William Richard Bradford, known in court as Bill Bradford, was a freelance photographer in West Los Angeles who was convicted of killing two young women within about a week of each other in July 1984. Shari Miller was 21. Tracey Campbell was 15 and lived next door to him. A Los Angeles County jury found him guilty of two counts of first degree murder, found true a special circumstance of multiple murder, and returned a verdict of death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in its entirety on July 14, 1997.
The case returned to the news in July 2006, when the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which had found a collection of his photographs in an old case file, published numbered pictures of women from the collection and asked the public to help identify them. Investigators said they feared that some of the women had been harmed between 1975 and 1984. Within days, they said, most of those identified had been found alive.
Little was reported about Bradford's early life. In 2006 the sheriff's department described him as a freelance photographer who had worked in West Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, taking pictures of women he met at bars and at car races, CBS News and The Associated Press reported. He had also worked as a handyman at an apartment complex, owned a motor home and a Harley-Davidson, and was reported to have belonged to a motorcycle gang. He was 60 in July 2006.
He had lived in several states. The California Supreme Court's opinion places him in Florida in 1980 and in a motor home in Michigan, near his then wife's parents, at another time. KATU, the Portland television station, reported in August 2006 that he had lived in Cornelius and Forest Grove, Oregon, during the years investigators were examining, and that police in both towns had said they would cooperate with Los Angeles detectives but had no missing women from that period who matched. Sheriff's officials told reporters that because he had moved around so much, any further victims could be spread across the country.
He married four times and had five children, CBS News reported in its program "48 Hours" in November 2006. One of his former wives, who testified against him at his trial, told the program she had met him when she was 15 and described years of violence in the marriage. One of his daughters told the program he had been a loving father to her until she began visiting him in prison, and that she later cut off contact.
His criminal record, as summarized by the California Supreme Court, ran to a three-page "rap sheet." It included a 1972 charge, later reduced to battery, involving a 17-year-old girl, indecent exposure charges that were dismissed, and earlier charges of auto theft. Press reports in 2006 said he had also been arrested for burglary and for offenses against one of his former wives.
Shari Miller was 21 in the summer of 1984. In the days before she disappeared she spent time with friends in the Los Angeles area, and on July 2 she spent the day painting a house in the San Fernando Valley with a friend, using yellow paint. That detail later mattered: flecks of the same paint turned up on a wristwatch police found in Bradford's apartment.
According to the facts set out by the California Supreme Court, Miller had written Bradford's name on a list of appointments for July 2, and telephone records showed a call from her family's home to his on June 30. A bartender saw her on July 3, and an acquaintance saw her at Bradford's apartment on July 3 or 4. The woman who shared the apartment with Bradford said he left before dawn on July 4 and came back late that evening.
On July 6, 1984, the body of an unidentified young woman was found in Los Angeles County. The medical examiner determined that she had been strangled and estimated that she had died between the afternoon of July 3 and the evening of July 5, nearer the later date. With nothing to identify her, she was recorded as Jane Doe No. 60. Miller's car was found in a bar parking lot on July 8. For weeks no one connected the two.
Tracey Campbell was 15. In the spring of 1984 she moved from Montana to Los Angeles to live with her mother, and she finished the school year at a junior high school there. She had a brother and a sister, and a cousin who lived nearby. She did not drive, did not hitchhike and had no money of her own, the court's opinion records.
Bradford lived upstairs in the neighboring apartment complex. In early June 1984 he met Tracey and her relatives and told them he was a photographer. Tracey disappeared on the morning of July 12, 1984. Her brother had heard Bradford talking with her that morning.
Her relatives searched for her and noticed that Bradford's car was gone from the garage. Her mother reported her missing on July 13 and told a private investigator that Bradford "had her daughter." When the investigator found Bradford, he said he had dropped Tracey off so that she could hitchhike to the beach. To a neighbor that day he said he had been in the desert taking photographs, and he told Tracey's family that his car had been cleaned because of a fire under the hood.
Police interviewed him on July 14 and again on July 16. His accounts were similar, and he agreed to let officers search his apartment and car. That search turned up nothing significant.
