Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

So, I knew Bill was going to be noncommunicative as to any-thing that mattered, and I also knew that, when he did communicate, his goal was not communication. Rather, it was control.

See, when Bill was first arrested and stuck in the “old” jail, the authorities decided to bunk him with Riverside’s other notorious accused, Jim Bland, who had kidnapped a young girl, taken her to the shack he’d prepared for the purpose, and then methodically raped, tortured, and mutilated her before finally granting her release unto death. Or maybe she’d actually died before he’d finished everything he had planned for her—we’ll never know.

I was aware that Jim and Bill had become fast friends, and Bill delighted in telling people so he could watch them cringe. In fact, I was sure that most of the time when Bill said something—anything—it was to see how his listener would react. You can tell by his writing—both its content and presentation—that, at all times, he considers audience reaction. He’s always experimenting, trying to find buttons he can push, trying to evoke a response. All writers do this, but Bill does it for a more sinister purpose. He’s not trying to connect, he’s trying to gain control. It’s a test— if you react at all , you lose —and he keeps a scoresheet so he knows how best to get to you the next time. However, it occurred to me that if I could keep myself from reacting to his lead, but yet otherwise proactively present myself with emotional honesty and candor, then I could legitimately gain his trust. Or, at the very least, maybe he would find me to be a worthy opponent who would take a while to conquer. I correctly suspected that this was a man with whom no one ever dealt honestly and emotionally, going back to his youth. I might well pique his interest by treating the poor bastard the way he and every human being ought to be treated, even though he was more certain than ever that, due to his crimes, no one would dare treat him that way. He’d become a self-fulfilling prophecy, doing bad acts that perpetuated the very pain that crippled him. I hoped that if he couldn’t read my reactions or if they threw him for a loop, then, for one of the first times in his life, he might well inadvertently project his own feelings outside of his killing fields.

Anyway, that was my pop psychology approach. What the hell, I couldn’t do any worse than all the lawyers, doctors, and psychologists who’d gotten nowhere with him over the years.

“Press 1 to accept the charges, or 2 to say no,” said the recording on the phone.

I took a deep breath, sat up in my chair, felt my heart pound, and pressed 1 on the keypad. A click, and: “William, nice to meet you,” I said.

“William? That’s my father, not me. Call me Bill,” he said. He has a sort of jolly chortle to his voice even when he’s trying to be serious, but I could tell that this time he was trying to break the ice and yet remain on guard.

The line gave a couple of odd, ominous clicks. Originally voluble, now Bill got real quiet. I heard him draw a breath to say something, but I cut him off before he could—I wanted to show Bill that, even though I meant business, I was going to be his protector first, and that he and I had a unity of interest in that intent.

“Hold on a minute, Bill, I want to give a notice here. To anyone who’s listening in on this line, my name is Brian Lane and I’m an attorney licensed to practice in the State of California. Bill Suff is my client, and anything we say to each other during this phone conversation is privileged and confidential. More to the point, if you are listening, you shouldn’t be—because you are violating Mr. Suff’s rights and you may very well be responsible for getting his convictions overturned .” There was a pause, silence, and then suddenly the loud clunk-click of some eavesdropper disconnecting. Where there had been some static before, now the line was clean.

Bill laughed. “I was just about to warn you about that. But that’s the first time they ever hung up.”

I laughed too. A moment later I heard my office door slam, followed by the bedroom door just across the hallway. Apparently my wife didn’t much appreciate that I was having a laugh with a serial killer after midnight.

“They’re not allowed to listen in on you, Bill—that’s ridiculous,” I said.

“There’s a lot of things they do here that they’re not supposed to,” said Bill. “Didn’t you follow my trial?”

“I have to admit, I got hooked on O.J. and you stopped making the papers here in L.A. I remember when you got arrested, and there was never any question you did it, and then I heard you were convicted, and here we are,” I said.

“Yeah, here we are,” he said.

“Look, Bill, before we get into all that, I want you to know that the reason I want to do this book is because I admire your writing and I think we can talk writer to writer. I read ‘Tranquility Garden’ and some of your other stuff, and you’re damn good. Your writing tells me that there’s a side to you—a complexity—that never came out at trial. It tells me that, no matter what the prosecutor and the jury say, and no matter what crimes you’ve committed, you are a thinking, feeling human being that we should all take the time to get to know. I also think that if you and I talk about your writing, you’re going to discover things in it about yourself that even you haven’t recognized before. At least that’s the way my own writing is for me.”

“You liked my stories, huh?”

“I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you they’re brilliant—I am going to tell you they are professional and they show promise and they made me want to see more, and that’s not something I say to very many writers. I get a real sense that you work hard at your craft and you take on new storytelling challenges with each new piece, and that tells me you have the talent and the heart of a true writer. Anybody can write, but not very many people are really writers. And clearly you had to teach yourself to write, so you’re not just mimicking a bunch of lessons people get in school.”

“Thanks, I really do care about what I write.” He seemed genuinely humbled, and humility is definitely not one of Bill Suff’s usual personas.

We then proceeded to discuss and analyze “Tranquility Garden”—it was written when Bill was in jail in Texas, and it was his first short story, although he’d dabbled with poetry and incomplete writings when he’d been in high school. “Tranquility Garden” represented the first time Bill really believed he had the right to write, the right to memorialize some part of himself and expect others to pay it mind.

And, I have to tell you, all this discussion with Bill was embarrassingly normal and professional—I could have been talking to any of my non-murdering writer pals except for Bill’s almost endearing trait of occasionally mispronouncing some sophisticated word. It’s not that he uses the word incorrectly, it’s that he says it wrong. His vocabulary is vast and growing, but I realized that he’s picked it all up by reading rather than through conversation, so he’s simply never heard many of these words spoken. There’s never been anyone in his life intelligent or erudite enough to trade bon mots with him, and I can only imagine how he’d pronounce “erudite” or “bon mots”.

During our chat, Bill even freely admitted that “Tranquility Garden” was about him, about his lost love. But, when I brought up the letters he’d sent to Teryl’s parents—“I am dead now. I am alive, but I am dead.”—he swore he didn’t remember writing them. He wasn’t denying their sentiment—he actually paused to think about it and then agreed that this was probably an accurate assessment of his emotional state back at that time, but it perplexed him that he couldn’t remember having expressed it to anybody, let alone written it down and mailed it off. In any event, he insisted that he didn’t feel “alive but dead” now, he simply felt alive and misunderstood. Then he quickly and nervously changed the topic to his favorite reading and his latest writings. Science fiction, fantasy, swords and sorcerers—he was a huge fan of the “Pern” fantasy books written by Anne McCaffrey, and he was just beginning to write just such a fantasy book based on a dream he’d had.