The Toolbox Killer (2021) Movie Script
One night my phone rang.
You have a prepaid call from an inmate
at the California State Prison,
San Quentin, California.
Bittaker had a series of heart attacks.
Teenagers brutally attacked.
Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker...
Raping and murdering five teenage girls.
The evil that these guys caused--
it really captured the fear
of the city of Los Angeles.
Just a lot more careful about where I go.
I'm afraid to be walking down the street.
Lawrence Bittaker and
his partner, Roy Norris,
were known as the Toolbox Killers.
Bittaker was the most evil man
because of that toolbox.
Pliers, vise grips,
ice picks.
I thought Roy Norris was very strange.
I think he hated women.
He creeped me out.
I interviewed Lawrence Bittaker,
the most sadistic serial killer
on San Quentin's death
row, for over five years.
He used to say to me, "If I
just had one good parent,
I wouldn't have become this monster."
The police followed Norris,
and, boy, did they find a lot.
Hundreds of pictures of young girls
were found in their possession.
Everyone one of these photographs
represents a potential victim.
I thought, "He's gonna
kill me in the courtroom."
Oh, I thought about killing
Lawrence Bittaker at the trial.
I would dream that I had a gun.
He was sexually aroused by
their screams and their cries.
Bittaker finds out that she is a virgin.
He wants to audio-record
the rape of a virgin.
They begin to play the tape.
The courtroom was stunned.
I first came
across Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris,
the Toolbox Killers-
it was in a criminology textbook.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
And I read about what
they did with the van...
with the girls,
with the ice pick through the ears,
and the torture for days.
And I just remember, I dropped the book
'cause I was so floored
by the level of sadism.
I always wondered what it
took to get to that level of sadism,
how their progression from their childhood
to committing such violent,
heinous acts transpired.
That was something I
really wanted to explore.
I majored in forensic psychology.
I had this incredible professor.
He said, "If you start
doing your own study,
"this will give you a leg up
when you go for higher education."
I developed this
questionnaire that I sent out to--
I think it was, like, 80
different serial killers.
My only goal was to
create a set of questions
that they can't manipulate so we can catch
these violent patterns
and behaviors early on,
before these other offenders
go on to do a life of crime,
like Lawrence Bittaker.
I didn't even think I was
gonna get a response back.
And I was like, "They're not
gonna help me with a study,"
you know.
I ended up getting a
crazy amount of responses,
and I was shocked.
But when I first reached out to Bittaker,
he wrote me back saying
he didn't want to talk to me,
he didn't want to do the survey.
He's in his late 70s at this point,
and he didn't want to
talk about the crimes.
So many journalists tried
to get him to do interviews
over the years, but he
just denied everybody.
I had already collected so much data
from the other inmates.
Why am I bothering with one
that is so challenging
to deal with?
But he was the most sadistic serial killer
in American history,
the worst of the worst,
and I wanted to try to find out
if he was hiding something
for all these years.
I didn't take no for an answer,
and I just kept writing and writing
for years and years and years.
One day, he finally agreed to talk to me.
This call is being recorded.
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Bittaker was really tricky to warm up to
and build the trust and rapport.
It really took a lot of time.
Early on in our relationship,
we used to try to have just,
like, normal conversations,
and it was like he just couldn't do it.
As an FBI agent, I worked in the FBI's BAU,
commonly known as the
Behavior Analysis Unit,
and in that unit, I was involved
in working a number of very violent crimes,
most specifically serial murder cases.
When I first met Larry,
he was clearly playing
a cat-and-mouse game with me.
Didn't admit to anything.
Said he hadn't done anything wrong.
He didn't give up very much.
Bittaker, he doesn't see
people as individuals.
He sees them as objects
to be used and to toss away.
I was a special trial deputy
handling some of the most
gruesome murder cases
in L.A. County,
including Charles Manson
and his family members.
I always felt that Lawrence Bittaker
was the worst,
even worse than Manson,
because of the torture.
He always said he wanted to be
bigger than Charlie Manson.
My name is Dennis McCarthy.
I was a reporter at the
South Bay "Daily Breeze"
in 1981,
and I covered the murder
trial of Lawrence Bittaker,
the Toolbox Killer.
Larry was such a fascinating study in evil.
Basically, Bittaker's
defense was, "I didn't do it.
It was the other guy."
Right? "It was Norris."
Bittaker and Norris
met and spoke in prison.
Their sharing of violent sexual fantasies
really cemented their relationship.
You had violent Bittaker
and rapist Norris getting together.
Bittaker was the lead.
Norris was the follower.
Lawrence Bittaker was a near-genius.
He has a 138 IQ.
When you're working with a psychopath,
if you go in and you're pretending
to be something you're not, they can tell.
These guys are smart.
And if you're gonna play games with them,
they're gonna play games with you.
So I go in nonjudgmental.
I build a real, actual,
authentic relationship with them,
and I definitely open up about myself
and my own personal life.
Anytime you're working with offenders
who have antisocial personality,
there's always gonna be a risk.
But once Lawrence Bittaker
and I finally felt that trust
and that rapport, he
started to reveal stuff
that he had never told
anybody else about this case.
I guess it was a Sunday.
Bittaker and Norris had been
driving all day for 15 hours
just smoking weed
and photographing unsuspecting girls,
when they spotted Cindy Schaefer.
She was dropped off at a church meeting
in Redondo Beach,
and she had left early,
and she was walking back
to her grandparents' place,
where she was staying,
and they start to trail her.
The police had no leads.
They had a big, bloody fight.
She is punching him
and just fighting for her life.
Cindy Schaefer was a
very bright young woman.
She was 16 years old.
Cindy was, from all accounts
of everybody who knew her,
just the sweetest and nicest girl
you could have ever imagined.
She tutored in Spanish, algebra,
and geometry in high school
and just had so many friends.
She wanted to go to college.
She wanted to study language
and teach foreign language,
just like her mother.
When Bittaker would talk
about how the girl more
or less went along with it
once she was inside the van,
as effort on his part to
minimize his involvement,
to minimize how serious these crimes were,
he's trying to manage the impression
that you have of him.
Bittaker, when he was a teenager,
had been placed in a camp
in the San Gabriel Mountains,
and he thought that that
would be a good place
for them to take their victims,
because nobody would hear them scream.
Cindy asked if they were gonna kill her.
She said, "I just want you to let me pray
if you're gonna kill me."
Bittaker and Norris laughed at her,
and Bittaker turned to her, and he said,
"God isn't here, only devils."
Norris saw that Cindy was crying,
and he just couldn't do
it anymore, so he let go,
and he went over to the
side of the road and threw up.
Bittaker went to the back of his van
and sectioned a wire coat hanger,
and told Norris to wrap it
around her neck and choke her.
And Norris tried to do that manually,
but he couldn't get it tight enough.
So Bittaker got a pair of vise grips
from the back of the van
and tightened it enough
so that it finally killed her.
There were no leads
to explain Cindy's disappearance.
They even found a girl in Tijuana
that they thought might be her,
so they went all the way down
to Tijuana and saw the girl,
and, of course, it wasn't Cindy.
Nobody had really any idea.
They, of course, didn't realize
that she was the first victim
of the infamous Toolbox Killers.
We know that Larry Bittaker
was a criminal sexual sadist.
He's an individual who is sexually aroused
by the infliction of
physical or emotional pain
on his non-consenting partners.
He wants the victim to scream, to cry.
He wants to see the fear in their eyes.
We know this behavior would have started
at a very, very early age.
Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker
was born to a teen mother in 1940.
Bittaker's father was violent,
and his mother was a drinker.
She would go and leave him
and his little brother home alone
while she went out and partied.
Soon, the family convinced
her to give up the two boys.
They were adopted by
different aunts and uncles
within the family.
At some point, something happened to him
when he was a little boy.
Sexually sadistic behaviors are learned
when their sexual identity is being formed.
So, whether Larry had
been himself the victim
of some kind of sexual abuse,
that more than likely
shaped his development
as a sexual sadist.
Bittaker was raised by an aunt and uncle.
They provided what
would have been a good life
for a normal person,
but Bittaker was not a normal person.
Even in his 70s,
he would talk about the
mother who gave him up.
That was a big part of
where his rage came from.
He actually had a plan
to go find her and kill her.
He always felt like, if she had kept him,
he would have never become a monster.
He had amazing grades. He was very smart.
He was tested early with a 138 IQ.
But he was unmotivated and unchallenged.
He loved to play with fire,
and he did burn down a couple sheds.
He was doing it to try to get
his adoptive parents', you know, attention.
And she took a cigarette
and just put it all over his body,
in a way that seemed like torture.
Larry began to manifest
his interest in torturing things
by the time he was adolescent.
One time he told me that he was upset.
They had rabbits, and he
went outside with a pair of pliers,
and he removed the teeth of
one of the rabbits with the pliers.
As a teenager, he would
wander around the streets
at night.
But then it started to escalate,
when he would move furniture around
so people knew that someone
had been in their house,
just so people feel
unsafe in their own homes.
So you're seeing the early signs of sadism.
A serial sexual
killer-they're born predators.
They hunt human beings.
And so his practice-
following people, watching people,
walking around his
neighborhood late at night-
is a result of his psychopathy,
which has a genetic link to it.
When sexuality and
violence becomes intertwined,
now you have these compulsion
and these urges to go out
and kidnap people and torture them,
that's a very, very deadly combination.
Lawrence Bittaker was very society awkward.
He reports that he didn't
have any friends growing up,
but he was able to get a
girlfriend in high school.
Mary Anne was a Catholic school girl-
Blonde hair, big blue eyes.
If you look at the victims,
they look very similar.
She also wore a cross,
and he actually made some of the victims
actually put on a cross during his crimes.
Bittaker told me that he had recorded
a make-out session with this girlfriend.
I was really blown away,
'cause I think this is where
the paraphilic urges started.
What's chilling is she does remember
him taking her up to San Gabriel Mountains,
and they would go and hang out and hike.
I've always wondered if that's why he took
the victims there-is
because of this first girlfriend,
his first rejection.
Bittaker had what's known
as a polymorphous perverse personality.
That means that he was able
to commit any crime on the books
just for his own pleasure.
His psychopathy was not
something that he worried about
or he fretted about or
he was concerned about.
When Lawrence Bittaker was in juvie,
they did a ton of evaluations,
and they're seeing that he is violent
with anger issues and deeply disturbed.
There were warning
signs from the beginning.
In 1974, Bittaker was
living in the Hollywood area.
He went into a Ralph's market,
and he stole a couple of steaks.
It was a miracle this guy survived.
By him stabbing this clerk,
it really changed the lives of everybody-
this fateful moment that sent him
to California Men's Colony, CMC East.
This is where Lawrence Bittaker
meets Roy Norris.
Roy Norris was a rapist.
He was a serial rapist.
Who was worse?
I don't think I could even say,
'cause when they partnered
up, they were both horrible.
I think he hated women.
He was the one who
typically grabbed the grabs
and subdued them.
He was a much bigger guy.
He was over 200 pounds.
He was a big oaf.
His IQ-I have no idea what it was,
but it couldn't be
anywhere near Bittaker's IQ.
He wasn't a liar and
an actor like Larry was.
Like, Larry pulled it off.
Norris-you felt uncomfortable.
So he was definitely the muscle of the two,
and Bittaker was the brains.
I prosecuted Roy Norris
for rape in 1975.
He was sentenced from three years to life
in the California Men's Colony,
East Facility, in San Luis Obispo,
where he met Lawrence
Bittaker, who was already there.
How they met, actually,
is they would make jewelry together.
And they did tell an inmate
named Richard Shoopman,
who was in there for
killing a young college girl.
Shoopman would write up their fantasies
and sell them to other prisoners.
They talked about getting
a cabin in the woods.
