Lawrence Bittaker was convicted in 1981 of the murders of five teenage girls who were abducted in Los Angeles County between June and October 1979. His partner was Roy Norris, a younger man he had met in a California prison. Norris made a plea agreement, led investigators to evidence and testified at Bittaker's trial; Bittaker testified that Norris had done the killing. A jury in Torrance believed Norris and the physical evidence, convicted Bittaker of all 26 counts against him, and voted for death.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 1989. Bittaker remained on death row at San Quentin, filing appeals and lawsuits, and died there of natural causes on December 13, 2019, at 79. He was never executed. The Associated Press, reporting his death, recorded that the pair had been known as the "Tool Box Killers," after the tools they used on their victims. Two of the girls, Lucinda Schaefer and Andrea Hall, have never been found.
Little was reported about Bittaker's early life beyond his criminal record. At the penalty phase of his trial a psychologist, Michael Maloney, described a criminal history made up mostly of nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting and car theft, put his IQ above 130, and classified him as an antisocial personality who could not feel for others, according to the California Supreme Court's opinion.
One conviction from that period reached the federal courts. Bittaker was convicted of burglary in a California court about four years before the United States Supreme Court decided Faretta v. California in 1975, the case that confirmed a defendant's right to conduct his own defense. He argued in a federal habeas petition that the state court had denied him that right. The federal district court agreed and ruled that the burglary conviction had to be set aside. On August 3, 1978, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in Bittaker v. Enomoto, holding that the right to self-representation already existed under its own precedents before Faretta and that its denial could not be treated as harmless.
His one violent conviction came from 1974. A store clerk named Gary Louie accused him of shoplifting, and Bittaker stabbed him. He was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Louie later described the stabbing to the jury that decided Bittaker's sentence in 1981.
Bittaker met Roy Norris while both were serving time in state prison. Norris had a rape conviction. According to the facts set out by the California Supreme Court, the two men often discussed their shared interest in rape and worked through ways of abducting and assaulting women without being caught.
Bittaker was paroled in November 1978. He rented a room at the Scott Motel in Burbank and, by the time of his trial, was described by United Press International as a Burbank machinist. Norris was paroled in January 1979. After committing a rape in Colorado, Norris returned to California and telephoned Bittaker.
On weekends the two men went to the beach, where Bittaker photographed teenage girls. They also drove the fire roads in the mountains of Southern California, looking for places where they would not be seen. Bittaker bought a van with sliding doors, which, the court's summary says, made it easier to seize a victim and pull her inside. In June 1979, after Norris tried to rape a woman who escaped from him, the two agreed that from then on they would carry out all their crimes together.
Lucinda Lynn Schaefer, who went by Cindy, was 16 and from Torrance, according to the Associated Press. On June 24, 1979, the date the California Supreme Court took from the trial record, she was walking along the Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach. The men in the van offered her a ride, and she refused. They parked on the residential street she turned onto, and when she walked past, Norris seized her and pulled her into the van.
They drove her to a fire road in the mountains, where, Norris testified, she was killed. Her body was never found. At the trial her friends and relatives testified that she had not been seen after the date Norris gave, and the prosecution offered evidence that she was not the kind of girl who would have disappeared of her own accord. The defense did not dispute that she was dead.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in its 2019 release, gives the date of her death as June 14, 1979. The court's opinion, which follows Norris's testimony, gives June 24.
Andrea Joy Hall was 18 and from Tujunga, the AP reported. She was hitchhiking to see her boyfriend in Wilmington. Another driver picked her up first, and the van followed that car to Redondo Beach, where she got out and began hitchhiking again. Bittaker stopped and offered her a ride.
She was taken into the mountains. Bittaker photographed her there, and photographs of her were introduced at the trial. Norris testified that Bittaker told him how she had been killed; Norris did not witness it. Her body was never found. As with Lucinda Schaefer, friends and family testified that she was never seen again, and the defense did not contest her death. The court's summary dates her abduction to July 4, 1979; the CDCR release gives July 8.
Jacqueline Doris Gilliam was 15 and lived in Long Beach. Jacqueline Leah Lamp, known as Leah, was 13 and lived in Redondo Beach. On September 2, 1979, the two girls were hitchhiking together in Redondo Beach when the van stopped for them.
