Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

Ahem.

But my belief, as I told Bill in our first conversation, is that the circumstantial evidence against him was weak to nonexistent in any one of the murders with which he was charged, taking on a cumulative weight only when all the cases were tried together; yet reasonable doubt always hovers in the wings of a circumstantial evidence case, which is why the cops dragged in Rhonda Jetmore.

Rhonda Jetmore was the linchpin of the prosecution’s case. She was the one and only person who could point her finger at Bill Suff and say: “He did it—he tried to kill me, but I’m the one who got away.” The basis of this testimony was her claim that, in 1989, she had been hooking to feed a hard-core drug habit, had been flagged down by Bill Suff, taken to a boarded-up old abandoned building where she plied her trade, and had barely escaped with her life by fighting him off when he had suddenly turned on her and tried to strangle her to death. She even remembered his big BILL belt buckle.

However—and it’s a monumental “however”—after the alleged attack she left town, gave up hooking, finally gave up drugs, took up food, and put on about three hundred pounds, and only came back to testify after the cops tracked her down and showed her a pointedly suggestive photo lineup which included a current photo of Bill Suff that looked little like the man who’d supposedly attacked her all those years before. Her descriptions of Bill kept changing until they finally matched his present appearance and she took the witness stand, but her description of the BILL belt buckle was always wrong. You’ve heard of political assassin Dan White’s “twinkie defense”? I like to think of Rhonda Jetmore as “the twinkie offense ”—I think the cops and the prosecutor knew the way to her rather stout heart, and I think they all knew that, without a positive ID of Bill, he would walk.

Sorry to be so cynical, because as you know I am not maintaining Bill’s innocence, I’m just telling you—as I told him in our first conversation—I don’t much like the way in which he got convicted.

Bill greedily agreed with me, embellishing my points as we chatted, but what he never did was simply explain his innocence. He didn’t even try, and that really bothered me. All he did was try to argue away prosecution evidence by undercutting its weight or alleging conspiracy. Then again, maybe I’m asking too much. Maybe I can’t really put myself in the place of an innocent man unjustly accused. How dare I expect him to act one way or the other. Right? It’s just that I think I would be angry and determined to prove my innocence rather than just counter the prosecution’s arguments as to my guilt. It would not be enough to be acquitted; I would want to be declared innocent: so that I could truly have my life back, without the whispers and funny looks and “Sorry, we’re closed” signs swiftly turned to my face. If I were innocent, I would want the world to know it. I would stop at nothing to prove just how far away I was from any of these murders. And, the fact would be that the multiple cases would offer me more opportunity than ever to prove innocence—that’s the double-edged sword of trying serial murder in one fell swoop—you can wind up convicted even if you’ve been clever enough not to leave enough clues at any one crime, and yet if you can legitimately alibi just one of the crimes, the whole pyramid of indictment comes crumbling down.

Indeed, defense would be easy… if you were innocent.

But Bill has yet to come up with even one genuine alibi for any of the thirteen murders with which he was formally charged, let alone the others informally hung on him.

And when you call him on it, he flies straight into absurdity without passing “go”: “I have these close friends, the Schartons,” he said. “They live in Elsinore. Anyway, Florence—that’s Florence Scharton—she heard from a friend who overheard some cops talking about how the city’s prostitution problem was getting better because every time one prostitute was murdered, then a lot of the others would leave town. ‘Just like we planned it,’ is what one cop said. And Florence said there’s no question the cops themselves are killing the prostitutes in order to get rid of them.”

Now I didn’t want to burst Bill’s bubble, but this was nuts. I decided on a literary response. “Bill, you know sometimes when we’re trying to come up with clever mystery plots, we run into ‘the vault door problem’ without knowing it. The way that works, say you’re writing a story about guys who want to break into a bank, so you plan a wonderfully elaborate, high-tech scheme which has them tunneling under the street and into the vault during broad daylight. You know, they pretend to be a construction crew, and they shut down the street and use these amazing lasers and robots and stuff. Very clever.”

“Yeah? So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is the vault door is always open during business hours, so all the robbers had to do was walk in the front door and point their guns. You understand what I’m saying? Why on earth would cops murder hookers in the hope that it would drive the rest out of town? Why wouldn’t the cops just bust them and then dump them outside the city limits as the terms of a mass plea bargain? If you want to clean up prostitution, all you gotta do is do it, and you make a stronger case being up-front and very public about it. Let the media ride along with their video cameras, and the johns’ll stop hiring the hookers. In every city where they publish the names of johns arrested with hookers, the business dries up. Fast. Trust me—you got a ‘vault door problem’ with your Elsinore theory.”

The wind came out of Bill Suff’s sails, and he was audibly pissed, which he shows by forcibly evening his tone—never up and angry, tight-lipped instead. “Easy for you to say—you’re not in jail,” he said, and I thought that was a very fair and pointed statement.

But I was drained—it was two-thirty in the morning, and I’d worked at being vigilant and methodical, albeit candid and honest, for far too long as our conversation had progressed—so now I opened my mouth and proceeded to put my foot square in it, all the way down the gullet. You just never know when to say when, I guess. “Bill,” I said, “you’re well-read and you’re creative, and the way you’re going to save yourself is by making use of those attributes. Since it’s your life on the line, you know this case better than anybody, better than all the lawyers and all the reporters and all the victims’ families. So, you tell me, if you’re not the killer, then what kind of a person is he? What’s your profile of him, taking into account all the evidence? Who is this guy? Tell me about him and then we’ll go hunt him down.”

Dumb dumb dumb. I still cringe when I think about it. All the trust that had been built up exploded all around me. I’d asked a fairly obvious trick question, and Bill put me between the crosshairs and pulled the trigger without even a nod to mercy: “I wouldn’t have any idea about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t hurt a fly and I can’t even imagine what a murderer would be like or how he’d think.” It was an answer by rote, the standard response from someone whose fate had all too often been in the hands of cops and juries and jailers and parole boards. Name, rank, and serial number—that was all he was giving me—he’d totally shut down.

Of course, it would do no good to argue with him, to tell him that innocent people can well imagine and are manifestly intrigued by what killers might be like, while only the guilty refuse to discuss it out of fear that they might give away some truth about themselves.

In a backhanded sort of way, I considered Bill’s response—or better, lack of response—to be a victory for me, but the cost had been too high. I knew his first shot at me was about to become a fusillade.