Date With the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

woman. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that this was not my forte; much too depressing. People I became fond of got sick and passed away. That was kind of hard.”
    Considering a career at the Veterans Administration (VA), Vicki discovered that she would need additional education to become a registered therapist. Instead, she found employment with the city of Hermosa Beach doing clerical work for the police department. “I met another female employee, who owned a duplex right near the sand. Perfect! I am twenty-five, working for the city, living by the beach, working nights and enjoying the surfside atmosphere in the daytime. The duplex owner had a lifelong dream of becoming a police officer and talked about it all the time.
    â€œSome of the guys I worked around seemed pretty dumb to me,” Vicki recalled. One of them, though, made her heart flutter. He told Vicki of his floundering marriage, that he had filed for divorce, and then asked her to go out with him. She refused until the divorce would become final. He agreed; and when it came through, Vicki began dating him. At the beginning of their relationship, his participation in a notoriously gory murder case consumed a great deal of time and visibly impacted his psyche. It involved a couple of career criminals, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, who had met in prison and jointly fantasized about raping and killing teenage girls after getting out. Following their paroles, the pair reunited, and one of them bought a van. In the summer and fall of 1979, they turned the vehicle into an abattoir. The thugs kidnapped six females, five of them ranging from ages thirteen to eighteen.
    In the back bed of the van, the savage pair raped and tortured the five teenage victims, using vise grips, pliers, and an ice pick before strangling each of them to death with wire hangers. The only adult woman, age thirty, escaped after they sexually assaulted her.
    Criminals often make the error of boasting to cronies about their conquests. One of these “pals” heard details of the horrific murders and called the police. After Bittaker and Norris were arrested, evidence collected from the van included photographs and a hideous audiotape of an eighteen-year-old girl pitifully screaming as she was tortured to death. The adult victim who escaped identified her captors and their vehicle.
    Facing potential capital punishment, Roy Norris testified against Lawrence Bittaker, accusing him of the actual killings. Found guilty, Norris received a sentence of forty-five years to life, while Bittaker was sent to San Quentin’s death row.
    The case, even though solved and adjudicated, resulted in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder with nearly everyone involved. The man Vicki dated had worked long hours on it. She wondered if it may have been a factor in the divorce. It certainly induced nightmares for years. (Vicki helped him through the trauma and eventually married him. He passed away in 1987.)
    Meanwhile, her friend at the duplex convinced Vicki to accompany her to an LAPD recruitment drive. “We drove up to the academy. They have a program for interested candidates where they work out with you and get you in shape to take the test. I went along only to observe, but someone convinced me to apply. They said that since I had a college degree, I probably wouldn’t have to take the written exam, kind of like army recruiters. So, just for the heck of it, I took the physical and passed. The degree did help by eliminating the need for a written test and starting me at a better salary.”
    Hired in 1981, Vicki Bynum started as a patrol officer in the beach community of Venice, adjacent to Santa Monica. Police work, she said, was like wearing many hats. “Out on the streets, you are not just a cop. You are a teacher, a psychiatrist, and a protector. I became fascinated with it. The job was fun, exciting, and well paid. So I pretty much fell into it by