Bill Suff was an even more terribly shy youth, particularly when it came to girls, and he didn’t have a cashmere coat. He couldn’t even get close enough to girls to get turned away. How then could he gain their affection?
Bill did not have a plan exactly; he just operated on instinct, instinct that would later become a conscious pattern by trial and error,
A pattern that would bring him wives and girlfriends and women to murder.
Try this scenario: You’re eighteen years old. You go to the Rose Bowl for a high school football game. One bus you see is filled with a group of wayward girls from a church “home”. Your emotional antennae point you toward one girl in particular—you know nothing about her but you find her attractive.
Emotional antennae are weird deals. If you drop me into a crowded room, I will be instantly sucked toward people who lost their parents at any early age, I feel it as attraction, only later finding out anything about their backgrounds. Somehow they exhibit loss or pain that I instinctively want to heal, I dated a paralegal for a time many years ago, and, when I broke up with her, she sobbed, “But I thought we had a future together because you’d lost your mother and I’d lost my father!”
I was stunned, I truly had no idea that this had formed any basis of my attraction to her, but of course she was right. Suddenly I realized that my previous girlfriend filled the same bill. From that point on, I was at least wary of that particular parameter. But then how do you know when you meet someone whether you are attracted to them for good reasons or self-destructive reasons? As you get older, everyone you meet has lost a parent or two, everyone is suspect, everyone proves a letdown. At least when you’re younger and more insecure you can delude yourself into thinking that people have more to offer than they really do. You fictionalize them and relate to the fiction. Reality is always such a drag.
Anyway, Bill first met Teryl Cardella at that high school football game at the Rose Bowl in the fall of 1968. She was fifteen and he was eighteen, but he was too shy to speak to her. However, after a while he came up with a gambit that allowed him direct ingress into her soul.
Bill had dressed in a light blue shirt, dark blue pants, and a glitter belt for the game. He also had a gold sweater which he was carrying rather than wearing this early on a warm Southern California evening. He thought of himself as a sort of mysterious dandy, a kind of hip Johnny Cash, He also thought the outfit was more or less adult and authoritative. If he was too shy to speak, then the outfit could speak for him. Years later, in the Air Force, he would even come to be known as “Hollywood” because of the blue and silver glitter Nehru jacket he wore.
Too timid to hang around his peers at the game, unsure what to say to them, Bill cruised down to the front of the stands, by the field, where the ushers and security guards prowled. He struck up a conversation with one guard who was trying to tell him to go back to his seat.
“In all those blue clothes, you’re dressed a lot like me,” said the guard.
“I always wear clothes like this,” said Bill.
“You oughta head on back to your seat, son,” said the guard.
“The kids are pretty rowdy up there,” said Bill.
Just then, some peanuts, chunks of ice, and berries pelted down. Bill looked up into the crowd and spotted Teryl—she was smiling at him—she and her friends settled into their seats, acting like they hadn’t thrown the peanuts, ice cubes, and berries, but nonetheless wanting to make sure that everyone knew they had. “Tell you what,” said the guard to Bill (at least this is what Bill told me he said), “since you’re dressed like one of us—one of the security guards—why don’t you take charge of this section and see if you can keep these kids in line.”
And so Bill did—he became an ad hoc security guard for the night. And Teryl kept taunting and teasing him by tossing stuff to get his attention, and then acting all innocent as he scolded her. Then the minute he’d turn away, she’d climb up on the wall and grab some berries off the vines there, and she’d hurl them at him. They were going to mess up his nice clothes. Finally, he had a flash of inspiration. He went to Teryl and asked her—ordered her, actually—to mind his sweater for him. He gave her his sweater and she sat down and was a good girl for the rest of the night. Clearly, she liked the attention. She liked Bill’s attention. She liked that he would trust her with his sweater. By the end of the evening, she let him walk her to her bus and she wrote her address and phone number on his hand. Then she kissed him, just a peck. Her mates taunted her to give a real kiss, but, before she could respond, Bill did: he grabbed her, dipped her, and kissed her full and deep. Like in the movies. “Great kiss,” Teryl said. Everyone cheered. Bill Suff had never done anything so forceful, so impromptu in all his life. It was the happiest moment of his life.
When he thought about it later, he knew what had happened: It was the uniform. The uniform made him bold. And it made people do what he asked.
So, from that night on, for the rest of his life, Bill was never out of uniform. Prior to that he’d worn his high school band uniform, extending the costumed hours before and after performances, but the night at the Rose Bowl proved that even “civilian” clothes could have the urgency and authority of a uniform. From high school to the local fire/forestry department to the Air Force and the Medical Corps, to prison in Texas, then to Riverside, county service and the prostitute killings, and back to prison—Bill’s uniform of each period defined him, empowered him. Clothes didn’t make the man; they spoke for him, they were him.
When he met Cheryl Lewis in 1990 in Lake Elsinore—she was then only seventeen, working at night in a Circle K minimart— Bill had scouted her, decided to move on her, and showed up in an “unmarked” security guard’s uniform—sheriff’s shirt without the patches, pressed khakis.
“Don’t pay me any attention,” he whispered to her, “just go on about your business. The store management has hired me to keep watch on you and make sure you’re all right here working so late at night.”
And she believed him. After all, he was more than twice her age, just barely younger than her parents, and he hung around for endless hours all night long—no one would do that if it wasn’t his job, right? Or, more importantly, he really did make her feel safe even though before he first showed up she couldn’t actually say that she really felt unsafe. She sort of felt unsafe in retrospect, after he’d made her realize what a fool she’d been to have been unwary. It’s a dangerous world out there. And she was important enough to deserve protection.
When Bill was arrested in Riverside in January 1992, much was made of the sheriff’s shirts hanging in his closet; when he was tried, much was made of his personalized belts and tourist T-shirts and caps. The prosecutors tried to identify him through his clothes and the recollections of witnesses, but they missed out on the real point: his uniforms predict his conduct. Put him in prison garb, and he’s harmless. Put him in a guard’s clothes or firefighter’s clothes, and he’s helpful.
Then again, when he pulls on his killer’s clothes, look out.
Contrary to any profiles or prosecution theories, there’s no evidence that Bill wore crypto-cop clothes when he killed. I think the hookers would have been wary of it, and I think Bill had a different mind-set in such clothes. I even think there was a different “uniform” for the nights he simply dated hookers, as opposed to the nights he killed them. No biological or trace evidence turned up on any of Bill’s clothes, yet there’s no way he could have cleaned everything up so thoroughly. I think that somewhere out there he hid a bag of killing clothes, as well as the clothes he sometimes redressed his victims in.