S11, Chapter 5: Killing Binge

0:04 Tapes from the Dark Side contains descriptions of violence and sexuality. Listener discretion is advised. The following is a quote from Roy Norris describing his recollections of the audio tape the pair had created of Shirley Ludford's rape and torture. We've all heard women's scream in horror films. Still we know that no one is really screaming. Why simply because an actress can't produce some of the sounds that convince us that something vile and heinous is happening. If you've ever heard that tape, there is just no possible way that you'd not begin crying and trembling. I doubt you could listen to more than a full sixty seconds of it.

1:01 I think everyone has a bit of a fascination with the dark Side. I myself, Wilways love the dark Side as well. I think it's something that everyone secretly longs for a walks. I just picture those girls, how long they were when they died. I'm sorry, The dark Side, The dark Side. The dark Side.

1:45 Andrea joy Hall July eighth, nineteen seventy nine, two weeks after the murder of Lucinda, eighteen year old Andrea joy Hall is hitchhiking along the misty stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. She's alone, vulnerable, and she's about to cross paths with two men who've already killed. Their names are Laurence Bittaker and Roy Norris. As Andrea stands on the roadside, Larry slows his silver van beside her, ready to offer a ride, but just as he does, another driver pulls over, and Andrea chooses that car instead, but Larry and Roy don't give up.

2:26 They follow from a distance mile after mile until the good Samaritan drops Andrea off at Redondo Beach. Now she is alone again, and that's all they need. Roy crawls into the back of the van, hiding behind a hanging bedspread, while Larry pulls up next to Andrea. Friendly and calm, he offers her a cold drink from the cooler in the back. She steps inside, The door closes and the trap is set. As Andrea reaches for the drink, Roy lunges out of hiding. A violent struggle erupts inside the cramped van. Andrea, fighting desperately for her freedom, Roy twists her arm behind her back until she screams in pain tape covers her mouth, binds her wrists, then her ankles.

3:12 The van drives back onto the highway, carrying Andrea into the nightmare Ahead. Larry and Roy take her deep into the San Gabriel Mountains, even farther than where they had taken Lucinda. Isolated and without hope of rescue. We have no idea exactly what happened to Andrea that night. All we have is the testimony of Larry and Roy, convicted killers and liars. But here's what they confessed to that Andrea was raped repeatedly twice by Larry, once by Roy, but after that the horror wasn't over. While Larry was assaulting her again, he suddenly froze, thinking he saw headlights in the distance. He pressed his hand over Andrea's mouth and dragged her into the bushes for cover. Roy drove off to investigate, but there's no car, no witness, nothing.

4:01 When Roy returns, they took Andrea even deeper into the mountains. Larry forced her to walk uphill, naked along the rough roadside. He makes her perform oral sex, then orders her to pose for several polaroid photographs. But the cruelty still escalated. At the third location, Roy leaves briefly to buy alcohol, and when he returns, Larry is alone holding two polaroid pictures, images of Andrea's face contorted in what Roy later described as quote sheer terror. Andrea had been begging for her life. Larry tells Roy what happened. He told Andrea he was going to kill her and challenged her to give him every reason she could think to be spared. Then he took out her an ice pick. He drove it through Andrea's ear and into her brain. Then he turned her over and did the same to the other side, stomping the handle until it broke off. When the ice pick snapped, he strangled her. Finally, Larry and Roy carried Andrea's bonny to the edge of a cliff, and they threw her into the darkness below.

5:13 As an FBI agent, I worked in the FBI's BAU, commonly known as the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and in that unit, I was involved in working a number of very violent crimes, most specifically serial murder cases. When I first met Larry, he was clearly playing a cat and mouse game with me. Didn't admit to anything, said he hadn't done anything wrong. He didn't give up very much. We know that Larry Bittaker was a criminal sexual sadist, an individual who is sexually aroused by the infliction of physical or emotional pain on his non consenting partners. He wants the victim to scream, to cry, He wants to see the fear in their eyes.