They talked about getting a trailer.
They even talked about a cave.
And they would fantasize
about what they were
gonna do when they got out.
It was Roy who also told
me that part of their fantasies,
as they plotted out
what they were gonna do,
was that they were going to kidnap a girl
for every teen year.
Once they got out, they
would kidnap 13-year-old,
14-year-old, 15-year-old...
It was the perfect storm
when they hooked up.
Back in the '70s,
rape wasn't treated as
seriously as it is nowadays.
Another factor-both of them
have antisocial personality,
so they are conning
the, you know, psychologist constantly
and telling him, you know, they're fine,
they're rehabilitated, they
can go back out into society.
So, Bittaker got out of jail first,
and he went to Los Angeles.
And then he got a job as a
skilled machinist in Burbank.
Roy Norris gets out a couple
months right after Bittaker.
He actually wanted Norris to quit his job
to build a compound,
and he was gonna
financially take care of him.
There was a very, like,
teacher-student vibe to them.
And I noticed, even with
my relationship with Bittaker,
it was a very student-teacher.
It was like, he's Hannibal, I'm Clarice.
He loved, like, that role and that dynamic,
and loved that he was teaching me
about, you know, the psychopathy.
And I think that was the same
dynamic with him and Norris.
They talked about Bittaker wanting a van
and specifically a van with a sliding door,
'cause that way they could
get victims in the van quicker.
Bittaker buys, you know,
the infamous silver van,
which they named Murder Mack.
They start personalizing this van.
They had police scanners.
He put a fold-down bed in the back.
They put flooring down.
They put a shag green carpet down.
They put the makeshift
bed with the toolbox-
the infamous toolbox-underneath the bed
to use for their torture.
They also had the walkie-talkies,
which they used to
communicate back and forth.
And then they started going to The Strand
in the South Bay area,
taking photographs of young teenage girls
in their skimpy bikinis and roller skating.
They did a trip up to
San Gabriel Mountains.
Bittaker had wanted to show Norris
all these, like, remote fire roads
that they could use.
He thought that that would be a good place
for them to take their victims,
because nobody would hear them scream,
and they could dump the bodies
down the very steep ravines.
There's a picture of Bittaker bending down,
breaking off the lock onto this fire road
so they would have
complete access to this road.
Bittaker took a photograph of Norris...
on the fire road, pointing
to the steep ravine.
Now, these look like innocent pictures,
but when they were sent to Shoopman,
they were a message to Shoopman
that, "We are actually
going through with this plan.
We're doing it. We're
bringing victims here."
They have this tricked-out murder van,
and then they have the
mountains and the woods.
I mean, it's very clear
everything was planned.
And that was Bittaker.
He was a planner. He was a thinker.
He thought every scenario through.
Beach towns down in the South Bay
were considered very safe.
You know, they were a
place where airline pilots
and stews hung out,
because it was close to LAX
and only a couple of feet
from some of the most beautiful beach area
in all of California.
A lot of young girls, a
lot of muscle builders.
It was a happening place, man.
Everybody was going down to The Strand,
because that's where the action was.
Unfortunately, there was so much action,
that's where Bittaker and Norris
went to find their victims.
Hitchhiking was part of the culture.
I myself had tried it a couple times.
My girlfriends wanted to always, you know,
in the summer, hitchhike to the park
that wasn't very far away.
But I didn't know
my sister was hitchhiking
until right before she was abducted.
Andrea Hall was an
18-year-old girl from Ohio.
She was spotted
by Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris
only two weeks after they had killed Cindy.
Andrea had been at the beach
with her sister and her kids.
She had a boyfriend
who lived out in Torrance.
She wasn't too far from
the boyfriend's place.
So, to get there, she hitchhiked.
She was hitchhiking down
Pacific Coast Highway.
She got in the car with
somebody else first,
and followed that car,
thinking that that person
may not want to take her
as far as she wanted to go.
They followed this car for miles
until he had let her out.
And then she started hitchhiking again,
'cause she wasn't at the
location she needed to be.
And that's when Norris
went and hid under the bed,
the makeshift bed, and Bittaker came up,
rolled down the window
and said, "Hey, want a ride?"
She made it easy for
these two perpetrators.
All they had to do was
pick her up, and they did.
My sister looked in. She got in.
Lawrence told her that there was a cooler
in the back with cold drinks.
So she got up and went back there.
And Roy Norris came up
and started accosting her.
She starts fighting, and
she fought like a bull.
And, I mean, she is punching him
and just fighting for her life.
He saw that she was overpowering Norris,
so he slammed on the brakes,
and they both tumbled backwards.
They had a big bloody fight,
and Norris finally got control of her.
They went to the mountain area again,
to a place we now know it's called
the Upper Monroe Truck Trail.
They're fire roads.
Bittaker had a sleeping
bag, a blanket, walkie-talkie,
so he could stay in contact with Norris,
and a camera.
It was like a Polaroid camera.
It would shoot the picture out,
so you didn't have to take
it in to a nosy film developer
who would see pictures
of girls in great distress.
Bittaker had told me in some
of my interviews with him,
he had used, you know, the pliers on her.
When he took her up on that hill,
he had her bound, and he took a camera.
He took one...
just gut-wrenching photograph of her.
He had said, "I'm going to kill you,"
and snapped a picture of her face-
the look on her face when he said that.
That is true sadism.
She was his first attempt
with an ice pick in the ear,
and that idea came from
a movie we saw in prison.
When you puncture an eardrum,
it's one of the most
severe, severe types of pain.
You would almost, like, go deaf instantly
and just hear blood through your brain.
But it wouldn't kill you instantly.
It would be a very slow, painful death.
But then he manually strangled her
until she was dead.
Andrea Hall's body was never found.
A small piece of myself died every day
for 13 1/2 years.
It was tough.
When Andrea went missing,
the police had no leads.
Her mother in Ohio was beside herself
because she had talked to
Andrea at least once a week.
So, when I did start digging into the case
and I saw that Cindy and
Andrea have never been found
in all these years,
something told me to keep working.
You know, could this be something
that I could get from him, some information
to try to get the
locations of the two girls?
When I talked to Andrea's
sister for the first time-
Julie-she just said to me-
She was bawling, and I was bawling,
and she's like, "We've
never given up hope."
And just hearing her say,
you know, "We've never given up hope"...
yeah, it was a really
emotional conversation...
to have.
You know, my mother
said to my sister Pamela,
whose son drowned in the ocean one day-
she said, "At least you
had his body, Pammy,"
because we never had a body.
We never found her.
We've still been looking for her.
It's almost 43 years.
When Bittaker was about 78,
he starts telling me, you know,
he's starting to have
emotions he never had before.
He'll watch a commercial and start crying.
He once said to me-
he goes, "Do you
understand what it feels like
"to actually put an ice
pick through someone's ear
and not feel anything?"
Before, he felt like a void,
and now he's feeling, like,
a flood of emotion for the first time ever.
He calls it a dam breaking.
He's having a new
experience, a new emotion,
and what he called and wrote about-
he described as becoming fully human.
I find it very hard to believe that any one
of those psychological
professionals at San Quentin
would have given him that diagnosis,
that, "Once you were, but now you're not."
I talked with him about
his lack of empathy,
and I recall one time he
said he would find himself
crying during soap operas.
And I remember it
was-I couldn't control it.
I started laughing and saying,
"You have got to be
kidding me. It's absurd.
You know it's absurd,
and I know it's absurd."
And he starting laughing, too.
When he engages in behavior with people
where he's coming across
as caring and concerned
or seems to show a soft side of him,
it's the FBI training in me that says,
"Be very careful that
this is not just another way
to try to manipulate the situation."
My name's Tracee Whitney, and in 1979,
I lived at the Scott's Motel
next to Lawrence Bittaker.
I saw him daily when I was at the hotel.
The Scott's Motel was a very dingy,
cheap hotel.
Burbank Police knew
that people that lived there
were basically homeless.
I was 18.
A lot of younger people my age would party
in each other's rooms.
Larry would give us money.
He would give us weed.
He would give us beer.
I think Larry wanted to be liked.
It was as if Larry loved
having a gang of girls
around him, you know?
Like, it made him somebody.
Larry chose to live in a rundown place
over a much more expensive
place that he could afford
because it did give him
access to young girls.
It gave him access to people
that he could manipulate
and dominate and impress.
I found out I was pregnant.
I attempted to make a
phone call to my family
to beg them to allow me to come home
and live there while I figured
out what I was gonna do,
and they refused to
do it, and they hung up.
When I turned around,
Larry was standing behind me
and had heard the conversation,
and I was extremely upset.
And he said, "If you need something--
"if you need maternity
clothes or a place to sleep,
I'll pay for it."
Larry had a soft spot
for young pregnant girls,
because he was always the predator.
He was very nice to me, you know,
and I get pretty upset when I say that...
knowing what I know.
But it's the truth. He was very kind to me.
You have to look at it through the lens
of this was a very, very, very
dangerous sexual predator
who preyed upon young teenage girls,
who dominated them, took advantage of them.
And so, while he may
be extending a kindness,
there would have
been ulterior motives.
What was he getting back in return?
I think it's very possible that
Larry was grooming them.
He would drive me to the beach.
He would drive me any place I wanted to go.
So, we spent a lot of time in his...
A lot of time alone in his van.
I had no clue, no idea the
things that he was doing.
The last time I was with Larry,
I was in the van with him alone,
and we got in an argument about something,
and I don't remember what it was.
He pulled a gun out, and he said to me...
"The only reason you're
alive is 'cause you're pregnant."
And...
I remember jumping out of that van so fast.
I don't even know how-
I don't know how he didn't shoot me,
knowing what I know
that he did to other girls.
I don't-I'm really lucky to be alive.
And part of me feels guilty
that I'm alive and those girts aren't.
In 2018, I had gotten pregnant.
One week later,
the place I was working
went into bankruptcy,
and now I was homeless,
jobless, and pregnant and alone.
It was a really, really
dark time in my life.
But Bittaker was the one calling me,
saying, "How did the doctor's go?"
For the first time ever,
he actually agreed to
be interviewed in person,
so I started making plans to go meet him.
My doctor almost had a heart attack
when I told her I was
gonna go to San Quentin
to interview serial killers,
7 1/2 months pregnant.
She literally just drops
the pen, and she goes,
"I don't even know how
to put this in my notes."
The guys on death row
actually really networked
and helped me make it possible
to actually come out there.
They really came to my rescue, in a sense.
They found me a place to stay.
One of the wives of the death row inmates
actually, like, took me in.
The goal with any interview
is to get unknown information.
So, of course, with having two girls
that have never been found,
you want to find their
location for their families.
Detectives at Hermosa Beach
wanted to have a rolling
surveillance of Norris.
She was paid to make certain responses.
She was having difficulty
following those directions.
There was gasps in the courtroom.
He was dying.
He was a ball of emotions
and anxious and upset.
When I first interviewed
Lawrence Bittaker in person
at San Quentin's death row,
I was 7 1/2 months pregnant.
I was, like, wobbling on death row.
It was wild-even the correctional officers
are looking at me, like,
"What are you doing?"
When you're walking into
death row at San Quentin,
you're walking across the yard...
people out there milling around.
Prisons are not safe environments
for the other inmates,
for the correctional officers,
and once you're inside,
you don't have any control
over what happens to you.
You're signing waivers
that say if there's a riot,
no one's gonna come
for you or fight for you.
It's not like a phone call
like you see in the movies.
It's a dog kennel-style cage,
and they padlock you in.
Two chairs and a little table,
and you're sitting there just face-to-face.
The correction officers
brought Lawrence Bittaker down.
And I remember, when he first saw me
and, like, how big I was,
like, his eyes bugged out of his head.
He was so taken back.
