Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

For the next several minutes, Bill cleaned up the scene and packed everything away, walking around Carol like she was just another rock in the garden. Finally, he pulled up the plastic tarp around her and hefted her into the back of his rig. The blue liquid light was just about faded out, and the stars winked from their canopy. Down below, there were just a few lights still on in Elsinore. Bill checked the time—it was late, later than he planned. Cheryl would be home by now and his alibi might be iffy.

Suddenly, he had an idea that flushed him with excitement: He wouldn’t dump the body tonight. He’d keep it in the rig—take it home with him, take it to work tomorrow, and then get rid of it tomorrow night. That would really be something—to go through the day acting normal when you knew you had the corpse of a dead girl in your rig. He’d have a hard-on all day long. And the police would get all screwed up trying to figure out time of death. Bill would create a perfect alibi for himself for tomorrow and make it look like the girl died then, when Bill couldn’t’ve done it.

That would be the final equation for Carol Miller.

When Bill got home, Cheryl was asleep on the sofa. This was the first time after a killing that he really wanted to fuck the girl he was living with, but he stopped himself. So long as Cheryl was underage, he had to maintain his discipline.

Bill went into his bedroom and jerked off. At one point he thought he saw Cheryl’s shadow standing by the door, but he wasn’t sure. Afterwards, he found he couldn’t sleep. He crept out to his rig half a dozen times or more between then and morning, making sure that Carol’s body was hidden from view. Cheryl woke up at Bill’s peregrinations, asked him what was going on, what was the rumpus, and he told her his allergies were acting up and he was going outside to sneeze. He actually thought she believed him, but the truth was she just didn’t mind his lies.

Early on the morning of February 8, 1990, a migrant worker found the body of Carol Lynn Miller in a grapefruit grove in Rubidoux by Lake Elsinore. She was naked, lying on her back, laid out evenly, legs spread, her black cotton undershirt draped at an angle across her face, a sort of exotic harem veil, with one eye covered and the other open and exposed. She’d been dead at least all night and maybe another full day, too. Her lower lip was crunched and folded down and there was some lividity in her face, so she’d spent her first hours after death in a different position than she was found, maybe with her head bent under or curled up.

Some paint chips were found on her skin—just a few, blue and white and clear layers of lacquer, just like chips found on Darla Ferguson, the most recent victim of the Riverside Prostitute Killer prior to Carol. These were the only two victims ever found with paint chips.

There were conflicting stories as to when Carol had last been seen alive. The John said she’d slept under his porch on Monday the 5th, but in fact Monday was the 6th. A dealer said he’d seen Carol on the street the night of Tuesday the 6th, but of course Tuesday was really the 7th.

Nobody keeps dates straight anymore.

Bill claimed to have worked late one night and gone to the hospital for an allergy shot on another night, and records bore him out. Cheryl said she was home with Bill both nights after work.

When bodies are left outside, you can determine time of death by maggots if you have to. Literally the moment you die, carrion flies land on you, feed on your cells as the dead cell walls burst and ooze their juices, and then the flies lay eggs. And the eggs hatch maggots after only a few hours, a set number of hours varying only between the different types of flies. Then the maggots turn into adult flies over the course of the next few hours, and these flies have a nosh and lay eggs and start the process all over again. Along the way, other flies land and lay eggs, so your corpse is pretty quickly a multigener-ational breeding ground, and you can accurately backdate to time of death just by counting up the generations buzzing around.

Unfortunately, no one bothered to run a maggot check on Carol Miller, so there was no way to prove when she died. Had Bill Suff been charged with only her murder, he would have walked. No evidence placed him anywhere near her, not then, not ever.

Nonetheless, Carol Miller helped Bill earn the death penalty.

Next to Carol’s leg, on the ground, a peeled grapefruit had been found. The press, the police, and the prosecutor all asserted that this cold-blooded killer had stood by the corpse and calmly eaten the grapefruit. Surely you have to execute a man who snacks over the bloody body of his victim, right?

This was the death sentence equation. As noted, it was raised exponentially by Dijianet, but Carol was the only victim found near “food evidence” like this.

The problem is, the killer didn’t eat the grapefruit at all, didn’t even attempt to. This killer would never have taken a bite out of an object and then left it for police to take dental impressions and recover pristine DNA saliva residue. And this killer didn’t leave any fingerprints on the peelings either.

What you should be struck with when you examine the photo of the grapefruit is that it has been peeled and then placed whole on the ground near Carol Miller’s leg. And the pieces of peel have been dropped in a pattern inconsistent with the notion of a callous guy just standing around peeling and eating a grapefruit. The peels are mostly lumped in one area, but too many are scattered all around, including between Carol’s legs. Also, aerodynamics says that if the peels were just dropped or even tossed, they should have landed outside down—that is, the curving, yellow side down… yet, most of the pieces were found yellow side up.

You may have your own theories as to the meaning of the grapefruit and its peels—like clouds and constellations, you can see all sorts of imagery from a bird to a man to whatever if you squint from different angles and let your mind go free.

But I think the grapefruit was an offering symbolic of Carol’s virginal sacrifice. Bill was in a grapefruit grove, so he peeled— deflowered—a grapefruit; had he been in a rose garden I believe he would have pulled the petals from a rose.

The peelings were clearly accumulated in his hand, all together, and then hurled down all at once, scattering in a spray pattern, hurled with enough force to override aerodynamics. This was an I Ching throw of the markers—fate would determine the meaning of the spray/landing pattern. Bill believes in tea leaves and every other prescient symbol, even though he tends to read them pursuant to his own rules, and the meanings tend to be predetermined in his own mind.

Accordingly, after raining down the peelings, Bill knew to place the grapefruit itself at the head of the spray. Now he had a pattern creepily similar to the “maps” of McCaffrey’s Pern solar system from which Bill’s own fictional universe was derived in his story “Crash Landing”. The pattern mimics the actual crash of the spaceship— an impact crater and a spray of material from ship and ground.

The grapefruit and its peelings therefore comprise a map, a hieroglyph, directing us to the other world where Bill really lives, the world where Carol Miller’s soul has now gone. It is the parallel world of both “Crash Landing” and “A Whisper From the Dark”.

Carol’s body may be here in this earthly “graveyard” (an orchard to us, a graveyard to Bill), but her spirit, her real self, is alive and well and now embodied on another world, worlds away.

A world where Bill Suff is loving, kind, generous, and heroic. A world where Bill Suff is for all time an innocent man. It is the world of good intentions, the world of a child.