With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  John saw David a few times after high school, but he didn’t have a lot in common because of David’s continual sinking into a destructive lifestyle. David bought an expensive house in Madison in the mid-1970s and John always wondered where a twenty-one-year-old like him would get the money. Then David sold the house a year later and left town. John felt bad that David didn’t keep up with his Oregon, Wisconsin, friends after that. “We could have been such a support to him,” John said wistfully. Two of them, Kip and Kim, were even closer to David, and he gave me their phone numbers.

  Next I called Kip, who didn’t seem surprised to hear from me, as everyone else had, and I realized John had alerted him, which was not unexpected. Kip said much the same thing about David and his downward spiral and how they all thought he killed his stepfather to protect his mother from abuse. When asked about Lawson, he couldn’t even put a first name to her. “None of us had real girlfriends. We dated and fooled around, but nothing lasting. Certainly not four months. I would have known if David was involved like that.”

  He talked fondly about a few times that Vernie came home from work early and found the boys in their bathrobes hanging around the house. No scolding from Vernie, just some knowing smiles. He was no doubt realizing there’s only one reason teenage boys are all in their robes on a weekday afternoon at someone else’s house, even if the girls had already left.

  Kip knew about Mrs. Freeman (Jocelyn) who had lived in the Oregon, Wisconsin, house while Suzanne was in the hospital. He told me he had visited Suzanne when she moved to Madison in the mid-1970s at her place on Regent Street, just off University Avenue. I asked if Danny was living there, and he said he didn’t think so. This agreed with what the Gast brothers had told me, that Danny had stayed with Mrs. Freeman and hadn’t lived with his mother anymore after Suzanne got out of the hospital.

  Kip also talked about David’s Madison house, how he lost money on it when it was sold. Just before David left Madison, they got together and David said he was going to use the money from the house and go to Florida and buy a boat. And that’s the last they ever talked. “But I figured he was just trying one thing after another. ‘Maybe I’ll buy a house, maybe I’ll sell the house and buy a boat,’ and then later I heard he got a motorcycle. He was just too unstable to stay with anything for more than a few months.” A later talk with another friend, Kim, supported what John and Kip had said, but Kim also noted, “Vern was a very fun-loving guy and was very understanding of teenage boys. He tolerated a great deal from us that other fathers would not have. He taught us how to hunt and survive in a cabin. He was a fine man. He really was. I was really saddened when he passed. It was a long time ago, but it stands out so clearly in my memory.”

  Kip talked about how all the friends assumed David had pulled the trigger and how carrying that burden had ruined his life, though Kip accompanied David for several years going to Beloit on the anniversaries of the death to visit Vernie’s grave, until he lost touch with David. Kim also had vivid memories of my brother Johnny Ray, “who was quite a character,” and told me how he learned the ranges of behaviors open to handicapped people. He remembered Johnny Ray, whose legs were as straight and thin as a mop handle, getting in his wheelchair and riding into his Ironsides van with hand controls. Or how my brother would challenge anyone to an arm wrestling match, and usually win. He also recalled my brother’s obsession with Elvis Presley, and how the girls flocked around Johnny Ray, waiting for a smile or a touch.

  * * *

  By this time I had learned a lot about Vernie, Suzanne, and their life together. From the court documents and interviews I learned they owned a boat, plus a thirty-five-acre property in Winter, Wisconsin, within Sawyer County, where they often went on hunting trips, taking friends and Suzanne’s family. They had bought the property in 1966 (after one of Suzanne’s suicide “attempts”) for $3,500.

  I made a trip to the property during my research, accompanied by my friend Monte Hanson, who picked me up at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport, and we drove almost four hours to an area much more remote than I had envisioned. On the way, we stopped to eat at the only place for a hundred miles, Burnett Dairy, which was packed. We still had a long way to go.

