Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

Incredibly, once I opened myself up to living that nightmare, I felt alive again. I was no longer dead but alive; now I was just plain alive. Being dead had been a self-imposed exile—a critical part of me had been butchered off, wrapped up, and shelved because I was afraid, and yet the fear proved to be worse than what I was afraid of. But, for all those years in exile, I had done things, acted in ways that would have been different had I known how to come back from disintegration,

I suspect that it’s the same for Bill, even though he remains in denial and murder gives him the strength to maintain the mask. If, despite your worst intentions, the psyche tends toward becoming whole, then you must geometrically compound that which you must deny if you are to keep from ever facing your initial fear. So, as you act, as you become increasingly and necessarily more frequently criminal, the fantasy is more pronounced but the act is ever cooler, the focus more and more sharp.

Just think of Bill when he has his hands around a woman’s throat. If Rhonda Jetmore is to be believed (and she may well have been primed by specialists who led her into “remembering” how serial killers act), Bill was so focused on killing her, so lost in his fantasy plan, that it was relatively easy to snap him out of it by surprising him with a punch to the face. She didn’t just break his physical hold, she broke his glasses, his perception, and his concentration, and then he backed off and she escaped. After that, Bill added both a garrote and a knife to his repertoire, and no one ever fought him again.

Of course, fiction writers have to write it differently for the sake of drama, but the reality is that fantasy is tenuous, easily burst the more complex and circumscribed it becomes. Break Bill’s cycle, and he has to crank it up and start all over.

In the end, while I fully enjoyed my sexual acting out and was doubly aroused at the time when I realized I was not so anxious or guilt-ridden as to not become aroused, the acts themselves occupy a dreamlike, unreal place in my memory. It’s that they’re non sequiturs—they don’t fit in with the chronological, characterolog-ical line of the rest of my recollections, much like that business with the master’s degree. Accordingly, I actually have to remind myself that, yes, they did happen, I did do that—otherwise, I could just as easily be convinced that they never took place.

By the same token, when I lie back and flip through the stack of mental images, they are incredibly juicy, almost liberating. The secret of it is also exciting, as in any taboo.

For Bill, and others like him, it seems that the act itself is not enough. When my acting out was done, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there—I felt complete release, and later the pleasant memories were a total surprise. My acting out was a loss of control, and, once done, I needed to immediately regain control and get back to my life. I recall an adventure I had as a youth in Paris, a short time spent with an Irma La Douce in a seedy Pigalle hotel— trust me, she was in complete control and I was terrified and completely controllable, first desirous of paying to be with her, then ready to pay even more to get out. But Bill’s acting out is about his control, total control over the woman of the moment, and it is not complete unless and until he reconfigures the scene to create the memories he needs—he kills and then he uses the body to create his fantasy memory. His act is no release, and may not even really be arousing. Later, it’s arousing, but it’s not enough. He’s lost control when he’s not killing, so he will have to try again; while I, having acted out a forbidden fantasy and then regained control afterwards, don’t have any urge to try it again. My spell is broken even as Bill’s is all the stronger and angrier, yet we both have the exact same goal : we all move stridently in the direction of what will be for each of us control .

So, perhaps the only real difference between serial killers and us is that, for reasons experiential and genetic, they never don’t feel the terror of being out of control, while we take control—and serial killers—for granted. Much to our ultimate chagrin.

All through adolescence, Bill Suff was a big dork who played a big horn in his high school band. Speaking to the court just before his death sentence was pronounced, Bill even pronounced himself “a lovable nerd”. You’ve seen the pictures—this was not a guy who partied down or played around, and he was the first to admit it.

But, having savvy, grace, and cajones in a social setting has nothing to do with whether you’re playful and funny, and, were you to stop by the writers’ offices on any hit TV comedy, I promise you would find nothing but a collection of geeks and malcontents and guys whose formative years were spent “accidentally” overhearing variations on the line “Hey, who invited him ?” delivered sotto voce , more voce than sotto .

Yes, no matter how dorky, you get the last laugh if you have a sense of humor, if you work hard and overcompensate in order to accomplish while taking advantage of all those years spent observing, analyzing, and note-taking on the outside looking in. But bear in mind that no matter you’re the funny one, if you’re the writer rather than the performer, then somebody else is delivering your lines and continuing to get the public acclaim. You’re funny but you still keep your distance—humor is at once your connection and your insulation.

And Bill Suff is one of those funny, playful guys who didn’t much get into the game and has now learned to embrace that rejection. Accordingly, Bill doesn’t ever sit down and tell you a joke—he always maintains a serious facade that he thinks is only appropriate considering the unjust circumstances of his imprisonment. Yet, he constantly sets you up and manipulates things for the sake of maximum irony, for reaction, so that you live the joke rather than just hear it.

I told you about his “friendship” with murderer Jim Bland. Same deal when Bill first got to Death Row at San Quentin. “Made some new friends,” he excitedly told me by phone. “We’re real good friends now—William P. Bonin and Randy Kraft—ever heard the names?”

I thought for sure that Bill Suff was about to explode with laughter, but he never did. Of course I knew of William Bonin, L.A.’s “Freeway Killer”, so named because he dumped the bodies of numerous young men along our maze of freeways. And Randy Kraft was his own prize piece of work—when he was finally stopped and arrested for drunk driving, he would’ve been allowed to sleep it off and be released on his own recognizance in the morning were it not for the California highway patrol officer strolling to the far side of Kraft’s car to ask his passenger if the latter wanted to drive the car home rather than be towed. That’s when the officer noticed that the passenger was one very murdered Marine. It’s one way to drive legally in the “diamond” carpool lane, I suppose. Anyway, Bonin died by lethal injection just a few weeks after Bill’s arrival at Quentin’s “D” Block. Kraft is presently trying to fake a psychological defense for his appeal.

“I know all about Bonin, Kraft, and all the others,” I said. “Do they ever talk about their crimes?”

“Nope, never do—we all mostly avoid talking about why we’re here—it’s kind of an unwritten rule—you take a man for how he treats you here and now, not for anything he might’ve done outside of prison.”