William Suff in Chains

"In some cases the victim's breasts were cut off. Some of the bodies were dressed in men's clothing. Many of the bodies were left in fields or groves or dumped by roadsides."
                                       ______Deputy District Attorney Paul E. Zellerbach

FATAL SLIP OF THE KILLING GENIUS

Late in 1974, in the Riverside area of Southern California, unvirtuous young women began disappearing at the rate of about one a month. The exact total of victims was never fixed, but between 20 and 30 women were purportedly snatched from the streets by a killer who rampaged through Lake Elsinore, Rubidoux, Corona, Romoland and other cities. Targeting prostitutes, he dumped the bodies of his victims in mountainous regions, dumpsters, and various roadside areas where they were sure to be found. In some cases, the bodies were decomposed beyond recognition and if not for DNA evidence or dental records would have remained nameless. With some, only scant bones were found. A few remain unclaimed to this day. No one knows how many women will never be found at all.

The first known murder victim was discovered on Thursday morning, October 30, 1986. A traveler scavenging for aluminum cans spotted the partially clothed body of a dark-haired women in her twenties, curled up in a drainage ditch in an industrial area of Rubidoux, near Agua Mansa Road and Market Street. The dead woman was lying on her back, her sweater and beige culottes ripped to shreds. Her flimsy panties were pulled down around her ankles. She had been stabbed multiple times and her chest and face were cosmeticized with blood. Her public hairs had been ripped from her private parts by an angry hand.

An autopsy revealed that 23-year-old Michelle Yvette Gutierrez, of Corpus Christi, Texas, had strangulation marks on her neck and suffered trauma to the anal and genital areas. Marks on her breast and buttocks provided a chilling framework for the story of her death.

Another gruesome case began on December 11, 1986, when the half-clothed body of Charlotte Jean Palmer, 24, of Anna, Illinois was found near Highway 74 and Matthews Road in Romoland. County coroners were unable to determine the cause of her death, because of the rapidity of putrefaction. Fear and panic spread as more and more women began mysteriously disappearing. Over a period of five years, from 1986 to 1991, nineteen prostitutes were found murdered - at least three of the Riverside County victims had their breasts severed. A forensic pathologist noted that cutting off female breasts was a way in which serial killers can uniquely hurt and harm the females they loathe.

"Serial killers perceive themselves as somehow not being worth what other people are worth," he said. "They are the walking dead." The expert said this behavior often stems from severe child abuse that can be either sexual, physical, emotional or psychological. The serial killer's third victim was a woman named Linda Ann Ortega. At age 37, she worked at Carl's Jr. fast-food restaurant on Railroad Canyon Road in Lake Elsinore when she wasn't applying her trade as a strumpet, Her record reeked of drug arrests. Her naked body was found ravished and stabbed in a patch of light brush off a dirt road near Franklin Street and Ridge Road. Tailored evidence put her death at three days earlier. Her blood contained high levels of alcohol and cocaine.

Ortega's coworkers at the fast-food restaurant described her as a devoted single mother, struggling to raise a teen-age son. They were surprised to find out she was a part-time prostitute. On May 2, another transient fell prey to the random slayer. Decaying molars in the lower jaw made identification conclusive. Her name was Martha Bess Young, she was 27 years old, and formally of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was found spread-eagle and totally naked in a gully adjacent Franklin Street, her open eyes staring sightlessly into infinity. She had been dead at least three weeks.

An ex post facto examination revealed the pretty blonde Lake Elsinore streetwalker had a high level of amphetamines in her blood. Apparently, she had died from a toxic reaction to the drug as she was being strangled. Once again, the genius killer left minus-clue signs.

With the deaths of victims 3 and 4 reality set up shop in Lake Elsinore, population 15,000. This is where a majority of the victims would be dumped. This is where the hub of the Task Force Operation was centered, headed by Riverside Police Chief Linford L. "Sonny" Richardson, Sheriff's Lt. Al Hearn, Captain Bill Reynolds, Lt. William H. Caldwell, and Sheriff Cois Byrd, among others. Under their direction, the task force trebled its ranks to 14 detectives and homicide sleuths, the largest enforcement effort ever contrived in Riverside County.

