"Think of how many you don't even know about," William Bradford told the jury that was deciding whether he should die. He was acting as his own lawyer at the time, had offered no defense to the charge that he had strangled two young women in the desert north of Los Angeles in July 1984, and was asking the jurors, in effect, to sentence him to death. They did. The sentence he gave them stayed in the case file with a stack of photographs seized from his apartment, and twenty-two years later it was the reason the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department put fifty-four women's faces on the internet and asked the public who they were.
Bradford was born William Richard Bradford in Pleasanton, California, on May 18, 1946. Before he came to Los Angeles he had lived in Michigan, Florida, Texas, Oregon, Illinois, Kansas and Louisiana, and had faced criminal charges in several of those places; in 1978 he was charged in Michigan with sexually assaulting his wife, and in 1980 he was accused of a sexual assault in Valparaiso, Florida. In Los Angeles he presented himself as a professional photographer who could help young women build a modeling portfolio. In the summer of 1984 he was out on bail awaiting trial for a rape that had taken place at a campsite in the desert.
The campsite was a horseshoe-shaped bowl among rocks near Lancaster, south of Edwards Air Force Base, a place so isolated that few people could find it. Bradford knew it because a drinking friend, Nick Klos, had taken him camping there in 1983. Between July 4 and July 6, 1984, he drove Shari Miller there. She was twenty-one and worked as a barmaid at a Los Angeles bar called the Meet Market, where he had met her. He photographed her posing against the rocks and strangled her. He cut away her tattoos, took her blouse, kept her body in the trunk of his car for several hours, and left it in a parking lot in West Los Angeles, where it was found on the morning of July 6. With nothing to identify her, she was logged as Jane Doe No. 60.
On July 12 he drove Tracey Campbell to the same place. She was fifteen and lived next door to him, and she too had been told she could be a model. He killed her that day or the next and left her body behind the rocks, with Shari Miller's blouse over her face. Tracey's father told police she had gone off with Bradford, and her disappearance, together with the rape charge already pending against him, got detectives a warrant to search his apartment in Studio City. They found photographs of both young women and recognized Miller as their unidentified victim. Nick Klos recognized the rock formation behind her in the pictures. On August 11, 1984, officers searching the campsite, about twenty-eight miles east of Lancaster, found Tracey Campbell's remains a few hundred yards from where the photograph had been taken.
Bradford was arrested on suspicion of murder, pleaded no contest to the earlier rape and was sentenced to eight years for it. At the murder trial, in 1987 by most press accounts and 1988 by others, the evidence was largely circumstantial: the photographs, the campsite, and his having been the last person seen with Tracey. Partway through he dismissed his lawyer and represented himself, and he presented no evidence and made no argument for his innocence. The prosecution called him a serial killer but offered the jury no evidence of any killing beyond the two charged. The jury deliberated for twelve days before convicting him of both first degree murders and finding the special circumstance of multiple murder true, and it returned a death verdict after he told it to think of the ones it did not know about. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in its entirety on July 14, 1997.
In 1998 he dropped his appeals, saying life at San Quentin had become unbearable, and hired a lawyer to speed his execution. He wrote poems about death row, and the press called him the Death Row Poet. Five days before the execution date he changed his mind, declared himself innocent and asked for the process to stop. It did, and he was never executed.
The photographs had been seized in 1984 and filed away. In July 2006 a retired detective the sheriff's department had rehired to review old cases brought them to his superiors, and the department released head shots of fifty-four women from the collection, saying they might have been raped or killed between 1975 and 1984. "We could have victims theoretically all over the country," Captain Ray Peavy said. The public identified several quickly. Some were Bradford's former wives, and investigators said nothing to suggest any of them had come to harm. Number three was Nika LaRue, the sister of the actress Eva LaRue, who was alive. Number twenty-eight was Donnalee Campbell Duhamel, whose decapitated body had been found in a canyon in Malibu in 1978, a few days after she met Bradford at a Culver City bar called the Frigate. He was also linked to the death of Mischa Stewart, twenty-three, who left a gay bar in Santa Monica on the night of October 8, 1982, and was found strangled with a ligature in an alley the next morning. He was never charged with either death.
Bradford died of natural causes at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville on March 10, 2008, at sixty-one, still under sentence of death, and with him went the only person who could say what the rest of the pictures meant. Detectives said his death hindered their inquiries into other cases. Most of the women in the collection have never been identified. The police never said they were victims; they said they did not know, and that the man who had photographed his two known victims before killing them had given them reason to ask.