Carol Anne Davis - Couples Who Kill

LAWRENCE BITTAKER & ROY NORRIS

When former prison friends Bittaker and Norris were reunited in 1979, they decided to kidnap teenage girls for sexual pleasure. Within a four month period they would repeatedly rape five known victims, torture them for kicks and kill them in an especially brutal way.

Lawrence was born on 27th September 1940 to a drug-addicted single mother in Southern California. She soon put him into care, where he was moved from one home to another by families who were more interested in the foster-payment cheques than in their foster child. As such, he didnt receive the nurturing that all babies require if they are to bond with others, and if they are to ultimately care about anyone other than themselves.

Lawrence had an IQ in the top one percent of the population and also had a photographic memory. But his foster families were often Spanish so couldnt converse with him fluently even if they wanted to. He was invariably clothed in hand-me-downs, some of which were girls clothes and shoes. Alternately ignored and laughed at, he retreated into his own little world. He literally remained on the sidelines as his foster parents fed their natural children, only giving him the leftovers. He was also sexually molested and raped by some of his so-called carers during these desperately unhappy years.

At six he was adopted by a couple who gave him their surname, Bittaker. Unfortunately it was too little too late as he was already a nascent psychopath. Young psychopaths can improve if given a consistently loving and stable environment but George Bittakers work as an aircraft fitter meant that the family moved around the country so the child was uprooted again and again. He attended schools in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and California where he was always the new boy. It made Lawrence Bittaker feel even more of an outsider, alienated from his peers.

At seventeen he dropped out of high school and stole a car, was involved in a hit and run and fled to Long Beach to escape prosecution. But the police caught up with him and he was sent to a California Youth Authority home, where he remained until he was nineteen.

The rootless teenager now travelled to Louisiana, where the FBI charged him with a further motor theft. He was sent to a Oklahoma reformatory where he behaved so strangely that he was transferred to a Missouri medical centre. Hed later admit to forensic psychiatrist Dr Ronald Markman that he faked psychotic symptoms in order to get hospitalised. The medical centre found him to be hostile and manipulative, but he made sure that his conduct improved so that the staff believed they had cured him. As a result, he was released after a year.

The intelligent but self-destructive Lawrence now moved to Los Angeles and was arrested again almost immediately, this time for robbery. But he was let out on parole in 1963.

Lawrence Bittaker continued to cause havoc in the outside world. He again stole cars and was imprisoned, got out and burgled and was imprisoned, stabbed a shop assistant who tried to prevent him shoplifting and was arrested again. He was consequently sent to the California Mens Colony where he met Roy Lewis Norris, who had a history of sexual crime.