It got so bad that a large group of Republicans started a “Dump Leslie” movement in September. The tide had turned. Not only did Richard Nixon win on November 7, 1972, by a landslide, but so did Democrat William H. Ferris for sheriff. While Nixon carried forty-nine states and got 61 percent of the popular vote, Ferris got 63 percent of the votes in Dane County, with a 2–1 lead. Taking away the other five candidates who trailed them, Ferris got 72 percent more than Leslie. The public had spoken.
Can we conclude from this evidence that Leslie was corruptible? Definitely. Was he involved in the obfuscation in Suzanne Stordock’s case? Perhaps, but I haven’t yet proven it. So far, I’ve established two major players in the Stordock case had serious ethics violations and censures.
If you think of this case as a three-legged stool, of law enforcement, district attorney, and medical experts, what about the doctors involved? I found in December 2015 that the state’s main psychiatrist, Dr. Leigh Roberts, was notorious for granting insanity pleas to anyone and everyone. He looked a great deal like Ned Beatty in Deliverance, only Roberts was even chunkier and had thick, black hair. Roberts later lost his medical license for having sex with a patient, which says to me he is not only corruptible, but especially vulnerable to women who employ what they used to call “feminine wiles.” And we already know Suzanne used sex to get what she wanted. How many times did I hear her announce Vernie would not get any more until he did what she wanted? A psychiatrist I consulted about Roberts’s license forfeiture noted, “That’s all you need to tell me and I then discount anything he says.”
So every leg of that stool was ethically wobbly. What I am saying is that each of the three main law-enforcement players had corruption issues. Sheriff Leslie, whom Suzanne phoned right after the murder, was run out of office because of ethical abuses. The assistant district attorney, who ultimately prosecuted the case, was later disbarred, and the state’s main psychiatrist, upon whose assessment the insanity plea was based, lost his medical license some time later.
* * *
I next started to think that I should look beyond ethics. Maybe that wasn’t the whole story. What about Boll and his office and the context of where the law was in 1970? Maybe one of the reasons Suzanne got off so easily is that Wisconsin and much of the country was going through a period of feeling more empathy toward the accused. Lighter sentences, more sympathy for extenuating circumstances, for difficult childhoods, for effects of poverty, and so on. It was this sort of leniency that was criticized by the right wing and got much attention from President Reagan onward, when candidates would become more popular if they ran on a “law and order” platform.
I decided to look at the evidence, specifically those three other murder cases DA Boll claimed he had the summer of 1970. Fortuitously, any murder case in Dane County was reported in the two Madison newspapers, so I had no trouble researching them. He had remembered almost accurately. Actually, there were four other cases that summer, but I am thinking Boll wasn’t counting one of them, because it was adjudicated by the very beginning of June, and maybe that didn’t seem quite summer yet. The other cases were:
1. Mrs. Hope Thomas Privett, thirty, mother of two, who murdered a Sun Prairie coworker/lover, Harold Vernig, thirty-five, on November 23, 1969, and went for the insanity plea. Privett was recently divorced, and Vernig was going through a divorce. Privett was held without bail. Parents and wife of Vernig were the first round of witnesses, called by the defense. Privett was represented by attorney Darrell MacIntyre, who came with a long and impressive list of defense counsel successes. James Boll prosecuted and spent five days in court proving his case. Judge Richard W. Bardwell presided. Hope Privett was found guilty of first-degree murder on June 6, 1970. Sentenced to life imprisonment in Taycheedah Prison for Women.
2. Odell White, thirty-three, pleaded innocent to murdering Robert Borchardt, on June 27, 1970, in a traffic dispute between two strangers at a stoplight, with White insisting throughout that the gun had gone off accidentally. Bail was set at $50,000, which he was never able to raise, so he stayed in jail. White was found guilty of first-degree murder (which meant the jury thought intent was present) on November 12, 1970, and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. He fought back sobs as the verdict from the jury came in. White’s attorney was Harold Jackson, with Judge Bardwell presiding. ADA Andrew L. Somers was the prosecutor.
