The second of the “Tool Box Killers” died Monday at a prison facility in Vacaville, barely two months after his crime partner.
Roy Lewis Norris, 72, died of natural causes at the California Medical Facility, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported.
Norris had been serving a sentence of 45 years to life for the 1979 murders of five teenage girls in Los Angeles County.
Over the course of five months, Norris and Lawrence Bittaker kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered the girls. The victims, some of them hitchhikers, ranged from 13 to 18 years old and were from Los Angeles County’s South Bay, Long Beach and San Fernando Valley.
The pair were dubbed “the Tool Box Killers” because of the instruments of torture, including ice picks, vise grips and a sledgehammer.
Norris pleaded guilty and testified against Bittaker in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty. He was denied parole in 2009 and 2019 and would not have been eligible for another parole hearing until 2029.
Bittaker was found guilty and sentenced to death. He died of natural causes at San Quentin State Prison on Dec. 13, at age 79.
The victims were Lucinda Schaefer, 16, of Torrance; Jacqueline Lamp, 13, of Redondo Beach; Jackie Gilliam, 15, of Long Beach; Andrea Hall, 18, of Tujunga; and Shirley Ledford, 16, of Sun Valley.
The two men, who met in prison, drove a van scouring the coastal areas in search of their victims. They took the girls to isolated areas, including the San Gabriel Mountains, where they were tormented and then killed.
The bodies of Schaefer and Hall were never recovered.
