With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  * * *

  A few years after the murder, Donald and my mother died within days of each other; both of cancer. On April 7, 1977, Donald finally succumbed. Two days after his funeral, my mother died on April 12, which sadly also happened to be the day after my stepfather’s birthday. He died three years later. The priest at the funeral said the light in my stepfather’s life went out when my mother passed.

  I spent years wondering how it could be that Donald and my mother died so close to one another and with the same illness. I’ve read articles about how traumatic events can increase cancer risk five years later. Is that what happened here?

  What makes sense to me is that Vernie’s death essentially took out the entire remaining generation in the Stordock family: not only Vernie, but also his two remaining siblings. And then the death of my stepfather, who couldn’t really live without my mother. We had no elder Stordocks, other than my grandma, to call on for advice, for help, for companionship.

  Jenylle remarried (a happy union that lasted until her husband’s death many years later) and moved to Los Angeles. Maxine remarried and moved to Florida. Grandma was left alone in Waukesha, with assorted grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but that’s not the same. And I can tell you it’s not the same for those in my generation. I saw my cousins, plus the aunts, periodically, and my grandmother more often, but family gatherings were no more. Where would we have them? In Grandma’s five-hundred-square-foot apartment in the assisted-living facility? The loss was highlighted for me in 2015 when my ailing friend Philip asked me to take him to the hospital, and the intake nurse was getting information. Philip said his birthday was February 20, 1926. I just looked at him as my heart broke apart one more time. My uncle was born February 25, 1926, and he could be still alive, and he would be the exact age as Philip, with probably the same gray hair and wrinkles, but a determined and indomitable spirit.

  I had pushed all the grief inside for many years and only now really see what I lost, what we all lost. And then to have the confessed killer spend only eleven months in a mental hospital, and after she was released, she went on to receive Vernie’s life insurance and all his assets—that is a lot to bear. Where were our rights as the victims of this tragedy?

  * * *

  When I ordered the police reports and had such difficulty getting them (the court documents were much easier), I couldn’t understand what was going on. Sure, it was a long time ago, but they did have the records, or so I assumed. I ordered them in December 2014 and finally got them in April 2015, after numerous phone calls, even talking several times to the lieutenant who was in charge of records. When some of the records finally arrived, they came with the letter from that same lieutenant, with excerpts below. And this is long after the victim’s rights movement had taken hold:

  As custodian of records for the Sheriff’s Office, I must balance competing interests when determining whether or not to release a record in my custody.... I have determined that the public interests favoring non-disclosure substantially outweigh the public interest in disclosure of some information. Therefore . . . certain information has been redacted from this report.

  She went on to give the exclusions allowed by law: anything medical, which just about covers all things having to do with my uncle’s body and his condition. Names of juveniles were redacted, which is understandable, and also anything having to do with motor-vehicle information, which I assumed meant license plate numbers. Then she said I needed to get the coroner’s report directly from that office, which I did, and it came immediately. And I also tried to get my uncle’s FBI file, which somehow disappeared during the few weeks I was trying to retrieve it. They were going to send it, and then poof, it had been destroyed. I even appealed that ruling, but was turned down. No report exists anymore, they said. I tried to get Suzanne’s, but she was still alive, and the FBI wanted to know why her right to privacy was less important than my desire to know. I thought I was asking under the Freedom of Information Act, but it did not feel like information was free.

  Anyway, I thought I might as well try and get my own FBI file. When I was in college at the University of Wisconsin, I was in one protest after another, as I was also in Milwaukee the year I dropped out. My uncle, who worked undercover in Milwaukee, told me the organization I frequented was a Communist front, which I discovered years later was correct. Photographers were always there, taking pictures. And I had roommates who were so into drugs that narcotics cops would sit outside our house 24/7. All these years I had wanted to see what was in my FBI file. After my request they wrote me a formal letter that there was no file on me. I was quite disappointed, but not as disappointed as I was to be restricted from receiving some information in the police report.

  In that same letter the lieutenant used victim’s rights (does she mean my uncle Vernie as the victim?) to tell me I cannot see or read anything of a graphic nature of the crime, to allow for privacy of the victim. Are we family members not also victims, and aren’t we now allowed to finally know what happened? All I can see is that this censorship protects, mainly, the murderer.

  What about the rights of my family? Does anybody care? Do the confessed murderer or her family members feel any twinge or regret for the killing?

  * * *

  During my four visits with Suzanne and family, no one ever said anything like they were sorry, not even sorry that the death had happened, much less that one of them had done it. David got close to saying something similar, but not quite.

  At first, I was hurt and angry that no one would even show a hint of remorse, but then over time I learned to accept it. They would never come to that place. Suzanne justified what she had done because Vernie was so cruel, and Louisa thought of Vernie as a monster, so I guess it was some kind of relief for her, as well, when he died. I’ve also learned to see Louisa’s point of view. She had to believe her mother’s story; otherwise her whole emotional world would collapse. Louisa and David both found God and Jesus as a healing balm for their psyches, and I could see how hard they had tried to overcome the chaos that was their lives.

