As for any previous abuses by Vernie or reporting of abuse, I have found no other examples, from searching through court and police documents, newspaper accounts, interviews of friends and family and Oregon residents, or the pointed discussions I had with Suzanne and her two living children, who reported no previous abuse.
Vernie’s past had a quiet and friction-free marriage. Suzanne’s past was filled with multiple divorces, temper tantrums, dish smashing, broken-bottle attacks, crying jags, and suicide attempts. And when I’ve listened to people tell me that Vernie was shot because he had abused Suzanne, I cringe inside, and I hurt, knowing the injustice of opinion based on unsubstantiated information. That’s one of the problems when there is a murder, as the victim isn’t around to defend himself. I am comforted by the fact that forensic science can dispel some of the untruths. And I am grateful to the Wisconsin judicial and police systems for keeping these records for so long and for allowing me access.
* * *
As to the matter of the marriage license, I had searched for more than two years, sending letters to vital records offices of a number of states, searching myself through Dane County marriage records, checking online with other states, and accessing four different genealogical sites, most of which offer services to hunt down marriage licenses. I even checked via phone with Minnesota and vital records in some counties in Iowa (close to Boscobel, where Suzanne’s parents lived), and I have a certificate from Illinois that they did not get married there. In my research, I did find marriage licenses for Vernie and Jenylle, for Suzanne’s other four marriages, and dissolution registration for Vernie and Jenylle’s divorce, as well as the three divorces Suzanne got. Nothing anywhere on a marriage license for Vernie and Suzanne. I came to believe what Franklin said: They just told people they were married.
Here’s what I think happened. Suzanne moved her kids to the Oregon, Wisconsin, house around January 1964. Soon after, Danny found Vernie and Suzanne naked in bed, but they told him it was all right, because they were already married. However, Vernie was not even divorced yet. That legal milestone didn’t go through until June 10, 1964, and under Wisconsin law back then, you had to wait one year before remarrying. So Vernie would not have been free for another wedding until June 1965. Suzanne, likewise, had gotten her divorce from Irving Gast in November 1963, so she wasn’t free to marry yet, either.
After the naked-in-bed incident, we can assume Vernie moved into the house, because the kids all thought they were married. I spent two years trying to figure out if they actually did get married and was having no success.
This brings us to probate. It took me months to make sense of the probate documents, partly because some of the pages were fuzzy, but mostly because, like the sheriff’s report, they weren’t designed for easy reading. It was just endless claims, receipts, reports, letters from the bank in charge of probate, appraisals, stipulations, and so on for ninety-three brain-numbing pages. I did see that Suzanne kept requesting money, over and over again, during the course of several years. Just four months after the murder, in a show of extreme remorse, I imagine, she put in a claim on the estate of more than $41,496. She claimed she’d loaned Vernie thousands of dollars since 1964 and that she, herself, had spent $30,000 on the mortgage and repairs of their joint house in Oregon. The house wasn’t even worth that much. She’d purchased it for $13,000 in March 1964 and sold it in 1973 for $26,000. But every time she put in a claim for some of Vernie’s assets, she’d have to list her relationship, and she always put “widow.” What if she had instead written down “confessed murderer”? In the end she got the life insurance (Shannon sued the company and lost) plus $23,279, which included Vern’s half of the house. However, the increase in value of the property all went to Suzanne. So that was another $13,000. This means her take was $52,279 ($315,979 in 2018 dollars), plus other assets, with more detail in the following chapter, where you’ll see I discovered her windfall was much more.
A prosecutor friend of mine suggested contacting the law firms of Suzanne’s attorneys, Kenneth Orchard and Jack van Metre (both of whom died decades ago), as there might be some interesting materials lying around in a storage room or someone’s garage, and so Madison paralegal Adam Premo (who had been recommended to me by attorney David Walsh, one of Danny Stordock’s Guardians ad Litem) and I did some investigating. He was told that Van Metre’s files had been destroyed many years ago, and after weeks with both of us searching for Orchard’s children, his daughter finally told us she had shredded his files five years ago. She commented, “I remember my dad having to leave the house during the middle of the night because one of the clients had shot her husband in the head.... It sounded like such a gruesome case at that time that these few details stuck in my head.”
