* * *
Next I wanted to talk to Jocelyn’s children. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to be in contact. I tried many, many no-longer-in-service numbers, and her son seemed to be the only one who might have a working number listed. Finally I dialed and there was an answer, with a message saying the son and his wife had moved and had a new number. Could I finally be close? When I called the more recent number, I just got voice mail and didn’t want to leave what would prove to be a confusing message to Marvyn. I’d just call back.
Five minutes later my phone rang and the caller ID had the Madison area code. It was Marvyn, wondering who had called. I introduced myself. He was, of course, a little confused at first, but talked about his mother and Suzanne, and how Suzanne had adopted Jocelyn as an adult. I asked some questions about his mother’s birth and also the wedding to his father. The son stumbled around and kept saying, “I don’t know.”
After a few minutes I realized they didn’t talk much about Jocelyn’s history, and Jocelyn perhaps did not want to give away Suzanne’s secret past. It was enough for her, evidently, to be able to tell her children that they were mother and daughter through adoption later on.
* * *
After repeated study of that Illinois birth certificate, I finally realized why Suzanne had adopted the adult Jocelyn, besides wanting free child care while in the mental hospital. Evidently, Norman and Claudia never legally adopted Jocelyn, so the birth certificate would have listed Suzanne as birth mother with no known father. But after the adult adoption, that original certificate would have been obliterated, and Suzanne could obfuscate Jocelyn’s real parentage. But she could not stop me from digging deeper for the truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
An Unexpected Call
Sometimes you get beautiful sunny weather on your day off, and sometimes one phone call can almost change your life.
On my list of things to do was to contact Jan, the current owner of the Oregon mansion, to ask her some follow-up questions about the property. I punched in her number, and after a couple of minutes, her voice changed from that of a polite raconteur of details to enthusiastic reporter of unexpected events. She energetically told me about a recent visitor to her home.
“My husband and I were sitting outside when a car zoomed into our driveway and out strolls a tall, Clint Eastwood–walking white man, with lots of gray hair, probably in his seventies, followed by a fortyish Chinese woman with a black blunt-cut hairdo. ‘I came to see my house!’ he announced, and we just sat there, not knowing what he meant,” Jan Bonsett-Veal explained. “He introduced himself as Otis Wahlburger, who had bought the house from Suzanne back in the seventies, and pointed to his companion as ‘my dance partner.’ He lives in China and is back in the States for a couple more weeks and I told him about you, and he really wants to talk with you. He’s a therapist and I think was Suzanne’s counselor after the murder and that’s how they met. But his story is really different from the one you told me.”
This was more than intriguing. I had talked to all the owners except for the people who had bought it from Suzanne in 1973. Manna from heaven, I thought. Yes, there is a God.
Jan went on: “He gave me his business card, which is Chinese on one side and English on the other. It has his name and then says, ‘Clever Monkey in China.’ Underneath that is ‘VIP English Teacher, Management Consultant, Nutritional Research.’”
Jan had no idea where he’d gone after leaving Oregon, but she gave me some phone numbers in the United States and China and e-mail addresses, one for the States and one for China. I called him three times over two days, but all I got was a voice saying the phone had not been set up with a mailbox. Then I tried e-mailing, first to the one evidently used in the United States and two days later the one in China, just in case.
* * *
On the third day my phone rang at 11:03 P.M. I recognized Otis Wahlburger’s number, picked up the phone, and heard a deep, clear male voice. After making clear who I was and exchanging pleasantries, he related what Suzanne had told him about the night of the murder:
She said her husband drank all the time, then he’d beat her up, would drink some more and beat her again. This went on for years and she suffered terrible abuse. Then one night he said he’d had enough and took a gun and went down to the basement to commit suicide. She heard the gunshot and ran down the stairs and saw he was still alive. Then she got mad that he had pretended to kill himself, and there was a struggle with the gun. It went off and killed him. But that’s not the story Jan told me, I mean the one you told her.
I wanted to correct him and started to say something about court transcripts and newspaper articles, but he didn’t seem interested. And, anyway, the important thing was learning what he had been told, and what his experience was with Suzanne:
I had just finished graduate school in counseling and had taken all these psychology courses. Suzanne was studying psychology and criminology, so we had so much to talk about. She is really smart and such a nice person. And we both loved the house.
Otis had the same experience that Alice Seeliger had with various Oregon residents. They’d stop by and ask him if he knew someone was murdered there, and then they’d tell him they thought the son did it and the mother confessed to protect her son. While he was talking, I couldn’t get his reported murder story out of my mind, so I said, “You mean she told you he was killed in the basement?”
It seemed strange to me, because back then the basement had a dirt floor. We later cemented it. But the original furnace had huge pipes that ran across the floor, and when the furnace was replaced, the pipes were removed and there were just holes everywhere in the basement floor. Having a struggle down there didn’t make sense.
