Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

When the van pulled alongside her and the driver beckoned her over , he had a kind of half smile , like he had gas . He looked like he was trying not to look nervous , which is exactly how you want your tricks to look . Too steely was scary . Too much to the point was a cop . Too twitchy meant he didn’t have enough of a bankroll or a hard - on , so you’d just be wasting your time and you might get smacked , to boot .

Looking in through the window , the van looked almost homey — staged , but homey . There was a Bible on the front console , a sleeping bag in the back . There were other bags and rope and odds and ends all over , all carefully stowed . There was even an audiocassette recorder down behind the front seats . The driver was clean and his belt buckle shined , although his stomach slopped over it , held tight by the too - tight shirt . His jeans were pressed and that shirt was dark — it was like his personal uniform . This was maybe an ex - military guy , or maybe private security . On second thought , maybe he was a cop or a cop - aspirant , but this was no sting — he didn’t want to bust her , he just wanted to get laid . He stated that he wanted sex and he would pay twenty dollars , no more .

Cops made sure you were the one to tell them what you’d do and how much it would cost — so , no , this was no cop .

Cathy McDonald had not heard a whole lot about the Riverside Prostitute Killer . The guy had been operating for years , a task force was pulling its collective hair out , and a German film company had even made a movie about it , based on the fiction that the killer really was a cop , but none of it had much to do with Cathy . See , Cathy was black , and the killer had only killed whites . A local newspaper had just pointed out that fact this week .

So , Cathy had nothing to worry about .

At least not until Bill Suff read that newspaper .

The German film crew goose-stepped into town about halfway through the killing spree. Like all foreign filmmakers, storytelling was going to get lost in political diatribe, and, to these particular filmmakers, this was obviously a story about a fascist, vigilante cop secretly terrorizing his beat, murdering hookers to scare the populace into granting the cops more power and authority in order to clean up the streets. This was a way for the Germans to pretend that the Nazis were all American now.

As noted, Bill Suff would later adopt this fiction as his “alibi”, much as O.J. conjured up crazed Colombian drug dealers.

In the meantime, since the task force wasn’t getting anywhere and the murders kept happening, the local press was hard-pressed to come up with daily angles for coverage, so they greedily glommed onto this low-budget movie production. No doubt Bill read about it in the newspaper—he read every article about the killings and clipped them out religiously.

So, when the papers indicated the location of the next day’s movie shoot, Bill showed up and blended into the onlookers. Pretty soon he started acting like he belonged there, like he was local security for the crew. He kept the onlookers at bay and he advised the crew on the closest and best places for late-night coffee and doughnuts. Later, once the errand boys brought in boxes and jugs of the stuff, the crew politely offered Bill a bite. He didn’t decline. Jelly doughnuts and crullers—even the crumbs were sweet.

Finally, after a few days, the film crew was ready to move on to the next location. They arrived bright and early, just after dawn, with all their big trucks of equipment and “honey wagons” for the cast. This was going to be the scene of a “murder”. A “local hire”— that is, a Riverside girl/actress—was going to play the corpse.

She never got the chance.

The Riverside Prostitute Killer had marked his territory the night before.

There was a real live dead body waiting in the weeds for the film crew as they arrived.

They packed and finished the movie in Germany. Publicly, they pretended that they believed their fiction had stumbled onto the truth and the killer cop wanted them out of Riverside; but, privately, the opposite conclusion obtained—the real killer was pissed that a cop was getting credit for something a clever civilian was doing. The killer wanted the difficulty of his work to be appreciated.

When Cathy McDonald’s nude , fully exposed body was discovered in a sort of dirt / rock field on September 13, 1991 , the task force was not happy . There was no doubt this was the work of the Riverside Prostitute Killer . She had been posed on her back , knees wide apart but feet bottoms together , arms outstretched crucifixion - style except that one hand was up and one was down , fingers fanned and pointing . She could have been showing off the latest kitchen showcase on The Price Is Right, or she could have been taking a formal stage bow , or maybe she was doing that ersatz “ Middle Eastern ” dance where the women slide their heads back and forth from shoulder to shoulder — it’s more of an old vaudeville routine than a real dance — Steve Martin doing “ King Tut ”. Whatever this pose represented , it was a new pose for the Killer , who seemed to be more whimsical with each outing . It’s hard to say whether it’s better or worse that Cathy’s face was exposed rather than bent back under and buried in the ground like an ostrich as had happened to some victims , but Cathy’s open eyes and the big bloody gouge through her neck suggested that the Killer had chosen to take more time toying with her while she was alive rather than just concentrating on posing her postmortem . Although the killing might have started out innocuously , dispassionately enough , something had pissed off the Killer , something had happened between victim and Killer after she was already in his clutches .