With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  Suzanne spent a great deal of time during the four hours of the third interview telling me how Vernie had no integrity, no values, no conscience, and would have had affairs with anyone, and how he was cruel, cruel, cruel, beyond what she ever thought was possible, how she feared for the safety of her children, and how she hated herself for what she had put them through, and what she did to them with that one bad judgment. There it was again, the “bad judgment.” Not an out-of-reality psychotic break. At this point my research skills helped. When you’ve gathered a great deal of data and begin to look at the numbers, it can seem like just so many unrelated, scattered pieces of information in the beginning. But when you see a measurement reappear, you’ve got two instances and you can draw a line and begin to see a pattern, perhaps even a trajectory. Suzanne had already twice mentioned her “judgment” that led to the murder, and she had never given me any details or evidence there had been a psychotic break.

  Suzanne described how Vernie wanted more excitement in his life, especially if it involved doing bad things. She said he needed an exciting female and she (Suzanne) filled the bill, but then she got too exciting. At this point she laughed explosively, and then tried to explain. “Well, I was the one who ended his life, if I remember correctly,” she noted without any irony. How much I wanted to get up and look her straight in the face and ask, How in the world can you laugh about killing my uncle, the man who took care of me, the father of Shannon, who’s never gotten over this loss? I thought about Alice Gregory’s work on the shame experienced when someone accidentally kills another person. Since Suzanne claimed to have been basically in a trance, one could argue that her story involved not an intentional killing but an accidental one. However, Gregory discovered that unlike Suzanne, the accidental killers were unable to rid themselves of shame and remorse for the rest of their lives. If only I could have brought that up with Suzanne. But I had to maintain my professional demeanor, the unbiased management consultant, who nonetheless must appear to sympathize with Suzanne.

  After the laughter she went on boastfully. “Then I called the sheriff, the actual sheriff. Not the sheriff’s office, but the sheriff’s home. Afterward, David came downstairs and told me, ‘I had a dad. And I don’t have one anymore. Goddamn you!’ so I started to tell him how Vernie had burned me, but David just looked at me and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He was right. Anything I said would be like an excuse, and there is no excuse for what I did. I did so much for my kids and look what I brought on them.”

  When I told Suzanne that David had confessed to the shooting to Aunt Maxine, Suzanne scoffed and said he was covering up for her, even though it was dumb, because people would know the truth, but I couldn’t get any details out of her on how people were supposed to “know the truth.”

  She waxed on about all her difficulties, how she’d gotten herself in trouble, and she’d learned a lot—which has made her reasonably well-balanced—but she would rather not have had to learn.

  So, killing my uncle helped her gain mental health, is that what she was trying to say? I thought.

  One lesson was that she’d become a better and more important person than she had realized. Even if the schoolkids would knock Danny down (he was, by this time, about eleven years old and slight of build) and say his mother murdered his father, she wasn’t going to leave her beautiful mansion in Oregon, Wisconsin. And what about the people who stared at her when she was out? Let them walk across the street. It was a tough time for her.

  For her? What about Danny and all he had to endure? Did she ever consider moving and starting anew for her son’s sake?

  Her life was harsh back then, she continued. Only three people visited her in the hospital, and I was one of them, a visit that created an enormous amount of negative feelings from my family. My grandmother was particularly hurt.

  “You’re associating with the woman who murdered your uncle,” she said with such pain in her voice it now makes me want to prostrate myself in front of her. But back then, I was so certain of right versus wrong, I just shot back, “Jesus said to forgive!” Oh, how I’ve come to regret that interaction with my beloved grandmother, whose life was seared with pain.

  Was part of Suzanne’s strategy to take away any blame toward herself? She recounted her hospital psychiatrist’s admonition: “You have been driven to the point it was either suicide or homicide, and whether you want to hear it or not, you chose the healthiest.”

