* * *
After leaving that Madison house on that May 2015 afternoon, I spent three hours in an Italian café with Irv Gast’s son Jim and his wife, Anne. Jim looked very much like someone who had gone back to school to get his doctorate in computer science: smart, well-spoken, and extremely personable. Anne had curly brown hair and a bubbly personality. She was easy to talk with, as was Jim. Initially I thought we’d meet for about an hour, and I forgot about my rental car and the parking meter, because when I went out to fill it after three hours, the car had been towed away Both Jim and I were eager to talk about parts of our childhood, some of which had been snatched away. In my case it was because of my uncle’s murder, and in his case it was his immediate family. He’d barely ever seen his father and had never met his half-brother. “Do you have any pictures of Danny?” he asked.
Jim gave me copies of his parents’ marriage license, and his and his brother’s birth certificates. I noticed a keen interest in the parts of my research that related to when Vernie and Suzanne started their affair, which Jim believed did not end his parents’ marriage, as they were likely already estranged.
* * *
The next day I returned to Oregon and drove through the charming downtown, with its 150-year-old restored brick municipal and business buildings, then headed to the bowling alley and its adjacent tavern. I walked in and stared at the room where my uncle had spent some of his last hours alive. I already knew that the bowling alley and bar were exactly the same, except for one small area, so I was able to really feel what the space had been like. The eight lanes looked very much like the kind I had bowled on decades ago.
About eight people populated the horseshoe-shaped bar, as the bartender and those drinking away their agitated emotions didn’t—or perhaps couldn’t—display any response when I told them I was there to see the last place my uncle was before his murder. They had as much reaction as the foaming beer exhibited in their glasses, and it felt as if I were talking to a room of mannequins. None of them seemed to care, or be curious in the least, about how or why such a violent episode had happened unusually close to the very location they currently occupied.
Then I stopped at the local Firefly Coffeehouse, encompassing two large areas filled with wooden tables, captain’s chairs, overstuffed chairs, and couches. The place was bustling. I went up and talked to a few people, asking how long they’d lived in town, hoping to find some long-term residents. Nothing. All of them were either tourists or recent residents. Same responses at a nearby Mexican restaurant filled with bright-colored booths and plenty of tortilla chips on the tables. As I walked over to a number of groups and asked questions, I started to feel like a stalker, so I got in my car and headed west toward Mount Hope, where Elmira Brandon had spent her childhood.
* * *
At first, I thought the sparsely appearing white farmhouses and red barns, with the gently rolling green fields and occasional cows, were charming. But after more than an hour of one cornstalk after another, as the terrain became flatter and the periodic clumps were of houses was smaller and less frequent, I didn’t know how much of this I could withstand. I got off one of the highway’s scarce exits and started to turn around and go back to Madison. Thankfully, I forced myself to get back on the freeway, heading west. I felt I just had to experience how far it was from the Madison area to Mount Hope and then Boscobel, so I could get a sense of how difficult it was for Elmira and her family to get to Madison. And back when she was a young girl, there were only narrow two-lane highways and slower cars. If I couldn’t stand driving even half the way to Mount Hope, how difficult must it have been for them back in the 1940s?
After another hour I almost came to the border of Wisconsin and Iowa, where stood Mount Hope, a small village of perhaps fifty mostly wooden ranch and one-and-a-half-story houses, flanked on one side by a large, active farmhouse, with barns and assorted buildings, all of which lay in the middle of vast croplands. I drove around the single main street—which felt more like a long driveway around the homes—then got out of the car and imagined the smart and ambitious little girl who was going into high school in 1942 and realized how limited she would have felt here, considering she had even lived on a farm far outside this small enclave of people. Why wouldn’t she want to go somewhere with more excitement, more intellectual and social challenge? The closest town was Patch Grove, population 168, so it would make sense to look for a bigger city.