  The biggest town nearby to tiny Winter, Wisconsin, was Spooner with 2,682 residents, but it is 49 miles from my uncle’s place. As we got close to our destination, we went to the Village of Winter, hoping to get something to eat, but the only café had closed at 2

  P.M. All that was open were two bars, located close to the four churches. No one was on the sidewalks, and I felt like a character in an episode of Twilight Zone. Winter has 302 residents and 165 properties for sale, so you can imagine the lack of economic activity.

  Driving on narrow asphalt roads, we found my uncle’s land, which was more like a deteriorating forest, with trees fallen in every direction and overgrown underbrush almost too dense to walk through. We wanted to see if there were any vestiges of life, so we entered the woods. Branches and bushes constantly scratched me, as I waited for hordes of ticks to bite me or poison ivy to afflict me. Was all of this worth Lyme disease or endless itching from a rash? At one point, Monte got so far from me on the property that he couldn’t hear my shouts. I wondered, if we sank in the mud here, how long would it take someone to find us?

  Then we came upon the cabin, which evidently was not the building my uncle had used, as Rachel Thompson (who works in the county assessor’s office) had told me the original structure was gone. It was a small, probably modular, log cabin. We looked for evidence of a larger house there previously, but found nothing. How could my uncle. Suzanne, David, Danny, and various friends have all fit into a building that size? And they must have loved it, to drive the five-plus hours from Oregon on weekends.

  In addition to new knowledge about the property and the boat, I had also learned about the “adopted” daughter, Jocelyn Brandon Freeman. Trying to figure out if I was the only who had been ignorant, I asked other members in my family. No one had ever heard about the boat, the cabin, or Jocelyn. And I, who had spent so many, many weekends at their house, never heard even the slightest hint about any of those three. It means they had to coach the kids before I came not to bring up those subjects. The things that their friends and Franklin talked about so casually and with such vigor (“Oh, we had such fun at that cabin,” or “Mrs. Freeman was a wonderful person”) had been cut off to Vernie’s whole family. It was like we all lived behind some secret wall we’d never known existed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Trip to the Bountiful Oregon

  I knew I had to go back to the mansion. I wanted to go back and see where the murder had occurred. After trying to get there for months, I arrived on Tuesday, May 12, 2015.

  The house was majestic by any standard, and it stood out among the large, well-kept homes on the wide, clean streets, the newly mown lawns, the well-trimmed hedges, and the carefully planted flowers blooming reds, oranges, purples, and blues. As I drove down Main Street, I could see it up ahead, the outside painted in teal, cantaloupe, aqua, and dark salmon, quite different from the complete white it had been back when I had visited so many weekends in the late 1960s. The gables, the wraparound porch, the leaded glass, all added to its grandeur.

  My first stop was the Oregon Area Historical Society. For a few months I’d been e-mailing two people, who’d been extremely helpful. When I got there, they had already gotten out newspaper articles and anything they had related to the Stordock case. Was I interested in high school yearbooks? Yes! But the only relevant ones they had were from 1966, where Louisa was shown as a senior, and from 1969, with David as a sophomore. Because I had found information that the girlfriend who had given David a sort-of alibi was named Lawson, I looked for her in the yearbooks. There was a Charlene Lawson listed as a junior in the 1969 book, and elsewhere I found the name of Sherri Lawson in a club, but with no picture, so I could not figure out if that Charlene and Sherri were the same person, but I assumed Sherri was probably the sa
me Lawson from the police reports and the one I had discussed with David’s friend, John. And despite weeks of searching and endless dead-end phone calls, I never did locate her. On a subsequent trip, I checked at the public library and found a couple of more yearbooks with pictures of David and Louisa. It was strangely comforting to see their faces as I had remembered them so long ago.

  I had previously contacted the current owners of the mansion to get permission to come and view the house, to revisit the crime scene and to see if any old memories were unlocked. We had talked on the phone several times and the woman who lived there had a lot of questions about the murder, as she was fairly new to the house and had only heard bits and pieces from the neighbors. I parked my rental car on the street and walked to the back porch. I noticed the driveway was asphalt, but I was quite sure it had been gravel back in 1970.

