Shirley Ledford, The Halloween Murder Victim Of The “Toolbox Killers”
TwitterA harrowing tape of Ledford’s Halloween murder led to the conviction of the so-called “Toolbox Killers.”
By Oct. 31, 1979, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris — the so-called “Toolbox Killers” — had already killed four women. That Halloween, the sadistic murderers abducted their final victim, 16-year-old Shirley “Lynette” Ledford.
According to Oxygen, Ledford had decided to hitchhike home after a party in Burbank, California. She was picked up by Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker and taken to a secluded location, where the men tortured her.
As UPI reports, the sadistic serial killers raped and sodomized Ledford, bludgeoned her elbow with a sledgehammer, and twisted her breasts with pliers before they strangled her with a coat hanger.
Public DomainThe van that Bittaker and Norris used to abduct and torture their victims.
Damningly, Norris and Bittaker also recorded the entire brutal assault. As Oxygen reports, the two killers were arrested after they bragged about their string of murders to a friend, who notified the police. Their tape of Ledford’s prolonged torture was played to jurors during Bittaker’s trial in 1981.
“For those of you who do not know what hell is like, you will find out,” prosecutor Stephen Kay told jurors before starting the tape of Ledford’s torture, according to UPI. The jury sat in shock as the 10-minute tape played, and some of them were moved to tears by the audio recording.
In the end, the shocking tape helped convict Bittaker, who was sentenced to death. Because Norris had agreed to testify against his former accomplice, he was sentenced to life in prison.
But though both of the “Toolbox Killers” have since died (Bittaker in 2019 and Norris in 2020), their gruesome Halloween murder of Lynette Ledford remains one of the most disturbing in recent memory.