He was kind of, like,
socially awkward, I remember.
We sat in the cage,
and he wouldn't even look at me in the eye
for a good 2 1/2 hours.
He was that shy when we first met.
But something inside of me kept saying,
"Keep going back to this guy."
It was almost like an intuition.
There was something
more to be gained with him.
A couple months later,
I went to the hospital.
Bittaker was even on the phone
with me when I was in labor.
Bittaker had this love for my son.
I think he almost sees himself
as, like, a surrogate father
for Romeo or grandfather.
It was Romeo's first birthday party.
I had sent him a picture.
He would bring that picture
of him with all the balloons
and show it off to everybody on the row.
I think he looked at Romeo and I
as, like, his only family.
He even put me down
as his next of kin in the will.
So, yeah, I would say
I definitely did the deepest
dive into Lawrence Bittaker.
My experience with psychopaths
is that they don't bond with other people.
The risks of thinking
you're getting really close
to someone who's like that
and giving up a lot of personal information
to someone that's incarcerated
could be problematic.
You can't be 100% sure whatsoever
that that information won't compromise you.
It is a tightrope you're walking.
But, you know, the more and more
you're building that
trust and that relationship,
the more and more you
can push that envelope.
And you kind of see that develop
with my interviews with Bittaker.
He had made me say a
couple promises to him,
and one of the promises I made to him
was I would always be a good mother.
He used to say to me, "If I
just had one good parent-
if I had one good parent,
I wouldn't have become this monster."
The third and fourth
victims of the Toolbox Killers
were Leah Lamp and Jackie Gilliam.
In 1979, I was 14 years old.
I met Jackie when she moved
into the apartment complex
next door to ours,
and we became fast friends.
Jackie was beautiful. She was amazing.
This smile is so genuine.
Jackie stayed at my house a lot,
and we used to spend a lot of time
taking the bus to the Santa Monica Beach,
pretty much every day in the summer.
One day she told me that she was gonna go
to Redondo Beach to
stay with her stepsister,
and I never heard from her again.
Leah Lamp was 13.
She was very bright.
Had just finished junior high school,
and she was ready to
start high school in the fall.
Her mother had a new wardrobe for her,
and she was really looking forward to it.
Jackie met Leah Lamp,
and they had become friends.
One day, Leah and Jackie
decided to go to the beach.
Bittaker and Norris saw them
and came up and asked
them if they needed a ride.
When they got into the van,
Norris and Bittaker offered them a joint,
and they were sitting
in the back of the van
with Norris, smoking this joint.
That is when Norris took a homemade sap.
It was full of BBs, really heavy.
And he hit Leah in the head
with it and knocked her out.
While Leah was down,
he tried to grab Jackie.
At some point, Leah regained consciousness
and tried to get out of the van.
It was on front of tennis courts,
so people were playing tennis
and actually stopped, looked over.
Leah Lamp jumped out of the van, screaming.
Bittaker stopped the van, came around,
and slugged Leah in the
face as hard as he could,
knocking her back.
He turned to everybody and said,
"She's having a bad LSD trip."
Leah Lamp was 13 years old,
and Jackie Gilliam was 15 years old.
When they got into the van,
Norris took a homemade sap,
hit Leah Lamp over the
back of the head with it.
While Leah was down,
he then tried to grab Jackie.
At some point, Leah regained consciousness
and tried to get out of the van.
Leah Lamp actually jumped
out of the van, screaming.
It was in front of tennis courts.
So, people were playing tennis
and actually stopped, looked over.
Bittaker stopped the van, came around,
and slugged Leah in the
face as hard as he could,
knocking her back.
He turned to everybody and said,
"She's having a bad LSD
trip. I'm just taking her home."
They took the girls up
to San Gabriel Mountain.
Bittaker told Jackie that
he was gonna rape her
and she better pretend
that she was enjoying it.
Bittaker finds out that she is a virgin,
and he wants to audio-record
the rape of a virgin.
So, he took the audio recorder,
and when he was raping
Jackie, she was screaming.
That is not what he
admitted later in person.
You know, these girls were
scared out of their mind.
Sadists are getting off on that fear.
That's what they love.
That's what they want to see.
When Bittaker would talk
about the girls went willingly with him,
he's trying to minimize any responsibility
he has for these murders.
There was a ton of photographs taken
of Jackie Gilliam-sexual
acts with Bittaker.
What's really haunting about the pictures
with Jackie Gilliam is,
you know, it's very clear
she has a black eye in the pictures.
Her ankles are bound. Her wrists are bound.
She's naked in the back of a van.
And she has a smile on her face.
Obviously, Bittaker forced her to smile
during these pictures that he took of her.
He showed some of these
photographs to other people,
so he had no sense of what's appropriate
and what's not appropriate.
So he used it to masturbate,
and then he used it thinking
he was impressing people.
Bittaker decides, "Well, we don't have
"to go to work tomorrow,
so let's sleep with the girls overnight."
They slept in the van, and
they took shifts sleeping
and watching the girls.
Bittaker was in the
van. Norris stood guard.
Bittaker and Roy Norris
kept them the longest.
It was somewhere around 48 hours.
Eventually Bittaker decided
that he had had enough, and so...
he cradled Jackie's head in one hand,
took the ice pick with the other hand,
and drove it into her ear canal,
into the brain.
Went to take it out,
but the handle came off.
When Jackie's skull was found,
the ice pick was embedded into the skull.
And then they got the girls' bodies
much the way they did with Cindy,
and they tossed them as far as they could
down this really steep ravine.
Jackie Gilliam and Leah
Lamp were the only two victims
that were found up on San Gabriel Mountain.
It was just partial remains of
their bones were recovered.
They told me she was tortured.
They told me there was
an ice pick stuck in her ear.
It wasn't a pretty picture,
the things they said.
It's just devastating.
I remember one day,
Leah Lamp's mother was in my office.
Her name was Myrna Carlisle.
And I said, "Myrna, you don't look so good.
Have you been sleeping alright?"
She said, "I don't sleep.
I have two eight-hour jobs,
one in the daytime and one at night,
because I can't go to
sleep, because if I sleep,
I have nightmares about how
my daughter was murdered."
And, oh, my gosh.
I don't think at that age I understood
really what was going on
until the detectives
started coming to my house.
It was horrible hearing things like that
about one of my best friends.
Jackie didn't deserve that.
Both Bittaker and Norris
knew that the police had nothing on them
and that they were not being looked for.
They started to feel invincible,
and they started getting bolder and bolder.
October 31, 1979-
Bittaker and Norris were
out looking for victims.
It was kind of late at night.
They were away from The Strand.
They were out in the Valley,
which was a deviation
from their normal pattern.
Shirley Lynette Ledford-
just a young girl
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She was a 16-year-old
girl who lived in Burbank.
She had a boyfriend. Had a lot of friends.
She was a wonderful person.
She just thought only the best of people.
Lynette had been at a Halloween party.
All the friends I've talked to
said they had a great time at the party.
She was happy.
She was hitchhiking home.
Bittaker and Norris spotted her.
We picked her up north of Burbank,
and she jumped right in.
I mean, she wanted a ride somewhere.
Bittaker grabbed her
and threw her in the back.
He and I both struggled with her.
You know, he pulled out a knife.
She grabbed the knife blade
and cut her finger pretty seriously.
If you look at Lynette Ledford...
it's showing this progression of sadism
and how much worse they are getting
with each and every murder.
Shirley Lynette Ledford-
just a young girl in the wrong
place and the wrong time.
Bittaker grabbed Lynette
and threw her into the back of the van.
Bittaker had a knife.
She grabbed the knife blade
and cut her finger pretty seriously.
They were able to get her
bound in the back of the van.
They didn't bring her to the mountains.
They brought her to,
like, a gravel dirt path,
somewhere isolated but still in Burbank.
That's where they proceeded
to torture and rape her.
During the time of these rape and torture,
Bittaker and Norris are
making her play along
that she likes it.
Bittaker wasn't after loving porn,
and I'm not even sure
what that phrase means.
This tape was gonna be used
for his own sexual gratification
after the attack had ended.
Bittaker would want to listen to it again
as he thought about what
he had done to his victims.
She was beaten around the chest,
around the face.
Bittaker raped her and tortured her
with pliers and screwdriver.
He and Norris then traded spots.
Norris, to get her to scream,
hit her on the elbow with a sledgehammer.
They wanted to capture the girl's scream,
and the girls' screams
is what got them off.
So, you know, if she wasn't screaming
as loud enough as they wanted,
the torture kept getting worse and worse.
When Larry talks about
it being spontaneous,
it's an effort to take away
the criminality from it.
And yet, they have a van that
they purposely soundproofed.
They engaged in predatory behavior.
Roy Norris took a coat hanger
and wrapped it around her
neck and used pliers to twist it.
When they found her body
and took this metal coat
hanger off of her neck,
it was the size of a silver dollar.
That's how much he had
twisted it around her neck.
It was, like, getting late,
real late in the early morning.
I had to be back to work at 7:30.
I had a long way to drive.
We finally just decided
that we'd just dump her off,
you know, probably on somebody's lawn,
more than anything else,
to see what reaction we
would get in the papers,
'cause he wanted to know
how society would react to it,
I guess.
The next day, the woman's
property who it was on,
she actually thought it was a
mannequin from Halloween.
Lynette was discarded there for the purpose
of messing with the cops and the press.
They wanted to get a
reaction from everybody.
There was a lot more girls
they were already stalking
and planning to attack at this point.
One was an airline stewardess,
and one was a 13-year-old
girl in a residential neighborhood.
I believe that Roy and
Larry would have continued
to kidnap, assault, and torture young girls
until they got caught.
They would not have stopped.
When Roy was in jail,
he became friends with a
guy named Joe Jackson.
One day, Roy tells Jackson
that he has been kidnapping,
raping, and murdering girls
all over the South Bay
with Lawrence Bittaker.
Told me that he killed them
because this way he could sleep at night
and not have to worry
about being identified.
It disturbed, you know,
Jackson so much, so deeply
that even a serial rapist
himself went to the cops.
Detectives at Hermosa Beach,
Paul Bynum and his partner, Tom Cray,
got really interested in these guys.
Bynum started thinking more about it
and said, "You know,
this guy isn't smart enough
to cook up these facts."
And they wanted to
have a rolling surveillance
of Norris.
They followed Norris.
Norris stopped at a drugstore,
and he left a shopping
bag in the front seat, open.
Bynum looked in
and saw that the shopping
bag was full of marijuana.
So the police came up
and stuck a gun in his ear,
said, "I'm putting you under
arrest for parole violation,"
and that meant that they
could search Norris' residence.
And, boy, did they find
a lot in Norris' residence.
They found about 500
photographs of young women
taken in supermarket parking lots,
women's gyms, girls walking
home from high school.
Every one of these photographs
represents a potential victim.
They also found the photograph
of the girl who was nude from the waist up,
with her hands folded behind her head,
who we now know is Jackie Gilliam.
While they were there,
Bittaker called and said,
"Well, where's Norris?"
And somebody said,
"Oh, well, he's up on the
roof fixing his antenna."
Well, Bittaker thought that
there was something fishy,
so he hurriedly cleaned out his van.
The photographs, the tapes-
he does an entire sweep of this van.
He got rid of everything.
When they were doing a
search at Norris' duplex,
they found a little card
that said "the Scott's Motel,"
with Bittaker's name on it.
So they sent over the
Burbank PD that night.
They kicked in his door and his window.
He was in the shower
when they arrested him.
The Sheriff's Department
identified Roy Norris
and Lawrence Bittaker...
raping and murdering five teenage girls.
The evil that these guys caused,
it really captured the fear
of the city of Los Angeles.
Teenagers brutally attacked.
Just a lot more careful about where I go.
