital and asked her why. She said he burned her with a cigarette and that was the last time he was going to hurt her. Well, I never even knew they had any problems, but I’ll tell you this. She didn’t shoot him. It was that simple. David did it. He was always a renegade kid and Vernie was a narcotics officer. They didn’t get along at all. And that day Vernie told him he had to get a haircut, because he had this big, bushy ’do. When I asked what happened, Suzanne told me she had gone and got the rifle off the gun rack in the den, came up, raised the gun, and then shot him. But I knew she was fibbing.
I went over to the house the next day with my brother Bob. I got out of the car and asked him to wait for me, as I wanted to go there alone. Sometimes I just get a feeling about things. I went upstairs to the master bedroom. Straight across from the bedroom door was the door to another bedroom, which belonged to Daniel, who had not been home that night. In the doorway of that bedroom was a chair with several pairs of pants lying over the back. I walked over to the wall where the bullet had lodged, took a pencil and stuck it first in the headboard, and then in the wall, so I could see the angle the bullet traveled. Then I walked into Daniel’s room and had to step over the seat of the chair to get in. And I just lay my hand down across those pants and held my finger out there. I was looking straight at the pencil. I knew that was where the shot had been fired. My sister claimed she went to David’s room after she shot Vernie, to wake up David. The hall in the upstairs was maybe twenty feet long, but it made no difference, because he could not have slept through the blast from a Mauser 8mm rifle. And I know they took my sister and David out of the house pretty quickly, so nothing had been touched. I went to David’s bedroom and there were so many wine bottles I couldn’t count them. But his bed was perfectly made. No one had slept there.
Later on, David came to visit me in Las Vegas and I sat on the porch and accused him. All he said was he wouldn’t deny it. I supposed my sister took the rap for him because she is his mother, and she was trying to protect him. My brother told me a few years later that we’ve seen two murders that people got away with. The other one was our oldest brother, Jimmy, who got out of the navy after World War II and was working for some wealthy woman in Michigan, who was going through a divorce. Her story was that Jimmy came to wake up the husband at six A.M. and the pistol fell out of his inside pocket, hit the floor, and accidentally fired and took off the bottom of his heart. I saw the autopsy reports and there was no way the trajectory of the bullet matched her story, but they were rich folks in Crystal Falls, Michigan, and they could afford expensive attorneys.
You know, I have a hard time calling her Suzanne, because her given name was Elmira, and it broke my parents’ hearts when she changed it as soon as she got out on her own. Elmira was one of my dad’s favorite aunts.
Franklin continued:
Well, Elmira always was uppity and too good for us. Forced my dad to work extra jobs to pay for her to go to high school in Boscobel, because Mount Hope wasn’t good enough for her. She boarded with a family who owned a drugstore and did some work to help pay for her room. She always got mad at me when I called her “Elmira,” but the hell with it. But Elmira was always going to school and it was our responsibility to pay for it. That’s why my dad got crippled for the last twenty-four years of his life. She needed to pay college tuition in Madison, and dad wasn’t earning enough money on the farm, so he took a roofing job, and right at the end the ladder came unhooked and he fell down thirty-two feet and mangled his foot. So he gimped around for twenty-four years.
My sister got married, I don’t know, four or five times, but when she married Vernie, we all said, finally she’s got a regular guy, a good guy. They both came out to Las Vegas and I took them out on my boat. We had so much fun.
But her kids, well, David was heavy into drugs. Even when he got married—to an older woman—in Tennessee, his wife tried to get him off drugs, but then she finally gave up and divorced him. He was useless. And Danny, well, he never had a chance. He was one troubled kid.
Then I told Franklin I had been searching for eight months, looking for a marriage license for Vernie and Suzanne, coming up with nothing. I had checked with the State of Wisconsin Vital Records, twice, having them look between the years of 1963 through 1970, even though Vernie wasn’t actually divorced until 1964. Shannon had told me she heard they got married before his divorce was final. And I also checked with Dane County, just in case, even though the records were from the same database. I looked everywhere, including Las Vegas, where Franklin had previously lived, and in Minnesota, where Suzanne later lived. Neither David nor Louisa could tell me exactly when the marriage took place.
