Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

So I took the memory of this murdered woman into my care, and I wrote about her, and I did my very best to bring her back to life by inference and instinct and emotional connection, to fill out her empty file with what my heart told me had to be true. My ultimate goal: to make her real, to show the battle between her best intents and the fatal flaw of her addiction.

As much as I had spent a year in Bill Suff’s head, I now spent the next days in this poor dead woman’s heart.

And, may I say, it was a much warmer place to be.

But, as we published “Mind Games With a Serial Killer”, I did not know if my truth would ever prove to be the true truth.

And then it was.

There was the gangly young man shaking my hand and thanking me in the Geraldo hallway.

This was the son of the dead woman I’d written about, and he said I got it right.

For a writer and a human being, there can be no sweeter moment. To be connected to one’s thoughts, one’s words, and one’s fellow human beings about whom and for whom the words are intended—wow, that’s what it’s all about.

Shannon Harrison went through his own hell for many years after that handshake—a hell that was as ordained as his mother’s fate—but he’s come through it and out the other side, with his own story to tell, and to which I commend you when the time comes.

Meanwhile, his aunt—the wraith woman—lives in the fetid flurry of guilt and misunderstanding reserved specially for those who care but are left behind to wonder what they could have done differently to save the day.

Answer: nothing. You can’t change someone else’s fate, all you can do is care.

As for my caring for Shannon’s mom, I’ll let you find it in the book yourself. My only hint: the last chapter I wrote is not the last chapter in the book.

“Mind Games With a Serial Killer”. I think you will find it to be much more than that.

The first edition sold out within days of my appearance on “Geraldo”. Libraries bought a ton of them. And reviewer and reader reaction was fascinating. People who just wanted the usual “true crime” book were puzzled—sometimes pleased, other times pissed off. Individual readers glommed onto the book in deep ways. I got fan letters from readers who said the book had touched them and changed their lives. Survivor guilt was certainly a common chord, as was courage and also acceptance.

At the same time, two dark souls contacted me and Bill Suff to admit their predisposition to the path of serial killers, seeking our help and advice toward a different path. To his credit, Bill offered good counsel away from the dark and into the light. Like me, he realized these folks needed to be heard, needed to be told the truth. However, in Bill’s case, his truth was a lie: he gave good counsel because he wanted to try to make the case that he was not in fact a serial killer. Whether we successfully re-directed the dark souls, I don’t know. I believe one of them subsequently sought formal help and found a life in living rather than dying. As for the other, I wonder. When young serial killer Israel Keyes was caught in Alaska last year, and when it was revealed this year that he had hidden “killing kits” all around the United States and the profilers believed this was a new wrinkle, I referenced the “proud” revelation I’d had about Bill Suff in “Mind Games With a Serial Killer”, because one dark night when I was in his head I saw him hiding his killing kit (with its glitter paints and panties and leather-working tools and worse) behind rocks in a cave near the Orange County, California coast, and he was stunned and guilty when I confronted him about it the next day at the jail. I could not fully report this in the first edition of “Mind Games With a Serial Killer”, but Bill acknowledged that I was right, demanded to know how I knew, and refused to give me the kit’s location unless I told him what he needed to know. He wouldn’t accept the eerie truth that there were moments during the writing of the book that I could see out his eyes. So, I never found Bill’s killing kit, but eventually someone will, quite by accident, likely not knowing the dozens of sundered spirits it contains. But the point is that Bill’s killing kit existed even before Israel Keyes skinned his first pet. When it comes to serial killers, the profilers—and the writers—are always late to the party.

As for the formal published reviews of “Mind Games With a Serial Killer”, my favorite (from “The Boston Book Review”) loved the book but hated me. The reviewer insisted that this “masterpiece” had to be “accidental”, that I was that mythic monkey with a typewriter who finally wrote something fantastic, because it was just not possible for a TV and film script writer to intentionally write a book so wonderfully, insightfully twisted and savory. I have that review framed. When a major national reviewer says you write like Nabokov, you frame it.

Over time, as the creative non-fiction world expanded fully into true crime, “Mind Games With a Serial Killer” found a new audience and a stream of excellent reviews from both booksellers and readers, particularly in on-line reviews. As a result, even when out-of-print, the book re-sells and re-sells. The one thing I found is that a lot of the re-sold copies—particularly library copies—are missing the photo arrays of the bodies. People steal the photos. And, while those photos definitely triggered much discussion in their day, we now see such things every week on “Criminal Minds” and “CSI”.

In fact, immediately after “Mind Games With a Serial Killer” was first published, I was called in to every Hollywood film studio and TV network to pitch ways to bring more serial killers to viewers, and the whole arena has certainly had a boom time in both filmed fiction and documentaries. There just doesn’t seem to be a saturation point.

Do we wonder why?

Not really.

Secretly, it’s arousing to think that things are happening all around us that are secret and virtually random.

It’s not that we want there to be killing, it’s just that it wakes us up, focuses us, gives us a shared experience, propagated through television and new media. TV’s urgency has always been about disaster, visited on a few victims but tried on for size by the communal audience. Serial killers and spree killers are quite simply the best at amping our adrenaline and our cortisol because these creatures are active as we hunt them.

If only the real serial and spree killers were as entertaining as the ones we concoct for fiction.

After “Mind Games With a Serial Killer” was a best seller, I was asked to write about another killer, Glen Rogers (“The Cross Country Killer” or “The Casanova Killer”).

Well, I met with Glen on Death Row in Stark, Florida, and he told me stuff, and I got as far away from him as fast as I could.

Let’s just say Glen doesn’t have the flair for drama that Bill has. If you’re going to hang around with a serial killer, better to choose the one who says he’s innocent and is determined to convince you of it. Better to choose the one who has a keen grip on a robust life of fantasy and metaphor.

You wouldn’t enjoy your time with Glen, but everybody has fun with Bill.

Well, everybody who lives to talk about it anyway.

See what you think. Read “Mind Games With a Serial Killer” and let me know your thoughts.

Brian Alan Lane

November 2014

info@mindgameswithaserialkiller.com

As you go from left to right, there are three signposts on the road of the “true crime” story.

You begin with the “objective”, journalistic report and retelling. Newspaper clippings collected into chapters. The author a craftsman but a nonentity—his or her voice intentionally stilled in exchange for “truth”.