The gruesome carnage was just beginning. 37-year-old Linda Mae Ruiz was once a pretty brunette, fair complexioned, 5 feet 2 inches, 122 pounds, and married. But years of drug and alcohol abuse had taken their toll and she even had trouble picking up tricks - except for one, her last.

On January 17, 1989 Linda's strangled body was found near Lakeshore Drive, at the end of Lowell Street, on the beach of Lake Elsinore some 120 feet from the water. There were no signs of a struggle. A pathologist said she had a blood alcohol level of .19 percent, more than twice the level at which a California motorist is presumed intoxicated. Her killer had forced her head into the sand and smothered her.

With the strangulation death of Kimberely Lyttle, 28, found June 28, 1989 in Cottonwood Canyon south of Canyon Lake, network campers and out-of-town headlines chronicled the ghastly killings of wanton women with mixed feelings: a resort boating and fishing resort, furtive sex, frenzied sex murders.

Under media fire, at the flattop oasis that sheltered the sheriff's station, Capt. Bill Reynolds proclaimed, "I'm confident we'll get him. It may not be tomorrow. The greenest rookie could stop the guy for a broken tail light and crack the case - like the CHP officer who in 1983 pulled over serial killer Randy Kraft's car for erratic driving and found a murdered Marine in the front seat."

On a corked bulletin board in the captain's office, was a "victimology" kit of the serial killer's handiwork: Gutierrez, Palmer, Ortega, Young, Ruiz, Lyttle, and the latest, Judy Lynn Angel, whose naked and bludgeoned body was found November 11, 1989 northwest of Lake Elsinore, near Temescal Canyon Road, I-15 and Lake Street.

"Angel," as she was known on the streets, was a derelict of drink and drugs at age 36, and she knew it. She became a prostitute to support her two children after her divorce. Her arrest record included jail time for prostitution and possession of drug paraphernalia. A pathologist was able to deduce by the deep gashes in her arms and hands, that Angel hadn't died easy; she had received these frightful blows while attempting to ward off the lunatic, attacking her.

The killer was becoming more brazen now, the urge to violate and posses his victims more prevalent than ever. The following month, on December 13th, the mortal remains of 23-year-old Christina Tina Leal, a resident of Perris, was found off Goetz Road in Quail Valley. She had suffered sexual trauma before she was strangled and stabbed in the heart. Victim No. 8 was also a drug user with a record of arrests for prostitution. The list was climbing, and by now Lake Elsinore was besieged by representatives of the Press of the nation, searching for the slightest peg on which to hang a story.

On Thursday morning, January 18, 1990, Riverside County sheriff''s investigators were summoned to a scene east of I-15 in Lake Elsinore. They arrived at 6:30 a.m., 30 minutes after a Lake Elsinore jogger stumbled upon the nude corpse of Daria Jane Ferguson, of Sun City. In death, she was a doll-like figurine. Blood caked her bitten tongue. Sheriff's Sgt. Howard Rush pinpointed the location at Grape Street, one mile south of Railroad Canyon Road. Never married, the 105 pound victim had four children. Her arrest record was crammed with the usual titillations of sex and drugs. At this point of the investigation the state Department of Justice was busily examining minute particles found at the nine crime scenes to determine whether any connection existed. After many hours of overtime and frustration, probers conferred with members of the 11-member San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, who were presently investigating the deaths of 42 transients and street walkers. One by one, their bodies were found strewn between mid-1985 and mid-1989. By all standards, this killer of fast women was setting an unforgettable precedent in the darker annals of California lore.

