Doomed to Fail - Ep 7 - Part 2: Never get in a stranger's van - The Toolbox Killers

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Last week, Taylor's best friend from college had a baby. 20 years ago, he had a van that was carpeted in the back and only had two seats, when he picked her up from work for the first time, he was very clear not to get into any weird van, but specifically to get into his.Does that make sense? This story will very clearly spell out why you should never get into a van (or car) of someone you don't know. Honestly, don't hitchhike unless you are in a very quaint part of Europe.This is the story of Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, The Toolbox Killers. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hey everyone, this is Taylor, and today we are re-releasing our episode on the Toolbox Killers. It's the classic, don't get into someone's car. And also don't blame the victim, because I would definitely help someone if they needed help. I can't remember if this is like a Ted Bundy situation, but I don't know. I kind of would help someone and definitely, definitely get killed, like in the silence of the lamps. And I think this is just generally, don't hitching. hike. I think we're past that as a people, as a culture. I think we did that in like the 1970s when cars were first like taking us across the country. We were really excited about it and then we could like leave and all this freedom and you don't have a phone. But now you have someone

tracking your location at all times and don't hitchhike. That's my best advice. Um, hope you enjoy and I will see you on the next one. As a reminder, we are re-releasing all of our episodes. So you can also listen to them in full if you go back, but I'll I'm just dividing them in half for you all. So that's where we are right now. Enjoy. Thank you. In a matter of the people of the state of California

versus Hortenthall James Simpson, case number B-A-0-19. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. I'm going to segue into the true crime side of the equation for today. Like I said, my drink today is watered. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story. It has to do with the fact that I was at a work conference all last week in Florida. And I just needed to spend this weekend in the next week, hydrating.

So that's the idea. So this whole time, we've been looking at relationships that were doomed to fail. And knowingly or not, I've kind of couched that. And actually, you kind of have to, Taylor. within the framework of romantic relationships. But there are probably thousands of stories of friendships that were also doomed to fail. Friendships that probably should have been avoided all along. It's funny, as we discussed the premise of the show and how sometimes the universe puts two people together at the exact same time,

and I started researching this particular episode and framed it more as being put together at the exact wrong time. Like a pairing that you should have... The universe could have avoided and done without. Yeah. Ooh, okay. Yeah, I know. I'm getting, I'm getting, again, like the premise is like a little bit shifty, but it's still kind of like, eh, you really, really shouldn't put these two together.

Like you said at the beginning, we have, we have very, very loose premise. Exactly. We're just telling stories. We're easy going over here. Thanks for coming. Okay. Yeah. Um, so one thing that I thought of when I was looking into like this thing that I'm going to talk about today was,

it seems that in non-romantic relationships in particular that end in tragedy there's at the very least either a power imbalance between the parties or feedback loop that leads to the tragedy and a lot of times a power imbalance with these kinds of friendships are based on one's mental acuity versus the others as in i can't remember the she said i should have done the research on this before i started talking um what's the book where the guy hugs the bunny too hard and then the friend is Um, is it, it's, it's not grapes of wrath. Is it groups of wrath? No. It's, um, bunny, a hug. Of mice and men, of mice and men. Like, there's an, a great example of, you know, two individuals with slightly different mental acuity and it was obviously to do it feels. Like, that's where I started thinking about.

And when I started going through the research of this, I thought about the, probably the single most impactful friendship gone wrong. from our childhood, Taylor, in real life, not of mice and men, but in real life, can you think of what I'm thinking about, the most impactful one of our generation? The most impactful friendship of our generation? Gone wrong. Gone wrong? Oh, my God, I have no idea. Can you give me a hint?

Colorado. Oh, are you going to do Coleman? I'm not doing Collinine, but that's the story that came to mind. so yeah that's exactly what i thought of when i was thinking about like man two people should definitely not have gotten together in any capacity i thought a columbine and yeah okay so for those that don't know this is combine is about eric harris and dylan clebel there were two friends who became acquaintances in high school and in 1999 they ended up um injuring 24 people and killing 13 including later themselves so total death count was 15 um and this is kind of the situation that kicked off

mass school shootings in general. I remember, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was, I was in Reno at like a student council conference, you know, and it was like 500 like good kids, you know, talking about how we get everybody to be involved in whatever. And we had just had like three days of like, you know, meeting new people and doing all these things. And I remember getting on the bus to go back to Las Vegas to home and someone telling us that it happened.