I'm afraid to be walking down the street.
I got a call that Bynum and Cray had a case
that they wanted me to review,
and I saw the name
Roy Norris, and I thought,
"Wait, but he got sent to prison,
three years to life.
That can't be the same one."
One of the suspects,
32-year-old Roy Lewis Norris,
has implicated Lawrence Simon Bittaker.
It was kind of like pulling teeth,
but Norris eventually signed an agreement
that he could plead
guilty to all of the murders,
and he would get a
sentence of 45 years to life,
and he would have to lead
us to the bodies of the victims.
Norris, of course, was the
one leading the searches,
because he knew, supposedly,
where the bodies were.
Searches in January didn't find anything.
Went searching on the 8th of February.
Didn't find anything.
And then on the 9th, with the help
of the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team,
we climbed down this
incredibly steep ravine,
about 300 feet down.
That's where the remains of
Jackie and Leah were found.
It was partial skeletal remains,
only, you know, a few months
after they had been killed.
Jackie Gilliam had the ice pick
embedded in the skull.
Bittaker was not that cooperative.
He said he wanted to
talk. He waived his rights.
And he just said, "You ain't got sh--."
Bittaker stripped this entire van clean,
but he had missed one thing...
the Ledford tape in the cassette player.
It was like something that none of us
had ever heard before.
I mean, it was the tape recording
of an actual murder.
The Sheriff's Department
identified Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker
as the main suspects in
five local rape-murders.
The jury of seven women and five men
is expected to get the case on Wednesday.
The Bittaker trial was the first case
in California history
that they allowed cameras in the courtroom,
over the objection of the defense.
Bittaker did not want those
cameras in the courtroom.
His attorneys didn't want
them in the courtroom.
But the judge, Fredericks,
said, "No, this is too important."
Every newspaper, every television station
had a reporter covering it.
Norris, you'll recall, pleaded guilty
to all the charges and agreed
to testify against Bittaker
in order to avoid the death penalty.
Bittaker pled not guilty.
Did I think I was gonna get a conviction?
Well, I hoped I would,
but it was not a foregone conclusion.
The trial is expected to take two months.
Bittaker could get the
death penalty if convicted.
These were all wonderful girls.
I had their pictures on a board
when I was giving my opening statement,
'cause I wanted the jurors to get to know
what these girls were like in life.
It was scary... scary.
I was uncomfortable in the courtroom
looking at Lawrence Bittaker.
And I hated him for what he had done.
Norris said he didn't
want to kill the girl,
but said he was too afraid
of alleged accomplice
Lawrence Bittaker not to.
Norris was responsible for his own actions,
and he's lying about all of it.
Roy's version of the
crimes, a lot of times,
is very, very different than Bittaker's.
The defense attorneys came to me first
because Larry was nice to me
and wanted me to testify on his behalf.
They subpoenaed me.
I begged them to not make me say...
in front of the camera
that he was nice to me.
Tracee Lee Pea-
P-E-N-A.
I remember them asking about the gun
and me talking about the gun.
And he was pissed
because I brought that up.
He was really pissed.
And I thought, "He's gonna
kill me in the courtroom."
Like, you know, that's what's gonna happen.
Oh, I thought about killing
Lawrence Bittaker at the trial.
I would dream that I had a gun,
and I snuck it into the courtroom.
This afternoon, in a surprise move,
Bittaker took the stand in his own defense.
Basically, Bittaker's defense was,
"I didn't do it. It was
the other guy," right?
"It was Norris."
Mr. Norris and another party
took turns raping her.
Mr. Norris killed her
with two hammer blows to the head.
Bittaker's defense
was that he didn't do it,
that Norris was the killer,
and was trying to blame him.
He said that he wasn't even there
when Cindy Schaefer was murdered.
Have you ever seen
that young lady in person?
No, sir.
You ever taken any
photographs of this girl?
No, sir.
He said Andrea Hall
agreed to sex for $200.
If she was bound and
gagged, as Mr. Norris states,
she wouldn't be able to hit me.
He said Jackie Gilliam agreed to $600
to pose in the photographs of her taped up.
She was paid to make certain responses.
She was having difficulty
following those directions.
And that Lynette Ledford was drug-crazed.
I cannot explain the actions
of a intoxicated individual who's on PCP.
He never said, "God, I
wish Norris hadn't don't that."
You know?
"I wish I had known. I
could've stopped him."
None of that.
The main thing I had going for me
was the Lynette Ledford torture tape.
Nobody has ever had a
piece of evidence like that.
The most dramatic moments of the trial
are expected to come on Wednesday,
when a tape recording of the torture
of the fifth murder victim
will be played to the jury.
Stephen warned me.
He says, "You know, this
is gonna be pretty heavy."
They begin to play the tape.
Now, I'm not even gonna
try to explain how bad it was.
But just let your imagination think...
of the worst thing you've ever heard,
because this poor girl is
just begging for her life.
The tape was one of the
worst things I've ever heard
in my entire professional career.
It should never see the light of day.
It is very, very, very upsetting.
And, frankly, it involves the torture
of an innocent young woman.
And, so, at her expense,
it should never, ever be
played for an audience.
I looked over to the jurors,
and they were in shock.
Two of the jurors openly started to cry.
Maybe half a dozen
people sitting in the audience
just got up and left.
The courtroom artist ran out in tears.
I just never heard
anything like that in my life.
I've never heard screams like that.
I don't know. It was bad.
As the tape is being played,
Larry is basically looking
down at a transcript of the tape.
He's reading along
with it. People are crying.
People are leaving the courtroom.
Everything around him
is kind of turning into this chaotic scene,
and these screams are
piercing through the air.
He's dead-focused, with
no emotion on his face.
- I can tell you that
for two years after the trial,
I would have a recurring nightmare
of hearing the girls scream
and running to try and save them
and always getting there too late,
seeing the results of ice picks in the head
and fractured skulls
and nipples ripped off and everything.
And...
you know, I was very depressed.
I won't lie about it.
I didn't have to take antidepressants
after the Manson trial,
but I did after the Bittaker trial.
I'm sorry.
I think when Bittaker took the stand-
I think that 138 IQ of his
worked in the opposite direction.
I think he truly thought
that he could get up there
on the stand and convince
the jurors that it wasn't him.
She's saying, "Don't touch me."
She's not screaming. She's not crying.
She's not sobbing.
I asked him, "Would you please describe
"for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury
what we hear on the
tape of Lynette Ledford?"
And he said, "Oh, it was just pillow talk."
Mr. Norris was interested
in having the sounds
of domination or fear.
I wanted some sounds of...
pillow talk or...
kind of dirty talk.
That this was all a setup,
that it was just pillow talk.
She was playing along and screaming,
and he had paid her to do that.
I just told her I liked
hearing that type of thing,
and...
I hadn't-didn't have a tape
at that time of such a thing,
so I asked her if she
would make one for me.
There was gasps in the courtroom.
And you almost felt
like laughing in his face.
And then when he broke
down and started crying,
it was as if we were watching this farce.
For him to all of a sudden
have crocodile tears
running down his face,
nobody bought it.
Nobody bought it.
He was the murderer. He was the torturer.
He was the bad guy.
It took the jury of seven
women and five men
less than 2 1/2 days of deliberation
to convict Bittaker of 26 counts,
including kidnapping,
rape, torture, and murder.
Going for the death penalty
was only partially my decision.
It had to be okayed
by the District Attorney,
who was against capital punishment,
but this case was so
egregious that he agreed
that we should seek the death penalty.
If the death penalty
isn't proper in this case,
when would it ever be proper?
The jury went in the room
and just looked around and just nodded.
Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker
should be put to death
by administration of lethal gas.
They were unanimous within 60 seconds,
giving him the death penalty.
In 1978, the voters had
overwhelmingly approved
the death penalty.
But you had a very liberal
Supreme Court at that time.
You had a liberal governor.
It was always thought maybe,
with the appeals process,
it wasn't going to happen.
And it ultimately didn't.
Bittaker sat on death row,
playing bridge and chess.
I was planning on going
up there at his execution
and holding up the
photographs of the five girls.
But I never got that chance.
It was a terrible case to live through.
I mean, Paul Bynum,
who was the investigator
who broke the case,
ended up committing suicide,
and he left a suicide note
saying that he felt
that Bittaker and Norris would get out
and Bittaker would come after him
and that if he killed himself
that maybe Bittaker would let
his wife and daughter live.
He called me and said he had cancer.
It was serious, and it was a ton
of different types of cancer
spreading throughout his whole body.
I had pulled out my notes,
and I said, "Let's do, like,
a little round of fact-check."
I was like, "The remains
of Cindy and Andrea
have not been found
to this day.
Correct?" He's like, "Yes."
And then I'm, like, about
to go to my next point,
and he just grabs the paper and the pen,
and he starts drawing a map
of the San Gabriel Mountains
and saying Norris gave
the wrong location for Cindy.
It's about a mile off from
where she actually was.
Then he's like, "Oh, he's
so wrong about Andrea."
So he's drawing this,
and he's, like, telling
me as he's drawing it.
I messaged Andrea Hall's sister,
and I said, "I know where your sister is."
And she called me.
She's like, "We've never given up hope."
And...
it was just-
how hard I fought to get
this information from him...
And just hearing her say, like...
Just hearing her say, you know,
"We've never given up hope,"
it just made it all worth it
to get this information to the families.
- The area was never searched.
Stephen Kay said
they had searched near there
but not that area.
So my hope is to find
my sister and bring her home.
Laura's approach to Larry
was certainly different than my approach.
But it could have been effective
on several different levels.
It sounds like he did give her information
that he certainly had not given to me.
But now it becomes important
to be able to verify
what he did say to her.
One night Bittaker had a series
of heart attacks during the night,
and he had his heart medication
he was popping all through the night.
He was dying.
He was a ball of emotions
and anxious and upset.
And he was really, you know,
starting to process what he had done.
I think that's when it
all started to hit him.
Friday the 13th, 2019,
I had just returned from
California from seeing him.
I got a call that he passed away.
I was sad.
You know, this is someone
I've talked to every single day.
We had a friendship. We did
have an authentic friendship.
It's been a profound, profound experience.
2 1/2 months right after Bittaker,
Roy Norris died of natural causes.
So many people called them soul mates,
and you got to wonder.
They died like an old, married couple,
like they couldn't live without each other.
When I heard Bittaker and Norris had died,
I was shocked but happy...
relieved.
I'm sorry that it took so long.
My mother said, in order
for her to heal herself,
that she forgave
Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris.
Personally, I can't do
that. I cannot forgive them.
It's taken me my whole...
rest of my life to deal with this...
that somebody...
that was kind to me,
that I trusted...
was hurting young girls.
If anybody deserved the death penalty,
it was Lawrence Bittaker.
I'm glad that he was kept alive, though,
because we've learned so much, I believe,
about psychopathy and sadism from him.
It's a challenge to try
to find that humanity.
But I would definitely say
that I did see some human
in him in our time and
in our interviews together.
I do think he was developing feelings,
'cause I don't think it
was just to manipulate me
or to tell me what I wanted to hear.
I don't believe a man
at that late stage of life
is gonna turn over a new leaf.
I believe that he tried to convince Laura
that he had empathy because
he liked to have her visit.
It was companionship.
He was actually proud
of being psychopathic.
He was proud of not being controlled
by the kinds of emotions
that non-psychopathic people have.
Do I think he just shredded his psychopathy
and became a feeling, loving human being?
Based on my experience,
my background, and training,
I do not.
A lot of people might be like,
"He doesn't deserve kindness.
He doesn't deserve empathy
from anybody," you know.
And that's fine for people
to have that perception.
I just know that I'm gonna live my life
with empathy and compassion for everyone,
and I'm gonna have no
regrets at the end of my life.