By the end of July, detectives had enough for warrants. On July 31, 1984, they obtained warrants to arrest Bradford and to search his apartment, his car and his person. The supporting affidavit described Tracey Campbell's disappearance, Bradford's criminal record and other cases detectives were examining, and stated that he "takes photographs [of] or films his victims." It said nothing about Jane Doe No. 60, who had not yet been identified or linked to him.
Bradford was arrested at about 6 p.m. that day at a bar. In the trunk of his car officers found an address book, Polaroid photographs, negatives and a camera bag holding photographs of a young woman. A key found in the car fit the locks and ignition of Shari Miller's car.
At the station, Detective John Rockwood looked through the photographs and saw a resemblance between the young woman in them and Jane Doe No. 60. A fingerprint comparison then identified the unidentified woman as Shari Miller, about a month after her body had been found. Her mother was told on August 1. CBS News reported that the homicide detective assigned to the case, John St. John, was known in the department as "Jigsaw."
Over several hours that night and many more the next day, Bradford told detectives that the woman in the photographs was Shari Miller, whom he said he had known for two years, and that he had photographed her in Topanga Canyon and elsewhere. He was released on August 3.
Detectives kept working. On August 7 they questioned an employee of a photo shop whose records showed Bradford had brought in film for developing on several dates, including negatives of Shari Miller. On August 9, according to the court's opinion, Bradford came to the shop, told the employee he knew police were following him and asked what she had told them. He went through negatives, had some reprinted, and cut out one negative, which he chewed and scraped with his teeth.
On August 7, police had also searched Shari Miller's car for the first time since it had been found a month earlier. Her belongings were in disarray, and several outfits that appeared in Bradford's photographs were missing. Paint on a pair of her cutoff jeans matched paint at the house she had helped to paint on July 2.
A forensic photographer later compared the shadows in some of Bradford's pictures of Miller with shadows at the same site at the same time of year. He concluded that some of the pictures had been taken at about 11:05 a.m. and 2 p.m. on July 4, which meant that Miller had been alive into the early afternoon of that day.
Tracey Campbell was found in northern Los Angeles County on August 11, 1984, after a man who had camped with Bradford in the desert in 1983 helped police search. She had been strangled, and the medical evidence was consistent with her having died on July 12.
The prosecution tied the two deaths together through the photographs: the court's opinion records that one of Bradford's pictures of Shari Miller had been taken a short distance from where Tracey was found.
Bradford was arrested again on August 16, 1984, and taken to Parker Center. Detectives advised him of his rights, and he asked for his lawyer, whom he could not reach. A few minutes after he was taken back to the interview room, a detective reported that he was now willing to talk without a lawyer, and he waived his rights again at about 7:30 p.m.
He told detectives that he had photographed Shari Miller only in Topanga Canyon, in a bar and in his garage. When they told him the pictures had been taken in the desert, he said they had been taken near Chatsworth. He said he had last seen Tracey Campbell when he drove her to a coffee shop and did not know where she had gone. When the detectives said they could place him and Shari Miller at the desert site where Tracey had been found, he answered, "I can't explain it to you." Asked whether he had killed either young woman, he said, "No sir." He then asked to try his attorney again, and the interview ended.
A second search of his apartment turned up the wristwatch flecked with yellow paint, beach sandals like those in Shari Miller's car, and about 50 documents in his name. More photographs and other items were recovered from a storage locker in the building's garage.
Several days after his arrest on August 16, according to the California Supreme Court, Bradford pleaded no contest in an unrelated case that arose from an April 1983 trip to the desert with another person. CBS News and The Associated Press reported that he was sentenced to eight years in state prison in that case.
Deputy District Attorney Pam Bozanich prosecuted the case. She persuaded the trial judge to try the two killings together, CBS News reported, and she later described Bradford as "clean cut" and approachable.
Before trial, Bradford's lawyers challenged the searches. The trial court held hearings on motions to quash and traverse the warrants and to suppress the evidence. It found that the July 31 warrant was overbroad in one respect, its authorization to seize "any and all photographs," and it suppressed one item taken from the apartment, but it declined to suppress the photographs. In a separate hearing on the August 16 warrant, the trial judge found that Detective St. John had been selective in what he told the magistrate and had shown intentional or reckless disregard for the truth by leaving out interviews with people who had seen Shari Miller after July 1. Even so, the judge ruled that the affidavit, read with that information added, still established probable cause.
