Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

At the halfway mark along our highway, you run across in Cold Blood . You get Capote’s invention of “faction”, the nonfiction novel. A true story, investigated by the author after the fact, and then reborn as a character drama about what “certainly was” and “must have been”. A tapestry, not a report; threads spun from verifiable facts, but the fabric woven by the writer’s mind. The kind of story that jurors themselves create during deliberations in order to make sense of and judge the madness.

At the far end of the true crime panorama is Dominick Dunne, and all those stories that you know are true but the names have been changed and the author’s “improved” the drama for the sake of drama. Truth always has more power than fiction, but truth doesn’t always make for the best story because a beginning, middle, and end, and a nice, comfortable three-act structure, don’t always exist in nature. Dunne memorializes cocktail party conversations for five hundred pages.

Cat and Mouse falls somewhere between the nonfiction novel and the cocktail party conversation, although I do not presume for a moment that my work is on par with Capote and Dunne.

In dealing with Bill Suff, the convicted Riverside Prostitute Killer, I had unique access to people and material that the journal- ists couldn’t touch. More than anything, I had access to Bill himself.

My goal was not to improve the public record, not to be limited to facts that could be proved and verified, but rather to understand the interpersonal dynamics of these crimes. I was at all times more interested in people’s impressions, in feelings, rumors, and hearsay. I wanted to know what people really thought, I wanted to hear everything they would only say off-the-record.

What sparked me was the fact that Bill is a writer, and I wanted to create a book that would guide all of us in reading between the lines of Bill’s work, a dream that could only be realized if the book were freed from all constraints.

The only way to accomplish this was to inject myself into the proceedings, not because I’m so important but because you have to know my biases in order to judge my report. And, I think I rightly felt that I was living out a fantasy that everyone would like to indulge in if you could do so safely: I was going to walk into the den of a living, breathing serial killer, and I was going to see if I could get back out alive.

You will now get to see what I saw, and you will get to decide what you see.

Guilt or innocence is not the issue.

This then is neither fiction nor nonfiction. It’s “true crime” because the crimes are real, and it’s a “true” story because everything in it is what I believe, everything in it is what is “real” for me. Everything contained in this book is emotionally honest and tremendously candid, but its meaning is left to you.

As a moral and legal matter, I have to make a final point: I have written about Bill as a de facto serial killer because a jury has in fact convicted him. He is no longer entitled to a presumption of innocence.

However, Bill has at all times professed his innocence, and he is entitled to his appeals. There is no doubt in my mind that, aside from the question of true culpability, Bill’s arrest was unconstitutional, his trial prejudiced, and his death sentencing improperly argued.

Once arrested, Bill Suff never had a chance, and, as a lawyer, I’m not happy about that. The system can and must do better. We need to look long and hard at how we investigate and prosecute serial killers, because, in the rush to convict and close cases, we are leaving too many active serial killers out there, out of the reach of law enforcement.

But that’s another book.

In light of Bill’s appeals, please know that none of the “facts” presented herein can or should be used to prove the case either against him or for him.

There are no “facts” in this book.

Everything is impression, everything a personal conclusion and construct of my own, no matter the record or testimony or memory on which it is based.

When interviewing people, I took no contemporaneous notes, made no recordings, and shredded my outlines. All that exists of this book is what you now have before you.

Bill’s writings are presented unedited and uncorrected.

Brian Alan Lane

Los Angeles, California

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

While the world was consumed with the trial of OJ. Simpson and the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, there was another trial—a more important trial—going on just a few miles away.

That is, if you define “more important” by a higher body count.

Higher, much higher.

And, in the gradations of murder, if “important” means torture, mutilation, and cannibalism, then O.J.’s alleged crimes in LA. were mere misdemeanors compared to what had been going on down the road in Riverside.

Yeah, there’s murder, and then there’s murder.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

If you grew up in Los Angeles, you lived through “The Manson Horrors,” “The Nightstalker,” “The Hillside Strangler,” “The Free-way Killer,” and a host of other madmen and bloodletters, all of whom made you worry that it wasn’t safe to go out but maybe it was even more dangerous to stay home.

When these lunatics were running around, the cops got mobilized, the mayor begged for calm, schools closed, people set themselves curfews, security companies flourished, Dobermans were in, and earthquakes, fires, and floods were welcome relief.

At least you knew who to blame for the earthquakes.

So, after the murders of Nicole and Ron, when the cops didn’t set up a task force, and the mayor didn’t tell you to stay home and lock your doors, and property values in Brentwood didn’t go down (they went up ), it was a pretty telling sign that everyone who knew anything knew that the killings were personal—committed either by that maniac husband who then hopped an alibi plane to Chicago to play golf, or by those maniac Colombian drug dealers who presumably hopped their own getaway plane back to Colombia to play what? Soccer, maybe.

The Nicole/Ron killings were done before anyone knew that anyone cared enough to bother to commit them. And then the killings were done and there would be no more, no threat to the public at large—you could eat at Mezzaluna without fear that you were being stalked by “The Mezzaluna Mauler” and you could enjoy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream without concern that it would be found melting later by your back door as your corpse lay melting in the muggy night.

These killings had nothing to do with dinner, and everything to do with celebrity.

Which is why the O.J. trial consumed us, and the Bill Suff trial got lost.

Lost to everyone except all the victims, the victims’ families, the hundreds of cops who pursued the case for half a decade, and the population of an entire county that had long lived with the gnawing realization that the Devil himself was loose in their midst.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.