The body of Susan Sternfield was found in a trash bin at a Riverside factory complex in December 1991, her clothes arranged with deliberate precision, her body positioned as if she were a piece of refuse left for collection. The 27-year-old prostitute had been strangled, but it was the staging of the corpse that chilled veteran Detective Christine Keys to her core. This was not a dumping.
It was a display, a grotesque piece of theater staged for whoever would find the body.
“I was used to the streets,” Keys would later recall. “I was used to death. But this was different.
Her feet, her hands, her legs — all positioned by the perpetrator. The body was posed for us, legs open, basically saying here’s your trash, it’s right here.”
The killing bore hallmarks that would come to define one of California’s most prolific serial murderers: a campaign of terror that claimed the lives of at least a dozen women across Riverside County and left a community reeling in fear.
What investigators did not yet realize as the calendar turned to 1992 was that the savagery had already been unfolding for nearly two years. The same ritualistic signature had appeared in the murder of Cheryl Coker, another prostitute discovered at an industrial complex. Her body had been laid out with legs spread, and when detectives searched the surrounding area, they found her severed breast tossed 50 to 70 feet away from her corpse.
“It was a purposeful heave,” Keys said. “He obviously did not like prostitutes, or he did not like ladies of this nature, because of the violence that had taken place.”
The first known victim in the cycle was Carol Lyn Miller, a 35-year-old mother found in a citrus grove in Lake Elenor in February 1990. Her daughter Shannon was 13 when she received the news. “My grandma threw her arms around me and said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, your mom passed away,” Shannon recalled.
“I got hit with a sledgehammer — that’s what it felt like. My body swelled with emotion; I felt like the world was collapsing in around me.”
Miller had been strangled and stabbed repeatedly in the chest. The wounds were not random slashes but deliberate, centered thrusts. At the scene, investigators discovered a partially eaten grapefruit.
The killer had sat beside his victim’s body, calmly consuming fruit while admiring his work. “If he felt he could eat a grapefruit while standing there and looking at the body,” one investigator noted, “that tells you he is definitely not worried about the police catching him.”
The murders escalated in brutality and frequency. Officers found victims with electrical light bulbs inserted into their vaginal cavities. Others had objects stuffed down their throats after death.
The killer was communicating through his victims, each crime scene a message of dominance and rage.
Detective Keys, who had worked the vice squad and knew the women of University Avenue personally, was among the first to sound the alarm. University Avenue was the beating heart of Riverside’s illicit nightlife — a stretch of road where 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 dealers, gang members, and prostitutes converged after dark. “The girls would hang out, and the Johns would pick them up,” Keys said.
“They’re 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 users; they had families to support. They would go out and work the streets, getting money, turning tricks, getting their heroin.”
When Keys compared the cases of Sternfield and Coker, she went to her superiors with a grim conclusion. “I told them we’ve got a pattern going here. We were beginning to sense that we had a serial killer in our midst.”
Across town, a man named Bill Suff was living a double life that would ultimately shatter the quiet community. To his neighbors in Lake Elenor and Riverside, he was a helpful, friendly man — someone who won the county chili cook-off, appeared as the smiling face of a rideshare program poster, and presented himself as a protector of his apartment complex.
But William Lester Suff Jr. carried a history of violence that stretched back decades. Born in 1950, he grew up with a mother described as “dominant, cold, and non-loving.”
“He was always trying to acquire his mother’s approval,” those who knew him said, “and she denied it to him at every turn.” His father left when he was young, thrusting Bill into the role of substitute patriarch for his four siblings — a household where control became his currency, where he learned to manage chaos by dominating it.
In 1969, Suff married a young woman named Terrell who had been raped and become pregnant. He offered to raise her child as his own. But the marriage quickly soured into a pattern of manipulation and isolation.
He forbade her from going to the laundromat alone. He demanded she be sexually available at his command. When a kitten cried at night, he shot it with a BB gun and killed it.
The arrival of children did not soften him. His stepdaughter Billy took up too much of his wife’s attention. “He would smack him on the face,” Terrell recalled.
“I told him you don’t do that, and he would kind of turn around, look at me, and say, ‘Oh God, now I’m going to get it.'”
