Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

“Except for child killers, right?” I queried.

It was a nice little jab, I thought. “Riiiiiight,” said Bill slowly and cheerily as if he weren’t a child killer, dragging out the word, trying to buy time to think all this through before the conversation continued, and then: “Actually, it’s child molesters that have problems in jail.” I know he thought he’d parried back pretty well, but what he didn’t notice was he was suddenly speaking on the inhalation—it’s what con men call a “tell”, some unconscious action that gives away what you’re really thinking, that proves you’re worried even though you’re saying you’re not—and it occurred to me that maybe Bill wouldn’t be able to fool a polygraph, after all

“What about Bonin’s impending execution—he ever talk about it?”

“Yeah—some—he’s hoping it won’t happen.”

“It will—he’s out of appeals and he’s not a real sympathetic character—even the anti-capital punishment people have a tough time standing up for him,” I said.

“Well, like I said, I like him—he says he didn’t do it,” said Bill.

“Riiiiiight,” I said. “So when you’re alone, you guys don’t talk shop? You just compare notes on how you all got framed?” You could hear I was smiling.

Bill lowered his voice out of the reach of his tier-mates: “Maybe Bonin’s guilty, I don’t know. I just know the guards who’ve gotten to know me keep telling me they don’t understand why I’m here, because now that they know me they know I have to be innocent. I don’t ask them, they just volunteer that.”

“And you think they’re serious?” I asked. Out of the 440 or so guys on Death Row in California at that time, only a handful were serial killers—it’s rarefied air, the top of the pyramid for felons trying to show they’ve got The Right Stuff. My goal with Bill has always been to make him see that I truly do accept him for what he is, so it would be cool for him to discuss it all with me. The only way he’s going to get off Death Row, legitimately working an insanity plea, is to be candid with the world about what he did. I firmly believe that even the families of the victims will back off some if only Bill would give them their closure. Closure through disclosure. But San Quentin was dummying him up. Time and distance from the crimes was dummying him up. He’d pretty much confessed to me, shown me inside his world back when we’d met in person in Riverside in early October of 1995 as he waited for and worried about the death sentencing, but now that it was a reality he wasn’t so scared anymore. Assuage Bill’s worry and the truth goes with it.

“We can talk about all this when you come up here in person,” said Bill insincerely, changing the subject since it hadn’t exactly gone the way he’d planned it. So much for his little “surprise”, his “joke” about his infamous, newfound friends. That’s the thing to remember about Bill: if you don’t play along with him he doesn’t take his ball and go home; rather, he backs off and lets you run the show. He can be controlled. This is a man who causes no trouble in a controlled environment. In fact, he thrives there.

“He was a pleasure to deal with,” said Randy Driggs.

“But he didn’t give you any help preparing the defense,” I pointed out.

“I meant, unlike my other clients, I never had to worry about Bill sticking a pencil in my ear. He was never violent, never aggressive. Hell, every other client I have, even their mothers bark at me and get in my face threatening I better get their sons off or else.”

“And Bill’s mom—Ann?”

“The only client’s mother I ever had who didn’t insist her son was innocent. She just insisted she was innocent.”

“Any problems dealing with Bill?” I asked the guards at the Riverside lockup every time I visited.

“Nope” was always the answer. “Oh, he complains about things sometimes, gets impatient, gets kinda stubborn when you interrupt him while he’s reading or writing, but we never worry he’s gonna cause trouble or get violent. He’s just not like the other prisoners. And he’s definitely not like what we expected when they first brought him in. Sometimes it’s hard to believe he is who he is. He always tries to be real polite and respectful.”

“You know that when he’s out of jail he’s always gone around pretending to be a security guard or a cop, right? Guess he identifies with you,” I would say.

“Heard that,” the Riverside guards would say, oddly complimented.

“Surprised?” I asked.

“Maybe,” they’d say.

On the other hand, the guards at San Quentin are surprised by nothing, and they’re a whole lot less awestruck by their charges. “No, he’s not like Richard Ramirez, he doesn’t try to kill us every time we get near him, but a guy like Suff you gotta watch every second because he puts on such an act of acting cooperative.”

“So you watch out for Richard Ramirez because he’s out of control, and you watch out for Bill Suff because he’s totally in control?”

“All these serial killers—they’re totally different from the rest of the prison population. These guys have their own agendas— secret agendas—in their heads. And they’re patient—time passes differently for them. Maybe, for his own reason, for reasons none of us will ever understand, Suff wants to get over to that water fountain over there. He might wait a year, five years, ten years, but I promise you there will come a moment when he makes his move to try to get to that water fountain. So you gotta watch out. You don’t know what a serial killer is up to, but you know he’s up to something, and today might be the day he goes for it, just because you let your guard down. Other convicts—they want to escape, they want to have sex, they want to hurt somebody. Serial killers—whatever they do, there’s another reason behind it, there’s always a bigger picture. Everything they say or do—every single thing—it’s all a lie. You never look the other way, particularly when they treat you like a friend.”

“Bill says sometimes he gets called on the carpet by the assistant warden—he just gets rousted out of his cell, hauled into some conference room and told he’s a sex offender and a murderer. Then he gets sent back to his cell. What’s that all about? Just trying to rankle him, see if you can push him to fight back?”

“Serial killers get too comfortable with the discipline here. They’re smarter’n us. They learn the rules, they follow the rules, they expect that’ll give ’em freedom to plot whatever it is they’re plotting. So you gotta throw ’em for a loop now and again. You gotta let ’em know that the rules aren’t the rules, the rules can change any damn time we decide to change ’em. You gotta remind ’em that they’re the prisoners and we’re the bosses. They tend to forget that.”

The voice of experience—no bumpkins among the San Quentin guards—day in and day out, these guys live with Bill Suff— and serial killers are not like other guys . So, the questions remained: can any of us ever really understand how serial killers think? Is there any kinship? Are they even human? Why does some inner voice keep telling me that we’re all closer than we want to be?

“I think you’re gonna be surprised by me,” Bill has said to me on several occasions, teasing me about something he’d written which he wanted me to read and respond to.

The first time was the first draft of the speech he was going to give at his sentencing, and the surprise proved to be his request that, if he was executed, then his organs and corneas should be harvested for transplant so that both his life and his death would not be in vain.