On June 24, 1979, Lawrence Bittaker was driving his van along the Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach with Roy Norris in the passenger seat when they saw Lucinda Schaefer, sixteen, known as Cindy, walking along the road. She turned onto a residential street. Bittaker pulled alongside and offered her a ride, and she said no. He parked a little way down the street, and Norris got out and pretended to be working on the van. When she walked past, he grabbed her and dragged her inside.
They took her to a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains. She asked whether they meant to kill her, and asked for time to pray first. Her body was never found. Neither was that of Andrea Hall, eighteen, who was picked up hitchhiking on July 8. Friends and family testified that neither girl was seen again after the dates Norris gave for their deaths.
On September 2 they took two girls together, Jacqueline Gilliam, fifteen, and Leah Lamp, thirteen. On October 31 they took Shirley Ledford, sixteen. Norris strangled her with a coat hanger, and on Bittaker's suggestion they left her body in a bed of ivy in a suburban neighborhood, so they could read the reaction in the newspaper. An early-morning jogger found her. Parts of the attack on her had been recorded on tape in the van.
Norris was born in 1948. He had been convicted of rape and held as a mentally disordered sex offender, and he met Bittaker, who was serving time for stabbing a store clerk who had accused him of shoplifting, while both were inmates of the California prison system. There they agreed on what they would do once they were out.
He talked about the killings to a man he had known in prison, who went to the police, and both men were arrested in November 1979. Norris then made the bargain that shaped everything after it. In exchange for the state not seeking death he agreed to testify against Bittaker, and on March 18, 1980 he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, along with forcible rape and robbery. With his help the police found and identified the skulls of Jacqueline Gilliam and Leah Lamp. A piece of an ice pick was still lodged in Gilliam's skull. Shirley Ledford's bracelet turned up in Norris's apartment.
Bittaker's trial began in January 1981. Norris was the prosecution's central witness. The defense argued that he, not Bittaker, was responsible for the murders, and called Richard Shoopman, a convict who knew both men, to say that Norris had told him many times how much he wanted to rape young women and that the look of shock and fear on a victim's face aroused him. Bittaker took the stand and said Norris had killed Schaefer with another man. The jury convicted Bittaker on twenty-six counts, and he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed in 1989, describing the crimes as a partnership: from June through October 1979, it said, Bittaker and Norris kidnapped and murdered five teenage girls.
Norris was sentenced in Los Angeles County on April 28, 1981 to forty-five years to life. He became eligible for parole in 2009, declined to attend the hearing, and was automatically deferred for ten years. At his hearing in March 2019 parole was refused for another ten. Late in life he began to say that he had been blacked out on drugs throughout the killings, which cannot be squared with the detailed testimony he gave in 1981.
He died of natural causes on February 24, 2020 at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where he had been moved from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. Bittaker had died on death row two months earlier, on December 13, 2019.