Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

So, tonight, when Bill’s supervisor waved good-bye and left at the dot of quitting time, he didn’t bother with the fact that Bill was still busy at his computer and busy dipping into the footlocker he kept at his workstation. The supervisor didn’t even consider the issue of whether Bill was going to put in for overtime—it never even occurred to the supervisor to think about it, the same way there are about a zillion billion things you don’t think about and don’t know you’re not thinking about at any given point in time. The supervisor was thinking about stopping for a beer on his way home, and he was thinking he was pretty hungry and he hoped his wife had made a roast, and that was the sum total of his thoughts. So, by definition, he had not the slightest idea that, when Bill Suff woke up that morning, he’d planned his day so he could most definitely put in far overtime.

Not because he needed the extra couple of hours pay—in fact, it would have been fine with Bill if the supervisor later called him in and denied the overtime, that would have been better than fine, it would have actually been excellent—because the reason Bill needed to put in for overtime was to establish himself an alibi. It would indeed be excellent if the supervisor took special note of the requested overtime by denying it, because then the supervisor would remember the date, would remember that Bill worked late that date, and that recollection might well come in handy for Bill if anyone happened to inquire where he was that February night.

For tonight was to be a killing night.

It worked like this: All day long, in all outward appearance, Bill got calmer and calmer, more businesslike. At quitting time, everyone else would leave, but they’d see Bill still at his post. He’d make sure to stay until everyone else had gone. Then, when the coast was clear, he’d get some tools out of his footlocker.

When he’d been in jail in Texas, Bill had taken up engraving as part of the arts and crafts rehab training. Over the years he’d become a master at scoring and cutting and filleting, at working leather and metal and plastic. He’d made all sorts of wallets and purses and keycovers and wall hangings and belts and moccasins for his family and friends, and he’d embellished everything with etched artistic designs of birds and animals and whatever came to mind, all deftly painted in for full effect.

Over the years, he’d compiled a set of perfect paintbrushes and perfect paints and perfect tools, the best of the best, acrylic paints and lacquers that wouldn’t chip, peel, or fade, diamond-tipped cutting tools that would make a surgeon proud.

All of this he kept in a tackle box, and the tackle box he kept in his footlocker at work, and, on killing nights, these became some of the killing tools. Added to that was a toolbox of more ordinary but terrific mechanics’ tools which he’d stolen from his stepfather, Shorty. These tools had been items of special pride to Shorty, who paranoically worried that they might be stolen and so kept them well hidden, even going so far as to move them from hidey-hole to hidey-hole. Bill brought off the theft first by doing Shorty the favor of engraving Shorty’s driver’s license number on the tools as a means of identification in case of theft.

Of course, Shorty was grateful.

Then, once Bill finished the engraving job, now knowing exactly where the tools would be and when Shorty would be out, Bill snuck back in and snatched the tools away. Incredibly, no one ever suspected him. Occasionally Bill even contemplated returning Shorty’s tools—he would say that they’d been recovered because of Bill’s engraving—but heroism lost out to Bill’s desire to have all manner of tool avaüable to him for his killings.

Bill’s initial plans for killing were essentially artistic—the corpse would have to be painted, manipulated, cut up in whatever way the muses tittered—he planned on treating the body as just another piece of leather— but reality and the threat of capture changed all that immediately.

The fact is that it’s not so easy to cart around dead weight the size of a human body. Then lividity fights against the artist’s vision. And, rigor mortis sets in pretty quickly, making the body difficult if not impossible to work with. Finally, were he to be too distinctive with his cuts and were he to use his distinctive tools and his distinctive paints, the forensic people could tie the killer and his killing tools to the murder as easily as if he signed his name “Bill Suff’ to his deadly masterpiece.

As a result, in February 1990, with only a few murders under his belt, Bill was still experimenting with how artistic he could be and still not get caught. So, he still schlepped along all the killing tools, all the possibilities for artistic expression. Tonight, he would get the tools out of his footlocker at work, put them in his van, and say he worked overtime.

That would explain why he didn’t make it home for dinner, didn’t see Cheryl before she went to work at the Circle K. So long as he was home once she got home later, he could say he’d come home any hour he chose, and she’d back him up. When he told Cheryl something, she didn’t just believe him: it became reality for her, it was as if she knew it firsthand.

Then, tomorrow night, from home, Bill would phone a few friends during the evening. Local calls—no toll charges, no phone records. He’d have simple conversations, nothing too memorable, but then he’d mention something specific about getting together the coming weekend, some reference that you could date. Then he wouldn’t talk to those people the rest of the week. Later, months later, if anyone should be so inclined as to inquire, Bill would say he had those phone conversations on the night of the killing—he was home, on the phone, how could he be out killing anyone? The friends wouldn’t remember for certain what night they had the conversations, but they’d gravitate toward the night Bill suggested. It even helps you to mix up day and date—you refer to Wednesday the seventh, then “realize” that Tuesday was the seventh, so you must have spoken on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, because you know you remember having the conversation that night you worked late and you’ve got the overtime record to prove when that was, right? “Remember that conversation we had on February seventh, the night 1 worked late, that Tuesday?”— you’d be amazed how easy it is to talk someone into a memory of something mundane. Mundane for them, that is; life and death for you.

So now, with his alibi preset that night in February 1990, Bill could go out and enjoy his killing.

On February 8, many years ago, the ambulance brought me, my mother, and my brother to the Loma Linda University Hospital Emergency Room. I’m still not sure whether Loma Linda is in San Bernardino or Riverside, but it’s near where they border one another, and it’s where Bill Suff plied his trade sometime later.

It was getting dark, and the darkness was swirling. My mother was DOA but they tried to revive her, I begged them to. Every available doctor and every available nurse went with her into some operating room I never saw. My brother, his collapsed lung wheezing, his condition comatose but stable, was taken up an elevator for a CT scan. A doctor shined a penlight in my eyes, had me touch my nose a few times, popped his mallet against my knee, rolled some prickly metal thing hard against the arch of my foot, and then sat me on a table behind a curtain and told me to wait. I was deaf in my left ear, everything I looked at was red and fuzzy, my head was swelled up on the left side like another head was growing there, and my right hand was twisted and mangled, but caked-on dirt and sand had pretty much sopped up all the blood.