In 1973, tragedy struck. Bill called Terrell to say something was wrong with their two-month-old daughter, Debra. When Terrell arrived home, the baby was lying on the bed, not breathing.
Bill had not called an ambulance. Doctors found extensive injuries consistent with chronic 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 — the infant’s liver had been ruptured by a fist blow to her stomach.
Suff was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to 70 years in prison. He served just 10 before being paroled in 1984. Despite orders not to leave Texas, he returned to his old stomping grounds in Riverside and Lake Elenor and simply started his life over, as if his past had been erased.
“He was your next-door neighbor,” investigators said. “Mild-mannered, friendly, outgoing, helping people. He liked to be known as somebody standing up for truth, justice, and the American way.”
By 1990, police had linked a string of murders stretching from Lake Elenor to Riverside. The victims were overwhelmingly prostitutes — women who worked the streets and were easy prey. The task force assembled to catch the killer was headquartered in a Riverside County warehouse, staffed by employees who handled logistics and equipment.
One of the regular stock clerks was Bill Suff.
“He would provide us with all the equipment, all the desks, all the chairs that we needed to create the task force site,” Keys remembered. He also displayed an unnerving interest in the investigation. When investigators received pages about a body discovery while Suff was nearby, he quipped: “Oh, did you find another body?”
In the summer of 1991, the killer struck again, murdering Kathleen Puckett, whose body was discovered near Lake Elenor. Investigators now believed they were hunting a truck driver, based on profiling. A false lead sent the task force to Wisconsin, where they pursued a suspect who proved to be the wrong man.
While the team was out of state, the killer responded with chilling defiance.
One morning, detectives returned to find another body — 24-year-old Sheree Pesser, a deaf woman who worked as a prostitute. Her body was laid out, 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮, legs spread, arms arranged deliberately. “He was mad,” Keys said.
“He was responding to the fact that this task force had gone off and diverted attention from whatever he was doing. I think he thought, ‘Oh, I’ll show them. I’m right here.'”
The killer’s arrogance was matched only by his escalating savagery. When the chief of police speculated publicly that the suspect preferred white women, the killer responded by murdering Katherine McDonald, a Black prostitute. Her breast was removed, and her wounds were so violent she was nearly decapitated.
“We became more concerned because of the manner in which these homicides were occurring at an exponential rate,” Keys said. “Once you get the taste of blood like that and you’re a serial murderer, you’re going to continue doing it.”
In December 1991, just two days before Christmas, the killer claimed Eleanor Cazares, a 39-year-old prostitute whom Keys had grown close to. Cazares was gentle and sweet, a stark contrast to the harsh realities of her life. Her body was found in an upper-class suburb, displayed with artistry that suggested growing confidence.
Her breast had been severed and thrown away from the corpse. When Keys moved the hair from the victim’s face, she recoiled. “It was Eleanor.
I felt sick inside that this happened on my watch.”
But the killer had finally made a mistake. He had backed his vehicle into the location where he dumped Cazares’ body, leaving tire tracks that investigators could analyze. The rubber impressions revealed something extraordinary: all four tires on the vehicle were of different makes.
“How many people drive around with four different types of tires on their vehicle?” Keys asked. “That’s very unique and unusual to begin with.”
Weeks earlier, the task force had also received a crucial eyewitness tip: the killer was a white male in his late forties who wore glasses and drove a silver van. The description came from a victim’s best friend who had seen the van pick up Kelly Hammond before her murder.
The net was closing. On January 9, 1992, a Riverside police officer pulled over a silver van in the red-light district of University Avenue for making an unauthorized U-turn. Inside, the officer saw a green blanket that matched fibers found at crime scenes, and a rope coiled in the back.
When she got the call, Detective Keys asked the patrolman to check the driver’s-side front tire brand, then the passenger-side tire. Each was different. “That’s when I said, ‘OK, I’m in route.'”
When Keys arrived, she came face to face with the man she had hunted for over a year. “I looked at him and I was rather shocked that he was so plain-looking, very calm, spoke very, very softly. Didn’t look like somebody that could commit the atrocious acts.”
Bill Suff was arrested and taken to the station. He remained composed until Keys leaned forward and said: “You were in the orange groves.” It was a direct reference to the discovery of an earlier victim.