  Even though I thought I was beyond expecting penitence from them, I did feel pain again in 2015 when Louisa and I were texting. She wished me Happy Resurrection Day, which is the way, I assume, Messianic Jews refer to what Christians call Easter. Another text that day, April 5, also said it was a difficult day because even though they had a lovely Seder, it was also Danny’s yahrzeit, the remembrance of when he passed, but they said Kaddish and Sabbath prayers and moved on. I felt for them.

  Even though I hadn’t seen Danny for decades, I missed him, too. But I wondered if they had done yahrzeit on March 1 for my Uncle Vernie. Of course I knew they did not, because I assume they only did it for loved ones whose death brought sadness to them.

  * * *

  At the same time I was fighting my own ethical and moral battles. When I started out, I just wanted answers, wanted to find out for Shannon, and for me, what had actually happened that night. But as time went on and I got close to David, and then developed a relationship with Louisa and her husband after David died, I started to feel guilty. I felt genuine love and care for them, but I also wanted answers to questions too long buried. How could I possibly claim any moral high ground? Sometimes it would get so bad, I’d hyperventilate. I talked to several friends who’d calm me down, telling me I was doing this for justice, for my uncle, for my cousin, and for the rest of the family. But was I just fooling myself with these excuses? All my life I’ve tried to be honest and fair, but how could I claim I was being so now?

  Then I remembered my uncle Vernie had worked undercover most of his career, starting back in the navy in Japan during the Korean Conflict and later doing undercover work with the Mafia in Milwaukee, on a prostitution sting in Hurley, Wisconsin, and many other assignments I didn’t know about.

  What I was doing with Suzanne and family was undercover work. It helped me to understand what he went through. Did he feel guilt when he’d develop a relationship
and then later testify against that person? Or was he more able to be detached? But how could I use Louisa’s kind heart and loving nature to get information out of her? On the other hand, she did know I was a writer and that I was writing about the murder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Police Reports

  A few days after I got the letter about victim’s rights and redactions, a thick envelope arrived from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office. I didn’t open it for a few days, because I thought the forensic pictures would be in there and they would scare me, so I waited until a friend came over. No pictures, unfortunately—but, oh, the other things that were there!

  At first, I found it overwhelming to read the police files, which were in the old Courier font of typewriters and obviously had been copied several times over, indicated by all the stray marks and illegible type on some lines. The files were a string of short reports in an almost chronological order, with a lot of overlapping and sometimes contradicting information. Even after reading them six times, I was still overwhelmed.

  It was causing me a great deal of confusion and anxiety until I figured out a way to make sense of the 121 pages. After reading the reports for the seventh time, I categorized and then indexed the information, line by line, ultimately putting all the details on 205 color-coded note cards. Then I sorted the cards by topic and wrote down the data in a narrative form, which made it more readable than the raw police files.

  The police conducted a pretty thorough investigation, interviewing Suzanne, David (not much, though), all their neighbors and friends in Oregon, including any persons who were in the bowling alley with them that night, just before the murder, as well as talking to Suzanne’s parents and a few other relatives. Almost everyone was asked about the nature of the relationship between Vernie and Suzanne. But why they didn’t interview any of Vernie’s family is a puzzle to me. My grandma, mother, or uncle could have provided a lot of information about dramatic incidents between Vernie and Suzanne and given some insight into her unpredictable and punitive behavior. Here is a short summary of the police and coroner’s reports:

  1. The first call Suzanne made after the murder was to the home of the Dane County sheriff Vern Leslie, at 2:17 A.M., saying, “This is Suzi. I just shot Vern.” She then hung up and immediately called the sheriff’s office. “My husband has been shot and we need help right away.” Patrol car was dispatched at 2:20 A.M.

  2. Vernie was sitting up, on the side of the bed when he was shot. With the coroner’s report, I saw that Vernie was not only sitting up, but that his head was turned away, looking toward what was the corner of the room, where two dressers—and nothing else—stood, on each side of the corner. There was no sign of struggle in the room.

  3. The killer fired the gun from some feet away, at least in the doorway, if not farther away, and it was held at hip height. This agrees with Franklin’s theory that the gun was resting on the back of a chair in the doorway to the other bedroom.

  4. Though both Suzanne’s and David’s fingerprints were on the gun, and Suzanne had blood splatters on her person, nothing was written whether David had any splatters. And when I had asked David during that last time I talked to him, he told me only his mother had blood splatters. That put her in the room. Not to mention the small piece of brain that was removed from Suzanne’s hair at the police station. The skull exploded to the right, away from the shooter. In order to get hit by blood splatters and brain fragments, one would have had to be closer to Vernie and also either in front of or to his right side. The shooter was relatively far to the left.