Sgt. Bill Walsh, one of the Riverside County Sheriff's detectives who coordinated the investigation, told reporters that the causes of death varied, but the method most often used was strangulation. A psychiatrist said that apart from his rapacious lust for power, and the ruthless manner by which he achieved it, the killer longed for recognition. Several of the slayings involved bludgeoning, sex battery, and mutilation, and strangulation. The similarities caused Riverside investigators to compare notes with authorities in Seattle investigating the Green River killings.

In that case, a Green River Task Force was still investigating the deaths of 49 females between the ages of 15 and 35 in the Seattle area between 1982 and 1984. The Green River women were unceremoniously tossed naked and strangled in remote areas. The series of murders took their name from the Green River, along which some of the victims were found. A psychiatrist working close to the case said, "Serial killers are going to do the things a 1-year-old baby would do. They'll go to the edge. They'll test limits. They'll actually put themselves in danger because they don't know what their limits are. They will target prostitutes because in the killer's minds, the women are already lost. Because they are selling themselves, they are women who are not worth living."

Her need for narcotics and alcohol, sent Carol Lynn Miller into the risky area of the unknown, and interrupted the 35-year-old woman's housewifely role. Now divorced, in late January, 1990, she vanished from the Riverside area. It was first presumed she had left the area because of police pressure to rid the streets of whores. Her totally nude body was discovered by workers in an orchard on February 8, at Mt. Vernon Avenue and Pigeon Pass Road in Highgrove. Cause of death was listed as "multiple stab wounds to the chest, and asphyxia. A coroner said there was a wound near Carol's right nipple.

William Suff's Victims

Police determined that Cheryl Coker, 33, and married, suffered the worst death of all. Her remains were discovered on November 6, 1990, near a dumpster enclosure about 11:40 a.m. by a man installing factory equipment in a new factory building behind an industrial unit on Palmyrita Avenue in northeast Riverside, adjacent where Miller was found. She was naked, and her suffocated body was concealed under a pile of oak branches. In a moment of unreasoning madness her attacker had severed her right breast, which was found beside her.

The man who telephone the police said: "I went to a dumpster enclosure in the parking lot behind the building looking for a piece of wood to use as a brace. I saw a foot sticking out from some tree trimmings near the gates to the enclosure. At first, I thought the foot and leg belonged to a plastic mannequin. I reached down and touched the toe. Then, I realized it wasn't plastic."

There were many old trees in the neighborhood and police went in search of one with newly cut branches, in hopes that someone might have seen a man cutting the trimmings and would be able to provide them with a description. No such tree was found. No one in the neighborhood saw a stranger lurking about.

The ghastly rampage, which quickly became known as the Lake Elsinore Massacre, raised the number of worst massacres in the United States over the past 50 years to 12 on December 21, 1990. Not far from the last murder scene, in a dumpster enclosure at the rear of an industrial complex on Iowa Avenue, a man emptying trash was startled by the sight of Susan Melissa Sternfeld's nude and strangled body. She was barely 27.

A few crumbs of information were gathered. Susan was a resident of Riverside. She had worked successfully as a model and in the cosmetics, clothing business. An unmarried mother, Kathleen's apple-pie life succumbed to narcotics. Her costly addiction plummeted her into the depths of harlotry.

It was now January 19, 1991, and more than $100,000 had been spent on the long and fruitless search for the menacing killer of wanton women. According to the pathologist who performed the autopsy on victim No. 13, Kathleen Leslie Milne, a divorced woman of 42, "she was rendered unconscious by several blows to the head, then strangled." Her lifeless body was unceremoniously dumped amid discarded beer cans and old tires. The pathologist theorized that the flesh abrasion on the pretty brunette's right thigh had been caused by forcible removal of her panties. Police were stymied. Clues led nowhere.

Also known on the streets as Carol Kathleen Swenson and Kathy Pluckett, a passing motorist spotted her corpse northwest of Lake Elsinore, less than a mile from where Angel's body was found. She had been dead less than 24 hours, a pathologist said.

