With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  By this time she was clawing at him, grasping for patches of his T-shirt as she gasped for air, nearly hyperventilating, but all in hushed tones. “You’ve got to help me, David. Please, please.” This went on for a while as a slightly inebriated David didn’t want to make the situation worse. Try as he might, he couldn’t calm his mother. She got more and more hysterical and finally declared, with just enough pity and desperation in her voice, “I can’t stand it, waiting for someone to gun me down like an animal.”

  She showed him a bottle of pills that she had taken out of Vern’s attaché case. David had likely seen her handle lots of bottles of pills, so this was nothing new. She rattled the contents in his face. “It’s better if I just take this whole bottle now and end it. There’ll be no mess to clean up.” She opened the bottle, poured a pile of pills out onto her hand, and made a movement to put them in her mouth.

  A deep fear came over David, because he’d lived through several of her suicide attempts and believed it was only good fortune that saved his mother in previous attempts. “No, Mom, no!” He helped her guide the pills back inside the bottle.

  “Then help me, please, David. Help me find a gun that will do the trick on the first try. You know there can’t be a second shot after a missed one, because he’ll strangle me right then and there.”

  David sat there, stunned. Remember that psychiatrist Roberts said that Suzanne “tended to dominate members of her family, has had neurotic attachments and alliances with family members bidding one against the other, tying together the family by means of crises, and at times, threats of suicide.”

  “Help me get one of the guns down.” When he looked alarmed, she said, changing her intent to suit his mood, “I just want to scare him, to let him know he can’t threaten me like that anymore.” (If David and girlfriend did talk until 2:00 A.M., then this whole scene would have gone faster.)

  As they left David’s room, she poked her head into the master bedroom and saw Vernie had fallen asleep, nude, on his side of the bed. She quietly closed the bedroom door, and she joined David walking down the front stairway, carefully, so Vernie wouldn’t hear them, for the back stairway was solid wood and the front is carpeted. They were in the den, looking at four guns on a high rack and two leaning on the wall in the room’s corner.

  “What about one of those?” She pointed toward the corner, thinking this would be faster. “Vernie knows which one is the deadliest. If you want to scare him, the Mauser will be best,” he said as he reached up as high as he could. It was almost seven feet off the floor, so it took some balancing, which was not easy after having those beers, even if the whole situation was sobering him up. He got the rifle down. Suzanne then asked where the ammunition was for this particular weapon, because Vernie kept shells locked in two different places. “You don’t need to load it, if you’re just going to scare him!” David said.

  But Sue convinced him that Vernie can tell when it’s not loaded and he would just laugh at her and burn her with another cigarette. After the gun was loaded, Sue asked him how to shoot it, and he attempted to show her, but he realized she was never going to hold it convincingly, and he tried to talk her out of the whole gun-scare tactic. Her resolution was firm. “Do you want your mother dead tomorrow?” Being so close to him, she almost spat in his face with the raw emotion. “Protect me, David!”

  Finally her goal was achieved. David was riled up, and she clumsily lifted the gun. Though it looked like a fumble, she’d been rehearsing her motions on the nearby rifles for days. If she didn’t fumble horribly while holding the gun, he wouldn’t get how incompetent she’d be. He had to believe she’d never be able to scare Vern.

  “Oh, Mom, this will never work,” he said as he tried to take the gun from her, but she clung to her strategy.

  “Okay, then I’ll just take the pills and you won’t have to protect me ever again.”

  David started crying and grabbed the gun, agreeing to scare Vern. They both walked up the stairs. She asked him how to set the gun up in the hallway. “Let me go in and just point the gun at him,” David whispered.

  “You can’t,” she said, “because he’ll grab it from you and then shoot me. Figure out someplace out here in the hallway to set it up.”

  David dropped down on his left knee with the gun resting on his right leg and showed Suzanne how he could aim it right toward the side of the bed where Vernie slept. “We’ll scare him good, Mom.”