And it was just like such a stark contrast to what I had just experienced. of like this like you know all the all the kids trying to like get everybody involved and excited and then you know up the same time someone was killing people at a school where you are supposed to feel safe but you don't need more obviously thank you fuck you america so that's actually why i thought it was like i couched is the most impactful because there's certain things that happen in our youth where you're like i remember where i was it's like when people talk about where they were when candy was shot anyways but that was kind of my first thought and it took me back to a particularly awful story our remember reading about like years ago and I think it's still considered obscure in the pantheon pantheon of true crime like I don't hear this story told very often it is well let's get into it maybe you already know it I'm I'm I'm thinking about the toolbox killers Laurence Bidickr and Roy Norris gross yes I know a little bit I feel like I don't have that that kind of makes him more throw up so I'm excited okay so you're yeah again you're a PhD in true crime so I'm not I do, I do want to differentiate this from the toy box killer, which sounds delightful by comparison, like you're forced to be locked in an FAO Schwartz before they kill you. This is not that. This is toolbox. So that's not a thing, though.

What, but the FAO Schwartz? Why? Because they're bankrupt. to say that'd be a weird way to a weird a weird thing yeah that might be that it might have to be the reboot of those saw movies like I said like I almost feel like there are some true crime stories that though they're incredibly interesting and compelling or just too much for mainstream consumption and yeah that's essentially this the toolbox killers like I'm not going to go super into the weeds and details on the gross stuff because it's just too gross. So, don't even out of the top. Totally.

And don't, yeah. I feel like I know some of the gross stuff. I'm sure that you'll talk about some of it as well, but it's gross. I will go mildly into the. It's like real, real bad. It's real, real bad. Like, I was thinking about like how certain situations have like, and certain folks would then this genre have an it factor you know bundy being considered normally good looking gacy being

a clown involved in politics btk had a normal family these two are just garbage humans they have none of that if you look at a picture of lawrence biddickering in particular he looks like pennywise the clown it's terrifying like he's i'm going to look it up in an incognito window so it's not like in my search history that's good call i should have been doing that this whole time oh yeah you see like his forehead does look like penny wise right he's like she's really like pointy and it's got a huge forehead like it's just creepy at creepy looking dude yeah let's get into our two main characters and note the red flags along the way i'll start with what i'm going to say is the main antagonist of the story which is laurence biddicker he actually died fairly recently actually

died in 2019. So we'll get to how that ended up happening. But Lawrence was born in 1940 to a couple who gave him up to an orphanage. He was adopted as an infant. And his family moved around quite a bit. I don't have the years, but I do know over the course of 17 years, he went from Pennsylvania to Florida to Ohio to California. So setting up roots was obviously a challenge. Like if you're going up like that, you're going to have like very shallow human connections because you'll never have the opportunity to build deeper ones, right? Or, I mean, it also depends on who you are. You know, like my husband, his dad was in the military and he moved around and like,

he has friends from every place that he lived that he still talks to because his parents are making friends with everybody and his parents were like made it really made a mission for them to meet people. Yeah, yeah. If it's, if you as a parent understand that you have to make that like a point that your kids are socialized, then I'm sure it's different than if you're this guy. this is not like he got this so right uh once he turned 17 he seemed like he kind of fell into a life of crime but there was still kind of cute 1950s crimes like he was arrested for auto theft evading

arrest and i mean this last one is less dennis the menacey uh there was a hit and run as well oh that's bad yeah that's we don't know if the person died or not but but you know still i mean he got hit by 1950s car he probably wasn't doing great um he spent two years in a reform school and he kind of just drifted in and out of different facilities for various different crimes until he was about 21 years old at 21 lawrence's mental acuity comes into play he is said to be manipulative and was found to have an IQ of 138 do you know what that means taylor i don't know what that means yeah i didn't know what i meant either for the record it's like my blood pressure like i don't know what that means you're just stochialic diabol i'm like yeah just am i going to die or not

text, the IQ classifications, there's like various versions of this, but like just generally speaking, 90 to 109 on an IQ test is average. Okay. 120 to 129 is considered superior. 130 and above is considered very superior. So like I said, there's different scoring methodologies for this, but just generally speaking, a quote unquote genius is someone with an IQ of around 140 or so. Is that, is that true? like what if you're a bad test taker or what if you're a good test taker or how do they test you i don't know how test taking or your ability to be good at i i have never taken an iq

test i don't know if it's like if i should do you need to know something or is it just like how you logically reach conclusions to things right because it's i don't think if they ask you like who was president in 1912 i think they're like a kaplan course to study for it right I think it's... I'm sorry, I'm just... No, I want to know. How do you take an IQ test? I feel like this is...