  Jan Bonsett-Veal answered the door and I saw a tall woman dressed in white slacks and a loose purple-and-black floral top, with wavy dark brown hair, parted on the left side. Her smile was warm and welcoming, and she led me into the kitchen, which had been completely remodeled. I thought I was in the wrong house. In my memory it was a rather crowded space with a kitchen table, cupboards, appliances squeezed in between an archway to the hallway, an entrance to the den and two doors: porch entrance and one leading to the back stairway. Now the kitchen was about 50 percent larger. A previous room had been knocked out to make way for a huge commercial stove and some cupboards, the whole thing done in contemporary style. It was very beautiful, but a contrast with the rest of the Queen Anne setting.

  Whereas the kitchen seemed (and actually was) larger than before, the rest of the rooms seemed to have shrunk. What had happened to the huge living and dining rooms, which now were the size of those in many older homes? The staircase and its elaborately carved spindles were as magnificent as ever. We walked upstairs and I went to the doorway of the master bedroom. I noticed the bed was in a different place, but otherwise the room was quite recognizable. I could feel my chest tightening as I entered the room and could not stop my mind from imagining my uncle’s dead body lying there.

  I walked over to the wall and found the place where I thought the bullet had lodged itself. My fingers traced over the spot, which was below an oblong abstract painting. Then I looked straight to the doorway and saw right into the bedroom across the hall, the very place Franklin had said the chair was, with some pants over the back, the chair he believed David had used to aim the rifle. A minute later I found myself in that other doorway, looking straight onto the place where the bullet had been extracted. It was a straight line.

  The rest of the rooms were only slightly familiar to me, as if I had only glimpses of them in my mind. Jan took me up to the huge attic, which her family used for living space. Then we went down to the den, the very room where my uncle’s gun rack had protruded from the wall, and I tried to think how the frail Suzanne could have reached way up, six feet seven inches, to haul down a very heavy weapon.

  I stayed for almost two hours, and if I hadn’t felt I was starting to impose, I would have stayed all day. Some mysterious force was holding me there and I had to compel myself to leave. As we chatted, Jan gave me names of neighbors who had lived in Oregon for decades. After a number of calls in which people said they knew nothing, I talked to a previous owner of the mansion, Mrs. Alice Seeliger, who had lived there with her husband and children for more than twenty years, starting in 1977. We spoke for fifty minutes, and I felt instantly close to her from the warmth in her voice and her approachability. She told me that Louisa had stopped by one day and asked to see the house in 2000, and that Louisa said she’d used the attic for her art studio.

  Right before I left the mansion that day in 2015, I asked to visit the basement, hoping there might be a stray bullet hole there as proof that Vernie had done some shooting practice. I was relieved when Jan said they’d done no work there, because that meant maybe nothing would be covered up. It was untouched from the time Suzanne had lived there, except the floor had been concreted.

  It was dark and hard to find the lights after I opened the basement door. Going down the stairs was tricky. The wood planks were narrow, the light switches were all in unexpected places, and the architecture was more like one underground chamber or crypt leading into another, and it felt similar to being in Cave of the Mounds, just outside Madison. Rooms trailed off into other rooms, like some labyrinth, or one of those mazes where rats get lost. I examined the walls, which were made from those stones used back in the early 1900s, the kind farmers pulled out of their fields to make the land plowable. I didn’t see any bullet holes.

  As I was about to figure out how to get back upstairs and out of this quagmire, I saw a door leading to what originally would have been the root cellar, where the residents would store potatoes, carrots, and other root vegetables during the winter. The door was hammered sheet metal. In the upper center was a series of concentric squares painted in red, with hundreds of bullet holes surrounding the area. The owner of the house said no one had realized what those red shapes were for. Vernie had not gone down in the basement to randomly fire off guns in order to scare Suzanne. He had made his own shooting range, to make sure he maintained his marksman skills. In the kind of undercover work he did, you never knew when your firearm prowess meant the difference between life and death.