3. Virnell Hunt, twenty-five, pleaded insanity in the murder of Jeanne Francis Schroeder Broomell, twenty-two-year-old housewife found in her bed by her husband, on January 20, 1970. Hunt was found guilty by a jury of first-degree murder on July 29, with a mandated life imprisonment, according to Wisconsin statute. James Boll led a five-day prosecution, followed by attorney Richard E. Lent’s defense. Hunt was originally held without bail, but that was changed and bail was set at $65,000, which he was not able to raise, so he remained in jail. Norris Maloney was the judge.
4. Russell Buckner, nineteen, was charged with first-degree murder (of Robert O’Donahue, twenty-two) and robbery for an August 17, 1970, holdup in a bar. He was held on $100,000 bail. His “partner in crime,” Rodney Beales, twenty-one, was charged with third-degree murder and robbery, also held on $100,000 bond, with Jack van Metre as defense counsel. Buckner was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced. Two others were arrested and they turned state’s evidence, one of whom was sentenced to eighteen years in prison and the other offered immunity for testimony. Prosecutor was Assistant Attorney General Andrew L. Somers, who was completing a case he had as ADA. Defense attorney was William Coffey of Milwaukee. Buckner was found guilty of second-degree murder on January 23, 1971, and sentenced to forty years, with Judge Bardwell presiding. Since Rodney Beales’s case was delayed for so long, until February 1972, his bail was mercifully reduced to $5,000, which he was able to raise. Almost eighteen months after the murder and robbery, Beales was found innocent, as some witnesses testified he never even entered the tavern.
5. Suzanne Stordock, forty-one, charged with first-degree murder of husband and lifelong law enforcement professional La Verne Stordock. First judge was Richard Mittelstadt, who set bail at $15,000. Then Judge Bardwell got the case. A few months later attorneys requested a new judge because of prejudice, and Judge Norris Maloney was assigned. Original prosecutor was DA James Boll, who turned case over to the assistant district attorney, Victor Mussallem, at the same time the charges were dropped to first-degree manslaughter. Her final hearing lasted less than thirty minutes. She got the insanity plea.
Here’s a table with the summary information regarding the other Dane County first-degree murders prosecuted in that same time period of Suzanne Stordock’s case of 1970 through 1971 (see table on pp. 152–153).
What does it all add up to? Not counting the two men who turned state’s evidence, there were, including Suzanne, six people charged with murder and five of those with first-degree murder, three of whom sought the insanity plea. Only one of the five had killed a cop, and that same person was the only one who got out on bail, the only one found not guilty, the only one who got the insanity plea, and the only admitted (or judged) killer not sent to prison, and that fortuitous person was Suzanne B. Stordock.
Murders in Dane County, Wisconsin, in Same Time Period as Stordock Case, 1969–71
Perhaps some could argue that a white woman being tried would tend to be treated more favorably back in 1970. If that’s true, let’s compare the prosecutions of Suzanne Stordock with that of Hope Privett. Both were accused of first-degree murder.
1. Both killed a lover (alleged husband, in the case of Suzanne) who was threatening to leave.
2. Both went for an insanity plea.
3. Only Suzanne got out on bail.
4. Despite two doctors testifying that Privett could not have formed an intent to kill, and despite the fact she was barely saved from a suicide attempt not long before her trial, Hope was denied her insanity plea, and convicted of first-degree murder.
5. Total pages for Privet
t’s hearings and trial were 635, with Suzanne’s ninety-seven. Whereas DA Boll spent five days on Privett’s prosecution and the final trial transcript was 423 pages, Suzanne’s final hearing produced fourteen pages of transcript.
6. Hope was sentenced to life in prison at Taycheedah Prison for Women. Suzanne was judged insane at the time of the shooting and spent eleven months in the state mental hospital and was free for the rest of her life.
