With One Shot Read online

  Praise for With One Shot

  “Dorothy Marcic uses her incredible talent as a playwright to impart mystery, suspense, and sheer investigative guts on every page of this rapid-fire real-life thriller. Meticulous research brings the narrative to life, while extraordinarily, at the same time, it solves a cold case. Exciting, beautifully written, a sure bet for any serious true-crime fan.”

  —M. William Phelps, New York Times bestselling author of Dangerous Ground

  “When Dorothy Marcic starts probing through her family’s closet she discovers skeletons that are very real. Someone did commit murder and it was someone intimately close to the author. Dr. Marcic skillfully tells the story of her own journey of discovery. As she discovers the web of relations that led to murder, she is at the same time rediscovering her own childhood. It is a gripping tale, well worth reading.”

  —Lawrence M. Miller, author of Barbarians to Bureaucrats

  “In my twelve years writing ‘The Ethicist’ for The New York Times, I got a good look at human treachery and—as impressive—our ability to rationalize our own horrible conduct. But lest I think I’d seen it all, Dorothy Marcic excavates new depths of perfidy, cruelty, and lies. And delightfully so. If by ‘delightfully’ we mean ‘disturbingly.’ And I do.”

  —Randy Cohen, former ethicist for The New York Times, host of NPR’s Person Place Thing

  “Dorothy Marcic has written a riveting, true-crime, personal story of her beloved uncle and the mystery of who brutally murdered him, and how the American justice system is often flawed and corrupt. We take the journey with Dorothy as she carefully reconstructs the past and leaves no stone unturned in her search for the truth. A personal odyssey through family—and on a larger scale, American—dysfunction.”

  —Kaylie Jones, author of Lies My Mother Never Told Me and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries

  WITH ONE SHOT

  Family Murder and a Search for Justice

  DOROTHY MARCIC

  CITADEL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 Dorothy Marcic

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-8065-3855-6

  First Citadel printing: April 2018

  First electronic edition: April 2018

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8065-3856-3

  ISBN-10: 0-8065-3856-2

  To Vernie, Jenylle, and Shannon: the three who lost the most.

  Table of Contents

  Praise for With One Shot

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Epigraph

  Prologue—Why I Still Cry

  CHAPTER ONE - Metamorphosis

  CHAPTER TWO - The Visit

  CHAPTER THREE - David’s Communications

  CHAPTER FOUR - Suzanne’s Strategy

  CHAPTER FIVE - A New Family Member—Dealing with the Unexpected

  CHAPTER SIX - Organizational Chart #1

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Shannon’s Road Trips

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Another Death and More Planning

  CHAPTER NINE - Jenylle and Change

  CHAPTER TEN - The Rest of the Family

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Louisa’s Courage

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The Law and Openness to Learning

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - David and Connections

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Court Transcripts

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Family, Once-Removed

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Franklin, with Key Information

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The District Attorney, Lawyers, Judges, and Sheriff

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Asking Questions with Suzanne

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Finding the Old Friends

  CHAPTER TWENTY - A Trip to the Bountiful Oregon

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Jocelyn Revisited

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - An Unexpected Call

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Forensic Files—An Information System

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Forensic Files and Ethical Matters

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Police Reports

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - From the Doctor and Psychiatrists

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Is She a Psychopath?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Final Thoughts on Cigarette Burns and Marriage Licenses

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Careers and Money

  CHAPTER THIRTY - Danny, the Other Heir

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Munchausen or Serial Killer?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Was She an Abused Wife?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Forensic Experts

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - If She Did Have a Psychotic Break

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - Why’d She Do It?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - One Possible Scenario

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Hindsight of the Sheriff, et al.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - Good-bye, Jenylle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - Suzanne’s Last Curtain Call

  CHAPTER FORTY - The Police Badge

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Thoughts on Complicity and Redemption

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Notes

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The following account is based on true events. What I wrote is to the best of my memory on the murder of my uncle, La Verne Stordock, and its aftermath. I also read the voluminous court transcripts and police/forensic reports, as well as the reams of newspaper articles about Vernie and Suzanne. I interviewed more than sixty people: every member of my family, as well as anyone else tangentially related to the case, such as people in Oregon, Wisconsin (a village fourteen miles south of Madison surrounded by miles of farmland), friends of the family, associates of one of Suzanne’s former boyfriends, and relatives of Suzanne’s previous husbands. I talked with District Attorney James C. Boll, who had originally prosecuted the case, and the one officer still alive who was first on the crime scene. Finally, I visited Suzanne and her children four times and spent a total of fourteen hours interviewing Suzanne herself. To protect privacy, I have changed a number of the names in this book.

  Well, I think I’m the one who ended his life, if I remember correctly. . . . With that one shot I took out both Vernie and my mother.

