Norris and Bittaker: The Toolbox Killers
Oct. 31, 1979, Sunland-Tujuna suburb of Los Angeles, California: A Halloween house party was in full swing, with guests dressed in the usual macabre costumes: ghosts, zombies, vampires, murder victims.
But 16-year-old Shirley Lynette Ledford and her boyfriend weren’t having much fun. The two got into a fight, and her boyfriend left the party without her. Ledford couldn’t find a ride home, so she left and began hitchhiking.
Halloween night turned into Nov. 1, the Day of the Dead, and Ledford still had not made it home.
Shortly after sunrise, a jogger came upon her nude body, a coat hanger cinched around her neck, in a neighbor’s front yard.
Ledford’s autopsy would reveal evidence of horrific torture, indicating she had been beaten and raped with some form of heavy implements or tools before being garroted with the wire hanger.
Investigators didn’t have much to go on. Her boyfriend had an alibi. There was no physical evidence on her body, no witnesses as to her whereabouts after she left the party, and no suspects.
All they had was a troubling suspicion that Ledford’s murder might be connected to the recent disappearances of other teenaged girls who had gone missing since June, when 16-year-old Lucinda Lynn Schaefer had gone missing after leaving her church in Redondo Beach. Two weeks later, also in Redondo Beach, 18-year-old Andrea Hall had gone missing while hitchhiking. Then, over Labor Day weekend, two girls went missing: Jackie Gilliam, 15, and Jacqueline Leah Lamp, 13. Like Hall, they had also been hitchhiking; they were last seen at a bus stop in Hermosa Beach.
But the investigations into the missing girls, as well as Ledford’s murder, was going nowhere. Then the Los Angeles Police Department got a call from an ex-con named Joseph Jackson. He had recently become reacquainted with an old cellmate from the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo: Roy Norris. Norris had bragged to Jackson about a series of brutal crimes that he had committed with another friend, Lawrence Bittaker. For the last five months, Norris told Jackson, he and Bittaker had kidnapped, raped, and tortured several teenagers they’d picked up between Redondo Beach and Santa Monica. They had killed five of these girls, Norris bragged — including Ledford. Jackson was able to give detailed information about these attacks, from descriptions of the girls to where they were picked up and what was done to them — brutal acts of torture using tools like sledgehammers and pliers.
Jackson had come forward with the information, he said, because he had a 13-year-old daughter whom Norris had started taking “an unhealthy interest” in.
The LAPD had Jackson contact the Hermosa Beach police with his story. Jackson repeated what Norris had told him, including the fact that Norris and Bittaker had bought a silver 1977 GMC van and customized the interior to turn it into a mobile torture chamber.
That detail alerted the Hermosa Beach detectives; on Sept. 31, a young woman named Robin Robeck had come to police to report being raped. She told police she had been sprayed with mace and dragged into a silver van, where she had been bound and raped by two white men in their 30s. After they released her, she went to the police, but they were unable to identify her attackers.
Her story perfectly matched one of the stories Norris had told Jackson. So Hermosa Beach police tracked down Robeck and showed her a photo lineup containing Norris and Bittaker’s mug shots. She immediately picked them out.
Police went on the hunt for the two — to arrest Bittaker for the rape of Robeck and to place Norris under surveillance.
It didn’t take long for Norris to give police a reason to arrest him: he was openly selling marijuana. Bittaker was also found in possession of drugs, a parole violation. Police arrested the two and impounded their silver van.
When police searched the van, they saw it had been customized just as Jackson had described. Inside, the police found a sledgehammer, lubricant, a sap made from lead weights in a plastic bag, and two women’s necklaces. But the most damning piece of evidence was a tape that had been left inside a tape recorder. On it, a woman’s voice could be heard screaming in pain, begging for mercy, and two men’s voices could be heard mocking her and ordering her to scream more.
Bittaker’s and Norris’ apartments contained some 500 Polaroids of girls, all taken around Redondo and Hermosa beaches. Among the hundreds of girls pictured were the missing girls Hall and Gilliam.
Norris and Bittaker denied any knowledge of any of the missing girls. But after being confronted by the evidence, Norris agreed to confess and plead guilty in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty.
Bittaker and Norris had met in 1977 at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Norris had a lengthy record of rapes and attempted rapes going back years. In fact, he had been discharged from the Navy after an attempted rape and was diagnosed with severe schizoid personality. He was later committed to Atascadero State Hospital as a mentally disordered sex offender, but was released after five years when the doctors there declared him no longer a threat to society.