Tests at IQ, Mensa, the most accurate IQ test. Ooh, is one you can do in five minutes. Who knows? There's a free IQ test.net. Yeah, I feel like you need to go into a space with people in like lab codes watching you do it for it to be like, legit. Um, so Einstein was 160. Yeah, yeah. So I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna bring.

that up. So, for example, again, a genius is somebody with an IQ of around 140 or above. Lawrence was a 138. I looked it up. Elon Musk was a 155. And like you said, Einstein was a once is a 160. He was closer to Elon Musk than he was to our IQ for context. Snoop Dog is 147. Seriously? Yeah. But I don't believe that about Elon Musk. I think he made that up. I mean, I don't know if he. I want to see some receipts for Elon Musk's. I mean, the your Einstein IQ started three companies and ran them kind of and then spun off the planet with his ego I think it's just like not having any empathy anyway um continue I'm so sorry well well anyway let's take a cue test later well let everybody unless they're bad or wildly different

if one of us is really smart and one of us is not let's just not share it exactly exactly it's got be the same we will not be sharing our IQ later I think I think if I had to guess you're probably a 119 which is just shy of superior it's very average and I think I'm probably like I'm probably right next to that maybe like a 117 116 all right we'll take it we'll figure it out okay report back maybe so I bring all this up because I mentioned that I think he's the main antagonist and I think being basically a professional criminal criminal with that level of intelligence has to put you in a rare category based on people you would normally interact with let's leave let's leave Lawrence there and move on to his partner in crime, Roy Norris.

So Roy was eight years, Lawrence's junior. So there you go. There's a little bit of that obvious power and balance. In addition to the fact that Lawrence was crazy smart and Roy wasn't, there was also the age gap. He ended up in foster homes quite a bit. Mostly due to his mom being a drug addict. This guy was kind of fucked from birth, it sounds like. There was a lot of stories around his abuse and what people did to him.

And he didn't have an. easy life growing up. But again, like also, you know, I was reading it and I was also thinking like, it's the 50s. Like, how do you interpret that? Like, isn't this standard that your dad comes home and just beats the entire family? Like, I don't. Right. I mean, I'm not saying it's good, but I'm saying like, did he have it worse than a lot of people or was his particularly bad? Hard to gauge that, I think. Yeah, totally. One thing that was interesting was that at one point in his youth, Roy did try to attempt suicide. Oh. Yeah. Like, he just strikes me in his someone like a kid with no mentors or anyone to look up to um i don't really see him as like an

obvious deviant just yet like mostly just like a lost kid you know i would say that changed the older he got uh he unlike lawrence who was like involved in stupid petty theft like sealing cars and shit roy's dabbling in the criminal underworld came about through sexual crimes that he was committing or trying to commit so around the age of 21 he was caught trying to break into a woman's house for refusing to let him in it sounded kind of like a date gone wrong for that he was arrested he was diagnosed as having a schizoid personality disorder again not to harp on this too much but think about that on the one hand you have lawrence who is basically beethoven levels of intelligence beethoven i looked up was 135 to 140 and on the other hand

you have an obviously mentally ill man in Roy, who's diagnosed as schizoid personality. Yeah, totally. After Roy's released, he attacks a female student in San Diego, strikes her in the head, and then beats her repeatedly. So his escalation is ramping pretty quickly from trying to break into a woman's house to like this level of aggression and violence.

