God's Not Here, Only Devils
Revelations from the Toolbox Killers
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 28, 2026
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- $30.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
The District Attorney began his opening statement with, "If you don't know what hell is like, you're about to find out."
In 1979, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris went on a rape and killing rampage. The pliers, screwdrivers, hammers, sledgehammers, and ice picks they used on their victims became their calling card and moniker: The Toolbox Killers. They were soon apprehended and convicted for their atrocities, but for decades, refused to reveal the location of their victims' bodies. More than two decades later, criminologist Laura Brand had the opportunity to interview this sadistic pair as they sat behind bars, probing the depths of their depravity right up to the days of their deaths. Over this relentless six-year period, Bittaker finally gave Brand what he had withheld from law enforcement and families alike: the precise locations of two victims' remains. Brand's investigation tore open sealed police reports, court transcripts, and witness accounts, and unearthed brutal and shocking new findings: undisclosed victims, forgotten evidence, and chilling new insights that resurrected this nightmare in unimaginable ways.
God's Not Here, Only Devils is told through a powerful blend of narratives: the voices of Bittaker himself, his victims, traumatized witnesses, the tenacious lead detective, and the hardened District Attorney. This book pulls the reader into a visceral retelling of the horrors that unfolded and the legacy of terror the Toolbox Killers left behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Five years of interviews with a convicted serial murderer form the backbone of criminologist Brand's chilling debut. As part of a study on serial killers, Brand reached out to Lawrence Bittaker in 2014, when he was on death row at San Quentin prison. The pair discussed Bittaker's 1979 abduction, rape, and murder of five teenage girls across Southern California with his accomplice Roy Norris—a killing spree that earned them the nickname "the toolbox killers," because they tortured their victims with household tools. Brand explains how Bittaker and Norris met in prison in the late '70s and, after their release, transformed a van into a mobile torture chamber. She details the pair's crimes, but her account of the rapport she and Bittaker cultivated is just as unsettling: he named her his next of kin and, after refusing to cooperate with police for decades, gave her a map to the graves of his last two victims before dying of natural causes in 2019. Brand interweaves her and Bittaker's conversations with compassionate portraits of his victims and snapshots of her own grief over her cousin's murder of her best friend in 2015. Along the way, she steadily probes the inner workings of remorseless killers without losing sight of the human cost of their crimes. For true crime devotees, this is a must.
