S11, Chapter 6: Finale

0:00 It was October nineteen seventy nine. Roy Norris had a secret five of them, actually, and he couldn't stop talking. By the time Halloween came and went, Norris had already told his friend Jimmy Dalton things that no person should ever have to hear. He'd described the screaming, the mountains, the van, the tools. He described what they'd done to five teenage girls between June and October of that year, girls whose names were Cindy, Andrea, Jackie Lea and Shirley. Dalton didn't believe him. He thought it was talk prison bravado, the kind of dark fantasy men like Norris used to puff themselves up to seem dangerous, to seem powerful. He thought it was just talk. And then Shirley Ledford's body turned up on a front lawn in Sunland and Jimmy Dalton picked up the phone.

1:08 I think everyone has a bit of a fascination with the dark side. I myself, WI always love the dark side as well. I think it's something that everyone secretly longs for in moves. I just picture those girls and how long they were when they died. I'm sorry, the dark side, the dark side, the dark side.

1:53 This is the final episode on our series on Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, the man that law enforcement and the rest of society would come to know as the Toolbox Killers. Now, I'm not going to get too deep into it, but i do want to apologize for this final episode being so late. I had a little bit of a mental health crisis. But I'm back now, and if you want to hear a little more of the update regarding that, I'm going to be putting it on Patreon. Also, if you are a Patreon member and you want the last month or two refunded, I'm completely happy to do that. But now let's get back into the story. Over the last four episodes, we've traced how two men met inside the walls of the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, how they built a plan so deliberate and so cold that they called it a game, and how they spent the summer and fall of nineteen seventy nine hunting teenagers along the southern California coast. And today we cover the end, the arrest, the confession, the tape, and the trial, and the one question that hangs over every case like this one, how does the justice system prosecute evil when the only person who can help you do it is evil itself?

3:17 Part one The weak Link. The Imrosa Beach Police Department, by November of nineteen seventy nine, had a body but no suspects. Shirley Lynette Ledford, sixteen years old, had been found on the lawn of a suburban neighborhood in Sunland in the early hours of November. First Halloween night had barely ended, a resident discovered her body. She had been strangled with a coat hanger, the wire tightened with pliers. The case had been assigned to Detective Paul Byam. He was experienced, methodical, and he had almost nothing to work with.

3:59 No forensic evidence, no witnesses, no murder weapon. The killer or killers had left behind only a body and the evidence of what they had done to her. What Detective Bynum did have was a detail, a small one, a silver van. Several months earlier, a young woman named Shirley Sanders, sometimes identified in court documents as Robin Roebeck, had filed a police report. She'd been abducted, dragged into a silver GMC cargo van by two men in their mid thirties, driven to a remote location and raped. She had survived.

4:44 She had reported it, and the report had, as so often happens, disappeared into the bureaucracy, but Detective Bynum remembered it. Meanwhile, across Los Angeles, Roy Norris was talking. Norris and Lawrence Bittaker had known a man named Jimmy Dalton from their time at the California Men's Colony. In October of nineteen seventy nine, while the murderers were still ongoing, Roy had reconnected with Dalton, and Roy, who had never been good at keeping quiet, had started to brag. He told Dalton about the van, about the mountains, about the girls. He described the murder of Shirley Ladford in specific graphic detail, including the fact that she was the only victim whose body had been found. He also told Dalton something investigators had not yet made public, that there had been other incidents.

5:41 Three additional women had been attacked, but then had been released or had escaped. Norris seemed almost proud of the breadth of what he and Lawrence Bittaker had done. Dalton, by his own account, thought it was all fantasy, the kind of dark story of man like Norris might tell. He didn't believe it, and then he found out about Ledford's body, and that's when Dalton called his lawyer. The lawyer called the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD listened to what Dalton had to say and then passed him to detectives in her Mosa Beach, where Ledfort's body had been found, and that call would unravel everything Part two building the case. When Jimmy Dalton sat down with Detective Buying Them and his team, he gave them a thread, a silver van, two men, a confession about murders, murders that matched the details of the missing girls who had been in the news for months. Bynum took the thread and pulled. He knew about the September thirtieth ray report.

