Bittaker was born in 1940 and had a long record of theft and assault. He met Roy Norris, a convicted rapist, in a California prison, and the two agreed on what they would do when they were out. Bittaker bought a van, which they called the Murder Mack because it had a sliding door and no side windows.
Between June and October 1979 they abducted five girls from the beaches and roadsides of the South Bay area of Los Angeles County: Cindy Schaeffer, sixteen; Andrea Hall, eighteen; Jackie Gilliam, fifteen, and Jacqueline Lamp, thirteen, taken together; and Shirley Ledford, sixteen. They took them to a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains, raped and tortured them, and killed them with a ligature and an ice pick. They audio-recorded the killing of Shirley Ledford. Norris called him Pliers, after the tool he used.
Norris talked about it to a former cellmate, who went to the police, and both were arrested in November 1979. Norris agreed to plead guilty and testify in exchange for avoiding the death penalty; he received forty-five years to life and died in prison in 2020.
Bittaker was tried in 1981. The tape was played to the jury, and the accounts of that day by the people present, jurors, the judge, the prosecutor, are part of the permanent literature on the case. He was convicted and sentenced to death on March 24, 1981.
He remained on California's death row for thirty-eight years, filing appeals and, for a period, corresponding with people who wrote to him. He died of natural causes at San Quentin on December 13, 2019, aged seventy-nine. California has executed no one since 2006.
This entry is deliberately brief about what was done to the five girls. The detail is documented at length elsewhere and adding it here serves nothing.