  She started crying and hugged him, then said desperately, “No one can threaten Vernie, David. You know it won’t work.” She paused and took a deep breath. “It’s him or me.”

  David just stared, but his mother showed him the cigarette burn again. Then she said if he didn’t help her, then when Vernie murdered her, it would be David’s fault and he’d remember that the rest of his life. David nodded.

  Sue kissed him on the cheek and told him the code words, the ones to pull the trigger on: “Do you hear me?”

  Turning around, she opened the master bedroom door, leaving it wide open. She had the bottle of pills in her hand, and she went over and shook Vernie, waking him up. She was careful to stand on the other side of the room, so that he wouldn’t look toward the door.

  Vernie was by now sitting up in bed, looking toward Sue in the corner away from the door, and she said, calmly and slowly, “Vernie, we have to talk. You said you want to leave me and go back to Jenylle.” She raised the bottle of pills and shook it, and went on. “You know I can’t live without you, so I just took half this bottle of Seconals. It won’t take long.”

  By this time Vernie was completely awake and started pleading with her, but realized he had to act fast. He leaned forward toward the phone on the floor, intending to call an ambulance so they could come and pump her stomach. She smiled at his gullibility and taunted him, “If you leave me, it’s going to be on my terms, honey.”

  While he was going for the phone, Vernie gave her that “not again” stare, indicating he’d reached his tolerance level on her self-harming threats. She knew that look and realized she never, ever was going to be patronized by this man again and shouted, “Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

  David was nervous, but he heard the code words and took aim at Vern’s head, making sure his mother was out of range. Then his index finger pulled the trigger. Bang! The right side of Vern’s head was blown away and splattered all over the headboard and the wall above, as well as the edge of the adjacent wall and onto Sue, who was standing right where the two walls intersect. Suzanne looked behind her on the dresser and realized the drug-filled attaché case would not look good in that location, so she moved it to the other side of the room. She must have been in a hurry, because she probably did not notice on top of the case was pieces of bone and flesh from Vern’s head. Such tissue on the top would not be possible in the new location, as it was very far from the body.

  * * *

  I’ve given this a great deal of thought in the past three years, and I think it had to have happened that way. According to forensic reports, the gun was shot from several feet away, coming from the direction of the hallway and the door of the opposite bedroom. Vernie was sitting on the side of the bed, right in front of the telephone on the floor, and leaning over slightly when he was shot. This was evident from the height at which the bullet went through the headboard and wall. The headboard gunshot hole was three feet seven inches from the floor.

  If Vernie had been looking at the shooter, he would have gotten shot straight in the face. But the angle of the shot was directly into the left temple and straight out the right temple—what was remaining, anyway, after the shot. This means Vernie had to be looking at the corner of the bedroom, but with his head slightly down. The only items in that corner were two dressers, at right angles to one another.

  As far as I can imagine, there aren’t many reasons for Vernie to be looking right at the intersection of the dressers around 2:00 A.M. and not be distracted by the sights and sounds of David setting up the gun and cocking it
. Perhaps someone had closed the bedroom door, but if the shooter opened it, Vernie would have looked toward the door. If he hadn’t been distracted, he would have looked over toward the shooter. Someone had to come in the room and walk to the other side, away from the shooter, and get Vernie to look toward the corner. And remember this was a career law enforcement officer, who had worked for years undercover and would be highly trained to notice any small signs of danger. What this means to me is that someone was definitely diverting him, in that very corner, and there were only two people in the house. Suzanne had to be doing something compelling, which could have been about him leaving her. Then bang!

  Vernie slumped over onto the floor and his brains splattered all over the walls and into laundry baskets, and even one piece in Suzanne’s hair, which one of the officers noticed and removed later at the police station. The bullet entered the left side and exited the right, causing the right side of Vernie’s head to explode. Most of the blood and brains went onto the bed and the wall around the bed, because those were to the right side of Vernie.