Bittaker, despite having an IQ of 138, also had a long rap sheet, mostly involving theft and transporting stolen goods. But during one of this many stints behind bars, he was evaluated by a psychiatrist and diagnosed as a borderline psychopath. He finally landed in San Luis Obispo for stabbing a store clerk who attempted to stop him from stealing a steak.
The two bonded over their shared sadistic fantasies. Behind bars, they hatched their plan to abduct, rape, and torture girls between the ages of 13 and 19.
Bittaker was released on parole in November 1978, and Norris was paroled in January of the following year. Both appeared to be model parolees; Bittaker got a job as a machinist in the aircraft industry making six figures, and Norris landed a decent-paying job as an electrician.
But only a month after Norris got out of prison, the two began working to turn their fantasies into reality. Their first step was to buy the van, which they nicknamed “Murder Mack,” in homage to another sadistic duo, the Hillside Stranglers.
They began cruising the area between Redondo Beach and Santa Monica, picking up hitchhikers. At first, the two did nothing other than take pictures of the girls they picked up. They were perfecting their technique — much like Edmund Kemper, they wanted to practice, to see what made the girls trust them, and to ingratiate themselves amongst the many teens who would hang out in the area. They were also scouting out secluded locations where they could put their plan into practice.
Before long, they escalated to rape. Some of the girls, they lured in with the promise of a ride or the offer to smoke weed. Others, like Robeck, they grabbed and forced into the van before attacking them. Their sexual assaults always included binding their victims and beating them, sometimes with their hands, sometimes with tools they kept in the van for just that purpose.
Soon they found the perfect location to take their fantasies to the next level: an isolated fire road in the Angeles National Forest near Glendora. The area was extremely remote and rugged, with steep cliffs, and prone to flash floods. Bittaker broke the lock on the gate and replaced it with his own. Now everything was in place.
On June 24,1979, the two spotted Schaefer walking along the street and agreed she was a “cute little blond.” They launched into their usual MO, pulling up alongside her and offering her a ride. She refused. So they tried offering her some weed; again, she refused. So the two drove a little farther and pulled over. Norris stepped out, opened the side door, and leaned inside as though he was fixing something on the door. As Schaefer walked by, he grabbed her and dragged her into the van.
Bittaker drove to the hideout, turning the music up as high as it would go to drown out Schaefer’s screams. Meanwhile, Norris bound and gagged her with duct tape.
The two took turns raping her. Then, they argued over whether to kill her; Norris claimed he wanted to release her, but Bittaker insisted on killing her. Bittaker claimed the opposite. But in the end, they decided to kill her.
First, Norris attempted to strangle her, but became upset and vomited. So Bittaker finished the job, first using his hands, then the wire hanger, which he tightened with a pair of pliers. They wrapped her body in a shower curtain and threw her over a cliff, where Bittaker said the animals would dispose of all the evidence.
Two weeks later, they picked up Hall as she was hitchhiking. However, when Norris attempted to subdue her, she fought back. He was finally able to twist her arm behind her back and gag her with duct tape, then he bound her wrists and ankles.
They took her to the fire road, just past where they had taken Schaefer. There, the two raped and tortured her multiple times using a sledgehammer, icepick, and pliers. Bittaker forced her to pose while he took pictures. They drove farther down the rugged, isolated road before Bittaker took Hall up a nearby hill. Norris said he then left to go buy food. When he returned, Bittaker was alone, but had two Polaroids of Hall, her face in “sheer terror.” Norris said Bittaker told him that he had forced Hall to give him a list of reasons to spare her life. Hall did so, but Bittaker didn’t think her reasons were good enough. He stabbed her in both sides of her skull with an icepick, then strangled her and threw her body off a cliff.
They took a break for a couple months, until Labor Day weekend. That’s when they picked up Gilliam and Lamp. At first, the four smoked weed together, but once the girls realized Bittaker was driving away from the beach, they panicked. Lamp tried to open the side door, and was almost successful, until Norris knocked her out with his homemade sap. Norris then began binding Gilliam. Because of the struggle, Bittaker pulled the van over near some tennis courts, where Lamp came to. She was able to get the side door open and almost escape. Norris twisted her arm and dragged her back into the van; Bittaker punched Gilliam in the face and helped Norris bind the two. However, there were people nearby who witnessed the struggle. Norris told them the girls were just having a bad trip.
