Latest / True Crime California / TCC #9: The Toolbox Killer

Transcript

TCC #9: The Toolbox Killer · True Crime California

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hi there. I'm Cony Gallagher and I'm Ethan Flick, and
• 0:04
  together we are the husband and wife team Behind and
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  Then They Were Gone a true crime podcast about unsolved
• 0:11
  missing persons cases. Each week we take a deep dive
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  into a case that I have researched and written about
• 0:20
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  Speaker 2: Right, and I react naturally and usually leave with a
• 0:27
  whole lot of stuff to edit out with the podcast.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Very true, but I do love getting your analysis and
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  a fresh perspective on these crimes that I've been spending
• 0:36
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  a brand new episode.
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  Then They Were Gone dot com?
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  Speaker 2: Could you hold the Key to bringing Someone Home?
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  Speaker 3: We are the Brutal, Bizarre, and Boozy podcast. I'm Declan
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  the Sun.
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  Speaker 4: And I'm Jane the Mom. This is the podcast where
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  You might get to hear crazy stories about our pets.
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  Are just silly movie recommendations.
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• 2:06
  Speaker 5: Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
• 2:12
  and I'm glad you're here. Hey everybody, welcome back to
• 2:24
  episode nine of True Crime California. So just yeah, I
• 2:30
  just started this podcast a couple months ago. It's already
• 2:33
  been more successful than I could have ever imagined in
• 2:35
  such a short time. Thank you to everybody who has
• 2:37
  tuned in. Who's listening. You guys are incredible. The last
• 2:43
  couple of weeks here in La I live in la
• 2:44
  If people don't know, they've been real rough. There's been
• 2:48
  you know, catastrophic fires. A lot of people I know
• 2:51
  have lost their homes. Air quality has been terrible. Everything
• 2:55
  kind of was in a standstill, you know, I'm safely
• 2:58
  tucked away in the valley. I still lost my power
• 3:01
  for eighteen hours and there was ash raining down. It
• 3:04
  feels like Armageddon a little bit. It feels like the Apocalypse,
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  I guess, maybe more appropriately so. It's been a rough
• 3:11
  couple of weeks here, but Los Angeles is one of
• 3:14
  the most magic places in the whole world. It's magical,
• 3:17
  it's fantastic, and I have no doubt that it will
• 3:20
  come back better than ever, as long as we can
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  keep the fucking smart city and fast rail out, which
• 3:26
  I really worry they're going to put where these families
• 3:30
  have lived for a long time, so we'll see what happens.
• 3:34
  Is jumping into my political hot takes here, I think
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  I wanted to start today with a little bit less
• 3:42
  on the case because the case that I chose is
• 3:45
  absolutely disturbing, like just next level awful. And for those
• 3:52
  of you who listened to Twisted Listens, I actually asked Diva,
• 3:56
  I said, you know, weirdly, I'm having troubled choosing cases
• 3:59
  in California, or even really finding ones. It's like when
• 4:02
  somebody asks you your favorite band and your mind just
• 4:04
  goes completely blank. You're like, I don't listen to music,
• 4:06
  you know. So I reached out to her and I
• 4:09
  was like, can you can you give me some suggestions?
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  And boy did she And I think I forgot who
• 4:13
  I was asking because Diva's like one of the gnarliest
• 4:15
  people I've ever met in my life. So she of
• 4:18
  course went for you know, the gnarliest cases, and by gnarly,
• 4:22
  like she's wonderful, She's intelligent, brilliant, beautiful, wonderful, but like
• 4:26
  when it comes to true crime, like she does not play.
• 4:29
  And I just kind of blindly jumped into the case.
• 4:32
  I knew the case, this case, but I.
• 4:34
  Speaker 6: Don't think I knew it. I don't. I didn't.
• 4:37
  Speaker 5: I definitely didn't know it the way that I needed
• 4:40
  to in order to say, hell, no, I'm not touching
• 4:42
  that with a ten foot pole. So I got myself
• 4:44
  into this mess and we're just we're gonna get through it.
• 4:47
  I'm going to cover the Toolbox Killer. And I mean,
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  this is honestly like a devastating, devastating case. I think
• 4:57
  for me researching it, reading things, hearing things which I'll
• 5:02
  talk about, and kind of knowing things in a more
• 5:05
  first hand manner than the way that most podcasts disseminate.
• 5:09
  The information really really messed with me, Like I've had
• 5:12
  some general anxiety since researching this. I've been checking that
• 5:16
  my doors are locked, I've checking on my son at
• 5:19
  night more.
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  Speaker 6: This is one of the most disturbing cases.
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  Speaker 5: And I've been doing this, you know, my last podcast
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  I had for four years. So this is very very
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  much like a crazy, tough, horrible case. So I'm just
• 5:36
  gonna get into it. I want to thank you Diva
• 5:38
  for this gift. It's really horrible, so let's just talk
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  about it, believe it or not. As with the majority
• 5:46
  of the cases I've covered so far on this podcast,
• 5:49
  and I promise this will change. This mostly takes place
• 5:51
  in the late seventies. It's in the LA area, definitely
• 5:55
  a theme for our podcast, and the two main perpetrators
• 6:00
  Devils are Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. Now I think
• 6:06
  Larry Lawrence Bittaker is sort of like the main guy.
• 6:10
  Speaker 6: Like when you.
• 6:10
  Speaker 5: Talk about the Toolbox Killers, you can also often just
• 6:14
  find the toolbox Killer because it's pretty clear who the
• 6:18
  main aggressor was, who the sadist was. I mean, they're
• 6:21
  both super sadistic. But when people murder together, there's kind
• 6:25
  of always a leader and a follower, and I would
• 6:28
  say that Lawrence Bittaker was absolutely the leader, so much
• 6:33
  so that sometimes, like I said, when you read about
• 6:35
  this case, it won't even be plural. It'll just be
• 6:37
  like he's the toolbox killer, and then Roy Norris was
• 6:40
  like his sidekick. I'm going to get into some details,
• 6:43
  and you guys can decide for yourselves. I think they're
• 6:47
  probably like sixty forty, so neither one of them is
• 6:50
  anything more than a complete waste of space in the world. Okay,
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  But now that I've kind of got that out of
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  the way. Lawrence Sigmund And Bittaker was born September twenty seventh,
• 7:03
  nineteen forty in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Larry's parents were teens at
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  the time and did not really want him or his
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  older brother. His mother was a heavy drinker and his
• 7:13
  father was abusive, so after a short while, their family
• 7:18
  convinced them to give up the boys for adoption. Now
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  you will read a number of things about Larry Bittaker online,
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  and a lot of them are not true and have
• 7:29
  been debunked much more recently, Like you know, in the
• 7:33
  last few years, through interviews with Larry through like research
• 7:38
  into his family. So if you look on Wikipedia, it's
• 7:40
  going to tell you that he was in and out
• 7:41
  of orphanages, I believe, and he was adopted by like
• 7:44
  some random people.
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  Speaker 6: That's not true.
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  Speaker 5: He was actually raised by his parents for a short
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  time and then given up to an aunt an uncle
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  that were within his family. So he was adopted by
• 7:56
  one of his aunts, but somehow, like didn't seem to
• 7:59
  know who his real mother was at any point in
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  his young life, So I don't know how they worked
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  that around until he got older that he didn't realize
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  that like his actual mother was within his family. Even
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  as an adult after he found out he was adopted,
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  there wasn't as far as I could find, any sort
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  of like reuniting with his mother or meeting at all,
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  you know, which is interesting because it's an aunt, so
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  it's like what her sister probably was who adopted him.
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  But it's still felt very like detached in a way,
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  which is interesting. Maybe it was a very big family,
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  you know, maybe the siblings were very far apart in
• 8:33
  age so it was easier to conceal it.
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  Speaker 6: I don't know.
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  Speaker 5: What I do know is that this is somewhat similar
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  to our case last week with Marlene Olive. And this
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  is obviously a very you know, harsh form of trauma
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  for children sometimes to find out that they're adopted, and
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  for Laurence Spittaker this was definitely the case. It said
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  that even in his seventies, he was still talking about
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  his mother, which is a very like Ed Kemper moment.
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  I can always bring it back to Ed Big Ed
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  is like we will cover him. But Lawrence Bittaker here
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  was very bitter about his mother, I think, up until
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  his death, and even said that if he saw her
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  on the street that he would want to kill her,
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  which I think is very significant considering what happens. I
• 9:15
  think it's significant that she's a teenager, or that she
• 9:18
  was when he was born. I think it's significant that
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  she abandoned him, and I think it's very significant that
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  this stuck with him his entire life. And of course,
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  in typical serial killer sociopath fashion, he of course blamed
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  you know, his growing up, his life, his young life
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  on why he was the way he was. But I
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  think he's really significant to note that he never really
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  focused on his father.
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  Speaker 6: He was always on his mother.
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  Speaker 5: Another Ed kemper trait, but you know, he was just
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  very much angry at his mom his whole life, and
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  I think that's important to note. So he was raised
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  in a very strict and borderline abusive household, which only
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  you know, added to the te that he felt as
• 10:01
  a child. One of the things that I definitely understand
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  personally as a traumatic kind of thing was that his
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  family moved a lot because his adopted father was in
• 10:12
  aviation and had to.
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  Speaker 6: Move for work.
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  Speaker 5: This left Larry very isolated and unable to make long
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  term friends, because what's the point. I moved a lot
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  as a child, and it is really tough, and I
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  do understand that it does make it difficult to form
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  attachments to people because you're just going to lose them
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  in a short amount of time and have to start over,
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  and so that can be really traumatic as well. You
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  end up kind of feeling hopeless and you kind of
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  just give up on any sort of social stability. Larry
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  was very very smart. He had an IQ of one
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  thirty eight, which is borderline genius. But this can be
• 10:48
  as much an issue as a good thing, especially when
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  you kind of are young but you know exactly what's
• 10:53
  going on. You realize that you're being taken away from
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  people repeatedly. You realize that you're being ignored by your parents,
• 10:59
  or that you maybe your parents don't love you. You
• 11:02
  are immature, but you're smart, so you pick up on things,
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  but you don't have the ability to process them, just
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  because biologically you can't at.
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  Speaker 6: That point in life.
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  Speaker 5: And I think this can lead to a lot of
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  anger issues, especially in somebody like Larry.
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  Speaker 6: So.
