With One Shot

by Dorothy Marcic

  As I listened to her, I remembered how distant and remote I had thought she was when we talked months ago, before I ever knew whether I’d get the reports. But on that day in the sheriff’s office, I found out how wrong I had been when Detective Blanke turned to me and said in a measured voice, “If David were still alive, we’d reopen the case.” I don’t remember what they said immediately afterward, because I was overcome with emotion. Tears streamed down my cheeks. Good thing they had a box of tissues on the table next to me. For the next few days I alternated between elation at being vindicated in my search and castigating myself for not investigating Vernie’s murder earlier, even a few years previously would have made so much difference. I thought about how David had died just when my questions started getting more intense, and how convenient his death was to Suzanne, which even back then I had noticed. With the only other person in the house that night dead, any digging I did on the case would be legally fruitless.

  Bringing me back to the moment in the sheriff’s office, Lieutenant Rauch spoke. “We saw too many red flags in the report,” she said.

  “What were they?” I asked.

  Blanke answered quickly, which made me realize he’d thought a great deal about this case. “Those first two phone calls were very telling,” he said. “Suzanne’s first call was to the sheriff in his home and she said, ‘This is Mrs. Stordock and I shot my husband,’ while the second call was to the dispatcher, where her words were ‘My husband’s been shot.’ ” I sat there dumbfounded and told him I had missed that one about the difference in the two calls.

  “I didn’t pick up on it, either,” said Lieutenant Rauch. I asked Blanke to explain more.

  “Those two sentences give a completely different message. One names the perpetrator and the other is more passive. It doesn’t really solve the crime, but it’s a reason to ask more questions.”

  It was my turn to speak. “They interviewed all their friends and people in the bars that night. In fact, they talked to many of them twice, with one of the questions being what kind of relationship Vernie and Suzanne had. During this time they spoke to some of Suzanne’s family, but why no one in my family. We would have had a lot to tell them about their relationship.”

  “We noticed that, too,” said Blanke. “And how David was never really interviewed.”

  Then Rauch offered her warning signs: “The whole psychotic break and handling a complicated weapon by someone who everyone says has no knowledge of guns. We know that in a psychotic incident, your motor skills would decline, which makes it impossible for an unskilled person to manipulate that difficult rifle. When I finished the report, it was like I had read a book that ended at chapter eight and you’re wondering how it turned out. A lot of things were never resolved.”

  It took me a while to absorb these insights, because I previously thought no one in law enforcement would want to admit such errors. My mind went to that first conversation with Lieutenant Rauch in early 2015 and she was asking me if David and Suzanne were still alive. Suddenly, sitting across from them in Madison, Wisconsin, I realized she had been trying to find out if they could reopen the case. Just from reading the 1970 reports, they saw the problems. I had no awareness of their suspicions and how thorough they were, and how they cared, even back to old, sort-of-cold cases from before most of them were born. My heart sank when I realized they could not reopen the case. Couldn’t they go for conspiracy to murder? I asked desperately. Of course, they could not. Not with David dead.

  That’s when I realized I had been fooling myself. Though I had believed the previous two years that I was seeking answers, not legal justice, as I sat across from those three members of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, I now knew the truth. I did want someone to pay, to get convicted and go to prison. But it was too late.

  Blanke then asked me, “You told us David had confessed to your aunt. Did she ever tell anyone?” I was taken aback, because I realized I had never asked her. Probably because I was too shocked by the revelation, but also because if she had told anyone, surely I would have heard about it before forty-five years had elapsed. So I called Aunt Maxine soon after and asked her.

  “Yes,” she said quickly, as I realized how sharp her memory was for a ninety-one-year-old. “I told your mother, your grandma, and some others, but none of us believed him. We all thought he was covering up for his mother. And, anyway, she got off with practically nothing and what would they have done with him, a juvenile? We couldn’t bring Vernie back, no matter what,” she said with resignation. “And it would only add to your grandma’s pain to have to live through all the horrific details once again.”

  Some people may find this hard to believe. Here we had a confession to the murder and my family basically did nothing. What I have come to know, though, is that is how my working-class family and others in our neighborhoods behaved. We respected people in authority and expected them to do the right thing. And we never felt we had any right to complain. Only after working as a waitress in college did I realize I could send food back if it wasn’t what I had ordered. Imagine generations of decent, down-to-earth blue-collar folks giving in and giving up time and again. After many years, resentments would develop towards those in authority.

  Back in the sheriff’s office I told them I really wanted to find an 8mm Mauser rifle, as it was important in my research, and how in New York City the gun shops are only listed with phone numbers, no addresses, and you can’t even make an appointment unless you have a gun permit. Lehman said they might have one in their evidence room, but it turned out they didn’t. Call a gun shop in Sun Prairie, they said, giving me the name as we parted and I thanked them again.

  Could they ever know how much they’d helped me, Shannon, and the rest of our family? I’ll never see police officers the same way again. As Blanke walked me out, he apologized to me that the case could not be reopened. I could feel his palpable regret.

