Criminal Minds (17 page)

Norris claimed that Bittaker saved his life twice. Thus, according to the “prisoner’s code,” he owed Bittaker, and would do anything the older man asked of him. They began to formulate a plan. They would have some “fun” when they got out: kidnapping, raping, and torturing at least one girl of each of the teen years, thirteen through nineteen. After seeing how long they could keep the girls alive and screaming, they would kill them, because they decided that Norris’s mistake had been letting his victims survive to testify against him. Bittaker had already killed once, in what started as a simple shoplifting incident. He put some meat down his pants and left a supermarket; when an employee confronted him, Bittaker stabbed the employee to death.

Once again, mental health experts warned that Bittaker was a psychopath and a continuing danger to society. Once again, he was released from prison. In November 1978, he moved in with his mother in Los Angeles and waited for Norris to be released.

When Norris got out in early 1979, the two retired to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles to refine their plan. Their first move was to acquire a 1977 GMC cargo van with no windows in back and a sliding door. Naming it “Murder Mack,” they outfitted it for rape and abduction and began cruising the Pacific Coast Highway. The investigators later found around five hundred photos the pair took of teenage girls they spoke to during their time on the streets. The two predators also drove Southern California’s more isolated reaches, looking for the right spot to have their “fun.” Finally, they found both things they were looking for: the place and the girl.

The morning of June 24, 1979, they worked on the bed they were constructing in the back of Murder Mack; the bed would have a space underneath in which to hide a body. After they finished that task, they started cruising, drinking beer, smoking dope, and flirting with girls. Soon they spotted one they could both agree on. Cindy Schaeffer, sixteen, was walking home from a church youth group meeting. Bittaker and Norris offered her a ride. She declined. They swung into a driveway ahead of her and offered more forcefully. Norris grabbed her and heaved her into the van through the sliding door, and they raced away. With Bittaker at the wheel, Norris wrestled with their captive, covering her mouth with duct tape and binding her wrists and ankles.

On a dirt road in the San Gabriel Mountains, the psychopaths took turns raping Schaeffer. When they finished, Norris tried to kill her. He failed, and Bittaker took a crack at it. Finally they teamed up and strangled her with a wire coat hanger, then wrapped her body in a plastic shower curtain and hurled it into a canyon.

The adventure had been almost everything they’d hoped for, but it left them wanting more, so they tried again on July 8, abducting and repeatedly raping Andrea Hall, an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker. This time they took Polaroid pictures. Bittaker sent Norris to fetch more beer, and while his partner was gone, Bittaker murdered Hall, driving an ice pick into each ear and then strangling her when the stabbings failed to kill her. Once again, the body was tossed off a cliff.

Their next assault involved two girls at once: Jackie Gilliam, fifteen, and thirteen-year-old Leah Lamp. Bittaker and Norris kept the girls alive for two days of torture and documented the ordeal with pictures and audiotapes. When they threw the girls over the side of the canyon wall, Bittaker’s ice pick was still jammed into Jackie’s head.

A few weeks later, the pair maced Shirley Sanders and raped her in the Murder Mack, but she escaped. Although she reported the attack, she couldn’t identify her attackers.

The killers were anxious, but no official scrutiny came their way. On Halloween night they grabbed Lynette Ledford, their second sixteen-year-old. Instead of taking her to the mountains, they raped and tortured her in the back of the van. While Norris drove, Bittaker went to work with vise-grip pliers, a tape recorder going the whole time. Eventually, Norris took a turn. They strangled Ledford with a coat hanger and dumped her in a random yard.

This corpse—the first of Bittaker and Norris’s victims to be found—startled a metropolitan area that was still reeling from the Hillside Stranglers case. One of the two stranglers, Angelo Buono, had just been arrested on October 22.

Ledford was the beginning of the end for the psychopathic killers. It’s not uncommon for organized killers to become less organized as their crimes continue, because their tenuous psychological state progressively degenerates. Had the men continued with their plan of picking up at least one girl of each teen year, taking all of their victims to remote locations and hiding the bodies, they might have been able to finish what they started. But they abandoned a routine that had been working for them because they were unable to delay their gratification.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s job was made easier by the fact that Norris couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He had bragged about the murders to another prison buddy, who thought that Norris was blue-skying him until he heard about Ledford. This onetime friend told his lawyer, and the two of them alerted the cops. The police showed Shirley Sanders (the victim who had gotten away) photos of Norris and Bittaker, and she identified them as her rapists.

While the authorities were constructing their case, Norris was seen selling marijuana. He was picked up for dealing, and Bittaker was arrested for the kidnap and rape of Sanders. In custody, Norris blamed Bittaker for everything and showed the police where the bodies were hidden. Bittaker’s ice pick was still stuck in Jackie Gilliam’s skull. Norris couldn’t find Andrea Hall or Cindy Schaeffer, and those bodies have never turned up.

The audio recordings made clear that Norris was every bit as engaged in the crimes as Bittaker was, but the state needed Norris to testify. In return for his confession and his testimony against Bittaker, Norris was promised a life sentence with the possibility of parole. He received a sentence of forty-five years to life, with the possibility of parole after thirty years. He is eligible for release in 2010.