Still, when he is arrested, he goes to the psych ward for mental illness, which I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know how mental illness or the criminal justice system work in the 1950s and 60s but this guy's crimes beared so heavily towards sexual violence and they keep putting them in psych wards yeah i don't is that a mental illness yes probably in some way but also it's very violence you should probably should be around other people yeah i mean i don't know i was i was thinking well it's definitely abhorrent behavior

so maybe that's a signal of mental illness but he's yeah definitely put him in jail. He shouldn't be around others, right? Yeah. Definitely shouldn't be around other people. Staying on brand for Roy, he is eventually released from that situation. And then he rapes a woman in Redondo Beach, which is actually reported to police. And that'll come up again because that is a really, really critical moment in why everything else here happens. It happens. I will say this. Like, I am changing. I'm not using. the word rape very much

deliberately in this because I just don't want to say it like 300 times so just note that I'm I don't know I don't get triggered by much but I did get kind of upset at like how many times this comes up over and over again and so I just don't want to do that to you or the listeners or myself again

so I'm just not going to go into detail we can assume there was a lot of sexual crime yeah exactly exactly so let's get into the overlap between these two deviants so how do they come together so let's going back to lawrence in 1974 lawrence stole a stake again it's kind he's kind of dennis the menace like what a what a stupid crime anyways so the grocery store employee who was going way above and beyond uh confronted lawrence and lawrence ended up stabbing the guy oh god never heard you that let him take it

take the steak like who cares yeah the guy lived but lawrence was arrested on obviously, and he was sent to a prison in San Luis Obispo, all these places that I'm listening, I'm like, I have so many amazing memories of it. It's so weird. Like it's so beautiful there. Redondo Beach is one of my favorite places in the world. And it's just like you think about what was going on with these guys. And it just tints everything in this weird shade. And then going back to Roy's rape accusation in Redondo Beach. In 1976, he was arrested. for that and then he also landed in San Luis Obispo so now you have the two coming together right you have

you have the incredibly smart manipulative Lawrence the incredibly you know mentally ill and sexually violent Roy coming together yeah I was I was thinking about this I was like how do you compare this like what is it like with that kind of kisman when two people kind of come together I thought about like Michael Jordan Scottie Pippen or Jobs and Boisne like that's kind of what this is in like a totally opposite way they're going to change the world let's make it worse or or let's invent computers or let's be the best and yeah totally yeah so so the two hung out in like seemingly different crowds roy was more with like the hardened criminal types the biker types and laurence kind of kept to himself and hung out with the older inmates not for any like it just

seems like that's just where he gravitated towards it wasn't because like he couldn't hang out apparently Lawrence would save Roy multiple times from getting beaten up and jumped like he wasn't like soft in any way like he just didn't hang out that crowd regardless they bonded while they were in prison mostly because of this situation where Lawrence was saving Roy's from getting his ass kicked they bonded and decided to get together once they were released and when they bonded over again it was just gross sexual stuff that don't need to talk about yeah but that was basically it That's like, they're just like, we're like sharing fantasies with each other. Lawrence ends up getting released in 1978 and then he moves to Los Angeles.

And again, given what I said about the guy earlier, like he's doing pretty well for himself. He got like a really, really good job. He was making $1,000 a week in 1978, which I can't do the conversion. That sounds like a billion dollars in today's money. I think, I think you're right. I think it's a billion dollars. It's exactly a billion dollars. Are you doing the conversion?

Yeah, it's in 1978. Yeah in 19708 money to today. Oh my god, $4,500. A week? Yeah. That's so much money. Yeah, he's crushing it. Yeah, he was a skilled labor. He socialized normally. Like people knew him. So I didn't say any of this in the outline, but he would like donate to the Salvation Army. He would go by, food and give it out to the homeless people in downtown LA like he he was being a normal dude despite the fact that he looks like penny wise roy's released a few months after this and he goes right back to being a piece of shit committing more sexual assaults while living with his mother for whatever reason Lawrence writes to Roy and the two make plans to meet up and they did and this is where they start putting together their plan to play out the scenarios they discussed while they were in jail together.

Oh. They acted like this was like a startup. Like they started like pulling their money together. Like it was that's why I brought like the Wozniak jobs things. I was just like they had this like light bulb moment, but it was just like so counter good. Like I don't. Yeah. Money together.

They were like buying materials. I'll get into this. Like they like. Right. They're like. planning to do something like a party like something fun but they're planning to commit crimes they ended up converting a van they did the van life thing before van life was a thing oh my god yeah it was anyways we'll we'll we'll go into it yeah they ended up buying

a van obviously and i sort of wondering like is this where the trope comes from like did these guys actually invent that trope and we don't know we i don't know but it's it had to have been close to the beginning of that, right? I mean, how long have a van's even been around? Totally. That's funny. So, yeah, let's get into what they ended up doing after they put together this, you know, LLC of theirs. I'm joking there was no LLC, obviously.