I realized at this point in the Stordock research that I had a bias I was not even aware of. Despite Wisconsin being the home of Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, I also knew it was the place where the La Follette family and William Proxmire had practiced progressive and clean government. Isn’t that how I would describe the land where I grew up? And yet, even though I went into this research believing Wisconsin was a fair and honest state and not really accepting my family’s contention that there had been some backroom deal, I started to think the Wisconsin judicial system in the 1970s was looking a great deal like I imagined Mississippi was back in the 1930s.
Accepting this new reality caused such dissonance inside me, forcing me to challenge deep beliefs about the integrity of Wisconsinites, that I questioned whether I could continue my quest. Would the price I had to pay inside myself be worth it in the end?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Asking Questions with Suzanne
Iventured into the country called “The Suzanne Formerly Known as Psychotic” in hopes of understanding what had happened the night of the murder.
I posed a lot of queries to Suzanne during the four times I went to visit her, and I tried, very consciously, to ask open-ended questions, which have been scientifically proven to elicit longer responses. In the beginning I just wanted some answers, and I had some abiding hope that merely knowing what had happened that night could balance the injustices everyone in my family had felt. Looking for any legal justice was not my aim, or so I had convinced myself, that is, until months later when I came face-to-face with three Dane County detectives. But at that time I remember deciding that I was hoping for some confession that would give me a sense of justice and, in the end, some answers.
During that first visit in February 2014, I walked into the house of a family that had blacktopped over the cobblestones of family history for decades, having conveniently forgotten, or at best sidetracked, the fact that one of their members was a murderer. Enter Dorothy, with a compulsively optimistic, naïve belief that somehow these former relatives would open up the truth, a commodity that had been welded over with steel-girded stories in a kind of collective loss of memory.
As much as I tried to engage Suzanne in conversation about Vernie, the most I got from her was “Husbands. What I learned is they are all boring.” She told me that numerous times during our visits, and I came to understand that men would be enthralled with her sexual energy at the beginning. However, once they started to see the real Suzanne, they ceased being captivated by her, and she lost interest.
But I never really understood why men were drawn to her. She wasn’t particularly pretty, just sort of decent-looking and thin. Perhaps it was pheromones. I’ve tried to look up articles in scholarly journals, and I’ve interviewed psychologists and asked many men to give me some insight. Part of what I’ve learned is this type of woman has a nonverbal way of letting men know she is obtainable. We can call it the “Availability Factor.” Maybe it’s the way she looks at him, or touches her own breast, or fingers a drinking straw, or how she pretends to, at the same time, be out of his reach. “Someone like that is irresistible,” declared a male friend.
* * *
I got an even better answer from a writer friend. He went into emotional overdrive when I explained how Suzanne would sit next to Vernie in the front seat of the car, with me on the passenger side, as her left hand would quietly remain on his right thigh, with her pinky touching the crotch area. “You told me everything about her in that one action,” he said explosively. He continued:
A woman who would practically grab a man’s genitals in front of his eighteen-year-old niece, back in the 1960s, was an alpha woman and someone comfortable with overt sexuality. Any man who might have challenged her would have been discarded. The fact that your uncle accepted her aggression tells me he was the passive one in the relationship. Your uncle thought he was being a sexual bandit, because he thought he was stealing her attention from everyone else in the car. But, in actuality, she had drafted your uncle and you into her erotic army. Being part of this ongoing titillating experience was why he left June Cleaver.
Then he stripped away any doubts I might have secretly harbored about Suzanne’s persona: “Where I grew up in the Bronx in the sixties, women who were ‘loose’ all had beehive hairdos.” I shrieked and everyone in the room stared at me.
“Suzanne had a French-twist beehive,” I whispered, my mind racing through many memories. It was true, as the newspaper reporter indicated, she sometimes wore it in a bun, but often it was a French twist with some height on top, which made it more like a beehive.
He went on, “I can state with almost one hundred percent certainty that the murder was committed from pride. He wounded her ego in some way, and I’m sure her hitting her forties and having the blush of youth recede gave her more motivation.”
