Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

So, in humans, the females get the feathers and the charge accounts. In the case of the second ex-Mrs. Lane, she believed that shoes were the attractor of moment. Imelda Marcos was a K-Mart shopper compared to my ex. When we split, she had to rent a mini-storage for the seasonal overflow, and Polaroid stock skyrocketed as she cleverly slapped photos of the shoes on the sides of the boxes so she could differentiate between two dozen pairs of bone pumps. I had no idea that bone came in so many colors.

At the same time, human males are hopelessly lost. Most mistakenly think that they have to look good—a vestige of our lesser ancestors combined with misleading instructions from females—and only an insightful few males realize that looks don’t mean shit. How many times have you said “How in the heck did that troll wind up with that supermodel?”, as if you were surprised. The answer is not money or power or brains or brawn; the answer is that any male can still have any female if he thinks of himself as king of the jungle. The difference being that a human male can look like the jester and still be king because there will never be enough kings to go around, while supermodels have become pretty much a dime a dozen thanks to cable television.

I am no king. Neither is Bill Suff.

When I was a teenager, I went with my friend Rob—the one who died in the wreck—up to an Oakland As game, where I was determined to make a play for the adorable blonde ballgirl. Rob and I had press passes, field passes, courtesy of me conning the A’s management, and so we were on the field in ballgirl territory as the players warmed up pregame. I assumed that our mere presence on the field would bespeak “importance” to the girl, but I knew I could cement our relationship once she noticed how nicely I was dressed. I was wearing a handsome, plaid, cashmere sport coat, bought for me by my mother, who had told me that you need to look good, stand up straight, and give girls nice presents—the basic marching orders for Jewish males.

When my conversation with the ballgirl went nowhere—”Hi, how are you?” “Fine. Could you move so I can watch batting practice?”—I resorted to pointing out my fine sport coat. Rob pretended not to know me. The girl looked right through me, sport coat and all. Maybe another of those blue-winged demons had winged in.

Nonetheless, pathetic though I was and rejected though I was, I didn’t pull out a knife and gut the cute little ballgirl. To this day I’ve never even had a negative thought about her. If she’d responded positively to my “advances”, I know I would have later concluded that she was pretty stupid.

Subsequent dating and marriage followed a more complex pattern, but underneath it all was the same insecurity and the same misplaced reliance on packaging. Essentially, I bought two wives, paid for by vast amounts of money and even vaster amounts of physical and emotional caretaking, all for naught. There is no more foolhardy or just plain wrong mission than deciding that your only goal in life is to make someone else happy. It is a manipulative and terribly selfish motive, dripping in honey, and I apologize.

Bill Suff was an even more terribly shy youth, particularly when it came to girls, and he didn’t have a cashmere coat. He couldn’t even get close enough to girls to get turned away. How then could he gain their affection?

Bill did not have a plan exactly; he just operated on instinct, instinct that would later become a conscious pattern by trial and error,

A pattern that would bring him wives and girlfriends and women to murder.

Try this scenario: You’re eighteen years old. You go to the Rose Bowl for a high school football game. One bus you see is filled with a group of wayward girls from a church “home”. Your emotional antennae point you toward one girl in particular—you know nothing about her but you find her attractive.

Emotional antennae are weird deals. If you drop me into a crowded room, I will be instantly sucked toward people who lost their parents at any early age, I feel it as attraction, only later finding out anything about their backgrounds. Somehow they exhibit loss or pain that I instinctively want to heal, I dated a paralegal for a time many years ago, and, when I broke up with her, she sobbed, “But I thought we had a future together because you’d lost your mother and I’d lost my father!”

I was stunned, I truly had no idea that this had formed any basis of my attraction to her, but of course she was right. Suddenly I realized that my previous girlfriend filled the same bill. From that point on, I was at least wary of that particular parameter. But then how do you know when you meet someone whether you are attracted to them for good reasons or self-destructive reasons? As you get older, everyone you meet has lost a parent or two, everyone is suspect, everyone proves a letdown. At least when you’re younger and more insecure you can delude yourself into thinking that people have more to offer than they really do. You fictionalize them and relate to the fiction. Reality is always such a drag.

Anyway, Bill first met Teryl Cardella at that high school football game at the Rose Bowl in the fall of 1968. She was fifteen and he was eighteen, but he was too shy to speak to her. However, after a while he came up with a gambit that allowed him direct ingress into her soul.

Bill had dressed in a light blue shirt, dark blue pants, and a glitter belt for the game. He also had a gold sweater which he was carrying rather than wearing this early on a warm Southern California evening. He thought of himself as a sort of mysterious dandy, a kind of hip Johnny Cash, He also thought the outfit was more or less adult and authoritative. If he was too shy to speak, then the outfit could speak for him. Years later, in the Air Force, he would even come to be known as “Hollywood” because of the blue and silver glitter Nehru jacket he wore.

Too timid to hang around his peers at the game, unsure what to say to them, Bill cruised down to the front of the stands, by the field, where the ushers and security guards prowled. He struck up a conversation with one guard who was trying to tell him to go back to his seat.

“In all those blue clothes, you’re dressed a lot like me,” said the guard.

“I always wear clothes like this,” said Bill.

“You oughta head on back to your seat, son,” said the guard.

“The kids are pretty rowdy up there,” said Bill.

Just then, some peanuts, chunks of ice, and berries pelted down. Bill looked up into the crowd and spotted Teryl—she was smiling at him—she and her friends settled into their seats, acting like they hadn’t thrown the peanuts, ice cubes, and berries, but nonetheless wanting to make sure that everyone knew they had. “Tell you what,” said the guard to Bill (at least this is what Bill told me he said), “since you’re dressed like one of us—one of the security guards—why don’t you take charge of this section and see if you can keep these kids in line.”

And so Bill did—he became an ad hoc security guard for the night. And Teryl kept taunting and teasing him by tossing stuff to get his attention, and then acting all innocent as he scolded her. Then the minute he’d turn away, she’d climb up on the wall and grab some berries off the vines there, and she’d hurl them at him. They were going to mess up his nice clothes. Finally, he had a flash of inspiration. He went to Teryl and asked her—ordered her, actually—to mind his sweater for him. He gave her his sweater and she sat down and was a good girl for the rest of the night. Clearly, she liked the attention. She liked Bill’s attention. She liked that he would trust her with his sweater. By the end of the evening, she let him walk her to her bus and she wrote her address and phone number on his hand. Then she kissed him, just a peck. Her mates taunted her to give a real kiss, but, before she could respond, Bill did: he grabbed her, dipped her, and kissed her full and deep. Like in the movies. “Great kiss,” Teryl said. Everyone cheered. Bill Suff had never done anything so forceful, so impromptu in all his life. It was the happiest moment of his life.