Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

For you will find that the killing is done but not over.

And the trial is over but not done.

Let the games begin.

If someone took you to the edge of the world and threw you off, the place you’d land in would be the town of Lake Elsinore, Riverside County, California,

Lake Elsinore is not a place where people go when they get lost, it’s the place where people wind up who are lost.

It’s a place where, once you’re there, you stay lost.

And then you die.

Actually, you were already dead or dying when you got there.

Not that anyone noticed.

Crank cookers, crooked crankers, bikers, people who’ve been abducted by aliens, everyone who wants to forget the past and anyone who wants to avoid the future—they make up the loose-knit population of Lake Elsinore, a place where if you say, “Morning, and what’s your name?” you’re more likely than not to get a tire iron rammed in one eye and out the back of your head.

A bar there was called Out of Luck, and what would be Main Street anywhere else in the world is called Lost Chance Road.

And the Lake is a boiling mudhole in the middle of endless, shifting desert.

“Ramshackle” is too kind a word to describe the housing there. Like the desert, people’s homes shift around in the darkness of night. Trailers, lean-to’s, corrugated tin shelters—you swear you saw ‘em one day, but they’re sure as hell gone the next. Or maybe you’ve just lost your bearings in the heat. Maybe the sweat got in your eyes and the heat waves got you dizzy and your nose led you astray because the place has no smell. Just a vague “ozone high” from the heat.

Even the dead bodies there don’t seem to smell. Desperately starving animals become corpses fast, and the sun dries out what’s left and bleaches the bones even faster. Within just a few short hours, you’re past the point where a coroner can run definitive tissue samples, by nightfall you’re mummified, and by the next morning you’re dust.

That’s why Lake Elsinore is a favored dumping ground for serial killers. Toss a body there, and there won’t be much left for the district attorney to identify, let alone make a case against the perpetrator.

Even better, because of the wide vistas and infinite horizon, you can dump a body so it’s never ever found, just another speck of sand in the desert, or, if you’re like Bill Suff, you can pose and position the body so everyone for fifteen miles around can see it at daybreak. For the serial killer with an artistic bent, the sweeping dunes of Lake Elsinore comprise a canvas where you can show off your deathstrokes without fear of compromise or comparison.

But I’m getting ahead of our story. The relevance of Lake Elsinore is not so much that Bill Suff dumped most of his many murdered prostitutes here; it’s that he grew up in this place, lived and loved and learned fear in this place.

And then he transposed Lake Elsinore into his mind so he could carry it with him everywhere—to Texas where he slaughtered his infant daughter, then back to California where he annihilated grown women for years—envisioning them all in elaborate masquerades and scenarios staged in the various secret places throughout and around Elsinore that had become for him a rich, robust, romantic adventure/fantasy/reality where life and death were not opposing points on a continuum but rather equal and simultaneous states of existence.

In Elsinore, Bill charged around on his flying steed, slew dragons, saved damsels in distress, made off with the golden fleece, and confronted, defeated, or at worst stalemated evil. Here, Bill found meaning in emptiness, saw visions in the night, and listened for the voice of a God which would batter him by silence. (God, like Bill’s own father, was to be feared not for what He did, but rather for what He failed to do.) But here, in Elsinore, Bill found his own voice. From music, to story and poetry writing, to cartooning, Elsinore was the place where this young man’s groin first tightened, where he became possessed of the temerity to feel he had the right to leave his mark on the world.

In 1967, when Bill was sixteen years old, his father, William Sr., dropped Bill’s mother off at work, at the coffee shop they owned, told her he was running down to the store and would be right back, and then drove to Michigan, where he remains to this day.

When I asked Bill how he felt about his father abandoning the family that way—a wife and five kids, Bill the eldest, leaving his mother to scrape and claw for a living before she met and married an order-barking, one-legged military man called Shorty, whom the other kids all think of as their “real” father—Bill told me he was angry at William Sr.

It is one of the few times that Bill has admitted to any anger or hostility toward anyone—most of the time, Bill preaches love and compassion more than Jesus Christ himself. But then, it’s natural that Bill would be angry at his deadbeat dad, isn’t it?

“I wasn’t mad ’cause Dad left,” said Bill, “I was mad ’cause he didn’t take me with him.”

Bill was mad because now there was no escaping Lake Elsinore. Now, like all his future victims, there was no way to escape himself. In his mind, he himself had begun to die, and, once he was dead, he was free to kill. It was only a matter of time.

My phone rang. My office is in my home, and the phone rings day and night because I do a lot of film projects overseas where their daytime is my nighttime and my nighttime is my best work time. Now it was late morning—Pacific daylight time—L.A. time. I was just recovering from brain death and getting refocused after a long night of writing and no sleep—it’s like having a hangover, but without the guilt. In fact, the more beat-up you feel, the prouder you are—marathoners have their walls, and couch potatoes their couches, but whatever architecture, furniture, or graven image you define yourself by, you push yourself to your physical limits and that justifies the limit on your creative work which you always wish was better and more courageous. See, writing comes from one place and one place only: from fear. You fear the world, you fear your marriage, you fear for your children and you fear them too, you fear yourself, and more than anything you fear what you write, but writing is the way you whistle in the dark and hold the fear in momentary check. And then, when you wake up in the morning and read what you’ve written, you simultaneously and contradictorily fear that you have no idea where these words came from or who could have put them there even though you want to make sure that the entire world sees and comprehends them and offers you thanks.

At all costs you want to be judged, but only if it’s a favorable judgment.

On the phone was my book agent, Barry Krane, calling from New York. He was, per usual, unconcerned about writers’ angst.

“There’s this guy Bill Suff the serial killer—his brother wants to sell the story. Talk to the brother and see if you’re interested, I don’t know if there’s anything here or not—let me know what you think. But don’t waste a lot of time on it.”

Don Suff is the brother. He’d apparently been in touch with the tabloid television show Hard Copy during Bill’s trial, and the executive producer over there referred Don to Barry. Now Barry figured I might find an angle on a story that was seemingly seamless.