Louisa did remember one time, though, that Danny had found Vernie and Suzanne naked in bed when Louisa was fifteen, which puts it in late 1963 or early ’64, but the kids were told it was all right, because they were already married. When I told this to Franklin, he said, “I never heard anything about a wedding from either of them, so maybe they just told people they were married.” I told him I had asked Suzanne, but she couldn’t remember when they got married, despite the fact she could recall very specific details from that time period about my mother being a school bus driver and details about my aunt Maxine. Franklin’s response, “Memory was never a problem with anyone in our family. Louisa told me recently about all the memories Suzanne tells her, and our brother Bob was sharp right until the end.”
In a second call to Franklin a few weeks later, he reiterated much from the first time, but I asked him this time if he thought Suzanne was mentally ill or insane. “Absolutely not. No one in the family ever was. And when I heard about her insanity plea,” he said, “I realized she had conned the system. She’s always been smart and tries to fool people. This time
it worked.” When I told him some of the reports said Suzanne had described herself as coming from an abusive family, where her parents fought all the time and got divorced, Franklin got upset:
First of all, my parents were married up until my father died in 1974. Second, she was always telling people our family was violent and I told her those four years you were there before I was born must have been pretty intense, because those aren’t my memories. The only time I remember my father raising his voice, or a hand to my mother, was one day when she kept complaining over and over about money and wanted to go and buy something. He raised a newspaper up to her and swatted her, just once. I never saw him do anything like that again.
Then I told Franklin that Suzanne had told the psychiatrist she had tried to kill herself in August 1966. Had he ever heard about it? At this one, he laughed. She knew what to say, he noted, to get an insanity verdict.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The District Attorney, Lawyers, Judges, and Sheriff
The newspapers reported on Monday, March 2, 1970, that District Attorney James C. Boll was in charge of the investigation and made an announcement the day before he would seek first-degree murder charges. He stayed on the case until August, when he turned it over to ADA Victor Mussallem, who ended up with the quickly dispensed insanity plea.
Who was this new guy? I saw pictures of him in the newspaper and he had this gangly, nerdy appearance, with black curly hair and glasses. He looked like someone who was smart in school but perhaps socially awkward. He graduated from UW–La Crosse in 1965. Back then it was called Wisconsin State University at La Crosse and was pretty much a backwater school. Mussallem did get admitted and graduated from UW–Madison Law School, which is impressive, and he went into private practice for a year until he got hired as assistant district attorney in Racine, Wisconsin, one of the medium-sized cities in the state, and the original home of Golden Books, one of the earliest and most successful children’s publishers. Right after his stint in Racine, Mussallem became ADA in Madison, which would have been a much better position. His first day on the job was March 2, 1970, the day Suzanne was arraigned.
Here we have a capital case of a cop killer, as my uncle had been in law enforcement his whole life, and it got turned over to someone two years out of law school, who’d only been on the job five months. And as soon as Mussallem took over, the murder charges got dropped and changed to manslaughter so that Suzanne was then under the more lenient revised state legal statute and she ultimately got off. This part has been really difficult to get my mind around, because Boll was such an upstanding guy. He was so clean you’d think he had a squeegee man following behind him on the occasion of his retirement from being district attorney and going into private practice.
It only gives more weight to what most of my family believed, there was some behind-the-scenes deal. Perhaps someone was pressuring Boll and he had too much conscience to go along with it himself, but not enough to prevent it.
So he gave the case to an inexperienced ADA, who gladly took over. And why wouldn’t someone like Mussallem bend the law a little? He got fired from his position two years later in 1972 for appropriating porno films that had been seized in a raid and showing them at parties. He challenged the firing and it dragged out for more than a year with the subsequent DA, who said Mussallem had poor attitude, poor performance, and created a morale problem in the office. Mussallem was taken to court in 1980 by the Wisconsin Board of Regents for $4,630, plus $1,100 interest on his law school loans. Mussallem argued that since he hadn’t paid them off in six years, he didn’t owe any more. The court did not agree.
Time was not kind to Victor Mussallem. The Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended his license (meaning he was disbarred) for three months in 1991, citing instances in 1988 and 1989 where he forged prescriptions for controlled substances and was subsequently imprisoned for three months in a federal medical facility, where he participated in a program for drug abuse. He died in 1999 at the age of fifty-six.
Mussallem was unavailable for an interview, but what about Boll, the original prosecutor? It took me weeks to track him down.
* * *
During that time I learned that Boll’s wife of fifty-five years had died in 2012, some years after they’d moved to Florida. Then it was more weeks before he finally answered his phone. There was no voice mail option, but I wouldn’t have used it, anyway. I wanted to hear the immediate reaction to me asking about the case. And I wished I could see his face, too, which from newspaper pictures appeared intelligent and kind, with a rectangular shape, strong jaws, and dark, straight hair, as you’d expect of a stalwart hero.
