Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

0800 – Yard Call – 2ndWave, Last Out.

1300 – Recall – Sack Lunch – PB&J, Corn Nuts, Cookies, Banana, Cherry Drink.

1700 – Supper – Spaghetti, Pizza, Salad.

2030 – Phone – Brian – Appointment made for Tuesday. Mom – Will try to send pkg on Monday.

298th Day – Saturday – 8/ 24/ 96

0600 – Breakfast – Sausage, Tater Cakes, 2 Boiled Eggs, Doughnut, Milk.

0930 – Shower/Shave

1000 – Sack Lunch – Meat, Cookies, Pretzels, Peach, Cherry Drink.

1700 – Supper – Turkey Ham, Cheese Taters, Beans, Salad, Cake, Iced Tea.

299th Day – Sunday – 8/ 25/ 96

0600 – Breakfast – Waffles, Dry Cereal, Melon, Milk.

1100 – Sack Lunch – PB&J, Cookies, Corn Nuts, Apple, Orange Drink.

1100 – Phone – No answer at Brian or Florence.

1700 – Supper – Baked Chicken, Black Eye Peas, Rice, Green Beans, Salad, Ice Cream, Koolaid.

As you can see, “meticulous” is an understatement, “compulsive” is only half the story, and “obsessive” barely scratches the surface.

Bill Suff doesn’t just keep track of things, of everything, he sees things, details that none of us knows exist. He sees the forest, he sees the trees, he sees the leaves, and he sees the atoms that make up the leaves. He lives in a paradise of microcosm. Nothing is too small for him to fixate on, everything is relevant, and it’s absolutely critical to chart it. If Heisenberg said you can’t predict the exact location of an electron in its orbital shell at any given moment in time, then Bill would say “There! Right there! That’s where it is!”

And so it would be.

You keep track of things because they matter now and they might matter more later, because they keep the uncontrollable and the frightening from creeping across your consciousness now, and because you might need to know for sure what’s going to happen down the road.

So, you must ask yourself about Bill: With this kind of record-keeping, how come he couldn’t alibi himself for the times of the murders?

Zellerbach says that Bill dazzled his interrogators by his total recall of all of his life except for those times when hookers were being slaughtered. That more than anything convinced Zellerbach that he had his man even before the scientific evidence came back from the lab.

When I visited Bill in San Quentin, he gave me his logs. He told me they helped him keep his sanity. I suggested they were more indicative of sanity long ago lost.

Bill laughed.

During his time at San Quentin, Bill had become increasingly hardened to the notion of confessing and exploring a psychological defense. He’d convinced himself that he’d convinced people here at the prison—guards and convicts alike—that he was an innocent man. As I had suggested to him, he’d shown these people his writings and now they knew him as a different person than they’d expected. Of course, I simply want people to understand that there is a humanity to Bill, despite his deeds, while he believes that to like his writing is to like him, and if you like him then you believe he’s innocent.

It’s childhood mathematics.

“I’m in the middle of this hideous divorce, Bill, and my feelings are really hurt that my soon to be ex-mother-in-law—a woman I was quite close to for years—now she won’t talk to me.”

“Well, that’s understandable,” he said, “she’s got to take her daughter’s side.”

“I didn’t think you’d say that,” I said. “My position is that she can back her daughter without damning me. In fact, she can even believe all the lies her daughter tells her about me and yet still believe in me. You can believe in someone without having to decide whether you believe anything they have to say. So my mother-in-law can stay out of the middle, still defend her daughter, and still know me for the person I am now and always have been—a person she very much liked, a person she trusted with her daughter. You get my point?”

Randy Driggs had told me that he thought Bill had been more forthcoming with Frank Peasley because Bill didn’t like Peasley but he felt that Driggs was a friend. You didn’t just gain friends by being innocent, you lost them by being guilty,

“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” said Bill, “and I just can’t plead guilty to something I didn’t do. I’m not afraid to die, if that’s what has to happen,”

So that was it: Bill felt he was deemed an innocent man here in the world in which he now lived, and he would die an innocent man. Zellerbach and the cops and the judge and the jurors and the victims’ families—they would get their scalp but not their revenge.

“All right then, so if you’re not guilty, then you must have an alibi—out of all these murders, give me one alibi.”

“I can’t think of any that I could prove.”

“Then there’s only one other tack: if you’re not guilty, someone else is. Therefore, our task on appeal is not to try to refute evidence against you that even you admit makes you appear guilty beyond reasonable doubt; no, our mission is to point the finger at someone else who could be guilty of even one of these murders. If we can legitimately inculpate someone else for just one murder, then the whole house of cards will crumble because there wasn’t enough evidence in most of these cases to convict you, you just got convicted of them all because they were all lumped together. Put up a dozen photos of dead girls, and whoever’s in the defendant’s chair gets the death penalty.”

“Donny,” said Bill Suff, “my brother, Donny.”

“Donny?”

“There were red hairs found on one of the victims—I don’t remember which anymore. Donny’s got red hair.”

“You really think Donny’s capable of murder?”

“Yes. He was convicted of raping that prostitute in Las Vegas, so it’s not a big step up to killing ’em.”

Don Suff—he was definitely guilty of trying to cash in on his brother’s infamy, but he’s just not a serial killer. Don’s like the little birds that sit on the backs of hippos—they wait for crumbs to float off the hippos’ teeth and they munch bugs out of the folds in the hippos’ skin. These birds are nothing to aspire to, but the hippos’d probably miss ’em if they were gone. Or not. It’s hard to know if they evolved to their station or just flopped there and got overlooked when nature took a head count. But what was interesting here on the human side of the fence was that Bill clearly had a mad-on for brother Don, and this was the passive-aggressive way he was handling it.

“You mad at Donny because he wanted to sell your van to that guy that collects serial killer memorabilia?” I asked.

“I’m mad at Donny ’cause of what he said on Leeza ” said Bill.

In October of 1995, Don and Ann needed money. I was friends with the then executive producer of Leeza , and so I pitched her the idea of doing a show where the serial killer’s family would get together and make peace with the families of the victims.

However, the victims’ families refused. Instead, the show became “My Son Is a Serial Killer”, starring Don and Ann along with Mr. and Mrs. Dahmer. Don and Ann got $1000 and a night at a posh hotel for their trouble.

It was the highest rated show Leeza ever had, and, once it aired, Zellerbach and the victims’ families demanded their own “Victims Talk Back” show so they could go “on air” and call all the Suffs every name they could think of.