Songfacts®:

• Rich Hillen Jr. is a man who has what might be rightly called an obsession with serial killers. This modern murder ballad is one of the self-styled murder junkie's finer efforts. If you haven't heard of Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, be warned, you may find the following disturbing.
  
  Lawrence Bittaker was said to have had the highest IQ of any American prison inmate. He met convicted rapist Roy Norris in the California Men's Colony, where the two men hatched a conspiracy to kidnap, rape, torture and murder teenage girls. When they were released, that was exactly what they did.
  
  Their modus operandi was strikingly similar to that of another "killer couple" in California - Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi; they snatched or lured girls off the street.
  
  In spite of his supposedly stratospheric IQ, Bittaker made mistakes, the biggest of which was to play a tape of one of their victims screaming to a criminal associate. This man had two daughters, and after contacting his lawyer, the police were notified. By the time they were caught, Bittaker and Norris had committed five murders.
  
  They were tried separately, Norris copping a plea to avoid the death penalty. After his March 1980 conviction, he testified against Bittaker, who was convicted in February 1981 and sentenced to death, although he languished on death row for decades. Some of the testimony during his trial was so graphic that people fled the courtroom.
• This song is related through Bittaker's eyes; it describes the murder of their final victim, 16-year-old Shirley Ledford, who was abducted on Halloween as in the song. Murder Mac spelt thus was the name of their vehicle. And yes, they really did cross that line, big time. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2