It was, as they say, déjà vu all over again. Like when Don had told me about Billy bringing used clothes and jewelry to Don’s wife.
“I’ve kind of taped over some of the stuff,” said Don sheepishly.
“Don’t tape over any more, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You know what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah. I know.”
I was thinking that if Bill drove around in his van with a tape recorder going, then it was because he was taping his trysts and his murders. Listening to them later would definitely be arousing for him.
Donny brought me the tape recorder and the tapes—I listened to them all.
Sure enough, one was a tape of a bunch of men sitting on metal chairs in a hollow sounding room watching Super Bowl XVI— Cincinnati and San Francisco—on the TV in 1982. None of the men said anything to the recorder, they just cheered and reacted to the game—they had no idea they were being taped. There was less conversation than one would expect among friends watching a football game together. Since Bill was in prison in Texas at that time, I assumed that was where he recorded this.
But, when I asked him about it, he got nervous. He denied making the tape and he denied watching the game. And his denials started to get long and complicated and explanatory. It’s not just that he didn’t make the tape, he couldn’t have made the tape, and here’s why—blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.
I didn’t bother to listen to his explanation—it was obvious he was lying. The truth was that he had broken the convicts’ code by secretly recording his fellows, even though nothing incriminating was going on. He’d also broken prison rules by having the tape recorder outside of his workstation—in Texas he’d been a computer operator, much privileged after being a model prisoner for so many years.
But why on earth would he care now about transgressions of prison ethics more than a decade ago? Because once a con, always a con. You know you could go back, you know you probably will go back. Somewhere sometime you will encounter your fellow cons again, and time doesn’t pass for these guys. If you owe them, you will pay. Time served might pay your debt to society, but cons trade in different specie. Ditto, if you’ve made a fool of a guard. The cons and the guards are all waiting for you, and they will always remem-ber not to forget.
“What was it like in Texas, in prison?” I asked.
“Oh, it was fine,” said Bill.
“You know that if your California convictions get thrown out and you don’t get retried, Texas will haul your ass back and make you serve the rest of your seventy-year sentence, right?”
“Riiiight,” he said.
Bill’s conduct in Riverside included numerous acts that would constitute violations of his Texas parole, so he is toast one way or the other. That was why it’s so morally easy to help him with his appeals—Bill Suff is going to spend the rest of his life in jail somewhere, bank on it. He will never again walk the streets and be a danger to anyone.
“Tell me a little about Texas,” I requested.
Bill proceeded to recount how violent the place was, how a new young inmate, in for the short term on a drug offense, was brutally and repeatedly gang raped until he killed himself. Apparently the guards were bribed to leave unlocked the appropriate cell doors so that the cons could get at the boy each night.
And, where Bill worked, in the computer center, inmates were in charge of inputting State and County filings into the State mainframe database. That is to say, no more tinking out license plates. Now prisoners were given stacks of files that contained records of property transfers, deeds of trust, automobile registrations, driver’s licenses, welfare benefits, marriage licenses—every kind of State and County filing respecting the assets and property and ultra-personal doings of private citizens.
Of course, the prisoners would secretly jot down the names and addresses of anyone who looked interesting—people who had rich homes and expensive cars—that way, when you or a friend got out, you’d know just where to go to steal the best stuff.
Nice work if you can get it.
“You know, Bill, I listened to these other tapes, too—what’s the deal? They were obviously made in your van—I can hear you opening and closing doors, shifting into gear, accelerating, braking, traffic around you, your radio ‘on’ playing music, and then there’s you talking with Cheryl at one point—she clearly didn’t know she was being taped—you weren’t talking about anything important.”
“Don’t remember taping Cheryl, but I could’ve. See, I drove around a lot for my work, as you know, and, well, I love music…”
“Yeah?”
He was thinking, trying to come up with an explanation. There were indeed hours of tapes of Bill just driving around. Clicks on the tapes told me that he had recorded over them repeatedly. I played them for an audio expert and he thought he could recover some of the underlying, earlier tracks, but it would cost a lot of money I didn’t have. Plus, maybe I didn’t want to know the truth, particularly if I was right. I’d been able to keep my emotional distance by telling myself that the crime scene photos were fake and staged and the people in them were actors or wax dummies—“Naw, these people were never really alive, so now they’re not really dead”—kind of the inside out version of Bill’s thinking—but if I actually heard one of these poor girls screaming on a microcassette tape, well, I don’t even want to think about it.
However, if we ever find the killing kit, don’t bet that there won’t be tapes in it. Like Nixon, Bill very much sees himself as significant to posterity and certain to be better understood and appreciated then than now.
“The deal with the tapes was…” said Bill, “… well, see, sometimes I’d hear a song on the radio and it’d become a favorite of mine but it wouldn’t be on the album so I couldn’t buy it.”
“So you’d tape the radio playing all day long, and that way you were certain to catch this song at some point?”
“Exactly.”
As you know, sometimes I would back off Bill when the conversation got a little Alice in Wonderland-ish. But not this time.
“Let me understand this—you’d tape the radio while you were driving in your van where it was noisy and you could barely hear the song on the tape later, rather than, say, taping the radio at home.”
“If I was in the van taping, then when I heard the song on the radio I’d know where to find it on the tape. Otherwise, I’d have to listen to the whole tape.”
“Bill, I say again: you could have done all this better at home, and it makes no sense that you didn’t, other than it makes no sense that you would do any of this in the first place.”
“It makes sense to me. Didn’t you ever tape things off the radio?”
This is where Bill hopes to get you, when he finds the points where his world intersects with your own, where the parallel universes flow together and so what he does seems acceptable because you’ve done the same things. Sort of.
He was right—as a kid in the days before VCRs I’d used my audiotape recorder to record off of radio and TV. I’d taped Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for slain brother Bobby. I had Dick Enberg’s call of the Rams blocking a Packers’ punt and winding up in the play-offs for the first time since I started following football. And I even had the audio portion of a TV retrospective of the Army-McCarthy hearings.
But all that was experimentation—I was just playing around with my new tape recorder, my first tape recorder, trying to figure out what good it was. And, after a weekend or two of making such tapes, I never did it again. Tape recorders were for specific purpose, where people intentionally talked into it, for interviews or at family get togethers or if you were doing some creative skit or such. You didn’t just turn on a tape recorder and leave it running and then keep the tape like it mattered.