With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  8. Irresponsibility. From various reports she didn’t seem to give her children much attention, and after Vernie was murdered, it seemed she essentially abandoned Danny. Her parents reported that she took no responsibility toward anyone in the family other than herself. Yet I am without complete information; I give her a 1.

  9. Inability to accept responsibility for own actions. She murdered my uncle, or was somehow involved in a cover-up. Did she want to pay for her crime? No, she got off on insanity, cashed in his life insurance, took all his assets, and made sure his daughter, Shannon, got nothing. And she blamed it all on Vernie’s cruelty. Did she ever think of divorcing him? She was surprised at the question the first time I asked. During the next visit, when I asked it again, she was more prepared. She probably did think about divorcing him, but she didn’t because counselors confused her. I give her a 2.

  10. Need for stimulation and gets easily bored. She told me during that first visit, probably three or four times, how quickly she got bored with her husbands. And how the work she did was not satisfying. So when she had enough assets accumulated from the four different husbands, she no longer worked and went to school full-time. Interestingly, she never seemed to work full-time after that. She taught as an adjunct at the College of St. Catherine and had some kind of a law practice, but I don’t think it was very successful, from what I’ve been able to determine. Or maybe it was just too boring to meet one client after another. Did I mention she ran for the state legislature and got her real state license, and also became an insurance broker? In this category, she gets a 2.

  11. Parasitic lifestyle. She did work a couple of years before she murdered Vernie, though her brother claims she never really worked, but got rich from all of her ex-husbands. After one of her alleged attempts at suicide, she stopped working, but I’m not sure how long. It was during this time that she and Vernie bought the 35 acres, plus cabin, in northern Wisconsin. And she also told me her second husband had an affair, but she waited a couple of years to divorce him, until he had a decent level of assets. She fought for the inheritance from her third father-in-law, even though she was already having an affair with Vernie, and she got divorced as quickly afterward as possible. I give her a 2.

  12. Lack of realistic, long-term goals. The fact that she had three divorces and three children from three different fathers when she moved in with Vernie indicates someone who’s not thinking ahead. She did go to school and get a lot of degrees in a short time, but that did not seem to lead to any fulfilling or remunerative career. It seemed mostly so people would admire her. She didn’t think through, or didn’t care about, the effect the murder would have on her children. I give her a 2.

  13. Impulsivity. I saw this on a number of occasions during her connection to Vernie, when she’d go off in one of her rages because someone didn’t talk to her enough, or Jenylle’s name was mentioned. Plus, as mentioned above, marrying and divorcing so quickly, back in the 1950s and ’60s, was very impulsive. I give her a 2.

  14. Poor behavioral controls. See above and her rages, and also how she would announce to anyone in the room how Vernie was not going to get any sex unless he did what she wanted. I give her a 2.

  15. Early behavioral problems. Her parents went on and on with the detective about her jealousy, her tantrums, the chaos she’d created in the family. I give her a 2.

  16. Revocation of conditional release. She didn’t seem to have any problems here that I could see. She gets a 0.

  17. Juvenile delinquency. No evidence here. She gets a 0.

  18. Criminal versatility. I don’t know enough about her life outside the murder and its aftermath. Why did she have so many jobs way back then, and nothing substantive later on? It’s probably related to her problems, but I don’t have enough information. She gets a 0.

  19. Many short-term marital relationships. Do four husbands by the time she is thirty-four years old count? I give her a 2.

  20. Promiscuous sexual behavior. The fact of her multiple marriages and the affair she had with Vernie, while both were still married, and her showing up in Boscobel, Wisconsin, with a boyfriend a few months before the murder, all of this points to someone who uses sex to gain power. I give her a 2.

  The cutoff for psychopath is between 26 and 30 depending on which expert you read. My assessment of Suzanne’s score is 30.

  Another aspect of psychopathy has to do with emotions, but taken from a different angle from what I’ve already discussed. Psychopaths are better than average in gauging fear in others, which makes them more facile in finding palatable victims. It was scary to consider how many times I might have been around someone who was checking out my fears to see at what level I could be manipulated.

  One of the documentaries I watched featured a psychopath who explained how he looks for his next victim. He screens for vulnerable women by sending out an “empathy bomb,” which means he’ll say something like, “My parents didn’t love me much,” or “I’ve never told anyone these things,” or “I really need someone to understand all my troubles.” Then if the woman doesn’t respond in a caring and empathetic way, he moves on, because, “What’s the point?”

  Suzanne evidently used a sort of empathy bomb with people. A number of old family friends and associates told me how much sympathy they had for her. One couple, Bertram and Linda Kres-nick, stood up at Suzanne’s marriage to John Briggs in 1952. After I dialed, Linda picked up the phone and Bertram got on another line. When I explained who I was and what I was doing, Linda almost yelled out, without any hesitation, “Oh, Suzi, I remember her well! She was my boss in the mimeograph department, back when we used to duplicate exams for professors, using that awful purple ink, and we were in the Commerce Building in Sterling Hall. She married John, who was a TA and doctoral student in the Commerce School. John’s father taught in a small college in Maryville, Tennessee.”