They were held in the mountains and killed the next day, according to the trial evidence. Bittaker photographed Jacqueline Gilliam, and photographs from that sequence later reached his own defense lawyer, who turned them over to the police. Norris testified that when he suggested ending her life quickly, Bittaker answered that "they only die once, anyway."
Their remains were found later, with Norris's help. The skulls of both girls were recovered and identified, and the court found that their condition matched what Norris had said about how each girl died. Items found in Bittaker's van were also put in evidence. The jury later found that Leah Lamp had been killed to prevent her from testifying as a witness.
The court's summary records two attempts in late September that failed. On September 27, 1979, a woman the men tried to seize dodged behind the van and escaped. On September 30, Bittaker sprayed a woman with Mace as she was closing her apartment garage door and tried to drag her to the van. She screamed, neighbors came out, and Norris drove away, leaving Bittaker to flee on foot.
Bittaker admitted the September 30 attack at his trial but said he had only been testing whether Mace worked as a defensive weapon. The incident was charged as an overt act in the conspiracy count, and the jury heard about it.
Shirley Lynette Ledford was from Sun Valley, according to the AP. CDCR and AP reports give her age as 16; the California Supreme Court's summary of the trial record gives 18. Late on October 31, 1979, she was hitchhiking home from her job when the van picked her up. She was taken to a secluded place.
Norris testified that he strangled her. He also testified that Bittaker suggested leaving her body in someone's front yard so that the two of them could follow the reaction in the newspapers. Her body was left in a bed of ivy in a suburban neighborhood, where a jogger found it early the next morning.
Part of what happened to her was recorded on a cassette tape, which police found later in Bittaker's van.
Bittaker did not keep the photographs to himself. Richard Dryburgh, who lived at the Scott Motel, testified that Bittaker showed him photographs of girls and told him one of them was called Cindy. Dryburgh picked out Lucinda Schaefer's picture and identified a photograph of Jacqueline Gilliam. He testified in exchange for the dismissal of an explosives charge against him. Another resident, Mike Horn, said Bittaker had shown him photographs of Gilliam and Hall.
A 17-year-old girl who knew him at the motel testified that he showed her photographs of Jacqueline Gilliam and four other girls and told her, "The girls I get won't talk any more." He played her a tape of Gilliam. A visitor, Steven Eastman, also heard a tape.
The case broke through a woman who had survived. A sergeant named Bynum of the Hermosa Beach Police Department swore an affidavit that she had picked out Bittaker in a photographic lineup as one of the men who had attacked her, and a magistrate issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that included robbery and rape.
Norris was arrested first, by the Hermosa Beach police. Sergeant Bynum then had Burbank police arrest Bittaker at the Scott Motel. Six or seven uniformed officers took part. An officer named Valento knocked three times; after the third knock Bittaker opened the bathroom window and asked who it was, and Valento grabbed his arm through the window. Told that no one else was inside, an officer kicked in the locked door. The California Supreme Court later held that the entry was lawful, noting that Bittaker was known to carry weapons. The opinion does not give the date of the arrest.
Bittaker agreed to a search of his room. He pointed out photographs and opened his safe. Officers took a large number of photographs, police scanners, a replica .45 handgun, chemicals, pornographic film and other items. His van was impounded.
Officers searched the van three days after the arrest. They took jewelry, a sap and a number of cassette tapes. One of the cassettes was a recording of the attack on Shirley Ledford.
At the trial Bittaker's voice was identified on the first part of the recording, and the defense stipulated that the female voice was Ledford's. The tape was played to the jury, and the defense did not object. On appeal Bittaker argued that the police should not have listened to the tape without a warrant, but the California Supreme Court refused to consider the point: because there had been no objection at trial, the prosecution had never been asked to justify the search, and the issue was waived. The court upheld the seizure of the van itself, holding that it could be held as an instrument of the crimes and that items in plain view inside could be taken.
Then-Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter Pitchess described the abuse the girls had suffered as "sadistic and barbaric," CBS San Francisco recalled in 2019.
Norris agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. Under the agreement described in the California Supreme Court's opinion, he would plead guilty to five murders without special circumstances, two rapes and one robbery; would help the sheriff's department find bodies and evidence; and would give complete and truthful testimony at all court proceedings. In return the prosecution would not seek the death penalty or life without parole. If Norris asked, a judge, Edward Hinz, would review whether the district attorney had abused his discretion in deciding that Norris had broken the agreement. The Supreme Court later advised against agreements that left the question of truthfulness to the prosecutor, but found no reversible error in this one.