The evidence at trial was circumstantial. Bradford's appellate lawyer, Darlene Ricker, told CBS News in 2006 that he had never confessed and that his trial lawyer had presented no defense. The guilt phase bears that out: the defense presented no evidence. The jury found Bradford guilty of two counts of first degree murder and found true the special circumstance of multiple murder.
The year of the verdict is reported differently. The Associated Press, in reports carried by CBS News in 2006, said he was convicted in 1987. A 1998 newsletter of Amnesty International's Pasadena group said a Los Angeles County jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death in 1988.
At the penalty phase, the prosecution called seven witnesses to describe a prior offense and other acts that had never been tried. They included the woman involved in the 1983 case to which he had pleaded no contest; two young people he had taken to the desert in June 1984, one of them a woman then 21, whom he threatened and held before eventually letting them go; a woman who described an assault in Florida in 1980; and his former wife, who described years of beatings and threats. The 1972 incident involving a 17-year-old girl was also presented.
Before the last three witnesses testified, Bradford asked the court to relieve his appointed lawyers and let him represent himself. The court granted the motion. He told the court that "no defense" would be presented, and he chose not to cross-examine two of the witnesses. CBS News reported that he questioned his former wife himself.
He called no witnesses and offered no evidence in mitigation. When the prosecutor finished her closing argument, he stood and told the jurors: "Think of how many you don't even know about. You're so right. That's it." His later lawyer, Ricker, told CBS News that he had been angry at the jury and had "tossed up his hands" when he said it.
The jury fixed the penalty at death. The trial court denied his motion to modify the verdict, and he was sentenced to death.
Because the sentence was death, the appeal to the California Supreme Court was automatic. The court appointed David A. Nickerson to represent Bradford; the office of the Attorney General, then Daniel E. Lungren, defended the judgment. The case was decided on July 14, 1997, in an opinion by Chief Justice George, with which Justices Kennard, Baxter, Werdegar, Chin and Brown concurred. Justice Mosk wrote a separate opinion concurring and dissenting.
Much of the opinion deals with the searches that produced the photographs. Bradford argued that the trial court had wrongly limited the suppression hearing by refusing to admit all 189 photographs seized on July 31. The court disagreed, finding that the trial judge was aware of what had been seized and could judge whether the search had been exploratory.
He argued next that the July 31 warrant was so plainly defective that no officer could reasonably rely on it. The court assumed, without deciding, that the phrase "any and all photographs" was overbroad, but held that the defect did not make the warrant so facially deficient that the officers could not reasonably presume it valid. It rejected the claim that the officers had acted unreasonably because few of them had read the warrant, noting that one detective had read the affidavit, another had the warrant with him, and a third had briefed the team.
The court held that the photographs were admissible under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule and, separately, under the plain view doctrine and the nexus rule, which allows officers lawfully in a place to seize an item that might be evidence of a crime. The detective conducting the search had authority to seize photographs related to the Campbell case, and when Detective Rockwood reviewed them at the station, their resemblance to Jane Doe No. 60 made their significance apparent without any further search.
The court also rejected the argument that the officers had turned the search into a general, exploratory one by seizing more items than the warrant named. Where officers stay within the places named in a warrant and simply seize unconnected items, it said, the remedy is to suppress those items, not everything else; "there is certainly no requirement that lawfully seized evidence be suppressed as well."
On the challenge to the affidavit for the August 16 warrant, the court agreed that the magistrate probably had not been misled, since the affidavit itself mentioned a sighting of Shari Miller on July 1. Even if the omitted interviews had been included, it held, they would not have been material: the fingerprint identification, Bradford's false statements about the photographs and the other evidence still supplied probable cause. The opinion concluded: "We affirm the judgment in its entirety."
After the affirmance Bradford gave up his right to appeal. Amnesty International's Pasadena group reported in its July 1998 newsletter that the state had set his execution for August 18, 1998, at San Quentin, "after voluntarily giving up his right to appeal," and urged members to ask Governor Pete Wilson to commute the sentence to life in prison. The group planned a vigil for the evening before.
The execution did not take place. In 2006 he was still on death row at San Quentin State Prison. His appellate lawyer, Ricker, said that year that he maintained his innocence and had always told her he never killed anyone, and CBS News reported that November that he was trying to overturn his two murder convictions, with new attorneys seeking a new trial.