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  Speaker 5: When he was pretty young, he started lighting fires. He
• 11:20
  said he did this to get his parents attention, and
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  in return, his mother would do things like burn him
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  with cigarettes to teach him not to play with fire.
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  It doesn't make sense, but it's horrific. He also went
• 11:32
  out at night and harmed animals, which I won't go into,
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  and as he got a bit older, he would sneak
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  out at night and start stalking people and spying on them,
• 11:41
  mostly women, but men as well. He just wanted to
• 11:45
  essentially learn how to stalk his prey. So we're going
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  down a path here for sure. By the time he
• 11:51
  was twelve, he'd already been arrested for shoplifting, which you
• 11:53
  can imagine did not go over well with his parents.
• 11:56
  This happened a few more times over his teenage years,
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  and he would later make the excuse that he did
• 12:00
  it because he had no love from his parents. So
• 12:03
  again there he is blaming them for the way that
• 12:06
  he is, the way that he's acting, when in reality
• 12:09
  he knows better. Everything's just an excuse. Nothing his fault
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  is his fault. He downplays everything he does. It's just
• 12:16
  an obvious pattern and so blatant, and for as smart
• 12:19
  as he is, it's pretty sad that he doesn't realize
• 12:21
  how transparent this is. So sometime in high school, so
• 12:25
  he was in Pennsylvania at this time, and sometime during
• 12:28
  high school his family moved to Los Angeles or I mean,
• 12:32
  he had moved around obviously, but I think he mostly
• 12:35
  like his home base was kind of Pennsylvania, and then
• 12:37
  they moved to La just East I think, or maybe
• 12:40
  even in Pasadena. He started school here and sort of
• 12:44
  fell into the same patterns of crime and trouble. And
• 12:48
  it's now nineteen fifty seven. At the age of seventeen,
• 12:50
  Despite being super smart, Lawrence Larry drops out of high school. However,
• 12:56
  before this, while still in high school, he was able
• 12:58
  to get himself a girlfriend, a pretty blonde by the
• 13:00
  name of mary Anne.
• 13:02
  Speaker 6: She was a Catholic.
• 13:03
  Speaker 5: Girl, so not fast by any means. And one of
• 13:06
  the things the two of them would do together is
• 13:08
  they would go hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. Larry
• 13:12
  knew these mountains pretty well as he was a bit
• 13:14
  of a loner obviously, so he would show her around
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  to different areas, and this is very important for the
• 13:20
  leader that they spent time in these mountains. It's also
• 13:25
  significant to note that she wore a cross at all
• 13:28
  times on her neck. And I'm just going to tell
• 13:30
  you right now that he used to make some of
• 13:32
  his victims wear crosses while he tortured them. So at
• 13:41
  one point, Larry told mary Anne that he loved her,
• 13:44
  and her reply to him was I like you a lot.
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  This was a big blow to Larry's ego and stuck
• 13:51
  with him forever. In a later interview, he admitted to
• 13:55
  recording himself making out with mary Anne without her consent
• 13:59
  up in the mount mountains, which is really fucking weird.
• 14:03
  He said he wanted to listen back to it later on,
• 14:05
  and my assumption is because he wanted to masturbate to it,
• 14:08
  because this is the kind of guy that he was,
• 14:11
  and this is very wild to me and also indicative
• 14:14
  of paraphilia. And right now I want to take a
• 14:17
  moment to call out that there are so many similarities
• 14:21
  between this case and Bill Bonnen's case, and not just
• 14:25
  in the timing and location, which is also pretty crazy,
• 14:28
  but Bill Bonnon also had paraphilia, which is quote a
• 14:32
  persistent and intense sexual interest in atypical objects, situations, or
• 14:37
  individuals that differs from conventional sexual behavior. It's a pretty
• 14:42
  broad scope, but I think both of these guys fit
• 14:46
  that in like every sense. So things like wanting to
• 14:49
  record these quote sessions or wanting to hurt someone in
• 14:53
  order to get off like these are very specific and
• 14:57
  good examples of paraphilia. Already, we're seeing some weird behavior
• 15:02
  from Larry, and it's not anything new in terms of
• 15:05
  how serial killers behave, but it's important to note for
• 15:08
  the story, so you know, just obviously again I say
• 15:11
  going down a path. So of course they break up
• 15:13
  during high school and Larry's back on his own and
• 15:16
  starts getting into trouble again and gets arrested a few
• 15:19
  more times, and eventually he's sent to the Tracy Dual
• 15:23
  Vocational Institute in Tracy, California, which is like the middle
• 15:26
  of nowhere, up the Fire Freeway. So he's like way
• 15:29
  up in central California at this vocational institute, which is
• 15:32
  essentially like it's a prison for like young young people.
• 15:38
  I believe he's like seventeen at this time, and while
• 15:40
  in this institution, he's given psychiatric evaluations and found to
• 15:44
  be extremely disturbed, very angry and violent and not really
• 15:49
  amenable to therapy. So a lot of big red flags here. However,
• 15:54
  while he was there, he was underage, so they couldn't
• 15:57
  keep him. They had to release him. He had really
• 15:59
  done anything bad enough to keep him forever. They were
• 16:02
  just like, holy shit, this guy's dangerous, all right, good luck,
• 16:05
  so they let him go after a pretty short while.
• 16:08
  When Larry was released, he went home, and I actually
• 16:12
  found out that this is not exactly true.
• 16:14
  Speaker 6: Timing wise.
• 16:16
  Speaker 5: His parents disappeared on him, like stopped responding to him,
• 16:21
  didn't let him know where they lived. And I read
• 16:23
  that they did this while he was still a teen,
• 16:24
  but it actually happened when he was in his early twenties,
• 16:28
  so it wasn't like as soon as he got out
• 16:30
  here he didn't have a home, but it was like
• 16:31
  fairly shortly thereafter his parents moved. They left no forwarding address,
• 16:36
  no number. They just didn't want to know him anymore.
• 16:39
  So more trauma for Larry here. But at this point,
• 16:41
  you know, he's old enough that his actions were what
• 16:44
  led to this.
• 16:45
  Speaker 6: He could have helped, he could have.
• 16:46
  Speaker 5: Kept this from happening, but he's just refusing to take
• 16:50
  responsibility or change his ways. So now Larry's out on
• 16:53
  his own. He's living in the Hollywood area, and he's
• 16:56
  not working, and he's just doing petty crimes to support himself.
• 16:59
  He didn't have a job at any point before this
• 17:01
  that I could find, which is something a little bit
• 17:04
  different about him, Like even Bill Bonnan had to cover.
• 17:07
  And later on Larry does get a job and does
• 17:09
  kind of have a cover. But it's interesting that in
• 17:11
  his younger life he was just kind of just a criminal, like.
• 17:14
  Speaker 6: That's all he did.
• 17:16
  Speaker 5: So over the next ten years or so, Larry was
• 17:18
  in and out of prison for various increasingly violent crimes,
• 17:22
  including robbery, all sorts of bad shit. Now, during this time,
• 17:26
  he was further evaluated and found to be highly manipulative
• 17:29
  and a borderline psychopath. He was given multiple long sentences
• 17:35
  for up to fifteen years each, but kept getting out
• 17:38
  after only a year or two in prison, only to
• 17:41
  go back months later, only to be released again. It's
• 17:43
  the tale as old as time with our California, with
• 17:45
  our system in general, especially with rapes and things which
• 17:49
  were not really taken seriously.
• 17:50
  Speaker 6: At this point.
• 17:51
  Speaker 5: So it's pretty easy for him to go in for
• 17:53
  a violent crime and then come back out, which is
• 17:58
  exactly what happened over and over and over. Above all else,
• 18:03
  this institutionalized him, which made him both used to and
• 18:07
  very comfortable with being in prison, which is super scary
• 18:09
  because it means that he's not really afraid of punishment,
• 18:12
  and not being afraid of going to prison will absolutely
• 18:16
  embolden a criminal to continue criming. They're going to keep
• 18:20
  doing the crimes, you know, because they don't give a fuck.
• 18:22
  Then what are they afraid of? So that's very scary
• 18:26
  to consider. We're now in nineteen seventy four and thirty
• 18:31
  four year old Larry is high on drugs and alcohol
• 18:34
  and he goes to a Ralph's in Hollywood, which I
• 18:36
  believe to be the rock and roll Ralphs in Hollywood.
• 18:38
  It's on Sunset and they called it the rock and
• 18:40
  Roll Ralps because it's where like all the hair bands
• 18:42
  and like rock stars would go after they were done,
• 18:45
  like on the Sunset Strip, like doing their thing. Nowadays
• 18:47
  it's just like a grimy ass Ralphs in like kind
• 18:50
  of what West Hollywood ish and it's just gross. But
• 18:54
  in its heyday, it was called the rock and Roll
• 18:55
  Ralphs and you would go there to like see, you know,
• 18:58
  rock stars. This it was just a Ralphs And this
• 19:01
  is where he went. And just based on kind of
• 19:03
  the location and what I read about him, I think
• 19:05
  that's where he was. So anyway, he goes in here
• 19:07
  and he tries to steal a steak by putting it
• 19:09
  down his pants. A clerk working there caught him and
• 19:12
  chased him into like the back of the store. Larry
• 19:15
  turned around and stabbed the clerk with a pocket knife
• 19:19
  he had brought with him. Now, when Larry retells the story,
• 19:22
  he is so it's so ridiculous the way he does this.
• 19:26
  According to him, he barely remembers anything, of course, you know,
• 19:29
  because he's so high, and he says things like, quote,
• 19:33
  apparently I had a pocket knife in my hand, so
• 19:36
  really just removing him from the situation as best he can, Like, Larry,
• 19:40
  how'd you get that pocket knife where it just appeared
• 19:43
  somebody just like willed it into your hand, Like come on,
• 19:45
  you brought it with you, you pulled it out, and you
• 19:47
  stabbed the man. And it's just like every single time
• 19:50
  he tells a story, it's very passive on his part.
