Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

My first wife was a schizophrenic. For a long time her doctors tried to define her condition without labeling it—she “exhibited agitated depression”, she “expressed bipolar behavior”, she “evidenced separation anxiety”—like somehow she wasn’t as bad off as she was because what she had didn’t have such a fearful name or a certain diagnosis. She just “wasn’t acting right”, as if her actions did not have a direct, high-speed conduit to a brain that needed some serious rewiring.

Her “condition” stayed secret because I was always home writing and the doctors could palm her off on me for continuous caretaking. Work made me reclusive, and she could hide while I worked. And the doctors could delusionally presume that, so long as she wasn’t dropped off on their doorsteps, then she must be reasonably functional. Out of sight, out of mind, out of her mind—it was all okay by them.

The thing was, I didn’t see how crazy she was either. It’s not just that I was with her so much I had no perspective; it’s that her crazi-ness made her focus desperately acute and her conduct effectively manipulative. Crazy though she was, she knew just exactly what to do and how to do it in order to cover things up for the longest time. “Crazy like a fox” is no fiction. My ex knew that only she was hearing those voices in her head, and she knew it was not wise to let anyone else listen in. No no no. Even when she tried to step out of a moving car at sixty miles an hour, she convinced everybody it was because they’d overmedicated her, not because God had whispered “Jump!” in her ear. As a result, the doctors cut back on her medication, if you can imagine.

I found out really how bad things had been for her and for me, in retrospect, after she was institutionalized and I looked around at the smoldering detritus of our so-called “life together”. But, the day I first knew that things had gone too far was the day I found myself, fully dressed, locked in the shower of the downstairs bathroom, eating two Taco Bell “Taco Bell Grandes” standing up, hiding, escaping from my ex as she pawed and knocked at the door, calling for me. For minutes and hours and days and weeks she had paced into wherever I was, called my name, and then when I’d looked up expectantly, she’d turn and walk out, only to return a moment later and repeat the process. Endlessly. She’d made it impossible for me to work, to watch TV, to eat, to sleep, to live. But it was not until I stood there eating those tacos in the shower that it occurred to me that, if the authorities came into my house at that moment, they would think I was the crazy one. In fact, I was. But, as with the moment of my brother’s death, my survival instinct suddenly took hold and snapped me out of it. That was the last time I ate tacos in the shower. It was also the last day I lived under the same roof as my first wife.

I don’t know that Bill Suff ever had such a moment, such an opportunity, such a bona fide crossroads. As I said before, I don’t much believe you have much choice in these things. Some people make it out of the wilderness okay, and others don’t, and the seeds for return and redemption are sown long before you ever get lost. I suspect that the day Bill killed Dijianet was the day he needed to tell Teryl that he’d had it with her betrayals and he needed her to get lost. Instead, he wound up partnered with her at trial. He couldn’t let go, and he still hasn’t. He hangs on to everyone, dead or alive. You run away, but he’s still there, sitting in the backseat, grinning at you in the rearview mirror.

Of course, arrogantly, I believed that my experience with my first wife had prepared me sufficiently for what would be my relationship with Bill Suff, convicted serial killer. I figured I could play cat and mouse with him, get him to reveal things to me that he wasn’t even willing to admit to himself. I figured I could see his manipulations coming, and I could either pretend to give in to them or else counter them, depending on my strategy of the day. It didn’t even bother me—although I was well aware—that I was objectifying Bill and about to treat him with the same detachment he’d had for his victims. Bill was a case study, not a human being— I didn’t need to care whether he lived or died, so long as he lasted long enough to supply material for this book. He was commerce, man—nothing more.

And Donny agreed. Once I’d sold the book on the basis of the pitch—“lawyer/writer plays cat and mouse with killer/writer”— Donny’s concern for content, for positive, revisionist family history, became a simple issue of “When do I get paid?” Suddenly, as far as his family was concerned, Bill “owed them”, and this book was the first installment of the payback. Donny was the only one in touch with Bill at that point—he swore he’d make Bill sign the requisite contracts, by which Donny would assume all of Bill’s rights and income and become owner of Bill’s writings. Then the publisher and I would make our deal with Donny.

But, until that happened, until all the documents were signed and initialed, Donny insisted he wouldn’t let me speak with Bill.

The problem was, once the contracts were slipped to Bill inside the jail, he balked. And Donny panicked—the miniseries was fading away. So, late one night in August of 1995, my phone rang.

“Collect call from…” said the chipper female monotone recording, and then a sing-song male voice, curiously spoken on a breath intake rather than exhalation, as if he was taking the words back rather than giving them up: “Bill Suff,” said the man’s voice.

At once I decided on a two-pronged strategy. First, as I saw it, “model prisoner” and “good son” Bill was responsive to authority. By the same token, his acquiescence in the face of superior firepower was dishonest. I knew that if I lorded over him, he might well say what I needed him to say, but I couldn’t trust it. You can’t trust anyone you put in a position of subservience. Bill’s only honest candor came when he had his hands around some girl’s throat— that was the real deal. However, if I backed off and didn’t have power over Bill in our interactions, he’d just take me for a ride and get grandiose with his lies. Of course, you’re probably wondering how this could even be an issue—I mean he was the one in jail, freshly convicted of a dozen homicides, and I was a free man who could hang up on him and change my phone number and disappear from his life if I wanted, so, by definition, didn’t I unavoidably have the upper hand?

What you have to understand is that Bill lives in a completely egocentric, childlike world. Everything revolves around him, just as any and every child thinks it does. His emotional growth stopped cold somewhere in childhood, and he’s still there. Everything that has ever happened or will happen is at once his fault or his credit. He is responsible for the breakup of his parents’ marriage; he is responsible for Teryl’s betrayals. As a child, when he cried, his mom and dad used to come running. So, when Dad ran out the door and all the way to Michigan, sans Bill, it must’ve been because Bill had proven himself an unworthy son. And Teryl had loved him and trothed herself to him and gone away with him and craved salvation from him even as she cared for him in sexual ways that no other woman ever had, all because he must have been doing something right. So, when Teryl up and cheated on him—for love or money— it was because he hadn’t been man enough for her. It couldn’t have been because she was a low-life, white trash whore whose own ability to love had been gutted by an incestuous stepfather. She had to be a princess because Bill knew damn well he was a knight in shining armor who wouldn’t have settled for a lesser mortal. And yet now the suit was rusty and the lance was limp and the princess was on the prowl and it was all Bill’s doing—everything in Bill’s world just had to be Bill’s doing, one way or the other. And so as everything he wanted to hold on to began to float away from him and out into space, as if the gravity had suddenly been turned off, his world no longer spinning certainly on axis, of course Bill had to desperately, voraciously seize control—control over life and death itself.