With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  * * *

  In October 2015 I managed to get a copy of the coroner’s report on Danny and the related police files. Danny’s best friend, Callen Harty, had called the police on April 14, 1992, when Danny wouldn’t answer his door for days. Danny had threatened to kill himself a couple of days before, but no one believed him, no doubt because he’d made such threats before and had even landed in the hospital after attempts, a type of behavior he no doubt learned from his mother. Upon entering Danny’s apartment, they found him lying faceup on the bed, with his hands resting on his chest, clothed in white tennis shoes, white socks, washed jeans, and a red-and-white long-sleeved shirt.

  Another of Danny’s friends, Roger Waugh, said he had given him some opium recently, which turned out to be one of the four drugs that killed him. The other three were morphine, codeine, and diphenhydramine (which many people have used as either an antihistamine or a sleep aid). Though Louisa told me Danny never meant to kill himself, the coroner’s report does not support such a conclusion. Danny ingested fifty times the fatal dose for morphine, ten times the fatal dose for codeine, and double a fatal dose for the diphenhydramine. Since Danny was reported to be an experienced drug user, as well as a nurse’s aide, surely he would have had some idea of fatal doses of medications.

  I wanted some connection to Danny, since he was so amorphous in my mind, and I had no sense of him as a grown-up. So I tried to find the two friends listed in the coroner’s report. Roger had died, but Callen Harty was alive and well, doing work as a sexual-abuse counselor, and had written books about emotional healing. So I called him. We had an instant rapport.

  Callen told me Danny had been his best friend since 1982, and they had been on-and-off roommates. Turns out that Roger was the boyfriend who had just broken up with Danny. Callen said Danny had a severe manic-depressive disorder, and when he would meet someone, he’d fall in love immediately and get very clingy, which would doom the relationship, sending Danny into an emotional abyss. Danny was loving and giving, but had led a life filled with pain, all the way back to his childhood.

  He also told me Danny had a love-hate relationship with his mother, Suzanne, and only loved her out of obligation, and that she would often drive him crazy. Callen didn’t know Suzanne well and had evidently only met her at the funeral, but he did know Danny had a “very complex family tree.” One thing Danny and Callen had in common was that they both had been sexually abused as children, but Callen never found out any of the details from Danny. Danny talked a lot about Vernie, about what a good father he was and how much he missed him.

  Callen is a beautiful writer and I want to share what he wrote in 2012 about Danny, because it gives insight into Danny and the family:

  Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the death of my friend, Dan. I’ve been wanting to write about it, but it is very difficult. He was one of the first people I met when I moved to Madison in 1982. That means I only knew him for ten years and four of those years I lived in Denver. But we were very close, like long-lost brothers, like a couple without the romance, even when I was a thousand miles away. When I moved back to Madison in 1991 I moved into the same building as him and our friendship resumed where it left off in 1987.

  Dan more or less introduced me to the gay community of Madison. Through him I met many, many people and settled comfortably into queer life in the big city after coming out in a small town in southwestern Wisconsin. He was the first person I ever knew to be a drag queen and while he was always a little nervous on stage he loved dressing up. He would select odd little numbers (songs and clothes) and have fun with the performances—he never took himself too seriously. In his drag world, at least.

  He was also very troubled in some ways. Early in our friendship Dan told me about the loss of his father, a man he clearly admired and who had been murdered in a small town in Wisconsin, a case that to my knowledge is still unsolved. He had a lot of suffering in his background and he shared that with me. Every time he fell in love, which was often, I was the one he talked to about it. He desperately wanted love and would start talking of marriage and life-long relationships after one or two dates, sometimes even before the first date. I think he often scared people off who could have loved him because he was so desperate for things to work.

  As I read what Callen so eloquently wrote about Danny, I felt empathy. Danny most certainly had an attachment disorder, which caused these overwhelming feelings of neediness in relationships.

  Callen goes on:

  Dan was also the first person I knew to be manic-depressive, something I have encountered in many others since then. He explained what it meant and how it felt in ways that helped me to understand what he was going through. When he was manic he was perhaps the most fun person in the world to be around—very funny, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, hilarious really, and he drank in life in all its fullness. I had some of the best laughing jags of my life with him. On the contrary, when he was depressive he could be very difficult to be around because he dwelled in his depression in all its fullness, too. He could bring others down with him because the gloom was so deep. Dan felt everything fully, whether he was in a happy or depressed state. He took medication for his condition, but didn’t always stay on the regimen the way he should.

  Dan was always honest about his illness. He was always honest about everything. He would confess the most intimate things to people, sometimes too open too quickly. I think ultimately it was because he wanted most of all to be loved and accepted and he didn’t feel that in his life, so he opened himself up at the first indication that someone would care enough to listen. We balanced each other nicely that way, as I am a natural empath, and I could take on his pain sometimes, even when I was depressed myself.

