Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris

• 1. Introduction

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  Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, two men later known as the Tool Box Killers, kidnapped five teenage girls in Southern California during 1979. None of the five survived. Everything happened within a span of just five months. The nickname came from the instruments of torture and death: pliers, ice picks and sledgehammers, all ordinary items that a family might keep in a household toolbox.

  John Edward Douglas, an FBI special agent, spent his career building criminal profiles. When he later looked back over all of them, he called Bittaker the most disturbing individual he had ever profiled.

  So how did two men meet and agree on a plan like this? What did the mothers, detectives and jurors who came near the evidence take away from it? And when each man pointed at the other as the worse of the two, whose account could be believed?

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• 2. Two Troubled Records

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  Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the 27th of September 1940, to a couple who had chosen not to have children. His birth mother left him in an orphanage, and he was adopted as an infant. His adoptive father worked in aviation, and the job kept the family moving around the country.

  At the age of 12, Bittaker was arrested for shoplifting. Over the next four years he was arrested again for the same offense, and for petty theft, which put him on the radar of juvenile authorities. He would later say these thefts were an attempt to make up for the lack of love from his parents.

  Bittaker was reported to have an IQ of 138, yet he found school tedious and quit in 1957. By then the family lived in California. Within a year he was arrested for car theft, a hit and run, and evading arrest, and he was sent to the California Youth Authority. When he was released at 18, his adoptive parents had disowned him and moved to another state. He never saw them again.

  Roy Lewis Norris was born in Greeley, Colorado, on the 5th of February 1948. His parents had married only to avoid the stigma of an illegitimate birth. His father worked in a scrapyard, and his mother was a housewife addicted to drugs. Norris lived with them only on and off, and was repeatedly placed with foster families across Colorado.

  He remembered being wrongly accused at home, and being denied enough food or clothing by many foster families. He also claimed he was sexually abused by one Hispanic family, and said that experience was the root of his prejudice against Hispanic people.

  At 16, Norris spoke to a female relative in her early twenties in a sexually suggestive way. She ordered him out and told his father, who threatened him with a beating. Norris stole his father's car, drove into the Rocky Mountains, and tried to kill himself by injecting air into an artery in his arm. Police picked him up as a runaway. Back home, his parents told him that he and his younger sister were unwanted, and that they planned to divorce once both children reached adolescence.

  A year later Norris quit school and joined the United States Navy. He was stationed in San Diego in 1965 and sent to the Vietnam War in 1969. He saw no active combat during a four-month tour.

  Bittaker's adult record began almost at once. Days after leaving the Youth Authority, he was arrested for driving a stolen vehicle across state lines. In August 1959 he received eighteen months, served first in the Oklahoma State Reformatory and then at a federal prison medical center in Springfield, Missouri. Freed in 1960, he was arrested within months for robbery in Los Angeles. In May 1961 he was sentenced to fifteen years. A prison psychiatrist described him as highly manipulative, with considerable concealed hostility.

  Bittaker won parole in 1963, then went back to prison in October 1964 for violating it. In 1966 two independent psychiatrists examined him, and both called him a borderline psychopath. Bittaker told one of them that crime gave him a feeling of self-importance. He was prescribed anti-psychotic medication and released the following year.

  His next arrest came a month after that parole, in July 1967, for theft and leaving the scene of an accident. He received five years and walked out in April 1970. A burglary arrest followed in March 1971. After repeated parole violations, he was sentenced in October 1971 to a term of between six months and fifteen years, and he was freed three years later.

  In 1974 the violence arrived. A young supermarket employee named Gary Louie saw Bittaker take a steak and followed him into the parking lot. When Louie asked whether he had forgotten to pay, Bittaker stabbed him in the chest, narrowly missing his heart. Two other employees held Bittaker until police came. Louie survived, and Bittaker was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and sent to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo.