  * * *

  When I got to my car, I called up the gun shop they recommended, but had no luck. I then called every weapons store in the region and finally talked to a shop owner who said, yes, he had a Mauser. And it was in the most unexpected location: Oregon, Wisconsin. Could this have been the very same weapon? Maybe not, but at least I could see a real Mauser and hold it.

  I drove thirty minutes to the south end of town and found a small beige building, with a huge parking lot in front. The owners ran both an outdoor recreation store and the gun shop. Entering the front door, I came into the recreation area and couldn’t find where the guns were sold. After I asked, I was pointed to a door tucked away, almost hidden. I walked into a long room with rifles all along the left side and the back, and with a waist-high glass counter on the right. A tall, thin man in loose jeans, in his late thirties with some tattoos on his arms, greeted me and spoke with an accent that sounded more Tennessee than Wisconsin. His name was Johnnie. Rather than pretending I was actually looking to buy a weapon, I told him the story. He’d never heard about the murder, but he must have felt enough empathy, because I sensed an outsized willingness to help as he handed me the long Mauser rifle. It was much heavier than I had imagined. I held the butt in my right hand and the chamber and barrel in my left. It didn’t take long for my hand to get tired. Looking down at the chamber and the bolt and the trigger, I realized just how perplexing it would be to manage this firearm.

  “This is a very complicated weapon,” Johnnie said with the seriousness of someone who knows the carnage that is possible. “The way that bolt action works, there is no way an unskilled person can pick up a rifle like this and work it. Even if they handed the weapon to someone and gave her the correct bullet, she ain’t gonna know how to load it, release the safety, and know what to do with the bolt. And she ain’t even got the strength for holding that heavy war rifle up and aimin’ it.”

  I thanked Johnnie and drove an hour to meet Shannon and another cousin, to go over some old family photos.

  * * *

  After we got settled in, I told Sha
nnon I’d been to the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and they’d told me they would have reopened the case. She and I looked at each other and then cried together for the next half hour.

  “I always knew it was a cold-blooded and calculated murder of my father,” she said as she wiped tears away. Though we never said so, I knew we were both lamenting the fact that our quest had started so late. If only we’d found Suzanne and David more than a couple of years ago.

  While engaging in self-criticism about the loss of precious time, I also thought I was near the end of my research. I had talked to around sixty people by this time and had pored through all the police and court documents so many times I had parts memorized and could list off the names of the lawyers and many of the officers working the murder back in 1970.

  One area missing was talking to someone involved in the probate process. In the documents I noticed one name that kept appearing and that was Gordon Neil, who was the attorney for the probate bank, First Wisconsin National Bank.

  * * *

  Mr. Neil and I had a pleasant discussion. He had been a young attorney when he was asked to supervise the probate for the case.

  As was common, he never actually met the parties involved, as he was making sure the paperwork and payouts were legal. He told me one person I should contact was P. Charles Jones, who was a public defender that visited Suzanne in jail the night of the murder. What? I said. She had her own attorney. Neil didn’t know how Jones got there, but he was there.

  “You need to call Jones,” he said. “I’m sure he has some very interesting off-the-record information for you.” As he talked, I realized that name was very, very familiar. Wasn’t his name on quite a few of the Stordock probate documents?

  “Yes,” replied Neil. “Not long after that he got appointed as a probate judge.” What I discovered as soon as I hung up was that Jones had died several years ago. His wife had passed away. But while I was on the call with Neil, I asked about marriage licenses and probate. He told me there was a “Proof of Heir” section, which might help. However, looking later on, the only document in that section was a statement Suzanne made and was notarized that everything she said was true. And the woman at the clerk of courts said she’d never seen a marriage license in any probate files.

  Then I told Neil I’d been unable to verify a marriage between my uncle and Suzanne. “That would be fraud,” he said. “But I don’t know the statute of limitations on fraud in Wisconsin.” I looked it up and it is six years. Another disappointment.

  * * *

  Talking to Neil got me enthused about digging more in related areas. During the probate process a guardian ad litem was appointed to represent the interests of the minor child, Danny Stordock. Then I discovered a second one had been appointed, but the reason for the change wasn’t clear. I did manage to talk to the first GAL for about an hour, and he was extremely helpful, and he talked briefly about the other guardian ad litem, who was a well-respected attorney who had recently retired as a trustee of the University of Wisconsin. But because I felt overwhelmed by all of the writing I still had to complete, I reasonably concluded there was no need to talk to the second GAL.

  Something inside me kept pulling, though, and I finally called and left a message in November 2015. Almost a month passed and I hadn’t heard anything. And why would I? It must be very surprising and unsettling to find a message on your voice mail from some unknown woman who had a slight connection to a client you briefly represented forty-five years ago. Then the phone rang.

  “Hi, this is David Walsh and I got your message.”

  My mind raced. I had called so many people, but then it clicked: the second GAL. There was something about his voice that let me know he was approachable, and I felt the complete decency behind the words. This was a good man.

