Lawrence Bittaker

What the record shows

Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker (1940-2019) was an American serial killer who, with accomplice Roy Lewis Norris, kidnapped and murdered five teenage girls in Los Angeles County, California, between June and October 1979. Because of the hand tools used on the victims, the pair became known as the "Tool Box Killers." A Los Angeles County jury convicted Bittaker in February 1981 of five counts of first-degree murder and 21 related felonies, and he was sentenced to death in March 1981. The California Supreme Court affirmed in 1989. He was never executed: the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) reported that he died of natural causes on death row at San Quentin State Prison on December 13, 2019, aged 79.

According to the California Supreme Court's opinion in People v. Bittaker (1989), Bittaker bought a van with sliding doors to make seizing victims easier. The victims, as named by CDCR and the court record, were Lucinda Lynn Schaefer, 16, abducted on June 24, 1979, in Redondo Beach; Andrea Joy Hall, 18, picked up while hitchhiking on Pacific Coast Highway on July 8; Jacqueline Doris Gilliam, 15, and Jacqueline Leah Lamp, 13, taken from a bus stop near Hermosa Beach on September 2; and Shirley Lynette Ledford, 16, abducted on October 31 while hitchhiking home in Sunland-Tujunga. The girls were driven into the San Gabriel Mountains, sexually assaulted and killed. Ledford's body was found on a Sunland lawn the next morning. The bodies of Schaefer and Hall were never recovered; the remains of Gilliam and Lamp were found in February 1980 after Norris agreed to help locate them.

The investigation began in November 1979 when, according to the Wikipedia article, Norris described the killings to a former fellow inmate, who consulted an attorney and then went to the police. The court opinion records that a woman who had survived an abduction and rape in September 1979 identified Bittaker from a photographic lineup, supporting the arrest warrant. Norris was arrested in Hermosa Beach on November 20, 1979, and Bittaker the same day at a Burbank motel. A tape recording of Ledford's abuse and photographs of victims, found in the van, were later used at trial.

Under a plea agreement described in the court opinion, Norris pleaded guilty to five counts of murder without special circumstances, two counts of rape and one count of robbery, agreed to help locate the bodies and to testify against Bittaker, and, prosecutors having agreed not to seek death, was sentenced to 45 years to life.

Bittaker's trial opened in Los Angeles County Superior Court in Torrance on January 19, 1981, before Judge Thomas Fredericks. United Press International reported the guilty verdicts on February 17, 1981; CDCR recorded convictions on all 26 counts, including kidnapping, conspiracy, rape, sodomy and firearm possession. The jury found 38 special circumstances true and returned a death verdict a week later. Bittaker testified that Norris had framed him and that he did not learn the girls had died until after his arrest. Judge Fredericks sentenced him to death on March 24, 1981 (CDCR lists March 22), and he was received on San Quentin's death row on March 30.

On June 22, 1989, a unanimous California Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Allen Broussard, affirmed the conviction and death sentence, holding that a restriction on death-penalty questioning of prospective jurors was erroneous but not prejudicial. According to the Wikipedia article, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in June 1990, execution dates set for 1989 and 1991 were stayed, and in 1993 a court declared Bittaker a vexatious litigant after he filed dozens of lawsuits. Norris died of natural causes on February 24, 2020, aged 72, at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, the Associated Press reported.

Bittaker was born on September 27, 1940, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to the Wikipedia article, he met Norris in 1977 at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where Norris was serving a sentence for rape; Bittaker was paroled in October 1978 and Norris in January 1979. The court opinion notes that Bittaker was known in prison as "Pliers Bittaker" for the stories he told about torturing women.