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.
As for Carol, she was uniquely special to Bill and his fantasies, in the pantheon of his victims she mattered in a positive way. Unlike other victims, he didn’t mutilate her, and he killed her twice—both the strangling and the stabbing were fatal—not as overkill, but to be quick, certain, and painless about it. He also did not demean her in final repose—in death she was left laid out as in life, with her face discreetly covered. Interestingly, Eleanor Casares was also left in an orchard, and her face was covered, too.
Finally, Bill’s attitude toward his victims—how he perceived them—was no doubt more a function of his “outside” life than any actual reality respecting the victim. When Bill killed Carol, he was in love with Cheryl and believed in her and her virginity. Despite her best intentions, Bill later found out that Cheryl was no virgin, and, as bad as that betrayal was for him, the only thing worse was when she got pregnant. Once again he decided that he was with a woman who lied to him, cheated on him, and might be bearing another man’s child. Teryl’s betrayals became ascribed to Cheryl, even though there’s no evidence at all that Cheryl ever betrayed Bill.
But, once Bill turned on Cheryl—once he’d concluded that she’d turned on him—the violence of his killings escalated. The first killings—including several in Elsinore attributed to him but for which he has yet to be charged—involved sacrificial stabbing of the heart. Clearly, he then began stabbing the vaginas of his later victims because the wombs of the women in his life had cuckolded him in the most emotionally profound and painful way, and drawing blood from the vaginas of his victims was his way of finally getting the virginal blood that both Teryl and Cheryl had promised and then denied him.
Does all this fantastic fantasy make sense?
Sure.
Isn’t it just plain nuts?
Definitely,
So what do we do with these people, with the Bill Suffs of the world?
That’s the question.
And the answer is that, all this horror aside, I am still anti-death penalty and particularly anti-death penalty for Bill Suff.
Murder is wrong, and, as a society, we have to find a way to stop it. But the death penalty has no deterrent effect. It also dehumanizes us, it turns us—the innocent—into murderers. More, the system is all-too-often fallible, and one too many innocent men have been executed for my taste.
Giving the State a mechanism of legalized homicide is an open invitation to abuse and disaster. It scares me. The cinder-block room is bad enough.
Nonetheless, I feel for the families of crime victims, and I know that if someone murdered someone I loved, I’d be the first out there with my nine-millimeter Beretta looking to get even.
I don’t find that hypocritical. My suggestion is that we rewrite the laws and go back to our English common law tradition. It used to be that, if you saw a guy killing your daughter, you could chase him down the street and blow him away, and, at worst, you were guilty of manslaughter but probably you were guilty of no crime at all.
So, I say if we insist on having a death penalty, then work it as a writ of execution issued to a family member of the victim. If Dad wants to see his daughter’s killer killed, let Dad himself throw the switch on Old Sparky.
Murder is personal—let’s keep it that way.
As for Bill, it’s easy for me to push for reversal of his death sentence because, no matter what, he’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail. Nonetheless, he’s proved he’s no danger to anyone while in jail, and he’s always protested his innocence to these crimes where the evidence was hardly beyond a reasonable doubt and where the investigation, arrest, and trial were anything but fair.
People will say that, by his convictions, Bill has forfeited his right to be heard any longer, but his is a unique and powerful voice that will go a long way toward helping us save ourselves from future Bill Suffs. We really have to decide whether we want to prevent murder or merely be content with mopping up the blood afterward.
Finally, to be noted is that Bill has his share of supporters who fully believe in his innocence. To them and to Bill, I say that the simple test of the truth would be to let Bill out of jail and watch what he does. As smart as he is, as clever as he is, as creative as he is, if he is what we think he is, then, loose in the world, he will attempt to kill again.
A serial killer can’t stop himself.
That’s the whole point.
And, to me, that’s insane.