I needed more information and called John’s now seventy-nine-year-old brother, Joseph, who I discovered was away on a swimming marathon off the coast of Greece. His wife told me no one knew exactly why John had died, and her husband did not like to talk about it. I tried calling officials in Blount County to get a coroner’s report, or police report, which are public record, but it turns out this tiny, rural Tennessee county doesn’t pay much attention to its records. Each coroner takes the records with him, and the police reports have also been lost into the ether.
David surely would have told me something more about his father’s death, would have answered the questions churning in my head. What was John doing in Maryville? How did he die? Was there a police investigation? But I couldn’t ask David, because he was dead. And forget about Suzanne. Even if I hadn’t been literally scared to see her again, she would never give me any satisfactory information. Most times I asked a substantive question, she had a convenient memory lapse.
What about David’s former wife? During one of my conversations with her, I asked her if David had ever talked about his father’s death. Though I suspected he hadn’t gone into much detail with her, I was shocked when she told me, “He never talked about his father at all.” How could you be married to someone for eight years and never talk about a parent? David was young when his parents got divorced, but he’d kept in contact with his father and grandparents, and he even lived with his father’s brother for a while.
I had one other option: to ask Suzanne’s brother, who by now seemed like an old-time buddy, and someone I felt totally comfortable with. He seemed like a real good guy.
“Do you know anything about the death of David’s father?” I asked, hoping for some random fact that might help me figure out the riddle.
“No, I don’t really,” he said in his usual silken and deep voice, and my heart dropped in disappointment. “But I do know my sister got a huge amount of money after he died.” I was speechless. Here was another wallop I did not see coming. I was sitting at my desk in my New York apartment, staring out my office window at a large air shaft and brown and reddish bricks with flickers of sunlight glinting off them in the late-day light.
“But they had been divorced for quite a while,” I said, so much in a stupor that I wondered if he’d think I was on drugs.
“I know, and she still got a ton of money from some life insurance policies. There was a point, back in the seventies, when she was a multimillionaire, just from all the money she got from her husbands. I don’t think she worked a day in her life, but she knew how to invest her money. She’s a smart cookie. She bought some properties in Boscobel and kept my dad busy with repairs the last years of his life. I gotta hand it to her on that.”
The idea that Suzanne had also profited from the death of her second husband caught me off guard. I just sat in my office chair for twenty minutes, trying to process this, and averting my eyes from the pile of papers needing care. I knew I had to check this insurance payment out. Her second husband, John Briggs, had been living in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and working as a manager for New York Life Insurance Company at the time. He’d climbed his way up the ladder and was publishing academic articles in journals, as well as traveling around the country, giving talks on how people are motivated regarding insurance. In fact, two articles came out in the 1990s that referenced his work in the ’70s. The publications and lectures stopped abruptly when he died in July 1974. It made me sad to see this man of great potential, who had been remarried for twelve years, cut down at age forty-four. I could see from studying his history that his best days were still ahead. Amazingly, that was the exact age at which my uncle was murdered.
The next morning I went down to New York Surrogates Court and looked up probate cases, hoping I’d find information about the disposition of his estate. Nothing was there under his name. The clerk told me that back then, people were not bound by law to go through probate. So I called up Blount County, where he’d grown up and died so suddenly. Maybe that’s where the probate was. But I found another blind alley and was told again there was no legal requirement in Tennessee for probate. Just for luck, I checked in Wisconsin, where he had lived for some years. Nothing there, either.
Would I ever find the details of her inheritance from the ex-husband who died so suspiciously? Months later I thought perhaps what I needed was some professional help, so I hired a private investigator to see if he could find anything regarding John Briggs and his will or probate. He had no luck, either.
Those weeks until the brother, Joseph, got back from his swimming event in Greece seemed endless as I waited to be able to call him and try to find out something, anything, about John’s death. He came to the phone and I remembered the warmth in his voice, and it made sense to me that he had been a minister for years, because you could just feel how loving he must have been with members of his congregation. I told him I had collected all the publications and newspaper articles about his brother. Would he want me to send those? Yes, of course. And I told him how sorry I was for his loss, as I had lost one brother when I was just thirteen and another when I was older. Same as he had lost two brothers, one in World War II. I told him how impressed I was with his brother’s career, and I hope I communicated that adequately, because in the moment I was feeling pain for what was perhaps an unnecessary death. Could he tell me about it?
“John was visiting Maryville, staying in his favorite hotel, the Holiday Inn on Alcoa Highway, but no one knew he was there.”
What? Why would he have come all the way down from New York City to Maryville, Tennessee, where his parents and brother lived, and not tell anyone?
“David found him, but he’d been dead for a while. There wasn’t any sign of foul play with him being attacked or committing suicide. And I’ll tell you, I’ve read that autopsy many times and it is confusing and basically inconclusive. Maybe his heart just stopped. That’s what we all thought.”
I asked him whether Suzanne had gotten some money.
“Yes, that’s correct,” he said matter-of-factly, and I wondered if he’d even considered before that such information might be a clue to the death. Even though they were divorced, he confirmed what I had assumed: Suzanne was the beneficiary on at least one life insurance policy, for a great deal of money.