You have a prepaid call from an inmate
at the California State Prison,
San Quentin, California.
Bittaker had a series of heart attacks.
Teenagers brutally attacked.
Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker...
Raping and murdering five teenage girls.
The evil that these guys caused--
it really captured the fear
of the city of Los Angeles.
Just a lot more careful about where I go.
I'm afraid to be walking down the street.
Lawrence Bittaker and
his partner, Roy Norris,
were known as the Toolbox Killers.
Bittaker was the most evil man
because of that toolbox.
Pliers, vise grips,
ice picks.
I thought Roy Norris was very strange.
I think he hated women.
He creeped me out.
I interviewed Lawrence Bittaker,
the most sadistic serial killer
on San Quentin's death
row, for over five years.
He used to say to me, "If I
just had one good parent,
I wouldn't have become this monster."
The police followed Norris,
and, boy, did they find a lot.
Hundreds of pictures of young girls
were found in their possession.
Everyone one of these photographs
represents a potential victim.
I thought, "He's gonna
kill me in the courtroom."
Oh, I thought about killing
Lawrence Bittaker at the trial.
I would dream that I had a gun.
He was sexually aroused by
their screams and their cries.
Bittaker finds out that she is a virgin.
He wants to audio-record
the rape of a virgin.
They begin to play the tape.
The courtroom was stunned.
I first came
across Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris,
the Toolbox Killers-
it was in a criminology textbook.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
And I read about what
they did with the van...
with the girls,
with the ice pick through the ears,
and the torture for days.
And I just remember, I dropped the book
'cause I was so floored
by the level of sadism.
I always wondered what it
took to get to that level of sadism,
how their progression from their childhood
to committing such violent,
heinous acts transpired.
That was something I
really wanted to explore.
I majored in forensic psychology.
I had this incredible professor.
He said, "If you start
doing your own study,
"this will give you a leg up
when you go for higher education."
I developed this
questionnaire that I sent out to--
I think it was, like, 80
different serial killers.
My only goal was to
create a set of questions
that they can't manipulate so we can catch
these violent patterns
and behaviors early on,
before these other offenders
go on to do a life of crime,
like Lawrence Bittaker.
I didn't even think I was
gonna get a response back.
And I was like, "They're not
gonna help me with a study,"
you know.
I ended up getting a
crazy amount of responses,
and I was shocked.
But when I first reached out to Bittaker,
he wrote me back saying
he didn't want to talk to me,
he didn't want to do the survey.
He's in his late 70s at this point,
and he didn't want to
talk about the crimes.
So many journalists tried
to get him to do interviews
over the years, but he
just denied everybody.
I had already collected so much data
from the other inmates.
Why am I bothering with one
that is so challenging
to deal with?
But he was the most sadistic serial killer
in American history,
the worst of the worst,
and I wanted to try to find out
if he was hiding something
for all these years.
I didn't take no for an answer,
and I just kept writing and writing
for years and years and years.
One day, he finally agreed to talk to me.
This call is being recorded.
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Bittaker was really tricky to warm up to
and build the trust and rapport.
It really took a lot of time.
Early on in our relationship,
we used to try to have just,
like, normal conversations,
and it was like he just couldn't do it.
As an FBI agent, I worked in the FBI's BAU,
commonly known as the
Behavior Analysis Unit,
and in that unit, I was involved
in working a number of very violent crimes,
most specifically serial murder cases.
When I first met Larry,
he was clearly playing
a cat-and-mouse game with me.
Didn't admit to anything.
Said he hadn't done anything wrong.
He didn't give up very much.
Bittaker, he doesn't see
people as individuals.
He sees them as objects
to be used and to toss away.
I was a special trial deputy
handling some of the most
gruesome murder cases
in L.A. County,
including Charles Manson
and his family members.
I always felt that Lawrence Bittaker
was the worst,
even worse than Manson,
because of the torture.
He always said he wanted to be
bigger than Charlie Manson.
My name is Dennis McCarthy.
I was a reporter at the
South Bay "Daily Breeze"
in 1981,
and I covered the murder
trial of Lawrence Bittaker,
the Toolbox Killer.
Larry was such a fascinating study in evil.
Basically, Bittaker's
defense was, "I didn't do it.
It was the other guy."
Right? "It was Norris."
Bittaker and Norris
met and spoke in prison.
Their sharing of violent sexual fantasies
really cemented their relationship.
You had violent Bittaker
and rapist Norris getting together.
Bittaker was the lead.
Norris was the follower.
Lawrence Bittaker was a near-genius.
He has a 138 IQ.
When you're working with a psychopath,
if you go in and you're pretending
to be something you're not, they can tell.
These guys are smart.
And if you're gonna play games with them,
they're gonna play games with you.
So I go in nonjudgmental.
I build a real, actual,
authentic relationship with them,
and I definitely open up about myself
and my own personal life.
Anytime you're working with offenders
who have antisocial personality,
there's always gonna be a risk.
But once Lawrence Bittaker
and I finally felt that trust
and that rapport, he
started to reveal stuff
that he had never told
anybody else about this case.
I guess it was a Sunday.
Bittaker and Norris had been
driving all day for 15 hours
just smoking weed
and photographing unsuspecting girls,
when they spotted Cindy Schaefer.
She was dropped off at a church meeting
in Redondo Beach,
and she had left early,
and she was walking back
to her grandparents' place,
where she was staying,
and they start to trail her.
The police had no leads.
They had a big, bloody fight.
She is punching him
and just fighting for her life.
Cindy Schaefer was a
very bright young woman.
She was 16 years old.
Cindy was, from all accounts
of everybody who knew her,
just the sweetest and nicest girl
you could have ever imagined.
She tutored in Spanish, algebra,
and geometry in high school
and just had so many friends.
She wanted to go to college.
She wanted to study language
and teach foreign language,
just like her mother.
When Bittaker would talk
about how the girl more
or less went along with it
once she was inside the van,
as effort on his part to
minimize his involvement,
to minimize how serious these crimes were,
he's trying to manage the impression
that you have of him.
Bittaker, when he was a teenager,
had been placed in a camp
in the San Gabriel Mountains,
and he thought that that
would be a good place
for them to take their victims,
because nobody would hear them scream.
Cindy asked if they were gonna kill her.
She said, "I just want you to let me pray
if you're gonna kill me."
Bittaker and Norris laughed at her,
and Bittaker turned to her, and he said,
"God isn't here, only devils."
Norris saw that Cindy was crying,
and he just couldn't do
it anymore, so he let go,
and he went over to the
side of the road and threw up.
Bittaker went to the back of his van
and sectioned a wire coat hanger,
and told Norris to wrap it
around her neck and choke her.
And Norris tried to do that manually,
but he couldn't get it tight enough.
So Bittaker got a pair of vise grips
from the back of the van
and tightened it enough
so that it finally killed her.
There were no leads
to explain Cindy's disappearance.
They even found a girl in Tijuana
that they thought might be her,
so they went all the way down
to Tijuana and saw the girl,
and, of course, it wasn't Cindy.
Nobody had really any idea.
They, of course, didn't realize
that she was the first victim
of the infamous Toolbox Killers.
We know that Larry Bittaker
was a criminal sexual sadist.
He's an individual who is sexually aroused
by the infliction of
physical or emotional pain
on his non-consenting partners.
He wants the victim to scream, to cry.
He wants to see the fear in their eyes.
We know this behavior would have started
at a very, very early age.
Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker
was born to a teen mother in 1940.
Bittaker's father was violent,
and his mother was a drinker.
She would go and leave him
and his little brother home alone
while she went out and partied.
Soon, the family convinced
her to give up the two boys.
They were adopted by
different aunts and uncles
within the family.
At some point, something happened to him
when he was a little boy.
Sexually sadistic behaviors are learned
when their sexual identity is being formed.
So, whether Larry had
been himself the victim
of some kind of sexual abuse,
that more than likely
shaped his development
as a sexual sadist.
Bittaker was raised by an aunt and uncle.
They provided what
would have been a good life
for a normal person,
but Bittaker was not a normal person.
Even in his 70s,
he would talk about the
mother who gave him up.
That was a big part of
where his rage came from.
He actually had a plan
to go find her and kill her.
He always felt like, if she had kept him,
he would have never become a monster.
He had amazing grades. He was very smart.
He was tested early with a 138 IQ.
But he was unmotivated and unchallenged.
He loved to play with fire,
and he did burn down a couple sheds.
He was doing it to try to get
his adoptive parents', you know, attention.
And she took a cigarette
and just put it all over his body,
in a way that seemed like torture.
Larry began to manifest
his interest in torturing things
by the time he was adolescent.
One time he told me that he was upset.
They had rabbits, and he
went outside with a pair of pliers,
and he removed the teeth of
one of the rabbits with the pliers.
As a teenager, he would
wander around the streets
at night.
But then it started to escalate,
when he would move furniture around
so people knew that someone
had been in their house,
just so people feel
unsafe in their own homes.
So you're seeing the early signs of sadism.
A serial sexual
killer-they're born predators.
They hunt human beings.
And so his practice-
following people, watching people,
walking around his
neighborhood late at night-
is a result of his psychopathy,
which has a genetic link to it.
When sexuality and
violence becomes intertwined,
now you have these compulsion
and these urges to go out
and kidnap people and torture them,
that's a very, very deadly combination.
Lawrence Bittaker was very society awkward.
He reports that he didn't
have any friends growing up,
but he was able to get a
girlfriend in high school.
Mary Anne was a Catholic school girl-
Blonde hair, big blue eyes.
If you look at the victims,
they look very similar.
She also wore a cross,
and he actually made some of the victims
actually put on a cross during his crimes.
Bittaker told me that he had recorded
a make-out session with this girlfriend.
I was really blown away,
'cause I think this is where
the paraphilic urges started.
What's chilling is she does remember
him taking her up to San Gabriel Mountains,
and they would go and hang out and hike.
I've always wondered if that's why he took
the victims there-is
because of this first girlfriend,
his first rejection.
Bittaker had what's known
as a polymorphous perverse personality.
That means that he was able
to commit any crime on the books
just for his own pleasure.
His psychopathy was not
something that he worried about
or he fretted about or
he was concerned about.
When Lawrence Bittaker was in juvie,
they did a ton of evaluations,
and they're seeing that he is violent
with anger issues and deeply disturbed.
There were warning
signs from the beginning.
In 1974, Bittaker was
living in the Hollywood area.
He went into a Ralph's market,
and he stole a couple of steaks.
It was a miracle this guy survived.
By him stabbing this clerk,
it really changed the lives of everybody-
this fateful moment that sent him
to California Men's Colony, CMC East.
This is where Lawrence Bittaker
meets Roy Norris.
Roy Norris was a rapist.
He was a serial rapist.
Who was worse?
I don't think I could even say,
'cause when they partnered
up, they were both horrible.
I think he hated women.
He was the one who
typically grabbed the grabs
and subdued them.
He was a much bigger guy.
He was over 200 pounds.
He was a big oaf.
His IQ-I have no idea what it was,
but it couldn't be
anywhere near Bittaker's IQ.
He wasn't a liar and
an actor like Larry was.
Like, Larry pulled it off.
Norris-you felt uncomfortable.
So he was definitely the muscle of the two,
and Bittaker was the brains.
I prosecuted Roy Norris
for rape in 1975.
He was sentenced from three years to life
in the California Men's Colony,
East Facility, in San Luis Obispo,
where he met Lawrence
Bittaker, who was already there.
How they met, actually,
is they would make jewelry together.
And they did tell an inmate
named Richard Shoopman,
who was in there for
killing a young college girl.
Shoopman would write up their fantasies
and sell them to other prisoners.
They talked about getting
a cabin in the woods.
They talked about getting a trailer.
