Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

“My brother Bobby testified for the prosecution that Billy said he hated prostitutes and wanted to kill them, but that’s not true,”

“I thought the family didn’t cooperate with the prosecution?”

“The D.A.’s investigators got to my mom and tricked her into helping them at first, but she didn’t know anything, none of us did. And Bobby just wanted the attention, to be in the headlines, so he made up the story about Billy saying he hated prostitutes. Bobby’s not real truthful.”

So much for this close-knit family.

“All right, Don, then tell me—I don’t want to make you or your family look bad, but level with me—was there anything in your background, in Bill’s background, that you now think might have led him to become a serial killer?”

“His first wife, I think she became a prostitute. When she and Billy were in Texas, when he was in the Air Force. I think that’s what made him kill. That and Dijianet dying.” ( Dijianet pronounced Day - sha - nay )

“Dijianet?”

“Billy’s daughter. She was a baby—eight weeks old. Billy and Teryl—that’s his first wife; the second wife is Cheryl—Billy and Teryl, they were convicted of murdering Dijianet. But we—the family—we don’t really know what happened. Billy says Teryl did it, that she shook her too hard or something.”

I was reeling and I was pissed and I felt like my time was being wasted, and Don knew it. He knew that I was suddenly finding it a little hard to accept the family’s naiveté about Bill’s guilt for the prostitute killings, in light of the fact that they all knew that Bill was a child killer. Don also knew that I was no longer going to buy into the whitewashed family history he’d originally planned to spoon-feed me. I got the impression that this sudden awareness on Don’s part had less to do with me or my silent reaction to his words than the simple fact that, once he had said the words aloud, Don himself listened to them for the first time. His brother was a baby killer. Anyone who could kill a baby was capable of any and every horror ever conceived. Prostitute murders were de rigueur for someone experienced in infanticide.

“Go on,” I said icily. I knew that if I told my wife, my agent, or anyone else about that dead baby, then this book would never happen. It’s funny where lines get drawn in the sand. When you write about someone, that person is glorified by the simple act of focusing attention on him or her, and, while we all may be willing to allow such glorification for a prostitute killer, we don’t countenance biographies of men who kill babies. On the other hand, we are fascinated by women who kill babies or children, and those stories turn into both books and miniseries. We just cannot believe it when women kill their children—we have to stop and examine the situation in minute detail just to accept that it happened, and even then it defies reality, more unreal than real, a true perversion of the natural order of things. But men who kill their children are simply repugnant—we accept that evil men commit such crimes, and we simply want these men out of our sight and off our planet as quickly as possible. In jail, these men are immediately marked for death by the other inmates, yet Bill Suff had survived, hadn’t he? How was this possible? It had to be that even though he wasn’t sexy Ted Bundy, he nonetheless had a disarming personality that belied his crimes. Pleasant but respectful. Charming but reticent. Eddie Haskell on Valium.

“Look,” said Don Suff, “Billy was in Texas, and Dijianet died, and Billy and Teryl were both convicted for it, and the family didn’t know what to make of it. We didn’t want to see the case files or the autopsy report or the evidence or the pictures of the dead baby. We really didn’t want to know. If we knew the details, then we could never forgive Billy. You can’t forgive someone for killing a baby; you can’t say ‘I know he did a terrible thing, but he’s still my brother’; you just can’t live with it—you can’t be related to someone who would do something like that.”

“So you pretend it never happened?”

I could tell that Don was close to tears. Dijianet Suff died in 1973. More than twenty years had passed, and Don had never once had the chance to talk about it, to cry about it, to scream about it. This was a public event but still a family secret. Dijianet Suff was gone before the family ever knew her, but she haunts them to this day.

As for Billy, I correctly guessed that this crime was the one that embarrassed him. He didn’t want to tell his family about it, and they didn’t want to hear it. He told them pretty much after the fact that Dijianet had died and he’d been tried and convicted and that was all. He didn’t want his family at the trial and he seems to have needed time to get his stories straight and build a wall over his emotions about it. As many times as I have looked into his eyes and asked him about Dijianet’s death, no real reaction comes out. He gets glib about how he was asleep, had nothing to do with it, and has no idea what happened, although he can guess that Teryl did it and then went to work that day, leaving him to wake up later and find the baby dead. However, at the time, according to notes in his own handwriting that he slipped to his lawyers, he surmised that if Teryl didn’t do it, then the CIA did. Other outrageous and conspiratorial outsiders and interlopers were also possibilities. When I told Bill about these notes, he denied making them. Period. As voluble and forthcoming as Bill can be about so many things, Dijianet’s death is locked away in a place so inaccessible that no one, including Bill, will ever have at it again.

In fact, it was Ted Bundy who explained that even serial killers have certain crimes or certain acts tied to certain crimes that make them anxious. I won’t go so far as to call it a matter of conscience, but it is what passes for self-rebuke in a serial killer. Bundy regretted that, on one occasion, he’d taken the heads of two of his victims and brought them home, to the place he shared with his girlfriend and her child. Bundy hid the heads from his girlfriend, and he ultimately toyed with them and then burned them in the fireplace, but he was ashamed and worried that somehow his girlfriend would find out. It wasn’t that he was afraid she’d find out he was a mass murderer; it was that she’d learn that he’d betrayed her in her own home. Since Bundy was always reticent to discuss the sexual aspects of his crimes, it would seem that he felt that by masturbating into those skulls at home, he was cheating on his girlfriend, and that bothered him.

“You think that Dijianet’s death somehow helped to provoke the prostitute killings?” I asked Don.

“Billy and Teryl were both convicted and given sentences of seventy years. But a female prison guard helped Teryl file her appeal, her conviction got overturned, and she got out right away, while Billy served ten years.”

“So you think Bill is angry at Teryl, and that’s who he sees in his mind’s eye when he’s killing hookers?”

“When Teryl got out of jail, she moved in with that prison guard, and they’ve been together in a lesbian relationship ever since. I think that Billy loved Teryl, but she cheated on him, worked as a prostitute to get more money, and then became a lesbian. I think it turned him upside down and inside out. Billy didn’t have a lot of girlfriends growing up—Teryl was it. And there’s one other thing—”

“Yeah?”

“She was pregnant when they got married. But not by him.”

Bill Suff had two children by Teryl Cardella. There was Bill Jr., and then there was Dijianet. I was momentarily confused. “Are you telling me that Bill’s son, a son named after him, is not his flesh and blood? Did he know it at the time?” Suddenly I was thinking maybe all this was a motive for mass murder—this was certainly a plot we’d buy if we saw it on a TV soap opera. Little did I know that I had it all wrong, and truth would once again prove stranger than fiction. In fact, truth would prove unbelievable were it not for the fact that it was, after all, true.