With Norris's help, investigators found and identified the skulls of Jacqueline Gilliam and Leah Lamp. Shirley Ledford's bracelet was found in Norris's apartment.
News reports differ on how the plea is best described. CDCR and AP reports say Norris pleaded guilty to all counts in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty. UPI reported in March 1981 that he had pleaded guilty in return for a promise that he would not be sentenced to death.
Bittaker was tried in Los Angeles County Superior Court at Torrance in 1981. The trial lasted about a month, UPI reported, and it was the first felony trial in California history to be recorded by television and still cameras and tape recorders over the defense's objections. The jury was made up of seven women and five men. How it was chosen later became an issue on appeal.
Norris was the central prosecution witness. He testified, UPI reported, that he had killed one of the girls and that Bittaker had killed the other four. His account was supported by the physical evidence: the skulls, the bracelet, items from the van, the photographs and the tape.
The defense argued that Norris had committed the murders alone. It called Richard Shoopman, a convict who knew both men, who testified that Norris had told him many times that he wanted to rape young women. Investigators had searched Shoopman's cell at the California Men's Colony under a warrant issued by a judge in San Luis Obispo and taken 14 photographs and five letters, two of which went into evidence. The Supreme Court later upheld that warrant.
Bittaker testified in his own defense. He said he had no part in the abduction or death of Lucinda Schaefer, and that Norris had told him that Norris and another man were responsible. For each of the other girls he described an encounter that, in his telling, the girl had entered willingly, for money, and that ended with Norris taking her away or leaving her. He said he never saw Gilliam or Lamp again after Norris drove off with them, and that Ledford had not been harmed in his presence. He admitted the September 30 attack but called it a test of the Mace. The California Supreme Court noted that his account contradicted both Norris's testimony and the prosecution's other evidence.
The prosecution confronted him with his own writing. While in custody he had written a manuscript called "The Last Ride," a partly fictional account of the crimes. He had shown drafts to a guard and to a newspaper reporter, who wrote an article about it. A jail sergeant named Budds asked to read it; Bittaker at first joked that Budds could read and correct it, and later let him have it, saying he did so only "in submission to authority." Bittaker described the book as part fact, based on what Norris had told him, and part fiction. The prosecution used it in cross-examination. On appeal the court held that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in property kept in his jail cell, so questions about his consent did not matter.
Other inmates testified about what he had said and done in jail. A cellmate, David Lambert, testified that Bittaker asked him to draw a girl on the cell wall, said she looked like "Cindy," asked him to add coat hangers and pliers, and signed the drawing "Pliers Bittaker." Bittaker also signed autographs for other prisoners, one of them reading "Norris did it." Another inmate, Lloyd Douglas, testified that Bittaker had described to him in detail the abduction and killing of Gilliam and Lamp, including details that Norris himself had never described.
On cross-examination Bittaker admitted that he had buried a number of photographs and one tape at Forest Lawn Cemetery. He refused to say exactly where.
On February 17, 1981, the jury found Bittaker guilty of five counts of murder with special circumstances, UPI reported. The full verdict covered 26 counts: five of murder, five of kidnapping, and counts of criminal conspiracy, rape, oral copulation, sodomy and possession of a firearm by an ex-felon, according to CDCR. The jury found 38 special circumstances. Twenty of them were multiple-murder findings; the others included felony-murder findings based on kidnapping, rape and other crimes, four findings of murder by torture, and the finding that Leah Lamp was killed to keep her from being a witness.
At the penalty phase the jury heard Gary Louie describe the 1974 stabbing. The defense offered psychiatric evidence that Bittaker may have been in an altered state of consciousness at the time of that attack, and the prosecution answered it with expert rebuttal testimony. Michael Maloney gave his description of Bittaker's criminal history and personality.
A week after the guilty verdicts, UPI reported, the same jurors recommended execution and rejected life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Federicks, as UPI spelled the name, sentenced Bittaker to death in San Quentin's gas chamber. UPI's dispatch from Torrance, dated March 24, 1981, said the sentence was imposed that Tuesday. CDCR records give the sentencing date as March 22, 1981. Bittaker was 40.
