Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

The profile said he wouldn’t kill women he knew. But, while Kim Lyttle rejected him directly and got her comeuppance, Darla had inadvertently trod into the very heart of Bill’s need to kill.

Darla had weaseled her way into Mom’s life. Darla and her daughter had supplanted Billy Boy in Mom’s field of view. Bill hadn’t gone out looking for Darla that night, and he’d tried to forget her transgressions for years, but then destiny had placed her squarely in his path, in his headlights, and the killing clothes were on and the graveyard was waiting, and he knew he had to live up to his fate.

Other victims were friends and acquaintances of Kimberly Lyttle and other hookers that Bill dated. He didn’t really know these victims, but he would have looked familiar and okay to them when he stopped to pick them up, and that just made things easier. “Hey, guy, you know Kim, right? What’s your name? What’d you have in mind? How much you wanna spend?”

It all makes sense in retrospect, right?

We should have known .

But we couldn’t have known. The most crucial piece to the puzzle, the enigma that is Bill Suff, is that he is not who he is.

No profiler in his right mind could have had the slightest inclination that the Riverside Prostitute Killer was a sensitive, spiritual, loving, passionate, caring, childlike person who could well express himself and gain a large measure of release through his writings. When maintained in a confined and disciplined environment where creativity is the only allowable release, then Bill Suff is harmless. The Bill Suff I know, the Bill Suff that Zellerbach knows, the continuously incarcerated Bill Suff who was tried and convicted for murder, is in fact not a murderer.

There is no profile for that guy, because that guy is an innocent man.

The Prostitute Killer only exists when he’s back in a world big enough and free enough to incorporate his fantasy universe where women must be sacrificed to a higher and more complex destiny over which he alone is master.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

But rest assured that Bill Suff is now a statistic which the profilers will use to help them better pinpoint the next Bill Suff.

And there will be one.

According to the profilers, there already is.

It’s just a matter of finding him.

Whenever possible, I tried to draw Bill into discussions about sex and his sex life. I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, but, at trial, the prosecution had made a big deal out of some hearsay that quoted Bill as saying that he hated prostitutes and would sooner kill them than fuck them. In fact, if you remember, it was Bill’s brother, Bobby, who gave the testimony. Somehow it sounded sensible, seeming to explain the unthinkable, but everyone who knew Bill knew that Bobby was lying and just wanted an excuse to take the stand and squint into the spotlights. Bill’s trial was a bully pulpit, and sibling rivalry reared up with fierce determination. It just wasn’t fair that Bill was getting all this attention , thought Bobby, prepared to assume any position that anyone with a video camera wanted to see and hear. For me, talking about my sex life is unnatural. Well, maybe not unnatural, let’s say uncomfortable, let’s just say that I keep it to myself and figure I can only get disheartened if I compare notes. In fact, in my experience the supposed macho male locker room chatter doesn’t much happen. The only guys I know who partake are gay but closeted, and they seem to think that if they do this unintentional parody of talking about hammering this or that “babe” then no one will realize they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Accordingly, since I’m not a big “sex talker”, I can’t really judge Bill’s talk. He always seemed to enjoy the opportunity to talk about sex, and, once he got started he seemed to go on and on, even though it was pretty conservative stuff. It may well be that he was just trying to convince me that all his sexual inclinations were perfectly normal and hardly those expected of a serial killer. Or, as a prisoner who hadn’t been with a woman in years, talking about sex in any context might have given him a needed release.

I won’t dwell on what he told me, but, for those of you taking notes, he loves to give head to a woman but worries about receiving it. Apparently when he was in the Medical Corps they picked up a guy who’d been bitten off down there, and Bill’s been squeamish ever since. Straight sex, missionary position, that’s his bread and butter, or so he says. I already mentioned his distaste for condoms, and he insists he’s not prone to any particular fantasies, fetishes, or experimentation.

Of course, his first wife, Teryl, disagrees. She swears all he ever wanted was to be sucked off, and he took her by force, fury, and punching power whenever the urge struck. She swears he bites, burns, and has all sorts of nasty little needs.

And the Riverside Coroner will tell you that the Riverside Prostitute Killer definitely left his mark with teeth and cigarettes, in addition to the carving knife.

But what I ultimately wanted was to spark Bill’s sexuality. Forget the talk, I wanted to see what his sexual reactivity was. I wanted to see if he had normal impulses or if perhaps rage and other aggressiveness and weirdness would slip out.

So, one day, when I was alone with Bill in the Riverside jail, I snuck in a photo of Coco. She didn’t have any photos where she was wearing clothes, and in this one she was stretched upright, like she was climbing an invisible but obviously massive beanstalk, twisted and smiling and looking back at the camera, flexed to maximum effect. Man, she had great musculature. And she was, by coincidence, exactly the sort of woman that Bill had described as his “dream woman”—very young, with blonde hair, small breasts, etc., etc. I wanted to see how Bill would react—would he slaver and lick his lips, would he ask to keep the picture, or would he grab it and eat it or stuff it down his pants or wipe his ass with it or shred it into a million pieces? Who the hell knew—anything was possible.

All my non-serial-killing friends had been quite impressed by the picture and had asked for copies—they were the control group for this exceedingly scientific experiment.

Didn’t Masters and Johnson start out this way?

Interestingly, Bill reacted to the photo just the same as the controls. He was appreciative and clearly attracted. I can’t swear it, but I know his own “Johnson” shook off its cobwebs—Bill shifted in his seat, in his prison jumpsuit. However, no serial-killing, evil-incarnate, sick motherfucking monster man came out and introduced himself. All that happened was that, after his initial receptivity, Bill quickly became concerned that the guards might see him with the photo, so, after visibly committing it to memory, he gave it back to me and asked me to put it away.

“Now that’s exactly the kind of girl I like,” he said.

This was another of those times when I felt like I was the pervert. I mean, what sort of man thinks it’s really fun and exciting to show a picture of a naked girl to a serial killer?

Later, I got my redemption—as I’d hoped, Bill brought up the picture.

“You know,” he said out of the blue, “that was a very nice pose for that girl.”

When you read Bill’s letter to me recounting his brushes with death, you will find that he describes the out-of-body experience he had due to the motorcycle wreck. He describes how he floated over his crumpled body and entered the tunnel of souls that would open onto heaven. However, forget about the mystical and spiritual aspects of his story. Focus instead on his exquisitely precise, geometric, figurative, long winded, word drawing of the exact positioning of the molted body he left behind on the ground.