The Toolbox Killer

One night my phone rang.

You have a prepaid call from an inmate

at the California State Prison,

San Quentin, California.

Bittaker had a series of heart attacks.

Teenagers brutally attacked.

Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker...

Raping and murdering five teenage girls.

The evil that these guys caused--

it really captured the fear of the city of Los Angeles.

Just a lot more careful about where I go.

I'm afraid to be walking down the street.

Lawrence Bittaker and his partner, Roy Norris,

were known as the Toolbox Killers.

Bittaker was the most evil man

because of that toolbox.

Pliers, vise grips,

ice picks.

I thought Roy Norris was very strange.

I think he hated women.

He creeped me out.

I interviewed Lawrence Bittaker,

the most sadistic serial killer

on San Quentin's death row, for over five years.

He used to say to me, "If I just had one good parent,

I wouldn't have become this monster."

The police followed Norris, and, boy, did they find a lot.

Hundreds of pictures of young girls

were found in their possession.

Everyone one of these photographs

represents a potential victim.

I thought, "He's gonna kill me in the courtroom."

Oh, I thought about killing Lawrence Bittaker at the trial.

I would dream that I had a gun.

He was sexually aroused by their screams and their cries.

Bittaker finds out that she is a virgin.

He wants to audio-record the rape of a virgin.

They begin to play the tape.

The courtroom was stunned.

I first came

across Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris,

the Toolbox Killers-

it was in a criminology textbook.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

And I read about what they did with the van...

with the girls,

with the ice pick through the ears,

and the torture for days.

And I just remember, I dropped the book

'cause I was so floored by the level of sadism.

I always wondered what it took to get to that level of sadism,

how their progression from their childhood

to committing such violent, heinous acts transpired.

That was something I really wanted to explore.

I majored in forensic psychology.

I had this incredible professor.

He said, "If you start doing your own study,

"this will give you a leg up

when you go for higher education."

I developed this questionnaire that I sent out to--

I think it was, like, 80 different serial killers.

My only goal was to create a set of questions

that they can't manipulate so we can catch

these violent patterns and behaviors early on,

before these other offenders go on to do a life of crime,

like Lawrence Bittaker.

I didn't even think I was gonna get a response back.

And I was like, "They're not gonna help me with a study,"

you know.

I ended up getting a crazy amount of responses,

and I was shocked.

But when I first reached out to Bittaker,

he wrote me back saying he didn't want to talk to me,

he didn't want to do the survey.

He's in his late 70s at this point,

and he didn't want to talk about the crimes.

So many journalists tried to get him to do interviews

over the years, but he just denied everybody.

I had already collected so much data

from the other inmates.

Why am I bothering with one

that is so challenging to deal with?

But he was the most sadistic serial killer

in American history, the worst of the worst,

and I wanted to try to find out

if he was hiding something for all these years.

I didn't take no for an answer,

and I just kept writing and writing

for years and years and years.

One day, he finally agreed to talk to me.

This call is being recorded.

If you do not wish to be recorded,

please disconnect at this time.

Bittaker was really tricky to warm up to

and build the trust and rapport.

It really took a lot of time.

Early on in our relationship,

we used to try to have just, like, normal conversations,

and it was like he just couldn't do it.

As an FBI agent, I worked in the FBI's BAU,

commonly known as the Behavior Analysis Unit,

and in that unit, I was involved

in working a number of very violent crimes,

most specifically serial murder cases.

When I first met Larry, he was clearly playing

a cat-and-mouse game with me.

Didn't admit to anything.

Said he hadn't done anything wrong.

He didn't give up very much.

Bittaker, he doesn't see people as individuals.

He sees them as objects to be used and to toss away.

I was a special trial deputy

handling some of the most gruesome murder cases

in L.A. County,

including Charles Manson and his family members.

I always felt that Lawrence Bittaker

was the worst,

even worse than Manson, because of the torture.

He always said he wanted to be

bigger than Charlie Manson.

My name is Dennis McCarthy.

I was a reporter at the South Bay "Daily Breeze"

in 1981,

and I covered the murder trial of Lawrence Bittaker,

the Toolbox Killer.

Larry was such a fascinating study in evil.

Basically, Bittaker's defense was, "I didn't do it.

It was the other guy." Right? "It was Norris."

Bittaker and Norris met and spoke in prison.

Their sharing of violent sexual fantasies

really cemented their relationship.

You had violent Bittaker

and rapist Norris getting together.

Bittaker was the lead.

Norris was the follower.

Lawrence Bittaker was a near-genius.

He has a 138 IQ.

When you're working with a psychopath,

if you go in and you're pretending

to be something you're not, they can tell.

These guys are smart.

And if you're gonna play games with them,

they're gonna play games with you.

So I go in nonjudgmental.

I build a real, actual,

authentic relationship with them,

and I definitely open up about myself

and my own personal life.

Anytime you're working with offenders

who have antisocial personality,

there's always gonna be a risk.

But once Lawrence Bittaker and I finally felt that trust

and that rapport, he started to reveal stuff

that he had never told anybody else about this case.

I guess it was a Sunday.

Bittaker and Norris had been driving all day for 15 hours

just smoking weed

and photographing unsuspecting girls,

when they spotted Cindy Schaefer.

She was dropped off at a church meeting

in Redondo Beach,

and she had left early,

and she was walking back to her grandparents' place,

where she was staying, and they start to trail her.

The police had no leads.

They had a big, bloody fight.

She is punching him and just fighting for her life.

Cindy Schaefer was a very bright young woman.

She was 16 years old.

Cindy was, from all accounts of everybody who knew her,

just the sweetest and nicest girl

you could have ever imagined.

She tutored in Spanish, algebra,

and geometry in high school

and just had so many friends.

She wanted to go to college.

She wanted to study language and teach foreign language,

just like her mother.

When Bittaker would talk

about how the girl more or less went along with it

once she was inside the van,

as effort on his part to minimize his involvement,

to minimize how serious these crimes were,

he's trying to manage the impression

that you have of him.

Bittaker, when he was a teenager,

had been placed in a camp in the San Gabriel Mountains,

and he thought that that would be a good place

for them to take their victims,

because nobody would hear them scream.

Cindy asked if they were gonna kill her.

She said, "I just want you to let me pray

if you're gonna kill me."

Bittaker and Norris laughed at her,

and Bittaker turned to her, and he said,

"God isn't here, only devils."

Norris saw that Cindy was crying,

and he just couldn't do it anymore, so he let go,

and he went over to the side of the road and threw up.

Bittaker went to the back of his van