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. He was helpful, he was talkative, he wrote poetry, and in 1991 he entered the departmental chili cook-off. Detectives on the task force hunting the man who was killing women on University Avenue drew supplies from his counter.
They had been looking for him for five years. He had been in the building the whole time.
Twelve women were killed in Riverside County between 1986 and 1991. Kimberly Lyttle. Tina Leal. Darla Ferguson. Carol Miller. Cheryl Coker. Susan Sternfeld. Kathleen Milne. Sherry Latham. Kelly Hammond. Catherine McDonald. Delliah Zamora. Eleanor Casares. Most of them were working the streets around University Avenue, most of them were dependent on crack, and most of them were reported missing by people the police were slow to take seriously.
They were strangled or stabbed. The bodies were left where they would be found quickly, sometimes arranged, and one of the women had a breast removed. For a long time the task force worked on the assumption that more than one man was responsible, because the pattern did not hold still.
One woman survived him. Rhonda Jetmore fought him off and lived to describe him, and she gave evidence at his trial.
He had done it before, and Texas had already convicted him of it.
Dijanet Jawn Suff was two months old. She died on September 25, 1973, in Tarrant County, after her mother Teryl was made to leave the family home and the baby was left in her father's care. The autopsy found that the first injuries to her had been inflicted at birth. Both parents were charged and both were convicted; the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later reversed Teryl's conviction and upheld his.
What he served for that is not settled. A seventy-year sentence with parole after ten fits a 1984 release, which is when he came out. One recent account says the couple were convicted of voluntary manslaughter, given probation, and told police the child had fallen from her crib - and then says he was released from prison in 1984, which cannot both be true. The Texas appellate record would resolve it and has not been obtained.
What is certain is that he was paroled in 1984, that the parole was transferred to California, and that two years later women began dying in Riverside.
He was stopped on January 9, 1992 for an illegal turn, on a street near a place where a body had recently been left. The officers recognized the van from a witness description. What followed was an evidence case rather than a confession: fibers, cat hairs from his home, tire impressions, a distinctive knot he used, and items belonging to the dead women.
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. He was sentenced to death in October.
The California Supreme Court affirmed unanimously on April 28, 2014, nineteen years after the verdict. Habeas petitions since have not disturbed it. He is on death row, and California has executed nobody since 2006.
Then, thirty years after the Riverside killings ended, a thirteenth name arrived.
Cathy Small was nineteen. She was stabbed to death on a street in South Pasadena in February 1986, months before the first Riverside murder, and her case went unsolved for nearly forty years until Los Angeles County investigators matched Suff's DNA to her clothing. He admitted it in 2022. He said she had enraged him by knocking his glasses off his face.
Her younger sister was ten when it happened, and she wrote a letter to be read aloud at the press conference announcing the match. 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.