The Toolbox Killer

The documentary deals with a murder case and with the conversations built around it. Lawrence Bittaker was convicted of killings committed in Southern California in 1979. He had acted together with Roy Norris. Five teenage girls were killed. Bittaker said nothing about any of it for forty years. Then he met the criminologist Laura Brand. She spoke with him over five years on death row. The film uses parts of those conversations. The question it follows is how a person like this comes about, and Bittaker’s own voice is heard. Brand weighs how much of the behaviour was learned. The former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole looks at it from another side and argues that make-up and circumstance worked together. The retired prosecutor Stephen Kay sets out the legal side of the case. Bob Cea directed the eighty nine minute documentary, an American production finished in 2021.