  I was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail Linda had after more than fifty years. She went on about her friend: “Suzi had a messy life. A sad background. She told me about it, but I know it was a difficult life. I felt sorry for her.” Linda repeated this three times: “I felt sorry for her.” Was this Suzanne’s MO even back then, to seem like the victim?

  After having talked for about thirty minutes, Linda got more reflective. “Suzi was unusual, now that I think about it. Even a bit unhinged, with all her personal problems. At one time she had told me how her mother had given birth to a stillborn girl, and I felt so bad for Suzi. Then she mailed me a picture with a baby in a coffin. Dead as a doornail. It really scared me. We had a strange relationship. But she was a smart girl.”

  When I asked her about Suzi’s dating, Linda said, “Oh, yes, she was really out there. She wasn’t unattractive, she didn’t dress very sexy, but she had some ‘come hither’ look that men were drawn to.”

  I asked if she remembered an Egyptian guy, as Suzanne had told me she had been engaged to someone from Egypt, and my research had uncovered her being the secretary of the Islamic Cultural Association in 1952. Linda said she had some recollection of the Egyptian guy, but she couldn’t remember the details and said it wasn’t long after that Suzi married Briggs. Interesting that an Egyptian man named Abbas Assam was also an officer in the Islamic Cultural Association, and then became an usher at the Briggs/Chappington wedding in 1952. Turns out Abbas Assam already had a wife back in Egypt, but perhaps Suzi didn’t know that, or perhaps it was someone else.

  * * *

  Writings on psychopaths indicate they “mimic” others, because they have no empathy and don’t feel emotions the way the other 99 percent of the population does. As Suzanne had told me, she was smart in the brain, but she “never factored in emotions” enough when dealing with other people. People with average empathy would probably not say such a thing, because we don’t have to go through some incredibly complicated mental gymnastics to understand someone else’s emotional reaction. Psychopaths, however, have to learn, as a pigeon does, that one kind of behavior leads to a cert
ain outcome. For example, if you criticize and complain, you’ll get defensiveness and anger.

  I’ve learned that psychopaths must manufacture their understanding of the world and relationships in an intentional manner—unlike more normal people who learn about human dynamics as they continue to mature without perhaps even noticing much of the learning until later.

  Based on my new awareness, I found it fascinating that Suzanne did her doctoral research and dissertation about how a person learns, by observing other people and relationships. In other words: how to mimic and then become accepted as a member of society. Though the topic of her dissertation is parental kidnapping, she explains early on that the theoretical foundation comes from “Symbolic Interactionism,” a sociological framework that basically says we are shaped by our socializations.

  However, when Suzanne expounds on this theory in her work (Brandon, 1987), which she does for about fifty pages, it sounds more like a manual for a psychopath to learn how to be considered a normal human being. One of my professors in graduate school said we all go into our fields of study to fill our unmet needs. In my career as a full-time professor, I saw, over and over, how the psychology departments had the wackiest faculty, political science had the least “political” members, management departments (my usual academic home) had little ability to manage their own affairs, and so on. Therefore it was no surprise that Suzanne would be drawn to a topic that spoke to her lack of ability to naturally understand human dynamics. She described human beings as biological individuals who learn to relate to others by developing an intricate set of values and meaning. She went on:

  The individual gradually becomes able to respond to gestures, objects, and other stimuli as meaningful to him/her in the same way they are meaningful to others . . . Relationships . . . are duplicated in many different people. . . Identity is “situated” . . . Not only is this situated identity essential as a BASIS for initiating interaction, it is crucial for guiding and anticipating the course of that interaction. . . focused on the negotiation which occurs in the diagnosis which is the outcome of a psychiatric interview. NEGOTIATION of reality takes place. (pp. 66 & 68)

  Suzanne should be an expert regarding negotiation of reality, considering her meetings with the psychiatrists and the police. Even though her story never quite made sense, it was ultimately her narrative that carried the day, leading to her insanity plea, eleven months in the hospital, and being declared completely cured not long after. Interesting to note, that in the hearing to determine her final sanity, she waived the right to have two psychiatrists examine her and chose to just have one. Who was chosen? Dr. Glover, who had already signed off on her insanity plea in late 1970. And Dr. Glover had originally been brought in at the request of Suzanne.

  * * *

  Another shocking revelation was the sloppiness of her final dissertation, done at the highly regarded University of Minnesota. It was filled with grammatical errors and typos and a citation style I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been on many doctoral and master’s committees. I wondered how this got past the university librarian, who is charged with making sure every single dissertation is without even one tiny mistake. After I wrote my own dissertation, passed the final oral examination, and then had to turn in the revised manuscript to the graduate school, I had near-anxiety attacks for weeks. So many stories circulated about how one misspelled word would force the entire document back and you’d have to delay graduation. Those were the days before word processors, when any stray or incorrect mark meant retyping the entire page. Until I got the actual doctoral diploma in the mail, I was sure they were going to find too many spaces between words on, say, page 136. And that would be it. No doctorate.