• 19:54
  Some of the things that he does are the most
• 19:56
  horrifying things I've ever heard, and the way that he
• 19:58
  tells it is so insulting and so obvious. I think
• 20:02
  I've said this a few times, but it really just
• 20:03
  can't say it enough. So another example of this, I
• 20:06
  apparently I had a pocket knife in my hand, like
• 20:08
  get out of here, get out of here, guy. So unfortunately,
• 20:12
  this gets him sent to the California Men's Colony CMC,
• 20:16
  which is a prison in San Luis Obispo, which is
• 20:18
  on the coast in central California. Now I've read that
• 20:22
  he was sent to a mental health ward due to
• 20:23
  this attack, and that is general and because of his
• 20:26
  general demeanor and past evaluations, And upon doing more reading,
• 20:29
  I did find that this prison has those facilities, so
• 20:32
  I think that he was being treated at this prison.
• 20:34
  Speaker 6: But I don't know.
• 20:35
  Speaker 5: What I do know is that if he was, it
• 20:37
  did not do anything. He's a sociopath. He was diagnosed
• 20:41
  as such and more as I've noted. But anyway, this
• 20:45
  it's unfortunate he got sent here because this situation changed
• 20:48
  his life and the lives of so many innocent young
• 20:51
  girls in ways that I don't think anybody ever saw coming.
• 20:55
  The way that this happened is that this is where
• 20:58
  he met his future partner in murder, Roy Norris. Roy
• 21:06
  Norris was a serial rapist who had been given a
• 21:09
  sentence of three years to life after being prosecuted for
• 21:12
  a rape in nineteen fifty seven. Now there's a lot
• 21:16
  of misinformation about Roy Norris out there, and I'll talk
• 21:19
  about this for a moment and then I'll clear up
• 21:20
  some of the issues. Roy Norris was born in Greeley, Colorado,
• 21:24
  in nineteen forty eight, he said, to unwed parents who
• 21:28
  got married to avoid the stigma, but quickly gave him
• 21:31
  up to foster care as his mother was addicted to
• 21:33
  drugs and his father was mostly absent.
• 21:36
  Speaker 6: He said.
• 21:37
  Speaker 5: He went in and out of these homes and would
• 21:38
  sometimes live with his family, but it was very unstable,
• 21:42
  and I'm sure that you know this is his excuse
• 21:46
  and what led to him hating his mother and women
• 21:49
  in general. Now, he also said that he was sexually
• 21:51
  abused at a young age in one of these homes,
• 21:54
  which I'm sure would have you know, contributed to his
• 21:56
  later sexual deviancy when he was sixteen and living with
• 22:00
  his birth parents. Now this did happen, because this is
• 22:05
  something he actually said was real. When he was sixteen,
• 22:08
  living with his birth parents, he made a move on
• 22:10
  an older family member who told his father.
• 22:13
  Speaker 6: Roy said.
• 22:14
  Speaker 5: He then attempted suicide by injecting air into his arteries
• 22:17
  but failed. His parents, at this point told him they
• 22:20
  no longer wanted him and would divorce when he left home. Now,
• 22:23
  this is what he says. This is what he wrote
• 22:26
  to his pen pals after his arrest. In reality, it
• 22:29
  turns out he had a really stable life with loving
• 22:31
  parents who took great care of him and his siblings.
• 22:34
  Speaker 6: The only real issue.
• 22:35
  Speaker 5: In his young life was that his father's mother hated
• 22:38
  his mother. But like, welcome to the world, my dude. Like,
• 22:40
  that's one of the most common issues in families.
• 22:43
  Speaker 6: Ever.
• 22:43
  Speaker 5: The women don't get along like the moms and the wives.
• 22:46
  It's tale as old as time, to be honest, so
• 22:51
  not really a big deal. But he did come on
• 22:53
  to that family member, so that is something that happened.
• 22:55
  But what the point is is that he created this
• 22:58
  whole narrative with people where he was like a victim
• 23:01
  and that's why he was the way that he was,
• 23:02
  and in reality, he's.
• 23:03
  Speaker 6: Just fucked up. There's something wrong with him.
• 23:06
  Speaker 5: So either way, when he was about seventeen, he did
• 23:07
  in fact going to the Navy and was sent to
• 23:09
  Vietnam in nineteen sixty nine. This fucked him up royally,
• 23:13
  as it did to many young men, which is why
• 23:15
  I say, fuck war, Fuck imperialism. It's absolutely not okay
• 23:18
  to kill innocent people and young children for profit.
• 23:22
  Speaker 6: It's not okay.
• 23:23
  Speaker 5: He was honorably discharged after a year and sent out
• 23:27
  to wander in the world, angry, sexually, devant, and ready
• 23:30
  to hurt people. And I do want to note that
• 23:33
  he was discharged for a series of rapes that he
• 23:36
  committed while in Vietnam, which is insane to me that
• 23:39
  he was honorably discharged, Like way to go US government. Anyway,
• 23:43
  I'm sure this emboldened him and he went to work
• 23:45
  harming innocent women pretty much immediately upon his release. His
• 23:50
  first arrest for both rape and attempted rape was that
• 23:52
  same year, in nineteen sixty nine, so either just before
• 23:56
  or right after being released, and I believe that this
• 23:58
  led to Navy psychiatrists diagnosing him with schizoid personality disorder
• 24:02
  before discharging him, so we.
• 24:05
  Speaker 6: Have an idea of what he's about.
• 24:06
  Speaker 5: But again they just let him go, which is crazy
• 24:08
  to me. In nineteen seventy, he attacked a woman on
• 24:12
  the San Diego on a San Diego college campus, either
• 24:15
  in San Diego State or you see San Diego. Sorry,
• 24:17
  you see San Diego, beating her on the head with
• 24:19
  a brick. After stalking her for hours, he then took
• 24:23
  her head and beat it on the sidewalk until police arrived. Now,
• 24:27
  she survived this attack, but like, what is going on?
• 24:30
  Why is he doing this? Where did this come from?
• 24:32
  She's just walking for this. He was given a whopping
• 24:36
  five years in a Tascadero State hospital before being released
• 24:39
  as no further danger to society. This was after being
• 24:43
  classified as a sexual deviant and after multiple rapes and
• 24:47
  this attack, which is also the sexual deviant part is
• 24:50
  something that he shared with Larry. Larry was also classified
• 24:53
  as a sexual deviant, and both of these men just
• 24:56
  keep getting released. Three months after this last release, he
• 25:00
  raped a woman shocking and was arrested about a month
• 25:03
  after that as she spotted him. She found his motorcycle
• 25:07
  and called the police and were like, come do your jobs,
• 25:10
  and they arrested him, and this is when he was
• 25:13
  sent to the men's colony, which is where he met Larry. Now, harr,
• 25:17
  I want to note that obviously rape wasn't taken seriously
• 25:19
  in the seventies. I mean, it's still not really, but
• 25:21
  back then it really wasn't, which is obviously a big problem.
• 25:24
  I kind of already talked about it. But it's really
• 25:26
  problematic that these two met in prison and then were
• 25:28
  like pretty quickly released after all of the things that
• 25:32
  they did, which is nuts. I mean, at this point,
• 25:35
  Larry wasn't arrested for rape, but he was arrested for
• 25:37
  like pretty much attempted murder, and both of them are
• 25:40
  just like, all right, do a couple of years and
• 25:41
  go back out into the world. There isn't really anything
• 25:45
  funny about this story. But one thing that I thought
• 25:47
  was a little comical was that these two men bonded
• 25:50
  in prison over making jewelry. There's actually like photos of
• 25:54
  jewelry that they made together while in prison, which is
• 25:57
  incredibly random and so off the wall, but it's what
• 26:00
  brought them together. And during this time, while they were
• 26:03
  making jewelry, they were also planning out how they would
• 26:06
  attack women once they were free again, which like, because
• 26:09
  of course they're going to be free again, so they
• 26:11
  had all the time in the world here to plan
• 26:12
  it out, and then once they're out they put it
• 26:15
  in action. They plan out all the small details, including
• 26:18
  agreeing that they would kill their victims to avoid going
• 26:20
  back to prison. They thought they were going to get
• 26:23
  a van, they were going to find a dumping ground.
• 26:25
  I mean, they went all in on this plan, and
• 26:27
  they went back and forth on like the different things
• 26:28
  that they could do where they could go, Let's find
• 26:30
  a cave, let's do this, let's do that. But they
• 26:32
  really were like putting the pieces in place, and they
• 26:35
  even told another inmate about it, though he wasn't really
• 26:38
  invited to join for whatever reason, maybe he wasn't going
• 26:40
  to get out of prison. I don't know, but one
• 26:43
  of the most insane parts of their plan was their
• 26:46
  agreement to murder a girl for every teen year thirteen
• 26:51
  through nineteen, which is really extra sickening that this is
• 26:55
  just like a game to them. So they planned this,
• 26:59
  and then in nineteen seventy eight, near the end of
• 27:01
  nineteen seventy eight, Larry is released from CMC and he
• 27:05
  actually gets a job in Los Angeles as a skilled machinist. Now,
• 27:10
  this paid him about one thousand dollars a month, which
• 27:14
  is about forty eight hundred dollars I'm so sorry one
• 27:17
  thousand dollars a week. He made one thousand dollars a week,
• 27:20
  which is about forty eight hundred dollars a week in
• 27:22
  today's money. Now, he started to rent a room in
• 27:27
  a CD motel in Burbank, California, which I am recording
• 27:30
  in Burbank, California right now. The motel called the Scott Motel,
• 27:34
  which is after a nearby street, is still there and
• 27:37
  it's still like CD and gross, but it's not nearly
• 27:41
  as bad as it was in the seventies. The motel's
• 27:44
  located like by the freeway, kind of off a beaten path,
• 27:47
  Like really, you're not going to drive there very often
• 27:49
  unless you're going to the freeway.
• 27:51
  Speaker 6: There is like a park that.