He was admitted to California's death row on March 30, 1981. Norris, then 33, was sentenced in Los Angeles County on April 28, 1981, to 45 years to life, according to CDCR, and entered state prison on May 8, 1981.
Stephen Kay, the Los Angeles deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, told City News Service after Bittaker's death that he regarded him as the worst murderer ever to appear in a Los Angeles County courthouse, Charles Manson included, the California Globe reported.
California death sentences are reviewed automatically by the state Supreme Court. Bittaker was represented on appeal by Richard Such, appointed by the court. On June 22, 1989, in an opinion by Justice Allen Broussard expressing the unanimous view of the court, the California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence.
The court found several errors and held that none of them required reversal.
The trial judge had limited the questions defense counsel could put to prospective jurors about the death penalty and had barred follow-up questions to jurors whose answers were unclear. That was error. But every juror who gave an ambiguous answer was removed by a challenge, and Bittaker did not claim that any juror who sat was biased. The court used the case to abandon an earlier rule that such an error required automatic reversal.
The trial judge had also refused defense requests to excuse five prospective jurors for cause. The Supreme Court held that two of them should have been excused. Because the defense needed to show three such errors to establish prejudice, given the extra peremptory challenges it had been allowed, the error was not reversible. The court also rejected a claim that the prosecutor had used peremptory challenges to exclude Black jurors, finding no prima facie showing of group bias.
The instruction on murder by torture was incomplete, because it left out the purpose for which torture must be inflicted. The court held that the omission did no harm, because it was undisputed that any torture had been inflicted for a sadistic purpose. It did not decide challenges to the witness-killing finding and the four torture-murder findings, holding that one valid special circumstance was enough to make the case eligible for death and that the jury, knowing there had been five murders and at least 14 valid special circumstances, would not have been swayed by the total of 38.
At the penalty phase the trial judge had failed to tell jurors that they must find beyond a reasonable doubt that Bittaker committed other crimes before treating them as aggravating factors. That was harmless, the court held, because he admitted the September 30 attack and the jury had already found it as an overt act of the conspiracy. Several of the prosecutor's arguments were improper, including comments about deterrence and an analogy that misstated how the jury should weigh aggravating and mitigating factors, but defense counsel had not objected to them, and the court found no reasonable possibility that they changed the verdict.
The court also upheld the arrest warrant, the entry into his motel room, the consent search, the seizure of the van and the use of the manuscript, and found that the evidence of the 1974 stabbing and the September 30 attack had been properly admitted. "We affirm the conviction and sentence," the opinion concluded.
Bittaker then challenged his conviction through habeas corpus. The California Supreme Court denied state relief on November 29, 2000, according to a later federal opinion. He then filed a federal petition in the Central District of California, raising many claims, among them that his trial lawyers had been ineffective.
The petition led to a ruling on the attorney-client privilege. To defend against the ineffective-assistance claims, the state needed to see the trial lawyers' files and question them. The district judge, Senior Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr., allowed that discovery but entered a protective order: the material could be used only by the Attorney General's office in the habeas case and could not be passed to prosecutors or police without a court order, including for any retrial. The state appealed, arguing that by raising the claims Bittaker had given up the attorney-client privilege entirely.
On June 6, 2003, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the protective order in Bittaker v. Woodford, in an opinion by Judge Alex Kozinski. A habeas petitioner who claims his lawyer was ineffective waives the privilege, the court held, but only so far as needed to litigate that claim fairly in federal court, and it could see no federal interest in widening the waiver beyond that. Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, joined by Judge Johnnie Rawlinson, concurred in the judgment. No later ruling on the merits of the federal petition was reported.
Bittaker remained on death row at San Quentin until his death. He also went to court from his cell. In 1995 the Associated Press, reporting on the cost of prisoner litigation, wrote that he had filed more than 40 suits from death row. One concerned a broken cookie. State officials estimated that court, attorney and processing costs had reached about 4,500 dollars over two years before a judge dismissed it. The state attorney general, Dan Lungren, was then backing state and federal measures to deter suits of that kind.
He was never executed. At his death CDCR counted 13 executions carried out in California since 1978. On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order imposing a moratorium on executions, which granted reprieves to the 737 people then on death row, closed the execution chamber at San Quentin and withdrew the state's lethal injection protocol, UPI reported. Bittaker was among those reprieved, the California Globe reported.