6:52 He dispatched an officer to Oregon, where Shirley Sanders was now living, and had to review a collection of mugshots. She went through them carefully, without hesitation. She picked out two photographs none other than Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. That identification gave Detective Bynum what he needed probable cause, But here he did something notable. Rather than move immediately, Bynum consulted with Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, the same prosecutor who had previously put Roy Norris away for rape and da Stephen Kay counseled patients. He told Biynum that a quick arrest would stop the murders, but it might lose the case. They needed to build something air tight.

7:42 The men were intelligent. Lawrence Bittaker, in particular, with his IQ of one p thirty eight, had spent years learning how the system worked. If they moved too soon and the case fell apart, these men could walk. So police mounted surveillance and Roy nor Tris, as he so often did, gave them exactly what they needed. He was spotted on the street dealing marijuana, a parole violation, a clean and simple charge that would put him in custody without tipping their hand on the murder investigation. Police made their move on November twentieth, nineteen seventy nine, two days before Thanksgiving.

8:22 The arrests happened simultaneously. Roy Norris was taken by the Hermosa Beach Police on the marijuana and parole violation charges. Across town in Burbank, officers went to the motel where Lawrence Bittaker was living, the Scott Motel and arrested him on suspicion of the rape of Shirley Sanders, two different charges, two different agencies, but one coordinated operation. When the cell doors closed, the men were separated and the investigators began to wait part three three hours. What happened next is in many ways the center of this entire story will be right back after this quick break. On November thirtieth, nineteen seventy nine, Roy Norris attended a preliminary hearing related to the September rape charge. By this point, he was already showing signs of strain. People who observed him that day noted that he seemed visibly stressed, not the composed, calculated man who had spent months committing crimes without detection.

9:41 He looked like a man who was beginning to understand that the walls were closing in. At the hearing, something unexpected happened. Roy Norris waved his Miranda rights, and he waved them voluntarily. Detective Baynam and Prosecutor Stephen Kay began questioning him. They started with the rape of Shirley Sanders, then methodically they moved on and confronted him with what Jimmy Dalton had told police. They showed him evidence recovered from his apartment and from Laurence Bittaker's motel room, and within three hours, Roy Norris had confessed to all five murders.

10:24 Three hours, five murders spanning five months, five victims. Roy described each killing in detail, provided information that only the perpetrators could have known. Details were later verified and used to corroborate his account. He knew, for example, that their first victim, Cindy Schaeffer, had been coming from a meeting at Presbyterian Church before she was abducted, and he knew that she had lost one shoe as she was dragged into the van. He knew partial details about Shirley Ladford's background that had not been made public, and then he agreed to testify against his partner in crime, Lawrence Bittaker.

11:08 Roy Norris accepted a plea bargain. He would plead guilty to five counts of murder and receive a sentence of forty five years to life, avoiding the death penalty. In exchange, he would cooperate fully with the investigation and take the witness stand against his partner. Prosecutor Stephen Kay later recalled being struck by Roy Norris's demeanor during those early interviews, Roy, he said, seemed afraid of him, aware that the da KAY had prosecuted him before, and he was very concerned about the possibility of facing him again. That fear became the lever that opened the case. Part four.

11:49 What they found. With Norris's cooperation, investigators executed search warrants on both men's residences. What they found at Biker's motel room was deeply disturbing, even by the standards of this investigation. Polaroid photographs, hundreds of them, photographs of young women and teenage girls, mostly taken at Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach, most taken without the subject's knowledge. Among them were photographs of two of the victims, Andrea Hall and Jackie Gilliam. Those photographs confirmed the identities of girls who had been reported missing for months. Investigators also found seven bottles of various acidic materials in Bittaker's room. Later it would emerge that these had been intended for a future victim. The murderers had not been meant to stop. At Roy Norris's apartment, police found a bracelet it had belonged to Shirley Ladford.