• 27:52
  Speaker 5: Is kind of like a mouth into actually like a
• 27:54
  really nice neighborhood. But it's really weird because the road
• 27:56
  that it's on almost like splits it. There's like the
• 27:58
  freeway side and then there's like the nice side. So
• 28:01
  he was on like the freeway side, and it's just
• 28:03
  not a good area of town. That being said, this
• 28:06
  was the only time in his life that he really
• 28:08
  ever made friends, and his friends would describe him as
• 28:11
  generous and friendly and helpful. He donated money to the
• 28:15
  Salvation Army. I mean, here's where this like manipulation comes in,
• 28:19
  where he's putting up this front, and I think this
• 28:22
  was all in service of his greater plan to murder
• 28:26
  these women. Because if you remember, before he met Roy,
• 28:30
  before they concocted this plan, before he had like an ally,
• 28:34
  he was just sort of floating through life. He didn't
• 28:36
  have a job, he didn't really care if he was
• 28:37
  in prison. He wasn't really doing anything to help himself
• 28:41
  out or to make himself hide in plain sight. And
• 28:44
  now he's got this other guy just like him, and
• 28:48
  he's got something to work towards, and it's just disgusting
• 28:51
  that this is what he's working towards. Roy Norris got
• 28:56
  out about i think three months after Laurence Bittaker, and
• 29:00
  they pretty much immediately linked up. Their relationship was described
• 29:04
  as that of student and teacher, with Bittaker as the
• 29:06
  teacher and definitely the leader and definitely the smarter one,
• 29:10
  whereas Bittaker was the larger one, so he was like
• 29:12
  the bron and Bittaker, like Norris, was the bigger one, sorry,
• 29:16
  and Bittaker was the smarter one. Bittaker told Norris he
• 29:20
  wanted to get a van with a sliding door to
• 29:23
  get victims in and out more quickly, so that's what
• 29:26
  they chose to buy. They got a silver gmc van,
• 29:30
  one of those big seventies ones, and they called it
• 29:33
  the Murder Mac because it was the size of a
• 29:36
  Mac truck according to them. And if you've seen those vans,
• 29:40
  they are really big, and they've got like the carpeting
• 29:42
  in the back. They're very like very seventies. Now this
• 29:47
  reminds me again of Bill Bonnen, as does the next thing.
• 29:51
  What these two did was they tricked this out for
• 29:53
  torture and murder. They added a bed in the back
• 29:57
  They included a toolbox full of torture item like plyers, screwdrivers,
• 30:03
  ice picks, all manner of horrific items. And this is
• 30:07
  of course where the toolbox Killer nickname comes from. The
• 30:11
  two after getting this fan went and found their dumping grounds,
• 30:16
  and I'll give you all three guesses where they.
• 30:18
  Speaker 6: Ended up going. That's right, they went to.
• 30:22
  Speaker 5: The San Gabriel Mountains to look for places to dump bodies.
• 30:26
  This is absolutely because of the connection to his only
• 30:29
  girlfriend and the last woman who meant anything to him
• 30:32
  and who rejected him. They found an old fire road
• 30:36
  up there with a padlock on it, and they cut
• 30:37
  the lock, replacing it with their own. They figured, and
• 30:40
  they were seemingly correct, then nobody would notice as long
• 30:42
  as there was a lock on the gate. Also, as
• 30:45
  a note, the area that they found was called Camp
• 30:48
  Crystal Lake, and I'm just going to leave that there
• 30:51
  for any horror fans because that's just too perfect. And
• 30:54
  they actually took at least two victims there. Now, during
• 30:57
  this time, they actually took photos of each other in
• 30:59
  this area and sent them to their friend in prison
• 31:02
  without any like context, so they didn't say, like, here's
• 31:04
  where we're gonna kill the girls, but he knew what
• 31:07
  the plan was, so seeing those photos was their way
• 31:09
  of proving that they were moving forward in their plans.
• 31:13
  These photos can actually be found online and they're super weird.
• 31:15
  It just looks like the two of them, Like one
• 31:17
  of them is like Larry inspecting the lock. One of
• 31:20
  them is Royd with like his hand out, like look
• 31:22
  at the mountain, but it's like basically, here's where we're
• 31:24
  gonna dump the bodies. So very very weird, but not
• 31:28
  nearly as weird or horrifying as the other photos they
• 31:31
  take in the coming weeks and months, which we'll talk about. Unfortunately,
• 31:40
  it's now early nineteen seventy nine and thirty eight year
• 31:43
  old Larry Bittaker and twenty nine year old Roy Norris
• 31:47
  start practicing picking up girls. This is something a lot
• 31:50
  of killers did again, including Ed Kemper, where they give
• 31:55
  kitchhiker's rides and work on how to engage with them
• 31:58
  without scaring them too much, so that they can sort
• 32:01
  of figure out how to get people into their van,
• 32:05
  how they can coax them in so they could get
• 32:07
  them to come willingly, and then they can take them
• 32:10
  up to the mountains. Torture rape, kill them, and then
• 32:13
  dump their body. And they figure when they dump the
• 32:15
  bodies in the mountains, they're not going to be found
• 32:17
  and they're going to be scattered by animals. So it's
• 32:19
  like the perfect place. It's a great way to not
• 32:21
  get caught. Now, during this time, Roy Norris was still
• 32:25
  actively attacking women, but was able somehow to avoid capture
• 32:29
  or even suspicion. And I'm not really sure how. Like
• 32:32
  one woman, he raped her and then he just dropped
• 32:34
  her in the desert, and as far as we know,
• 32:36
  she survived, but she never turned him in. Finally, the
• 32:42
  two pick a date and they decide to go out hunting.
• 32:45
  They're ready, they've done their trial runs. Everything's in place,
• 32:47
  they have their dumping ground, they have their murder mac.
• 32:50
  Speaker 6: They're good.
• 32:51
  Speaker 5: And on June twenty fourth, nineteen seventy nine, they went
• 32:55
  to Redondo Beach to look for a victim, and they
• 33:00
  found sixteen year old Lucinda Cindy Schaeffer walking from her
• 33:07
  church to her grandparents' house. It does not get more
• 33:11
  wholesome than that, which makes this all the worse. So
• 33:15
  on seeing her, they knew that's not the kind of
• 33:18
  girl that's gonna accept a ride from us, So they
• 33:20
  threw their plans out the window and just rolled up
• 33:23
  and grabbed her straight off the street. They just picked
• 33:26
  her up, threw her into the van, and tied her up.
• 33:30
  At first, Cindy screamed, but they both said that she
• 33:33
  eventually fell quiet, almost as if resigned to her fate.
• 33:38
  According to both men, she ended up being almost cooperative,
• 33:42
  which is something that Bittaker in particular loves to mention
• 33:46
  when recounting the rape and murder of this child, not
• 33:49
  only because it makes them sound less culpable, but because
• 33:52
  rapists they just love when victims quote give themselves over,
• 33:57
  you know, because it's part of the power trip. Be like, oh,
• 33:59
  she really wanted I wasn't raping her, like she was
• 34:01
  a part of it, and it's fucking disgusting. And the
• 34:06
  way that we know that this is true, that she
• 34:07
  really did sort of like stop fighting, was that In
• 34:10
  addition to Larry saying this, Roy Norris also said this,
• 34:14
  so both of them had sort of the same story
• 34:16
  about this victim. He however, Roy Norris was more accurate
• 34:21
  in his description of Cindy, saying that she was detached,
• 34:24
  like she seemed far away from everything happening to her,
• 34:28
  which I think was like shock. She was in shock
• 34:31
  and so that's why she was that way. So they
• 34:35
  drove her to the mountains. Bittaker then took a walk
• 34:37
  while Norris raped her for about an hour. They then
• 34:42
  switched and Bittaker had his turn, and from there I
• 34:46
  think they switched off a couple of times, I hate
• 34:48
  to say, and then they argued over what to do
• 34:50
  with her. Now, Roy Norris was getting cold feet and
• 34:53
  didn't want to kill her, but Larry said, we have
• 34:56
  to or she'll give us up. Do you want to
• 34:57
  go back to prison after one? Like we agree to
• 35:00
  kill the victims. At one point, Cindy, sort of picking
• 35:03
  up on what was going on, asked them, are you
• 35:05
  going to kill me? She said, if you are, please
• 35:08
  just let me pray first. The response from the men
• 35:11
  was no, we're not going to kill you, but they
• 35:13
  also laughed at the request, as if she was an
• 35:15
  idiot for even asking. They then did, in fact kill her.
• 35:21
  They started to strangle her and they did not allow
• 35:23
  her time to pray.
• 35:24
  Speaker 6: Of course.
• 35:26
  Speaker 5: Now, Roy Norris first tried to strangle her, but after
• 35:28
  about forty five seconds he saw the terror in her
• 35:31
  eyes and he backed away, wretching as it actually made
• 35:34
  him sick, which is the proper response. So Larry Bitaker,
• 35:40
  fucking sociopaths psychopath, took over, and while he didn't have
• 35:44
  any problem emotionally with doing this, he wasn't actually strong
• 35:48
  enough to finish the job, so he ended up letting
• 35:50
  go of her neck after a few minutes in. As
• 35:54
  a result, Cindy began convulsing on the floor of the van,
• 35:57
  and I can only hope that she was unconsciou and
• 36:00
  not aware of what was going on, because that's just
• 36:02
  fucking horrific. So to get her to stop, Bittaker then
• 36:06
  took a coat hanger and pliers out of the toolbox
• 36:09
  and wrapped the hanger around her neck, tying it so
• 36:12
  tightly that it cut into her skin. Eventually, she stopped
• 36:16
  moving and breathing and was dead. They then rolled her
• 36:21
  into a shower curtain and threw her body down the
• 36:23
  mountain side. There's a really interesting documentary about Larry Bittaker
• 36:28
  on Peacock, and honestly it's about the cases, but it's
• 36:31
  more about Larry, and in one of the interviews, he
• 36:34
  does everything he can to downplay this murder. But it's
• 36:38
  like you had a shower curtain ready to roll her
• 36:40
  body in in your van, Like, how do you deny
• 36:42
  for a thought when you have a murder toolbox and
• 36:45
  a shower curtain. Again, it's just another example of him
• 36:48
  like thinking he's smarter than everybody and clearly not being.
• 36:52
  Now that's murder one. About fourteen days later, on the
• 36:57
  eighth of July nineteen seventy nine, these two go out
• 37:00
  again to find another victim, and this time they pick
• 37:04
  up eighteen year old Andrea Hall, who was hitchhiking from
• 37:07
  Manhattan Beach to I've read a couple different places, but
• 37:10
  I think it was Wilmington or Long Beach to go
• 37:13
  see her boyfriend. Now, this one is crazy because these
• 37:17
  two men wanted to pick up Andrea, but before they
• 37:19
  had a chance, another man picked her up first, so
• 37:23
  they followed his car. They followed him while he gave
• 37:27
  her this ride, waiting for him to drop her off,
• 37:30
  hoping that he wasn't taking her to her final destination.
