William Lester Suff was born in Torrance, California, on August 20, 1950. In 1974, in Texas, he and his wife Teryl were convicted of the murder of their two-month-old daughter Dijianet, who died of injuries consistent with prolonged beating. He was sentenced to seventy years. He was paroled in 1984, having served ten, and the parole was transferred to California, where his record was not communicated to anyone who might have used it.
He settled in Riverside, remarried, and took a job as a stock clerk with the Riverside County public services department, driving a county van. He was known around the office as a helpful, talkative man who wrote poetry and entered the department chili cook-off. The California press called him the Riverside Prostitute Killer and the Lake Elsinore Killer.
Between 1986 and 1991 at least twelve women were killed in Riverside and Lake Elsinore, most of them working the streets on University Avenue and most of them dependent on crack. They were strangled or stabbed, and the bodies were left in places where they would be found quickly, sometimes arranged, in one case with the right breast removed. Riverside had a task force and, for a long time, an assumption that the killings might be the work of more than one man.
The women named in the record are Michelle Yvette Gutierrez, twenty-three; Charlotte Jean Palmer, twenty-four; Linda Ann Ortega, thirty-seven; Martha Bess Young, twenty-seven; Linda Mae Ruiz, thirty-seven; Kimberely Lyttle; Judy Lynn Angel, thirty-six; Christina Leal, twenty-three; Daria Jane Ferguson, twenty-seven; and Carol Lynn Miller, thirty-five. His two-month-old daughter Janet, killed in 1974, is counted separately.
He was stopped on January 9, 1992, for an illegal turn near a spot where a body had recently been dumped. The officers recognised the van from a witness description. Fibres, tyre impressions and, decisively, a distinctive knot and the paint transfer on one victim's body tied him to the series.
He was tried in San Diego on a change of venue and convicted on July 19, 1995, of twelve murders and one attempted murder. He was sentenced to death in October and is held at San Quentin. He has always denied it. Riverside investigators have linked him by suspicion to a further set of killings in the county in the 1980s that were never charged.