Bittaker died at 4 p.m. on Friday, December 13, 2019, at San Quentin State Prison, CDCR announced on December 16. He was 79. The department said he died of natural causes and that the Marin County Coroner would determine the cause of death. At the time, 729 people were on California's death row, and 82 condemned prisoners had died of natural causes since 1978.
Roy Norris died on February 24, 2020, at the California Medical Facility, the AP reported, citing state corrections officials. He was 72 and had been moved the previous week from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County to a hospital in Northern California. Officials said he died of natural causes.
Bittaker is dead, and with his death the criminal case against him ended; his convictions had been final since the 1989 affirmance. Norris is also dead. As of February 2020, the remains of Lucinda Schaefer and Andrea Hall had not been reported found. CBS San Francisco noted in 2019 that the bodies of two of the victims were never recovered.
Proven by final judgment: the murders and kidnappings of Lucinda Schaefer, Andrea Hall, Jacqueline Gilliam, Leah Lamp and Shirley Ledford, and the other counts returned by the jury on February 17, 1981, affirmed in 1989.
Who did what: the division of the killings between the two men rests mainly on Norris's testimony, which the jury accepted and which the physical evidence supported. Norris said he killed one of the girls and that Bittaker killed the other four; Bittaker said Norris killed all five. Bittaker's own manuscript, his jail statements as reported by other inmates and the recovered evidence were the main checks on Norris's account.
Dates and ages that differ between accounts: Lucinda Schaefer's abduction is dated June 24, 1979, by the California Supreme Court and June 14 by CDCR; Andrea Hall's July 4, 1979, by the court and July 8 by CDCR. Shirley Ledford's age is 18 in the court's summary and 16 in CDCR and AP reports. The death sentence is dated March 24, 1981, by UPI's dispatch and March 22 by CDCR. CBS San Francisco reported that Norris was sentenced in 1980; CDCR gives April 28, 1981, and UPI in March 1981 said his sentencing was set for April 24.
Not reported: the date of Bittaker's arrest; his birth date and birthplace; whether he faced a separate trial over the attack that led to his arrest; and what became of the photographs and tape he said he buried at Forest Lawn.
About four years before Faretta v. California (1975): convicted of burglary in a California court; the conviction is later set aside on federal habeas.
1974: stabs store clerk Gary Louie, who accused him of shoplifting; convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.
In state prison: meets Roy Norris.
August 3, 1978: the Ninth Circuit affirms the ruling setting aside his burglary conviction (Bittaker v. Enomoto).
November 1978: paroled; rents a room at the Scott Motel in Burbank.
January 1979: Norris is paroled.
June 1979: the two agree to commit their crimes together.
June 24, 1979 (court; CDCR: June 14): Lucinda Schaefer, 16, is abducted in Redondo Beach.
July 4, 1979 (court; CDCR: July 8): Andrea Hall, 18, is abducted in Redondo Beach.
September 2, 1979: Jacqueline Gilliam, 15, and Leah Lamp, 13, are abducted in Redondo Beach; killed the next day.
September 27 and 30, 1979: two attempted abductions fail.
October 31, 1979: Shirley Ledford is abducted while hitchhiking home from work; her body is found the next morning.
Date not reported: Norris is arrested by Hermosa Beach police; Bittaker is arrested at the Scott Motel; the tape is found in his van three days later.
February 17, 1981: a Torrance jury convicts him of all 26 counts.
About a week later: the jury votes for death.
March 1981 (UPI dispatch dated March 24; CDCR: March 22): sentenced to death.
March 30, 1981: admitted to death row at San Quentin.
April 28, 1981: Norris is sentenced to 45 years to life.
June 22, 1989: the California Supreme Court affirms the conviction and sentence (People v. Bittaker).
October 1995: the AP reports he has filed more than 40 lawsuits from death row.
November 29, 2000: the California Supreme Court denies state habeas relief.
June 6, 2003: the Ninth Circuit rules on the scope of the privilege waiver in his federal habeas case (Bittaker v. Woodford).
March 13, 2019: Governor Newsom's moratorium reprieves everyone on California's death row.
December 13, 2019: Bittaker dies of natural causes at San Quentin, aged 79.
February 24, 2020: Norris dies at the California Medical Facility, aged 72.