It took me about thirty minutes to get to Boscobel, where Elmira had been sent away to board with a family, or so she had told me. Boscobel, with 2,400 people, must have seemed like a thriving metropolis to her. It had a real downtown, with restaurants, shops, and the stately Boscobel Hotel, built in 1863 and where the idea for the Gideon Bible started in 1898. It is also the “Wild Turkey Hunting Capital” of Wisconsin. The city has many neighborhoods, some with elegant homes. I went to the former high school, a Romanesque Revival brick building from 1898, which looked like a castle with a tall, gabled bell tower in the middle of a wraparound Gothic structure built from Wisconsin River bluffs limestone. After the construction of a new high school in 1984 at the edge of town, “the Rock School” became the elementary establishment.
Hoping to find some Boscobel high school yearbooks with information about and pictures of Elmira, I went to the public library, but had no luck. So I called the local historical society and was directed to call the Boscobel Hotel, where the woman told me not enough people had been interested and the society just fell apart.
Because I had to drive far north from Mount Hope to Boscobel, I took a different route back to Madison. Highway 14 was as isolated as the previous roads, but at least it had more trees and river bluffs, reducing the tedium of driving on monotonously flat roads. As I drove the endless miles, I tried to think how daunting it would have been for a high school girl back in 1945. How could she have found her way to Madison often enough to make friends with Carlotta Rhoades, whom she had often talked about? And was it in Madison that she allegedly got pregnant by a black man?
* * *
On the way back I passed through Spring Green, Wisconsin. When the exit sign appeared, I remembered a connection and considered getting off the highway. Suzanne’s mother had died in 1980 and her obituary listed Suzanne as living in Spring Green, which had struck me as more than a little strange. Why not stop by there and just see if driving through town might give me some perspective? Spring Green’s only apparent economic support was tourism for the town’s Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin summer home and the American Players Theatre. By the time Suzanne had lived there, she had gotten her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from the University of Wisconsin. I couldn’t imagine how she might have earned a living in this place of 1,647 people, a town an hour from Madison and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. And why would she want to live there, anyway? After all, she had fled small towns for city life most of her existence. Was she living with a man or what? That could be the only reason she would live there, as far as I could make out. Was she still Suzanne Stordock there (as the obituary listed her), or had she started using Suzanne Brandon? But how could I ever find out? If she never owned any property in Spring Green (which she hadn’t—I’d already checked), it would be almost impossible to find traces of her.
* * *
After I got back to New York, I was doing research on Suzanne and Vernie’s properties and wanted to get more information on their hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin, so I called the Sawyer County offices. I discovered Suzanne sold the land in 1987 for the same amount as they bought it in 1966—$3,500 (even though it was worth $60,000, according to the assessor’s office) to a Fred Weir, who turned around that same day and resold it to Mary Klaus for $3,000. One thing the county clerk told me was that Fred Weir had lived in Spring Green. My head started to vibrate. Maybe that was the person Suzanne had lived with. But without any more to go on, it was not promising.
Searching for several months, I thought I’d never know what
she was doing in Spring Green. Then a clue appeared almost by accident. During a phone call to one of Suzanne and Jocelyn’s relatives, from Madison, I mentioned I was looking for people who remembered my uncle, and I got this answer:
“I saw your uncle quite a few times,” this fortyish man said confidently, but I knew he hadn’t been born until after the murder, so it threw me off. My mind was racing.
“We’d drive up to Spring Green to see Suzanne. Your uncle was a great guy.”
“Spring Green?” My uncle never lived in Spring Green, and it took me a few seconds to catch on, and in my confusion I almost missed the next part: “He was the caretaker of a big hunting preserve.”
“Do you remember his name?”
Unfortunately, he didn’t. And yet I got more than I bargained for in that conversation. My intuition had been right. Suzanne went to Spring Green around 1978 (when she sold her house in Madison) to live with the caretaker. I wondered how many guns he kept in their house.