They even talked about a cave.
And they would fantasize
about what they were
gonna do when they got out.
It was Roy who also told
me that part of their fantasies,
as they plotted out
what they were gonna do,
was that they were going to kidnap a girl
for every teen year.
Once they got out, they
would kidnap 13-year-old,
14-year-old, 15-year-old...
It was the perfect storm
when they hooked up.
Back in the '70s,
rape wasn't treated as
seriously as it is nowadays.
Another factor-both of them
have antisocial personality,
so they are conning
the, you know, psychologist constantly
and telling him, you know, they're fine,
they're rehabilitated, they
can go back out into society.
So, Bittaker got out of jail first,
and he went to Los Angeles.
And then he got a job as a
skilled machinist in Burbank.
Roy Norris gets out a couple
months right after Bittaker.
He actually wanted Norris to quit his job
to build a compound,
and he was gonna
financially take care of him.
There was a very, like,
teacher-student vibe to them.
And I noticed, even with
my relationship with Bittaker,
it was a very student-teacher.
It was like, he's Hannibal, I'm Clarice.
He loved, like, that role and that dynamic,
and loved that he was teaching me
about, you know, the psychopathy.
And I think that was the same
dynamic with him and Norris.
They talked about Bittaker wanting a van
and specifically a van with a sliding door,
'cause that way they could
get victims in the van quicker.
Bittaker buys, you know,
the infamous silver van,
which they named Murder Mack.
They start personalizing this van.
They had police scanners.
He put a fold-down bed in the back.
They put flooring down.
They put a shag green carpet down.
They put the makeshift
bed with the toolbox-
the infamous toolbox-underneath the bed
to use for their torture.
They also had the walkie-talkies,
which they used to
communicate back and forth.
And then they started going to The Strand
in the South Bay area,
taking photographs of young teenage girls
in their skimpy bikinis and roller skating.
They did a trip up to
San Gabriel Mountains.
Bittaker had wanted to show Norris
all these, like, remote fire roads
that they could use.
He thought that that would be a good place
for them to take their victims,
because nobody would hear them scream,
and they could dump the bodies
down the very steep ravines.
There's a picture of Bittaker bending down,
breaking off the lock onto this fire road
so they would have
complete access to this road.
Bittaker took a photograph of Norris...
on the fire road, pointing
to the steep ravine.
Now, these look like innocent pictures,
but when they were sent to Shoopman,
they were a message to Shoopman
that, "We are actually
going through with this plan.
We're doing it. We're
bringing victims here."
They have this tricked-out murder van,
and then they have the
mountains and the woods.
I mean, it's very clear
everything was planned.
And that was Bittaker.
He was a planner. He was a thinker.
He thought every scenario through.
Beach towns down in the South Bay
were considered very safe.
You know, they were a
place where airline pilots
and stews hung out,
because it was close to LAX
and only a couple of feet
from some of the most beautiful beach area
in all of California.
A lot of young girls, a
lot of muscle builders.
It was a happening place, man.
Everybody was going down to The Strand,
because that's where the action was.
Unfortunately, there was so much action,
that's where Bittaker and Norris
went to find their victims.
Hitchhiking was part of the culture.
I myself had tried it a couple times.
My girlfriends wanted to always, you know,
in the summer, hitchhike to the park
that wasn't very far away.
But I didn't know
my sister was hitchhiking
until right before she was abducted.
Andrea Hall was an
18-year-old girl from Ohio.
She was spotted
by Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris
only two weeks after they had killed Cindy.
Andrea had been at the beach
with her sister and her kids.
She had a boyfriend
who lived out in Torrance.
She wasn't too far from
the boyfriend's place.
So, to get there, she hitchhiked.
She was hitchhiking down
Pacific Coast Highway.
She got in the car with
somebody else first,
and followed that car,
thinking that that person
may not want to take her
as far as she wanted to go.
They followed this car for miles
until he had let her out.
And then she started hitchhiking again,
'cause she wasn't at the
location she needed to be.
And that's when Norris
went and hid under the bed,
the makeshift bed, and Bittaker came up,
rolled down the window
and said, "Hey, want a ride?"
She made it easy for
these two perpetrators.
All they had to do was
pick her up, and they did.
My sister looked in. She got in.
Lawrence told her that there was a cooler
in the back with cold drinks.
So she got up and went back there.
And Roy Norris came up
and started accosting her.
She starts fighting, and
she fought like a bull.
And, I mean, she is punching him
and just fighting for her life.
He saw that she was overpowering Norris,
so he slammed on the brakes,
and they both tumbled backwards.
They had a big bloody fight,
and Norris finally got control of her.
They went to the mountain area again,
to a place we now know it's called
the Upper Monroe Truck Trail.
They're fire roads.
Bittaker had a sleeping
bag, a blanket, walkie-talkie,
so he could stay in contact with Norris,
and a camera.
It was like a Polaroid camera.
It would shoot the picture out,
so you didn't have to take
it in to a nosy film developer
who would see pictures
of girls in great distress.
Bittaker had told me in some
of my interviews with him,
he had used, you know, the pliers on her.
When he took her up on that hill,
he had her bound, and he took a camera.
He took one...
just gut-wrenching photograph of her.
He had said, "I'm going to kill you,"
and snapped a picture of her face-
the look on her face when he said that.
That is true sadism.
She was his first attempt
with an ice pick in the ear,
and that idea came from
a movie we saw in prison.
When you puncture an eardrum,
it's one of the most
severe, severe types of pain.
You would almost, like, go deaf instantly
and just hear blood through your brain.
But it wouldn't kill you instantly.
It would be a very slow, painful death.
But then he manually strangled her
until she was dead.
Andrea Hall's body was never found.
A small piece of myself died every day
for 13 1/2 years.
It was tough.
When Andrea went missing,
the police had no leads.
Her mother in Ohio was beside herself
because she had talked to
Andrea at least once a week.
So, when I did start digging into the case
and I saw that Cindy and
Andrea have never been found
in all these years,
something told me to keep working.
You know, could this be something
that I could get from him, some information
to try to get the
locations of the two girls?
When I talked to Andrea's
sister for the first time-
Julie-she just said to me-
She was bawling, and I was bawling,
and she's like, "We've
never given up hope."
And just hearing her say,
you know, "We've never given up hope"...
yeah, it was a really
emotional conversation...
to have.
You know, my mother
said to my sister Pamela,
whose son drowned in the ocean one day-
she said, "At least you
had his body, Pammy,"
because we never had a body.
We never found her.
We've still been looking for her.
It's almost 43 years.
When Bittaker was about 78,
he starts telling me, you know,
he's starting to have
emotions he never had before.
He'll watch a commercial and start crying.
He once said to me-
he goes, "Do you
understand what it feels like
"to actually put an ice
pick through someone's ear
and not feel anything?"
Before, he felt like a void,
and now he's feeling, like,
a flood of emotion for the first time ever.
He calls it a dam breaking.
He's having a new
experience, a new emotion,
and what he called and wrote about-
he described as becoming fully human.
I find it very hard to believe that any one
of those psychological
professionals at San Quentin
would have given him that diagnosis,
that, "Once you were, but now you're not."
I talked with him about
his lack of empathy,
and I recall one time he
said he would find himself
crying during soap operas.
And I remember it
was-I couldn't control it.
I started laughing and saying,
"You have got to be
kidding me. It's absurd.
You know it's absurd,
and I know it's absurd."
And he starting laughing, too.
When he engages in behavior with people
where he's coming across
as caring and concerned
or seems to show a soft side of him,
it's the FBI training in me that says,
"Be very careful that
this is not just another way
to try to manipulate the situation."
My name's Tracee Whitney, and in 1979,
I lived at the Scott's Motel
next to Lawrence Bittaker.
I saw him daily when I was at the hotel.
The Scott's Motel was a very dingy,
cheap hotel.
Burbank Police knew
that people that lived there
were basically homeless.
I was 18.
A lot of younger people my age would party
in each other's rooms.
Larry would give us money.
He would give us weed.
He would give us beer.
I think Larry wanted to be liked.
It was as if Larry loved
having a gang of girls
around him, you know?
Like, it made him somebody.
Larry chose to live in a rundown place
over a much more expensive
place that he could afford
because it did give him
access to young girls.
It gave him access to people
that he could manipulate
and dominate and impress.
I found out I was pregnant.
I attempted to make a
phone call to my family
to beg them to allow me to come home
and live there while I figured
out what I was gonna do,
and they refused to
do it, and they hung up.
When I turned around,
Larry was standing behind me
and had heard the conversation,
and I was extremely upset.
And he said, "If you need something--
"if you need maternity
clothes or a place to sleep,
I'll pay for it."
Larry had a soft spot
for young pregnant girls,
because he was always the predator.
He was very nice to me, you know,
and I get pretty upset when I say that...
knowing what I know.
But it's the truth. He was very kind to me.
You have to look at it through the lens
of this was a very, very, very
dangerous sexual predator
who preyed upon young teenage girls,
who dominated them, took advantage of them.
And so, while he may
be extending a kindness,
there would have
been ulterior motives.
What was he getting back in return?
I think it's very possible that
Larry was grooming them.
He would drive me to the beach.
He would drive me any place I wanted to go.
So, we spent a lot of time in his...
A lot of time alone in his van.
I had no clue, no idea the
things that he was doing.
The last time I was with Larry,
I was in the van with him alone,
and we got in an argument about something,
and I don't remember what it was.
He pulled a gun out, and he said to me...
"The only reason you're
alive is 'cause you're pregnant."
And...
I remember jumping out of that van so fast.
I don't even know how-
I don't know how he didn't shoot me,
knowing what I know
that he did to other girls.
I don't-I'm really lucky to be alive.
And part of me feels guilty
that I'm alive and those girts aren't.
In 2018, I had gotten pregnant.
One week later,
the place I was working
went into bankruptcy,
and now I was homeless,
jobless, and pregnant and alone.
It was a really, really
dark time in my life.
But Bittaker was the one calling me,
saying, "How did the doctor's go?"
For the first time ever,
he actually agreed to
be interviewed in person,
so I started making plans to go meet him.
My doctor almost had a heart attack
when I told her I was
gonna go to San Quentin
to interview serial killers,
7 1/2 months pregnant.
She literally just drops
the pen, and she goes,
"I don't even know how
to put this in my notes."
The guys on death row
actually really networked
and helped me make it possible
to actually come out there.
They really came to my rescue, in a sense.
They found me a place to stay.
One of the wives of the death row inmates
actually, like, took me in.
The goal with any interview
is to get unknown information.
So, of course, with having two girls
that have never been found,
you want to find their
location for their families.
Detectives at Hermosa Beach
wanted to have a rolling
surveillance of Norris.
She was paid to make certain responses.
She was having difficulty
following those directions.
There was gasps in the courtroom.
He was dying.
He was a ball of emotions
and anxious and upset.
When I first interviewed
Lawrence Bittaker in person
at San Quentin's death row,
I was 7 1/2 months pregnant.
I was, like, wobbling on death row.
It was wild-even the correctional officers
are looking at me, like,
"What are you doing?"
When you're walking into
death row at San Quentin,
you're walking across the yard...
people out there milling around.
Prisons are not safe environments
for the other inmates,
for the correctional officers,
and once you're inside,
you don't have any control
over what happens to you.
You're signing waivers
that say if there's a riot,
no one's gonna come
for you or fight for you.
It's not like a phone call
like you see in the movies.
It's a dog kennel-style cage,
and they padlock you in.
Two chairs and a little table,
and you're sitting there just face-to-face.
The correction officers
brought Lawrence Bittaker down.
And I remember, when he first saw me
and, like, how big I was,
like, his eyes bugged out of his head.
He was so taken back.
He was kind of, like,
socially awkward, I remember.