Finally, the night of March 8, 2015, I heard James Boll’s voice on the line. I told him my name and that I was the niece of LaVerne Stordock, who was murdered on March 1, 1970, and that Vernie’s wife, Mrs. Suzanne Stordock, had confessed, and that Boll had originally prosecuted the case. Did he recollect it?
Without the hesitation of even one-half second, he replied, “No, I don’t remember anything about it.” There was no pause, no asking for me to repeat the names or the dates, just, “No, I don’t remember anything about it.” He went on to tell me he had three other murder trials that summer, which, by the way, he had no difficulty recounting. We talked very pleasantly for forty-five minutes, with him telling me about all the challenges of being district attorney in Madison during the student riots. There was nothing wrong with his memory, as far as I could tell.
He asked me details about the case and then expressed surprise that Suzanne got off on bail.
“We usually didn’t give bail in those kinds of capital cases,” he said. Did I have the police reports? he wondered. Not yet, I told him.
“So, when you get them,” he said, “feel free to call me back.”
“Really?” I said.
“Oh, yes, I’ll help you with those. That’s what DAs work with, police reports.”
When I got the police reports the following week, I thought I’d fly down to Florida and have a meeting with him. I called James Boll and noticed he now had voice mail. I didn’t leave any voice mail the first few times, kept hoping I’d just catch him; then finally I left a message that I got the reports and was coming down to Florida to visit some friends and would love to meet him. He didn’t call back. I left two more messages over the coming week, then tried to call him while I was in Florida, but never heard back. I guess he wasn’t so eager to talk to me, after all.
Still, DA Boll has a snow-white background. Untouched by scandal, always fighting for justice, he’s completely admirable. Then why did he turn over the Stordock prosecution and then distantly supervise this murder case that looked nothing like the other ones in Dane County at that time? I can’t answer that. But I do know that Victor Mussallem, who took over the prosecution, was less admirable, as described earlier.
* * *
I tried to find other major players who might be corruptible. If there was some behind-the-scenes deal and cover-up, there likely were several people involved. Using the database resources at my disposal, I started doing background checks and newspaper searches on the major players. I looked at Sheriff Leslie, the first person Suzanne called (according to her and Officer Pledger)—at his home—after the murder. And how was it she happened to have his private number? As I researched Leslie, at first all I saw was the fact that he and Franz Haas had traded positions as sheriff and under-sheriff since 1953, and how Leslie was a family man with eight kids and had two sons serving in Vietnam. He looked like a cross between Jack Nicholson and Gary Busey, and had nothing of the “heroic” quality Boll had in his pictures.
Around June 1968, when Franz Haas decided he wanted to remain sheriff and was not going to hand it back to Leslie as they’d done for fifteen years in their usual go-round, Leslie got mad and said he was going to run against Haas. That’s when the first cracks appeared, because in previous elections, Leslie never had any real competition. I mean, consider that 80 percent of the newspaper articles about
the sheriff involved property foreclosures, and most of the rest about traffic problems. The pay wasn’t that great. So perhaps that’s why there was not a long line of applicants for the job. As soon as Leslie announced his candidacy, Haas fired him.
One problem in this bureaucratic uncoupling for Leslie was that both he and Haas were Democrats, so Leslie switched parties, claiming that he was completely in favor of the Vietnam War and could not abide by the Democratic Party’s position.
The University of Wisconsin newspaper broke a story in late 1968 about how one of Leslie’s sons, a returned vet, had been beating up antiwar protestors, and Leslie had kept it secret.
Worse problems surfaced in the following campaign, in 1972, against William Ferris. News started leaking out about the twelve—no, fourteen—and then, ultimately, twenty-three accidents in which Leslie had been driving an official county car, and many times under the influence. Somehow he’d managed to squelch this news. Then there was the time he joined with brewery companies to oppose the state’s proposed increase in the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one, even with solid evidence that the age increase would drastically reduce highway deaths.
As sheriff, Leslie claimed he didn’t want to hire more officers. Then it came out he had violated campaign laws in recent campaigns, and his private security company was protecting ticket buyers attending entertainment that the Dane County DA had alleged was obscene. There were many more indiscretions, but one notable one was how he appointed one thousand special deputies with badges, who were authorized to carry guns, many of whom were bar owners who used their special status to wiggle out of legal offenses.
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