Bittaker tried to blame everything on Norris. The jury didn’t buy it, and in March 1981 he was sentenced to death. He remains on death row in San Quentin, where he’s a celebrity in the world of serial-killer fandom. He signs his responses to his fan mail “Pliers” and gives interviews, and for a while he sold artwork and souvenirs to the outside world. Noted FBI profiler John Douglas has referred to Bittaker as “among the vilest human beings I have ever come across.” One would be hard-pressed to disagree.

 

 

LAWRENCE BITTAKER
committed his first murder when he was stopped for shoplifting. For Leonard Lake and Charles Ng—who, along with Bittaker and Norris, are mentioned in the episode “Lo-Fi” (320)—the crime of shoplifting had somewhat different consequences.

On June 2, 1985, a hardware store clerk in south San Francisco saw an Asian man hide a bench vise under his jacket and leave the store, so he called the police. When an officer responded, the clerk showed him that the vise was sitting in the open trunk of a Honda; the Asian man had put it there and then ran away. A burly man intervened, telling the cop that he had paid for the vise, so there was no problem. But the cop, looking in the trunk, saw a .22 revolver and a silencer, so he had more questions. The man had a picture ID that didn’t seem to match his appearance, and the Honda belonged to someone else altogether.

The officer took the big bearded man in and found paperwork among his possessions that belonged to yet another man. The burly man told the interrogators that the Asian man’s name was Charles Chitat Ng, his name was Leonard Lake, and he was wanted by the FBI. Then he swallowed a cyanide capsule that he had hidden under his shirt collar and went into a coma from which he never awoke. Four days later he died.

In the car, the authorities found property belonging to still more people who weren’t Ng or Lake. Some of it led to Lake’s ex-wife, Claralyn Balasz, who led them to Lake and Ng’s hideaway, a cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Calaveras County. What they found could have been a set for a horror movie.

The walls were covered with bullet holes and blood. Inside a locked bunker was a torture chamber that included a workshop full of power tools, many of them coated with dried blood; a hidden bedroom; and a second, even more hidden room that the police termed a “hostage cell.” In addition, they found a huge array of weapons, books on chemicals and explosives, and photographs of nude and seminude young girls (taken at the juvenile hall where Balasz worked). In the main part of the cabin they found Lake’s diary, which detailed a series of abductions, rapes, tortures, and murders as well as Lake and Ng’s goal of building a series of similar remote camps that they would outfit with weapons and female sex slaves. The latter they planned to use to repopulate the world after a nuclear holocaust.

Outside, the police found a powerful incinerator and a long trench that had been treated with lye. In the trench and around the property, the police found personal effects and enough belongings to suggest that at least twenty-five people had been brought to the cabin, tortured, and killed. There were videotapes that showed some of the victims being abused.

Ng, an ex-marine like Lake, was the son of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. He had plenty of money and now had a head start of several days. Ng had been drummed out of the marine corps for theft, but Lake had been allowed to finish a tour in Vietnam despite being hospitalized for “exhibiting incipient psychotic reactions” and having had another tour cut short for medical reasons. It’s uncertain exactly how Ng and Lake met, but they wound up living on the remote mountain ranch with Balasz and then using that ranch to try to amass their army of sex slaves. Like Christopher Wilder and Bob Berdella, Lake was partially inspired by John Fowles’s novel
The Collector
. He called his plan Operation Miranda, after the imprisoned woman in the novel.

On July 6, shoplifting entered their story again. Ng was picked up in Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, after stuffing groceries into his backpack. A scuffle ensued in which he drew a pistol and shot one of the security guards, then he was overpowered and taken into custody. He was tried and sentenced to four and a half years for shoplifting and assault. The battle to extradite him to the United States, which Canada doesn’t typically do because it doesn’t agree with the U.S. practice of using the death penalty, took six years. Canada finally complied, and on February 11, 1999, Ng was convicted of eleven murders. He was sentenced to death but remains on death row in San Quentin.

It’s often said that in killing teams, there’s usually one partner who is dominant and one who’s submissive. In this case, burly Leonard Lake was definitely the dominant one, the one who had the idea of maintaining a bunker full of sex slaves. Ng went along willingly, and he participated fully in the brutal and vicious acts the pair committed. He’s every bit as guilty as Lake was, but apparently he was less willing to end his life with a cyanide pill. Instead, he has already been responsible for the most expensive legal proceedings in California’s history, and he has not stopped his appeals.

 

 

BITTAKER AND NORRIS
launched into their murders so closely on the heels of the Hillside Stranglers that it made terrified Los Angeles residents wonder if the police had locked up the right people. In fact, they had—Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi had killed at least ten women entirely on their own and didn’t need help from Bittaker and Norris to do it. Their crimes earned them their joint nickname and references in two episodes of
Criminal Minds
, “Children of the Dark” (304) and “Zoe’s Reprise” (415).

Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born on May 22, 1951, in Rochester, New York. His mother was an alcoholic prostitute who gave him up for adoption immediately after his birth. As if his destiny were already set, when he was a very young boy his adoptive mother recognized that he was lazy, irresponsible, and a constant liar. He was a bedwetter until late in childhood. After high school he married young, but his marriage didn’t last. After a series of menial jobs, he was hired as a security guard, a profession that gave him plenty of opportunity to engage in a hobby of petty theft. He was bright but never lived up to his potential in any area of life.