  Walsh said he had been hired because he had already made a name as a hardworking lawyer who would do anything (legal, that is), and they needed someone to find case law regarding the life insurance policy. Under Wisconsin Common Law, a person who was responsible for the injury or death of someone else cannot benefit. So he argued all of the insurance money should go to Danny and none to Suzanne. He found some case law to back it up.

  Walsh suggested I talk to a number of people, most of whom I’d already been in touch with. “Oh, and call James Boll, the DA at the time. He’ll have many insights to share with you,” he said seriously. “I see Boll often and I can tell him you’ll be contacting him.”

  I hesitated. What do I say now? Here’s a friend of James Boll, the DA who originally prosecuted the case and turned it over to ADA Mussallem. James Boll was the man I called on March 8, 2015, and after I introduced myself and asked if he remembered the case, he said without even a half-second hesitation, “No, I don’t remember anything about it.”

  Everyone else I had contacted had paused to think and then often asked me a clarifying question before they started to respond, whether they had any memory of the event or not. But at that moment on the phone with the smart, successful, well-connected and cordial attorney, who was a friend of Boll’s, I decided to be completely honest, knowing anything I might say would likely get back to Boll.

  “Boll told me he didn’t remember anything about the case,” I said, slowly at first, hoping I wasn’t offending Walsh. “Even though Boll spent the next forty minutes telling me stories with vivid details about being district attorney during all the demonstrations in the late sixties, and also about the other three capital-murder cases active during that time period.”

  Now it was time for Walsh to hesitate. “I can’t believe he doesn’t remember,” he said. “I don’t believe it.” He told me he might have a file on Danny and would look for it. Because I was going to visit my sister near Milwaukee the following week, we made an appointment.

  When I got to his office in Madison, the well-suited seventyish man with dark hair ushered me into the conference room, with a long, oval, hand-carved, wooden meeting table and a panoramic view of Lake Mendota. I thought I was in heaven.

  Walsh proudly pointed to a cluster of buildings across part of the lake. “That’s the new Health Sciences campus,” he noted proudly, telling me how that had come about during his tenure as a UW trustee.

  Then he changed the subject to the Stordock materials. All those long-ago files had been destroyed, he said, but we chatted about details of the case. He told me how after he had come up with case law determining Danny should get all the life insurance, Suzanne’s attorney quickly came back with a settlement, giving Danny one-half. It was plain they understood Suzanne had no legal basis to claim any of the money. Walsh wasn’t clear on why that deal was made, but Suzanne ended up with half of the insurance money, though my research indicates Danny likely did not get his share.

  I told him about my suspicions that Suzanne and Vernie had never been married. He got serious and said, “That would have been major fraud.” Yes, I replied, but the statute of limitations is six years. Then he said something that made me silently sing, Hallelujah that God made lawyers, and I am sitting right across from one, and a really good one at that. He said, “It might be six years from the time you discover the fraud.”

  I think I stopped breathing at that point. And I asked him if he could help me. He referred me to paralegal Adam Premo, who could possibly help me solve the marriage puzzle. And thus Premo began his task.

  * * *

  After six months, which was two and a half years since I’d started searching, Premo e-mailed me one day and said he had searched the entire country and found nothing. He was only waiting on Iowa to get back, but it looked like there never had been a wedding, and I’d already checked several counties in that state that were close to Wisconsin, so likely Premo was correct. I called Shannon. We were excited to get some answers.

  Premo e-mailed me again, thirty minutes later. Iowa had just contacted him. There was not only one marriage license, but two were found in two different cities in Iowa. One was June 10, 1965, and the other one was Ap
ril 28, 1967. At first, Premo thought there was a divorce in between, but he found no evidence. The only thing he and I could figure out was that Vernie’s divorce was June 10, 1964, and Wisconsin had a one-year waiting period. It could easily be assumed that getting married June 10, the following year, would be legal, but perhaps the period of waiting actually started June 11, which was the first full day after the divorce. Once they realized the mistake, they went back to a different town in Iowa and had another ceremony.

  Why Iowa? They must have known that Iowa didn’t care much about Wisconsin politics or crimes and that’s where they went. Vernie was well-known in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, and they likely worried the wedding would be reported in a newspaper read by people who knew him, and that it would then be picked up in Madison papers. They wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know they had been “living in sin” since early 1964. After 1967, however, Suzanne was his legal wife and she did inherit most of his assets.

  * * *

  But back to that day in Walsh’s Madison office, before I worked with Premo, I got up to leave and he just looked at me with his wise, kindly face and softly said, “There is no way that Boll doesn’t remember this case. I specifically remember talking with him about the case a few years after he resigned as DA and went into private practice.” (That was early 1971.) “He told me he had doubts about who the shooter was. So I know he remembers the Stordock case.”

  I was dumbfounded and stood there wondering if I should try for the eighth time to call Boll again and see if he would pick up or return my calls. But what would be the advantage for him to tell me that he did remember the case? He had a long and illustrious career and didn’t need any questions, at the final stage of his life, about cases he prosecuted. Even if I did talk to him, I doubted he could answer as to what really happened, because he admitted to Walsh in the mid-1970s he wasn’t sure who the shooter was. What was he going to say?