The van that kept turning up near the bodies belonged to Riverside County, because the man driving it worked there. William Lester Suff was a stock clerk in the county warehouse, hired while he was still on parole from Texas. He was helpful, he was talkative, he wrote poetry, and in 1991 he entered the departmental chili cook-off. When the task force hunting the man who was killing women around University Avenue needed office furniture, he was the one who delivered it.
Twelve women were killed in Riverside County between June 1989 and December 1991 in the murders he was convicted of. Most of them were working the streets, most of them were dependent on drugs, and most of them were reported missing by people the police were slow to take seriously.
Kimberly Lyttle, twenty-eight, was found manually strangled by a road in Lake Elsinore on June 28, 1989, with cigarette burns on her arms and body, all inflicted before she died. A blue bath towel over her carried red, white and blue fibers that were later matched to a sleeping bag in his van. Christina Leal, twenty-three, known as Tina, was found on a Quail Valley hillside on December 13, 1989. She had been bound, beaten, stabbed four times in the chest and mutilated while she was alive, and then strangled.
Darla Ferguson, twenty-three, was found strangled in Riverside on January 18, 1990, half a mile from where Lyttle had lain, with a trash bag pulled over her and tied at the waist. Carol Miller, thirty-five, was found in a grapefruit orchard in Highgrove on February 9, 1990, stabbed five times and smothered; a peeled and eaten grapefruit lay beside her. Cheryl Coker, thirty-three, was strangled with such force on November 6, 1990 that the ligature cut her neck, and her body was left partly inside a dumpster. A shoe print at that scene matched his shoes in size, pattern and wear.
Susan Sternfeld, twenty-seven, was found strangled and posed near a dumpster in Riverside on December 21, 1990. Kathleen Milne, forty-two, also known as Kathy Puckett, was found north of Lake Elsinore on January 19, 1991 with a sock forced into her throat. Sherry Latham, thirty-seven, was found in Lake Elsinore on July 4, 1991. Kelly Hammond, twenty-seven, of Rubidoux, was found strangled and posed in an alley in Corona on August 16, 1991.
Catherine McDonald, thirty, was found in Lake Elsinore on September 13, 1991. She was four months pregnant, she had been stabbed in the chest and neck, and she had been mutilated before and after death. Delliah Zamora, thirty-five, was found in Glen Avon on October 30, 1991 with her larynx crushed. Eleanor Casares, thirty-nine, was found in an orange grove at Jefferson Street and Victoria Avenue in Riverside on December 23, 1991, stabbed and strangled.
One woman survived him. On January 10, 1989 Rhonda Jetmore, twenty-seven, went with him and he began to choke her. She hit him with a flashlight, broke free, was tackled, and bit his finger so hard she broke a tooth. When he lost his glasses she shone the flashlight on them, and while he bent to pick them up she ran out and flagged down a car. The passenger, a man she knew, fired a gun at Suff. She gave evidence at his trial.
He had done it before, and Texas had already convicted him of it.
He was born Bill Lee Suff on August 20, 1950, the eldest of five children, and was musical as a boy. His parents separated in 1960, accusing each other of infidelity, and his mother's next partner was hard on the children. One biographical account adds that his mother turned to prostitution. At eighteen he met Teryl, who was fifteen, in a marching band. They married in 1969, and she said later that he threatened to kill her if she did not do what he wanted. A son, William Lester Suff Jr., was born in November 1970 and a daughter in July 1973.
The daughter's name is given as Dijanet Jawn in one account and Dijiania in another. She was two months old. She died on September 25, 1973, in Tarrant County, after Teryl was made to leave the family home and the baby was left in her father's care. He hit her, and when she stopped breathing he called his wife. The autopsy found that the first injuries to her had been inflicted at birth. Both parents were charged, and in 1974 a Texas jury convicted both. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed Teryl's conviction for insufficient evidence and upheld his in 1976.
He was sentenced to seventy years and paroled on March 6, 1984, after about ten, and the parole was transferred to California. One later account instead describes a voluntary manslaughter conviction and probation, which cannot be squared with the prison term and parole that the appellate case and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department both describe.
Other women died in the same corridor before and during the charged series, and he was never charged with them: Michelle Gutierrez, twenty-six, found in a drainage ditch near Riverside in October 1986; Charlotte Palmer, twenty-five, near Romoland in December 1986; Linda Ortega, thirty-seven, and Martha Young, twenty-seven, found a few miles apart near Lake Elsinore in the spring of 1988; Diana Talavera, thirty-seven, on the Lake Elsinore beach in January 1989; and Judy Angel, thirty-six, at Alberhill in November 1989. Police at one point suspected him in as many as twenty-two deaths.
On January 9, 1992 he was stopped for a traffic violation in Riverside, near a place where a body had recently been left. The officers recognized the van from a witness description, and inside it they found a bloody knife and objects they connected to the killings. What followed was an evidence case rather than a confession: fibers, cat hairs from his home, shoe prints and tire impressions, a distinctive knot he used, and items belonging to the dead women.
He did not testify. The jury convicted him on July 19, 1995 of twelve counts of first degree murder and the attempted murder of Rhonda Jetmore. It found that he had killed each of the twelve while lying in wait, that he had been convicted of more than one murder in the same proceeding, and that he had personally used a knife on Leal, Miller, Coker, McDonald and Casares. It deadlocked on a thirteenth count, the killing of Cherie Payseur, twenty-four, found behind a bowling alley in Riverside on April 27, 1991, where the DNA had come from two men and could not exclude him.
At the penalty phase the prosecution linked him to the 1988 killing of a San Bernardino woman and showed that after his Texas prison term he had violently shaken his three-month-old daughter by his second wife. The jury chose death. He was sentenced on October 26, 1995.
The California Supreme Court affirmed unanimously on April 28, 2014, nineteen years after the verdict. Habeas petitions since have not disturbed it. Governor Gavin Newsom's moratorium has halted executions in California since 2019. In August 2024 state prison records placed him, aged seventy-three, at a substance abuse treatment facility north of Los Angeles.
Then a thirteenth name arrived, and it came from before any of the others.
Cathy Ann Small was nineteen, a mother of two from Lake Elsinore. At seven in the morning on February 22, 1986 she was found lying in the roadway in the 800 block of Bank Street in South Pasadena, wearing a nightgown. She had been stabbed and strangled. The case went unsolved for nearly forty years.
It reopened by accident. In 2019 sheriff's detectives were called to the home of a sixty-three-year-old man who had died of natural causes, across the street from where she was found, and they found newspaper clippings about her death. His DNA matched nothing. Going back through the file, they found that the evidence had never been tested. In 2020 her clothing and sexual assault kit gave DNA from two men. One was Suff. The other is still unidentified, and the department is looking for him.
In 2022 detectives brought Suff from San Quentin and questioned him over two days. He confessed and described it. She had met him at the computer repair shop where he worked, and had agreed to ride with him from Lake Elsinore to South Pasadena for fifty dollars. He said she enraged him by knocking his glasses off his face, that he stabbed her repeatedly in the passenger seat, and that he threw her body out and drove away. The department said he also admitted to other unsolved killings in Riverside County without naming the victims. He is not expected to be tried for Small's death.
Her younger sister was ten when it happened, and she wrote a letter to be read aloud when the match was announced in August 2024. Cathy Small was not a statistic, she wrote. She was a protective big sister, a loving mother, a good daughter. She was funny and smart and caring. She taught her little sister to swim and ride a bike and play cards, and took her to church, and her life was cut short before she could begin to make her own dreams come true.