Forensic, Other Evidence Links Suff to 14 Deaths

Accused serial killer William Suff was linked to 14 murders by such forensic evidence as cat hairs, by the victims’ belongings and because of gruesome similarities in the killings, according to grand jury transcripts released Tuesday.

The transcripts offered a glimpse into how prosecutor Paul Zellerbach persuaded a Riverside County grand jury to indict Suff, portraying him as one of Southern California’s most infamous serial killers.

Zellerbach built his case on microscopic evidence, the testimony of one woman who survived an assault and another who jumped out of Suff’s car, and statements from Suff’s wife.

But throughout his presentation of the case, Zellerbach hammered on the violence allegedly displayed by Suff, whom he described as “like a spider with his web, weaving it, waiting for that insect or that fly or that prostitute to enter into his world, his van.”

The 42-year-old Suff, of Colton, is awaiting trial this summer for the murders of 14 prostitutes. He is suspected of killing at least nine other women, Zellerbach said, including victims in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Santa Barbara counties.

Riverside Superior Court Judge W. Charles Morgan ordered the release of nearly all 1,100 pages of the transcript over the objections of defense attorney Frank Peasley, who argued the material was inflammatory and would prejudice Suff’s chance for a fair trial.

Before releasing the documents, however, Morgan excised about 60 pages which, based on the context of other testimony, apparently related to some of the most precise and gruesome details of the killings.

Peasley could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

According to the Zellerbach, Suff preyed on prostitutes, first in the Riverside County community of Elsinore where he once lived, and later along a seedy stretch of a downtown Riverside city street. He lured the women by offering $20 in exchange for sex.

The killings started in 1986 and ended in December, 1991, a month before Suff’s chance arrest for an illegal U-turn--on the same street he allegedly had prowled. By then, the killings had escalated to one a month.

Suff would lure women into his vehicle, kill them by strangulation or stabbing, then carefully pose their bodies in lewd, offensive positions, Zellerbach and his team of homicide detectives told grand jurors.

Some bodies were found in fields and groves. Others, near garbage dumpsters. Usually they were nude. Many of the wounds were clustered on the chest.

At least three of the women had severed breasts. Another woman’s genitalia were mutilated and a foreign object was inserted into one victim’s genital area. Some of the women apparently were mutilated after they died, forensic pathologists told jurors.

Zellerbach said he did not know what motivated Suff, who at the time worked for the Riverside County Purchasing Department and who had served time in a Texas prison for the 1974 beating death of his 2-month-old daughter.

Motive? “I can’t tell you that,” Zellerbach told the grand jury last summer. “I wish I could. . . . I can’t get into Mr. Suff’s mind. No one can.”

There was ample forensic evidence to link Suff to the crimes, Zellerbach told jurors: body hairs, carpet and blanket fibers, cat hairs on some of the victims’ bodies that were the same as his cat’s. His tire tracks matched those of tread marks left at murder scenes. His shoes matched impressions left in the dirt. A rope was found in his van.

Suff’s wife, Cheryl, testified that one night he told her he had to present an earthquake preparation talk in Temecula, and she should not wait up for his return. “He never put on an earthquake show in his life,” Zellerbach said. A woman was killed that night.

Another night, she said, he returned home with scratches on his face.

According to testimony, Suff offered clothing from one of his victims to a friend. After his arrest, investigators found in his vehicle’s glove box a traffic citation of one of his victims. Zellerbach called it one of the alleged killer’s “trophies.”

At least two women who might otherwise have been victims--one who escaped a strangling hold and another who fled from a vehicle after the driver said he wanted to have sex in an orange grove--identified Suff in a group of mug shots.

One witness testified that she was working the streets of Elsinore in January, 1989, when a man she later identified as Suff picked her up. At her suggestion, they went to an empty house nearby, where the power had been turned off.

But when he grabbed her throat, she fought him off and ran out. She reported the assault two weeks later after learning a friend of hers had been murdered.

Another prostitute said she was picked up in Riverside by a man she later identified through a photo lineup as Suff. She jumped out of the car, though, when he said he wanted to take her to an orchard.

She said she watched the man then pick up another prostitute--a woman who turned up dead the next morning.

Zellerbach noted that beside one of the victim’s bodies, investigators found grapefruit peelings.

“It’s significant to me,” Zellerbach said, “because someone who had just brutally murdered another human being, could sit there and pick a grapefruit off a tree, peel it and eat it, this dead victim bleeding and lying on the ground next to him.

“That is indicative to me of a human being who doesn’t have a conscience,” he told the grand jurors. “Cold, calculating--just a way of life. Another dead body. Another conquest. Another success. Another rush. And now he’s going to sit back, eat his grapefruit and enjoy it.”