  —Suzanne, March 2015

  Both our fingerprints were on the gun and the police almost arrested me. . . . Dorothy, you have no idea how traumatic it was for my mom and me that night.

  —David, Suzanne’s son, December 2014

  I am quite sure David pulled the trigger. . . . When I heard Suzanne got off on an insanity plea, I knew she had conned the system.

  —Franklin, Suzanne’s brother, May 2015

  Prologue—Why I Still Cry

  The house was Queen Anne style, built in 1906, with steeply pitched roofs, front-facing gable, and asymmetrical layout. As the largest and most elegant home in Oregon, Wisconsin, it was known for its graceful beauty, wraparound porches, and leaded-glass windows.

  It was unusually quiet that March 1, 1970, at 2:06 A.M. An occasional car could be heard out the front windows, perhaps someone who’d been partying too late in nearby Madison, rushing home before anyone noticed. Down the neatly shoveled sidewalks you could see the reflection of streetlights on the white snow, which showed spots of brown near where the sidewalk ended and the street began. Only one light was on in the neighborh
ood of the mostly large Victorian houses, in the kitchen of the Queen Anne house.

  The upstairs hallway light went on at 2:10 A.M., just about the same time as the kitchen light went off. Then the master bedroom light was on, the hallway light off. A few moments after the master bedroom light went on, a single gunshot sound echoed through the ten-below-zero air outside. Several lights immediately switched on in nearby houses.

  Dressed in a pink robe, a short, frail woman, with loosely tied dyed-blond hair, stood in the bedroom with her back to the door. She was clutching a rotary phone, her thin fingers sweeping the dial clockwise, again and again. She moved her plait of hair from back to left front in a gesture that seemed more habitual than nervous; then she lifted her right hand to the top of her head, perhaps where a beehive hairdo had sat earlier in the day.

  “This is Mrs. Stordock,” she said calmly. “My husband’s been shot.”

  “Is he alive?” asked the male voice on the other end.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, not even glancing at the lifeless body lying on the floor next to the bed. The right side of its head was blown off; blood, brains, and tissue had sprayed across the sheets and beige chenille bedspread, the blue plaster wall, and even in the laundry basket of freshly washed underwear and towels.

  “Is the perpetrator still there?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly and hung up.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Metamorphosis

  When the call came February 11, 2014, I was sitting in my New York City apartment and there was no way I could have known this conversation would change the course of my life for the next three years, nor that I would have an opportunity to use all the research skills I had honed over many years as a university professor and the writer of over fifteen books.

  “I found them,” my cousin Shannon said breathlessly from Eugene, Oregon. She and her husband had moved out there some years after Shannon’s father was killed, and I could almost see her with her graying hair and showing a few more pounds than when we were younger.

  I immediately knew who she was talking about. For the past decade every conversation Shannon and I had included our failed attempts at finding out anything about Suzanne, “that tramp,” as my grandmother used to call her. The woman who broke up the marriage of Shannon’s parents. Suzanne, who’d already had three marriages and three children (one from each of those husbands) when she met my uncle, Vernie Stordock. They began an adulterous affair, which resulted in his murder seven years later. Suzanne confessed, but my family always had doubts.

  After he took up with Suzanne, I felt I was on one of those old Twilight Zone episodes where you wake up one day and the person you’re in bed with isn’t your spouse, but says he is. Uncle Vernie had been tall and handsome, with a neat crew cut, but had become pudgy and wan after being with Suzanne; this man had always been the jokester, always teasing and trying to get a rise out of someone; the husband who loved his wife and doted on his daughter suddenly became obsessed with this woman he called “Sue.” He left his wife as if in a drugged stupor. Maybe the aliens had come with a pod and replaced the real Uncle Vernie.

  I was only fourteen when I first met Suzanne in 1963 and didn’t really understand what was going on with their affair. Nor could have I predicted Vern’s obsession would end in his murder one dark, cold night seven years later.

  After his death we lost contact with Suzanne and her three kids, the youngest of whom Vernie had adopted. Though Suzanne had confessed to the murder, there were rumors for years that her older son, David, had actually killed Vernie that night. The other two children were not in the house when it happened.

  * * *

  My uncle, La Verne Gerald Stordock, had worked his whole life in law enforcement—twenty years as a police officer, then as a sergeant and later captain in Beloit, Wisconsin, where he retired as Captain in 1962.

  He was the youngest of five children in a dirt-poor family with an alcoholic father and a mother who was forced to raise their kids alone during the Depression, bringing home scraps of food from her job as a cook at Beloit College. None of them went to college.

