WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT. The duo targeted teen girls and abducted, raped, and tortured them using tools like screwdrivers, icepicks, and pliers before brutally murdering them.
Parul Sharma GAU audience writer
08:00, 03 Nov 2025
The pair committed unspeakable crimes
Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris can easily be awarded the distinction of being amongst the most infamous serial killer partnerships to have ever existed. The two offenders, who struck up a friendship whilst behind bars, chose to unite their efforts as they stalked female targets in a menacing van they dubbed the ‘Murder Mac’.
The duo would target young women before kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and torturing them through acts of “astonishing cruelty” prior to killing them. The pair initially met whilst both were detained at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo for separate crimes. Bittaker had been jailed for stabbing a shop assistant who challenged him over shoplifting in 1974, whilst Norris was completing a sentence for rape.
Following their connection and discovery that they both harboured similar twisted fantasies, the pair devised a scheme to begin sexually assaulting and torturing girls together, ending in their deaths to avoid detection.
Serial killer Lawrence Sigmond Bittaker(Image: Californian Police Handout )
Bittaker secured parole first, obtaining employment in Los Angeles as a machinist. Two months afterwards, Norris also gained parole and relocated to live with his mother in LA where he started work as an electrician.
The duo then established contact with one another in February of 1979, and commenced their appalling murder campaign as they put their terrifying scheme into action.
From February to June that year, the sadistic pair approached more than 20 female hitchhikers – “dry runs” for their forthcoming killing rampage, investigators suspected. Together, Bittaker and Norris kidnapped at least five youngsters aged between 13 to 18 and subjected them to horrific torture before murdering them.
The sinister duo methodically tortured and slaughtered their victims using implements like screwdrivers, icepicks, and pliers – gaining them the terrifying nickname ‘The Toolbox Killers’.
Roy Lewis Norris, one half of the Toolbox Killers(Image: Bettmann Archive)
The killers became infamous as they carried out their spree of violence in southern California’s San Gabriel mountains from June to October in 1979. Their victims were identified as: Lucinda Lynn “Cindy” Schaefer, 16; Andrea Joy Hall, 18; Jackie Doris Gilliam, 15; Jacqueline Leah Lamp, 13; and Shirley Lynette Ledford, 16.
Devastatingly, the remains of Schaefer and Hall were never recovered. June 24 marked when they slaughtered their first victim – 16-year-old Lucinda Lynn Schaefer. Bittaker and Norris alternately raped the teenage girl before Bittaker throttled her to death.
Andrea Joy Hall became their subsequent target. After the duo collected her whilst she was hitchhiking, they transported her to the identical isolated location where they had previously murdered Lucinda Schaefer.
Once more, they sexually assaulted their victim, forcing her to walk unclothed along the road before compelling her to perform oral sex on Bittaker. They took photographs of Andrea, which showed an expression of “sheer terror”.
Lucinda Lynn Schaefer, 16, was their first victim(Image: Californian Police Handout )
A month later, the fiends brutally murdered two women on the same day. Jacqueline Leah Lamp and Jackie Doris Gilliam were hitchhiking together along California’s Pacific Coast Highway when Bittaker and Norris offered them a lift.
The girls, just 13 and 15, were attacked, held captive for two days, and subjected to terrifying torture. Among their victims, 16-year-old Shirley Lennette Ledford was the fifth and final young woman to meet her end at their hands. Ledford was leaving a Halloween party on October 31, 1979, and while hitchhiking, was picked up in the notorious Murder Mac by Bittaker and Norris.
Ledford was held hostage by the Toolbox Killers for nearly two hours as she endured brutal and unspeakable torture, severe physical beatings, verbal abuse, and sexual assault. The teenager’s cause of death was strangulation by a wire coat hanger and her lifeless body was left on someone’s front lawn, discovered by a jogger the following morning.
Shirley Lennette Ledford was only 16 when she was tortured and killed(Image: Californian Police Handout )
The murderers were finally apprehended after Norris boasted about their heinous acts to a friend of the two men, who promptly alerted the authorities. In a desperate bid to avoid the death penalty, Norris cooperated with the investigation and chose to plead guilty as he turned against Bittaker. He was handed a sentence of 45 years to life behind bars in April 1981, reports the Mirror US.
Bittaker was given a death sentence on March 22 1981. However, he died of natural causes while on death row in 2019 before his sentence could be executed, having suffered multiple heart attacks that left him feeling “vulnerable”. “It’s kind of a taste of maybe what my victims were going through,” Bittaker admitted to criminologist Laura Brand during an interview for her documentary.
Reports suggest that Norris also died of natural causes two months later at the age of 72. “So many people call them soulmates, and you’ve got to wonder,” Brand commented. “They died like an old married couple, like they couldn’t live without each other.”
The Toolbox Killers have been labelled as “beyond barbaric”, with FBI Special Agent John E. Douglas describing Bittaker as “the most disturbing individual” he had ever profiled criminally.