  Norris's record turned violent earlier. In November 1969 he was charged with rape and with assault with intent to commit rape, after trying to force his way into a lone woman's car. In February 1970 he tried to talk his way into another woman's home, then tried to break in. She phoned police, who arrested him before he could hurt her.

  Less than three months later, military psychologists diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder, and the Navy discharged him administratively. In May 1970, while on bail, Norris attacked a female student he had been stalking at San Diego State University. He struck her head with a rock and beat it against the sidewalk. He was committed for five years to Atascadero State Hospital as a mentally disordered sex offender.

  In 1975 Atascadero released him on five years' probation. Doctors had declared him of "no further danger to others". Three months later he offered a ride on his motorcycle to a 27-year-old woman walking home from a restaurant in Redondo Beach. When she refused, he twisted her scarf around her neck and raped her in nearby bushes.

  Police at first could not find the attacker. A month later the victim spotted his motorcycle and gave police the license number. Norris was convicted a year after that and sent to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, the same prison that already held Lawrence Bittaker.

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• 3. The Plan

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  In 1977, one year after Norris arrived at San Luis Obispo, the two men met. Bittaker first saw him as a savvy inmate who mixed with hardened motorcycle-gang criminals and dealt in contraband drugs. The friendship began when Norris taught Bittaker how to make jewelry.

  Norris later said Bittaker protected him from attacks by other inmates on at least two occasions. By 1978 they were close. They shared hostile views of women and fantasies of sexual violence. Norris told Bittaker that the sight of frightened young women excited him more than anything, and that this was why his record of sex offenses was so long. Bittaker, who is not known to have committed a sexual offense before knowing Norris, said that if he ever raped a woman he would kill her so there would be no witness.

  When they were alone, the two men discussed assaulting and murdering teenage girls after their release. The fantasy grew into a scheme to kill one girl for every teenage year, from 13 through 19. They promised to find each other again once they were free.

  Bittaker walked out of the California Men's Colony on the 15th of October 1978 and returned to Los Angeles. He found work as a skilled machinist, earning close to $1,000 a week. He called himself a loner, but neighbors knew him as generous and helpful. He sometimes gave money to the Salvation Army, and once bought a large amount of fast food and wine to hand out to homeless people in downtown Los Angeles.

  Teenagers liked him in particular. He later admitted that he kept beer and marijuana in his Burbank motel room precisely so young people would keep coming by.

  Norris was released on the 15th of January 1979 and moved into his mother's home in Redondo Beach. Within a month he had raped a woman and left her in a desert. He then took a job as an electrician in Compton. A letter from Bittaker soon reached him, and in late February the two met at a hotel and went back over their plan.

  Bittaker decided they needed a van instead of a car. With money from Norris, he bought a silver-gray 1977 GMC Vandura that February. One side had no windows, and the passenger side had a large sliding door. Bittaker said that door gave him the idea that one of them could "pull up to a teenage girl real close and not have to open the doors all the way." They nicknamed the van "Murder Mac".

  From February to June 1979, they picked up more than twenty female hitchhikers and did not harm any of them. These were rehearsals, meant to test ruses for luring girls into the van and to scout hidden places. In late April they found an isolated fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains. Bittaker broke the lock on its gate with a crowbar and put on a lock of his own.

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• 4. Five Girls

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  On the 24th of June 1979, Lucinda Lynn Schaefer, aged 16, left a fellowship meeting at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Redondo Beach. Bittaker later wrote that he and Norris had spent the day finishing a bed in the back of the van, then drove to the beach, drinking beer and flirting with girls. At about 7:46 p.m., Norris spotted Schaefer walking toward her grandmother's home and said, "There's a cute little blonde."

  The men first offered her marijuana, then a ride, and she refused. They drove ahead and parked by a driveway. As she passed, Norris opened the sliding door, hid behind it, spoke a few words to her and pulled her inside. Bittaker turned the radio up to full volume, a trick they would use again, while Norris bound and gagged her. They drove to the fire road.

