On Dorothy Marcic’s ‘With One Shot: Family Murder and a Search for Justice’
Marcic’s true crime study is a heavily detailed, research-laden exposé on a small town murder that left behind many questions.
Dorothy Marcic
Nonfiction | True Crime | 400 Pages | Reviewed: PDF ARC
978–0806538556 | First Edition | $16.00
Citadel | New York City | BUY HERE
I’ve been a fan of true crime since I was six years old, when the JonBenét Ramsey case first flooded the media. Since then, I’ve been hooked, voraciously ingesting everything from articles on criminal behavior to podcasts speculating over unsolved murder cases. While I am intrigued by all true crime stories, the narrative takes on a unique significance when the writer is someone who has a personal investment in what really happened. With One Shot chronicles Dorothy Marcic’s in-depth examination into the murder of her uncle, LaVerne Stordock, nearly 50 years ago, a crime supposedly committed by his wife, Suzanne, who got off with a shockingly light sentence. Although on the surface the murder looks like a cut-and-dried crime of passion, Marcic’s digging exposes a variety of holes, inconsistencies, and even cover-ups in the case, encouraging the reader to conclude that there’s more to this murder than meets the eye.
“‘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.”
According to her website, Marcic is an incredibly accomplished woman who has worked within academia extensively, which may contribute to the thoroughness of her research. The book is filled with charts, timelines, diagrams of the crime scene, and even a section at the end with photos of the prime players in the case. Readers who enjoy getting down and dirty with the details will appreciate the sheer volume of Marcic’s detective work and her dedication to going back over the evidence again and again to contextualize it within the framework of different theories. As I tend to be a reader who is drawn to works that are more economical in their scope, I found some of the chapters to be tedious, redundant, or just not particularly helpful to the understanding of the case. Oftentimes, it felt like Marcic included all of her research without considering how or if these details clarify the case for the reader. While I question whether this book needs to be 400 pages, or if the narrative would have read a lot cleaner with cuts and restructuring, I acknowledge that readers with a penchant for the intricacies might better appreciate the expansive quality of the book.
While many readers, particularly those with a passion for true crime, may be drawn to the painstaking effort Marcic put into exploring every angle to the perpetrator’s motive, I felt that some of these explorations were unnecessary or at least did not need to be explored in such depth. Marcic spends a lot of time delving into Suzanne’s background to illustrate her nefarious, manipulative nature, both before and after the crime; this is admittedly important, particularly when Marcic begins to point out a pattern of mysterious deaths other than her uncle’s, and this information serves to deepen the mystery of what exactly happened and why. However, there’s a balance to this, and sometimes Marcic goes a bit too deep into the why, compromising pace and cleanness of structure. As a means of furthering her credibility, Marcic takes a special course to get certified in how to identify psychopaths and then uses a whole chapter to lay out evidence supporting the theory that Suzanne might be a clinical psychopath; by the time this happens, this evidence has already been brought up multiple times in the book, and the theory is one that seems pretty obvious to the reader without this chapter spelling it out further. Likewise, the author dedicates a chapter to the throwaway theory that Suzanne might have suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. However, the most frustrating aside is Marcic’s fixation on discovering why men were so taken with Suzanne, because, according to the author, she really wasn’t that pretty; this sexist question is posed multiple times, and Marcic takes up precious time and space speculating over a why that does not matter for the purpose of the narrative.
“Accepting this new reality caused such dissonance inside me, forcing me to challenge deep beliefs about the integrity of Wisconsinites, that I questioned whether I could continue my quest. Would the price I had to pay inside myself be worth it in the end?”
In reading this book, I could sense the author wanting to do two different things: write a fast-paced true crime book à la Ann Rule, and write a more literary memoir-esque work exploring how the murder and writing about it years later affected the family. While Marcic is pretty successful in writing a true crime book that is, at its core, an interesting story, the injection of family drama did not feel purposeful, and it slowed the pace. Marcic is in a unique position, as she knew the victim and is part of the family that was so shaken by such senseless violence; for her, the emotions and the sense of tragedy are there, embedded within everything, and she might assume that an outside eye will experience the same feelings. For the reader, the various family members do not receive enough screen time or focus for there to exist that strong connection. Although Marcic tries to manufacture a sense of loss for the reader via such methods as including a long eulogy about her deceased cousin, Danny, and a letter directed to her cousin, Louisa, the technique falls flat, and I was left wondering if the manuscript could have been improved by a restructuring and more focus on family dynamics instead of the more superfluous theories.
“By this time I was in a Kafka story. But I knew good communication under stress meant staying calm, so I continued. ‘Your mother’s husband. Vernie.’ What I wanted to say was ‘You know, the fourth spouse? The one you or your mother murdered,’ but I didn’t think that would help me create a connection with David.”
Marcic is incredibly prolific, having written numerous instructional and informative nonfiction books as well as plays. With One Shot differs from her previously published work in that it involves evoking a narrative on the page, a difficult skill that requires an incredible amount of study and practice. It is obvious in places that Marcic is new to constructing this sort of work, and she deserves the utmost credit for exploring outside her regular genres. The prose reads as clumsy to me, however, because it employs amateur techniques such as breaking the fourth wall, posing rhetorical questions, or blatantly revealing future events in place of more subtle foreshadowing. On the flip side, because Marcic is so sincere in her desire to expose the truth, her style is very accessible and conversational, as if she is speaking directly to the reader; additionally, she is often darkly funny, and I chuckled multiple times while reading the book. I cannot say With One Shot has earned a place in my list of true crime favorites, due to its weaknesses with structure, pacing, and focus, but I am confident that other readers with a predilection for detail and accessible prose will find this read an enjoyable and intriguing one.
JEN CORRIGAN is a Prose Editor for Alternating Current Press and a Staff Book Reviewer for The Coil. A nominee for the 2017 Pushcart Prize, she is a graduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, and Fiction Editor for 3Elements Review. Formerly she worked as an editorial intern at the North American Review and served as a jury member for Mash Stories. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Heather, Apocrypha and Abstractions, The Gambler, Change Seven Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, The Tishman Review, Pithead Chapel, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere.