It wasn’t just the basement that was a mess when we bought the house. The whole structure was in disrepair, and I’ll tell you we worked so hard on it. I mean, I would drive thirty minutes to get home from work in Madison after a nine- or ten-hour day, then spend three to four hours on the house, plus ten to twelve hours on Saturdays and Sundays. We had six kids and I was earning one thousand dollars a month. Painting the outside of the house cost seven hundred dollars, not to mention all the damage the carpenter ants had done on the floors and walls that we had to pull out. The roof was leaking, so we put in a new roof. It was no easy job because of the high slant, so we had to use ropes up there.
But I understood how Suzanne wasn’t able to manage, because she’d been in prison for five years, which I think was so unfair. Women who are abused like that don’t deserve to do any time. As part of my graduate work in counseling, I visited a prison, and they took me to the wing where all the women who had murdered their husbands were. They were the kindest, most polite people, so artistic. You could never imagine them as killing anyone. When you think of murderers, you see slanty eyes and cruel faces and ominous stares. These women were so engaging, so charming. What an injustice.
I just listened. It wasn’t my job to tell him how most murderers are not like the faces of criminals on the FBI’s most wanted list. And after all the research I’ve done on sociopaths and psychopaths, I’ve discovered the one thing they do better than anyone else is to make everyone think how kind and thoughtful and caring they are. And I also learned how often they fool mental health professionals. Such as Otis Wahlburger.
I asked if he ever met Danny, her youngest son, and he said “no.” Later on, I stated, “So, Suzanne was living alone in the house at the time you bought it,” and he said she was. He would have noticed, because he and his wife looked over the house the day they happened to pass by it and saw the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign and also there were inspections done for the mortgage and so on, in addition to frequent conversations when Otis Wahlburger would stop by. I had heard from several sources that Danny didn’t live with his mother after she got out of the hospital. Suzanne sold the house in May 1973, when Danny was twelve. And one of David’s friends told me when Suzanne moved from Oregon to Regent Street in Madis
on, Danny was not living with her there, either.
Wahlburger went on with his praise:
Suzanne had so many insights into prisons, both from her own experience as a prisoner, and also from her studies. She told me how humiliated she’d been, because there she was an intelligent, “high-class” person who was under the subjugation of these low-class prison guards.
As he was talking, I thought how Suzanne described herself as eminently intelligent and under the control of people who had less intellectual competence. It was her explaining all over again how she was so smart that she left 98 percent of others in the dust.
I wondered what Suzanne considered “prison.” She’d been in jail less than a day on March 1, 1970, before they moved her to the mental hospital for evaluation. Then, after a week in the hospital, she was transferred back to jail. Her bond was set on March 11 and she was out within a couple of days, so the maximum she spent behind bars was four to five days. She was in the mental hospital for eleven months and then was released because she was completely cured, but was still considered on parole until they gave a final judgment to set her free. Did she think her time in the hospital was prison? Or was she telling him those things to bolster her contention that she’d spent five years in prison and shouldn’t be held responsible for a leaky roof? One of the problems with lying, besides the fact that it’s morally wrong, is that when people get together and compare versions of the story, the stories often don’t match.
* * *
Some months after my last interview with Suzanne, I went back to the coroner’s reports and found out about an old friend of Danny’s and was able to contact him. During the first few seconds on the telephone, I heard his loving voice and there was an instant connection; then we both shared stories and asked questions. I learned a great deal.
Within days we were Facebook friends. He told me later that once he and I were connected, Suzanne, who was one of his Facebook friends, started commenting more on his posts. Not long after, I started noticing Suzanne showing up on my “suggested friends” list, even though we had only two connections in common. Many of my Facebook friends share one hundred or more common friends.
By accident I learned people show up on your suggested friends list because they have visited your page often. Did that mean Suzanne was looking to see what I was posting? She knew I was asking around, but she must have been awfully curious about exactly what I was finding. But even without knowing she was sort of stalking me on Facebook, I had made a rule for myself not to post anything related to my uncle’s murder or the research I was doing. Later on, there’d be plenty of time. And then I suppose Suzanne got tired of lurking in the background. One day in late January 2016, I woke up and there was a Facebook friend request from none other than Suzanne. Should I accept?
After much internal agitation and several months, I finally accepted her as a friend. In one way it didn’t matter, because I have nothing hidden. I use Facebook as more of a public site, so friends have no special viewing privileges, but there was the principle. After my book was accepted for publication, people asked me when I was going to post it online. My reply was “The confessed murderer is one of my FB friends, and I am not ready to disclose detailed information about the book to her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Forensic Files—An Information System
I needed as much data as I could get. But after forty years, what is left? How do you find evidence that was recorded when Nixon was still president, when the Vietnam War was still raging? I had been trying to get the police forensic files on the case for five months with no results, so far, even though I had first requested them in December 2014.
I called the Dane County sheriff’s office after a month and the woman said, “Oh, are you the one back East who made the request? We’re working on it.” This was the same response I got the next two times I called. Then in February, they told me “the lieutenant” was handling it, so I called her and left a message, thinking it would be another month before I had to call back again. She returned my call the next day.