We sat in the cage,
and he wouldn't even look at me in the eye
for a good 2 1/2 hours.
He was that shy when we first met.
But something inside of me kept saying,
"Keep going back to this guy."
It was almost like an intuition.
There was something
more to be gained with him.
A couple months later,
I went to the hospital.
Bittaker was even on the phone
with me when I was in labor.
Bittaker had this love for my son.
I think he almost sees himself
as, like, a surrogate father
for Romeo or grandfather.
It was Romeo's first birthday party.
I had sent him a picture.
He would bring that picture
of him with all the balloons
and show it off to everybody on the row.
I think he looked at Romeo and I
as, like, his only family.
He even put me down
as his next of kin in the will.
So, yeah, I would say
I definitely did the deepest
dive into Lawrence Bittaker.
My experience with psychopaths
is that they don't bond with other people.
The risks of thinking
you're getting really close
to someone who's like that
and giving up a lot of personal information
to someone that's incarcerated
could be problematic.
You can't be 100% sure whatsoever
that that information won't compromise you.
It is a tightrope you're walking.
But, you know, the more and more
you're building that
trust and that relationship,
the more and more you
can push that envelope.
And you kind of see that develop
with my interviews with Bittaker.
He had made me say a
couple promises to him,
and one of the promises I made to him
was I would always be a good mother.
He used to say to me, "If I
just had one good parent-
if I had one good parent,
I wouldn't have become this monster."
The third and fourth
victims of the Toolbox Killers
were Leah Lamp and Jackie Gilliam.
In 1979, I was 14 years old.
I met Jackie when she moved
into the apartment complex
next door to ours,
and we became fast friends.
Jackie was beautiful. She was amazing.
This smile is so genuine.
Jackie stayed at my house a lot,
and we used to spend a lot of time
taking the bus to the Santa Monica Beach,
pretty much every day in the summer.
One day she told me that she was gonna go
to Redondo Beach to
stay with her stepsister,
and I never heard from her again.
Leah Lamp was 13.
She was very bright.
Had just finished junior high school,
and she was ready to
start high school in the fall.
Her mother had a new wardrobe for her,
and she was really looking forward to it.
Jackie met Leah Lamp,
and they had become friends.
One day, Leah and Jackie
decided to go to the beach.
Bittaker and Norris saw them
and came up and asked
them if they needed a ride.
When they got into the van,
Norris and Bittaker offered them a joint,
and they were sitting
in the back of the van
with Norris, smoking this joint.
That is when Norris took a homemade sap.
It was full of BBs, really heavy.
And he hit Leah in the head
with it and knocked her out.
While Leah was down,
he tried to grab Jackie.
At some point, Leah regained consciousness
and tried to get out of the van.
It was on front of tennis courts,
so people were playing tennis
and actually stopped, looked over.
Leah Lamp jumped out of the van, screaming.
Bittaker stopped the van, came around,
and slugged Leah in the
face as hard as he could,
knocking her back.
He turned to everybody and said,
"She's having a bad LSD trip."
Leah Lamp was 13 years old,
and Jackie Gilliam was 15 years old.
When they got into the van,
Norris took a homemade sap,
hit Leah Lamp over the
back of the head with it.
While Leah was down,
he then tried to grab Jackie.
At some point, Leah regained consciousness
and tried to get out of the van.
Leah Lamp actually jumped
out of the van, screaming.
It was in front of tennis courts.
So, people were playing tennis
and actually stopped, looked over.
Bittaker stopped the van, came around,
and slugged Leah in the
face as hard as he could,
knocking her back.
He turned to everybody and said,
"She's having a bad LSD
trip. I'm just taking her home."
They took the girls up
to San Gabriel Mountain.
Bittaker told Jackie that
he was gonna rape her
and she better pretend
that she was enjoying it.
Bittaker finds out that she is a virgin,
and he wants to audio-record
the rape of a virgin.
So, he took the audio recorder,
and when he was raping
Jackie, she was screaming.
That is not what he
admitted later in person.
You know, these girls were
scared out of their mind.
Sadists are getting off on that fear.
That's what they love.
That's what they want to see.
When Bittaker would talk
about the girls went willingly with him,
he's trying to minimize any responsibility
he has for these murders.
There was a ton of photographs taken
of Jackie Gilliam-sexual
acts with Bittaker.
What's really haunting about the pictures
with Jackie Gilliam is,
you know, it's very clear
she has a black eye in the pictures.
Her ankles are bound. Her wrists are bound.
She's naked in the back of a van.
And she has a smile on her face.
Obviously, Bittaker forced her to smile
during these pictures that he took of her.
He showed some of these
photographs to other people,
so he had no sense of what's appropriate
and what's not appropriate.
So he used it to masturbate,
and then he used it thinking
he was impressing people.
Bittaker decides, "Well, we don't have
"to go to work tomorrow,
so let's sleep with the girls overnight."
They slept in the van, and
they took shifts sleeping
and watching the girls.
Bittaker was in the
van. Norris stood guard.
Bittaker and Roy Norris
kept them the longest.
It was somewhere around 48 hours.
Eventually Bittaker decided
that he had had enough, and so...
he cradled Jackie's head in one hand,
took the ice pick with the other hand,
and drove it into her ear canal,
into the brain.
Went to take it out,
but the handle came off.
When Jackie's skull was found,
the ice pick was embedded into the skull.
And then they got the girls' bodies
much the way they did with Cindy,
and they tossed them as far as they could
down this really steep ravine.
Jackie Gilliam and Leah
Lamp were the only two victims
that were found up on San Gabriel Mountain.
It was just partial remains of
their bones were recovered.
They told me she was tortured.
They told me there was
an ice pick stuck in her ear.
It wasn't a pretty picture,
the things they said.
It's just devastating.
I remember one day,
Leah Lamp's mother was in my office.
Her name was Myrna Carlisle.
And I said, "Myrna, you don't look so good.
Have you been sleeping alright?"
She said, "I don't sleep.
I have two eight-hour jobs,
one in the daytime and one at night,
because I can't go to
sleep, because if I sleep,
I have nightmares about how
my daughter was murdered."
And, oh, my gosh.
I don't think at that age I understood
really what was going on
until the detectives
started coming to my house.
It was horrible hearing things like that
about one of my best friends.
Jackie didn't deserve that.
Both Bittaker and Norris
knew that the police had nothing on them
and that they were not being looked for.
They started to feel invincible,
and they started getting bolder and bolder.
October 31, 1979-
Bittaker and Norris were
out looking for victims.
It was kind of late at night.
They were away from The Strand.
They were out in the Valley,
which was a deviation
from their normal pattern.
Shirley Lynette Ledford-
just a young girl
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She was a 16-year-old
girl who lived in Burbank.
She had a boyfriend. Had a lot of friends.
She was a wonderful person.
She just thought only the best of people.
Lynette had been at a Halloween party.
All the friends I've talked to
said they had a great time at the party.
She was happy.
She was hitchhiking home.
Bittaker and Norris spotted her.
We picked her up north of Burbank,
and she jumped right in.
I mean, she wanted a ride somewhere.
Bittaker grabbed her
and threw her in the back.
He and I both struggled with her.
You know, he pulled out a knife.
She grabbed the knife blade
and cut her finger pretty seriously.
If you look at Lynette Ledford...
it's showing this progression of sadism
and how much worse they are getting
with each and every murder.
Shirley Lynette Ledford-
just a young girl in the wrong
place and the wrong time.
Bittaker grabbed Lynette
and threw her into the back of the van.
Bittaker had a knife.
She grabbed the knife blade
and cut her finger pretty seriously.
They were able to get her
bound in the back of the van.
They didn't bring her to the mountains.
They brought her to,
like, a gravel dirt path,
somewhere isolated but still in Burbank.
That's where they proceeded
to torture and rape her.
During the time of these rape and torture,
Bittaker and Norris are
making her play along
that she likes it.
Bittaker wasn't after loving porn,
and I'm not even sure
what that phrase means.
This tape was gonna be used
for his own sexual gratification
after the attack had ended.
Bittaker would want to listen to it again
as he thought about what
he had done to his victims.
She was beaten around the chest,
around the face.
Bittaker raped her and tortured her
with pliers and screwdriver.
He and Norris then traded spots.
Norris, to get her to scream,
hit her on the elbow with a sledgehammer.
They wanted to capture the girl's scream,
and the girls' screams
is what got them off.
So, you know, if she wasn't screaming
as loud enough as they wanted,
the torture kept getting worse and worse.
When Larry talks about
it being spontaneous,
it's an effort to take away
the criminality from it.
And yet, they have a van that
they purposely soundproofed.
They engaged in predatory behavior.
Roy Norris took a coat hanger
and wrapped it around her
neck and used pliers to twist it.
When they found her body
and took this metal coat
hanger off of her neck,
it was the size of a silver dollar.
That's how much he had
twisted it around her neck.
It was, like, getting late,
real late in the early morning.
I had to be back to work at 7:30.
I had a long way to drive.
We finally just decided
that we'd just dump her off,
you know, probably on somebody's lawn,
more than anything else,
to see what reaction we
would get in the papers,
'cause he wanted to know
how society would react to it,
I guess.
The next day, the woman's
property who it was on,
she actually thought it was a
mannequin from Halloween.
Lynette was discarded there for the purpose
of messing with the cops and the press.
They wanted to get a
reaction from everybody.
There was a lot more girls
they were already stalking
and planning to attack at this point.
One was an airline stewardess,
and one was a 13-year-old
girl in a residential neighborhood.
I believe that Roy and
Larry would have continued
to kidnap, assault, and torture young girls
until they got caught.
They would not have stopped.
When Roy was in jail,
he became friends with a
guy named Joe Jackson.
One day, Roy tells Jackson
that he has been kidnapping,
raping, and murdering girls
all over the South Bay
with Lawrence Bittaker.
Told me that he killed them
because this way he could sleep at night
and not have to worry
about being identified.
It disturbed, you know,
Jackson so much, so deeply
that even a serial rapist
himself went to the cops.
Detectives at Hermosa Beach,
Paul Bynum and his partner, Tom Cray,
got really interested in these guys.
Bynum started thinking more about it
and said, "You know,
this guy isn't smart enough
to cook up these facts."
And they wanted to
have a rolling surveillance
of Norris.
They followed Norris.
Norris stopped at a drugstore,
and he left a shopping
bag in the front seat, open.
Bynum looked in
and saw that the shopping
bag was full of marijuana.
So the police came up
and stuck a gun in his ear,
said, "I'm putting you under
arrest for parole violation,"
and that meant that they
could search Norris' residence.
And, boy, did they find
a lot in Norris' residence.
They found about 500
photographs of young women
taken in supermarket parking lots,
women's gyms, girls walking
home from high school.
Every one of these photographs
represents a potential victim.
They also found the photograph
of the girl who was nude from the waist up,
with her hands folded behind her head,
who we now know is Jackie Gilliam.
While they were there,
Bittaker called and said,
"Well, where's Norris?"
And somebody said,
"Oh, well, he's up on the
roof fixing his antenna."
Well, Bittaker thought that
there was something fishy,
so he hurriedly cleaned out his van.
The photographs, the tapes-
he does an entire sweep of this van.
He got rid of everything.
When they were doing a
search at Norris' duplex,
they found a little card
that said "the Scott's Motel,"
with Bittaker's name on it.
So they sent over the
Burbank PD that night.
They kicked in his door and his window.
He was in the shower
when they arrested him.
The Sheriff's Department
identified Roy Norris
and Lawrence Bittaker...
raping and murdering five teenage girls.
The evil that these guys caused,
it really captured the fear
of the city of Los Angeles.
Teenagers brutally attacked.
Just a lot more careful about where I go.
I'm afraid to be walking down the street.
