Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

Ann has no idea why Bill can’t remember the funeral other than the experience was too upsetting for him.

Not long thereafter, William Sr. fled.

Soon enough after that, Bill married Teryl even though she was pregnant with her stepfather’s child.

After giving up that child, Bill and Teryl had children of their own—first Bill Jr. and then Dijianet. Teryl was always cheating on Bill, and during their fights she would tell him that his kids were not his kids and that blood-typing proved it, even though their resemblance to him was undeniable.

Bill Jr. was repeatedly and severely beaten until he suffered permanent brain damage. He was taken away from Bill and Teryl after they were arrested for killing Dijianet.

Had Bill’s Riverside jury seen the autopsy photos of Dijianet, there would have been no need for a trial. There’s a big tall tree out front of the courthouse and plenty of stout rope in Riverside, and Bill would have swung and everyone would have gone home and slept well that night.

In fact, I still don’t know how Bill Suff, child killer, survived prison in Texas and ever swam back to Riverside—that’s a Papillon-like feat. But that tells you just how truly innocent seeming the captive Bill is.

During the two and a half months of her too short life, Dijianet Suff had had virtually every bone in her body broken, all in various stages of healing and damage—she’d been beaten from the first day she came home from the hospital.

When she died, there were cigarette burns found on her feet, and bite marks on her arms. On her head was the hemorrhaged outline of a man’s hand—even Chris Darden could’ve made that outline fit Bill Suff.

In Dijianet’s stomach, the coroner found Kool-Aid and spaghetti.

But, what killed baby Dijianet was a ruptured liver. It had been exploded. Someone had squeezed her around the middle like Pop-eye bursting open a can of spinach.

Bill’s next child, Bridgette, by second wife Cheryl, was mercifully but too late taken away by Riverside child welfare authorities after being hospitalized for a blood clot on the brain and all sorts of broken bones in late 1991. She was just three and a half months old. Like Bill Jr., she too suffers from permanent brain damage caused by the abuse.

Incredibly, Bill Suff was allowed to go on with his life and his murders even while under investigation for child abuse, even while on parole for child murder.

Bill said then and says now that both his wives were lousy mothers—”They’d always let me nurse,” he smiles, “but never the babies.”—and he blames a family friend and a photographer for Bridgette’s injuries—the friend tossed the baby playfully and hurt her ribs; the baby fell on the floor and lifted up her head and hit the bedframe; her wrists were fractured when the photographer posed her with her sweet little head perched on her hands and looking at the camera.

At least the CIA wasn’t involved this time.

But the question remains: How did all this horror come to pass?

And the answer seems to be: one horror at a time.

Building, building, building.

No smoking guns, no one to blame—no one, that is, except the monster himself. Nothing went wrong for Bill Suff until he went wrong, and that probably happened inside his head, happened to his worldview, long before he acted out in any way that would bespeak it.

Randy Driggs explains it thus: “Piss-poor protoplasm.”

It was in the gene, man, maybe the same gene that makes Bill truly drunk on nonalcoholic grape juice or deathly ill from drinking just plain coffee or allergic to grass and pollen and life itself.

Because, growing up, nothing happened to Bill that hasn’t happened to innumerable people, none of whom became serial killers. But, once Bill began to perceive horror and once he began to commit horror, there was no turning back. Once he was swelled with guilt, he was as good as dead, dead but alive, and fantasy took hold.

Could something have happened that would have saved Bill from the horror?

Maybe in a parallel universe, but not in ours. Bill’s salvation is his creativity; his writing channels the monster within, holds it at bay, allows his humanity to come to the fore. Locked up in jail, there is no monster, there is only the writer, but ours is a universe where you don’t get locked up until you prove you don’t belong out there.

More’s the pity, for him, for us, for his victims.

The air was chilly and the ground was moist and smelled like dirt. That fresh, crisp, thickening smell that tickles the insides of your nose and plumes its way into your head just up behind your eyes and somehow makes you feel really alive. Not like flowery smells, not all fake and syrupy and swallowed rather than inhaled. Dirt smells like, well, dirt, and not like anything else. It’s got that clean, metallic bite. It’s what our ancestors crawled out of, and it’s where we all wind up—we’ve got a primal connection to it, and the smell awakens those connections and stirs our sense of belonging.

If only she could fire up that dirt and pump it into her veins, thought Carol Lynn Miller, maybe then she wouldn’t need the heroin anymore. The heroin was so warm—a flood of warmth and passion and comfort that made her body feel dully right, that floated her up on gentle hands, passing her out of harm’s way—but the cool, rusty dirt, that was a reminder that, if she cared, she could have a future again.

Carol was thirty-five years old. She’d had one marriage and it had been really bad. Actually, it wasn’t the marriage that was so bad, it was her husband—he was a bad one, all right. He liked to rob people, liked to assault them, liked to take what he wanted when he wanted it. And he’d wanted Carol to join in. He was the one who’d introduced her to heroin. He’d shown her how to do it, how to tie off her arm just so, how to melt the drug over the flame, how to swill it into the hypodermic, how to blow out the air without losing even a drop of that precious liquid, that liquid heaven. And he’d told her quite correctly just how it was gonna be: you’ll feel the prick and it’ll hurt—hell, you knot the tourniquet intentionally so it hurts, so it pinches your skin—you want to feel a little pain, because then you’ll be amazed at how the drug takes it all away, the superficial pain and the deep-down heartaches, everything that bothers you just wont bother you anymore.

At least, that is, not ’til the drug starts to wear off and then you find yourself facing a whole new fear.

But that fear you don’t need to fear, because that fear is easily fixed… with a fix. And your whole life suddenly becomes so simple: You do what you have to do to get your drug. It’s not that nothing else matters, it’s that there is nothing else.

Interestingly, the heroin had saved Carol from her ex, had saved her life. Without the drug, shed never have left him, and he’d probably have gotten her killed in one of his crime sprees, or else killed her himself in one of his rages.

But shed needed her fix, and he was no provider, and so she’d lit out on her own.

She settled in Riverside, in a place called Rubidoux, by Lake Elsi-nore, and she took up prostitution.

Carol Miller had a home, a house she rented there, but she didn’t like staying in it. Sometimes she was afraid her ex would show up, other times she was afraid no one would ever come knock on her door and shed just die there, alone, unnoticed, undiscovered, with Publishers1 Clearinghouse Sweepstakes entries piling up in her mailbox.