6:01 We know this behavior would have started at a very very early age. Were you aware that you were a sociopath. I didn't really think about us. It's kind of a card experience from Paris teaching their kids your doing this. It hurts people and you shouldn't do it. It made it hard to believe. But I just didn't have that and like the. Paris Jackie Doris Gilliam and Jacqueline Lea Lamp. Nearly two months later, September third, nineteen seventy nine, near her Mosa Beach, two young girls, Jackie Doris Gilliam, fifteen and Jacqueline Lea Lamp just thirteen, sit side by side at a bus stop bench. They're tired, sunburned, and waiting.

6:58 Moments earlier, they'd been hitchhighing along the Pacific Coast Highway, hoping for a quick ride north. Instead, they ended up here, resting beneath a fading afternoon sky. That's when Larry and Roy spotted them. Larry slowed the van, Roy leaned forward, the offer again, a simple one, a ride. Jackie and Jacqueline looked at each other, hesitated, and then climbed in inside. Roy offered them marijuana. Both girls accepted, still unaware of the danger that had just swallowed them whole. But the truth reveals itself quickly. Just minutes after the door's closed, Jackie notices that Larry isn't headed back towards the Pacific Coast Highway. Instead, he turns inland, steering towards the remote San Gabriel Mountains. Something is wrong. The girls know it.

7:50 They speak up. Larry and Roy try to calm them with excuses, it's just a shortcut, don't worry, everything's fine, But neither Jackie nor Jacqueline buys it. Then Jacqueline, the one who's thirteen, scared and desperate, slides her hands towards the van door's handle, yanks she tries to escape. Roy reacts instantly. He swings a bag filled with lead weights, striking Jacqueline hard in the back of the head. She collapses, dazed, barely conscious. With Jacqueline down, Roy turns on Jackie. He lunges, overpowering the fifteen year old, wrestling her into submission as she fights to breathe, to scream, to get away. As Roy begins binding and gagging Jackie, Jacqueline starts to wake up.

8:42 She stirs, remembers what was happening, and tries again, this time crawling, reaching, trying to flee the van entirely. Roy grabs her, twisting her arm behind her back, dragging her inside as she cries out in pain. The struggle is loud, violent, impossible to miss. Larry glances out the window, people, cars, witnesses. He slams the brakes, turns and punches Jackie's square in the face. Stunning are long enough for Roy to finish binding both girls. Tape over their mouths, tape around their wrists, tape around their ankles. The screaming stops. The fight is over.

9:25 The van was their prison. The sound of tires on asphalt, a grim metronome counting down the final hours for Jackie and Jacqueline. Their world now existed only inside that van. Racing into the cold, dark expanse of the san Gabriel Mountains for almost two days. They were held there, bound and gagged. Their captors, Larry and Roy, slept beside them, a grotesque parody of a camping trip, each man taking turns as a lookout. The abuse was methodical documented. Larry forced Jacqueline lamp to post for pornographic pictures on a desolate hill. He had Roy take polaroids of him with the girls, both nude and clothed, but the documentation didn't stop with photos. In a moment almost unimaginably cruel, Roy created an audio tape of him raping Jacqueline. On it, he forces her to pretend that she was his cousin.

10:23 He tells her to feel free to express her pain, and he did more than just rape her. Tortured her with an ice pick and vice grip pliers, tearing at her body in ways too horrific to detail. It has been said that he ripped off one of her nipples. After two days, the decision was made the girl's time was up. At his trial, Roy would claim he suggested killing Jackie quickly, arguing she had been cooperative, but Larry's response was chilling in its casual finality. He replied quote, no, they only die once anyways, And with that, Jackie was murdered, struck in each ear with an ice pick before being strangled.

11:07 Then it was Jacqueline Lamp's turn. Larry forced her out of the van and she stood there facing the darkness. He shouted a taunt that would become her epitaph, quote. You wanted to stay a virgin, Now you can die a virgin. Roy struck her in the head with a sledgehammer. Larry began to strangle her, believing her dead, until she opened her eyes again, and in a final brutal frenzy, Roy bludgeoned her again and again. When it was all over, the bodies of Jackie and Jacqueline were thrown over an embankment discarded in the chaparral below. Two lives ended their final moments etched into the cold hard record of law.