  At least two times while I was in Denver Dan ended up in the hospital after suicide attempts. I felt guilty for not being there for him. When he died at the young age of 32 it was from an overdose. I don’t know if the coroner ruled it a suicide, but I knew that it was. At the time I was in a new and wonderful relationship that is still going strong more than 20 years later. Dan was struggling to salvage one that had degenerated into fights and jealousy. I think he felt that it was his last chance at love and that if it didn’t work out he would never have anyone. He needed to be with someone to feel fulfilled.

  At the time both Dan and I were spending a lot of time with our boyfriends. One day Brian and I were at Brian’s apartment where he was cooking a nice dinner for us when we got a phone call from Dan’s workplace asking if we had seen him, as he hadn’t been into work for a couple days. My heart sank. The one thing that had been going right at that time was his job, which he really liked. I realized we hadn’t heard from him in a couple days either. I hung up and tried calling and got an answering machine. Something told me that he hadn’t collected his messages. There was something about the machine that if there were a lot of messages you could tell by how long it took before it beeped to allow a new recording. I knew. At that moment I knew. I told Brian we had to go downtown to my apartment building right away.

  When we got there we raced up to the fourth floor to Dan’s apartment. There was something on the door handle that had clearly been there for a while, so we knew he hadn’t been in or out. We made a phone call and within a short time the apartment manager and police were there to open the door and check on him, but of course they found him unresponsive. It had been a couple days. One of the policemen asked if I wanted to see him and I said no, then broke down sobbing in Brian’s arms. It was one of the hardest moments of my life.

  Brian and I went to my apartment and started to call some friends. Soon an ambulance pulled into the parking lot. We stood at the window watching. When the front door opened and an EMT started to come out of the building in front of a stretcher a bird suddenly flew right up at my apartment window directly in front of us. Brian turned and fell to the couch and I turned to him. By the time we got back to the window the EMTs were closing the door of the ambulance. It was an incredi
bly powerful and symbolic moment that neither of us will ever forget.

  I have often heard people say that suicide is selfish. I think I disagree with that. It may be thoughtless, but Dan was not a selfish person. He was one of the most generous people I have ever known. He and I were roommates a couple times and always shared what little we had—and we always had little at that time—with those who had less. Our apartment was known as the Hotel for Wayward Homosexuals because we let so many people live with us at various times—friends who lost apartments, runaways, friends who were kicked out by their partners, strangers we met at the bar, and on and on. We should have had a revolving door on the apartment.

  The thing is when a person is suicidal, when they are in that much pain and despair, they are not thinking about the effects of their actions on others. I have been there myself and yes, in a way suicide can seem selfish because a person gets so wrapped up in his or her own pain. But the thing is the feelings of sadness and despair are so strong that you cannot see through the haze to even think about anyone else. It is not because you don’t care about others; it’s that you forget about others because the pain is so strong that is all you can focus on or feel.

  So I don’t blame Dan for leaving. He did what he had to do for himself in that moment. I am confident that if he had known that people would be grieving him twenty years later he would not have left. He would have understood that in fact he was loved and accepted, and that really was all he ever wanted.

  Callen mentioned Suzanne’s reaction to Danny’s death almost offhandedly. It took the police a few hours to locate Suzanne and give her the bad news. Soon after, she called Callen. One of her first reactions to him was “This had to have been a murder. We have to make sure the police investigate.” Though she evidently contacted law enforcement, they were quite convinced it was a suicide and did no further investigation.

  I wondered if this was a common response to a suicide, to believe it had been a murder. But as I was to learn, there were other mysterious deaths around Suzanne. Was the reason she suspected murder that she was projecting from her own experiences?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Munchausen or Serial Killer?

  Many have heard of “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” in which a parent, usually a mother, instigates illness in her child in order to gain attention. I always wondered why the name of this disorder had to be so complicated, until I learned about “Munchausen syndrome,” where a person acts as if she were sick in order to be the center of attention. The more modern name is malingering. Munchausen is primarily a female disorder involving someone with an immature personality, fragile ego, narcissistic inclinations, low self-esteem, and overwhelming desire to have attention focused on her.

  Many of these characteristics were listed in the letters about Suzanne from the psychiatrists. And then think of Suzanne, who became an invalid with no medical reason. After her fifth husband died, she moved to Alaska to be with Louisa, who had a full life and many responsibilities. It is not unreasonable to think that Suzanne, who had neither job nor husband, would be on the periphery of action in Louisa’s busy Alaskan household. After some months Suzanne started to use a cane and had trouble walking, all of which required Louisa to spend an increasing amount of time on her mother.

  When they moved to Tennessee, Suzanne was a complete invalid (though I saw her stand up and walk, when she thought I wasn’t looking) and the center of the universe. When Suzanne was hungry, everyone prepared food. If she had to pee, all other actions ceased. And remember the letter of one of the psychiatrists, who said she used suicide threats to control the family. As he wrote, She has tended to dominate members of her family . . . tying together the family by means of crises.

