Mind Games With A Serial Killer

Preface

As you go from left to right, there are three signposts on the road of the true crime story.

You begin with the objective, journalistic report and retelling. Newspaper clippings collected into chapters. The author a craftsman but a nonentity—his or her voice intentionally stilled in exchange for truth.

At the halfway mark along our highway, you run across in Cold Blood. You get Capote’s invention of faction, the nonfiction novel. A true story, investigated by the author after the fact, and then reborn as a character drama about what certainly was and must have been. A tapestry, not a report; threads spun from verifiable facts, but the fabric woven by the writer’s mind. The kind of story that jurors themselves create during deliberations in order to make sense of and judge the madness.

At the far end of the true crime panorama is Dominick Dunne, and all those stories that you know are true but the names have been changed and the author’s improved the drama for the sake of drama. Truth always has more power than fiction, but truth doesn’t always make for the best story because a beginning, middle, and end, and a nice, comfortable three-act structure, don’t always exist in nature. Dunne memorializes cocktail party conversations for five hundred pages.

Cat and Mouse falls somewhere between the nonfiction novel and the cocktail party conversation, although I do not presume for a moment that my work is on par with Capote and Dunne.

In dealing with Bill Suff, the convicted Riverside Prostitute Killer, I had unique access to people and material that the journal- ists couldn’t touch. More than anything, I had access to Bill himself.

My goal was not to improve the public record, not to be limited to facts that could be proved and verified, but rather to understand the interpersonal dynamics of these crimes. I was at all times more interested in people’s impressions, in feelings, rumors, and hearsay. I wanted to know what people really thought, I wanted to hear everything they would only say off-the-record.

What sparked me was the fact that Bill is a writer, and I wanted to create a book that would guide all of us in reading between the lines of Bill’s work, a dream that could only be realized if the book were freed from all constraints.

The only way to accomplish this was to inject myself into the proceedings, not because I’m so important but because you have to know my biases in order to judge my report. And, I think I rightly felt that I was living out a fantasy that everyone would like to indulge in if you could do so safely: I was going to walk into the den of a living, breathing serial killer, and I was going to see if I could get back out alive.

You will now get to see what I saw, and you will get to decide what you see.

Guilt or innocence is not the issue.

This then is neither fiction nor nonfiction. It’s true crime because the crimes are real, and it’s a true story because everything in it is what I believe, everything in it is what is real for me. Everything contained in this book is emotionally honest and tremendously candid, but its meaning is left to you.

As a moral and legal matter, I have to make a final point: I have written about Bill as a de facto serial killer because a jury has in fact convicted him. He is no longer entitled to a presumption of innocence.

However, Bill has at all times professed his innocence, and he is entitled to his appeals. There is no doubt in my mind that, aside from the question of true culpability, Bill’s arrest was unconstitutional, his trial prejudiced, and his death sentencing improperly argued.

Once arrested, Bill Suff never had a chance, and, as a lawyer, I’m not happy about that. The system can and must do better. We need to look long and hard at how we investigate and prosecute serial killers, because, in the rush to convict and close cases, we are leaving too many active serial killers out there, out of the reach of law enforcement.

But that’s another book.

In light of Bill’s appeals, please know that none of the facts presented herein can or should be used to prove the case either against him or for him.

There are no facts in this book.

Everything is impression, everything a personal conclusion and construct of my own, no matter the record or testimony or memory on which it is based.

When interviewing people, I took no contemporaneous notes, made no recordings, and shredded my outlines. All that exists of this book is what you now have before you.

Bill’s writings are presented unedited and uncorrected.

Brian Alan Lane

Los Angeles, California

Introduction

DEAD AND COUNTING

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

While the world was consumed with the trial of OJ. Simpson and the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, there was another trial—a more important trial—going on just a few miles away.

That is, if you define more important by a higher body count.

Higher, much higher.

And, in the gradations of murder, if important means torture, mutilation, and cannibalism, then O.J.’s alleged crimes in LA. were mere misdemeanors compared to what had been going on down the road in Riverside.

Yeah, there’s murder, and then there’s murder.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

If you grew up in Los Angeles, you lived through The Manson Horrors, The Nightstalker, The Hillside Strangler, The Free-way Killer, and a host of other madmen and bloodletters, all of whom made you worry that it wasn’t safe to go out but maybe it was even more dangerous to stay home.