  It’s not physically possible for the blood to splatter and brains to fly toward the shooter, because the left side of the head, which faced the shooter, was not damaged except for a small entrance wound of the bullet. To me, this is the most compelling reason Suzanne could not have pulled the trigger. Unless this case defied the laws of physics, the blood and the brain tissue were hurled in the same direction as the bullet, which was away from the shooter. In order for Suzanne’s version to be true—that she hoisted up this heavy gun and pulled the trigger—it would have to be true that the blood and brain tissue exploded out of the right side of Vernie’s head, but circled back in midair toward the shooter.

  I also have to take into account Vernie looking at the corner, with his head slightly down, when he was shot. This was a trained marksman, a lifelong law enforcement official who was trained to survive in hostile conditions, to notice acts of violent aggression. How could he not notice someone aiming a gun at his head, unless he was distracted to look away? The bullet entered the left temple and exited in the same place on the other side, which means the angle of his head is determined. From my reading of the coroner and police reports, this means there had to be two people involved, because I can’t think of any other reason why Vernie would be looking toward the corner at this time.

  After the shot was fired, I believe, David woke up from his manipulated stupor and panicked. It’s attempted murder, we’ll get arrested, he shouted. Calm as a whipped meringue after the beater comes out, Suzanne quietly told him she was going to take the insanity plea. He didn’t have to worry, as long as he did what she told him to do. And if for some reason the insanity plea did not work—which she doubted would happen—David could then confess, and because he was a juvenile, he’d go to reform school for a short time and be done with it. She told him how grateful she was that he saved his mother’s life. Just stick to the story, David, and we’ll both be fine. You protected me, now it’s my turn to protect you from the police.

  I’ve had a great deal of time to consider why Suzanne took the rap. At first, one would think, she’s a mother and she’d want to protect her son. But what kind of mother manipulates her son to kill his stepfather? For me the whole protection idea does not fit in with her behaviors in the rest of her life. So what is the reason, then?

  If it’s true that Suzanne wanted Vernie dead, and chose somehow to use a gun (of which there were many in the house), she very likely had already thought her strategy through. I believe from all the research I’ve done, she had to know someone in the judicial system had her back, that she would be able to get an insanity plea, which, as we know, was not that easy to obtain in Wisconsin back then. But even so, she could have let David, who was a juvenile at 17, go to jail and prison and avoided her eleven months in the hospital. What would she have lost in that scenario? Firstly, her picture would not have appeared repeatedly on the front page of as many newspapers, as merely the wife of the murder victim, rather than the confessed murderer.

  But perhaps more important, if David had been arrested, he would have been interrogated more intensely and, because I knew David quite well, I think it nearly impossible he would not have told some officer or cellmate that his mother had put him up to it. As the shooter Suzanne could claim diminished capacity and loss of touch with reality. But if she was instead the instigator, she could have been arrested for conspiracy to murder. How would it be possible to claim loss of touch with reality when the person in question is masterminding a rather complicated murder? And, as Suzanne surely had researched, “aiding and abetting” a murder carried stiff incarceration penalties in Wisconsin’s judicial system. We’re talking years in a prison, not a hospital.

  I think all of this was in her mind as Suzanne led David downstairs. Going to the kitchen phone, she quickly dialed the sheriff at home to say she shot Vern, and then she tried to calm down David, who went back upstairs for a moment, then came downstairs again. Maybe Vernie’s still alive, he screamed. Get the ambulance here. David was very upset, because it hadn’t yet registered that Vernie was dead, so he was full of anxiety about whether his stepdad was alive or not. Suzanne made more phone calls.

  The police came and noted the difference between David’s and Suzanne’s demeanor. He was wildly emotional and she was without affect, but the officers reported she seemed polite, cooperative, and sane. ADA Mussallem later used her lack of affect as proof of insanity, but it could just as easily have been a symptom of being a sociopath or a psychopath.

