By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2026-07-21 15:26:16 | Updated at 2026-08-09 07:32:33
2 weeks ago
It was the last time I would ever see him alive.
For six years, I sat across from Lawrence Bittaker while he was behind bars at San Quentin prison. I got close to the Toolbox Killer to earn his trust, something that detectives, prosecutors and even his own defense team never managed. He named me his next of kin. He called me his confidante.
On one visit, I was heavily pregnant. On instinct, I reached for the hand that had ended five young lives and pressed it to my belly, so he could feel my son kick.
‘That might be the most human thing I’ve experienced in 40 years,’ he told me, his eyes fixed on my stomach.
Then he reached for my pen.
Lawrence Bittaker, The Toolbox Killer, and his 'confidante' Laura Brand discuss his murders of five women across California in 1979
Bittaker and his accomplice Roy Norris earned their sickening nickname from the tools they used to torture and murder five young women across California in 1979.
For more than four decades, the locations of two of those victims - Cindy Schaefer and Andrea Hall - remained one of the state’s most haunting unsolved mysteries.
That day, Bittaker began to draw a map. It was a path to both girls. And to a buried archive of stolen evidence he swore police had never found.
In this week’s The Crime Desk, I share the story of the six years I spent inside the mind of one of America’s most sadistic killers - and the final secrets he entrusted to me as he lay dying - in an exclusive excerpt from my book, God’s Not Here, Only Devils.
Read the whole excerpt in the Daily Mail's free Crime Desk Newsletter that comes to inboxes on Wednesdays.
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