The serial killer's lust for mayhem caused one medical examiner to remark: "We certainly have a sick individual here. He is a depraved maniac who will keep on killing until he is caught. So far everything has led to a dead end. We have absolutely no leads to follow."

Veteran officers were not strangers to the odor of death and murder was not new to them. But they were stunned by the savage cruelty of killings, the grotesque human sacrifice to a ritual of frenzied wrath. "It's something I'll never forget as long as I live and as hard as I try," said Detective Bob Creed. "I thought at the time: What type of person would want to kill like this?"

With an incomprehensible number of woman dead, and no clues to lead police to a suspect, Lake Elsinore panicked. Police were flooded with letters demanding they catch the serial killer. A nationally broadcast television program profiled the phantom killer and asked for the public's help in solving the case. But even with national TV exposure the killer managed to elude the grasp of police. Cherie Michelle Payseur was destined to become victim No. 14. At age 24, she had attended California School for the Deaf in Riverside. Never married, she had one child out of wedlock. To support herself and her child, Cherie worked periodically as a cleaning woman. To support her drug habit, she became a woman of easy virtue.

On the muggy morning of April 27, 1991, a homeless man looking for aluminum cans stumbled upon her bare body at the rear of the Concourse Bowling Center on Arlington Avenue in Riverside. Poor Cherie had become yet another piece of the puzzle of murdered prostitutes. The handle from a toilet plunger protruded from her vagina.

The cycle of violence in the Lake Elsinore area had nearly escalated to atomic proportions. There were no suspects, although stalwarts of the law began the tedious process of checking more than 200 possibilities. All available law enforcement personal were combing the area. In the next weeks, 20 agencies would become involved in the manhunt for the elusive killer of life's erring sisters.

Following the death of Kathleen Milne, fellow strumpet Sherry Ann Latham was interviewed by a newspaper reporter thirsting for a story. During the interview, she admitted she was a "harlot" and that she used the "buddy system" for protection. "We take care of each other," she said. "If we're gonna go off someplace with a trick, we make sure to let someone know." One hot night in June, 1991, Sherry Ann had gone on her regular night's walk through downtown Lake Elsinore in search of a trick. She needed money for drugs. At 37, she was a fairly pretty woman with shoulder length blonde hair. A car pulled up, a door opened, and Sherry became yet another victim in one of the most zaniest and bizarre cases in American jurisprudence. The Fourth of July celebration brings into the Lake Elsinore valley an unusual amount of tourists and guests. On this particular day, picnickers set up their tables, set our their wares, and made ready for an exciting day that would be capped off by fireworks. Those picnickers frolicking near Railroad Canyon Road near Grape Street, were unaware that nearby, lay the nude and ravished body of Sherry Latham, the serial killer's 15th victim.

Her ghastly remains were found outstretched in a patch of grass. Her complexion was pallid, her lips blue. Her eyelids were raised and her eyes appeared glassy in death. Little was known of Sherry's early life, except that she drifted young into drugs and then lower-class trampdom, and ended up a choked corpse.

Lake Elsinore Detectives Bob Creed and John Davis were in on the case from the beginning. They mulled over the snapshots of the victims tacked to a bulletin board in the task force office. They cringed. From the looks on the faces, every one of the girls looked as though they were much older than they really were. They were products of Poverty Row’s University Boulevard in Riverside, or Main Street, Lake Elsinore, or Perris' quickie-trip motels. They all worked communally. They lived together, ate at fast-food joints together, and all died the same way. Most of them left behind despondent and dispirited families.

Time was when "The Street of Fallen Women," the main drag in Elsinore, was a resort town frequented by President Grover Cleveland, who was lured by the town's hot springs bathhouse, along with famous movie stars like Clark Gable. People never locked their doors, or their cars, back then. Parents could rest easy about their children running off to a park or bicycle riding across town.

