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.