11:54 Not only that, but recorded recordings that they would later play court. And at the end of this episode we will hear a clip of one of those recordings. We'll be right back after a short break. Don't go anywhere. Roy and Norris's last known. Victim, Shirley Lynette. Ledford October thirty one, nineteen seventy nine Halloween night in the suburban Los Angeles neighborhood of Sunland to Junga. The air should have been filled with the sounds of laughter and the rustle of costumes, But for the sixteen year old Shirley Lynette Leadford, the night was about to turn into a real life horror story. She was just trying to get home, hitchhiking from a party, and then a van pulled over, a face she thought she recognized from the McDonald's where she worked. A simple, tragic decision to accept a ride home inside that van, the nightmare began immediately.

13:07 She was offered marijuana, which she refused. Then the quick flash of a knife, she was bound, gagged with construction tape and taken to a secluded spot. And that's when the real terror started. For over an hour, as the van drove aimlessly, Larry Bittaker was in the back, which surely he removed the tape from her mouth and legs, not out of mercy, but to actually hear her suffer. He began to torment her, his voice a chilling contrast to her screams. He slapped her, mocked her, beat her with his fists as he repeatedly shouted for her to quote say something, and as Shirley began to scream, he shouted for her to scream louder. This was his game, his soundtrack, And as she continued to scream, he asked her, his voice dripping with sadism, what's the matter. Don't you like to scream?

14:07 Larry began to manifest his interest in torturing things by the time he was adolescent. One time he told me that he was upset. They had rabbits, and he went outside with a pair of pliers and he removed the teeth of one of the rabbits with the pliers. A serial sexual killer. They're born predators. They hunt human beings, and so his practice following people, watching people walking around his neighborhood late at night, is a result of his psychopathy, which has a genetic link to it. When sexuality and violence becomes intertwined, now you have these compulsion and these urges to go out and kidnap people and torture them.

14:51 That's a very, very deadly combination. I shortly began to cry. Her pleas for mercy were met with more violence. She begged them, don't touch me. In response, Larry ordered her to scream as loud as she wished, and then came the tools, a sledgehammer a pair of pliers. He used them both, alternating between beating her, torturing her, and assaulting her. On a tape recorder he had running, you can hear her desperate voice over and over, Oh no, no. Roy driving the van would later recall hearing the screams, constant screams coming from the back. But the horror wasn't over. Roy switched places with Larry. He turned on the tape recorder himself and picked up where his partner had left off. He shouted at the broken, terrified girl, quote, go ahead and scream, or I'll make you scream, and a voice shattered with pain surely bargained for her life. I'll scream if you stop hitting me, she pleaded. She screamed for him until he ordered her to stop. Then Roy reached for the sledgehammer. Seeing this, Shirley screamed again, oh no. He brought it down once on her elbow, and through the agony, she asked him, please don't hit me again. In response, Roy raised the hammer again, and as Shirley repeatedly screamed no, he brought it down not once, not twice, but twenty five consecutive

16:22 times on the same shattered elbow, and when he was done, his voice, cold and detached, asked a simple, monstrous question, what are you sniveling about? The tape, along with others, would later be played in a silent, horrified courtroom, a testament to the final agonizing moments of Shirley Lynette Leadford, a recording that, once heard, can never be forgotten. After two hours of unspeakable torture, the final act was one of cold mechanical efficiency. Roy Norris killed by strangling her with a wire coat hanger, tightening it with a pair of pliers. Investigators noticed she did not react much to the act of the strangulation. Her body had already been pushed beyond its limits. She died with her eyes open.