But not anymore. Drug trafficking had become prevalent, and cuckolds had taken over and shop keepers were complaining that they would be happy if the world's oldest profession were legalized and regulated. The whole scenario smacked of cold-blooded brutality. And the motive? The best that sleuths could come up with was that he was a genius murderer, a master criminal, an untouchable killer of fallen women, exemplifying deft, ingenious techniques that put him above the bumbling of any ordinary killer. Some even praised this messenger of misery. They said his handiwork hadn't represented a loss to the community.

"There hasn't been much evidence of prostitutes on Main Street lately," one Elsinore shopkeeper said. "It's nice not having them around. I think business has picked up since they've gone. I think whoever is killing them is out to clean up the neighborhood."

But whether the crafty killer had a gnawing hatred for prostitutes or not, made no difference to Detective Creed. "We don't care if they're drug addicts or prostitutes," he said. "They're getting the same resource level as if they were cheerleaders."

The big break came on August 15, 1991. A man in a grayish-blue van, looking for fleshpot pleasures, wanted to take a pregnant Riverside prostitute with a $300-a-day cocaine and heroin habit to the orange groves near the University of California, Riverside. She agreed to accompany him. As they drove he made pleasant small talk but suddenly "he turned crazy." He became argumentative and reneged on a promise to pay her $20 for sex. She screamed as they fought in the cramped front seat of the van. As she fought for her life, the woman managed to force the car door open. She fell out along Riverside's University Avenue. Immediately after the unsuccessful assault, and still needing satiation, the man drove down the street and picked up 23-year-old Kelly Marie Hammond.

"I told her not to go, it wasn't worth it," the pregnant prostitute said. "Don't go! Don't go! I shouted to her. She looked back at me and smiled. She told me she'd come back. But she never came back. I waited for her." The faceless killer apparently abandoned his geographical links to dump Kelly Hammond's scrawny, naked body where a trucker would find it near the intersection of Sampson Avenue and Delilah Street, south of Highway 91. Authorities found Kelly's corpse still warm. Her delicate features had dissolved into expressionless immobility. It had been barely 43 days since the death of Sherry Ann Latham.

Taken to police headquarters, the only witness to escape death at the hands of the deranged butcher, helped the serial killer task force create a composite sketch of the suspect and his van. Police issued an APB on the van, with the advisement that the vehicle was wanted in a suspected murder investigation and peace officers were to use extreme caution when approaching the occupant of the vehicle. Newspapers and television stations picked it up and within hours police were deluged with numerous tips from concerned citizens in the wake of the publicity sparked by the alert. Police activity, parental concern and involvement and regional publicity did nothing to force the steely plotter underground.

The discovery of Hammond's body occurred under unusual circumstances. A movie titled "Roadside Justice" loosely based on the rash of slayings began filming on location. A steady flow of prostitute extras derived from the classifieds, came by car, bus and by thumb to Corona, just outside Lake Elsinore. On the fifth day of shooting the crew arrived amidst the shocking news: "Another hooker has been found murdered!"

The news shocked the crew and left such an eerie feeling that many girls who had been hired to play streetwalkers quit and left the area. John McBrearty, the writer-director from Chino, was one of those hit with stunned belief. He told reporters that he was cocksure the killer had been among the spectators watching the filming each day near the Corona Airport. He said he chose the location rather than disturb citizens of Elsinore with a further reminder of the slayings.

Following the death of Sherry Payseur, a psychologist said on the six o'clock news that the killer was probably a white man who preyed on white women. Police believed the killer saw the broadcast and reacted to it. The body discovered off a dirt road near a barren construction site in the Tiscany Hills section of Lake Elsinore was found by a building contractor around 1 p.m. September 13, 1991. Her background and the modus operandi was similar to other victims with one exception. For 30-year-old Catherine McDonald, of Riverside, the distinction of being the killer's only black victim was only more "horrible news" and added another dimension to the killer's many perversions.