  Bittaker wrote that Schaefer showed a "magnificent state of self-control" and shed no tears. At the fire road, each man raped her while the other waited away from the van. She asked Norris whether they planned to kill her, and he said no. She asked for time to pray if they did. The two men later blamed each other for arguing that she should die. She begged for "only a second, to pray". She was killed, and her body, wrapped in a plastic shower curtain, was thrown into a steep canyon Bittaker had chosen.

  Two weeks later, on the 8th of July 1979, the men saw 18-year-old Andrea Joy Hall hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway. Another driver pulled over first, so the two followed that car at a distance until Hall got out in Redondo Beach. This time Norris hid behind a bedspread in the back, so that Hall would think Bittaker was alone. When she reached for a cold drink from the cooler, Norris grabbed her.

  She was taken higher into the San Gabriel Mountains and raped. Bittaker made her pose for Polaroid pictures. He told her he was going to kill her, then killed her with an ice pick and by strangling her, and threw her body off a cliff. Norris, sent to buy alcohol, came back to find Bittaker holding the photographs. Her body was never found.

  On the 3rd of September, they saw two girls resting on a bus stop bench near Hermosa Beach. Jacqueline Leah Lamp was 13 and Jackie Doris Gilliam was 15. Both had been hitchhiking along the highway. They accepted a ride and marijuana. When the van left the highway and headed toward the mountains, both girls knew something was wrong, and their protests were met with excuses neither believed.

  Lamp tried to open the sliding door. Norris hit her on the back of the head with a bag of lead weights and overpowered Gilliam. Lamp woke and tried again to escape. Because the struggle was in view of passing witnesses, Bittaker stopped the van, punched Gilliam in the face and helped bind both girls.

  The two were held for almost two days in the mountains, bound and gagged between assaults. Both men slept in the van, taking turns as lookout. Bittaker made a tape recording of one assault. He also took photographs, including of Lamp on a hillside.

  As the captivity neared its end, Norris testified, he suggested killing Gilliam quickly because she had been cooperative. Bittaker replied, "No, they only die once anyway." Gilliam was killed with an ice pick and strangled. Lamp was struck on the head with a sledgehammer by Norris and strangled by Bittaker. Their bodies were thrown over an embankment into chaparral.

  The last victim was Shirley Lynette Ledford, aged 16. On the 31st of October 1979 she stood outside a gas station in Sunland-Tujunga, hitchhiking home from a Halloween party. Investigators believe she accepted the ride because she recognized Bittaker, who often visited the McDonald's where she worked part-time as a waitress.

  Norris offered marijuana, and she refused. On a quiet street, he drew a knife and bound her with construction tape. Bittaker took the back of the van with a tape recorder running while Norris drove for more than an hour. What the recording captured is why this case is remembered. Ledford can be heard pleading, while the sounds of Bittaker reaching into the toolbox are audible. Norris later switched the recorder on himself and took part.

  After about two hours, Norris killed her with a wire coat hanger tightened with pliers. Bittaker then wanted to see how the press would react to a body left at random. They drove to a house in Sunland, and Norris left her in a bed of ivy on the front lawn. A jogger found her the next morning.

  Bittaker would later claim the tape showed only a threesome, and that by the end she was begging the men to kill her. A tape of this kind would become the center of a courtroom three years later.

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• 5. Jackson's Tip

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  In November 1979, Norris ran into Joseph Jackson, a friend from the California Men's Colony. Norris told him everything about the previous five months, including graphic details of the death of Shirley Ledford, the only victim whose body had been found. He also mentioned three further incidents in which young women had been grabbed or targeted. Some escaped, and one was raped and let go.

  Jackson consulted his attorney, who told him to go to the authorities. The Los Angeles Police Department passed the two men along to Hermosa Beach police. There Detective Paul Bynum was assigned to test what Jackson had said.