When these lunatics were running around, the cops got mobilized, the mayor begged for calm, schools closed, people set themselves curfews, security companies flourished, Dobermans were in, and earthquakes, fires, and floods were welcome relief.

At least you knew who to blame for the earthquakes.

So, after the murders of Nicole and Ron, when the cops didn’t set up a task force, and the mayor didn’t tell you to stay home and lock your doors, and property values in Brentwood didn’t go down (they went up), it was a pretty telling sign that everyone who knew anything knew that the killings were personal—committed either by that maniac husband who then hopped an alibi plane to Chicago to play golf, or by those maniac Colombian drug dealers who presumably hopped their own getaway plane back to Colombia to play what? Soccer, maybe.

The Nicole/Ron killings were done before anyone knew that anyone cared enough to bother to commit them. And then the killings were done and there would be no more, no threat to the public at large—you could eat at Mezzaluna without fear that you were being stalked by The Mezzaluna Mauler and you could enjoy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream without concern that it would be found melting later by your back door as your corpse lay melting in the muggy night.

These killings had nothing to do with dinner, and everything to do with celebrity.

Which is why the O.J. trial consumed us, and the Bill Suff trial got lost.

Lost to everyone except all the victims, the victims’ families, the hundreds of cops who pursued the case for half a decade, and the population of an entire county that had long lived with the gnawing realization that the Devil himself was loose in their midst.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

These are believed to be only half the victims of the Riverside Prostitute Killer, but, across three counties, more than two dozen unsolved murder cases were closed with Bill Suff’s arrest. And, while the murder spree was going on, there was no reason not to believe that any woman could fall victim, any woman who crossed the killer’s path.

Bodies officially began piling up in 1986, when Charlotte Palmer’s half-nude corpse was found carefully posed along a roadside near the desert oasis of Sun City in Riverside County, California. Charlotte hadn’t been tossed there like some rag doll, she’d been carefully, painstakingly posed to convey some sort of meaning, and she’d been left in a place where she was certain to be found at first light. The killer might as well have pinned a note to her—he was telling the world a story, he was announcing himself and explaining just what sort of demon he was. Charlotte Palmer was his prop—he was the debuting debutant, he was the one that mattered, the one who had something to say, something to prove.

But who could read the story of this murder scene, who could interpret this art, what was the killer conveying beyond the fact that he could strike with impunity, he could mock both his victim and the authorities, and he was absolutely going to strike again and again and again, until caught?

How many open-air, roadside galleries would be filled with these murderous pastiches before these killings would come to an end?

Charlotte Palmer was a pretty woman and she was in good shape. She was not using drugs, and she had undigested fast-food chicken in her stomach at the time she died.

She seemed to have been strangled.

Traces of that gray/brown glue/goo from duct tape were found around her ankles, wrists, and thigh. She was pretty well bruised from head to toe.

Charlotte had last been seen in Sun City. She had no known job there, so she was officially classified as transient, and maybe she did a little hooking to earn enough to move on from place to place until she found the place she was looking for, certain that she’d know it when she got there.

She hoped.

And maybe the night of her death Charlotte was hooking, or maybe she just accepted a ride from a kindly stranger on his way up the freeway to that place that might be the place that she was looking and hoping for.

Either way, the two of them—Charlotte and her benefactor— picked up a little KFC and shared a laugh as they headed out onto the blacktop that whispers forever through the desert dark.

And then, when she was soft and warm and contented with food, running her tongue along her teeth to rub off the last taste of grease even though you can still smell the stuff for hours after, Charlotte suddenly got whacked across the face, took an elbow to the throat, and found herself tied up with tape, raped and beaten and murdered, posed later at the side of the road.

If she could have looked back down at herself lying there, Charlotte Palmer must have wondered one simple thing: how in the hell did this happen?

But the police didn’t wonder at all—they knew: a serial killer had just crossed the county line.

And, even though this guy signed his crime with a flourish, with the pose, he did not leave one hard evidentiary clue that could lead to his capture or conviction.

This guy planned his crime. He planned it, committed it, and then cleaned up afterward. No bloody glove here. A guy like this, a guy worried enough to make sure he wouldn’t get caught, couldn’t get caught; he wasn’t some trucker just passing through, and this killing was in no way personal. No, this guy was careful, he was organized, he was impassioned but focused, and, scariest of all, he had to be living right here in Riverside, living with his victims and his pursuers, living right under their noses, living as their friend and neighbor.

