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“What do you want me to say?” she responds.
The slapping continues, interspersed with cries of pain.
Frustrated, Bittaker asks Ledford, “You can scream louder than that,
can’t you?”
Ledford tries to accommodate him, but Bittaker wants more. Soon he
goes to work with the vice-grip pliers. “Scream, baby!” he urges.
Next, Norris’s voice is heard. “Make noise there, girl!” he orders.
“Go ahead and scream or I’ll make you scream!”
“I’ll scream if you stop hitting me,” Ledford sobs when Norris
starts striking her elbows with a hammer.
Norris swings the hammer 25 times while he chants mindlessly, “Keep
it up, girl! Keep it up! Scream till I say stop!”
Bittaker parked the van and prepared for the kill. “I got a section
of coat hanger,” he later told police, “and wrapped it around her
throat and tied it up with the pliers.”
Emboldened, they thought it would be amusing to see what happened
if they dumped their victim on someone’s front lawn. They chose a yard
at random in Hermosa Beach, and loaded Ledford’s corpse into a bed of
ivy. The corpse was discovered the next morning.
The find shocked Los Angeles, since it came only days after the
arrest of “Hillside Strangler” Angelo Buono. The police said they were
unaware of any other Buono victims. There were missing girls and women
on the books, of course, but who could say if they were dead? More to
the point, how could police identify the killers in the latest
unsolved case?
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