  Bynum found that the details matched reports of teenage girls missing since the summer. One incident also stood out. Norris had said that he and Bittaker sprayed mace in a woman's face and raped her in Bittaker's van. That matched a report from the 30th of September, when Robin Robeck had been maced, dragged into a van and raped by two men in their mid-30s before being released. Police had never identified them.

  Bynum sent an investigator to Robeck's home in Oregon with a set of mug shots. She picked out two without hesitation. They were Bittaker and Norris.

  Police put Norris under surveillance and saw him dealing marijuana within days. On the 20th of November 1979, Hermosa Beach police arrested him for violating parole. The same day, Bittaker was arrested at his Burbank motel for the Robeck rape. Robeck could not pick either man out of a live lineup, but both were held on parole violations, since Bittaker had drugs on him at his arrest.

  In Bittaker's apartment, investigators found Polaroid pictures of Hall and Gilliam, both reported missing earlier that year. In the van they found a sledgehammer, a bag of lead weights, a book on locating police radio frequencies, a jar of Vaseline, and two necklaces later confirmed as belonging to victims. They also found a cassette tape of a young woman screaming and begging for mercy.

  Ledford's mother, named by Jackson as one of the dead, identified the voice on the tape as her only daughter's. The mocking voices of the men were identified as Norris and Bittaker. Seven bottles of acidic liquids sat in Bittaker's motel room. Investigators later learned he had meant to use them on the next victim.

  In Norris's apartment, police found a bracelet he had taken from Ledford's body. Between the two homes were Polaroid pictures of almost 500 teenage girls and young women, mostly taken at Redondo and Hermosa beaches. Bittaker had taken others at a Burbank high school. Most of the subjects had no idea they were being photographed.

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• 6. Confession and Plea

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  At a preliminary hearing on the 30th of November 1979, about the Robeck rape, Roy Norris was visibly under strain. He waived his Miranda rights, and Detective Bynum and Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay began to question him about Robeck, then about Jackson's statements and the evidence from both homes.

  Norris first denied everything. Faced with the evidence, he began to confess, though he tried to make Bittaker seem more responsible. Bynum and Kay later said he spoke in a "casual, unconcerned manner". He explained that the pair drove along the Pacific Coast Highway and approached girls they found attractive with offers of a ride, photographs or marijuana. Most refused. Four who accepted a lift were killed, and a fifth, the first, was seized by force.

  He described the routine of bindings, gags and drives deep into the San Gabriel Mountains. Strangulation with a coat hanger usually followed, though two victims had ice picks driven into their ears first. He admitted striking Lamp with a sledgehammer, and Ledford's elbow too. The acid, he said, was for the next girl. The torture and humiliation had been done "for fun".

  Norris claimed Bittaker's brutality grew with each victim. Ledford, he said, had begged to be killed to end her suffering. Other details backed up his story. He knew Schaefer had just left a church meeting and had lost a shoe as she was dragged into the van. He also knew part of Ledford's ancestry was Hispanic, and that Bittaker had asked her on a date and been refused.

  On the 7th of February 1980, Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter Pitchess described "sadistic and barbaric abuse" and said five first-degree murder charges would be sought against both men. Police had traced 60 of the young women in the Polaroid pictures, and none had been harmed. But 19 others in the photographs had been reported missing. Pitchess stressed there was no conclusive evidence that Bittaker and Norris had hurt them.

  One picture still troubles the case. It shows an unidentified young white woman alone with the pair, in circumstances much like the photographs of Hall, Lamp and Gilliam. She was never identified, which suggests there may have been another victim neither man ever mentioned.

  Norris agreed to go back to the San Gabriel Mountains with detectives, and at each site he led them to where the bodies had been left. Searches for Schaefer and Hall turned up nothing, and neither was found. On the 9th of February 1980, searchers found the skeletonized remains of Lamp and Gilliam at the bottom of a canyon beside a dry river bed, scattered across hundreds of feet. An ice pick was still lodged in Gilliam's skull. Lamp's skull bore many indentations from the blows Norris described.