Fred Weir was the man she sold the hunting cabin to for a pittance. Was it some payoff? Suzanne was already married to Ronald by this time, so I doubted she and Fred were still involved. After I had dug through newspapers, I discovered Fred had a wife in a small town in Minnesota. Could this be the same man? Actually, it was. In the papers I also found names of village officials to contact, so I got on the phone and called about fifteen people. Eventually I found someone who had worked with Fred for about twenty years in Spring Green.
“Sure, I remember Fred. We both worked at the preserve for many years and then he bought some land and did farming farther out in the county.” Did he remember a woman who lived with him by the name of Suzanne? “Yes, that does ring a bell. And Fred had a son who’d come around.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t until later I discovered Fred had no children of his own; otherwise I would have asked more about the son. It must have been Danny or David. Fred’s coworker went on, “I also remember other girlfriends he had over the years. He sure liked to spend money. Was his wife disabled or something? She never came to Spring Green and he didn’t go up there much, maybe twice a year.” After I dug around some more and then got my daughter, Elizabeth, to help me with research, she found the house of Fred and his wife in tiny Trimont, Minnesota. Both Fred and his wife died around 2013, without any children as heirs. Their house was put up for sale and finally was bought in 2015, at which time all their papers and photos were taken to the local dump. Too late, again.
Nobody else I talked to in Spring Green had more than a cursory memory of Suzanne, but we already know from Oregon that she kept to herself. Then I tried to find out more about Mary Klaus, who married Tony Davidson a year after she got the property from Fred Weir. No one ever answered their phone, but I tracked down a relative, a close cousin, who said she had broken off contact with Mary Klaus years before, as all Mary did was try and manipulate money out of family members.
“Her mother died last year and she’s been illegally spending money out of her mother’s account and scheduled a hearing without telling her sister, who lives four hundred miles away. Nobody in the family wants anything to do with her.”
When I talked about the northern Wisconsin property, the cousin quickly shot back, “None of us can figure out how she could have bought something like that. She’s always in debt, with bill collectors chasing after her.” When I explained about the transaction, she said, “Oh, Fred. You mean her sugar daddy. He was forty years older than her, but I guess she smelled his money.”
If you subscribe to the theory about “birds of a feather,” then the argument that Fred was a sweet-talking guy who used people, it’s not much of a stretch to see one of his longtime compatriots (from about 1978 to at least 1987) Suzanne as someone who shared similar values. At last I had found evidence of her life in Spring Green.
One other question I need to answer in the same vein was about Jocelyn. Was she being used by Suzanne, or was she merely the lucky recipient of Suzanne’s overflowing generosity?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jocelyn Revisited
Finding out the truth about the “adopted” Jocelyn proved to be one of the most challenging parts of my research. I asked Suzanne and Louisa multiple times about Jocelyn, without letting on that I might know more about this daughter who had somehow been added into the family. When I would ask about Jocelyn, Suzanne would say, “I guess Louisa takes credit for introducing Jocelyn into our family, back when we lived near her family.”
Louisa would always tell me about how she’d been out in the neighborhood when she’d found Jocelyn and was fascinated with her hair, so she brought her home to meet Suzanne. After some months I started to think how unusual such stories were. Thinking back to my neighborhood in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, where we lived from the time I was four until ten, finding friends was a different procedure, if you can call it that. If you asked any of my siblings about how we met Mary Collins or Nancy Stracka, we’d probably just shrug and say, “They were just there. Neighbors.” What about where we lived before that, on Palmer Street in Milwaukee? I have no memory of any friends from back at that time, where I lived from age two to four, so there’d be no stories. My sister, on the other hand, who is four and a half years older, can recall quite a few friends, but how she met them is never part of her stories.
My cousin Donna encouraged me to find adoption records for Jocelyn, because Louisa and David had both told me Suzanne adopted Jocelyn as a grown woman, when Jocelyn was about thirty. Even if her childhood records were sealed, surely adult adoptions would not be so secret, my smart cousin reasoned. That made so much sense, but I found out that’s not how adoption law works. Even adult adoption records are closed.