With the two now under their control, they drove to the murder site. Over the next two days, they repeatedly raped and tortured Gilliam (they had no interest in Lamp because she was “too fat”). Bittaker recorded himself raping her and had Norris take several pictures of him with Gilliam. He also forced Lamp to strip and pose while he took pornographic pictures of her.
Bittaker and Norris would take turns sleeping in the van alongside their hostages while the other acted as lookout. After two days, they decided to kill the girls. They killed Gilliam by stabbing her in the ear with an icepick. They forced Lamp out of the van, where Norris hit her in the head with a sledgehammer. Bittaker then strangled her.
But Lamp was still a fighter. When she opened her eyes, Norris struck her with the sledgehammer, again and again, while Bittaker strangled her. Once she was finally dead, her body, along with Gilliam’s, was thrown over an embankment.
Ledford was their final victim. When they picked her up, Norris said, she was already “loaded” from the party. He also said she recognized Bittaker, since he was a regular customer at a restaurant where she waited tables.
Norris said Bittaker told him to take the wheel. Norris said he drove around aimlessly with the radio blaring to cover the screams as Bittaker repeatedly raped and tortured Ledford. Then the two switched places; while Norris brutalized her, Bittaker drove. They recorded these attacks as they had the others, until Norris strangled her with a wire hanger.
Norris said it was Bittaker’s idea to dump her in a public location to see how the press would react.
As part of his plea deal, Norris agreed to take investigators to where they had dumped the bodies of their first four victims. He led them to the spot where Gilliam and Lamp had been dumped. Their skeletonized remains were found scattered along a dry creekbed. Lamp’s skull bore multiple blunt-force trauma fractures and Gilliam’s was found with an ice pick still in it, corroborating Norris’ testimony.
Despite multiple searches, the remains of Hall and Shaefer were never found.
Bittaker refused to admit to anything.
In March 1980, Norris pled guilty to four counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder (for the murder of Hall), two counts of rape, and one count of robbery. He was sentenced to 45 years to life, with eligibility for parole.
Bittaker was charged with a total of 29 counts of kidnapping, rape, sodomy, murder, possession of firearms, and multiple charges of criminal conspiracy. The Robeck rape charges had been dropped for lack of evidence.
He pled not guilty; his trial began in January 1981. Besides witness testimony (especially Norris’), the most damning evidence of his guilt was the graphic 17-minute tape of the rape and torture that had been found in the van. The voices on the tape were clearly Ledford — crying, screaming, begging for mercy — and Bittaker and Norris, mocking her and ordering her to scream for them.
When it was played, several spectators, prosecutors, and jurors were forced to leave the courtroom in tears; some threw up. After the trial, several jurors needed trauma counseling; the prosecuting attorney later stated that he had recurring nightmares for years after hearing that tape. Six years after the trial, one of the chief investigators committed suicide, and in his note, wrote how the Bittaker and Norris crimes continued to haunt him.
Bittaker, who smiled calmly while it was being played, claimed the tape was of a consensual threesome. His defense was that Norris had killed all the victims without his knowledge.
After deliberating for three days, the jury found Bittaker guilty of five counts of first-degree murder, one charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, five charges of kidnapping, nine charges of rape, two charges of forcible oral copulation, one charge of sodomy, and three charges of unlawful possession of a firearm. Five days later, they sentenced him to death.
Norris first became eligible for parole in 2009, but declined to appear for his parole hearing. He came up for parole again in 2019, but was denied. He died in prison Feb. 20, 2020, likely of Covid-19, joining the ranks of numerous other serial killers who died of the disease, including David Brooks and Lonnie Franklin (“The Grim Sleeper”).
Bittaker, while incarcerated, granted several interviews, never once admitting his crimes or showing remorse. In some of his correspondence, he would sign his name, “Pliers.”
He also filed more than 40 frivolous lawsuits against the prison system for cruel and usual punishment — including being served broken cookies and soggy sandwiches. He was declared a vexatious litigant in 1993, barring him from filing any further lawsuits without the permission of a judge or attorney.
He died in prison Dec. 19, 2019.
The tape of Ledford’s torture is now in the possession of the FBI Academy in Quanitco, Virginia, where it is used as a tool to help desensitize agents to the reality of torture and murder.