12:45 He kept it as a souvenir. But the most significant piece of evidence was not found at either residence. It was a piece of evidence we've discussed before, and it was found in the van in Murdermack. Inside the silver nineteen seventy seven GMC van doorra, the van Bittaker had purchased in February of nineteen seventy nine, the van they had nicknamed Murdermac, investigators discovered a seventeen minute audio recording. The tape had been made on October thirty first, nineteen seventy nine, folloween night. It was recording of the torture and murder of Shirley Lynnette Ladford. We did hear just a brief couple of seconds of the screaming that occurred on that recording previous episode, and I'm not going to again get into the contents of the torture. I will say this, the tape was played during the investigation, during court hearings, and ultimately during Bittaker's trial. As we've discussed before, the people who heard it, seasoned law enforcement officers, prosecutors, investigators with years of expperiance and violent crime, were shaken by it. Accounts from the courtroom describe people crying, people vomiting, people leaving the room. FBI special agent John Douglass, who would later serve as the basis for a character in the television series mind Hunter, described Lawrence Bittaker as the

14:17 most disturbing individual for whom he ever had to create a criminal profile. This tape so traumatic that it became a tool used to train FBI agents in victimology and the psychology of sadistic killers, not because of any instructive value about the perpetrators, but to confront agents with the human cost of what they were working to prevent. Shirley Ladford's mother was asked to listen to the recording. She identified her daughter's voice. There was additional evidence found in the van, a sledgehammer, plastic bag filled with lead weights, a book on how to locate police radio frequencies Bittaker had always been paranoid about monitoring law enforcement, a jar of vassilene, and two necklaces later confirmed to belong to two of the victims. The van had been customized soundproofed, outfitted with a bed on a raised frame with space underneath to conceal a body, equipped with locks that could be disabled from the inside and fitted with blackout windows.

15:22 It had been built for this from the very beginning. Part five aftermath. After Bittaker's arrest, he was placed in County jail awaiting trial, and he did not go quietly. A fellow inmate named David Lambert was asked by Roy Bittaker to draw a picture of a girl on the cell wall. When Lambert finished, Roy said it looked like Cindy, a reference to his first victim, Lucinda Schaeffer. He asked Lambert to add coat hangers and pliers to the drawing. Bittaker then signed the drawing, and he signed it Plier's a Bittaker. That was the jail nickname he had acquired after telling the other inmate stories about what he had done.

16:08 He signed autographs for other prisoners using that name. One autograph red Hitchhiker's Welcome Females Especially, another red simply Norris did it. He told another jail cellmate, Lloyd Carlos Douglas, about the abduction of Gillium and Lamp in detail. Douglas later testified at trial the man was incarcerated, facing the death penalty, and he was still performing, still bragging. And then there's this detail from the trial, something that appears in the California Supreme Court's later opinion on Bittaker's appeal. Another witness, a seventeen year old neighbor of Bittakers named Christina Dreil, testified about events that had occurred before the arrest.

16:54 She told the court that Bittaker had once shown her a polaroid picture of one of his victims, and he said, to her, quote the girls I get won't talk anymore. He had also, on a separate occasion, played a cassette tape for Christina. On it, she heard two girls screaming, and she heard Bittaker laughing. He played it for a teenager as entertainment. And then there's the matter of the dead bodies. They couldn't find. Of the five victims, only three bodies were recovered. Cindy Schaeffer and Andrea Hall were never found, despite Roy's cooperation in his detailed account of the murders, despite the searches of the San Gabriel Mountains, despite Bittaker later providing coordinates to criminologist Laura Brand, who heard from in previous episodes, the remains of both women have never been located. Families have been waiting for over forty years. Laurence Bittaker's trial began in nineteen eighty one.

17:56 Prosecutor Stephen Kay stood before the jury and he told them what they were about to hear. Quote for those of you who do not know what hell is like, you will find out. The tape was played, people fled the courtroom when it came time to address the fact that his key witness was a confessed murderer. The only person who could put Bittaker at the scene of every killing was a man who had committed those same killings. Stephen Kay didn't flinch. He said what needed to be said. Quote, You're not going to like him, but he's going to tell you the truth. You have to remember that when a murder is committed in hell, you don't have angels for witnesses. It has thus become one of the most quoted lines in California prosecutorial history, and it worked. Lawrence Bittaker faced twenty six charges, five counts of murder, five counts of kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, rape, oral copulation, sodomy, and being an ex felon in pss ession of a firearm, and he was convicted on all accounts. On March twenty second, nineteen eighty one, Lauren Siegmund Bittaker was sentenced to death.

