Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

Driggs bore in on the DNA, blood, trace, and tire track evidence, and he and his investigators and experts feel to this day like they pretty much rendered it all moot. Of course, the jury felt otherwise, but they’d decided they felt that way long before the evidence was ever presented.

As for Peasley, he tried to walk a tightrope. If there are no more than six degrees of separation between any two people in the whole wide world, then there were no more than one or maybe two degrees between Bill Suff, his victims, the cops, and the jurors in this case. Riverside is sprawling but close-knit, and Peasley knew for certain that it would backfire big time to invoke the usual defense strategy of putting the victims and the cops on trial, so he smiled and scowled and sat back and let the prosecution put on its case with virtually no objection. Throughout the first half of 1995, prosecution witness after prosecution witness took the stand, and Peasley didn’t even bother to cross-examine. Even at this breakneck pace, this was going to be a long trial—eight months—and Peasley wanted each witness in and out of there without any clash or histrionics that would be memorable come deliberations. Peasley wanted the jury to think that these witnesses weren’t important enough to cross-examine, that their testimony amounted to nothing. He also wanted the jury to feel that he’d been a good guy in letting the prosecution attempt to make its case unimpeded, and so it would hardly be fair when the hotheaded Zellerbach later objected to every bit of defense testimony.

And, finally, Peasley and Driggs both wanted to give the impression that they weren’t worried about the prosecution’s case because they had a solid and stirring defense soon to be revealed.

Of course, they were bluffing—they had less than nothing to offer in defense.

From the beginning, what they’d desperately wanted was some sort of insanity defense. That would have at least given them something to try, something to make the jury go out and think about. But the psychologists and neurologists, the ink blots and CT scans, all came back negative, giving no basis for claiming insanity.

The problem was Bill Suff. He acted functional and sane, and he didn’t want to go along with any insanity plea. He wanted to argue the evidence, which someone ought to have realized was a pretty darn insane idea, and the closest he ever came to confessing was just a suggestion of the possibility to Dr. Michael Kania, the psychologist who told him he’d feel better if he told the truth.

“Which is?” inquired Bill.

“There’s no question you’re guilty,” said Kania.

“I don’t know that,” said Bill. “But then I’ve had blackouts since my motorcycle accident. I suddenly wake up sitting in my van parked in a parking lot somewhere and I don’t know how I got there or where I’ve been the last few hours.”

“Then you’re willing to admit that you could have committed the crimes during these ‘blackouts’?”

“No.”

“But you could have?”

“I’ve never killed anybody,”

In retrospect, Bill didn’t need an analytical psychologist who wanted to fit him for clinical indicia and then try to help him get well; he needed a guy with a blowtorch, a can opener, and a scalpel, determined to peel back each layer of the onion until the rot fell out for all to see.

You might well want to insist that insanity shouldn’t be a defense, but you just can’t seriously maintain that Bill Suff, serial killer, is a sane guy. He doesn’t kill in cold blood for money, jealousy, hate, wantonness, or other “understandably evil” reason that applies to the particular victim; he kills somewhat random but always objectified victims who fuel the compulsion and lust over which he has no control. And, as always marks the truly insane, he lives in complete denial of his insanity and is therefore unable and unwilling to help his own defense at trial.

How can it be right to try a man for his life when he acts like the trial isn’t happening and he spends his time writing a cookbook instead?

Under the law as it now exists and has existed since we adopted and adapted it from the English, Bill Suff should not now be on Death Row. Neither should he be walking the streets.

So, as I review Bill’s “nightmare” letter, I accept that it is at once a confession and a lie, proof of both his rational cleverness and his underlying insanity.

In the dream, a woman is being chased and Bill is running with her in order to save her. But, at the last, she looks up and sees the horror about to pounce. This is where Bill stops recounting the story. What happens next is all too obvious: Bill sees himself reflected in the woman’s eyes. He is the horror. He means to be her protector, but he is in fact her killer. She has been trying to run from him, and he’s not about to let her go except in death. This exactly defines his take on his relationships with his wives, his mother, his father, his brothers, his sisters, his children, and his murder victims. Bill means to save them all, to be their hero, but he always winds up failing them and they try to abandon him, their love now dead.

This “nightmare” is therefore very real and really insightful as to Bill’s unbalanced state of mind.

However, the clever lie is that it’s no nightmare.

I believe that Bill consciously truncated the story in its re-telling in order to make it seem like a nightmare which snaps him awake at the moment of horror. While I am amazed that he would trust me so much as to give me even this small piece of the puzzle, he’s not yet ready to trust the whole truth to anyone outside of himself. And the whole truth is that this is not a nightmare at all, it’s a fantasy memory. The “nightmare” letter is really a letter to “Penthouse Forum”. Big Bill Suff lies back in his bunk in the dead of night, many nights, and he consciously, intentionally, gladly, lustfully remembers the chases and the murders, the posed and positioned freeze-frames, the glossy centerfolds he created—some more exciting than others but all of them something to be proud of—and the man gets himself off.

That’s what this is all about.

So, when you waltz through the words and pictures in this book, try to think about them that way, as Bill would, try to see what Bill sees, try to feel what Bill feels.

I know I tried, and I came perilously close save for that last, unbridgeable, quantum leap between sexual perversity and actual murder.

What happened was, I would speak to Bill late at night, and then I’d go to bed and have nightmares. Now, I don’t usually have a problem with nightmares—that is to say, I kind of like them. I’m pretty good at remembering my dreams, but my nightmares I know in every detail. When I wake, I take time to mull them over, to try to understand what pea was under the mattress of my psyche the night before.

Luckily, my nightmares have never been particularly nightmarish—the most recurrent is a rather tame affair, more disorienting than frightening. It always takes place in the present, when I suddenly “realize” that, although I was awarded my Master of Fine Arts degree years ago, I still have courses to go back and take. It’s like I was given the degree in error or on faith, and I have yet to really earn it. I guess I feel like I’m some sort of hoax. In the nightmare, I am embarrassed and never quite able to “get it together” enough to go take those courses and complete my obligation, no matter how hard I try.

The reality is that I was working on my master’s at the time my mother and brother died. After “the accident”, I took a one-year leave of absence from school. In fact, I took a longer leave of absence from life. Talk about fugue states—I still don’t remember those years in any organized, systematic way. It’s like I just jumped from a memory here and an event there, with huge gaps in between. Not even a haze, just big blank gaps. And although I’m pretty sure I went to graduation and got my master’s one particular summer, I note that the framed degree on my wall is dated some six months later. I think that maybe my course work was done and degree earned that summer, but there was some technical “residency” requirement or “dissertation study” units that had to be accounted for later. I vaguely remember something like that. In any event, it unnerves me to think about it awake or asleep. It is of course just the tip of the iceberg for the real nightmare of the accident, which I guess I can’t bear at all, even after all this time.