Hey, neighbor!

He could be anybody.

But he had to be a nobody.

Somebody who was so indistinctive he could move freely, and yet so sociable you wouldn’t suspect him as weird or out of place.

He probably even had a wife or girlfriend. And surely a dog or a cat or some fish.

And, over the course of the many years of his murders, it’s fair to say that, without realizing it, damn near everybody who lived in Riverside stood next to or drove past or tipped a hat to or saw their man somewhere going about his business.

His business of murder.

A business he would get even better at as time went on, as he got even better organized, more brazen and yet more careful.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

When they found Lisa Lacik’s body next door to Riverside County in 1988, the authorities got really worried. She’d been strangled and posed—a familiar tune at this point, with other mur-ders in other counties—and there were no good clues, but, unlike previous victims, she’d been horribly mutilated with a knife. She’d been explored, exposed, ransacked, and debased, and her right breast had been cut off.

Typically, it was hard to get the authorities from different counties to trade information and evidence, to even know for certain that they were all dealing with the same serial killer, but, finally, after several more murders in Riverside, it became more politically expedient to subsidize a task force rather than ignore a bunch of dead, chopped-up hookers, and so all the counties were brought together, along with FBI advisors and profilers and DNA experts and computer jockeys.

Thank God for election years, right?

However, now, in the autumn of 1990, the murders began to happen fast and furious. In Riverside there had been a lag—nine months had passed between Carol Miller and Cheryl Coker—but the renewed attacks were even more vicious than before. Where there had been an almost twisted whimsy, a taunt and a leer in the previous murders, Cheryl Coker’s death was very angry and almost desperate and even a little bit rushed. There was the palpable sense that now, here we go, there might finally be a chance to catch this guy because he was upping the ante, operating right on the edge of control versus risk.

There was therefore a real urgency—catch this guy, or else watch the body count go through the roof. It’s not that the killer wants to be caught, it’s that he can’t stop himself from killing, even when he might get caught, even when he might fuck up.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

Despite the task force, bodies. In Riverside alone, a body a month in the latter half of 1991.

And still, no clues, not enough to do anything but tantalize the investigators. Some fibers, some hair, some shoe prints, some tire tracks. Duct tape had given way to surgical tubing that left no trace evidence at all. No fingerprints anywhere ever. Could’ve been anybody. Had to be somebody. Might as well have been a ghost. No matter the warnings, hookers still kept getting killed, mutilated, and posed. A head stuck in the ground. More shorn right breasts. Cigarette burns on the skin. Bite marks. A lightbulb in a uterus. A sock down a throat. Odd clothes put on the bodies after death.

And then, in January 1992, a break.

A cop with a hunch. A cop willing to make an unlawful search on a guy in a van who’d been trying to solicit a hooker.

An arrest.

Bill Suff.

Average look, average build, average guy. Forty years old or thereabouts. Personalized license plates with his name on ‘em.

Bill Suff was a Riverside County employee and, unbeknownst to the county, an ex-con. He’d lied on his employment application. You know where they ask Have you ever been convicted of a felony?—he’d checked the no box, and then no one had checked him. If you answer yes, then they check, like you’d lie by saying yes but not by saying no,

Somewhere there’s a theory—social psychology—that people who admit to some guilt are probably hiding something worse, and, if you admit to any guilt, then you can’t be trusted. The truth is that even the most guilty people think they’re innocent and you just can’t run background checks on everybody. Besides, if they’re really that bad and that guilty, they’ve probably covered their tracks anyway.

So, personnel departments by and large ignore what applicants put on the personnel departments’ forms. The honor system. Innocent until proven guilty, and then let some other department handle it.

In Riverside, once arrested, the presumed innocent Bill Suff proved to be married, with a cat and some fish—didn’t you just know it!—and an infant daughter who’d just been taken away by the authorities because she’d been abused. Two decades earlier, he’d crushed his first baby daughter to death and consequently served ten years in the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville,

A mistake, he said. It was all a mistake. He was innocent of everything they accused him of before, everything they were accusing him of now, and everything else they didn’t even yet know they were going to accuse him of but would surely get around to.

It was a mistake and it was a frame-up.

They had the wrong man.

The cops had him all wrong, Bill said. People who knew him liked him, Bill said. He had lots of friends, Bill said.