  I came to understand how much she wanted me to hear this, because she repeated the same quotation twice that third visit, and at least two other times during my interviews. “I didn’t want to hear that I chose the healthiest,” she said, “because my heart and soul and mind, and whatever, protected me. I didn’t know anything about guns,” she continued, “except I had been with Vernie when he’d bought that gun for deer hunting.” When she said “that” gun, she really meant that gun. With multiple weapons in the house she never talked about why she picked that gun, and I lost my chance to ask.

  People wondered how she could even load the rifle, she reported. “But I did it, somehow, I did.” It scared her, having that stuff in the house. At one time he had a machine gun, she said. There were so many crooked people he knew through work, so who knows where he got it? That job he had with the State of Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office was such a dream job. “But you know, his uncle Gil Stordock [one of the top officials in Wisconsin’s Department of Veterans Affairs and the American Legion] got it for him. Gil had a lot of influence.” What did Uncle Gil, who was big in Veterans Affairs, have to do with the state attorney general? Or maybe that tells us more about how Suzanne’s mind worked. Use people and relationships to push your way up in the world.

  After she got out of the hospital, she decided to go back to school and make up for all the time lost. People called her selfish, but she didn’t care. She finished her bachelor’s, a master’s, a doctorate, and finally a law degree. When she attended a hearing to be admitted to the state bar, they asked her if she’d ever been arrested or convicted. She said, “‘Yes. Of murder. Hasn’t everybody? ’ Then the judge told me I’d make a good attorney. So when people asked me what kind of attorney I was going to be, I said a good one. So all the things that have happened to me, all the good, all the disaster, everything, has been a total blessing, because look how far I have come.”

  At first, I was stunned. She killed my uncle and that made her life take on the kind of positive turn that nothing else had? I sat there trying to sound eagerly impressed with her intelligence, her sophisticated ways, her cunning approaches to life. I knew such adulation helped her open up, because I’ve spent a good part of my life living with narcissists.

  This reminded me of a 1998 article about her in The Wheel, the College of St. Catherine newspaper. Suzanne was an adjunct faculty member there. It listed her accomplishments with glowing praise and admiration at how far she had come, since starting college in the 1940s, but taking time off to “raise her family.” She returned to college full-time in 1972, when “all but her youngest son” had graduated from high school, though she said nothing about getting out of a mental hospital in late 1971. The final sentence, on the second page of the article, said it all: “Most of all, keep in mind that you are doing something for yourself, and you deserve it.”

  Then Suzanne talked with me about her “place” in northern Wisconsin (which she actually bought jointly with Vernie), which they purchased, she said, when she was sick and hadn’t worked for a while. Later I discovered that was a few months after one of her alleged suicide attempts, and also after the child support court hearing. Vernie stated in October 1966 court documents that he felt it “an undue financial burden” to pay child support because he’d remarried since the 1964 divorce and the cost of maintaining [an expensive] house in Oregon, his car payment, etc., was too much for him. (Suzanne usually worked, but she was unemployed at this time.)

  When Vernie and Jenylle were divorced in 1964, the age of majority was twenty-one, but
in 1966 the law changed the age when a child was no longer considered a minor to eighteen. Shannon turned eighteen in February 1966, which just happened to be the year Vernie and Suzanne took Jenylle back to court in the fall, not long after Suzanne’s August suicide attempt (which she had told one of the court psychiatrists and appeared in his report). Though in the divorce decree he had agreed to support Shannon’s college expenses, he now claimed not to know which institution of higher learning she wanted to attend and how much it would cost. Vernie won the suit and only had to give one more nominal payment of child support. The next month Vernie and Suzanne bought the thirty-five-acre spread, plus cabin, in northern Wisconsin.

  I think getting out of paying child support was one of the items Suzanne was after when she would withhold sex from Vernie, and I think the other two were cutting Shannon out of the will and removing her as one of the beneficiaries of the life insurance. In the original divorce settlement with Jenylle, it was ordered that Shannon be kept as a beneficiary on his life insurance, but when they went back in 1966, the requirement for Shannon to be a beneficiary was deleted. A new will was drafted in April 1967 without any mention of his only natural child, Shannon. It is clear that removing Shannon from Vernie’s assets was completed between 1966 and 1967, which is the time frame I remember Suzanne frequently announcing the conjugal refusals.