• 37:34
  And unfortunately that's exactly what happened. And also unfortunately she
• 37:39
  never realized that they had been following her. So she
• 37:42
  gets out of the car and Roy Norris hid himself
• 37:45
  under the bed in the back of the truck while
• 37:47
  Larry or in the back of the van while Larry
• 37:49
  picked her up. I don't know if I mentioned this,
• 37:51
  but they also built a bed into the back of
• 37:53
  the van, which is another like you cannot say that
• 37:57
  wasn't on purpose. And he's like, oh, I needed it
• 37:59
  as a backup house. And it's like, you make one
• 38:01
  thousand dollars a week, you could buy a house outright
• 38:05
  with cash, but you need a bed in your van, Like,
• 38:07
  get out of here, guy. So again, she gets into
• 38:10
  the car or into the van with Larry. He tells her, Oh,
• 38:13
  I've got a cooler of cold drinks in the back,
• 38:15
  go ahead and grab one. So she jumps up, goes
• 38:18
  into the back to grab one, and Roy Norris pops
• 38:20
  out and attacks her, tying her and gagging her before
• 38:24
  they made their way to the mountains once again. And
• 38:27
  I wanted to call out that Andrea fought like so bravely,
• 38:32
  and she almost overpowered Roy Norris, who was over two
• 38:36
  hundred pounds and over six feet tall.
• 38:38
  Speaker 6: He was a big.
• 38:39
  Speaker 5: Man, and it was so bad that at one point
• 38:42
  Larry had to slam the brakes on to break them apart,
• 38:45
  because she was actually winning this fight and was maybe
• 38:48
  going to get away. Unfortunately that is not what happened.
• 38:52
  But I did want to call out that she fought
• 38:55
  her hardest, and that doesn't make her a better victim
• 38:58
  than Cindy or anybody else. But I just want to
• 39:01
  call out that she tried so hard because I think
• 39:04
  it's important to know who she was and that she
• 39:07
  fought for her life. So they get her in the van,
• 39:11
  they overpower her, and they drive up to the San
• 39:14
  Gabriel Mountains and this time they actually go past where
• 39:18
  Cindy was killed, and they pull over and they take
• 39:21
  turns raping Andrea again. You know, one will leave, all
• 39:25
  the other attacks her, and then they move her. They
• 39:29
  move her up the hill because I thought, I think
• 39:30
  a car was coming, and Larry actually went up there
• 39:33
  with her on his own and took his polaroid camera
• 39:37
  with him. Now, another thing they had their toolbox was
• 39:40
  a pair of walky talkies so they could stay in
• 39:43
  contact to know when to come back to the van
• 39:45
  or just in case like the girls got away or
• 39:47
  you know, it's just another piece of their sort of planning.
• 39:51
  So he was gone with Andrea for two hours and
• 39:53
  took multiple photos of her in various poses and also
• 39:57
  forced her to perform oral sex on him. And yeah,
• 40:02
  this is it's getting to the point, like it's making
• 40:04
  me a little sick to talk about this, but we're
• 40:06
  gonna keep going. So one of the horrible things that
• 40:09
  he did. So he did a lot of fucked up things,
• 40:11
  but one of the things that he did was he
• 40:12
  would make the girls pretend that they were enjoying themselves
• 40:15
  while they were having sex with him. He would make
• 40:18
  them talk like they were having a good time, like
• 40:20
  they wanted to be there. And this is all part
• 40:22
  of that like weird sadistic thing, but also him wanting
• 40:26
  them to like give themselves over and so you know,
• 40:28
  later on he could say, well, they were into it,
• 40:31
  they wanted it whatever. It's super twisted. But he also
• 40:35
  had like a purely sadistic side that wanted to see
• 40:40
  the girl suffer. And so two of the polaroid photos
• 40:43
  that were later found showed Andrea and her face and
• 40:48
  this horrified look on her face. And it was this
• 40:51
  way because he took a picture, took these two pictures
• 40:55
  of her moments after he told her that he was
• 40:58
  going to kill her, and he said, I'm going to
• 41:00
  kill you. You need to think of as many reasons as
• 41:03
  you can as to why I shouldn't. So just very
• 41:06
  over the top sadistic shit, like really just getting off
• 41:09
  on the fear and anguish that he's causing her in
• 41:11
  this moment. So they took her back down the hill
• 41:15
  and Noras stood by while Bittaker did the killing. And
• 41:18
  this one was as bad as the rest of it,
• 41:21
  or more terrible.
• 41:22
  Speaker 6: I don't know.
• 41:24
  Speaker 5: To kill Andrea Hall, Bittaker took an ice pick out
• 41:27
  of his toolbox and shoved it through her ear into
• 41:29
  her brain. Now this did not kill her immediately. He
• 41:32
  did not get it far enough into her ear, so
• 41:35
  she's just in an intense amount of pain but not dead,
• 41:39
  but probably immobilized by this. He then pulls it out
• 41:43
  and shoves it into her other ear and jumps on it,
• 41:46
  meaning she's laying on the ground, so he's jumping on
• 41:48
  this handle and her head, pushing this thing into her brain.
• 41:53
  This is what this man does. And he actually did
• 41:56
  this until the handle broke, and then just to make
• 41:59
  sure that she was dead, he strangled her body. He
• 42:03
  then rolled her down the hill now I'm not sure
• 42:06
  if he recorded her rape and murder. Actually I do
• 42:08
  believe that he did, but I know he took audio
• 42:10
  of the next murders, including one that we'll talk about
• 42:14
  that this is like a big trigger warning case.
• 42:17
  Speaker 6: A lot of this.
• 42:18
  Speaker 5: It's gonna get worse from here. So one of these
• 42:21
  recordings I'm going to talk about in some amount of detail,
• 42:24
  and so if that's not your thing, I will give
• 42:26
  a warning. But this was sort of his thing, was
• 42:29
  recording these attacks. So we will get there. When we do,
• 42:32
  I'll let everybody know. But yeah, it's just really twisted.
• 42:37
  So Andrea is.
• 42:40
  Speaker 6: They've killed her, they rolled her.
• 42:41
  Speaker 5: Body down into the canyons, and their next victims, we're
• 42:47
  just gonna get into it. We're thirteen year old Jacqueline
• 42:50
  Leah Lamp she went by Leah, and fifteen year old
• 42:54
  Jacqueline Jackie Gilliam. These two girls were hitchhiking near Redondo
• 42:59
  Beach looking for ride to the beach. In fact, and
• 43:02
  Bitaker later said he had no idea why they were hitchhiking,
• 43:05
  is they were literally minutes from the beach, even on foot.
• 43:08
  He was like, it made no sense why they would
• 43:10
  be hitchhiking, but they were so we picked them up,
• 43:13
  which is absolutely fucked they of course, you know, these
• 43:16
  men took them back out to their spot, this time
• 43:19
  actually to Crystal Lake, which was the super hidden area
• 43:22
  the abandoned cabins that I kind of talked about that
• 43:24
  was way up on the top of one of the mountains.
• 43:27
  I should note that nowadays this is a popular hiking trail,
• 43:30
  and part of me wants to go check it out.
• 43:32
  Part of me wants to stay as far away from
• 43:33
  it as possible because I don't know how I'll feel
• 43:36
  when I'm there. But it is interesting that this is
• 43:39
  just like a place that people go hang out now anyway.
• 43:42
  So they get up there and the torture begins. Before this, though,
• 43:45
  I did want to call out that the girls nearly escaped,
• 43:48
  and it's so awful to me and so sad that
• 43:50
  they didn't, because for whatever reason in this instance, the
• 43:54
  men cannot wait to attack the girls. So Norris hits
• 43:58
  one of them in the head with a sock full
• 43:59
  of bebes like metal bebes, knocking her unconscious temporarily. He
• 44:03
  does this to Leah. I think what was happening is
• 44:06
  the man they were like sharing a joint in the
• 44:08
  back of the van, and the girl started to notice, like, hey,
• 44:10
  we're not driving toward the beach. We should already be there,
• 44:13
  Like what's going on? So they're starting to get nervous.
• 44:16
  And instead of like I don't know, I don't know
• 44:19
  making an excuse like who knows the thing that they
• 44:21
  practice for so long, you know, he just Norris pulls
• 44:26
  out this thing of Bebe's and hits her on the head. Now,
• 44:29
  Leah passes out and he goes and he then tries
• 44:33
  to overpower Jackie, and so he's tying Jackie up. When
• 44:37
  Leah regains consciousness, opens the van door and runs screaming
• 44:41
  out of it, And somehow they're next to a tennis
• 44:44
  court and there's people playing tennis. Norris runs out or
• 44:48
  no not, Norris Bittaker got out of the van and
• 44:51
  went around it and punched her in the face as
• 44:55
  hard as he could and then shoved her back into
• 44:57
  the van. Tennis players this people at this location saw this,
• 45:03
  and what he said to them is she's having a
• 45:04
  bad acid trip, and then throws her back in the
• 45:07
  van and they drive away. Nobody ever called the cops,
• 45:10
  Nobody ever did anything about this. This is a thirty
• 45:12
  eight year old man and a thirteen year old girl
• 45:15
  and a fucking molester van and they're just like whatever,
• 45:18
  I'm gonna keep playing tennis. And it makes me so
• 45:21
  mad that this is the way that people dealt with this,
• 45:23
  because it was just such a fucking It was just
• 45:26
  such a close call, you know, and these little girls
• 45:29
  just did not get to escape because people just didn't
• 45:31
  want to. I don't know, be involved, don't I don't
• 45:33
  really know. Each and every one of these murders is
• 45:37
  horrific in its own special way, but this one, to
• 45:41
  me would be particularly horrifying because what they did was
• 45:48
  they took these girls up to the mountains and they
• 45:52
  tell Leah, oh, you're too fat and ugly, we don't
• 45:54
  want to have sex with you, which, like of all
• 45:56
  the things they do, this is still it still bothers me.
• 45:59
  Speaker 6: Then, on top of everything else they.
• 46:00
  Speaker 5: Did that, they think Jackie Gilliam is good looking, so
• 46:04
  they begin taking turns raping her. And I believe that
• 46:07
  they would have done this either way. But it's said
• 46:09
  that when Bittaker found out she was a virgin, he
• 46:12
  decided that he wanted to record the rapes using the
• 46:14
  tape recorder, which I think he would have done anyway,
• 46:18
  because that's what he did. I believe that he did
• 46:20
  actually tape Andrea Hall. I think had he kept going,
• 46:23
  he would have produced more of these tapes.