The Sheriff's task force was immediately summoned to the rugged, barren site, at the end of Summerhill Drive. The corpse had evidently died in a paroxysms of pain, her curvaceous form all twisted, her arms akimbo, eyes staring wide open into oblivion. This, the 17th in a series of murders dating back to 1986, sent Riverside County further into paralyzing shock. Police noted a striking similarity between the other 17 murders and the murder of Delliah Zamora Wallace, age 35. A passing motorist spotted the girl's nude corpse in a patch of matted undergrowth on the dirt shoulder of a heavily trafficked intersection in Mira Loma northwest of Riverside. It was October 30, the day before Halloween, and , oddly, the fifth anniversary of the day Michelle Yvette Guttierrez, the first victim found. According to the motorist who discovered the body, he was headed for work, around 7:15 a.m., when he turned from Country Village Road onto Granite Hill Drive, a two-lane frontage street that parallel Highway 60. He said he spotted the body across the street from a heavily used park-and-ride lot adjacent the Country Village senior housing development south of the Riverside-San Bernardino boundary line.

"At first I thought it was a mannequin," he said, "but at closer inspection I realized it was the corpse of a woman." His heart beating a wild tattoo, he hurried to a phone and called the police. Within minutes, Riverside County's sheriff's investigator Henry Sawicki and a string of task force officers arrived and fanned the area for clues. Whirlybirds hovered overhead. Volunteer groups aided the police in a fine-comb of the hills that edged the private community of Canyon Lake. While this procedure was in progress, a team of sheriff's officers and California Highway Patrolmen closed a mile-long region of Granite Hill. Sleuths spent most of the day taking down license plate numbers from cars parked in the lot. With painstaking efforts, each of the commuters who shared rides into Orange and Los Angeles counties were eventually questioned. Not one of them reported seeing anything suspicious when they parked their cars between 5 and 7 a.m.



Map of Victim Locations

At 4050 Main Street in Riverside, Sheriff Cois Byrd (now retired) was busy answering questions thrown at him by reporters. At the Lake Elsinore station, at 117 South Langstaff, Lt. Bill Caldwell was also being put through the media wringer. Each of these law enforcement officers refused to say how Wallace was killed or discuss information on what evidence was found at the scene. But scribes learned that Delliah Wallace was a 35-year-old Riverside resident with a history of arrests for drug abuse and harlotry. A mother of five, her street name was Delilah Zamora.

Riverside Municipal Court records revealed that "Zamora" was arrested December 12, 1989, for giving oral sex to a man in a car near University and Park avenues in Riverside for $20. She had a long list of charges stemming from one form of debauchery or another. For the December 12th charge, she was sentenced to 150 days in jail. In June of 1991 she was arrested again and charged with separate cases of misdemeanor drug violations and oral copulation in a parked car. She failed to appear in court and warrants were issued for her arrest. Police went to her crime-plagued apartment building on Riverside's tenderloin Eastside. The entire complex had been closed down, boarded up and fenced off. A sign said: CONDEMNED.

By the end of 1991, many of the loose-moraled women who had frequented the streets of the 103-year-old community of Lake Elsinore, had moved on to safer settings. But, surprisingly, a few heroin-and-cocaine-addicted hookers still preyed on $10 and $20 tricks along the mainstream, just blocks from the police station. It was here that the crafty serial killer had trolled the streets in search of scarlet women whose very existence, and the existence of their children, relied upon immediate cash and the sexual appetites of strangers.

At 1:20 p.m. just two days before Christmas, 1991, emergency calls began coming in on Riverside's Sheriff's Office lines in rapid-fire order. The dispatcher fielded the first one - a call from a worker in an orange grove near the intersection of Jefferson Street and Victoria Avenue, a half-mile from the Riverside police station. Even as the unidentified caller was talking, patrol units were being rushed to the scene where body No. 19 was found.

The lawmen who found the bare-naked body of 39-year-old Eleanore Ojeda Casares were no strangers to the grim realities of their work. The violent deaths of local prostitutes had practically become an everyday fact of life in their profession. It was the same old story; the woman had a history of prostitution and drugs. She, like most of the others, had been killed near a holiday, which some lawmen considered held a hidden meaning while others felt it was a coincidence.

