Scary/Horror Stories.

Shirley Lynette Ledford

On October 31, 1979, 16-year-old Shirley Ledford was walking home from a party in the suburbs of Los Angeles when two kind men in a van offered to give her a ride. The next morning, a jogger discovered her mutilated body in an ivy bed on the front lawn of a residential home. It appeared to be a shocking random act of violence, but less than a month later, a tip from a former inmate put police on the trails of Roy Norris and Lawrence Bittaker, an electrician and a mechanic who lived and worked in Los Angeles.

It wasn't long before investigators discovered of young girls, bloodstained work tools, and chilling recorded tapes of women screaming and begging for mercy. The police had captured the Tool Box Killers, a serial-killing team that had abducted, tortured, and killed at least five teenage girls over the past few months.

But the true barbarity of this two-man torture team didn't come out until Roy Norris made a full confession of their murders. Particularly gruesome was his description of what had happened after they'd coerced Shirley Ledford into their van that tragic Halloween evening. Bittaker was driving when they picked her up, and Norris offered her some weed, which she'd refused. Norris then got behind the wheel while Bittaker slid into the back with Shirley. For the next two hours, all Norris heard was "" from the back. While Norris calmly piloted them through the bustling streets of LA, Bittaker beat her with his fists, broke her elbows with a sledgehammer, and sodomized her with a pair of pliers. All of it was recorded on a tape recorder.

Finally, Norris pulled over and strangled Shirley with a coat hanger that he cinched shut with pliers, and the two dumped her body on a random front lawn. Apparently, Bittaker wanted to "see the reaction of the newspapers" when the body was discovered. Bittaker received the death sentence, and Norris received 45 years to life.