So they have their van. They're probably the road to that. Yeah, exactly. So they have their van. They have a plan and they have each other's support. They start going through with this plan. This all gets, like I said, super gratuitous. And I just don't want to say the word rape 300 times.

So I'm going to gloss over a lot, except one particular murder I will go into the details of. Well, part of the details of. I'm actually not going to go into details of that one either that much. But the overarching premise was the same. They'd see a girl walking on the beach. It's just the most, like, innocent safe place. How many times, I mean, you, we've done, how many times you go to Manhattan Beach, you go to Redondo, though, like, it's just beautiful, and everybody's just having a good time in the sun.

It's like the safest place you would hope to be. And anyways, that's what they would do. They see a girl walking, always near the beach or on the beach, approach her, tell her they have marijuana or beer, and then they can give her a ride. They adopt her, and they typically drive her up to the San Gabriel Mountains where they do what they do and kill her there. That's it. That's their entire MO. Do they always kill them? No, no, they didn't.

so there were several women or girls who would either get away or they would release for whatever reason yeah it was it was a little bit uh it seems like just something got into them with the ones that they ended up killing but none of them had good experiences like none of them were like got away like not emotionally scarred of course no no of course yeah we'll get into one of those women actually later because she becomes really really relevant so the list that i'm going to go off of the ones that we know they killed there's actually one more that they think they killed because there was pictures of her alive in the San Gabriel Mountains, but they actually, these guys never talked about that one,

so they don't know what happened to her. So she's just always been missing. One, the first one was 16-year-old Lynn Schaefer. The second one was 18-year-old Andrea Joy Hall. The third one, third and fourth were Jackie Doris Gilliam, who was 15, and Jacqueline Leah Lamp, who was 13. They spent two days torturing those two girls. I didn't mention this, but the reason they were called the toolbox killers

is because the back of the van, like I mentioned, like I said, I was going to talk about later, was converted into like a workshop that also had a bed in it. And part of the torture method came from devices they kept in the toolbox. And like that comes up big time with Jackie and Jacqueline. And it will come up again with the next one. The next one was Shirley Lynette Ledford, who was 16 when she was abducted, while hitchhiking home from a Halloween party. Again, the hitchhiking thing, the van,

it's just like so, it's like a movie. I mean, now, hopefully, we know a little bit better. Yeah. You know, but I feel like then this is the story you hear a thousand times. Like, a woman was hitchhiking, got into a van, and gets murdered. It seems like it happened all the time. And maybe it happened 1% of the time, but people were doing it all the time, which is really crazy.

I think about that that was like, oh, I'll just hitchhike home. Yeah, from a Halloween party. So when I was living in Hill Country, I would constantly see hitchhikers for whatever reason. And there was a part of me, Taylor, that was like, just stop, just stop. Like, get the story. Like, just figure out what is going on. Like, get the story of what's happening. And you can get murdered on both sides, picking someone up and being picked up.

I would be murdered. I'm definitely on that side of that equation. Shirley is the one that I'll actually talk about because it's, I mean, they're all bad, but it's the worst one. For context, the audio recording of what happened to her is now used by the FBI to desensitize agents. Oh. Yeah. No. Yeah.

We're going to be harping a lot on that audio recording. It is really, really bad. Did you listen to it? You can't listen to it. You can't find it, but there's transcripts of it that are circulating. and there's also like up teen thousand reports of people who actually have listened to it and what the outcomes of them listening to it was which again like that audio recording is going to keep coming up over and over again because it had it had it sounds like very very dramatic impacts on

everybody who listened to it wow so um the so like i said like if you wanted to you can't look up the audio recording but you can look up the transcript of it i'll expand on one part of what was happening during the recording that sounds horrible i think i know what the answer to this is taylor you might actually know what this is because you sort of are familiar with this with this crime do you know what an old cranon is it's part of your anatomy oh no okay so it's part of your elbow so it is the it's this point i'm pointing nobody can see this because it's audio medium i mean it's an elbow put your elbow well everybody pay your elbows in the air so yeah so it is it is the bottom part it's the part that like is is um hinged from the forearm that ties to the top right so

obviously it's a place where a lot of bone comes together a lot of cartilage comes together isn't your funny bone no your funny bones above that you're funny actually actually your funny bone the top part of your fun the your funny bone is where the top part of your old crinon actually connects to the upper arm okay i don't know why this makes you want to throw up But just, like, talking about it is making me kind of nauseous, but keep going. Aren't you glad we're doing this at 8 a year time? Shirley's autopsy revealed that that part of her anatomy was basically sawdust. Oh, my God.