Another piece of information that has gone missing is any background on Suzanne Stordock. As I mentioned, I’ve accessed four genealogical services, plus one newspaper archive. In the old newspapers I can find Suzanne Stordock (almost exclusively related to the murder), and she also had a thesis published. But anywhere else that I have looked, even one of the services that specializes in arrest records, she has evaporated as an entity (except for one esoteric search I did in the Minnesota court records. Seems Suzanne Brandon married Ronald Aaronson August 26, 1983 and must have forgotten she hadn’t legally changed her name. So on September 25 of that same year, she petitioned the court to change her name from Suzanne Stordock to Suzanne Brandon). We know Suzanne Stordock was arrested for first-degree murder in March 1970, but neither that name nor that arrest is anywhere to be found, other than old newspapers. I can find information on Elmira Brandon, Suzi Chappington, Suzi Briggs, Suzanne Gast, and Suzanne Brandon, but there is nothing on Suzanne Stordock. It’s like that identity never existed. Or as if someone had records destroyed. My research associate, Gregory Smith, who knows Wisconsin state records better than the freckles on his own hands, found too many records related to Suzanne and this case missing. “The Sheriff probably had them destroyed,” he told me several times.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Careers and Money
Consider an ambitious woman back in 1960s Wisconsin before affirmative action, before women’s rights had taken hold. What if she was smart, driven, and prevented from attaining the kinds of positions she felt such a genius should attain?
Even after going to school for so many years and getting her bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate, and law degrees at two prestigious institutions (University of Wisconsin and University of Minnesota), she didn’t have full-time employment. Anyone with that background could have certainly gotten some academic position somewhere, and probably a decent faculty job in Minneapolis–St. Paul, which boasts ninety-three institutions of higher learning in the greater metropolitan area.
So what did she end up with? A position as adjunct professor teaching sociology and women’s studies at the tiny College of St. Catherine (now University of St. Catherine), which you’ve likely never heard of. I have, because it was not far from my house in St. Paul during the years I taught at Metropolitan State University. It occurred to me that I easily could have walked close to her at a Barnes & Noble or some restaurant and not even realized who she was.
As someone who’s spent most of my academic career hiring lots of adjuncts—and then in recent years teaching as an adjunct—I can confidently say those part-time positions are the bottom of the heap. Anybody who is smart and enterprising, who can do research and get along with others reasonably well (and that last one doesn’t even matter many times), can get some academic job, certainly back in the late 1980s and early ’90s. There had to be something wrong in the way she presented herself or her record, or she could have gotten something, somewhere.
Maybe she never got a full-time position because of her lack of any research beyond her thesis, which was, by the way, a replication of her stepdaughter’s work. Perhaps she was not able to do any research that was more than mimicking. Such a track record is okay for an adjunct, but not a full-time
professor. Or maybe she never needed to work again, after all the money she got from her marriages. And perhaps, if you believe her brother, she never really wanted to work. She did make some effort to set up a law practice, but it appeared to have been run out of her and Ronald’s condo, with the same phone number as her home, so I doubt she had many clients. Her specialties fit her background, though, and they were family law (five marriages, three divorces, so a lot of experiences), wills (she came to benefit from Vernie’s and Ronald’s), and probate (I got all ninety-three pages of Vernie’s probate documents, which detailed how she got everything, always listing herself as “widow”).
Before her degrees, she was someone whom the world did not seem to appreciate for her gifts. Her various jobs were all secretarial, certainly not earning enough to live in the style to which she wanted to be accustomed. She started with nothing, coming from a farming family in southwestern Wisconsin. Her wealth seems to have come from the various marriage endings. I have no data on the first divorce, but some information from the second union on.
