Roy Norris

Victims

5 - four convictions for first-degree murder and one for second-degree, all by guilty plea entered in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty and for his testimony against Bittaker. Two of the five bodies, those of Lucinda Schaefer and Andrea Hall, were never recovered

Years active

June-October 1979

Location

California, USA

Method

Ligature strangulation

Status

Arrested on November 23, 1979. He accepted a plea bargain under which he would testify against Lawrence Bittaker in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty, and on March 18, 1980 he pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and one of second-degree murder, together with two counts of forcible rape and robbery. He testified against Bittaker, who was convicted on all twenty-six counts and sentenced to death. Norris was sentenced in Los Angeles County on April 28, 1981 to forty-five years to life and entered state prison on May 8, 1981. He became eligible for parole in 2009, declined to attend the hearing and so deferred eligibility for ten years automatically; at his second hearing in March 2019 parole was refused for a further ten years, which would have put his next hearing in 2029. He died of natural causes on February 24, 2020 at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, aged seventy-two, having been transferred there from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. Late in his life he began to claim he had been blacked out on drugs throughout the killings, which contradicts the detailed testimony he gave at trial.

Norris was born in 1948 and had a record of sexual assault; he was a convicted rapist and had been held as a mentally disordered sex offender. He met Bittaker in a California prison, and the two agreed on what they would do once released.

Between June and October 1979 they abducted five girls in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County: Cindy Schaeffer, sixteen; Andrea Hall, eighteen; Jackie Gilliam, fifteen, and Jacqueline Lamp, thirteen; and Shirley Ledford, sixteen. They used a van with no side windows, took them to a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains, raped and tortured them, and killed them. One killing was audio-recorded.

Norris talked about it to a former cellmate, who reported it, and both men were arrested in November 1979.

He agreed to plead guilty and to testify against Bittaker in exchange for the state not seeking death. He was sentenced on March 18, 1980 to forty-five years to life, with parole possible after thirty. His evidence was the foundation of Bittaker's conviction. He was repeatedly denied parole and died in custody at the California Medical Facility on February 24, 2020, aged seventy-one.

Bittaker died on death row on December 13, 2019, having spent thirty-eight years there. The two entries describe the same five victims and the count should not be added twice. As with Bittaker's, this entry is deliberately brief about what was done to the girls.