Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

Not to be overly Freudian, but we’re all locked into childhood impasses in various ways, I will always remember my father, driving me from the hospital where my brother was comatose, on our way to my mother’s funeral, at a moment when I finally expected this World War II Silver Star hero to be crying, only to find that he was angry and self-righteous instead: “When your brother gets out of the hospital,” he said, pounding on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, refusing to turn toward me, “things are going to be different. I’m in charge now !” In the same breath, he was blaming my mother for our tragedy and himself for allowing her to put us in harm’s way, as if he could have prevented that tire from blowing at high speed. He couldn’t accept that his life had just been turned upside down by pure accident. To him, his failures as a husband and father were what drove my mother, my brother, my best friend, and myself to be on the road that fateful day without him. And, of course, she’d foolishly had faith in me as a driver, whereas he never would have. All my poor father could think of were all the times he didn’t somehow find a way to make peace with my mother, to make her happy, to make her love and respect him for all time. He desperately wanted control, and now, absurdly, in his grief, he was asserting it over someone too dead to notice. This from a man who had what can only be classified as a “normal” childhood under the auspices of loving parents. Apparently “normal” includes plenty of unresolved “stuff”. Apparently good intentions and love are not enough to save any parent from a kid’s ultimately critical regard.

But, again, it’s one thing to have unresolved “stuff” that makes your own life less than wonderfully happy, and quite another to be landlocked in a way that makes you into a serial killer. The stress of my mother’s and brother’s deaths brought my father’s guilts and neuroses to the fore, and, I think, made him own up to things once the grieving was behind him sometime later. It’s been many many years since “the accident”, but I recently asked him if I could see the legal files which contained the various investigative reports as to the facts of the matter. My father told me that he’d thrown out the files some months ago, after an earthquake collapsed the shelf that contained them, but then he blurted out: “But why would you want to see them? It wasn’t your fault .” He had apparently found a way to forgive himself, and me along with it. In that respect, I fear he’s come farther along than me.

In the meantime, Bill Suff continues along as the most guilt-ridden “innocent” man in history. He insists he’s never ever been guilty of anything, but you can feel the weight of the world— his world —on his shoulders. And you can read it in his writing. He’s positively imploded, like a star collapsed into itself, a black hole. Now nothing can escape him, not even light—no wonder he can’t find himself when he looks—he’s infinite mass, too solid to be visible, defined only by his pull on the heavenly bodies that try to slip by. And, when he was in jail in Riverside for all those years before and during his trial, the authorities there only added fuel to his nuclear fire. They actually expanded the domain over which he rules.

When he was arrested, Bill was first imprisoned in Riverside’s “old” jail while the new one was in the final stage of construction. The jailers were naturally worried about having this monster in their midst. The Silence of the Lambs was in theaters at the time, and I’m sure they thought they had their own homegrown Hannibal Lecter in custody. No one in Riverside really knew how to contain Bill, or rather their image of Bill. This was a guy who had eluded capture for years. This was a guy accused of killing more than a dozen women in this county alone, and there were other cases awaiting indictments in other counties. So penal anxiety ran rampant. While in jail, should Bill be shackled all the time? Should he be allowed to mix with other prisoners? Would he try to escape? Would he try to kill himself? Or would someone try to kill him, thinking it would be a commendable and noteworthy thing to do or else at least serve as some revenge for victims’ families who had ties to both prisoners and jailers in this relatively small community?

The conclusion was to prep the “new” jail specially to house Bill Suff.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever visited a jailhouse, but the fearsome claustrophobia you feel is as much the result of the tight quarters as the continuous, unnerving, unholy din of hollering, jabbering, and just plain noise that prisoners make, calling to each other from one cell to the next, all day long, a million conversations and complaints trumpeted all at once, interrupted by the occasional blast of orders from the guards over the public address system or the resonating clangs of doors opening and closing and the thud of footsteps as guards make their rounds. To a man, prisoners will tell you that the noise is the worst part of prison life. You can’t sleep, you can’t rest, you can’t think, and, even if you’re deaf, your body vibrates from the shock waves.

However, in an amazing demonstration of blind codependence, claiming that they were doing it to make the jail guards’ jobs easier, the Riverside County authorities quickly handed Bill a “cell” that was really an insulated, oh-so-quiet, private, walled room where he could be free from the noise, the taunts, and the prying eyes of both inmates and guards alike, and, in that room, that “apartment”, Bill was given both a color television set and a phone which he could use at all hours of the day and night. For his various allergies, aches and pains, and other real and exaggerated ailments, Bill had continuous access to the infirmary and the staff doctor, or else the nurse would bring him his pills in his room. This accused serial killer—arguably the worst criminal the county had ever encountered—had free room, free board, free medical care, free phone, and free TV. He probably could have gotten HBO if he’d asked. In all his life, he’d never had it so good.

And, of course, it went to his head. Now he knew how important he was. Now he knew that he’d worried needlessly all those years about being caught. He was a bigger deal in prison than he was in the outside world, and it only confirmed his egocentric view of things. Now, when people wanted to see him—and there were plenty who did—they had to come to him. This was his turf—he was the king on his throne— he decided who he would tune in or tune out, and, insomniac that he is, he could amuse himself till all hours, reading, writing, making phone calls.

So I knew that, when I would first be in contact with Bill, his view would clearly be that I needed him more than he needed me. And that meant I needed to find an opening to prove him wrong, otherwise I would just be a passing diversion for him. I needed to segue from diversion to lifeline in his mind if I was going to get anywhere with him.

The second prong of my strategy that first night I spoke with Bill was to connect with him in a way that was unfamiliar to him. I needed to throw him off his stride, yet keep him intrigued. I knew that he’d dummied up on his lawyers and everyone else who’d tried to get close to him. A lot of words came out of Bill—spoken and written—but none of them ever amounted to much in terms of revealing his true emotions.

“Wait’ll you meet Bill—he’s really something,” Randy Driggs, Bill’s codefense lawyer, had told me in his disarming drawl. “He just chats and rolls along like none of this is happening.”

At trial, Bill’s lawyers couldn’t even tell if he was listening to the testimony, no matter that lethal injection was the prosecutor’s goal. Sometimes Bill’d surprise Driggs and Peasley by passing them a written note, but usually it had nothing to do with what was going on at the time, and all too often it contained some fiction that he’d decided to float—like back in Texas when he suggested the CIA conspiracy. “It’s not that you’d call him uncooperative,” said Driggs. “He went happily to all the doctors and psychologists and everybody else we asked him to see, and he couldn’t get enough of all our meetings and trial preparation, but he was non-responsive in that, no matter what issue was hanging fire that day, he’d just smile and say he was innocent and talk about the cookbook he was writing. He didn’t give us any help; we basically prepared this defense in a vacuum.”