His demeanor shifted 180 degrees. He claimed he had been picking oranges when he stumbled upon a body, pulled out a knife that had been left in her, and — in a spontaneous slip — blurted out: “And I didn’t cut her breast off.”
Keys had never asked him about the breast. The statement was a confession wrapped in a lie.
A search of Suff’s van and home uncovered trophies taken from victims — jewelry and personal items. Some of the items had been given to his girlfriend. In 1995, prosecutor Paul Zabach charged Suff with 13 murders.
“We believe he probably murdered 20 to 25 victims,” Zabach said. During the trial, the victims’ families testified in the penalty phase. “I took pride in demonstrating to the jury that these weren’t just prostitutes,” Zabach said.
“They were daughters, sisters, mothers.”
Suff maintained his innocence to the end, claiming he was a caring, loving, helpful person. “The prosecutors and the news media have all painted a grotesque picture of me as a cold-blooded, heartless monster,” he said in a prepared statement. “They couldn’t have been more wrong about me.”
In August 1995, a jury found Bill Suff guilty of 12 murders and sentenced him to death — 12 times over. He was also convicted of a 13th murder. He remained on death row until his death from natural causes on January 5, 2020, at the age of 67, having never been executed.
What drove a man to such depths of brutality? Those who studied Suff point to a cauldron of rage simmering from childhood — a domineering mother, an absent father, a desperate need for approval that was never met. “He was bitter, very bitter, and a lot of that was towards women,” one profile suggested.
“A domineering mother, a wife who leaves you, prison, divorce — women are always doing something wrong to you in his mind.”
The prostitutes he targeted represented the lowest rung of womanhood in his twisted worldview. “Because he can pay them and tell them what to do, they’re also objects to be controlled,” one criminal psychologist explained. “He doesn’t see them as people; he sees them as objects, very similar to the way he saw his wife, his children.”
Whether Suff was born with a predisposition to violence remains a matter of debate. “I think he was born with this tendency to violence and cruelty,” one expert said. “But so do a lot of people, and they don’t act on it.
Something triggered his actions that allowed all the past upbringing and challenges to surface. Maybe our marriage breaking up might have sparked it. Killing Debra might have sparked a little fire — and then it had 10 years to burn in prison in Texas.”
For those left behind, the scars never fully healed. Shannon, Carol Lyn Miller’s daughter, carries her mother’s memory forward in the only way she knows how. “When I reflect on my mom and remember her memories, I smile,” she said.
“I don’t really dwell on a lot of that negativity in my life now. I try to live with honor, be trustworthy, and set a good example. That honors her memory, because I’m her son.”
For Detective Christine Keys, the case remains etched in her memory — not only for the monster she helped catch, but for the women he silenced. She remembers them as individuals, not statistics: women with families, addictions, dreams, and desperate circumstances. “They felt like I understood, so they would share things with me,” she said.
“I would give them advice and tell them, ‘Be very careful. I’m not here to arrest you. I’m just letting you know that we have a crazy man out here killing prostitutes.'”
They were the ones nobody wanted to see, working the darkest corners of University Avenue. And when a mild-mannered warehouse clerk began presenting their bodies as grotesque works of art, it took a task force years to piece together the pattern — and to learn that the man supplying their desks and chairs was the one committing the crimes.
The killer is dead now, his 12 death sentences never carried out. But the memory of the women — Susan, Cheryl, Carol Lyn, Kathleen, Sheree, Kelly, Katherine, Eleanor, and so many others — endures in the quiet streets of Riverside, in the citrus groves where bodies were found, and in the hearts of families who still mourn. They were not “just prostitutes.”
They were daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends. And their killer was not born to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 — he was made by a lifetime of rage, rejection, and a desperate hunger for control that consumed everything in its path.
The case of Bill Suff remains one of California’s most chilling chapters — a reminder that monsters often wear the face of a friendly neighbor, a helpful co-worker, the man smiling from a carpool poster. And in Riverside, the families of the victims know that justice, however long delayed, finally came. Not with the bang of an executioner’s needle, but with the quiet finality of a death in a prison cell — a fittingly unremarkable end for a man who spent his life taking lives.