So when I was in Madison at the Vital Records Department, I looked through their files for any kind of birth record for February 11, 1945. Nothing. I did find Jocelyn’s death certificate, which only listed Norman and Claudia Rhoades (who were both deceased by that time) as her parents. One of Jocelyn’s children gave the information to go on the death certificate. In Jocelyn’s obituary, which I had found on Madison.com, Suzanne was listed as her mother, and it went on to list Ronald Aaronson, David, Louisa Chappington and husband, and even showed that Jocelyn had been predeceased by brother Danny. It had Suzanne’s MO all over it, the way she had to put all her family into it. There was no mention of Jocelyn being predeceased by her granddaughter, the child of Jocelyn’s youngest son. Surely, this was a more important inclusion than David Briggs?
Then I called Jocelyn’s adoptive brother Norman Rhoades Jr., then in his eighties and still living on Beld Street in Madison. He said he didn’t know as much as Frank Rhoades did about Suzanne, as Norman was much younger. I knew Frank was ninety and wasn’t sure if I should call. Norman said Frank was in assisted living and told me to call his children, but I could not locate a phone number for Frank or his children. Then I mentioned Jocelyn, who was Norman’s adopted sister, and the probability that Suzanne was her real mother. “That’s what I heard,” Norman replied quietly. “That Suzanne was the birth mother. But I don’t know the details of how it was arranged.”
Norman’s admission was powerful, but I needed more. So far, I hadn’t been able to find Jocelyn’s birth certificate. Adoption couldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle; otherwise I would not have been able to find Daniel’s birth certificate, which was altered when my uncle adopted him. The fact that I could not locate Jocelyn’s must be because she was not born in Wisconsin. Then I remembered something very important. In the course of getting copies of marriage licenses of Suzanne’s three marriages before Vernie, I noticed that on marriage licenses it lists the parents of each partner and where the bride and groom were born. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?
I had come across information on Jocelyn’s second marriage, to Roger Afterton in 1990, and if I sent away for that marriage license, I could perhaps find out some important information. After mailing that request to Dane County, I thought I would also try to get the license for her first marri
age to William Freeman, with whom she’d had her three children. I couldn’t find when they got married, but I did discover he was killed while on active army duty, in 1974. So she wasn’t a widow when she moved into the Oregon house. Furthermore, her youngest child was born in 1971, and the newspaper listed Mr. and Mrs. Freeman as living in Oregon, Wisconsin. So they all lived there as a family, evidently.
When the envelope arrived from Wisconsin Vital Records, I was afraid to be too excited, as I would likely learn nothing new. Waiting a few minutes to open the letter, I calmed myself down; then I took out the 1990 license and immediately looked for “Parents of Bride (Jocelyn)”: Suzanne Brandon and unknown father. Born in Illinois.
Was this the definitive answer? On the forms she filled out before the marriage, Jocelyn had not put down her adoptive parents, Norman and Claudia Rhoades, only Suzanne Brandon. One could argue that she was still in the blush of being adopted as an adult by Suzanne, but then why did Jocelyn say the father was “unknown”? Writing something like that would be terribly difficult, if not humiliating.
However, this new marriage license told me something I had not known previously, that Jocelyn was born in Illinois. So I wrote away for her birth certificate, hoping any adoption would not get in the way. Two weeks later I got an envelope from the Illinois Department of Health, the certificate for the birth in Chicago of one “Jocelyn Brandon Stordock,” which told me the adoption took place probably not long after the murder. Vernie was not listed, so it couldn’t have been before, and Suzanne stopped using the last name “Stordock” a few years later, so it had to be sometime in the 1970s. Interestingly, there was not one single other place I could ever find the name “Jocelyn Brandon Stordock” listed in the newspaper, or in various obituaries or her death certificate. The birth certificate only listed Suzanne Brandon as her parent, and that Suzanne was sixteen at the time.
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