Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

And I couldn’t wait to meet with Bill Suff to ask him all about it.

“I’ll tell you one thing, I know I can get him to confess for this book of ours,” Don Suff told me over the phone in July of 1995. “Even though he’s my older brother, it’s like he looks up to me and confides in me—always has. Yeah, I’ll get him to confess.”

“Well, that would certainly be newsworthy,” I said, “but, with all due respect, if Bill hasn’t confessed up ‘til now, then I don’t think he’s ever going to. Maybe he doesn’t really know he’s done it—on a conscious level.”

“Hey, Bill is not crazy.”

I almost laughed. Don Suff was righteously and angrily defending his brother’s sanity, as if it was better to be a serial killer than to be insane. Or, better put, Don was telling me that on the one hand, his brother was a serial killer, while on the other hand, no way could Bill be such a thing.

It was my first conversation with Don. It began with a lot of business talk and even more false bravado. Don wanted to clear the family’s name; he didn’t want anyone blaming his mother for what Bill had become. By the same token, Don wanted to air the family’s secrets for a price. “There are things I can tell you that no one knows. Stuff about Billy. Stuff about the family. We refused to cooperate with the prosecutors. We just tried to hold this family together, but this town has put us out of business just because we’re related to Billy, because we have the name Suff. I haven’t worked in months—I had a nonalcoholic youth nightclub, shut down by rezoning after Bill was arrested—they wanted me out. And my mom and my sister both lost their child-care and foster-care licenses. Anything the police and the politicians and the media could dig up on us, they did. Now I need to make some money so my mom and I can move out of town. How much you think we can get for this book?”

“Maybe I can get you on Leeza or one of the tabloid shows for an appearance fee, for some quick cash.”

“That’d be great. You really think so? We need like a thousand, maybe a little more, so we can move to Nevada.”

“I’ll make some calls. But in the meantime, let’s talk about Bill—when did you know that he was a serial killer?”

“Not until he was convicted, I wouldn’t believe it until then. I tried not to follow the trial, but every time I heard any of the testimony it seemed pretty convincing. I just didn’t want to believe it. I still can’t accept that my brother’s a serial killer. I mean, how do you accept something like that?”

“And you had no idea while it was going on all those years?”

“No.” A long pause, and then: “I used to see Bill all the time after he came back from Texas around 1984. He used to come visit me and my wife at home—sometimes he’d stop by and see her when I wasn’t there. Gives me the chills now to think about it— him alone there with her.” Another pause. “He used to bring her presents. Clothes and jewelry. Said he got ‘em at swap meets.”

“But they were from his victims?”

Don didn’t answer. Through the phone I could see him shaking. At Bill’s trial, the evidence had been circumstantial at best—this guy didn’t evade the authorities for all those years by leaving a lot of clues around; he was a very tidy and careful killer, no matter how brazen. But, the most damning items were the clothing, jewelry, and personal effects from the dead women—Bill had gathered these things up and taken them home, given them to his own wife or to friends and coworkers. His wife never seemed to ask why he would get her used clothes that weren’t her size.

“I was just thinking,” said Don, “I really hadn’t seen Bill for a few months and then he heard I was building the nightclub and he started hanging around. He was arrested just before we opened. I bet he was planning on using the place to pick out his victims. Can you imagine?”

“But he just killed hookers, right?”

Incredibly, the Riverside Prostitute Killer operated for years in the same place, enticing his victims into his van from their promenade along a short stretch of University Avenue. Of course, there were other victims in neighboring cities and counties, trials which still await Bill should his present convictions ever be overturned, but the amazing thing is that, despite tremendous public awareness and a massive multijurisdictional police task force, Bill kept driving along University Avenue in Riverside and the hookers kept hopping in with him. And everyone guessed that the killer had to be masquerading as a cop in order to get the hookers to trust him, but not until his arrest did the authorities discover that Bill worked for the county of Riverside at the materials procurement warehouse—he minded the store of cop uniforms,

“Well, Bill told me he used to go with hookers, even when he was married or had a girlfriend.”

“You’re saying he ‘dated’ hookers?” This had not come out at the trial, as far as I knew. Bill’s life and routine had remained a mystery. His hours and his days went largely unaccounted for. From old motorcycle accident injuries to hideous allergies and some curious phobias, Bill took off a lot of time for sick leave; and when he was working he regularly volunteered to ferry female work-release inmates for the city, or do earthquake preparedness demonstrations “in the field” at other city and county facilities, or otherwise find some semilegitimate excuse to be out and about in his van with its BILSUF license plates.

All this posed a particular problem for prosecutors. It quite literally made District Attorney Paul Zellerbach knowingly lie to the jury. In the case of the last victim, who had been killed at night and whose body Bill admitted discovering (not killing, merely discovering) in the dead of night, Zellerbach felt compelled to present false evidence that she was killed the next morning, just before noon. This “proof problem” was twofold: first, Bill’s admission was not admissible, coming after he had asked for an attorney and the cops had pretended not to hear, even though they were audiotaping the interrogation and had to have known that Bill’s defense lawyers were hardly going to be as deaf as they. (Or maybe not—maybe the cops really didn’t think anyone in their small, frontier town would dare defend Bill, let alone plead him innocent. After a repeatedly botched investigation over so many years, the cops swaggered around, arrogantly parading themselves and Bill before the media once they finally collared him and declared the case to be closed, trial or no.) The second aspect of the proof problem was that the dead woman’s sister was sure that she had talked with her sister by phone on the morning after she was in fact already dead. See, Bill’s movements were hard enough to trace, but his victims’ were nigh on impossible. Not only don’t the friends and relatives of junkie hookers know where the junkie hookers are or were at any given moment, but the junkie hookers themselves would be hard-pressed to log in with the right or any answer.

So Zellerbach was stuck with the sister’s mistaken testimony, because she was the only person who could identify certain items found at Bill’s as the personal possessions of the dead woman.

Hence, Zellerbach lied to the jury and Bill couldn’t cry “foul” without taking the stand to admit to something that supposedly the Bill of Rights protects him from having to admit to. And the wheels of justice ground on. Grind on, big wheels,

Don answered my question: “Yeah, Billy said he often used the services of prostitutes.”

This I found fascinating. It made some sane sense that Bill could kill hookers and then go home and not harm his wife, but what sense did it make that Bill killed some prostitutes but not others? Was there something about a particular girl—some way that she looked, some way that she acted—something that triggered Bill’s violence, or was it just that some nights he wanted to get laid and other nights he wanted to commit murder?