  Now I confess that I fell in love with this story and was sadly disappointed to find out a year later from the Seeligers they had created this target for dart practice. Instead of bullet holes, the indentations were from the sharp tips of the darts. So not all my theories turn out to be true. That was a lesson for me.

  * * *

  Three other things Alice said to me in our first phone call were important in my research. One was that people would often stop by when Alice was outside in order to inform her that someone had been murdered in this house. This was in contrast to what people had told me on my brief visit to Oregon in 2006, when I talked to some neighbors who said no one had talked much about the killing. Secondly, Alice mentioned that people believed that David had killed Vernie (based on no particular evidence, just common belief), and the reason the cops never pursued the case very aggressively was because there had been abuse, and they didn’t want to make this former cop look bad. Finally Alice told me she and her husband, Michael, had done some work on the kitchen around 1980 and had found a great deal of dried blood on the top of the patterned tin ceiling tiles. Because the kitchen was below a back bedroom on the other side of the house from the master, she and her husband had always wondered if the murder had taken place in that room and the body moved.

  I considered that possibility as we talked, but then I told her the master bedroom had a bullet hole in the headboard and the wall, and there had been brains and tissue splattered over one side of the room. I should have asked her how they knew it was blood, but these were highly educated people, so presumably he would have been able to discern. Maybe there had been another, previous murder in that house, unreported, because it seemed they were the first owners to work on the kitchen. Was there some unknown crime? Louisa and the current owner had both reported to me strange noises and a presence that felt like the house was haunted.

  * * *

  The following day I rode around Madison, looking at all the houses that Suzanne had lived in. I was most interested in the house on Capital Avenue, because I knew there was a house where Vernie had taken my mother, stepfather, and me to visit Suzanne and her kids, early in their relationship. Once I saw the one-and-a-half-story white clapboard house, with a large bay window at the front, a driveway on the right, and the huge back, I knew this was the place where I’d been. In the back of my mind I remembered a large body of water down two blocks; and sure enough, as I drove in that direction, there was the beautiful and blue Lake Mendota peeking through some large trees. Going back and trying to remember streets and lakes from over forty years previous is slightly disorienting and incredibly fulfilling when you get it rig
ht.

  Vernie was keen, back in 1963, for his family to meet the wonderful woman on whom he’d staked his future, though I only realized recently that Shannon did not know about Suzanne until a few months after this. I remember our visit to the Capital Avenue house as being awkward, though I was only fourteen and didn’t really understand the dynamics of affairs and waiting for divorces. But I can only imagine how uncomfortable my parents must have been, as they both loved and adored Jenylle, Vernie’s first wife. We all sat in Suzanne’s wood-cabineted kitchen and had a meal, which was probably fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Then the kids/teenagers went outside to hang out in that big backyard, which had a huge, elaborate swing set, the kind I usually saw in playgrounds. None of my friends had ever had anything that grand in their own yards. That’s the day I first met Louisa, David, and Danny, who were about fifteen, twelve, and three years old, but were really just a blur of nonadult human beings to me. I wasn’t savvy enough to understand what these people would mean to me in the coming seven years, and ultimately the coming four decades. How could I have known back then the tragedy this group of people would bring to my entire family? Was there any way to see the emotional toll it would also take on each and every one of them—and us?

  Suzanne and Irv Gast had bought the Capital Avenue house in 1961, and she got it in the divorce in November 1963. Because of comments Louisa made to me, as well as documentation in the Oregon, Wisconsin, newspaper, I’ve estimated Suzanne and the kids moved to Oregon between December 1963 and January 1964. When we visited the Capital Avenue house back in the early ’60s, it was warm, if not hot, with no brown leaves. All this means late spring, probably May 1963, which would have put it before either of their divorces and not long after the Gast heirs meeting, where Suzanne and Irv’s first wife duked it out.