So in the audio recording, the sound of a sledgehammer repeatedly hitting something can be heard. There were 25 distinct sounds of that happening with a ton of screaming and everything else that came with. And the assumption is that that that's where that injury can be heard. came from it was one of a lot of injuries but that's the bulk of what you would hear if you ever were able to hear the audio recording is this sounds oh god it's like i'm like thinking about it okay so awful pause they recorded it and kept it just the audio or the recorded a video no no i mean this is 78 there's probably no capacity for video recording in the van right so no just audio they're in the van yeah it seems hard to wield a sledgehammer in a van i mean they

really i mean it's why you have to really want it you don't get in vans don't get advanced yeah totally yeah that that detail is the only one that i really am going to discuss because it was just it just shows how terrible and brutal it was later on roy himself would describe the tape by saying if you ever heard that tape there's just no possible way that you'd not begin crying and trembling i doubt you could listen to more than 60 seconds of it but he said but he's saying it like he's proud of it oh my god yeah like he like it wasn't like a um oh man you can't can't believe how crazy this was like what a what a wild friday that was like you know he's kind of like he's ragged about it yeah so thanks uh one interesting note that might have

contributed to why her death was particularly awful is that Lawrence, she was rejected by Lawrence. So she worked at some diner that Lawrence would frequent. And he asked her out and she said no. And they actually think they actually think that's also why she ended up getting in the van. She was like, oh, I know this guy. I see him all the time. Right.

So there was like a trust element there. But she didn't know that he felt the way he felt towards her. Like what he was intention was obviously. Yeah. She didn't expect to get murdered. Yeah. You should be able to say no. two people and not give not fear of your safety yeah exactly so after shirley's death and our body

was discovered she was the only one whose body was discovered by the way everybody else was um like lost the mountains roy he's a real social butterfly he rekindled a friendship with another guy he met in jail named joseph jackson and joseph seemed to have way more humanity in him than roy himself roy went on to tell joseph what he and laurence had Lawrence had been up to you just like what are you just casually mentioning it like oh what you do this weekend it's just it's just have you ever been cornered by someone who thinks what they're telling you is amazing and you can't get away from them sure i'll tell you what so every conference i can't think of a specific example but oh i know i know exactly what my example is every conference i go to

there's some crypto bro who shows up who's going to revolutionize democracy through the blockchain and they just find you and start telling you everything about NFTs and crypto and blockchain. You're like, your eyes just fucking glazing over and they won't. Every conference, universally across the board. Yeah. That's my hell. So please, anybody. Crypto bros.

Never talked to me about crypto. I don't care. Like, I aged out of it. I think I actually hit that age where it's like I don't need to learn anything more. Like, I don't need Web 3.0. Web 2 is good. I got it. I'm fine.

I'm holding on that side. So, yeah. Anyways, Joseph probably said they're just kind of nodding along to how cool Roy's story was. And then immediately went to the police. Good on him. He's the reason all this happened. Like, he's the reason why, like, the downfall happened because the police had no, they, these were all missing people for the most part, except for the last one, surely.

And stupidly enough, Roy gave such detail. that police were able to triangulate him just from what Joseph reiterated from the stories that he told. For example, he mentioned that one time they had maced a woman while trying to get her into their minivan. And then Joseph recounted that exact story verbatim

and the police looked up, there was a report saying, yeah, this woman showed up saying there was a silver minivan, there was two guys in it, and they maced me and tried to drag me into it. Did Joseph get some sort of presidential medal of honor? I don't know.

I hope he was still alive. Did he give him something? Yeah, unfortunately, Joseph Jackson's not an easy name to Google. Oh, true. Yeah, so. Man, good for him. Good for him. That's great.