17:14 But for Larry, the horror was not yet complete. It needed a final grotesque punctuation. He opted to discard her body on a random lawn, not to hide his crime, but to stage it to view the reaction from the press. The pair drove to a randomly selected house in Sunland, where Roy carried Shirley's broken body and discarded it in a bed of ivy upon a stranger's front lawn. Her body was found by a jogger the following morning. The autopsy report as a clinical document that reads like a catalog of horrors. It reveals that she died of strangulation only after receiving extensive blunt force trauma to her face, head, breasts, and left elbow. Her genitalia and rectum had been torn, caused in part by Roy having inserted a pair of pliers inside her body. Her left hand bore a puncture wound, a finger on her right hand had been slashed. And in the face of all this evidence, the body, the tools, the tape recording they themselves had made, Larry would later offer a defense so callous it defies comprehension. He would later claim that the tape recording offered nothing other than evidence of a threesome, and he added that towards the end, Sureley was screaming for him and Roy Norris to kill her, but he had no explanation for why a final desperate plea for the pain to end twisted by a monster into a justification the ultimate violation, followed by an ultimate lie.

18:47 News archive footage from NBC News can be found online, and it's the only known partial recording of one of the tapes. You can hear the footage playing when the courtroom door open, fins and someone exits. It was the most devastating testimony the jury has heard. The agonizing screams of teenager Lynnett Ledford as she was being tortured in a moving van. The accused, Lawrence Bittaker, showed no emotion as he listened, his eyes fixed on a transcript of the tape. The jurors concentrated on the transcript as if to try and block out the screams. It was too much for one member, who wept. A spectator rushed from the courtroom. It was more than she could stand. K NBC artist Elizabeth Williams also had to leave briefly, too overwhelmed to keep sketching. The tape. Recording lasted eleven minutes. Then Superior Court Judge Thomas Frederick's called a recess. Some spectators had waited days to hear the tape over defense objections. Now those spectators wish they hadn't.

19:57 I've heard screams before. I didn't. I thought I be able to sit and listen, but I've never heard anything like that in my life. I just couldn't believe it. I have a daughter, and I just I just couldn't see her, and I just I couldn't take it. You heard several times before, and it still seems to affect you, obviously quite deeper. Yeah, I just picture those girls.

20:45 H how long they were when they died. I'm sorry. In his open statement, the prosecutor told the jurors the tape would give them some idea of what hell is like. He was right from the County Courthouse in Torrance. If Joe ramires you center for.

21:29 On the next episode of Tapes from the Dark Side, we will be going into Roy and Larry's downfall what led to police finally catching them. I want to thank you for listening to Tapes from the Dark Side. I'm Tez, your host, and thank you so much to the people who support the show. We couldn't do this without you. Guys are newest members Nathan Davis, who joined for one year at the five dollars tier, which means he gets two free months of membership. Our new three month members Craig Romano, Casey Anderson, Rayna Alexis, Megan Kristen, and Eric Ninhala a new four dollar member Darius Williams, and two new five dollars members, William Robertson and Kirsten Brooks. If you want to join the dark Side and get ad free episodes and bonus episodes, there's a decent back catalog.

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23:09 He once said to me, He goes, do you understand what it feels like to actually put an ice pick through someone's ear and not feel anything? I didn't really care. I've had no real remorse or whatever I did. But I'm not the. Same person I was then Before he felt like a void, and now he's feeling like a flood of emotion for the first time ever. He calls it a damn breaking. Did it come on all of a sudden? A couple of weeks ago, I happened to ask my psychiatry, you still think I'm a sociopaph and he thought about it. I says, no, I don't really think you are anymore. He's having a new experience, a new emotion, and what he called and wrote about he described as becoming fully human.

23:55 Becoming fully human was a significant change in my life, very unusual. I find it very hard to believe that any one of those psychological professionals at San Quentin would have given him that diagnosis that once you were, but now you're not. I talked with him about his lack of empathy, and I recall one time he said he would find himself crying during soap operas, and I remember it was I couldn't control it. I started laughing and saying, you have got to be kidding me. It's absurd. You know it's absurd, and I know it's absurd. And he started laughing too. When he engages in behavior with people where he's coming across as caring and concern or seems to show a soft side of him, it's the FBI training in me that says, be very careful that this is not just another way to try to manipulate the situation.

24:52 The dog a dark side. What dark said, dark savage, get the hell out of my house. In Jesus' name, I pray h