Not only was the death suspicious, but now there were two people who benefited greatly from the death, both David and his mother, the duo I think responsible for my uncle’s murder four years earlier. And what was David doing there? He was, by all accounts, knocking around the country at that time, though it seems he had his base in Madison for another eighteen months. Was Suzanne in Mayberry, I mean Maryville, too? Had she lured John down for some tryst? Why otherwise would he go incognito? And if you want to get rid of someone, was there a way to do it secretly?
I asked a pathologist friend if you could kill someone without being detected. “Oh, heck yes,” he said, “by using sodium cyanide, arsenic, or methanol, which is the base ingredient in antifreeze. Fifteen percent of poisonings go undetected. Methanol itself has a taste indistinguishable from alcohol, so it would be easy to put it in someone’s drink, and unless there is a very complicated third-level toxicological screening, no one would be the wiser. Methanol poisoning brings drowsiness, confusion, lack of coordination and eventually cardio and pulmonary collapse and death, all within one to seventy-two hours from ingestion. Methanol poisoning has symptoms that are similar to heart attacks.”
That made me think that if you wanted to eliminate someone, perhaps using poison or some similarly subtle method, better not pick New York City, with its top-notch detectives and scientific equipment, or certainly not Madison, where Suzanne still lived, because a death of another husband might not be treated with such pity for her, the victim. How much smarter to do it all in rural Tennessee, in a county with the barest of law enforcement and where people would not likely assume the worst.
* * *
All of this brings me to the
next case. About a month after the revelations about the death of David’s father, I got the death certificate of Anthony Freeman, Jocelyn’s first husband. Through newspaper articles and phone calls with his son, I had learned Anthony died in a car crash, but when I saw the cause of death on the certificate, it wasn’t until the fourth cause that I found “fractured spleen, fractured left clavicle and ribs,” which were the sorts of things you’d expect from an automobile accident. The first two causes were cardiopulmonary collapse (heart and lung failure) and lactic acidosis, which can also be caused by ingestion of methanol. Either he had some spontaneous heart attack, which caused the crash (there were no other vehicles involved), or perhaps he was given some methanol, which caused drowsiness and confusion, and he lost control of his car. Was Suzanne and/or David visiting them at the time? I will never know.
And then I started to wonder if there were other mysterious deaths of people who were conveniently disposed of? So I looked at all the people around Suzanne who died before or after my uncle. Besides the homicide of my uncle, most of the other deaths were either suicides or heart failure. I wondered if that was normal.
When I explained all of this to my physician brother-in-law and mentioned about her third husband’s suicide, he said, “How do you know it was suicide? Unless there was a note, or the police and coroner did a deep investigation, chances are it was not suicide.” As a result of that conversation, I contacted the San Francisco police and coroner, but there hadn’t been an autopsy and the police had not investigated.
And then it occurred to me that David had lived out in Silicon Valley, perhaps around that time. But, try as I did with police and coroner, I could find nothing else about that death. Even her third husband’s grown son told me he learned about the death years later, when he Googled his father.
Another interesting coincidence I discovered was that both of Jocelyn’s husbands died of heart failure, and both at times that Suzanne might have needed some support from Jocelyn. Certainly in the years after Vernie’s murder, Jocelyn took over the raising of Danny until he was eighteen in 1978. William Freeman died in March 1974, just after Suzanne had moved to Madison and when she was finishing up her undergraduate degree and working on her thesis. We already know Suzanne was jealous and lost control when things didn’t go her way. Did she want more from Jocelyn than she could give and thought she’d eliminate one of Jocelyn’s distractions? It’s a theory I can’t prove.
Then Jocelyn’s second husband, Roger Afterton, died of heart failure just a few months after Danny died, a time when Suzanne was reportedly more vulnerable than usual. And why did Jocelyn forbid there being an autopsy for either death of her beloved husbands? Isn’t that just a little strange, unless some influential person whose love she was desperate for encouraged her to push science aside? (see table on the following two pages).
All the Deaths Surrounding Aunt Suzanne
Cause of death Notes
Heart failure She inherited a lot of money; she was alone with him the night he died.
Homicide Forensic files do not agree with court verdict.
Heart failure She babysat son Danny the night of Vernie’s murder.
?
Car accident, but main causes cardio- pulmonary collapse (heart/lung failure) and lactic acidosis, consistent with methanol poisoning Jocelyn’s 1st husband. She forbade an autopsy.
Mysterious; heart failure? Suzanne got lots of money on life insurance.
Suicide, overdose
Suicide, overdose Was supposed to receive half of Vernie’s estate.
Heart failure Jocelyn’s 2nd husband. She forbade an autopsy.
Lung cancer
Heart failure Three days after I pressed him for info on the murder.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Was She an Abused Wife?
I was ready for the encounter. At 8:30 P.M. on a Monday in September 2015, the only place to get together in Oregon, Wisconsin, was McDonald’s, which was situated on a large lot in an elongated strip mall with a liquor store, H&R Block, and U.S. Cellular. Right across the road was Holy Mother of Consolation Catholic Church Cemetery, which seemed oddly appropriate, as I was to meet a couple who had some connection to the location where my uncle was murdered.