• 46:25
  Speaker 6: So he takes a tape.
• 46:27
  Speaker 5: Player out and records her screaming while he's raping her,
• 46:30
  and then he also makes her pretend to like it
• 46:32
  and records that. They tie up the girls. They gag
• 46:36
  them after this, like horrifying, you know, abuse, and then
• 46:40
  they make them sleep with them in the van overnight
• 46:42
  up on the mountain like they're camping or something. So
• 46:45
  these little girls endured this torture and rape for nearly
• 46:48
  forty eight hours. And now, like I said, Leah was not,
• 46:50
  as far as I know, raped, but Jackie was. So
• 46:55
  the next morning after like the first day of abduction,
• 46:58
  Lawrence Bittaker takes Leah up somewhere and he does take
• 47:01
  sexually explicit photos of her, but again, at least according
• 47:04
  to him and according to Norris, neither one of them
• 47:07
  actually raped her. But he did make her get naked
• 47:10
  and take these humiliating, horrible photos of her and made
• 47:13
  her pretend that she liked it. He then raped Jackie
• 47:16
  Gilliam at least three times in total, and recorded all.
• 47:19
  Speaker 6: Of these rapes.
• 47:20
  Speaker 5: The recordings of these have not been released, but it
• 47:22
  still said in them that he tells her to pretend
• 47:24
  she's his cousin, tells her to feel free to express
• 47:28
  her pain that she's feeling, and he also tortured her
• 47:31
  by stabbing her breasts with an ice pick as well
• 47:34
  as tearing part of her nipple off with a pair
• 47:37
  of pliers, which is insane. She's fifteen, I mean, any age,
• 47:44
  but like, what the fuck? He also has Roy Norris
• 47:47
  take polaroids of him and her together, including while he's
• 47:50
  forcing her to have oral and vaginal sex with him,
• 47:53
  so he's raping her. These photos are online, not the
• 47:57
  ones of them together, but the nude photos of her.
• 48:00
  They're online and they are haunting. He makes her smile
• 48:05
  for these photos. In one of these photos, she's smiling
• 48:08
  and you can see that she has a black eye.
• 48:10
  I mean, it's it's just beyond it's so insane, and
• 48:14
  we're not even to the trigger warning part yet, if
• 48:17
  you can believe it. So, after about forty eight hours
• 48:23
  of this terrible rape, torture, just humiliation of these two
• 48:28
  little girls. They then of course murder them. Now, first
• 48:32
  they took them to town to get supplies. Again it's
• 48:34
  like a little fun camping trip with friends. But then
• 48:36
  they go back up to the mountain and they somehow
• 48:39
  separate the girls. Bittaker murders Jackie Gillium, and despite Noras
• 48:44
  saying like we should kill her quickly because she was
• 48:46
  so cooperative she did everything we asked, Bittaker said no, because, quote,
• 48:49
  they only die once anyway, so apparently he needs to
• 48:53
  make it count. He then stabbed her in the ear
• 48:57
  with the ice pick, then took it out because she
• 48:59
  was still alive, and stabbed her in the other ear.
• 49:03
  He was not able to remove the ice pick from
• 49:05
  her ear this time, so he just rolled her body
• 49:07
  down the hill with the pick still in her head.
• 49:09
  He then made Leah get out of the van, and
• 49:11
  as she walked out, he made Roy Norris hit her
• 49:15
  on the head with a sledgehammer seven times. Now, this
• 49:18
  was in part because Roy had not actually killed anybody yet,
• 49:23
  even like Cindy, when he tried to kill her, he
• 49:26
  couldn't do it, so this was his turn, so he
• 49:28
  was gonna kill Leah because Bittaker killed the other two.
• 49:32
  Bittaker then went to strangle her, and when he realized
• 49:34
  she was still alive, he also hit her on the
• 49:36
  head with the hammer and rolled her body down the
• 49:39
  hill as well. These men are absolute devils, like truly, truly,
• 49:45
  these two young girls had been abducted on September two
• 49:48
  and died September third, nineteen seventy nine.
• 49:51
  Speaker 6: And we have one more.
• 49:53
  Speaker 5: Victim to go over, which I'm very happy to say
• 49:56
  there's only one more, but this one is our trigger
• 49:58
  warning murder. Now, this is the last victim was sixteen
• 50:04
  year old Shirley Lynette Ledford. Now she went by Lynette,
• 50:08
  but her name was Shirley Lynette Ledford. Because of all
• 50:11
  the recordings, you can actually find a piece of this
• 50:13
  one online and it will ruin your week if you
• 50:15
  listen to it, or if you read a transcript of
• 50:18
  the attack, which I did. I regret it immensely, so
• 50:22
  I would suggest you don't go looking.
• 50:25
  Speaker 6: It's really bad.
• 50:26
  Speaker 5: This poor sweet little girl, like what they did to her,
• 50:29
  and really like knowing about it, hearing about it. It's
• 50:31
  just it's too much, you know, it's just too much.
• 50:33
  It's so much different when you hear a recording, or
• 50:37
  you see something happen or you read about it, than
• 50:41
  when you're being told it in a story. For some reason,
• 50:44
  when somebody else is telling you the story, it takes
• 50:46
  you out of it just enough that it's not quite
• 50:49
  as sickening. And I know that sounds crazy, because this
• 50:52
  is super sickening, but this is just like, I don't know.
• 50:54
  Speaker 6: It's this messed me up.
• 50:58
  Speaker 5: So Early was a sweeter Lynette, I should say, was
• 51:03
  a sweet, quiet girl who lived in Burbank and worked
• 51:06
  at a restaurant that Bittaker frequented. I think it was
• 51:08
  like the McDonald's in Sunland, and I do believe they
• 51:11
  used to have like table service and waitresses, so I
• 51:14
  think she was kind of like a waitress there, and
• 51:15
  so he knew her from those interactions. In any case,
• 51:19
  it was Halloween night, October thirty first, nineteen seventy nine,
• 51:22
  and Lynette was hitchhiking home from a party when Bittaker
• 51:26
  and Norris picked her up. It's thought that she was
• 51:29
  willing to go with them because she knew Larry, which
• 51:31
  is extra twisted. They get her in the van, they
• 51:35
  offer her weed. She actually said no. She was like, no,
• 51:37
  I'm good I don't do that. So then they just
• 51:41
  kind of cut to the chase and they pull a
• 51:42
  knife on her. And this time they don't drive.
• 51:46
  Speaker 6: Up to the mountains.
• 51:47
  Speaker 5: And I think this was because Laurence Bittaker wanted to
• 51:51
  taunt the police. The police at this point didn't even
• 51:55
  know that he was operating in the area because it
• 51:57
  was only four girls. They treated everybody like a runaway
• 52:01
  at that time, you know, like any young girl that
• 52:04
  goes missing, they're like, oh, she ran away, like call
• 52:06
  us in a month. So they didn't really know that
• 52:10
  he was doing what he was doing. And so it's
• 52:12
  believed that, on top of everything else, he wanted the notoriety,
• 52:16
  and so he was taunting them with this kill. So
• 52:21
  he did not go up the mountain this time. Instead,
• 52:25
  they just drive around the city. They just drive around
• 52:29
  Burbank and Sunland. And while they're doing this, I guess
• 52:32
  they actually pulled over somewhere in Burbank. I do not
• 52:34
  know where. I don't really want to know where, but
• 52:36
  it's off the beaten path. And here Bittaker rapes her violently.
• 52:41
  He tortured her, He tore at her nipples with pliers,
• 52:45
  He raped her orally, vaginally, and he sodomized her. He
• 52:49
  beat her with his fists while demanding she scream louder
• 52:53
  and louder. He will get to more. But the only
• 52:58
  way you can find any part of the online now
• 53:01
  is from a newsman who was recording outside of Bittaker's
• 53:05
  trial later on, And every time someone came out of
• 53:08
  the courtroom, the door opens for a moment, and you
• 53:10
  can hear the recording. You can hear her screaming, And
• 53:14
  the door opened quite a few times because so many
• 53:17
  people were escaping the courtroom while this was playing, because
• 53:20
  it was so beyond disturbing and horrifying, And even the
• 53:24
  little bit that I heard was more than I should
• 53:28
  I should have heard.
• 53:28
  Speaker 6: It was a mistake. It was a mistake.
• 53:30
  Speaker 5: I also looked up the transcript and it fills in
• 53:33
  the blanks and is one of the most depraved things
• 53:35
  I've ever read. Don't do it, trust me, like I said.
• 53:38
  But some snippets of the transcript of this these few
• 53:42
  hours they spent with surely include surely being forced to
• 53:46
  say she enjoys what's happening to her telling noris I'll
• 53:49
  scream if you stop hitting me repeatedly screaming oh no,
• 53:53
  and no, no, no, no, and then the men laughing
• 53:57
  and ordering her to say and do horrific things. There's
• 54:00
  also the sounds of her being beaten, the sounds of
• 54:03
  her crying during the attack, and you can hear this
• 54:07
  as well. I didn't hear it, but it's on the recording,
• 54:10
  so someone heard it. Bittaker took the pliers and stuck
• 54:13
  them inside of her rectum, tearing it open, and then
• 54:17
  sodomized her again during this horrific it was actually only
• 54:22
  about two hours, which is two hours too long. But
• 54:25
  during this abuse, Norris Roy Norris, not wanting to be
• 54:29
  left out, took a sledgehammer and hit Shirley on the
• 54:32
  elbow twenty five times until her bone was completely pulverized.
• 54:38
  After the first time he hit it, she told him
• 54:39
  you broke my elbow, and he hit her twenty six
• 54:43
  times after that. Finally, after this horrific torture and rape,
• 54:49
  the two strangled her to death with a wire hanger that,
• 54:52
  when removed from her neck later, was about the size
• 54:55
  of a silver dollar And if people don't know, it
• 54:58
  was like two inches three inches. I mean, I'm sure
• 55:01
  it cut through her skin and not just cut through it,
• 55:04
  but like very much damaged her. Shirley's last words were
• 55:09
  do it just kill me, and those are in the recording.
• 55:14
  For a sixteen year old to ask for death in
• 55:15
  that manner really drives home how horrible this was. And
• 55:19
  to add insult to all of this, the men posed
• 55:22
  Shirley on someone's front lawn in Sunland, just leaving her
• 55:26
  splayed out completely visible. She was found the next morning,
• 55:31
  either by the resident or by a jogger jogging by.