When I told this writer friend that the family had heard Vernie was trying to leave her, he just laughed. And when I further explained how Vernie had adopted Suzanne’s youngest son, he just about fell on the floor chortling.
“You mean she not only dominated him through her sexuality, but she managed to obtain a secondary support for her son? What a mastermind!”
I mentioned that her fifth husband was the son of Holocaust survivors.
“Of course, she chose another male who would abide by her bidding. Holocaust children are known to be avoiders of conflict.”
* * *
I knew I needed more information from Suzanne, but during that second visit in December 2015, I got nothing. She was withholding information better than the Russian KGB. It didn’t help that I felt duplicitous in my role as friendly cousin, even though at that point I wasn’t completely sure this would become a writing project. Answers. I was after answers.
Shortly after the funeral, I decided to pursue the writing and see where it would take me. A month later I called Louisa and mentioned to her how I was working on a few writing projects, one of which was a book about my family, including Vernie’s “situation,” which I knew she understood to mean the murder, as they always talked in code about the killing. Some weeks after I told Louisa, I had my third visit to Suzanne and family, and I was worried this new information would cause Suzanne to withhold even more, if that were possible. Au contraire. Whereas in the first two visits Suzanne was polite but tight-lipped about anything having to do with my uncle Vernie, in this third interview she went on and on and on, sitting tall on her invalid bed, her words pouring out, but her face still showing no emotion Our time together was only broken by pee breaks, but then she’d ask me to come back in. She wanted to be interviewed. She wanted to tell me oh-so-many things, and she evidently expected her statements to appear in a book. Total for that one visit was more than four hours of questions and answers.
During the first few minutes Suzanne started telling me—once again—how she was able to go away to Boscobel High School so she could take business courses, how she did so well on a typing test (128 words per minute) the teacher didn’t believe her. Suzanne ranted to me, “I don’t lie! That’s what I typed.” So, even back then, people suspected she was unencumbered by the truth?
Because I had been mirroring her nonverbals and treating her with near adoration, she just kept talking, and she said she had some “issues” with Vernie. “Later on, I had a difficult situation that I resolved. And I think in that one shot, I took out Vernie and my mother.” I was stunned, as she continued. “It was like getting a release of some kind.”
Was she just admitting to the murder? And she was telling me she kne
w the fatal shot was her means of solving a problem? And perhaps the “difficult situation” was a man finally wanting to ditch her? And did she mean by taking out her mother (who lived for another ten years) that her mother became even more negative towards her?
But maybe I misheard her, so I asked her about the shot that took out Vernie and her mother. She replied with no emotion, “Well, he deserved it more than she did.” Her words described intentional behavior, not a psychotic breakdown.
Knowing the attraction Suzanne held for men, I wanted to see if she knew this, but she feigned ignorance. She never thought she was pretty. I wasn’t asking about “pretty,” but rather about men’s desire for her. You ask any woman what it feels like to have men interested and they’ll tell you how powerful they feel. Even a low-IQ relative of mine noticed that as her breasts developed, boys suddenly were giving her attention. Surely, a Mensa woman, smarter than 98 percent of the population, isn’t going to be less aware than my female relative with an IQ of 68.
What were you drawn to in Vernie? I asked. Blank stare.
Why did you love him? She stumbled around with some confusing words about his worldly ways and then said she must have liked him. Though, she added, she did get to where she did not like him.
What attracted her? Was he smart? She didn’t think that would have been high on the list. And what was he enticed by? “I don’t necessarily think my intelligence would have appealed to him,” she declared with great confidence.
Was she perhaps more exciting than his first wife? Yes, she said. Suzanne only met Jenylle once, she claimed, at a court hearing to reduce child support. Suzanne’s attorney had chided her that day: “Do you have to look so damn wealthy?” So what if she was wearing a mink coat? And could she help it that she looked so damn good in everything she wore?
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