Police blubbered and fumed, but their efforts to catch the man whose ego and vanity insisted that he was above the minds of other men and beyond their laws, were stonewalled. According to James A. Fox, dean of the college of criminal justice at Boston's Northeastern University, "In some cases, birthdays and other specific dates are important to the killer and celebrated by the commission of another murder."

He noted that serial victim 17 was killed on Friday the 13th. No. 6 was found a day after her birthday. Victim 12 was killed near Christmas. Wallace's horribly mutilated body was found during the Halloween season. Since No. 16 was found at the intersection of Sampson and Delilah, members of the multiagency task force wondered if there was any significance between the location and the biblical story of Samson and Deliah. The case came to an abrupt end in a most unexpected way; a simple traffic stop on Thursday, January 9, 1992. It was the most important day of patrol officer Frank Orta's 11-year law enforcement career.

It was approximately 9 p.m. and Officer Orta was cruising Riverside's prostitution-plagued University Avenue. Suddenly he noticed a van similar to the one issued on the APB alert making an illegal U-turn near Seventh Street and Park Avenue, after pulling away from a hooker. Orta said he instinctively felt "things were a little weird," as he approached the van. When officers Don Tauli and Duane Beckman happened by, "you could say they got a little nervous." The driver's license had been suspended and his vehicle registration had lapsed - enough violations to have his van, a 1989 gray Mitsubishi, impounded. The suspect was escorted to the police station for interrogation.

After questioning the man, Lt. Al Hearn immediately became suspicious. He gathered members of the joint Riverside police/ Riverside County task force. In the days that followed, the startling, emerging portrait of William Suff hit the newspapers and flashed across TV; a five year employee who had won the chili cook-off a few years back, a skillful musician who played the trumpet and trombone in the band at Lake Elsinore High School. A reliable and trustworthy man who had graduated 87th in a class of 144 from Perris High School in 1968. It was difficult to believe that someone who looked so unremarkable could have been involved at all in crimes whose bloodiness and cruelty had horrified Southern California.

Police revealed that when William Suff went to work as a stock clerk for the county in 1986, he lied about his 1974 conviction for murder in Texas. He and his wife at the time, were convicted of beating their 2-month-old daughter to death in Fort Worth. Suff was sentenced to 70 years. In March, 1984, he was paroled to California. His wife served 20 months when her conviction was overturned by an appellate court.

Asked why county authorities had not checked Suff's application out properly, Tom DeSantis, the county's public information officer, explained that under California law, a 12-year-old manslaughter conviction couldn't exclude a person from getting a county job, while a theft conviction would. At his arraignment in Division 22 of the Riverside Municipal Court system, on Feb. 28, 1992, Suff sat quietly as his attorney, Floyd Zagorsky entered a plea of innocent before Judge Becky Dugan on two of the 19 deaths to which his client was charged. The judge, after hearing both sides of the argument, ruled there was enough evidence to hold Suff over for trial. The legal machine ground out the paperwork that eventually led to Suff's trial inside the Riverside Hall of Justice on Wednesday, March 25, 1995. Seven men and five women were chosen as jurors, along with eight alternates. Paul E. Zellerbach was the prosecutor. Suff's two lawyers were Randolph K. Driggs, a former prosecutor who worked with Zellerbach, and Frank S. Peasly. The presiding judge was W. Charles Morgan.

During the session, Zellerbach said the evidence would stand on its own. No deals would be made. The state was going to seek the death penalty for the man who had committed two murders a month during the last six months of his inhuman rampage. Suff grinned at the prosecutor with a kind of unconcerned maliciousness. Then he made a swallowing noise.