  She continued with me on one of her favorite topics: how she had put three men through college and got sick of working to educate a husband. When she wanted to divorce Briggs, her attorney told her to wait until he had more assets, which she evidently did. Then she met a hairdresser, who had this wonderful father, the wealthy Abraham Gast, whom people often told her she was in love with.

  Some years later on, Suzanne found Ronald, “the keeper.” He was the only son in his family, but there was a cousin who also survived the Holocaust with him, and she called herself his “sister,” a word Suzanne would say with contempt. This same cousin had been close to Ronald’s daughter, Alexandra, for decades and evidently stepped in when Alexandra’s mother died. She saw herself as a mother to Alexandra. Suzanne would have none of it.

  I’ve known Holocaust survivors. What they went through is far beyond what any of us can imagine, regardless of books or movies. And if it were only the two of them left from their entire family, I can see why she thought of him as her “brother,” and I imagine there were years when they clung together in sorrow, just trying to live beyond the horror and the terror. And by extension I get how she might feel as a mother to Alexandra. From what I could glean, Suzanne did her best to maneuver this woman out of the family, this “interloper” who pretended to be Ronald’s sister and Alexandra’s mother. And I imagine she used similar skills to maneuver Shannon out of Vernie’s orbit.

  Back to another recurring topic: her development.

  If you don’t have credentials, nobody listens to you. It might have been selfish on my part to insist on schooling, but it’s a horrible thing to be bright and possibly brilliant and not be able to live it.

  The possibility of her not reaching her potential because of lack of education was one of the few topics she got agitated about, or at least as agitated as someone gets who speaks mostly in a monotone voice without much modulation.

  Here’s more from her voice:

  Later on, when I was teaching sociology and women’s studies at the College of St. Catherine’s, I would get angry at students who didn’t know much and were satisfied. Sometimes I wanted to slap them upside the head. All I wanted to do was learn, and why didn’t they want it, too? I taught sociology and women’s studies.

  During that time I started a research project on children kidnapped by their parents, which was a replication of my stepdaughter’s research. I got a huge grant and called her and said, “Look, it wasn’t just Mom who likes your work. Other people like it and are financing it.” [By Mom, Suzanne meant herself, though Alexandra was almost thirty years old when Suzanne married her father, so I doubt the name was ever used by Alexandra.] I was her rescuer in the family, because everyone always looked up to her older brother, the rabbi, and she got ignored. Alexandra initially rejected me, but I just let her be, and told Ronald to just be patient. Her mother had died and was, thus, a saint, which I never pretended to be. Later on, Alexandra and I became close, very close, through no help of Ronald’s cousin [the one who called herself the sister], who tried to mother Alexandra, but which Alexandra did not want. So I finally told that cousin, “You want to be her mother? That job’s already taken!”

  Now, you have to have some sense of people’s feelings in this world, and the cousin made it worse. And Ronald sure wasn’t close to Alexandra. And I know for a fact that the one person Alexandra is close to is me, because I didn’t push her. And all the time she had to overcome her insecurities because of her brother, who ended up marrying this woman who gave me sugar diabetes. I don’t trust people like this, all honeybun and stuff. I think they got divorced.

  And for me, the one thing I wanted before I die is to have a happy marriage. I felt I had been gypped of that. This is how I met Ronald. I was in the synagogue socializing in my usual way, which was with my back to the wall and one foot nailed to the floor, when the rabbi came along and said there was someone he wanted me to meet and he took me over to Ronald, and I thought, he’s seeing two lonely souls. You know, I was afraid, after all I’d gone through, and Ronald had had a bad marriage since his first wife died. I saw he was afraid, too, because that second wife had married him for his money. I used to tell him, “I married you for your money, too, but I’m still looking for it”

  She laughed, like someone who loves hearing herself tell the same joke over and over. She told me that one four times. Suzanne also mentioned a couple of times how Ronald knew everything about her—and loved her, anyway—but that there were lots of people in her current life who don’t know anything about what she did, and they’d be very surprised. She was glad she had a few people, like Louisa and me—and that’s it—whom she could be completely open with, she said.