And, indeed, he did. He went out of his way to make friends. He was a grown-up Cub Scout. He was a responsible person. He curried favor and made affability his trademark. He liked positive attention. He liked to be liked, and he loved to be needed. His friends got up at trial and swore that the Bill they knew couldn’t have committed these crimes.

This of course begged the question.

The question was, Who was the Bill that the dead hookers knew?

After getting out of jail in Texas in 1984, Bill had returned to his home county of Riverside. The prostitute murders started soon thereafter. Interestingly, the little lag time of nine months in 1990 when there were fewer killings happened to coincide with the honeymoon first months of his life with child-bride Cheryl Lewis. The fresh spate of killings began late that year just after Bill found out that Cheryl was pregnant. Coincidentally or not, the woman he killed after his honeymoon was also named Cheryl—Cheryl Coker. Nonetheless, there had always been killings in and around during all of Bill’s time in Riverside County—he’d been homici-dally active from day one, no matter that he’d also always had female friends and heavy romances, and even regular trysts with hookers who walked away twenty bucks richer but none the wiser.

Charlotte Palmer, Lisa Lacik, Kimberly Lyttle, Tina Leal, Darla Ferguson, Carol Miller, Cheryl Coker, Susan Sternfeld, Kathleen Puckett, Cherie Payseur, Sherry Latham, Kelly Hammond, Catherine McDonald, Delliah Zamora, Eleanor Casares.

The pieces came together easily, and the authorities were certain they had their man—if Bill Suff wasn’t the Riverside Prostitute Killer, then no one was.

Unfortunately, the evidence was still tough to come by. It would take years before this case would be ready to come to trial—both the prosecution and the defense needed all the time they could get.

It wasn’t until early in 1995 that the gavel rapped and the trial began. O.J. was then on center stage, and Bill Suff got lost.

Of course, Bill was convicted from the moment of his arrest. The county sighed relief and got on with their lives . . . back in 1992. Three years later, the trial was not even a formality; it was just an exercise, something that had to be done before Bill could be shipped off to Death Row.

Yawn.

The first Riverside case—Charlotte Palmer—was dropped late in the game because there was really no evidence there at all. The Lisa Lacik case—in San Bernardino County—was put on semi-permanent hold, waiting in the wings if and only if Bill should somehow overturn his Riverside convictions on appeal.

And so the Riverside prosecutor put up a wall full of photos of dead girls, looking pretty in life and gruesome in death, and Bill Suff was pronounced formally and officially guilty. In fact, there has never been a serial killer trial in the United States where the defendant was not found guilty. A wall full of dead girls gets you a guilty verdict every time, no matter the evidence. See, Americans are not really so sporting as they pretend—we may appreciate the drama of the perfect crime, but in the end we want the crimes stopped and we want someone blamed and we want closure, and, whether you committed the perfect crime or not, you go to jail. No jury acquits, someone always gets convicted—that’s how we sleep at night.

The O.J. jury didn’t acquit O.J.; they convicted the Los Angeles Police Department. They convicted white America. They convicted history.

In Bill Suff’s case, the jury convicted him of serial murder, despite the fact that most of his individual murders were perfect. His only solace comes from the additional murders for which he will never even be tried. He’s on Death Row, but he’s gotten away with murder. He’s on Death Row, but he can profess his innocence because no one asked why he did what he did. No one even dared ask how. Why the lightbulb? How did you convince her to come with you? Tell us about the breasts, Bill, and what did you mean by that cookbook you wrote in jail? And your computer and your audiocassette recorder—what was it that got erased?

Bill Suff’s on Death Row, and we could all just forget about him and note his execution ten or fifteen years from now, except for one thing: the man is a writer, and, although his writer’s voice is sweet and romantic and innocent, full of fun and fantasy, there is an undercurrent of pain, loss, retribution, and maybe just plain malevolence crucial for us to hear before it’s too late, before the next Bill Suff crosses our path.

And, in his writings, whether he meant to or not, Bill answers all our questions. Everything. General and specific. He didn’t testify at trial, but now he spills his guts without knowing it. For even in Bill’s lies you can hear the truth, the sizzle of his passion burning not from flame but ice.

This book contains the stories about Bill Suff that never came out at trial, the tricks and the horrors that no one knew or wanted to know since he was going to get convicted anyway.

Courtroom observers were repulsed by what they heard on the record, but that was nothing compared to what’s in this book.

Conviction should not end our fear.