  Both men were formally charged with the five murders that month. Bittaker was denied bail, while Norris's bail was set at $10,000. Within a month Norris had agreed to a deal. He would testify against Bittaker, and prosecutors would not seek the death penalty against him.

  On the 18th of March 1980, Norris pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder, one of second-degree murder for Hall, two of rape and one of robbery. Prosecutors had also promised not to ask for life without parole. Before sentencing, a probation officer reviewed Norris and told the court that Norris again blamed Bittaker for the actual torture. The officer said Norris was driven by power and dominance over his victims more than by sex, and had shown no remorse. He called Norris an "extreme sociopath" beyond rehabilitation.

  On the 7th of May 1980, Norris was sentenced to forty-five years to life in prison, with a chance of parole decades away. His testimony would now decide how the case against Lawrence Bittaker unfolded.

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• 7. The Tape on Trial

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  On the 24th of April 1980, Bittaker was arraigned on 29 charges, including kidnapping, rape, sodomy and murder. Two further counts accused him of conspiracy to commit murder. In December 1979 he had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade two inmates about to be released to kill Robin Robeck so she could not testify. When Judge William Hollingsworth asked for his plea, Bittaker stayed silent, and the judge entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf. The charge of raping Robeck was later dropped for lack of physical evidence and because she had not picked him from the lineup.

  The trial opened on the 19th of January 1981 in Torrance, California, before Judge Thomas Fredericks of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. Norris, the prosecution's star witness, took the stand on the 22nd. He explained how the two men met in prison and planned to abduct, rape and kill teenage girls. He said he had failed to abduct a woman in June 1979, and that after he told Bittaker, they agreed to act together from then on.

  He walked the court through all five murders and the 30th of September rape of Robeck. He also described an attempt to abduct a woman named Jan Malin that same day, and an attempt to abduct a young woman on the 27th of September. His account of Ledford's death included a claim that Bittaker pressed him: "I should kill her, because I hadn't killed anyone yet. I knew this was coming, so I agreed."

  Other witnesses supported him. A 17-year-old neighbor, Christina Dralle, said Bittaker had shown her a photograph of Gilliam and remarked, "The girls I get won't talk anymore." She also said he once played her a cassette on which two girls screamed while he laughed. Lloyd Douglas, who shared a jail cell with Bittaker after his arrest, testified that Bittaker had described in detail the torture of Gilliam and Ledford.

  The defense argued that Norris was the true killer, and that Bittaker had learned of the murders only shortly before his arrest. To support this, it called Richard Shoopman, a friend of Norris, who testified that Norris often spoke of wanting to rape young girls and found a girl's fear exciting. The defense also pointed to the facial expressions in the Polaroid photographs of Hall.

  The most damaging evidence came on the 29th of January. Jurors heard a 17-minute section of the tape of Ledford's final hours. Norris had testified that Bittaker played it repeatedly while driving in the weeks before his arrest, and found it "real funny". Before it played, Stephen Kay warned jurors that a "voice from the dead" would "point an accusing finger" at Bittaker. "For those of you who do not know what hell is like," he said, "you will find out."

  More than 100 people were in the courtroom. Many jurors and spectators wept. Some covered their faces, and others hurried out before the recording ended. Bittaker was undisturbed and smiled through it. At the recess, Kay left the room in tears. He told reporters, "Everybody who has heard that tape has had it affect their lives. I just picture those girls... how alone they were when they died." Asked whether the tape should have been played, he answered, "You're darn right it should have been. The jury needs to know what these guys did."

  On the 5th of February 1981, Bittaker took the stand himself. He denied any part in Schaefer's death and claimed he had paid Hall $200 to pose for photographs. He said he last saw Lamp and Gilliam alone with Norris, who had taken them off in the van. Of Ledford, he said she had agreed to scream theatrically for the recorder and was left alone with Norris.