  So how did Suzanne manage to work the system? I looked up her committee. Her advisor was dead, and one member I was able to reach didn’t remember much about her. But Suzanne did go on at length about her advisor in her acknowledgments. He—oh, did I forget to say it was an older man? According to Suzanne in her acknowledgments, he seemed to have spent an inordinate amount of time helping her complete the dissertation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Final Thoughts on Cigarette Burns and Marriage Licenses

  That one cigarette burn on Suzanne’s back multiplied: from one blister, on March 1, 1970, to as many as five sores, on April 21, seven weeks later. Here’s what Dr. Washburn wrote after he examined Suzanne a few hours after the murder:

  Examination of Mrs. Stordock at this time revealed a ½ cm (5mm) circular burn over her right scapular area judged to be between a first and second-degree burn in severity. It was not blistered or weeping. She indicated that prior to the shooting while trying to embrace her husband that he had purposely burned her back with a lighted cigarette.

  At the preliminary hearing in April, Sheriff Leslie testified that he saw one cigarette burn on Suzanne’s back, after her attorney had pointed it out to him. Under cross-examination, Leslie was asked if there was more than one burn. Leslie answered there could have been, but he only saw one. How is it possible, I wondered, if she did have more than one burn, her attorney Kenneth Orchard did not make sure Sheriff Leslie (and Dr. Washburn) saw all of them that night in the City-County Building, around the time she was arrested? But wait, in the less redacted police reports I got later on, Orchard did just that—showed him, I mean. And the sheriff still testified he saw only one burn.

  Cigarette burns make up about 10 percent of all abuse, but they are most common in children. Intentional cigarette burns generally have a 7mm to 10mm diameter, distinct outlines, and a center crater. This assumes the victim is a child who has been held down and is not able to move. If accidental, the burns would be oval and more superficial, because the child would move quickly. Therefore, if an adult is burned, unless the person is forcibly held, the burn would not be round, but rather oval. And most often perpetrators leave more than one sore.

  Suzanne told me several times that Vernie burned her while dancing and she thought he was putting an ice cube on her back. After hearing this numerous times from her, I tried it on myself and held an ice cube up to my neck and my back. I can say definitively it did not feel like a hot burn of any kind, inflicted by a cigarette or a hot pan. Anyone with reasonable intelligence could immediately tell the difference.

  But let’s just assume she thought it was an ice cube, but it wasn’t. If that happened in the bar, surely someone would have noticed if she had been burned because she would have very likely screamed out in pain. If they were dancing at home, then it had to be in the ten minutes between 1:20 A.M. when the Oregon friends, Mr. and Mrs. Ace, left and David got home. David testified that they were arguing about a cigarette burn while he was going upstairs.

  This means during that ten minutes between when the neighbors left and David got home, Vernie would have had to put on some music and secretly get some ice in his hand. The police reports say that the Aces declined a drink and that Vernie had a beer, so no ice would have been out. Automatic ice-making units came later in the 1970s, so Vernie would have had to take out a metal ice-cube tray, pull the handle back, and wrestle the ice out, which back then was a noisy process.

  Then he would have had to leave the kitchen (if she had been there, she would have seen him retrieve the ice) and would have swept her away to the music. This, by the way, was not characteristic of my uncle, and surely not at 1:22 A.M. after they’d both been drinking, on a night that several people noted he was more quiet than usual. And on a night that he wanted to get to sleep because he was going to see his daughter the next day.

  Then after he gets her swaying in his arms, he has to pull up her sweater without her realizing (while they are moving) and burns her on the top right of her back. If they were dancing and he needed access to her back, wouldn’t his hands have been closer to the bottom of her back, and also easier for him to reach under the bottom of the sweater?

  You might wonder why I keep saying “sweater.” Couldn’t she just as easily have been wearing a dress? Remembe
r they started the evening bowling with their league. Nobody wore dresses to go bowling. She would have either had a sweater or a front-buttoned blouse, which went all the way up to her neck. That was bowling attire in Wisconsin in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

  And if Vernie and Suzanne were dancing, or even just standing there while she tried to hug him, he’d have had to reach under her sweater or blouse, with a lighted cigarette in his hand. And wouldn’t the blouse/sweater have been shown in evidence because it would likely have also gotten burned? In order to completely miss burning her clothing, he would have had to have her turn with her back toward him, lift up her top, and apply the lighted cigarette.

  Let’s go back to her earlier story of the hugging (or even the dancing). When he put his hands (one of them with the cigarette) inside her clothes, did she think he was feeling her up and that’s why she just stood there? And once she felt the pain, wouldn’t she have jumped back, if only from her reflexes? Dr. Washburn said the burn was round, suggesting the person remained still while the burn was penetrating the skin. However, it didn’t seem to be deep enough for a crater, which suggests to me someone burning him- or herself just enough for it to show, but not enough to inflict too much pain.

  The cigarette burn, which months later became plural, became Suzanne’s only defense for her actions, for her psychotic break. And to this day, people in Oregon, some of David’s old friends, and David’s ex-wife all say that those burns were the cause of the shooting that night. That either Suzanne was pushed to the limit because of the abuse, or that David was protecting her from the abuse. And where did they hear this? Likely from the recounting of the preliminary trial in the two Madison newspapers on April 21 and 22, 1970.