  As soon as he was able, on his seventeenth birthday in 1943, Vernie enlisted in the navy and served during World War II, and probably quickly understood his skills lay in keeping order in society. After the war he joined the Beloit Police Department in 1948. Shannon told me, “He was recalled in September 1950 for the Korean Conflict. He was sent to Japan and served in the Okinawa Shore Patrol, because of his police experience. I remember him leaving on the train from Beloit and remember him coming home to the Great Lakes Naval Station in July 1952.”

  In the police department he was promoted to sergeant and later captain. After his work with the Beloit Police ended in 1962, he sat for a very demanding test and was one of only five who passed it. He was hired as a chief investigator for the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office, and later as an investigator for the Wisconsin State Medical Examiner’s Board. According to newspapers, Vernie “played a prominent role” in one of his final cases, which involved a Dr. Milton Margoles, a Milwaukee physician who had been convicted in 1963 of tax evasion and obstruction of justice when he tried to bribe a judge and spent two years in prison. Margoles was attempting to get his license back and felt so strongly that the state medical examiner agents caused “public humiliation, public ridicule, scorn and derision” that he filed a $50 million lawsuit, with Vernie as one of the people named. But by the time the lawsuit went to court, Vernie was dead.

  Vernie had worked undercover during the Korean War, when he was a narcotics agent in Japan. Later with the attorney general (AG), he worked on some high-profile cases of racketeering in the mob, prostitution, and drug dealing. Because of the corruption and crime he uncovered, he received death threats.

  He also had a creative side. During his last years in Beloit, he was host of a weekend radio program, The Gerry Shannon Show, a combination of his middle name and his only daughter’s name, Shannon. Because of his media work and his later high-profile status in law enforcement, he was well known in the region. The day after his murder, twelve newspapers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota carried twenty-six different articles about the crime. And many of them kept reporting on updates for over two years.

  * * *

  About ten years ago, Shannon and I both became obsessed to find out what happened to Sue and her family. Maybe it was our moving toward senior citizen status, or the fact that our children had grown up and we had time to focus on other family needs. And perhaps it was also the realization that Suzanne’s family members were getting older, so time was passing us by.

  Shannon and I proved to be good sleuths. We were motivated, adept at problem solving and conflict management. But in those early years of our investigation, Shannon and I unearthed nothing substantial in our search for Sue’s family. Do you know how many people named David Briggs there are in the United States? We looked for Louisa (pseudonym), Suzanne’s daughter from her first marriage, who was away at college the night of the murder, but that name yielded an overwhelming number of hits. Suzanne Stordock as an identity had evaporated, so we looked for her previous legal name, Suzanne Briggs. No person showed up whose age matched hers. During the searches Shannon learned that the youngest son, the one my uncle had adopted, had killed himself in 1992.

  In 2006, after attending a friend’s funeral in Madison, I drove my rental car out to Oregon and found “the Mansion.” Luckily, the husband of the family was in the backyard and seemed willing to talk to me and remembered being in Oregon in 1970. He was tall and thin, with neatly combed brown hair, and was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt while he tended some flowers. He said no one in town had talked much about the murder. I found it strange that in a small village of five thousand, the high-profile killing of one of its residents had not been the subject of gossip. Or was he just reluctant to talk about that violent stain on the fabric of quiet, peaceful Oregon? He gave me the names of the people who had l
ived in the house previously, and Shannon called them later on, but they claimed ignorance, too.

  On that bright summer day in 2006, I got in my car and drove the ten blocks to the Oregon Police Station, where I imagined they kept archival data. For about fifteen minutes I sat in my car, immobilized, as I stared at the dark redbrick building with the two large glass doors. Why couldn’t I go inside? Was I afraid some man would tell me it wasn’t my business? Finally I climbed out and walked toward the entrance. I felt the stainless-steel door handle under my hand. It was the kind with grooves, to help you grip it. Maybe I could find some answers here. Perhaps they had records I could look at.

  But as I began to pull the door open, something inside me collapsed. How could any good come from my walking into that building? After all, who was I to question officers of the law, or at least those charged with safekeeping their reports?

  This incident is indicative of my whole family’s underwhelming reaction to what we always felt was a miscarriage of justice. My family members were poor but honorable folk, and if you look at the level of civic engagement of such people, it is shockingly low. And so on that sunny day I drove back to Madison. It would be another eight years before I found my own internal strength about the murder and understood the power I had to ask for legal documents.

  By 2014, Shannon and I were getting desperate. Suzanne was getting older, eighty-five by now, and any chances of asking questions could disappear suddenly. We were grateful that the Internet was carrying more and more information each month. But time was running out!

  The ticking clock really motivated Shannon. She started by locating the Find A Grave website, and she looked for the younger son’s resting place. That’s when she discovered Suzanne had gone back to her birth name, Suzanne Brandon, something that now seems so obvious, but we hadn’t even thought of before. Shannon’s pursuit also unearthed Suzanne’s location and her daughter Louisa’s current name.