In his opening statement Zellerbach told jurors that detectives had accumulated evidence connecting Suff to the strangulations and stabbings of 13 prostitutes in the Lake Elsinore and Riverside areas. He told them to prepare to view some gruesome photographs and hear painful testimony that would depict sexual mutilations and depravity beyond comprehension. He said he would show that William Lester Suff practiced his quackery unmolested for so long, that he came to believe that he could all but advertise his guilt and yet remain sacrosanct from the law.

Zellerbach added that the killer's ravings were not about love but about hate, violence, lust, sexual depravity, and murder. Over the next few days, video monitors displayed hideous images of death to a jam-packed audience, mostly made up of relatives of the victims, who responded to the evidence with moans and gasps. A few left the courtroom in tears. One mother fainted.

While Zellerbach was depicting Suff as a fiend whose sexual appetite was heightened and implanted by a lust for the murder of streetwalkers, the defense team suggested he was a man friendly with neighbors and coworkers and was being used as a scapegoat by frustrated lawmen who had the wrong suspect. "This is largely a circumstantial case," Driggs told jurors." But the defense team faced the difficult task of diverting crates of evidence that had been presented during the nine-day grand jury hearings in July 1992 that resulted in Suff's indictment. Some 32 witnesses testified about hair, fibers, tire tracks, weapons and other circumstantial evidence that identified Suff as a serial killer.

Although many prostitutes had left the area by now, probers located several who were willing to testify, including the victim of the attempted murder Suff was being charged with, and the pregnant prostitute who said she saw Kelly Marie Hammond get into Suff's van after she tried to warn her. But the final element of evidence was the clincher. A state criminalist testified on Tuesday, May 24, 1995, that he had linked microscopic samples of hair and fibers found at two murder scenes to Suff.



William Suff and Attourney

According to Faye Springer, the state Department of Justice's foremost criminalist on hair and fiber analysis, fibers from a pillow, blanket and sleeping bag found inside Suff's 1989 Mitsubishi van were similar to those that had been discovered near the bodies of Kim Lyttle and Christina Leal. Springer said a blue towel that covered Lyttle's naked body contained two gray fibers similar to the floor carpeting in Suff's vehicle. Other fibers matched that of Suff's car seat. A T-shirt and sock found on Leal's body also contained carpet fibers that the criminalist determined were similar to Suff's van, placing him directly to Leal, and implicating him in the murder of the woman. A bloody knife and other evidence, including tire tracks left at the most recent crime scene, tied the Colton resident to the slain women, Zellerbach said. After a little under fours days of deliberations, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on 12 of 13 counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder. They deadlocked 11-1 on one murder charge. The 44-year-old defendant wiped tears from his eyes as court clerk Tom Mitchell read the verdicts. It was the first time he showed any signs of emotion during the 54-day trial. Jurors also found Suff guilty of multiple murder, lying in wait and use of a deadly weapon - a knife - on five victims. On August 17, 1995, after reviewing evidence and testimony in the high-profile case, the seven-man, five-woman jury recommended the death penalty for William Suff. The 45-year-old man showed no emotion, but relatives of his victims cheered the decision. Looking back over the lives of the murder victims, it seems as if they were inevitably destined for violent ends, inexplicably racing towards death, helpless to turn back the furies that so doggedly pursued them. There was nothing spectacular about how they lived. Yet, each of the hapless victims has her niche in the dark corner of frenzied death, one that assures her of hallmark infamy. As a startling finale, sometime in early 1990, this writer encountered William Suff in the Golden Bit Bar in Canyon Lake. Sitting beside him at a bar, listening to Western Music, I struck up a conversation with him. When I pointed out that a woman on the dance floor was attractive, he sneered, "She looks like a damn whore." When I told him I was a crime writer, he said, "We have something in common. I'm a California Highway Patrolman ..." A few days later, I read a startling headline: SERIAL KILLER CAUGHT. The picture accompaining the article was the very same man sitting next to me in the Golden Bit Bar.
NOTE: For this article, the author conducted a personal interview with Detective Bob Creed, as well as sitting in on several days of the trial.  



William Suff in Court