As I pulled my rental Ford into McDonald’s blacktop driveway, I looked at the well-kept grave sites, with tall green trees and carefully tended flower beds, and hoped I could get some “consolation” on this additional trip to Oregon. Sitting in the back of the restaurant, in an orange-and-brown-plastic booth, were Alice and Michael Seeliger, who had lived in the Mansion from 1977 through 2001. Though I had talked to Alice a couple of times on the phone, this was our first physical meeting. Maybe because they’d moved into that big and expensive house back in 1977, I assumed they were older than I am, but as I looked across the table and listened to them, I realized we were all about the same age. When they got the house, they were a young couple with small children. As with everyone else who had owned the home, it was more than they bargained for in work and cost.
“I can’t think of a weekend where we did not work on that house,” said Michael, straightening out the trucker’s hat he wore over his brown hair. He was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a light brown jacket. “There was the roof in total disrepair and all of the woodwork needed refinishing. And then windows, gutter, carpet, updating the kitchen, you name it. When we got someone to paint the gable on the south side, I had to give them specific instructions on how to take the wood apart, because it was heated and formed in a circle, and if you just painted it, the wood would swell and you might get mold.”
Alice smiled and I saw the light in her eyes as her husband talked. She had on blue slacks and white blouse and had short, attractive gray hair in a style that was between a pixie cut and a bob. She spoke next. “After twenty-four years we finally didn’t have the energy to keep doing it, and our kids were grown. They weren’t happy when we sold it, but it was just too much.” Then she got serious and looked at me.
“Everyone in Oregon believes that David killed your uncle,” she said, “that he was defending his mother against some serious abuse. And I guess to repay David for that protection, Suzanne confessed. But because Vernie was a cop, the police didn’t want his abuse to become public, so they let her take the rap.”
* * *
The problem with that story is there is no history of any domestic violence: no calls, no reports. Well, you say, she was afraid to call the police because Vernie was one of them. But even all the people who were interviewed said they never saw any examples or symptoms of abuse. I even checked recently with Detective Tim Blanke, at the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, who said he also found no indication to believe there was any abuse by Vernie. When they were searching for the police reports on the murder, they made a thorough sweep for anything with the name Stordock and nothing else came up. And we know Suzanne’s mother had reported to the police on her daughter’s violent temper and threats to kill Vernie. Even Suzanne’s own children could not come up with examples of Vernie’s alleged abuse.
My uncle was no saint. He drank too much after living with Suzanne for a while, and he could get into fierce arguments with her. But I never, ever saw him behave in a way that would suggest physical abuse. This fits in line with my mother’s side of the family. Although alcohol was a constant companion, Stordock family drunks tended to be the happy docile kind, with perhaps a few words yelled just now and then. My mother, the alcoholic, was never mean or violent. My father brought violence into our family and he didn’t even drink, but he was from a different family system.
After poring through legal documents and interviewing more than sixty people, I found no evidence of Vernie’s abuse. I tried to keep my mind open, because what if Vernie had actually hurt her? But I couldn’t get Suzanne or anyone else to give me even one instance of his abuse.
He was a man she had trouble controlling, as he was ready to leave her for his first wife. Yet ultimately she was able, at last,
to control him by ending his existence. Still, I wanted more details from her, so I asked how she was able to put up with his purported cruelty. Her reply, “Well, you might say I did not.”
Yeah, Suzanne, and let’s now talk about your psychotic break.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Forensic Experts
During the summer of 2015 I hired two forensic experts. The first one, Dr. Jason Kolowski of Forensic Insight Consulting LLC, who spent much time with me and always had an air of über-proficiency in his voice, helped me to re-create the crime scene in 3-D, using the forensic data. Kolowski referred me to former law professor Christine Funk, who agreed to go over all the court transcripts and police reports to give me her reactions and opinions. I wanted to know whether I was delusional in the questions I was asking and whether the conclusions I was coming to were sound.
After reviewing whatever court and police documents I had at the time, Professor Funk called me. “I can’t believe no law faculty member has written up this case yet. It’s got an unbelievable amount of legal gymnastics.”
I could tell from listening to her that she didn’t take any poppycock from anyone, because she sounded supremely confident and competent. She asked if I could find more documents, because she was not able to make some evaluations with what I had given her. I promised to visit Madison again. Then she sent me a report that analyzed the legal arguments in the case, where she commented upon how quickly the prosecutors seemed to accept the insanity plea, and how the prosecution had changed the charge from first-degree murder to first-degree manslaughter for no apparent reason.
Rather than asking Professor Funk to interpret the rest of her report, I decided to wait to see if I could get more information, because she told me then she’d be able to give me a more complete assessment. She had told me to call up the District Attorney’s office, because the case was open record and they would surely have what the Clerk of Courts was missing. Unfortunately, the Dane County DA’s office only keeps records since 1979, so I struck out there. Later on, Gregory Smith told me all the old DA files were sent to the State Historical Society and he spent many days searching diligently, even having the librarians pull files from archives in another location. Gregory found nothing, which fits with his theory that the sheriff had records destroyed.
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