Serial Killer Confesses To Teen's 1986 Murder After New DNA Testing Of Clothing, Rape Kit

A convicted serial killer confessed to killing a Southern California teenager in 1986 after DNA testing linked him to the crime, authorities said this week.

William “Bill” Lester Suff, now 70, confessed to killing 19-year-old Cathy Small, whose body was found at 7 a.m. on Feb. 22, 1986, lying in the middle of a South Pasadena street in her nightgown, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Patricia Thomas said at a news conference Monday .

A medical examiner later determined that Small, a mother of two, had been stabbed multiple times and strangled.

Suff, also known as the Riverside Prostitute Killer and the Lake Elsinore Killer, was sentenced to death in 1995 and remains incarcerated in San Quentin. (California in 2019 put a moratorium on capital punishment.) He had been convicted of murdering 12 women, all sex workers, in Riverside County between 1989 and 1991. He’d previously been in prison for beating his 2-month-old daughter to death in Texas but was released on parole in 1984 after serving just 10 years of a 70-year sentence.

Small was initially listed as a Jane Doe when her body was found. Several days after her death, her roommate learned about the killing in a newspaper article and contacted police, Thomas said.

The roommate identified Small’s body and told detectives that she had been living at his Lake Elsinore house for the past few months.

The roommate, who was not named at the news conference, said he last saw Small, who was a sex worker, alive at around 10 p.m. the night before her body was found. She told him a man named Bill was picking her up and giving her $50 to drive with him to Los Angeles. She left wearing a nightgown, he said.

The case went unsolved for more than three decades until an unrelated death