Yeah, like, Roy Bates, like, we gave him all the details that he needed to incriminate himself. That story, the one of the Mace woman, she, her name is Robin Robeck. And she was, she report all this, like I said, to the police, but she couldn't identify the people at the time. So the case kind of just went away. After Joseph described what happened, the missing girls, the abductions, the police went back to Robin with photos of Roy and Lawrence, and she immediately identified them. Like, it wasn't like just those two. Obviously, it was like a photo lineup of like a dozen, but she immediately picked out those

two. Wow. Police are actually doing really good work here. So they're starting to survey Roy and they saw him dealing marijuana, which was a parole violation form that he was picked up on. Lawrence was also picked up, but it was more blunt. It was for the assault on Robin. Mm-hmm.

police search their uh search lawrence's apartment and roy's bedroom in his mom's house and they find basically what you would expect just tons of photos of victims of potential victims of random girls walking down the beach jewelry of the victims uh they also found that audio recording i mentioned earlier they said they also found acidic material which apparently Lawrence intended on using on the next victim. So thank God that stopped. Oh my God. Yeah. Roy was having a pretty hard time with this. He was having a hard time with being arrested. He actually waived his Miranda rights just to show how intelligent he is. And then he ultimately confessed to police. His argument being mostly like, hey, it wasn't me. It was Lawrence all the all

along, you know, just like the, the prisoner's dilemma story, basically, just rehashed in this situation, which, again, like I said, I always kind of couch Lawrence as the antagonist, but, like, he's not like, Roy's not like some innocent bystandard to any of this stuff. No, I mean, he was there and he didn't tell, he didn't tell anyone. Exactly. Like the other guy did. Exactly. And, uh, Roy was ultimately given a $10,000 bail, whereas Lawrence was outright denied bail,

which I don't even understand why Roy was given that option seems incredible. incredibly generous yeah although i mean again going for conversion conversion rates it might have been unattainable amounts of money for him anyways um roy would eventually testify against lawrence in return for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty obviously um roy ends up getting 45 years to life and then he became eligible for parole in 2010 but he actually this is not later on in his prison life he didn't actually go to his parole hearing which deferred it out another 10 years. By the time the next 10 years came, he was dead, so it didn't really matter.

Not that he would have gotten released anyways. Right. Lawrence is incredible. He just keeps on criming. So he hired two inmates while he was in jail to go kill Robin because they're about to get released soon to prevent her from testifying. So isn't that just what Alec Murdoch did too or tried to kill someone from jail? oh man it didn't it wasn't that part of his story that he tried to hire a hitman to tell someone i'm trying to remember it was it was somebody it was somebody else who tried to hire someone while in jail

to kill the prosecution it was one of the idiots that i covered it wasn't it wasn't the daybell guy was the other oh it was it oh yeah okay gosh that's so ridiculous that is not going to work it never works for our listeners who are incarcerated there is you are constantly surveilled there are no hit men there are none no hit men um obviously he got caught for that he ended going to trial for the murders in 1981 um having sort sort of pled guilty he didn't reply when the judge asked him if he pleads guilty or not so in that situation it's just deferred that you're pleading and not guilty and so that's what the judge entered his defense obviously to exclude the audio recording of Shirley's death.

And the judge actually told the jury, because they would play this tape in court, they told the jury, for those of you who do not know what hell is like, you will find out. Like, that is the level of insane that we're talking about. Apparently, when the tape was played, the entire courtroom and observers in the courtroom were reduced to tears, except for Lawrence. And again, I mentioned the impact this tape has had on people. As an aside, one of the main investigators in the crime committed suicide. after this trial and he wrote a 10-page suicide note that specifically referenced the tape and the murders is haunting him oh no how many murders how many people did they go it would have been

five well it's five that we know of because they confess to it there's another there's another one where the girl is at the dump site in the san gabriel mountains with pictures of her there and they didn't confess to that one so like we don't know what happened to this one she's still missing. Got it. Lawrence interestingly took the stand in his own defense, but it seems like that was mostly for his own entertainment value rather than any realistic hope of talking his way out of this.

He was obviously found guilty and obviously sentenced to death. Lawrence is just like when you talk, he's just a piece of work. He continued being a pain in the ass from prison. He was actually declared what's called a vexatious litigant at one point, which I love. Like that is someone who just will not stop filing for. lawsuits for no reason. So like there was one story about how he filed a frivolous lawsuit because he was served like a broken cookie and he called that cruel and unusual punishment. Like he was just in the ass. Yeah. Once you're labeled a vexatious litigant, you have to get permission from

a judge or a lawyer to actually submit any more litigation. So like that's like his right to foul complaints was basically taken away from him because he was so annoying because he was so annoying like he said like he ended up dying in 2019 who was 79 years old which is like a pretty ripe old age and he was still on death row at the time roy also died shortly thereafter he died in 2020 he was 70 uh he would have been 71 or 72 at this point because they're 7 8 year age gap um and that's kind of it like these were two guys who came together who the universe put together who in my mind i think that laurence would have just been the normal dude probably like yeah his crimes weren't that bad until they met like he was just and he had a quick job like he was