Right now there are forty to fifty serial killers still active in the United States, and what’s terrifying is just how close so many other people are to following in those ghastly, grisly footsteps.

How close is any one of us to killing someone?

Closer than you think. Closer than you want to be. Too close.

This then is a story of one writer connecting with another writer, dueling with words and printed pages, and yet knowing that the stakes are truly life and death. The innocent wanted to know if he could be guilty, and the guilty wanted to know how to regain his innocence—who would corrupt whom? This is the one chance you will ever get to cross over into the mind of a serial killer and see the world through his eyes, to taste the blood he still spills there.

For you will find that the killing is done but not over.

And the trial is over but not done.

Let the games begin.

The Scene of the Crime

If someone took you to the edge of the world and threw you off, the place you’d land in would be the town of Lake Elsinore, Riverside County, California,

Lake Elsinore is not a place where people go when they get lost, it’s the place where people wind up who are lost.

It’s a place where, once you’re there, you stay lost.

And then you die.

Actually, you were already dead or dying when you got there.

Not that anyone noticed.

Crank cookers, crooked crankers, bikers, people who’ve been abducted by aliens, everyone who wants to forget the past and anyone who wants to avoid the future—they make up the loose-knit population of Lake Elsinore, a place where if you say, Morning, and what’s your name? you’re more likely than not to get a tire iron rammed in one eye and out the back of your head.

A bar there was called Out of Luck, and what would be Main Street anywhere else in the world is called Lost Chance Road.

And the Lake is a boiling mudhole in the middle of endless, shifting desert.

Ramshackle is too kind a word to describe the housing there. Like the desert, people’s homes shift around in the darkness of night. Trailers, lean-to’s, corrugated tin shelters—you swear you saw ‘em one day, but they’re sure as hell gone the next. Or maybe you’ve just lost your bearings in the heat. Maybe the sweat got in your eyes and the heat waves got you dizzy and your nose led you astray because the place has no smell. Just a vague ozone high from the heat.

Even the dead bodies there don’t seem to smell. Desperately starving animals become corpses fast, and the sun dries out what’s left and bleaches the bones even faster. Within just a few short hours, you’re past the point where a coroner can run definitive tissue samples, by nightfall you’re mummified, and by the next morning you’re dust.

That’s why Lake Elsinore is a favored dumping ground for serial killers. Toss a body there, and there won’t be much left for the district attorney to identify, let alone make a case against the perpetrator.

Even better, because of the wide vistas and infinite horizon, you can dump a body so it’s never ever found, just another speck of sand in the desert, or, if you’re like Bill Suff, you can pose and position the body so everyone for fifteen miles around can see it at daybreak. For the serial killer with an artistic bent, the sweeping dunes of Lake Elsinore comprise a canvas where you can show off your deathstrokes without fear of compromise or comparison.

But I’m getting ahead of our story. The relevance of Lake Elsinore is not so much that Bill Suff dumped most of his many murdered prostitutes here; it’s that he grew up in this place, lived and loved and learned fear in this place.

And then he transposed Lake Elsinore into his mind so he could carry it with him everywhere—to Texas where he slaughtered his infant daughter, then back to California where he annihilated grown women for years—envisioning them all in elaborate masquerades and scenarios staged in the various secret places throughout and around Elsinore that had become for him a rich, robust, romantic adventure/fantasy/reality where life and death were not opposing points on a continuum but rather equal and simultaneous states of existence.

In Elsinore, Bill charged around on his flying steed, slew dragons, saved damsels in distress, made off with the golden fleece, and confronted, defeated, or at worst stalemated evil. Here, Bill found meaning in emptiness, saw visions in the night, and listened for the voice of a God which would batter him by silence. (God, like Bill’s own father, was to be feared not for what He did, but rather for what He failed to do.) But here, in Elsinore, Bill found his own voice. From music, to story and poetry writing, to cartooning, Elsinore was the place where this young man’s groin first tightened, where he became possessed of the temerity to feel he had the right to leave his mark on the world.

In 1967, when Bill was sixteen years old, his father, William Sr., dropped Bill’s mother off at work, at the coffee shop they owned, told her he was running down to the store and would be right back, and then drove to Michigan, where he remains to this day.

When I asked Bill how he felt about his father abandoning the family that way—a wife and five kids, Bill the eldest, leaving his mother to scrape and claw for a living before she met and married an order-barking, one-legged military man called Shorty, whom the other kids all think of as their real father—Bill told me he was angry at William Sr.