  Suzanne and David were taken to the sheriff’s office. They threatened to arrest David on first-degree murder. But Suzanne wouldn’t say anything until her attorney arrived. After he did, Suzanne confessed, saying she would do so with the understanding she’d take the insanity defense. What psychotic person is so in charge of reality a few moments after her “break” that she can understand the legal system and the value of an insanity defense?

  I remember Franklin telling me that she conned the system. He said she was always trying to fool people, to show how much smarter she was than anyone else. And I guess this time, she was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Hindsight of the Sheriff, et al.

  Detective Tim Blanke, of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, had been thoughtful, sensitive, and a good listener on the phone, even telling me how his office was dumbfounded about how Suzanne’s case had proceeded back in 1970. But was he just placating me? Lots of books and articles have been written on verbal aikido, manipulative sympathy, how people seem to agree with you, only in order to get you to stop disagreeing or asking questions. The sheriff’s staff knew I was digging around and maybe it was just easier for them to concur with my skepticism on how the evidence was ignored during the prosecution of the case.

  I needed another batch of information from the county clerk and the records offices and thought it was just quicker to go there myself. And as long as I was in Madison, maybe I could meet with Detective Blanke. “Come on over,” he said, and we scheduled a time for Tuesday, September 15, at 10:00 A.M. I spent Monday researching records at the county clerk’s and then drove out to Oregon to meet some former residents of the Mansion, getting back to my hotel really late. I set my alarm, and when I woke up, I realized I wouldn’t have time for breakfast if I wanted to look decent. So I just made a cup of coffee in the room and got ready. But what to wear? Nothing too fancy, as this was the sheriff’s office, not with stockbrokers. I chose a business-casual blue plaid dress with a black duster jacket.

  Fearing I’d get lost or not find any parking, I ended up arriving fifteen minutes early. It was a beautiful, clear day in the high seventies, and I wondered how many days like this Vernie had experienced working in this neighborhood of state office buildings, many of which were bright off-white brick with gleaming glass windows. When I got to the “Safety” building, there were a few people, wearing threadbare clothing, with barely washed hair, smoking cigarettes just outside the
entrance. The receptionist for the sheriff’s office was behind some bulletproof glass and had poofy hair and long lime-green nails. She shoved a pressed-woodchip clipboard with some paperwork through the opening. My reward for answering all the questions correctly was a temporary ID badge. Coming to greet me was Detective Blanke, who had a football player’s physique, at five feet ten inches, with brown hair and a well-trimmed goatee. He wore a dress shirt and tie and had the warm kind of smile that could melt a Wisconsin snowdrift in the middle of January.

  He walked me to a small meeting room, which had stuffed furniture, including a couch. I sat on a fabric chair and Blanke sat opposite. A minute later we were joined by tall and shaved-headed Detective Scott Lehman and by Lieutenant Alicia Rauch, who was the ranking officer and the person I had talked to several times on the phone while trying to get the forensic files. In her forties, with bob-length, slightly curled hair and a navy suit befitting a lieutenant, she shook my hand with warm emotion.

  “This is where we often meet with families of the accused or the victims,” Blanke said, pointing to some toys tucked neatly in a large plastic container in the corner. I wondered why all three of them were there. Had I done something wrong and they were going to counsel me to take another course of action? Was it necessary to subdue me with a trio of law enforcement officials? We made small talk and I thanked them for sending me the forensic files, a resource I had come to appreciate as the most vital information source I had on the murder. Without those documents, I said, it would have all been conjecture and groundless accusations.

  Lieutenant Rauch smiled as she spoke.“After you contacted us, we didn’t even know if we had records back that far, but I had Linda [a pseudonym] search through some dusty boxes of microfiche in storage. They weren’t labeled very carefully, so she had to go through one film after another, sliding each page through the reader. Three weeks later she still hadn’t found anything and we were about to give up the search, when we heard her yell across the office at the top of her lungs, ‘I found it!’ Everyone ran over to the screen and we saw that first page of the report from March 1, 1970. A lot of us read it and we couldn’t really believe how the case progressed.”