Bradford was born in 1946 and worked in Los Angeles as a photographer, using the offer of modelling work to approach young women.
In July 1984 he took Shari Miller, twenty-one, to the desert near Lancaster on the promise of a photo shoot, killed her, and left her body there. Days later he did the same to Tracey Campbell, his fifteen-year-old neighbour. He was arrested that month.
He was convicted of both murders in 1987 and sentenced to death. He died on death row at San Quentin in 2008, aged sixty-one.
The figure of fifty in this roster comes from what was found afterwards. Among his possessions was a collage of fifty-four photographs of women, most of them unidentified. In 2006 the Los Angeles Police Department released the images publicly and asked for help naming them, on the basis that a man who photographed his two known victims before killing them might have done the same to others. Some of the women were traced and were alive. Most were never identified.
That is the whole basis for the larger number, and the entry states it as such: two convictions, and fifty-four photographs of women whose fates are unknown. The police did not say the photographs were of victims. They said they did not know.