  The whole idea of her almost Don Draperesque quality of changing her name and obfuscating her life details fascinated me, and I wanted to know more, but I couldn’t let Suzanne know how much I already had learned. I found out later this is a common technique journalists employ to get to the truth of a story. After all, she was Elmira on marriage license #1, Suzi for #2, and Suzanne for #3, #4, and #5. So I kept asking her about her name, “Suzi,” and when she changed it to Suzanne and what she had been called in high school (she said Suzi), but I never could get her to admit she had once been “Elmira.” She did say once she hit thirty, it was no more “Suzi” and only “Suzanne,” and I didn’t remind her she had identified herself to the sheriff as “Suzi,” when she was forty-one.

  We talked about David some more and she told me (as she had several times) that he’d had heart problems as a child and how much she worried about him back then. A few times she’d say, “You’re just like David—going back over old times.” I took that to mean both David and I were asking difficult questions that she did not necessarily want to revisit. Toward the end of that third visit, she said, “You know, David had a fancy to find himself a female physics professor as a girlfriend and I asked him, ‘And what do you have to offer to her?’ He sat around all the time and he wants what he wants. But I just felt I had to make that remark right then.”

  During the third visit Louisa was in her usual long skirt and blouse down to her wrists and almost up to her chin and talked to me about photos, since she’d casually mentioned previously that they had lots of old pictures of Vernie and his family. Shannon and I had talked about this and decided I should ask Louisa if she would either copy the photos or give them to me, if they didn’t want them, so that my cousin Shannon (“Who’s Shannon?” she asked) and I could enjoy the pictures. Louisa had eagerly agreed and promised to look for them in all their boxes still packed from the Alaska move. During that same visit Louisa looked at me with her bright ey
es and red hair pulled back in the bun and told me she had found Vernie’s wallet and police badge and my heart leapt. That would be something I would love to hold and I knew how meaningful it would be to Shannon. When Louisa mentioned to Suzanne what she’d found, and she was going to give the badge and wallet to me, Suzanne objected, “What does Dorothy need that stuff for?”

  Louisa replied, “Because she’s Vernie’s family.”

  Suzanne replied, “Well, I’m his family, and I will keep them!”

  And because Louisa couldn’t even remember right then where she’d placed them, I didn’t even get to look at the wallet or the badge. Louisa felt bad she couldn’t find them. This was her nature, to be generous and cooperative.

  * * *

  Before I returned for the fourth visit at the end of April 2015, I thought I should let them know the writing project about my family and my uncle had morphed into one where Suzanne was a major character. Suzanne had been so open with me that last time, and I had attributed this change to her knowing I had a writing project in which she’d be a part. So, naturally, I deduced if she thought she was going to be more than a minor character, she’d really open up. Was I ever wrong!

  Louisa responded by saying, “We have a lot to talk about when you get here.”

  I decided to go this time for two days (previous visits were all only one day) partly because I was led to believe that Alexandra (Ronald’s daughter and Louisa’s stepsister from the fifth marriage) would arrive the second day. The first day was a bust, with Suzanne’s hospital bed needing repairs, but something still felt strange. I had no more than two minutes with Suzanne the entire long day. It felt like Suzanne was avoiding me. I just kept thinking about all the things I had left undone at home to come a day early. Phone calls I needed to make, writing deadlines, postponed meetings. Then Louisa sheepishly confessed she had “mixed up” the schedule and Alexandra wasn’t arriving until after I had left. But I wondered if that was true. Maybe they didn’t want me to meet Alexandra and risk me downloading all of my uncle’s murder story from my mental hard drive.