Her attorney had told her not to divorce Briggs yet, because he’d just finished his degree in 1954 and had been hired as a brokerage supervisor for New York Life Insurance. Wait until he’s got some assets, the lawyer said. So she went with him to New York City and waited until 1958 to divorce him. I am assuming she did quite well in the divorce; otherwise why would she bring up the whole issue of his assets some sixty years later? I am estimating $20,000 as her take. Plus I found out, almost by accident, that when he died—mysteriously—in 1974, she was left with “a lot of money” from some life insurance policies. My estimate is $30,000 (or $154,000 in 2018 dollars). There had to be a wad of money, because Suzanne’s brother said she was a multimillionaire from her divorces, even before she met Vernie. My estimate of her take from her first two marriages equal $329,314 in 2018.
By the third divorce I started to get actual numbers. Between Irving Gast’s inheritance that she got (split with his first wife, where each got $15,000) and the house, which she sold for $16,500 in 1964, her proceeds were $31,500, which is $260,098 in 2018 dollars.
Moving on to her fourth presumed marriage, with my uncle, after she (or David) murdered him, she got $13,000 in life insurance, plus $23,279.59 from the estate (including his half of the house and the cabin/acreage in northern Wisconsin), then also the increase in value of the house (she sold it in 1974 for $26,000, double what she’d paid in 1964), plus the increase in value of the Boscobel properties, totaling $6,000 or $37,370 contemporaneously. So her total from that marriage was $68,279.
Then, if you consider in 1973, after she got out of the hospital and off parole, she took the proceeds from the Oregon house and bought a house in Madison for almost exactly the same price, we might think of this as continued use of Vernie’s estate money. When she sold that house in 1978, she got a $32,100 profit, or $117,078.84 in today’s dollars.
But wait! After poring over fuzzy probate documents for the seventh time, I noticed some words tucked away in the life insurance information and blurry enough to have been passed over by me in the previous readings: double indemnity. She got $26,000, not $13,000. How did she ever convince Minnesota Life Insurance Company that it was an accident when she shot Vernie, hitting him square in the temple? After I did some digging, I found out insurance companies will sometimes pay double indemnity for murder, but only if the beneficiary was not the murderer or a conspirer. And she was, after all, not guilty by reason of insanity. So I had to add another $79,956.03 contemporaneously to her gain. And this means revising my previous estimate of her gain from the marriage to my uncle.
That means her total take for her fourth marriage was $100,379, or $606,700 in 2018 dollars.
Right now I imagine many readers might be confused by all of the husbands and the timing of the various marriages and divorces. In order to help them gain clarity, here’s another marriage spreadsheet, this time with the financial information (see table on p. 276).
(Elmira) Suzanne Brandon Chappington Briggs Gast Stordock Aaronson’s Marriages with Financial Gains
Suzanne profited from the two marriages that were between June 27, 1959, to November 5, 1963 (four years and four months), and then from late 1965 (some question about the marriage itself) to March 1, 1970 (four years and perhaps six months), or eight years and ten months with the sum of $131,879, which in 2018 is $866,798, or a yearly “salary” of $96,856. Not bad for a secretary from Boscobel, Wisconsin, with less than one year of college. (See table below.)
We can surmise from her real estate dealings that she was a shrewd businesswoman. Was the discarding of husbands a strategy to build her wealth? If money and prestige were her goals, then accumulating and perhaps even confiscating husbands’ assets were far more successful than any kind of job she would have been qualified for with her diploma from Boscobel High School. You can see from the numbers here that crime does, indeed, pay. With the cash empire that she amassed from Vernie, she was able to get those higher-education degrees, which would surely give her the regard from others she had been denied for way too long. She presumably took that knowledge and experience into her fledgling law practice, that perhaps was more for show than actual career-building, but she did present herself as being an expert in probate and wills. Indeed.