• 55:34
  Now as a note, at this time, Shirley was the
• 55:38
  only body found, so again police have no clue what's
• 55:42
  going on. And I believe that if these two had
• 55:45
  been able to kill more girls, they would have started
• 55:47
  to leave their bodies around to draw attention, because I think,
• 55:50
  in addition to everything else, that's.
• 55:51
  Speaker 6: What they wanted. They wanted the notoriety, or at least Bitaker.
• 55:54
  Speaker 5: I think Norris less so, but he was the follower,
• 55:56
  so he was going to do whatever Bittaker wanted. And
• 56:00
  I say they wanted the notoriety because I think in
• 56:01
  addition to leaving Shirley's body to be found, they also
• 56:04
  had big fucking mouths about these murders Bittaker himself had
• 56:09
  told multiple people at the motel, going as far as
• 56:12
  showing them photos like the polaroids of these young girls
• 56:16
  and saying these young girls wouldn't be able to come
• 56:18
  forward because they were dead. He told at least three
• 56:21
  people about these murders, and at the time none of
• 56:24
  them came forward. However, they did all testify it later. Now,
• 56:28
  before they killed Shirley, the two had attacked another woman
• 56:31
  inside her parking garage where she was trying to go
• 56:33
  from her car to her house. In this case, they
• 56:36
  maced her, but she started screaming, and so the neighbors
• 56:40
  came out and the men took off. This put the
• 56:42
  scare into Bittaker, so he was laying low for a while.
• 56:46
  But then about a month later he killed and posed Shirley.
• 56:49
  So what I'm wondering is did he enjoy the rush
• 56:52
  that feeling of almost getting caught, So did that become
• 56:55
  like the.
• 56:56
  Speaker 6: New thing he wanted to do.
• 56:58
  Speaker 5: I don't know if that you know is the case,
• 57:01
  but I do know that in addition to this attempted abduction,
• 57:04
  there are at least two others other attempts, at least
• 57:07
  according to Bittaker. So this was all really terrible and
• 57:13
  it was a really gnarly case. But now we're going
• 57:15
  to kind of talk about how they got caught, which
• 57:17
  is definitely my favorite part of this so far, because
• 57:20
  again it's just these idiots having two big mouths and
• 57:25
  getting themselves caught and maybe, you know, they want to
• 57:28
  go back to prison. Like I said, they were institutionalized.
• 57:30
  They spent so much of their lives there. The psychology
• 57:33
  behind this is really interesting. To be sure, I'm not
• 57:35
  a psychologist, so I can't really get into it, but
• 57:37
  it's definitely interesting to kind of think about why the
• 57:41
  things transpired.
• 57:42
  Speaker 6: The way that they did.
• 57:44
  Speaker 5: But in any case, in November of nineteen seventy nine,
• 57:46
  just after Shirley's murder, Roy Norris reconnected with a friend
• 57:50
  from prison, a serial rapist named Joseph Jackson. The two
• 57:56
  met up and we're hanging out, both free and I
• 57:59
  guess ex cons do. They are hanging out and shooting
• 58:02
  the shit and out of nowhere. Roy just straight up
• 58:05
  tells Joseph, hey, I've been killing people with.
• 58:10
  Speaker 6: Larry.
• 58:11
  Speaker 5: We've been killing all these little girls. Joseph, a father
• 58:16
  of two girls himself, was horrified, even though he's a rapist.
• 58:21
  He later said like, well, I have young daughters and
• 58:24
  it freaked me out. And he hid it very well
• 58:27
  from Roy. He didn't lean on. He didn't let on.
• 58:30
  I mean that he was gonna tell anybody. Later he
• 58:33
  said he thought about how Roy would ask about his
• 58:35
  daughters and he would do it in this way that
• 58:36
  made him really uncomfortable. So when he told him about this,
• 58:40
  he was, you know, very sure that he didn't want
• 58:42
  to keep this to himself because as a father, he
• 58:44
  was like, these this could be my daughters, like any
• 58:48
  he could have killed them, you know. So Joseph Jackson
• 58:51
  then goes and speaks with his lawyer, who advises him,
• 58:54
  you know, take this information to the police, and he
• 58:56
  does just that. From there, the case was sent to
• 58:59
  the Hormocid Beach Police Department, where Detective Paul Binham was
• 59:03
  assigned the case. Now, from the start, he believed Jackson
• 59:06
  at least enough to investigate the claims seriously and immediately,
• 59:10
  including going to a woman in Oregon who had reported
• 59:14
  being raped by two men in a van, and he
• 59:16
  went up there and showed her their mugshots. She immediately
• 59:20
  picked out Bittaker and Norris from a lineup of like,
• 59:22
  you know, twelve mug shots. This was enough for police
• 59:26
  to start putting the two men under surveillance, and pretty
• 59:29
  quickly they found that Norris was dealing drugs, Like they
• 59:32
  pulled up on his car and they found a bag
• 59:34
  full of weed, like tons and tons of weed. So
• 59:38
  he gets arrested for this, and then very quickly thereafter,
• 59:42
  they arrest Bittaker for the rape because he had an
• 59:44
  actual job, so there wasn't really anything going on that
• 59:47
  they could use to arrest him. But pretty quickly after
• 59:51
  they arrest Norris, they're just like, fuck it, We're just
• 59:52
  gonna arrest Bittaker for the rape. Let's get him off
• 59:54
  the street. Let's start, you know, the search of his home,
• 59:57
  of his van, let's just let's just do this now. Unfortunately,
• 1:00:01
  Bittaker had a little hint that something was up because
• 1:00:04
  he'd actually called Roy Norris during the police raid, and
• 1:00:08
  he went and cleared out his van of all items
• 1:00:11
  just before his arrest. So he gets rid of the toolbox,
• 1:00:13
  he clears the bet out, any you know, blood, anything
• 1:00:17
  else that's obvious. He takes out of his van except
• 1:00:23
  for one item that he forgot to remove. This item
• 1:00:28
  was the two hour long torture tape of Lynette Ledford,
• 1:00:33
  which he had of course been listening to and failed
• 1:00:36
  to remove from the tape player. This piece of evidence
• 1:00:42
  is obviously very damning. But police also searched Larry's motel
• 1:00:47
  room and there they found some of his polaroid collection,
• 1:00:52
  So now they have an audio source, they have photos.
• 1:00:56
  I mean, the cases coming together. I also wanted to
• 1:00:58
  call out the police. All so found several bottles of
• 1:01:02
  acid in his room, like the kind you burn skin with.
• 1:01:06
  So this man is really starting to ramp up the
• 1:01:10
  torture and he was definitely going to start torturing his
• 1:01:13
  next victims using acid. Now in Roy Norris's home, they
• 1:01:17
  found even more polaroids, in fact, over five hundred, including
• 1:01:23
  tons from Hermosa and Redondo Beach where I guess they
• 1:01:25
  were just taking photos like of girls on the beach,
• 1:01:28
  and they even found some from girls from Burbank, like
• 1:01:33
  girls walking to and from high school, so absolutely terrifying.
• 1:01:39
  They also apparently had their next two victims picked out,
• 1:01:42
  including a thirteen year old, so they're just already, you know,
• 1:01:46
  they're continuing their plan. They're stalking more, they're planning more
• 1:01:49
  they're ramping things up. It's terrifying. It's so good that
• 1:01:52
  they were caught when they were so the men, like
• 1:01:55
  I said, they're arrested and before they go to trial,
• 1:01:58
  Roy Norris strikes a deal with prosecutors so he was
• 1:02:02
  able to avoid the death penalty, which was a thing
• 1:02:05
  in the state at the time, and in return he
• 1:02:08
  would both testify against Lawrence Bittaker and also take police
• 1:02:12
  to the locations of the bodies. In return, he would
• 1:02:15
  only get a life sentence and not face the death penalty. Now. Unfortunately,
• 1:02:20
  they were only able to recover Jackie and Lea's bodies,
• 1:02:23
  while Cindy and Andrea's were not found during these searches,
• 1:02:27
  but at least it's something. At first, Norris completely denied
• 1:02:32
  any involvement in the crimes, but after being interrogated for
• 1:02:34
  a while, he sort of just like spilled the beans
• 1:02:37
  and he talked about all five victims. He also said
• 1:02:40
  that they attempted to pick up many, many more, but
• 1:02:43
  had been rejected pretty often, which is really good to hear,
• 1:02:46
  because who knows how many more they would have killed
• 1:02:48
  given the opportunity. That being said, it was later found
• 1:02:53
  that nineteen of the girls in their polaroids had been
• 1:02:56
  reported missing, which is very concerning because who knows what
• 1:03:00
  happened to them. And what's more, there was a photo
• 1:03:03
  of a girl with the two of them in the
• 1:03:04
  mountains in similar circumstances to the victims, and she has
• 1:03:08
  never been identified, so we don't know if she was
• 1:03:11
  a victim and they just chose not to mention her
• 1:03:13
  or what the situation was. So we really don't know
• 1:03:17
  how many girls they killed. We know they killed five,
• 1:03:20
  but we don't know if they killed more. Anyway, so
• 1:03:23
  the two go to trial, they of course blame each other.
• 1:03:26
  Bittaker even took the stand at his trial, which was ridiculous,
• 1:03:30
  and he tried to blame Roy Norris. He even went
• 1:03:33
  as far as saying there was yet another unnamed man
• 1:03:36
  involved in at least one of the rapes. He also,
• 1:03:39
  of course, said that most of the victims were sex
• 1:03:41
  workers and accused Lynette Ledford of being a drug adduled psycho,
• 1:03:47
  saying that the screaming on the video was because she
• 1:03:49
  was on drugs. It was just absolutely ridiculous, completely insulting
• 1:03:53
  to victims, just unreal. At one point, this motherfucker broke
• 1:03:59
  down crying obvious crocodile tears, like just unbelievably terrible acting job.
• 1:04:07
  It was just a really silly thing and sad because
• 1:04:09
  he actually thinks he's going to fool someone and it's like, sir,
• 1:04:13
  you aren't fooling anyone. It took the jury a little
• 1:04:18
  more than two days to come back with the guilty verdict,
• 1:04:20
  and they believe the reason for this was that people
• 1:04:23
  were going back and forth over the death penalty. There
• 1:04:26
  was no, you know, question of his guilt. It was
• 1:04:30
  more a question of the penalty. And they did come
• 1:04:34
  back and give Laurence Bittaker the death penalty for sure.
