Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

“Riiiight,” he said.

Bill’s conduct in Riverside included numerous acts that would constitute violations of his Texas parole, so he is toast one way or the other. That was why it’s so morally easy to help him with his appeals—Bill Suff is going to spend the rest of his life in jail somewhere, bank on it. He will never again walk the streets and be a danger to anyone.

“Tell me a little about Texas,” I requested.

Bill proceeded to recount how violent the place was, how a new young inmate, in for the short term on a drug offense, was brutally and repeatedly gang raped until he killed himself. Apparently the guards were bribed to leave unlocked the appropriate cell doors so that the cons could get at the boy each night.

And, where Bill worked, in the computer center, inmates were in charge of inputting State and County filings into the State mainframe database. That is to say, no more tinking out license plates. Now prisoners were given stacks of files that contained records of property transfers, deeds of trust, automobile registrations, driver’s licenses, welfare benefits, marriage licenses—every kind of State and County filing respecting the assets and property and ultra-personal doings of private citizens.

Of course, the prisoners would secretly jot down the names and addresses of anyone who looked interesting—people who had rich homes and expensive cars—that way, when you or a friend got out, you’d know just where to go to steal the best stuff.

Nice work if you can get it.

“You know, Bill, I listened to these other tapes, too—what’s the deal? They were obviously made in your van—I can hear you opening and closing doors, shifting into gear, accelerating, braking, traffic around you, your radio ‘on’ playing music, and then there’s you talking with Cheryl at one point—she clearly didn’t know she was being taped—you weren’t talking about anything important.”

“Don’t remember taping Cheryl, but I could’ve. See, I drove around a lot for my work, as you know, and, well, I love music…”

“Yeah?”

He was thinking, trying to come up with an explanation. There were indeed hours of tapes of Bill just driving around. Clicks on the tapes told me that he had recorded over them repeatedly. I played them for an audio expert and he thought he could recover some of the underlying, earlier tracks, but it would cost a lot of money I didn’t have. Plus, maybe I didn’t want to know the truth, particularly if I was right. I’d been able to keep my emotional distance by telling myself that the crime scene photos were fake and staged and the people in them were actors or wax dummies—“Naw, these people were never really alive, so now they’re not really dead”—kind of the inside out version of Bill’s thinking—but if I actually heard one of these poor girls screaming on a microcassette tape, well, I don’t even want to think about it.

However, if we ever find the killing kit, don’t bet that there won’t be tapes in it. Like Nixon, Bill very much sees himself as significant to posterity and certain to be better understood and appreciated then than now.

“The deal with the tapes was…” said Bill, “… well, see, sometimes I’d hear a song on the radio and it’d become a favorite of mine but it wouldn’t be on the album so I couldn’t buy it.”

“So you’d tape the radio playing all day long, and that way you were certain to catch this song at some point?”

“Exactly.”

As you know, sometimes I would back off Bill when the conversation got a little Alice in Wonderland -ish. But not this time.

“Let me understand this—you’d tape the radio while you were driving in your van where it was noisy and you could barely hear the song on the tape later, rather than, say, taping the radio at home.”

“If I was in the van taping, then when I heard the song on the radio I’d know where to find it on the tape. Otherwise, I’d have to listen to the whole tape.”

“Bill, I say again: you could have done all this better at home, and it makes no sense that you didn’t, other than it makes no sense that you would do any of this in the first place.”

“It makes sense to me. Didn’t you ever tape things off the radio?”

This is where Bill hopes to get you, when he finds the points where his world intersects with your own, where the parallel universes flow together and so what he does seems acceptable because you’ve done the same things. Sort of.

He was right—as a kid in the days before VCRs I’d used my audiotape recorder to record off of radio and TV. I’d taped Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for slain brother Bobby. I had Dick Enberg’s call of the Rams blocking a Packers’ punt and winding up in the play-offs for the first time since I started following football. And I even had the audio portion of a TV retrospective of the Army-McCarthy hearings.

But all that was experimentation—I was just playing around with my new tape recorder, my first tape recorder, trying to figure out what good it was. And, after a weekend or two of making such tapes, I never did it again. Tape recorders were for specific purpose, where people intentionally talked into it, for interviews or at family get togethers or if you were doing some creative skit or such. You didn’t just turn on a tape recorder and leave it running and then keep the tape like it mattered.

However, if I really thought about it… yeah, my brother and I did tape the radio now and again, to get new songs since we could hardly afford to go out and buy every record that got released and since you sometimes liked a group’s single but knew you’d hate the rest of the album, and since, in those days, the pop playlist changed almost daily and you might decide some song was your favorite song only now they weren’t playing it anymore. Then it would be good to have a tape of yesterday’s playlist.

And, suddenly, I realized I was looking at the world through a child’s eyes. All this seeming logic was kids’ logic. It didn’t apply to adults and it didn’t apply to modern times, to the computer and CD age. I was seeing the world through Bill’s eyes.

See, Bill Suff isn’t just living on another planet, he’s frozen in time there. He truly did stop living a very long time ago. Dead, but alive. Alive, but dead. Something happened to him in his youth, and his emotions, his worldview, stopped maturing. So his reactions and his emotions—his ability to love, his feelings of rejection—are as a child feels them, in black and white, utterly good or bad, supportive or devastating.

This explained why, when Bill was caught red handed doing something he shouldn’t have been doing—taping people secretly in his van—the best lie he could come up with was a child’s lie. He was supposedly taping music off his van radio even though he prided himself on the stereo, the computer, and all the other state-of-the-art electronic goodies he had at home.

But emotional immaturity still did not explain why he killed people. Being a kid did not make you a killer. Something ugly had flown into the mix, and I still didn’t know what.

“Bill, maybe you were taping yourself in the van, okay? Maybe it’s just part of your record keeping, your diary.”

“Kept that on my computer,” he said matter-of-factly.

According to Bill, his last apartment—with Cheryl—was neat, tidy, and organized, but according to everyone else it was a mess. The eye of the storm was his computer. It was his lifeline, his connection to our world, and he spent hours on it daily. He wrote his fiction on it, he kept his thoughts and philosophy on it, he played games on it, and now he was telling me that he kept his diary on it, too. He’d become proficient on computers in Texas, and then expert in Riverside when he was a computer salesman for the Schartons before girlfriend Bonnie Ashley made him quit since he had so obvious a crush on Florence Scharton.