doing normal shit but i don't know right brought the worst out but also the reason i placed him as the antagonist is because roy kind of planted the seeds and then Lawrence had the intellect to completely run with it If it wasn't for Lawrence, Ray would have just been, like, running, just finding women and hitting them over the head with a baseball bat. Like, you know, like, there'd be no, like, system if it wasn't for Lawrence's abilities, but. Right. So, like, separately, they might have done other things, but together that was really the thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's awful. It's all around awful. Hey, the story. I think, like, again, this is one of those ones that you just don't hear about very often because it's just so bad. And I've literally skipped over, like, 95% of the details of what happened to these people. And there's a reason for it.

If you want to read more, read more. But it's not going to make you feel good. No, it's going to make you feel terrible. Oh, my God. Those poor babies. Oh, I see a picture of the van. Not great. It looks like exactly what you think it would look like.

Yeah. Yeah. Yuck. It sounds like also some of the pictures I'm looking at from movies about it. some like the 70s and 80s I guess um it does look very saw you know the the stories of what they would do when they got up to the san gabriel mountains mm-hmm except I mean you've been up there right like yeah it's not it's not that far from L.A it's desolate it is desolate there's like hundreds of little offshoot roads that you could go down that would take you places where

nobody's ever going to find you yeah and it's just you with these two lunatics in a van that had its entire back stripped out there's a bed put in there and it's turned into like a workshop like it's just it is soft like it is close to that universe you can get and some of the some of the shit they did was just like yeah do you think they used their tools for like other things yes I know they did like fixing things no I meant other things like torturing people no I mean but like also they're like oh I need a screwdriver and then like would like use it even though they had just like murder zone with it would just take the pieces of hair than like blood that's on it to off and then start

and then like fix a chair yeah yeah I'm sure I mean they seem handy enough to build this mobile kill van well that's terrible so so you know going back to like the entire premise of like what goes on I think they tell you this what if you do rehab that like you're not supposed to date somebody else in rehab right yeah because there's a underlying component in your brain that's going to maybe go backwards with each other yeah and this is a little bit of that too like if you make buddies with somebody while you're incarcerated you maybe just like you know what like leave that relationship where it is that while you're in jail and then move on with your life and do something different like find other people go to the coffee shop go to the dog park and just like

socialized with others. I think like that's kind of the red flag here is like just there's no need to come back together. Like yeah, that part of your life. Yeah. That part of life happened. It must have been magical, but we can leave that in San Luis Obisbo's prison when it does happen. I feel like that the moment when they're like, oh, you have all these terrible thoughts too. That was like the no turning back point. You know, they're like, oh, I found someone who's just like me in. Yeah, it might be of Leonard Lakin. Carl Zingh like it's just like garbage wrapped in skin just showing it's just there's such trash and they bond over the things that nobody should bond over yeah totally so my aunt who will

never listen to this one time told my mom a story and I don't have the details but she said that in San Francisco in the 70s one of her friends was a gay man and he was killed by someone who came over and just shot him and I think it was Charles Zing yeah i know that story it was he was a radio dj or something and he put an ad in the paper and somebody just showed up and shot him and left and that's be in confess of that wow that's crazy i know um wow well that's awful yeah do you have any do have any um ending banter that you want to go into um thank you to everyone who's listening please give us review that's super helpful I made an email address so I have doomed to fail pod at gmail.com if anybody

wants to email us but anything and we're going to work on maybe a newsletter just getting it out to more people is going to be really the thing to to keep this going I think that's our next step yeah yeah thank you for taking point on that obviously my last two weeks have been chaotic two weeks ago I had no electricity for a week and then last week I was on the road so thanks for taking point on that stuff yeah totally i'm glad you're back and um yeah everybody watch watch wild the movie and there's some toolbox killer movies maybe watch it maybe don't i'm not watching it yeah i might not do it i like i like the saw movies but i like them because they're like ridiculous and not 100% accurate and yeah because they didn't really happen yeah so um well thank you taylor hopefully you have a great weekend

and safe travels for work the next week or two and yeah i guess i'll see you next week cool thanks all bye bye