Posted on 02/10/2011 2:28:35 PM PST by Mark
Shirley Lynette Ledford was a pretty, 16-year-old teenage girl just coming into her own in 1979, the year she was kidnapped and murdered.
She would have turned 48 this year.
I got to thinking about her Wednesday after reading another story about how we can't seem to come up with a humane way to thin out the waiting list on San Quentin's death row without causing murderers too much pain and suffering.
It's a hard argument to swallow when you know the pain and suffering Ledford went through at the end of her short life.
I can still hear her screams as she begged for her life. No one in the courtroom who heard the 17- minute audio tape of her last moments will ever forget it.
Jurors openly cried and half a dozen people sitting in the courtroom had to get up and leave, sick to their stomachs. Even the prosecutor cried talking to the media later. It was that chilling and cruel.
The man sentenced to death for kidnapping and murdering Ledford and four other teenage girls was Larry Bittaker, a Burbank machinist.
He's turning 71 this year.
I don't know if they celebrate birthdays on death row, but if they do Bittaker's been blowing out the candles for 30 years now while the system tries to figure out a way to kill him that won't hurt.
Sticking a hot needle in his arm and letting him fall asleep forever doesn't seem to be it, so Bittaker and more than 650 other murderers on death row keep celebrating more birthdays.
Shirley Lynette Ledford ran out of birthdays 32 years ago.
"It's sad to think Bittaker might have to go through a little pain if he's executed," quips Stephen Kay, a former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney who was lead prosecutor on the trial.
Kay, who also co-prosecuted the Charles Manson murder trial, vividly remembers the pain and suffering Bittaker and his partner, Roy Norris, (who got life for testifying against Bittaker) inflicted on Ledford.
They raped, mutilated, then strangled her with a clotheshanger in the back of a van they dubbed the Murder Mac. Then they threw her body into a Tujunga ivy bed like she was roadside trash.
It's unimaginable to know the pain and suffering this poor little girl went through at Bittaker's hands. That 17-minute audio tape tears your heart out.
It took the jury an hour and a half to come back with a guilty verdict in 1981. Since then, more than half of the jurors have died, as has the trial judge, assistant prosecutor, and lead detective who testified.
Meanwhile, Bittaker sits in his cell on death row celebrating another birthday while the state looks for a humane way to execute him.
"In my penalty arguments I apologized to the jury for only asking for the death penalty," Kay told me Wednesday.
"I told them I wish I could ask them to do to him what he did to those girls."
This column is not about being for or against the death penalty. That's another argument. This one's about the idea that somehow we degrade ourselves as a society if a murderer sitting on death row experiences some pain and suffering at the end.
Who cares? Pain and suffering was their livelihood. They're pros at it. Kay's words to the jury during the penalty phase of the trial 30 years ago hit a nerve in that courtroom.
Nobody on the jury gave a damn about what Bittaker's pain and suffering might be when it came time for their verdict to be carried out.
It was Ledford and the other girls' pain and suffering they cared about. The victims, not the murderer.
If we're going to have a death penalty law in this state, which we do, then make it one for the victims.
When it's your time, you get the same pain and suffering you caused your victims.
Yeah, I know, it'll never happen. But you can always dream.
Shirley Lynette Ledford celebrated her last birthday 32 years ago when she was 16.
Larry Bittaker's celebrating his 71st birthday this year - 30 years after a jury sentenced him to death for murdering her.
What's wrong with that picture?
Dennis McCarthy's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
Nobody gets away with anything. There is a higher court with no appeals. Justice will be done. Unfortunately we won’t see it just yet.
Strap the condemned down, apply an external brain wave activity monitor then apply a plastic face mask and pump in 99% pure industrial nitrogen. Wait till the brain monitor flat lines. Then wait 5 min more.
Environmentally friendly - Nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere
Painless - the material data safety sheet for nitrogen warns about how quickly and without notice individuals can succumb to nitrogen asphyxiation
100% sure kill
No blood splatter to clean up after wards
“justice delayed is justice denied” , unless you’re Mike Farrell, then justice is “just us” Hollyweird leftists living behind guarded gates.
fankly if your worried about “pain and suffering a shot to the head by 3 sincyronized mini guns or the new xm-25 with shot would do it just fine. by the time the nerve impuses reached the brain, there wouldn’t be any brain.
A claw hammer at True Value costs about $12.
No problems with finding a vein under rolls of fat, either.
Give him to me. I’ll need rope, a hoist, and some pizza.
If we had REAL MEN running our judiciary at EVERY level, these situations wouldn’t even be an issue...
I’m tired of living in a world where our menfolk won’t provide JUSTICE to a 16 year old GIRL in THIS case and kids MUCH younger in many others.
The lunatics of this world should NOT get a free pass...and living another 30 years while your victim doesn’t live past 16 is certainly just that! Grrrrrrr!
