The Book
Meticulously researched and documented, With One Shot by Dorothy Marcic is based on true events and recreates the murder of her uncle, La Verne Stordock, and its aftermath, on which the Man-Slaughter podcast is based.
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 neighborhood 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.