Southern California murders of 1979

Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker and Roy Lewis Norris were convicted of the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of five teenage girls in Southern California over five months in 1979. The two met in 1977 while incarcerated at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where they began planning to abduct and kill young women after release. Bittaker was released on October 15, 1978, and found machinist work in Los Angeles; Norris was released on January 15, 1979, and moved into his mother's home in Redondo Beach. In February 1979 the two reunited, and Bittaker bought a 1977 GMC Vandura van, nicknamed 'Murder Mac', chosen for a sliding door that let them pull close to a target without opening it fully.

Between June and October 1979, Bittaker and Norris abducted and killed five victims, typically luring them with offers of rides or marijuana before driving them to remote sites, most often in the San Gabriel Mountains. Sixteen-year-old Lucinda Lynn Schaefer was forced into the van in Redondo Beach after leaving a church meeting and was killed the same night, June 24, 1979. Eighteen-year-old Andrea Joy Hall was abducted while hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway on July 8, 1979, and killed hours later in the San Gabriel Mountains. On September 3, 1979, fifteen-year-old Jackie Doris Gilliam and thirteen-year-old Jacqueline Leah Lamp were abducted together near Hermosa Beach and held captive for almost two days, during which both were repeatedly sexually assaulted, before being killed. Sixteen-year-old Shirley Lynette Ledford was abducted on October 31, 1979, while hitchhiking home from a Halloween party in Sunland-Tujunga; she was tortured for roughly two hours before being strangled, and her body was left on a lawn in Sunland, found by a jogger the next morning.

The case broke after Norris described the killings to a former fellow inmate, who reported the account to his attorney and then to police. Detectives matched details from that account to missing-persons reports and to an unrelated rape reported on September 30, 1979, whose survivor identified Bittaker and Norris from photographs. Both men were arrested on November 20, 1979, initially on parole-violation and rape-related charges. A search of Bittaker's van and apartment turned up a bag of lead weights, jewelry later linked to two victims, and an audio recording of a victim's abuse; Norris's apartment yielded a bracelet taken from Ledford. On November 30, 1979, after waiving his Miranda rights, Norris confessed to investigators, describing the abductions, assaults, and killings in detail. Investigators then recovered the skeletal remains of Gilliam and Lamp from a San Gabriel Mountains canyon on February 9, 1980; the remains of Schaefer and Hall were never found.

Bittaker and Norris were formally charged with all five murders in February 1980. Norris pleaded guilty on March 18, 1980, to four counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder, two rape counts, and one robbery count, under a plea deal to testify against Bittaker in exchange for prosecutors foregoing the death penalty; he was sentenced on May 7, 1980, to forty-five years to life, with parole eligibility beginning in 2010. Bittaker was arraigned on 29 charges on April 24, 1980, and stood trial beginning January 19, 1981, in Los Angeles County Superior Court in Torrance, California, with Norris testifying for the prosecution. Bittaker was convicted and sentenced to death for the five murders on March 24, 1981. He died of natural causes on death row at San Quentin State Prison on December 13, 2019. Norris died of natural causes at the California Medical Facility on February 24, 2020.