I got a call that Bynum and Cray had a case
that they wanted me to review,
and I saw the name
Roy Norris, and I thought,
"Wait, but he got sent to prison,
three years to life.
That can't be the same one."
One of the suspects,
32-year-old Roy Lewis Norris,
has implicated Lawrence Simon Bittaker.
It was kind of like pulling teeth,
but Norris eventually signed an agreement
that he could plead
guilty to all of the murders,
and he would get a
sentence of 45 years to life,
and he would have to lead
us to the bodies of the victims.
Norris, of course, was the
one leading the searches,
because he knew, supposedly,
where the bodies were.
Searches in January didn't find anything.
Went searching on the 8th of February.
Didn't find anything.
And then on the 9th, with the help
of the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue Team,
we climbed down this
incredibly steep ravine,
about 300 feet down.
That's where the remains of
Jackie and Leah were found.
It was partial skeletal remains,
only, you know, a few months
after they had been killed.
Jackie Gilliam had the ice pick
embedded in the skull.
Bittaker was not that cooperative.
He said he wanted to
talk. He waived his rights.
And he just said, "You ain't got sh--."
Bittaker stripped this entire van clean,
but he had missed one thing...
the Ledford tape in the cassette player.
It was like something that none of us
had ever heard before.
I mean, it was the tape recording
of an actual murder.
The Sheriff's Department
identified Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker
as the main suspects in
five local rape-murders.
The jury of seven women and five men
is expected to get the case on Wednesday.
The Bittaker trial was the first case
in California history
that they allowed cameras in the courtroom,
over the objection of the defense.
Bittaker did not want those
cameras in the courtroom.
His attorneys didn't want
them in the courtroom.
But the judge, Fredericks,
said, "No, this is too important."
Every newspaper, every television station
had a reporter covering it.
Norris, you'll recall, pleaded guilty
to all the charges and agreed
to testify against Bittaker
in order to avoid the death penalty.
Bittaker pled not guilty.
Did I think I was gonna get a conviction?
Well, I hoped I would,
but it was not a foregone conclusion.
The trial is expected to take two months.
Bittaker could get the
death penalty if convicted.
These were all wonderful girls.
I had their pictures on a board
when I was giving my opening statement,
'cause I wanted the jurors to get to know
what these girls were like in life.
It was scary... scary.
I was uncomfortable in the courtroom
looking at Lawrence Bittaker.
And I hated him for what he had done.
Norris said he didn't
want to kill the girl,
but said he was too afraid
of alleged accomplice
Lawrence Bittaker not to.
Norris was responsible for his own actions,
and he's lying about all of it.
Roy's version of the
crimes, a lot of times,
is very, very different than Bittaker's.
The defense attorneys came to me first
because Larry was nice to me
and wanted me to testify on his behalf.
They subpoenaed me.
I begged them to not make me say...
in front of the camera
that he was nice to me.
Tracee Lee Pea-
P-E-N-A.
I remember them asking about the gun
and me talking about the gun.
And he was pissed
because I brought that up.
He was really pissed.
And I thought, "He's gonna
kill me in the courtroom."
Like, you know, that's what's gonna happen.
Oh, I thought about killing
Lawrence Bittaker at the trial.
I would dream that I had a gun,
and I snuck it into the courtroom.
This afternoon, in a surprise move,
Bittaker took the stand in his own defense.
Basically, Bittaker's defense was,
"I didn't do it. It was
the other guy," right?
"It was Norris."
Mr. Norris and another party
took turns raping her.
Mr. Norris killed her
with two hammer blows to the head.
Bittaker's defense
was that he didn't do it,
that Norris was the killer,
and was trying to blame him.
He said that he wasn't even there
when Cindy Schaefer was murdered.
Have you ever seen
that young lady in person?
No, sir.
You ever taken any
photographs of this girl?
No, sir.
He said Andrea Hall
agreed to sex for $200.
If she was bound and
gagged, as Mr. Norris states,
she wouldn't be able to hit me.
He said Jackie Gilliam agreed to $600
to pose in the photographs of her taped up.
She was paid to make certain responses.
She was having difficulty
following those directions.
And that Lynette Ledford was drug-crazed.
I cannot explain the actions
of a intoxicated individual who's on PCP.
He never said, "God, I
wish Norris hadn't don't that."
You know?
"I wish I had known. I
could've stopped him."
None of that.
The main thing I had going for me
was the Lynette Ledford torture tape.
Nobody has ever had a
piece of evidence like that.
The most dramatic moments of the trial
are expected to come on Wednesday,
when a tape recording of the torture
of the fifth murder victim
will be played to the jury.
Stephen warned me.
He says, "You know, this
is gonna be pretty heavy."
They begin to play the tape.
Now, I'm not even gonna
try to explain how bad it was.
But just let your imagination think...
of the worst thing you've ever heard,
because this poor girl is
just begging for her life.
The tape was one of the
worst things I've ever heard
in my entire professional career.
It should never see the light of day.
It is very, very, very upsetting.
And, frankly, it involves the torture
of an innocent young woman.
And, so, at her expense,
it should never, ever be
played for an audience.
I looked over to the jurors,
and they were in shock.
Two of the jurors openly started to cry.
Maybe half a dozen
people sitting in the audience
just got up and left.
The courtroom artist ran out in tears.
I just never heard
anything like that in my life.
I've never heard screams like that.
I don't know. It was bad.
As the tape is being played,
Larry is basically looking
down at a transcript of the tape.
He's reading along
with it. People are crying.
People are leaving the courtroom.
Everything around him
is kind of turning into this chaotic scene,
and these screams are
piercing through the air.
He's dead-focused, with
no emotion on his face.
- I can tell you that
for two years after the trial,
I would have a recurring nightmare
of hearing the girls scream
and running to try and save them
and always getting there too late,
seeing the results of ice picks in the head
and fractured skulls
and nipples ripped off and everything.
And...
you know, I was very depressed.
I won't lie about it.
I didn't have to take antidepressants
after the Manson trial,
but I did after the Bittaker trial.
I'm sorry.
I think when Bittaker took the stand-
I think that 138 IQ of his
worked in the opposite direction.
I think he truly thought
that he could get up there
on the stand and convince
the jurors that it wasn't him.
She's saying, "Don't touch me."
She's not screaming. She's not crying.
She's not sobbing.
I asked him, "Would you please describe
"for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury
what we hear on the
tape of Lynette Ledford?"
And he said, "Oh, it was just pillow talk."
Mr. Norris was interested
in having the sounds
of domination or fear.
I wanted some sounds of...
pillow talk or...
kind of dirty talk.
That this was all a setup,
that it was just pillow talk.
She was playing along and screaming,
and he had paid her to do that.
I just told her I liked
hearing that type of thing,
and...
I hadn't-didn't have a tape
at that time of such a thing,
so I asked her if she
would make one for me.
There was gasps in the courtroom.
And you almost felt
like laughing in his face.
And then when he broke
down and started crying,
it was as if we were watching this farce.
For him to all of a sudden
have crocodile tears
running down his face,
nobody bought it.
Nobody bought it.
He was the murderer. He was the torturer.
He was the bad guy.
It took the jury of seven
women and five men
less than 2 1/2 days of deliberation
to convict Bittaker of 26 counts,
including kidnapping,
rape, torture, and murder.
Going for the death penalty
was only partially my decision.
It had to be okayed
by the District Attorney,
who was against capital punishment,
but this case was so
egregious that he agreed
that we should seek the death penalty.
If the death penalty
isn't proper in this case,
when would it ever be proper?
The jury went in the room
and just looked around and just nodded.
Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker
should be put to death
by administration of lethal gas.
They were unanimous within 60 seconds,
giving him the death penalty.
In 1978, the voters had
overwhelmingly approved
the death penalty.
But you had a very liberal
Supreme Court at that time.
You had a liberal governor.
It was always thought maybe,
with the appeals process,
it wasn't going to happen.
And it ultimately didn't.
Bittaker sat on death row,
playing bridge and chess.
I was planning on going
up there at his execution
and holding up the
photographs of the five girls.
But I never got that chance.
It was a terrible case to live through.
I mean, Paul Bynum,
who was the investigator
who broke the case,
ended up committing suicide,
and he left a suicide note
saying that he felt
that Bittaker and Norris would get out
and Bittaker would come after him
and that if he killed himself
that maybe Bittaker would let
his wife and daughter live.
He called me and said he had cancer.
It was serious, and it was a ton
of different types of cancer
spreading throughout his whole body.
I had pulled out my notes,
and I said, "Let's do, like,
a little round of fact-check."
I was like, "The remains
of Cindy and Andrea
have not been found
to this day.
Correct?" He's like, "Yes."
And then I'm, like, about
to go to my next point,
and he just grabs the paper and the pen,
and he starts drawing a map
of the San Gabriel Mountains
and saying Norris gave
the wrong location for Cindy.
It's about a mile off from
where she actually was.
Then he's like, "Oh, he's
so wrong about Andrea."
So he's drawing this,
and he's, like, telling
me as he's drawing it.
I messaged Andrea Hall's sister,
and I said, "I know where your sister is."
And she called me.
She's like, "We've never given up hope."
And...
it was just-
how hard I fought to get
this information from him...
And just hearing her say, like...
Just hearing her say, you know,
"We've never given up hope,"
it just made it all worth it
to get this information to the families.
- The area was never searched.
Stephen Kay said
they had searched near there
but not that area.
So my hope is to find
my sister and bring her home.
Laura's approach to Larry
was certainly different than my approach.
But it could have been effective
on several different levels.
It sounds like he did give her information
that he certainly had not given to me.
But now it becomes important
to be able to verify
what he did say to her.
One night Bittaker had a series
of heart attacks during the night,
and he had his heart medication
he was popping all through the night.
He was dying.
He was a ball of emotions
and anxious and upset.
And he was really, you know,
starting to process what he had done.
I think that's when it
all started to hit him.
Friday the 13th, 2019,
I had just returned from
California from seeing him.
I got a call that he passed away.
I was sad.
You know, this is someone
I've talked to every single day.
We had a friendship. We did
have an authentic friendship.
It's been a profound, profound experience.
2 1/2 months right after Bittaker,
Roy Norris died of natural causes.
So many people called them soul mates,
and you got to wonder.
They died like an old, married couple,
like they couldn't live without each other.
When I heard Bittaker and Norris had died,
I was shocked but happy...
relieved.
I'm sorry that it took so long.
My mother said, in order
for her to heal herself,
that she forgave
Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris.
Personally, I can't do
that. I cannot forgive them.
It's taken me my whole...
rest of my life to deal with this...
that somebody...
that was kind to me,
that I trusted...
was hurting young girls.
If anybody deserved the death penalty,
it was Lawrence Bittaker.
I'm glad that he was kept alive, though,
because we've learned so much, I believe,
about psychopathy and sadism from him.
It's a challenge to try
to find that humanity.
But I would definitely say
that I did see some human
in him in our time and
in our interviews together.
I do think he was developing feelings,
'cause I don't think it
was just to manipulate me
or to tell me what I wanted to hear.
I don't believe a man
at that late stage of life
is gonna turn over a new leaf.
I believe that he tried to convince Laura
that he had empathy because
he liked to have her visit.
It was companionship.
He was actually proud
of being psychopathic.
He was proud of not being controlled
by the kinds of emotions
that non-psychopathic people have.
Do I think he just shredded his psychopathy
and became a feeling, loving human being?
Based on my experience,
my background, and training,
I do not.
A lot of people might be like,
"He doesn't deserve kindness.
He doesn't deserve empathy
from anybody," you know.
And that's fine for people
to have that perception.
I just know that I'm gonna live my life
with empathy and compassion for everyone,
and I'm gonna have no
regrets at the end of my life.