Divorce granted to When (ex-)husband died and where Proceeds, if known, in 2018 dollars
Suzanne Chappington 1995, Fairbanks N/A
Suzanne Briggs 1974, Maryville TN, mysteriously $329,314
Suzanne Gast 1977, San Francisco, suicide, overdose $260,098
N/A 1970, Oregon, WI $606,700
N/A 2010, Minneapolis, MN Estimated $600,000; bulk of his estate left for Suzanne to live on, then reverting to his 2 children
Summary of Marital Financial Gains, 1959–70
She made the most off Vernie, because she didn’t have to share it with the castaway spouse. You might ask why she didn’t divorce or eliminate her fifth husband. Maybe because her sexual allure had waned. She was, after all, fifty-five when she married Ronald. And I imagine hooking up with a husband killer would be a serious deterrent for many potential mates. Perhaps she told her boyfriends and potential husbands the story she told Otis Wahlburger, the one about how Vernie beat her all the time, and then that night he ran down to the basement to kill himself, with her running down after him and struggling with the gun, which went off and killed Vern. It made her look so much more sympathetic than her taking a rifle, aiming at his temple from a few feet away, and then shooting. And who’s going to bother to look through court transcripts or go to the library and look up old copies of the Madison Capital Times on microfiche? When she finally did remarry, it was to Ronald. And Ronald being a doctor meant she had someone with a serious income, and research shows that as narcissists and psychopaths age, the urge to murder decreases. She must have told me about seven or eight times that she married Ronald for his money, but she was still looking for it. Then she’d look at me with what was to her a winning smile and wait for me to laugh. Why would that be funny, unless it was somehow in the realm of possibilities? I’ve known many, many women in my lifetime and I can’t recall anyone else joking like that about a dead husband.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Danny, the Other Heir
I remember Danny as a thin, sensitive, socially awkward kid who was Suzanne’s third child, a product of her third marriage, to Irving Gast, but who was later adopted by my uncle. Various reports of family members talked about how neglected he was, the “kick-around child,” how he was really raised by the “kindly Mrs. Freeman” after the murder. He’d never known his two half brothers from his birth father, because they hadn’t seen him since he was a one-year-old.
I learned more about Danny during a second discussion with Jocelyn’s son, Marvyn, who told me Danny had lived with them for a while in West Madison, when Danny was a teenager. This fits with what the Gast brothers had told me. When Suzanne moved to Madison to her new home, probably without Da
nny in tow, Danny would have been fourteen and Marvyn three years old. Likely, Danny stayed with Jocelyn until he graduated from high school. It was sometime not long after high school that Danny tried to go and live with his half brother Mike, who resided in St. Louis.
Danny evidently was in the army for a short while and lived in California briefly, most likely when David was working in Silicon Valley, but he spent most of his life around Madison, Wisconsin, and worked as a nursing assistant until he died of apparent suicide in 1992. Louisa’s story was that Danny didn’t really mean to kill himself; his boyfriend had just broken off the relationship, and Danny was despondent. He tried to do a fake suicide to scare the boyfriend, but he mistakenly took too many drugs and actually died. This pretend self-destruction attempt gone wrong has believability, because Suzanne’s psychiatrist said she used the threat of suicide to control family members. And don’t we all learn good and bad behaviors from our parents?
I had many questions. Why was Danny so poor when he’d been awarded half of Vernie’s insurance money and state retirement fund? Everyone else in that family bought houses when they got inheritances, so why wouldn’t he have done the same? There was no record of any real estate purchases in Wisconsin by Daniel Stordock. And why was he showing up at his half brother’s home, nearly destitute, at age twenty? Danny was supposed to get the money at age eighteen. It is possible he blew it all in two years, but I have found no evidence anywhere that he actually received even some of his inheritance. According to the guardian ad litem (GAL) appointed on Danny’s behalf during the probate process, there should have been court filings every year on behalf of Danny’s interest in the estate and on the disposition of the assets. Even after repeated searches in the court records by one of the competent clerks, nothing was found.
With One Shot Page 26