What then were his killing clothes?
I suspect there were two stages of dress for the nights of the killings.
First, the clothes Bill wore when he stopped for the girls and enticed them into his van. These would be a slightly understated version of his dating clothes—long-sleeved shirt, plaid or dark; trousers, dark denim or maybe khaki; boots or maybe sneakers if his bum leg was bothering him, the one hurt in the motorcycle accident; and a big belt, but not the “BILL” one or any other so memorable.
Second, the actual clothes that Bill had to be wearing in order to commit “the sacrifice”. These would be clothes that were at once practical, erotic, and priestly. Think “wizard”, “hangman”, Bob Guccione, and Velcro… and there’s only one outfit that comes to mind: a jumpsuit. Bill wore them in the Air Force Medical Corps. He wore them in prison in Texas. The Air Force jumpsuits had been sent home and were waiting for him in Elsinore when he got out of jail for killing his baby. They already had blood on them from those ambulance calls in the Corps. Now no one much looked for those jumpsuits after he was arrested for the Riverside Prostitute Killings, but then again no one ever found them, either; and between the cops and Bill’s family, his stuff was scavenged through and picked at like chicken pox. Of course, he might have ditched the old jumpsuits years ago and replaced them with brand-new or even government surplus clothes made out of parachute material that doesn’t shed trace evidence. No matter where he got the damn jumpsuits, the fact is he had ’em, and once he had his victims in tow he’d dress up in the jumpsuits, and then he was able to kill. Practically speaking, jumpsuits are easy to get in and out of, even in the dark. They also cover you from neck to ankle, catching your loose hairs, sloughed skin, and all other biological evidence. If you’re wearing clothes underneath, the jumpsuit protects them from arterial spray, spitting, or any other messy act by your victim.
Erotically, jumpsuits zip or Velcro-rip open all the way down the front, allowing you to be fully dressed yet fully exposed, ready to “perform”, and the fully encasing, unbreathing nylon feels really slicky and sweaty and second skinny should you be buck naked inside.
Meanwhile, the look of a jumpsuit is decidedly mystical, authoritative, and reverential. If you’re medieval, it’s a robe and hood; but modern means jumpsuit. It’s what all the high priests wear.
But why is this relevant?
You will recall I previously knocked Bill’s Dungeons and Drag-ons stories, but now you should take a look at the unfinished “A Whisper From the Dark”, which follows shortly. The death-dealing villain is Zernebock, defined as evil incarnate—the same description the judge used on Bill when sentencing him to death. Zernebock is timeless… and be-robed. If you’re going to be Death, you have to dress the part.
See, Bill lived in the environs of Elsinore, but it was really his self-made Pern. It took me a while to convince myself of this, because his fantasy writing seemed so obviously contrived to make that very point. I kept thinking this was all misdirection—a sensible fiction to mask the true delusion. I kept thinking that Bill would be cleverer and less open, that he came up with Dungeons and Dragons because that’s what he knew people would expect to hear, much as he knew the cookbook would play into the Lecter stereotype.
Indeed, similarly, when Bill and I contemplated an insanity defense should his convictions be overturned and his case retried, I pressed him for any possible abuse or death-traumas he might have suffered as a youth. He said there was nothing, but then proceeded to write me a letter that contained, among other tales, a dream he had in which he was accusing his parents of abuse. He then wondered aloud whether the dream was some repressed memory fighting its way into his consciousness.
I read all this as fraud. I assumed he was just inventing what I needed in order to defend him.
However, I changed my mind about all this after he made a very real Freudian slip in discussing the last murder.
Bill was still in jail in Riverside, and his death sentence was due to be pronounced in a matter of days. He would then be taken immediately to a “safe cell” where he would be under suicide watch. Some night thereafter—it could be days or even weeks later—he would be spirited out without warning, tossed into a secure police vehicle, and transported to San Quentin. His days of high living in Riverside would be over, and the days of his life would be numbered.
Accordingly, he was at his lowest ebb emotionally, and I had just gotten a court order in order to see him alone without a guard looking in. I had to sign on as his civil attorney in order to get the order.
My friends and family kept asking me if I was frightened at the thought of being alone with Bill unmonitored, but I have to say I wasn’t worried he’d try to kill me. Although he would have nothing to lose and was certainly plenty angry at all the world, I just didn’t see him hurting me. Perhaps this was my shortsightedness, since I just can’t relate to blind or irrational rage no matter how hard I try—I mean it just always seems so false to me when I see it depicted in film or on TV as some Charles Foster Kane trashes his wife’s room—it makes me cringe because I don’t quite believe it, Welles or not. He just seems to be thinking, Okay, as I reach to sweep everything off her dresser, what’ll look good for me to destroy next and how do I keep my best profile toward the camera? In life, the times I’ve seen rage, it came across as entirely volitional and calculated. People do trash things, but don’t they have a purpose in doing so? As they’re flinging and stomping and punching, isn’t there a consciousness that says “I know exactly what I’m doing and even though it’s self-destructive and childish I’m going to do it anyway”? Isn’t rage more a matter of punctuation than text?
Paralleling this to other emotions and motivations, when you’re in the throes of hot sexual foreplay, doesn’t the thought cross your mind that you ought to reach into that drawer and get that condom even though you wind up letting lust overrule the thought? Bill had nothing to lose by killing me, but he had much to gain by treating me well—from legal advice to friendship to, most important, my telling his story in this book. So, no, I wasn’t fearful of him,
I was, however, worried that he would be a waste of my time, that he just wanted my company and would give me no legitimate or usable insight into his mind.
The Riverside guards put me alone with Bill in a conference room that doubled as the jailhouse law library. Before we did much else, I gave him a crash course in using a law library, so he could help himself with his own appeal. I also wanted to see just how smart he really was—not unexpectedly, he learned in twenty minutes what it takes most law students an entire semester to pick up.
And, as I moved around from bookcase to bookcase, I wanted to see how Bill watched me from his chair, how he moved, how he focused—I wanted to judge whether this was a man capable of concentrating on and mentally and physically overwhelming so many adult women without any slipups.
I remembered that years ago a friend of mine was working for a film director who’d gotten possession of two tiger cubs. I was invited to come play with the cubs, and they were amazing. Cute and cuddly and kitten-like, and then ZAP! a bird flitted out of a tree and the cubs’ eyes and ears snapped to attention and their claws came out. It was like someone had turned on a switch. And, just as quickly, the cubs became cuddly and relaxed again… except now I’d seen their true, instinctive, unalterable, predatory nature and I didn’t find the critters so cute and cuddly anymore. Even as cubs they could cause damage, and, six hundred pounds later, adulthood would make them downright terrifying and extra hungry.