It is one of the few times that Bill has admitted to any anger or hostility toward anyone—most of the time, Bill preaches love and compassion more than Jesus Christ himself. But then, it’s natural that Bill would be angry at his deadbeat dad, isn’t it?

I wasn’t mad ’cause Dad left, said Bill, I was mad ’cause he didn’t take me with him.

Bill was mad because now there was no escaping Lake Elsinore. Now, like all his future victims, there was no way to escape himself. In his mind, he himself had begun to die, and, once he was dead, he was free to kill. It was only a matter of time.

The Game Begins

My phone rang. My office is in my home, and the phone rings day and night because I do a lot of film projects overseas where their daytime is my nighttime and my nighttime is my best work time. Now it was late morning—Pacific daylight time—L.A. time. I was just recovering from brain death and getting refocused after a long night of writing and no sleep—it’s like having a hangover, but without the guilt. In fact, the more beat-up you feel, the prouder you are—marathoners have their walls, and couch potatoes their couches, but whatever architecture, furniture, or graven image you define yourself by, you push yourself to your physical limits and that justifies the limit on your creative work which you always wish was better and more courageous. See, writing comes from one place and one place only: from fear. You fear the world, you fear your marriage, you fear for your children and you fear them too, you fear yourself, and more than anything you fear what you write, but writing is the way you whistle in the dark and hold the fear in momentary check. And then, when you wake up in the morning and read what you’ve written, you simultaneously and contradictorily fear that you have no idea where these words came from or who could have put them there even though you want to make sure that the entire world sees and comprehends them and offers you thanks.

At all costs you want to be judged, but only if it’s a favorable judgment.

On the phone was my book agent, Barry Krane, calling from New York. He was, per usual, unconcerned about writers’ angst.

There’s this guy Bill Suff the serial killer—his brother wants to sell the story. Talk to the brother and see if you’re interested, I don’t know if there’s anything here or not—let me know what you think. But don’t waste a lot of time on it.

Don Suff is the brother. He’d apparently been in touch with the tabloid television show Hard Copy during Bill’s trial, and the executive producer over there referred Don to Barry. Now Barry figured I might find an angle on a story that was seemingly seamless.

The problem was that the Bill Suff story was old news. The killings had gone on for years; Bill had finally been caught and charged with the crimes; he’d been in jail awaiting trial for the better part of three years; his trial had happened concurrently with the O.J. trial; and he’d been convicted, now awaiting sentencing.

Everyone had heard about the Riverside Prostitute Killer, and everyone was certain that Bill was guilty even though he denied it, and that was the name of that tune.

The worst part, from a modern-day journalistic marketing perspective, was that Bill was an old-before-his-time, John Wayne Gacy pudgeball kind of guy. In other words, forget the TV movie. Mark Harmon wasn’t about to play Bill Suff, and none of those Melrose Place babes was going to play a junkie street hooker whose neck got in the way of Bill’s ham hands and noose-knotted surgical tubing.

Sure, Bill had killed a lot of women, but he was just one in an endless stream of serial killers who had killed a lot of women.

However, I didn’t know any of those other serial killers—Bill was the first serial killer I would ever meet. Dead hookers and a live murderer—this was my chance to take a walk on the wild side, my chance to rise above the surmise of mystery fiction writing and enter the real world of the criminal mind.

Who are these guys, these serial killers? Why do they do what they do? And just how much like them are we?

"I was maybe five years old, and maybe a little less. I was the oldest child, and I played by myself a lot. We had this planter alongside the house—my father had planted bamboo and some kind of low fern—caterpillars loved to congregate there and I loved to collect the caterpillars. Worms were slimy, but caterpillars were fuzzy and friendly and colorful, and I dug a little hole in the planter, lined it with leaves, and gently placed my caterpillars in it. I cut some of the bamboo shoots and planted them in the hole so the caterpillars could climb or dine. I had an orange caterpillar, and several black ones—no, I didn’t name them, but I could tell one from the other, and I noted and memorized their individual markings. Every night I’d lay a big fern leaf across the hole so the caterpillars would sleep for the night, and then in the morning I’d take out the caterpillars and hold them in my hand, stroke their manes, show them off to the neighborhood kids. Then one day I came out and found the caterpillars were all dead. They were mush. The fuzz of the orange caterpillar was everywhere in the hole. My first thought was that one of the other kids had come over and jealously killed the caterpillars. Maybe the kid was trying to play with them or grab them or steal them and got too rough. Or maybe he was just trying to kill them. Either way, I was heartbroken. I looked at that orange fuzz blowing around the hole and I just knew that this devastation was all my fault—if I hadn’t tried to covet and contain the beautiful caterpillars, they’d still be alive. If you find beauty in this world, people come in and take it from you, not because they want it for themselves but just because they don’t want you to have it.