• 1:04:38
  Roy Norris was given the forty five years to life
• 1:04:40
  sentence that he had agreed upon, and it was sort
• 1:04:43
  of a done deal. The death penalty, though, was actually
• 1:04:45
  really significant because the DA at the time was opposed
• 1:04:49
  to the death penalty, but he allowed it to be
• 1:04:52
  used in this case, which I would say is understandable.
• 1:04:55
  I personally don't believe in the death penalty, but in
• 1:04:58
  cases like this it's kind of hard to defend that
• 1:05:01
  a little bit. I mean, I'm still against it, but
• 1:05:04
  you know, it's hard sometimes. I've said that before. Now
• 1:05:09
  during the trial. Just to kind of drive home why
• 1:05:11
  the death penalty was sought and given as an option,
• 1:05:16
  the prosecution played seventeen minutes of the two hour long
• 1:05:19
  torture of Lynette Leadford, and during this time jury members
• 1:05:23
  and those in the courtroom openly wept, with many of
• 1:05:27
  those who were able to leave literally running out of
• 1:05:29
  the room. There was not a single person in the
• 1:05:32
  courtroom who wasn't completely horrified by the tape. FBI agents, police,
• 1:05:37
  and even the prosecutor on the case said it was
• 1:05:39
  the worst thing they've ever heard in their careers. The
• 1:05:42
  prosecutor said that he had nightmares for months about this
• 1:05:45
  man murdering girls and him not being able to save them,
• 1:05:49
  which is really sad and also very sweet, but just
• 1:05:51
  generally horrifying. There was a reporter outside the courtroom who
• 1:05:55
  interviewed people as they left, and many of these people
• 1:05:58
  were in tears. I mean, people were just sick over it.
• 1:06:02
  Everyone except of course for Larry Bittaker, who, during the
• 1:06:06
  playing of this tape sat there stone faced, reading along
• 1:06:09
  to the transcript, and I guarantee you he was enjoying
• 1:06:12
  every minute of it. This man is just pure evil.
• 1:06:15
  It's absolutely insane. Despite being given the death penalty, which
• 1:06:20
  was a very you know, out of the ordinary thing
• 1:06:23
  at this time. He was somehow able to procure a
• 1:06:27
  full stay of execution after delaying his death sentence twice.
• 1:06:31
  He got it delayed once in nineteen ninety again in
• 1:06:33
  nineteen ninety one, and then they just.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 6: Gave him a full stay of execution.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 5: Usually, you know, it takes years and years for somebody
• 1:06:40
  to be put up for death after being accused, but
• 1:06:43
  this was within like a ten year timeline. So they
• 1:06:45
  were really trying to get him put to death, and
• 1:06:48
  he fought back and somehow was able to get out
• 1:06:51
  of it. Crazy, and now you know, there's a moratorium
• 1:06:55
  on the death penalty in California, so you know a
• 1:06:58
  lot of people who are on death or sort of
• 1:07:00
  just they're just in prison now. While in prison, Roy
• 1:07:03
  Norris was pretty boring. There's not a lot to say
• 1:07:05
  about him. But Bittaker made everybody's lives hell. He filed
• 1:07:10
  so many frivolous lawsuits he was actually barred from filing
• 1:07:13
  without a lawyer or judge's permission. He was filing over
• 1:07:16
  things like being served a broken cookie at lunch, citing
• 1:07:19
  that as cruel and unusual punishment. So, I mean, he's
• 1:07:22
  very smart, but he's just an annoying like a troll.
• 1:07:26
  You know, He's just a piece of shit in every way.
• 1:07:28
  He also gave a ton of interviews throughout his time
• 1:07:31
  in prison, but never once expressed any remorse, and in
• 1:07:35
  fact often said he wishes he could go back to
• 1:07:37
  his life, which I'm sure you know he meant that,
• 1:07:41
  you know now. Later on, closer to his death, he
• 1:07:44
  did a series of interviews with a woman named Laura
• 1:07:46
  Brand who did an extremely deep dive with Larry while
• 1:07:49
  he was in prison. And I think I talked about
• 1:07:51
  this up at the beginning of this. It was like
• 1:07:54
  a documentary that came out, and it's really just kind
• 1:07:56
  of based on her experience with him. She later said
• 1:08:00
  they became friends, which really scares me because it goes
• 1:08:04
  to show how good this guy is at pulling the
• 1:08:06
  wool over people's eyes. I mean, she was there as
• 1:08:09
  an in an official capacity. She's a criminologist. She's interviewing
• 1:08:13
  him basically to get more information about like where the
• 1:08:16
  bodies were, you know, trying to like help the victim's families,
• 1:08:20
  and somehow she ends up coming to visit him with
• 1:08:22
  her son in San Quentin, like it's wild now. To
• 1:08:26
  be fair, she did get him to draw her a
• 1:08:27
  map of the location of Cindy and Andrea's bodies. But
• 1:08:30
  it's been, you know, nearly forty years since the murders,
• 1:08:34
  so as of now, even with those maps, they still
• 1:08:37
  have not been found. But at least now we have
• 1:08:39
  like a general idea of where they may be, and
• 1:08:41
  so if people continue to look, hopefully one day they
• 1:08:44
  will find them so they can be put to rest
• 1:08:47
  and their families, you know, can get some closure. But
• 1:08:50
  I just want to call out that it's really crazy
• 1:08:53
  that this woman actually said, like, I do believe that
• 1:08:57
  he felt some remorse, and I do believe that he
• 1:08:59
  cared for me, and I just like no, like no,
• 1:09:02
  I really don't think that's the truth. And it scares
• 1:09:05
  me that he's that good anyway. Lawrence Bittaker died in
• 1:09:09
  prison after being diagnosed with cancer and suffering a series
• 1:09:12
  of heart attacks. He died, aged seventy nine, on December thirteenth,
• 1:09:16
  twenty nineteen, in sam Quentin. Just before his death, I
• 1:09:21
  said he drew Laura that map. I don't think I
• 1:09:24
  had anything to do with the victims of the families,
• 1:09:26
  but rather with his own mortality. You know, he didn't
• 1:09:30
  want the death penalty. He didn't want to die. He
• 1:09:33
  cried on the phone to her after his heart attacks.
• 1:09:35
  So I think, like everything else, his drawing this map
• 1:09:38
  was self serving. It was like his way of making
• 1:09:40
  himself feel better somehow. Anyway, he died, and not even
• 1:09:45
  three months later, on February twenty fourth, twenty twenty, Roy
• 1:09:49
  Norris died at age seventy two in the Vacaville Medical Center,
• 1:09:52
  also in California. It's very interesting that they died so
• 1:09:55
  close together, but I'm very glad they are both dead,
• 1:09:59
  and that's about it. The documentary on Peacock is called
• 1:10:02
  The Toolbox Killer. It's really interesting. It's definitely not a
• 1:10:05
  deep dive in terms of the specifics of the case,
• 1:10:07
  which I think is great because some of those specifics
• 1:10:10
  are pretty awful. But even without those specifics, it's still
• 1:10:14
  a very unsettling but ultimately very informative documentary. So I
• 1:10:18
  do suggest everyone check it out. Do not check out
• 1:10:21
  the audio or the transcript from Lynette's murder. Please just
• 1:10:24
  don't do it.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 6: Don't do it. It's awful, it's not worth it.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 5: One more thing that I kept forgetting to write down
• 1:10:30
  in my notes. The detective who was assigned this case,
• 1:10:33
  Paul Binham, he actually committed suicide after this case. And
• 1:10:38
  in his suicide note, he mentioned Lawrence Bittaker, and he
• 1:10:42
  said he thought that if he got out of prison,
• 1:10:44
  which it's fair to assume he would he did over
• 1:10:47
  and over, that he would come after him and his family.
• 1:10:49
  And he thought that if he killed himself that Lawrence
• 1:10:52
  would spare his wife and children. So that is just
• 1:10:56
  another note about how scary this man is, how horrifying
• 1:11:01
  this case was. And I don't think that this man
• 1:11:04
  committed suicide only because of this case, but I do
• 1:11:06
  believe that it was the straw that broke the camel's
• 1:11:09
  back because detectives, especially in the seventies and eighties, the
• 1:11:12
  horrific crimes that were taking place, it's a lot. It's
• 1:11:16
  a big mental load. And honestly, like just researching this case,
• 1:11:19
  I mean, I think I made it pretty clear how
• 1:11:21
  tough it was, so I can't imagine what it was
• 1:11:23
  like for the detectives or the lawyers, the prosecutors, anybody
• 1:11:26
  dealing with this. These men were horrible monsters. I am
• 1:11:30
  so glad they are dead. I know a lot of
• 1:11:32
  people are upset that they died natural deaths, but I
• 1:11:35
  feel like as long as they were off the street
• 1:11:37
  and couldn't hurt anybody else, that's fine. Just get them
• 1:11:41
  out and a way and don't let them hurt anybody else.
• 1:11:44
  So all right, this is a tough one. This is
• 1:11:48
  an awful case, really devastating, really disturbing. Thanks everybody for
• 1:11:52
  hanging in there. You know, it's a little longer than
• 1:11:54
  my standard cases, but I didn't want to split it
• 1:11:56
  up into two because I don't think any of us
• 1:11:58
  can handle this for more than a week. So thanks
• 1:12:01
  everybody for hanging in there with this one. I know
• 1:12:03
  it was rough. Please like rate review, share with your
• 1:12:06
  friends and family. If you know of any cases that
• 1:12:10
  you want me to cover, please feel free to email me.
• 1:12:13
  My email is true Crime californiapod at gmail dot com.
• 1:12:17
  I'm always looking for good cases, and if I keep
• 1:12:19
  going to Diva, they're going to be like this. So
• 1:12:21
  let's get some variety in there. Let's get a little fluff.
• 1:12:25
  I mean, there's no fluff where murder is concerned, but
• 1:12:27
  maybe some disappearances, something a little less hardcore Please feel
• 1:12:31
  free send me anything and everything, and again thanks again
• 1:12:34
  for listening. I appreciate all of you, and until next week,
• 1:12:37
  stay safe,