"What Could I Say?": Lawrence Bittaker on Death Row

Name: "What Could I Say?": Lawrence Bittaker on Death Row
Uploaded: 2024-01-05
Duration: 1 min 22 s
Description: Asked by criminologist Laura Brand what he would say to his victims, Lawrence Bittaker answered: "What could I say? What could make up for it?"

Asked by criminologist Laura Brand what he would say to his victims, Lawrence Bittaker answered: "What could I say? What could make up for it?"

Subject: Lawrence Bittaker
Runtime: 1:22

Content warning: Concerns the abduction, sexual assault and murder of five teenage girls.

The Interview

In 2014 Laura Brand, a criminologist then in her twenties, began corresponding with Lawrence Bittaker on California's death row and later met him at San Quentin State Prison. In this short clip she describes her first meeting with him, "down in the cage", and says the relationship changed in 2018, when she was pregnant. The clip then plays a passage from one of her recordings. Asked what he would say to his victims if they were there, Bittaker answers: "Oh, God. What could I say? What could make up for it?"

Historical Context

Over five months in 1979 Bittaker and Roy Norris, who had met in prison, abducted five teenage girls in Los Angeles County in a GMC van Bittaker called "Murder Mac", and raped, tortured and murdered them. The victims were Lucinda "Cindy" Schaefer, 16; Andrea Hall, 18; Jacqueline Gilliam, 15; Jacqueline Lamp, 13; and Shirley Ledford, 16. The two men were arrested in November 1979. Norris pleaded guilty and testified against Bittaker, who was convicted of five murders in February 1981 and sentenced to death.

Circumstances of the Interview

Brand spoke with Bittaker over about five years, in prison visits and recorded phone calls, until his death on December 13, 2019. The recordings were later used in the 2021 documentary "The Toolbox Killer" and in her book "God's Not Here, Only Devils". The date of the passage in this clip is not documented.

What the Interview Covers

Most of the clip is Brand's own account: her nerves at the first meeting, his reluctance to call or write, and the change she saw in 2018. She says that in 2018 he "gave up the locations" of Cindy Schaefer and Andrea Hall, whose bodies have never been found. Bittaker is heard for about half a minute, answering the question about his victims and their families.

What Makes the Recording Significant

Bittaker is reported to have refused to cooperate with police for decades. Brand's recordings preserve his own words about the murders. In this passage he is asked directly about his victims.

Archival Importance

Bittaker died on death row in 2019, and Norris in 2020. Schaefer and Hall are still listed as missing. This recording of Bittaker's voice is publicly available.

Important Caveats

The clip is an excerpt of about a minute and a half, not the "full tape" its title describes. The statement that Bittaker revealed where Schaefer and Hall were buried is Brand's account; he is reported to have given her a map, but no search result or recovery of remains has been reported. What sounds like laughter in the recording has not been checked by a human listener and should not be described on the page until it has. Bittaker's words are his own and are not a measure of remorse.

Laura Brand: Getting him down in the cage, I had no idea what to expect. This was my first time on death row. This is my first serial killer I ever interviewed. I started with Lawrence Bittaker, you know, one of the most [unclear: "notorious" / "nation's"], sadistic serial killers, and now he's right there in front of me. And I wasn't even sure he would come down, and I was just a ball of nerves for my first time, of course.

Laura Brand: So I, I met with him for the first time, it was 2014. He gave up the locations of Cindy and Andrea in 2018, so about four years afterwards. And those were, even though I had sat down and met with him a few times, he was still very challenging. He didn't want to call. He didn't want to correspond through the mail. He was still kind of giving me this pushback. And it was finally in 2018, you know, there was a switch. I had gotten pregnant. I had always wondered if that could have been, you know, one of the underlying causes. I saw an immense change in all of the serial offenders.

Laura Brand: Is there anything you would say to them, your victims, if they were here?

Lawrence Bittaker: Oh, God. What could I say? What could make up for it? [sounds, transcribed by machine as "heh, heh, heh"; possibly laughter] It's like when they ask you, what would I like to say to the families? My God, what could I say? [unclear] What can I say? ---