  Closing arguments began on the 9th of February. Kay apologized to the jury for asking only for death, saying he wished the law let him ask that Bittaker suffer as the victims had. He held up a photograph of each murdered girl and warned, "a punishment of life imprisonment in prison would be a total, complete victory for him." Deputy District Attorney C. Randolph Ramsey told jurors the tape alone was enough to refute Bittaker's story.

  Defense attorney Albert Garber urged the jurors to set aside Norris's testimony and called the prosecutors' recitals of detail "bloodlust". He recalled the psychologist Michael Maloney, who testified that Bittaker could not empathize with others and that nearly all his earlier convictions were nonviolent, the 1974 stabbing of Gary Louie being the exception.

  On the 17th of February 1981, after three days of deliberation, the jury found Bittaker guilty of five counts of first-degree murder. It also found him guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, five kidnappings, nine rapes, two forcible oral copulations, one sodomy, and three firearms charges. The jury then took 90 minutes to recommend death. Bittaker showed no emotion, though he stared at the jurors.

  On the 24th of March, Judge Fredericks formally sentenced him to death. The judge also set an alternative term of 199 years and 4 months, to apply immediately if the death sentence were ever reduced to life imprisonment.

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• 8. After the Verdict

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  On the 22nd of June 1989, a court dismissed Bittaker's appeal, which had challenged the warrants used to search his van and motel room and the judge's dismissal of a woman hired to advise the defense on jury views about the death penalty. The court called any errors minor in light of the strong evidence. An execution date of the 29th of December 1989 followed. On the 11th of June 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision. A new date of the 23rd of July 1991 was set, and he won a further stay on the 9th of July 1991.

  Bittaker gave several interviews from death row. He showed no remorse, repeatedly saying his only regret was that he and Norris had been caught, which "ruined" his life. He answered letters from strangers under the nickname "Pliers" Bittaker, after one of the implements used on the victims.

  He also filed more than 40 frivolous lawsuits over matters such as a broken cookie and crushed sandwiches in the prison cafeteria, calling them cruel and unusual punishment. In 1993 he was declared a vexatious litigant and barred from filing suits without permission from a judge or attorney.

  He sometimes said his life had been wasted and that he wished he "could go back and not do it". Yet he also remarked that he and Norris had little in common before they met in 1977, and "one hell of a lot in common now!" In 2016, asked whether he would write to the victims' families, he said he was "too ashamed to even try and beg for forgiveness". Numerous professionals disputed his sincerity, noting he enjoyed his notoriety and tailored his regret to whoever's attention he wanted to keep.

  Bittaker died of natural causes on death row at San Quentin State Prison on the 13th of December 2019, aged 79.

  Norris served his sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. For years he claimed he took part only out of fear of Bittaker. He said he twice thought about confessing to police and that he steered three possible victims away from the van. He admitted he enjoyed the rapes but insisted only Bittaker enjoyed the killing, calling it "his favorite part".

  Investigators and psychologists disagree. They say Norris drew equal gratification from dominating and torturing the victims, and they point to his long record of violence against women before he ever met Bittaker. Norris became eligible for parole in 2009 but declined to attend the hearing, which deferred his eligibility another ten years. He was denied parole in 2019. He died of natural causes at the California Medical Facility on the 24th of February 2020, aged 72, a week after being transferred there.

  The prosecutor, Stephen Kay, still calls these the worst murders he has ever prosecuted or encountered. He believed that before Bittaker died, no one on California's death row deserved execution more. For more than two years after the trial, he said, he was haunted by dreams in which he ran toward Bittaker's van to save the girls but "always get there too late."

  The detective Paul Bynum, who led the investigation, died by suicide in December 1987, aged 39. In a ten-page note, he wrote that the murders haunted him and that he feared the men might one day be released.

  The cassette of Lynette Ledford's torture remains in the possession of the FBI Academy, where it is used to train agents and prepare them for the reality of torture and murder. A 2012 documentary film, The Devil and the Death Penalty, examines the murders alongside California's death penalty appeals process, and its director interviewed Stephen Kay.

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