"It never occurred to me that maybe my caterpillars were still alive and well, that they’d just molted, shed their fur, and crawled out of the hole to build their cocoons so they could turn into butterflies. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that then, why I might have been confusing a natural process for a sinister plot; I just know that I felt a tremendous loss and I needed someone—including myself—to blame.

Anyway, several years later, my mother was driving me and my brother to the market. In the street was a tortoise. It was dead. A tire track had torn through the back of its shell, leaving the poor animal frozen in midstep, its head stretched all the way up and out, eyes wide and alert. The tortoise was in the center of the road—the killer had intentionally veered out of his lane in order to run it over. My brother and I had several tortoises as pets—I knew this wasn’t one of ours, but the instant I saw the animal, looking so posed and alive and yet so clearly and needlessly dead, I burst into hysterics. In my entire life, I have never cried so uncontrollably. To this day I remember how completely out of control and horrific the world suddenly seemed to me at the sight of that dead tortoise. I’d led a protected and happy life until then, and somehow I now knew it was all a lie.

The words of Bill Suff, convicted infant slayer and serial killer?

No, the words of a nice, shy, Jewish boy from the San Fernando Valley. Me. Born to nice parents and raised in a nice middle-class existence where I never wanted for anything but never asked for what I couldn’t get.

Yet, if I suddenly went up in a tower and blazed away with an AK-47, everyone would point to my turtle and caterpillar stories as proof that I’d lost my bearings a very long time ago. And my years of writing murder mysteries, inventing ways for people to die on paper, would be a prosecutor’s wet dream. Hunter, Matlock, Remington Steele, and all my other television scripts would testify against me. In fact, when I was consulting for the series M.A.N.T.I.S., didn’t I have a heated argument with one of the producers about why serial killers kill, like I knew best? I was writing a script where a killer would kidnap and then impersonate his victims, jealously trying to live their lives before finding each insufficient. I maintained that my villain had no sense of acceptable self, and so he needed to control and become the people he most envied, only to find that each was just as weak and vulnerable and human as he. See, murder is the great equalizer. Paupers and presidents don’t die any differently from one another. And serial killers get only momentary relief, a momentary high from each killing. But then they are alone with themselves once more. All the secondary motives for serial killing—media attention, control over the victim—dissipate once the victim is dead. Now all the killer can do is kill again. The act of killing is both the sustenance and the famine. The successive killings are really just one act stretched out over time. There is no final exorcism; there is finally only the killer’s own death or capture to stop his act. The world of emotion that each of us lives in cannot be changed by anything we do—however and whenever that die is cast, we spend the rest of our lives in fight and flight that only conserves and justifies our reality, no matter how false or inconsistent it may be with everyone else’s.

However, the M.A.N.T.I.S. producer insisted that I was full of crap. Of course a killer has a motive—everyone has a motive for every act, but people are either good or evil, and they’re to be judged by their acts—their intentions don’t matter. Accordingly, as rewritten by the producer, the serial killer in my story became a guy who was simply out to avenge his partners’ attempts to steal from him and kill him.

To my mind, this was now not a serial killer.

In a given moment of anger, fear, pain, or jealousy, we each of us can find ourselves shot through with the urge to kill. For most of us the urge is juxtaposed, countered by either self-recrimination or simple relief—you feel better having gotten the emotion out while recognizing it for what it is, or your conscience simply clamps down on the impulse and that is that.

And, no matter how perfect our upbringing, we each suffer enough cumulative hurt and confusion that, in a moment of weakness, could lead to murder.

But that is still not serial killing.

Serial killing is an entirely different animal.

Serial killers are born waiting for the slings and arrows that will unleash the torment they already feel. While the rest of us pile up pain throughout our lives, able to endure more because of what we’ve already endured, serial killers are bursting with pain from the git-go, and life experience then shows them that there is indeed an outlet, that in this mobile world one person can cruise around wasting people by the dozens and never get caught.

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