The first thing Lieutenant Alicia Rauch told me was how she had initially thought I was calling the wrong office because the murder happened in the Village of Oregon, which should have done the investigation. But then she called Oregon herself and found out I had tried there first. Hesitating for a moment out of confusion, I finally said, “But Suzanne called the Dane County sheriff to report the murder.” Now it was her turn to pause, after which she blurted out, “But why? That’s not even our jurisdiction.”
That was my first hint that Suzanne had taken control of the situation from the start. Our supposedly psychotic mental case had the clear thinking to look in her address book (or had she memorized it?) for the sheriff’s home number and called him sometime around 2:15 A.M. Why wouldn’t someone just look on the inside cover of the Oregon phone book and call the police, who were a one-minute drive away? Unless our psychotic wanted to make sure the investigation would be handled by the Dane County sheriff himself.
Then the lieutenant started asking me a lot of questions about whether Suzanne was still alive and whether I was in contact with her or her family. I started answering her openly, then wondered why she was asking. Would she find some way to deny me access to these files? At the end she said she’d work on it. It wasn’t until many months later that I learned the real reason she asked so many questions, and it wasn’t anything like I thought at the time.
Another month passed, so I called again. The lieutenant had the files, the clerk told me, so I called her again. Two days later I got an e-mail from the Dane County sheriff telling me how much I owed for the copying, so I paid immediately online and called the next day to confirm. Oh, they’d have these out in a few days, I was told. Weeks later I called. Oh, it is so many pages, they said, so it’s taking a long time. I started to wonder if I’d ever get anything, or if they were just stalling and hoping I’d give up.
Just when I was wondering if the best strategy was to move on, a letter arrived in mid-April 2015 from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office. It wasn’t thick enough to be the forensic files. Maybe they were telling me I’d never be able to read those reports. With shaking hands I opened the envelope.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Forensic Files and Ethical Matters
Our justice system sometimes seems like it is weighted in favor of the accused. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against unreasonable search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment allows refusal to answer questions that might be self-incriminating, the Sixth gives the right to a speedy trial and trial by jury, while the Eighth prohibits excessive bail. Ergo, four of the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights are protection for those accused of crimes.
These are based partly on the Magna Carta, where England’s King John was pressured in 1215 by defiant and rebellious barons to protect subjects against royal abuses of power. Our Founding Fathers had seen enough abuses of royal power to want to prevent that in the new system. And because that abuse had been so egregious, the Bill of Rights was an attempt to balance the power and give the accused some rights under the law.
It wasn’t until the 1970s, when the consciousness changed about victims’ rights, and the tide was turned with a 1973 Supreme Court decision that said an unmarried mother who was not paid child support had no legal standing to pursue a case. However, the Supreme Court went on to encourage Congress to “enact statutes creating legal rights” for victims. A final report on the President’s Task Force on the Victims of Crime was released in 1982. That same year the federal government passed laws protecting victims, and since then thirty-three states have legislated victim’s rights statutes.
Even the idea of wrongful-death suits wasn’t popularized until the 1980s and later. O. J. Simpson was declared not guilty of murder by a jury in 1995, but in 1997 a different jury found Simpson liable and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Standards in civil
trial wrongful-death suits are less stringent than in murder cases. Shannon would have been the only one to have any legal standing to file such a suit. However, the first inkling of any legislation in Wisconsin was 1971 and it wasn’t until the 1980s, probably in tandem with the victim’s rights movement, that there was any real attention paid to such legal claims.
An important piece of this legislation was put in place in 1988: A person who “feloniously and intentionally” kills his or her spouse is not a surviving spouse for purposes of sub. (2) and is treated as having predeceased the decedent. Steinbarth v. Johannes, 144 Wis. 2d 159, 423 N.W.2d 540 (1988). In Wisconsin, as in many other states, the statute of limitations in wrongful-death suits is three years.
It was too late for us, because the case took place back in 1970 and it took more than ten years to have any meaningful victim’s rights laws, but not too late for me now to at least be allowed to get information, as one of the victims of the murder. Before my uncle’s death there were three surviving children of my grandmother, Dorothy Stordock. The oldest of the original five, Katherine, had died of rheumatic fever at age fifteen, and then the diabetic Amos died of insulin shock in 1967, just one month short of age forty-eight. Grandpa Oscar Stordock died one year later. Add to that my brother Raymond, dying at age twenty in 1962, and you’ve got a lot of deaths in a few years. Even before Vernie’s murder, we’d had three deaths in six years, but we were still functioning, talking on the phone, visiting one another, and somehow bearing the grief.
Then Vernie got murdered, brutally, and my grandmother was denied not only her son, but the chance to see him in an open casket. At that point my grandmother had two living children left, out of the original five. Donald had retired from the army and moved to Waukesha, to be close to his sister, my mother. Grandma soon followed, leaving her Beloit home. Our big family gatherings were not big anymore and were not as often. Our family world had shrunk and everyone bore wounds, before—and more since the murder.
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