The jury in the Torrance courtroom heard the tape. It had been made on October 31, 1979, in the back of a van, and it recorded the last hours of Shirley Lynette Ledford, sixteen, of Sunland, who had accepted a ride from two men that Halloween night. Her body was left on a lawn in the San Fernando Valley foothills the next morning. When the tape was played at the trial of Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker in 1981, the case became the first felony trial in California history to be recorded by television and still cameras over the defense's objections, and the people in the room, jurors, lawyers and the judge, spoke of it for decades afterward.
She was the last of five. Lucinda Lynn Schaefer, sixteen, known as Cindy, was taken in June 1979, on June 24 by most accounts and June 14 by the state's; Andrea Joy Hall, eighteen, on July 8; and on September 2, Jacqueline Doris Gilliam, fifteen, of Long Beach, and Jacqueline Leah Lamp, thirteen, of Redondo Beach, who were hitchhiking together in Redondo Beach. Four of the girls were picked up while hitchhiking and one was pulled off the street. They were taken to a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains, raped and tortured, and killed with an ice pick, a sledgehammer and a coat hanger twisted tight with pliers, which gave Bittaker the nickname that followed him. The killers photographed their victims. The bodies of Cindy Schaefer and Andrea Hall were never recovered.
Bittaker, thirty-nine, a machinist from Burbank, had been born in Pittsburgh on September 27, 1940, adopted by George Bittaker and his wife, and had spent much of his adult life in prison for car theft and robbery. At the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo he had met Roy Lewis Norris, eight years younger, a convicted rapist, and the two agreed on what they would do once they were out. Bittaker bought a van with a sliding side door and no side windows and called it Murder Mac.
Norris could not keep quiet. He described the killings to a former fellow inmate, who went to the police, and the tip led detectives to a woman who had been attacked by the pair and had escaped. Both men were arrested on November 20, 1979. Norris pleaded guilty to all counts in exchange for the prosecution's promise not to seek his death, and he became the state's chief witness. At trial he said he had killed one of the girls and blamed Bittaker for the other four; Bittaker, who took the stand, said Norris had killed them all.
On February 17, 1981, a jury of seven women and five men convicted Bittaker on all twenty-six counts against him, among them five of murder with special circumstances and five of kidnapping, and a week later it recommended death. Superior Court Judge Thomas Fredericks formally sentenced him to die in San Quentin's gas chamber on Tuesday, March 24, 1981, and added a term of 199 years to take effect if the death sentence were ever commuted; California corrections records give the date as March 22. Norris was sentenced on April 28, 1981, to forty-five years to life.
Bittaker was admitted to death row at San Quentin on March 30, 1981, and spent the next thirty-eight years there, filing appeals. He was never executed. He died of natural causes at four in the afternoon on December 13, 2019, at seventy-nine. Norris died in prison on February 24, 2020.