  * * *

  But let’s get back to the Munchausen syndrome by proxy, because two of Suzanne’s three children were so ill in their childhoods that they were in the hospital often and reportedly on the verge of death more than once. I doubt if such numbers are statistically possible. This syndrome most affects mothers, and they will even poison their own children to get the attention they desperately crave.

  Consider Suzanne and her three children: a total of four people. Three of the four—two children and one mother—had severe illnesses that caused other people to reorganize their lives. David and Danny had serious heart problems and were often hospitalized and barely clinging to life. It seems highly improbable to me that a mother and two of her three of her children would all be so ill.

  Literature suggests that Munchausen women use means that have little chance of forensic discovery, such as holding their hands over the mouth and nose, to restrict breathing, or otherwise smothering the victims. Could that have been what happened to the very wealthy father-in-law number three, with whom Suzanne was alone in his hospital room the night he died? An important element here is the timing. The father-in-law “conveniently” died, so she was able to gain her share of the inheritance and then quickly divorce husband number three to be with my uncle. And how strange that a son (1992) and son-in-law (Jocelyn’s second husband) both died in the same year, and both deaths freed Suzanne either financially or emotionally, which I’ll explain later.

  During my research I came across several other mysterious deaths, most of which had some financial or other payoff for Suzanne. Could she have been involved? Or was this my imagination running amok? Could she be a serial killer? Aren’t those usually guys who find naïve young women or men to rape and kill? Not if she’s among the number of female serial killers, who tend to only murder for some benefit (usually money), who stick to family members and often favor less violent (and subtler) methods, such as poison. Because she will sometimes wait for years for the need to destroy someone else, people don’t often see the pattern of killing. According to the world-renowned expert on female serial killers, Penn State professor Marissa Harrison, most of the women she’s studied are middle- to upper-middle class, are serial monogamists, are white and Christian, are above average in attractiveness, two-thirds are related to their victims, with one-third murdering their husbands and almost half murdering their own children.

  Harrison has argued that evolutionary psychologists theorize that men are motivated to leave their sperm in as many women as possible, and are therefore more motivated toward sexual characteristics when choosing a mate; while women look for someone with resources, which was necessary in ancient up to not-so-distant times, so she would have someone to protect her and her young children. In a similar vein male serial killers are often motivated by sex, and women serial killers by financial gain.

  * * *

  I stumbled on this line of thinking from Harrison just a few days after discovering the double indemnity payments to Suzanne, and more specifically when I got a long-awaited death certificate in the mail. It was for Suzanne’s second husband, John Briggs, who was also the father of David.

  David had told me briefly that his father had died and left him an inheritance he’d lived on for years, but he was vague about when his father died. After several pointed questions he finally told me it was after Vernie passed, maybe a couple of years. Even at that time I wondered how could someone not know when his own parent had died? But that wasn’t much of a concern back then, because it was before I’d seen a cluster of deaths around Suzanne in the 1970s and then the 1990s. Some months later, when I’d interviewed David’s high school friends, they wondered, quite emotionally, where in the world he had gotten money to buy such an expensive house in Madison in 1974. So I looked for documents and discovered that his father had died on July 14, 1974, and I figured David must have gotten some life insurance (considering his father was an executive in a life insurance company) that would have paid up within a few months, so he could buy that house. Getting money through insurance can take just a few months, while probate usually takes much, much longer, often years. David signed a contract for the house on September 30, 1974, just two and a half months after his father’s death. Presuming most people spend a month o
r two looking for a house, that would mean he started his home hunt very shortly after the funeral. The first payment for the house was not due until November 1, as he must have been told when the insurance policy would pay out.

  Other questions I asked David about his father were always answered very vaguely. I got the impression he might have died from some heart problems, but it was all very fuzzy, and only after repeated questions did I get even the thinnest of answers. David told me his father had no other children, though I discovered later he had remarried and was only forty-four when he died. It is possible David’s father might have had another child and ultimate heir if his life had not been cut off so prematurely.

  I also found that after John had remarried, he remained in New York City, but he died where he had grown up, in Maryville, a small city in East Tennessee, in an area that was antislavery in the nineteenth century and was pro-Union during the Civil War. I wondered if John had gotten into an accident or something, recalling David being very vague when I asked questions about his father’s death. Wanting to know more, I sent away for the death certificate of David’s father, John M. Briggs. Several weeks later the response came.

  The envelope said Tennessee Department of Health and I ripped it open. It did not say which day John Briggs died, and the cause of death was redacted, because I was not next of kin. But it did say the body was found by David Briggs on July 15, 1974. So David, who had confessed to my aunt that he had murdered Vern, and whose mother had proven that “crime pays,” found his dead father and soon after got a windfall inheritance.