Cannibal cooked victims in chilli
His tasty chilli had a ‘secret ingredient’
NO-ONE knows for sure how many met their end at the hands of mass murderer William ‘Bill’ Suff.
All we do know is that the 12 officially confirmed slayings should never have been allowed to happen – because Suff should already have been behind bars.
After he brutally killed his two-month-old daughter Janet in 1974, Suff was sentenced to serve 70 years in a Texas prison.
The criminal justice system, however, failed spectacularly. After just 10 years behind bars, Suff was released on parole.
Within two years, he had embarked on a bloody spree that, according to some, would claim around 30 lives.
He became known as the Cannibal Cook after being suspected of using human meat from his victims to make his own special chilli in cooking competitions.
All the women pictured here – and many more – are believed to be his victims. Three of them had their breasts hacked off.
No wonder the families of those he viciously beat, strangled and mutilated were still reeling when he was finally handed a death sentence in 1995.
But Suff, now 66 and an apparently well-behaved inmate in California’s notorious San Quentin prison, remains unrepentant and refuses to admit his guilt.
As District Attorney Grover Trask said at the time: “Mr Suff is the poster child for someone who deserves the death penalty. He is what the death penalty was made for. The sooner he dies, the better.”
Born in Riverside County, south California, Suff was considered a ‘friendly nerd who was always doing things to help people’, a loner who wasn’t particularly good academically but was always friendly to those around him.
Beating
He worked as a store clerk at John’s Service Centre, answering the phones, sorting mail and helping customers.
Away from work he was a Star Trek geek who would often babysit for neighbours.
Shop owner Eric Snyder said: “He used to buy sodas for all the grandkids. He seemed real nice.”
That warm reputation was shattered when Suff and his first wife Teryl were arrested in 1974 for beating to death their weeks-old child Janet.
Suff told cops the baby ‘must have fallen out of the crib’. But the poor mite had suffered massive haemorrhaging caused by a beating so severe that her liver was ruptured.
There were historic injuries too – 13 broken ribs, fractured shoulder, extensive bruises on the face and arms, bite marks on her abdomen and a cigarette burn on the sole of one foot.
And there was evidence that proved Suff was the perpetrator.
With an entire community revulsed, Suff was sent down for 70 years.
Teryl divorced Suff while he was inside, while the couple also lost custody of their other child, four-yearold William Jnr.
Despondent, Suff wrote in a letter, ‘Divorce is the second worst word in the human language. The first is goodbye. I was never really alive to begin with’.
But by March 1984, Suff was back on the streets, bizarrely released on parole.
And he appeared to have put his divorce woes behind him by marrying second wife Cheryl Lewis.
The first hint at the carnage to come arrived when Suff left Teryl a threatening note.
She reveals: “He said he knew where I was, he knew where to get me – and he would get me.”
More alarm bells should have rung when
Cheryl and Suff’s daughter Bridgette Ann was taken by authorities after suffering brain damage and other injuries.
The Suffs were investigated but never charged with a crime.
Around this time, friends of Suff started noticing how he would often make derogatory comments about the sex workers he’d see on the strip close to where he lived.
In 1986, six years of killing began.
Suff had begun work for Riverside County as a stock clerk, mingling with the local law enforcement officers.
In the years that followed, as Suff killed women remorselessly, he entered county cook-off competitions. His tasty chilli recipes won him first prize on more than one occasion.
It was never admitted publicly, but prosecutors suspect he had a chilling secret ingredient... human meat.
On October 30, the first of a suspected 19 victims – Michelle Yvette Gutierrez, 23 – was found dead, her body strewn with rubbish and half-naked.
She’d been stabbed in the face and chest. Her pubic hair had been ripped out by hand.
The cause of death was strangulation, but Michelle had also suffered extensive mutilation to her body.
Two months later, the corpse of Charlotte Jean Palmer, 24, was found near a motorway.
Due to the staggering number of injuries, coroners could not pinpoint a precise cause of death.
In early 1987, single mum and fast food restaurant worker Linda Ann Ortega, 37, was found strangled and naked in bushes.
Strangled
The body of Martha Bess Young, 36, followed in May 1987. She was found naked in a gully, her eyes wide open.
More than 18 months passed before blonde Linda Mae Ruiz, 37, was found dead. She’d been strangled and smothered by having her head forced into sand.
Kimberly Lyttle, 38, was found strangled in June 1989, while recently-divorced Judy Lynn Angel, 36, was discovered bludgeoned to death five months later. Deep gashes on her arms and hands suggested attempts to fight off a knife attack.
In January 1990, Christina Leal, 23, was found half-naked, having been sexually assaulted and stabbed
through the heart.
Investigators were shocked to find that a light bulb had been inserted into her vagina.
In the same month, a jogger stumbled upon the corpse of Darla Jane Ferguson, 39, mother of four children.
In February, 35-yearold Carol Lynn Miller turned up dead having been missing for a month. She’d been stabbed multiple times in her breasts.
Cheryl Coker, 33, was found dead in November 1990. She had been strangled and her right breast had been severed and placed beside her.
Between January and
August 1991, the bodies of Susan Sternfeld, 27, Kathleen Leslie Milne, 42, Cherie Payseur, 27, Sherry Ann Latham, 37, and Kelly Marie Hammond, 23, were all found in quick succession.
Cherrie had a toilet plunger inserted into her.
In September 1991, 30-year-old Catherine McDonald was found dead, her right breast removed.
The following month, the body of Delliah Zamora Wallace, 35, was discovered in undergrowth.
Eleanore Ojeda Casares, 29 – thought to
be Suff’s final victim – was found two days before Christmas 1991. Once again, the right breast was missing.
Weeks later, the detectives who’d been hunting a serial killer for five years finally got the break they needed.
Bloody
Suff was pulled over for doing an illegal U-turn in Riverside’s red light district.
Officers quizzed him over the area’s wellpublicised murders.
And when they found a rope and bloody knife in his van, DNA evidence linked him to various crime scenes.
On July 19, 1995, a Riverside County jury found Suff guilty of killing 12 women and attempting to kill another.
The prosecutor, Paul Zellerbach, trembled as he told the court: “Mr Suff is no longer a member of the human race. He is evil.
“By the nature of the crimes he has committed for 22 years, he has no heart, he has no soul and, by God, he has no conscience.”
On October 29, 1995, Suff was handed a death sentence.
Ana Zamora, the sister of Delliah Zamora Wallace, said: “It’s a very
happy day. He is going to feel the same pain that he has caused us.”
Bunny Harrison, the sister of Sherry Ann Latham, added: “Now I know that he’ll never be able to hurt another person.
“As long as he can’t hurt anyone else, then my sister didn’t die in vain.”
Like many desperate serial killers, Suff appealed against his death penalty.
But in 2014 the California Supreme Court upheld his sentence, describing Suff as ‘pathological’ and ‘manipulative’.