Everyone had heard about the Riverside Prostitute Killer, and everyone was certain that Bill was guilty even though he denied it, and that was the name of that tune.
The worst part, from a modern-day journalistic marketing perspective, was that Bill was an old-before-his-time, John Wayne Gacy “pudgeball” kind of guy. In other words, forget the TV movie. Mark Harmon wasn’t about to play Bill Suff, and none of those Melrose Place babes was going to play a junkie street hooker whose neck got in the way of Bill’s ham hands and noose-knotted surgical tubing.
Sure, Bill had killed a lot of women, but he was just one in an endless stream of serial killers who had killed a lot of women.
However, I didn’t know any of those other serial killers—Bill was the first serial killer I would ever meet. Dead hookers and a live murderer—this was my chance to take a walk on the wild side, my chance to rise above the surmise of mystery fiction writing and enter the real world of the criminal mind.
Who are these guys, these serial killers? Why do they do what they do? And just how much like them are we?
“I was maybe five years old, and maybe a little less. I was the oldest child, and I played by myself a lot. We had this planter alongside the house—my father had planted bamboo and some kind of low fern—caterpillars loved to congregate there and I loved to collect the caterpillars. Worms were slimy, but caterpillars were fuzzy and friendly and colorful, and I dug a little hole in the planter, lined it with leaves, and gently placed my caterpillars in it. I cut some of the bamboo shoots and planted them in the hole so the caterpillars could climb or dine. I had an orange caterpillar, and several black ones—no, I didn’t name them, but I could tell one from the other, and I noted and memorized their individual markings. Every night I’d lay a big fern leaf across the hole so the caterpillars would sleep for the night, and then in the morning I’d take out the caterpillars and hold them in my hand, stroke their manes, show them off to the neighborhood kids. Then one day I came out and found the caterpillars were all dead. They were mush. The fuzz of the orange caterpillar was everywhere in the hole. My first thought was that one of the other kids had come over and jealously killed the caterpillars. Maybe the kid was trying to play with them or grab them or steal them and got too rough. Or maybe he was just trying to kill them. Either way, I was heartbroken. I looked at that orange fuzz blowing around the hole and I just knew that this devastation was all my fault—if I hadn’t tried to covet and contain the beautiful caterpillars, they’d still be alive. If you find beauty in this world, people come in and take it from you, not because they want it for themselves but just because they don’t want you to have it.
“It never occurred to me that maybe my caterpillars were still alive and well, that they’d just molted, shed their fur, and crawled out of the hole to build their cocoons so they could turn into butterflies. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that then, why I might have been confusing a natural process for a sinister plot; I just know that I felt a tremendous loss and I needed someone—including myself—to blame.
“Anyway, several years later, my mother was driving me and my brother to the market. In the street was a tortoise. It was dead. A tire track had torn through the back of its shell, leaving the poor animal frozen in midstep, its head stretched all the way up and out, eyes wide and alert. The tortoise was in the center of the road—the killer had intentionally veered out of his lane in order to run it over. My brother and I had several tortoises as pets—I knew this wasn’t one of ours, but the instant I saw the animal, looking so posed and alive and yet so clearly and needlessly dead, I burst into hysterics. In my entire life, I have never cried so uncontrollably. To this day I remember how completely out of control and horrific the world suddenly seemed to me at the sight of that dead tortoise. I’d led a protected and happy life until then, and somehow I now knew it was all a lie.”
The words of Bill Suff, convicted infant slayer and serial killer?
No, the words of a nice, shy, Jewish boy from the San Fernando Valley. Me. Born to nice parents and raised in a nice middle-class existence where I never wanted for anything but never asked for what I couldn’t get.
Yet, if I suddenly went up in a tower and blazed away with an AK-47, everyone would point to my turtle and caterpillar stories as proof that I’d lost my bearings a very long time ago. And my years of writing murder mysteries, inventing ways for people to die on paper, would be a prosecutor’s wet dream. Hunter, Matlock, Remington Steele, and all my other television scripts would testify against me. In fact, when I was consulting for the series M.A.N.T.I.S., didn’t I have a heated argument with one of the producers about why serial killers kill, like I knew best? I was writing a script where a killer would kidnap and then impersonate his victims, jealously trying to live their lives before finding each insufficient. I maintained that my villain had no sense of acceptable self, and so he needed to control and become the people he most envied, only to find that each was just as weak and vulnerable and human as he. See, murder is the great equalizer. Paupers and presidents don’t die any differently from one another. And serial killers get only momentary relief, a momentary high from each killing. But then they are alone with themselves once more. All the secondary motives for serial killing—media attention, control over the victim—dissipate once the victim is dead. Now all the killer can do is kill again. The act of killing is both the sustenance and the famine. The successive killings are really just one act stretched out over time. There is no final exorcism; there is finally only the killer’s own death or capture to stop his act. The world of emotion that each of us lives in cannot be changed by anything we do—however and whenever that die is cast, we spend the rest of our lives in fight and flight that only conserves and justifies our reality, no matter how false or inconsistent it may be with everyone else’s.
However, the M.A.N.T.I.S. producer insisted that I was full of crap. “Of course a killer has a motive—everyone has a motive for every act, but people are either good or evil, and they’re to be judged by their acts—their intentions don’t matter.” Accordingly, as rewritten by the producer, the serial killer in my story became a guy who was simply out to avenge his partners’ attempts to steal from him and kill him.
To my mind, this was now not a serial killer.
In a given moment of anger, fear, pain, or jealousy, we each of us can find ourselves shot through with the urge to kill. For most of us the urge is juxtaposed, countered by either self-recrimination or simple relief—you feel better having gotten the emotion out while recognizing it for what it is, or your conscience simply clamps down on the impulse and that is that.
And, no matter how perfect our upbringing, we each suffer enough cumulative hurt and confusion that, in a moment of weakness, could lead to murder.
But that is still not serial killing.
Serial killing is an entirely different animal.
Serial killers are born waiting for the slings and arrows that will unleash the torment they already feel. While the rest of us pile up pain throughout our lives, able to endure more because of what we’ve already endured, serial killers are bursting with pain from the git-go, and life experience then shows them that there is indeed an outlet, that in this mobile world one person can cruise around wasting people by the dozens and never get caught.
And I couldn’t wait to meet with Bill Suff to ask him all about it.