  5. The gun was left on the floor, close to the body, as seen from the crime seen diagram (Figure 2). In the upper left are laundry baskets, from which brain tissue was taken. On either side of the bed are electric blanket controls. Both were on. Vernie was getting ready for bed and had turned his on. It was, after all, a freezing Wisconsin March night. Suzanne’s was also turned on. Since she had not gotten in bed yet, we could assume he had turned hers on to get the bed ready for her. Also important is #17, telephone on the floor. Was Vernie reaching for this when he was shot? He was leaning toward it. And also, he was looking toward the corner, which only had two dressers, at a right angle, almost touching. Item #15 was originally redacted from the descriptions, but I had surmised from reading the rest of the report that #15 was the attaché case filled with drugs. What I didn’t know until I got the second copy of the police report,2 was there were pieces of bone and flesh on the top of the briefcase. Because the case was so far outside the area where the skull and brains had splattered, it seemed clear the case had been moved after the murder. Also redacted was #11, and I found out later it was a moist substance on the “private parts” of Vernie’s body.

  6. In the photo spread there are more explicit 3-D crime scene diagrams based on the forensic evidence and originally designed by Dr. Jason Kolowski of Forensic Insight LLC.

  Figure 2. (Re-creation of police sketch by Maxim Zhelev)

  7. When the police arrived, Suzanne was very calm, but gave several hand gestures and facial expressions to show how upset David was, and indicated that they should be careful when they told David that Vernie was dead. At one point she just shrugged to the police, referring to David’s reactions. David, on the other hand, was crying and wailing and biting his hands to keep from further crying. He was very nervous and chain-smoked the whole time. The coroner’s report, however, included Suzanne breaking down and crying for a few minutes in front of a detective.

  8. Suzanne made a number of phone calls before the police arrived, and also after they came, to tell people, with the police officers’ permission, “I shot Vern.” The report says her first call was to the home of Dane County’s sheriff, Sheriff Leslie, which she did before they arrived. After they were there, she called a sister-in-law in Waukesha, a brother-in-law in Pewaukee, her daughter in New York, her brother, her second husband, and perhaps others. When she would make these calls and tell the person what she had done, David would leave the room, saying he couldn’t listen. Later on, officers reported that they received returning calls from Suzanne’s daughter, Louisa, and from brother-in-law Pete Evert, my step-father. When I read this, Pete’s face appeared before me with its kind expression. He was a like a rock and provided a home for his stepchildren and treated us like his own.

  9. Though they lived in Oregon, Wisconsin, which had its own police department, Suzanne chose to call the sheriff at his home in the middle of the night, about which she later bragged to me. She reached out to another jurisdiction when the Oregon Police were a one-minute drive away, and Sheriff Leslie was on Harbor Court in Madison, about twenty-five minutes from Suzanne’s home.

  10. Regarding her calling her attorney, she made some comment that one of the officers overheard: “Well, at least we can afford it now.” Does not seem to me the comment of someone in psychosis.

  11. The rifle used in the shooting came from the downstairs gun rack. David was able to show the detectives where the ammunition was kept. It’s not clear if the officers even asked Suzanne about the ammunition. David testified at the hearing that he wasn’t sure where the ammunition was kept. Later in that testimony he said he did not know where the ammunition was kept. The district attorney did not seem bothered by these inconsistencies.

  12. When detectives came back with a search warrant to look at the scene more carefully, they looked in the den cabinet and found an 8mm ammunition clip that held twelve shells. Only one cartridge was missing. And there was no evidence that anyone had been rooting through the ammunition drawers. Nothing was out of place, and only that one specific bullet was gone. Why would someone planning to kill another person only take one bullet? And especially if you were not familiar with guns, how would you know which ammo goes with which weapon, and then why only take one? What would be the chance you would hit your target the first time? Was that confidence or something else?

  13. The rifle was found on the floor with the shell ejected. David testified that he firs
t came into the room, saw the body, then went downstairs, after which his mother said something about a gun, so he ran upstairs, picked up the weapon, and ejected the shell.

  14. The gun used came from the top shelf of the rack, as you can see from the police diagram (Figure 3). That top shelf was six feet seven inches from the floor, and in front of it was a cabinet protruding twenty-one inches from the wall. Franklin said when he went there the next day, there was no sign of any furniture having been moved to reach that uppermost gun. He and David were the same height—about five feet nine inches—and Franklin could barely reach the gun. Suzanne was six inches shorter and more slight, making it impossible to maneuver a heavy rifle off that high place. Below that weapon were three other shotguns on lower racks. Also, in the corner, lying against the wall, were two more weapons. Why would someone who has no knowledge of guns choose the converted military-grade 8mm Mauser, sometimes referred to as a “sniper’s rifle,” probably the deadliest weapon in the house, which also happened to be the most inconvenient to reach and the most complicated to operate?

  Figure 3. Gun rack and cabinet located on first floor in the den (re-creation by Maxim Zhelev).

  15. Detectives found an attaché case in the home that was filled with numerous vials and bottles of pills, including barbiturates, heroin, marijuana, uppers and downers, and many more. What was that about? The inventory of drugs was so long it took two pages. Did Vernie really need all of those for his work?