I sometimes wish I could believe that. Absent such a belief, we have to make our own justice. That being the case, I fully support a fair and swift death penalty for murder.
I’ll buy the pizza! :)
I saw that case explosred on ID The Investigative Divcovery Chanel a while back.
Unspeakable animals. I thought he had been executed.
This is disgusting for that animal to still be drawing oxygen 30 years later!!
There’s an expression that goes “The anticipation of death is worse than death itself”. When those two are seeing the flames of Hell on their death bed then they’ll know. The reason I say that is; my former wife told me the story about a relative that was dying. The guy was pretty much a creep all his life. The family was gathered around his bed and all of a sudden he started screaming that ‘they’re here, they’re coming for me’ then he died. This is pretty much the short version but the way she told it to me raised goosebumps.
Murders
Bittaker and Norris hatched a plan to rape and kill local girls. Bittaker bought a 1977 GMC cargo van, which they came to call “Murder Mack”, because it had no side windows in the back and a large passenger side sliding door. From February to June 1979, they gave their plan a test run. They drove along the Pacific Coast Highway, stopped at beaches, talked to girls and took their pictures. When the pair was arrested, police found close to 500 pictures among Bittaker’s possessions.
On June 24, 1979, they claimed their first victim, 16-year-old Cindy Schaeffer. They picked her up near Redondo Beach, Norris forcing her into the van. He duct taped her mouth and bound her arms and legs. Bittaker drove the van to a fire road on San Gabriel Mountains out of sight of the highway. Both men raped the girl, and then Bittaker wrapped a straightened wire coat hanger around her neck. He tightened the wire with vise-grip pliers, strangling her to death. They wrapped her body in a plastic shower curtain and dumped it in a nearby canyon.
They picked up 18-year-old Andrea Hall hitchhiking on July 8. Norris hid in the back of the van and Bittaker talked her into the van. After she had gotten in Bittaker offered her a drink from a cooler in the back. When she went to the cooler Norris jumped her, bound her arms and legs, and taped her mouth shut. They took her to the fire road and raped her several times. Bittaker dragged her from the van, and Norris left to get beer. When he returned, Hall was gone, and Bittaker was looking at Polaroid pictures of her. He had stabbed her with an ice pick in both ears and strangled her. He threw her body over a cliff.
On September 3, while driving near Hermosa Beach, the pair spotted two girls on a bus stop bench and offered them a ride. Jackie Gilliam, 15, and Leah Lamp, 13, accepted their offer. The girls became suspicious when Bittaker parked the van near a suburban tennis court. Lamp went for the back door and Norris hit her in the head with a bat. A short scuffle broke out, but with Bittaker’s help Norris subdued the teens and bound them both. Bittaker then drove them to the fire road. They kept the girls alive for two days, raping and torturing them the whole time with a wire hanger and pliers. They even made an audio recording of the events. Eventually Bittaker stabbed Gilliam in both ears with an ice pick. When she didn’t succumb to her injuries, both men took turns strangling her until she died. Bittaker then strangled Lamp while Norris hit her in the head with a sledgehammer seven times. They dumped the bodies over a cliff, the ice pick still in Gilliam’s head.
They kidnapped Shirley Sanders on September 30, macing her and forcing her into the van. Both raped her, but she escaped. Police had showed her pictures of the men and she had identified the men as Lawrence and Roy.
They kidnapped 16-year-old Lynette Ledford on October 31, raping her and torturing her, while driving around Los Angeles instead of heading to their usual mountain spot. Bittaker stabbed the young girl several times and also tortured her with the pliers. During her torture, her screams and pleas were tape-recorded as Bittaker repeatedly beat her elbows with a sledgehammer, all the time demanding that she not stop screaming; he eventually strangled her with a wire hanger, using the pliers to twist a cinching loop around her throat. Instead of tossing her body over a cliff, they left it on a random lawn in Hermosa Beach to see the local reaction in the newspaper. The body was found the next day and caused quite a stir, being only days since the arrest of “Hillside Strangler” Angelo Buono.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Bittaker_and_Roy_Norris
Some of these bastards, though, seem to deserve CO2 asphyxia, though ...
Americans are fed up with this nonsense of painful executions.
$20 on 10-15 feet 3/4” of hemp rope.
All you need is a sturdy tree in front of the courthouse.
Problem solved.
I would like to hear the long version, if you are up to telling it.
Scott Glenn, the actor was very liberal on the death penalty. Then the FBI manhunter John Douglas played the tape of the torture of this girl for him. Glenn said that he would never oppose the DP again.
Your wife's story, while creepy, isn't exactly rigorous evidence of the afterlife. If demons show up right before the death of a wicked person, why aren't there countless similar accounts right before the execution of murderers? It seems more likely that her relative had simply seen the movie "Ghost" a few too many times...
The hanging sounds very painless. Also the libs said that starving is very painless and euphoric.
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