19:10 The jury found thirty eight special circumstances, including twenty multiple murder circumstances, five felony murder circumstances based on kidnapping, and five based on rape. The evidence of torture was found to be proven as to four of the five victims. The jury found that Layah Lamp, the youngest victim, thirteen years old, had been killed specifically to prevent her from testifying. A thirteen year old murdered because she might have talked. Roy Norris in accordance with his plea agreement, was sentenced in May of nineteen eighty to forty five years to life. He testified against Bittaker spent decades in prison attempting to reframe his role, claiming at various points that he had been blacked out on drugs during the murders, that he had been a passive participant, that Bittaker had been the dominant force, but the tape made those claims impossible to sustain.

20:04 Part six the Ends. Lawrence Bittaker spent nearly four decades on death row at San Quentin prison, he mounted appeal after appeal more than two dozen by some counts, he showed no contrition and a recorded phone conversation with criminologist Laura Brand, who spent years interviewing him in an effort to locate the missing bodies, Lawrence Bittaker reflected on his own declining health after a series of heart attacks near the end of his life. He said, quote, it's kind of a taste of maybe what my victims were going through. Larry died on December thirteenth, twenty and nineteen. He was seventy nine years old natural causes. Roy Norris, on the other hand, was denied parole in two thousand and nine.

20:51 He didn't even attend the hearing, automatically deferring for another decade. He was denied again in twenty and nineteen, and he died on February twenty fourth, twenty twenty, at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. He was seventy two years old. They died within two months of each other. Laura Brand, who has spoken about both men extensively in their final years, noted the strained symmetry of it. Quote so many people call them soulmates, and you've got to wonder they died like an old married couple, like they couldn't live without each other. Detective Paul Binham, the man who took Jimmy Dalton's tip and turned it into the case that sent both men to prison, did not live to see the conclusion of the appeals process. He died by suicide in nineteen eighty seven. His colleague said that the case had never left him, that the things that he had seen and heard in the course of that investigation, the photographs, the tape, the details that Norris provided in his confession had stayed with him in ways that were impossible to put down. He was one of the best detectives, or most of Beach had ever had, and the Toolbox Killer's case cost him everything.

22:13 Epilogue. What remains two bodies have never been found, somewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains or perhaps elsewhere. The remains of Lucinda Cindy Schaeffer and Andrea Joy Hall are still waiting. Their families have been waiting longer. The Leadford tapes still exists. It has never been made public. It is used sparingly and with enormous care in law enforcement training. Every person who hears it is changed by it. And that is not an exaggeration. That is the documented account of everyone from FBI profilers to prosecutors to journalists who have been present when it was played. It is, by any measure, one of the most disturbing pieces of evidence ever produced in American criminal case. It was made deliberately, with planning, with equipment, with the intent to relive it. That is the final thing to understand about Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris.

23:13 They were not men who lost control. They were not impulsive. They were not the product of a single night's rage or a moment's broken judgment. They planned this, they rehearsed it, they documented it, they kept their trophies, they bragged about it, and they intended to keep going. They were only stopped because Roy Norris could not keep his mouth shut, because something in him needed an audience, needed credit, needed someone to know what he had done. And because one man, Jimmy Dalton, a convicted criminal, sitting across from a friend he'd known in prison, heard those stories and decided some things are too terrible to be kept secret. He called his lawyer, As lawyer called the police and five teenage girls murdered over the course of one California summer finally got something like justice. Their names were Lucinda lenn Schaeffer she was sixteen, Andrea Joy Hall she was eighteen, Jacqueline Doris Gilliam she was fifteen, Jacqueline Leah Lamp she was thirteen, and Shirley Lynnette Ledford she was sixteen. Thank you for listening to tapes from the dark Side. This concludes our

24:46 series on the Toolbox Killers. No batoquatly b