Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

My friends and family kept asking me if I was frightened at the thought of being alone with Bill unmonitored, but I have to say I wasn’t worried he’d try to kill me. Although he would have nothing to lose and was certainly plenty angry at all the world, I just didn’t see him hurting me. Perhaps this was my shortsightedness, since I just can’t relate to blind or irrational rage no matter how hard I try—I mean it just always seems so false to me when I see it depicted in film or on TV as some Charles Foster Kane trashes his wife’s room—it makes me cringe because I don’t quite believe it, Welles or not. He just seems to be thinking, Okay , as I reach to sweep everything off her dresser , what’ll look good for me to destroy next and how do I keep my best profile toward the camera ? In life, the times I’ve seen rage, it came across as entirely volitional and calculated. People do trash things, but don’t they have a purpose in doing so? As they’re flinging and stomping and punching, isn’t there a consciousness that says “I know exactly what I’m doing and even though it’s self-destructive and childish I’m going to do it anyway”? Isn’t rage more a matter of punctuation than text?

Paralleling this to other emotions and motivations, when you’re in the throes of hot sexual foreplay, doesn’t the thought cross your mind that you ought to reach into that drawer and get that condom even though you wind up letting lust overrule the thought? Bill had nothing to lose by killing me, but he had much to gain by treating me well—from legal advice to friendship to, most important, my telling his story in this book. So, no, I wasn’t fearful of him,

I was, however, worried that he would be a waste of my time, that he just wanted my company and would give me no legitimate or usable insight into his mind.

The Riverside guards put me alone with Bill in a conference room that doubled as the jailhouse law library. Before we did much else, I gave him a crash course in using a law library, so he could help himself with his own appeal. I also wanted to see just how smart he really was—not unexpectedly, he learned in twenty minutes what it takes most law students an entire semester to pick up.

And, as I moved around from bookcase to bookcase, I wanted to see how Bill watched me from his chair, how he moved, how he focused—I wanted to judge whether this was a man capable of concentrating on and mentally and physically overwhelming so many adult women without any slipups.

I remembered that years ago a friend of mine was working for a film director who’d gotten possession of two tiger cubs. I was invited to come play with the cubs, and they were amazing. Cute and cuddly and kitten-like, and then ZAP! a bird flitted out of a tree and the cubs’ eyes and ears snapped to attention and their claws came out. It was like someone had turned on a switch. And, just as quickly, the cubs became cuddly and relaxed again… except now I’d seen their true, instinctive, unalterable, predatory nature and I didn’t find the critters so cute and cuddly anymore. Even as cubs they could cause damage, and, six hundred pounds later, adulthood would make them downright terrifying and extra hungry.

So the question was, would Bill show his predatory nature in the context of me showing him the whys and wherefores of legal research?

Answer: yes. He listened and he learned, with a vengeance. Nothing escaped him. I saw him observing me as well as the law books and cases. He was the student, but I was the subject rather than the teacher.

Of course, being focused and judgmental did not mean that Bill was a killer, but then again, if he hadn’t been able to be so focused he certainly could not have been guilty of anything. If he’d been dumber or more scattered, he’d have to have been innocent.

Now I sat down next to him, mere inches away.

And I admit that, all the time we chatted, I kept looking at those ham hands of his, I kept imagining the sensations they had experienced. Those thick, stubby fingers had crushed throat cartilage, burst veins, torn flesh. They had killed grown women and they had killed a baby. What had that felt like? What was it comparable to? You know how people always say any mystery meat—from rattlesnake to dog—tastes like chicken? Well then, what does strangling someone with your bare hands equate to for those of us who haven’t taken that dark path?

I cannot even imagine, I don’t even like forming hamburger patties.

However, I do have to say that as I sat with Bill, I had the odd sensation of talking to him and being outside myself watching myself talk to him at the same time. I was trying not to be tricked into his world—I was there to manipulate him, and not vice versa—and yet I realized later that my paranoia and focus split me in a way not unlike the way Bill sees the world. I personally had no incentive to violence, but at that moment the world had become a different place for me simply because I was now looking at it differently than before. I was now in Bill’s world after all. The serial killer exists on multiple planes of consciousness and focus that require utter vigilance and complete emotional detachment at the same time. Killing results from a singular release/burst of pain, confusion, and concomitant rage that suddenly floods through this intricate, geometric, high-rise reality, not unlike orgasm I am afraid to say. And that is as close as I can get to seeing that murder could get you hard.

“Bill,” I said after we’d been talking for a while and he was starting to get anxious, seeing the clock winding down and knowing that our visit would soon end and his trip to Death Row would not be far behind, “let’s be real. Let’s say we get your convictions thrown out on appeal because it was prejudicial to try all these cases together. Then you get retried on the strongest case. So you get convicted of that last murder, Eleanor Casares.”

“And Cheryl Coker, too,” he said.

“Really?”

“I’m not saying I did it, I’m just saying the evidence—the evidence the police planted—is strongest in those two cases.”

“I see.” I wracked my brain to see what was most damning about Coker—both Casares and Coker were breast-removal cases—and then I realized what had Bill so concerned: Coker was the case where a condom had been found nearby. The DNA match to the semen in the condom was no big deal, it matched Bill but it was a low-percentage match. That is, it didn’t eliminate him, but it did include about a few million other people in the immediate vicinity, like most white males. So why was Bill concerned about it?

Because leaving the condom there had been a mistake. He’d been so careful in all the other killings, but this time he’d left behind actual evidence. Out of haste or neglect or arrogance, that condom had gotten knocked out of the back of his van when he was carting out the body to toss her and pose her atop the pile of branch clippings in a dumpster bay.

Bill had fucked up, and that made him feel out of control, and that made him feel guilty. Not guilty of murder, guilty of screwing up “perfect” murder.

Maybe this was one of the only times he’d actually even come during a killing rather than later. Maybe he’d lost his bearings and then lost the condom because the whole sexual experience with Coker had been so WOW! Certainly something had happened to take his mind off his meticulous post-homicide rituals during which he carefully stowed condoms, garrote, bonds, knife, and the other tools and trophies of his trade.

I eyed Bill—he was far away, no doubt back at the murder scene.

“The condom, Bill?” I suggested.

“Never use them. Can’t come in them,” he stated emotionlessly.

Right. So it was the condom that had him spooked. I decided to play along but press any other button I could find. “Maybe the right breast being cut off then, think that damns you somehow?”