The photographs and film seized in 1984 stayed in the case file. In June 2006 a cold case investigator came across them again, and on July 25, 2006, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department posted numbered pictures of about 50 women on its website and showed them at a televised news conference. Officials said they suspected that Bradford might have harmed some of the women between 1975 and 1984. Capt. Ray Peavy said his "gut instinct" was that there were probably a substantial number of victims, though he acknowledged that many of the women might simply be people Bradford had met and photographed, and that they could be alive. "He has not been a threat for many years," Peavy said. "He's been off the street."
The response was immediate. Sgt. Alfredo Castro said calls were pouring in. The department's website recorded 25,000 visits in the first days, and by July 27 investigators had tentatively confirmed that 24 women were alive. On July 28 the department's spokesman, Steve Whitmore, said 31 women had been tentatively identified, 28 of them believed to be alive and three believed to have been killed. A second poster followed, and by November 2006, CBS News reported, 39 women had been identified while dozens remained unknown.
Santa Monica police said they were checking whether Bradford was involved in a 1975 killing. Investigators also said he may have been linked by the Los Angeles Police Department to the 1982 death of Mischa Stewart, 23. The California Supreme Court's opinion records that a doorman later picked Bradford out of a photo lineup as the man Stewart had left a bar with on the night he was last seen, and the July 31 affidavit referred to that case. Bradford was not charged with it.
The sheriff's department went further on one case from 1978, and Peavy said investigators were "absolutely convinced" Bradford had committed it. He was never charged with that killing, and he denied any role in it. CBS News reported in November 2006 that the department was building evidence to charge him with at least six more killings. No such charges were reported.
Ricker called the photographs "old news." "The existence of these photos has been known for 20 years," she said, adding that it was no surprise to find photographs among a photographer's belongings.
Convicted: the first degree murders of Shari Miller and Tracey Campbell, with the multiple-murder special circumstance found true, affirmed in 1997.
Never tried: the 1982 death of Mischa Stewart, which police linked to him in their 1984 affidavit; the 1978 killing that the sheriff's department said in 2006 it was convinced he committed; the 1975 killing Santa Monica police were checking; and the "at least six" further killings CBS News said the department was working toward charging. He was charged with none of them and denied involvement.
Unproven: the sheriff's 2006 concern that more of the women in his photographs had been harmed. Most of those identified within weeks were found alive.
Details that vary: the year of the verdict (1987 in AP reports; 1988 in the Amnesty newsletter); the number of women in the first release (about 50 in AP reports; 47 on the first poster, according to CBS News); and the running counts of women identified, which changed from day to day in July and August 2006.
1972: charged in an incident involving a 17-year-old girl; the charge is reduced to battery.
1980: assault on a woman in Florida, later presented at his penalty phase.
April 1983: the incident that led to his no contest plea in 1984.
June 1984: threatens and holds two young people in the desert before letting them go.
Early June 1984: meets Tracey Campbell and her family, his neighbors.
July 2, 1984: Shari Miller spends the day painting a house; her list of appointments includes Bradford's name.
July 4, 1984: photographs taken of Shari Miller in the desert that morning and afternoon, a forensic photographer later concludes.
July 6, 1984: an unidentified woman, recorded as Jane Doe No. 60, is found dead in Los Angeles County.
July 12, 1984: Tracey Campbell, 15, disappears.
July 13, 1984: her mother reports her missing.
July 14 and 16, 1984: police interview Bradford.
July 31, 1984: arrested on warrants; photographs seized; Jane Doe No. 60 later identified by fingerprints as Shari Miller.
August 1, 1984: Shari Miller's mother is told.
August 3, 1984: Bradford is released.
August 7, 1984: police search Shari Miller's car and question a photo shop employee.
August 9, 1984: Bradford destroys a negative at the photo shop.
August 11, 1984: Tracey Campbell is found in Los Angeles County.
August 16, 1984: Bradford is arrested again and interviewed.
August 1984: pleads no contest in the unrelated 1983 case; sentenced to eight years.
1987 or 1988: convicted of two first degree murders with the multiple-murder special circumstance; death verdict after he represents himself at the penalty phase.
July 14, 1997: the California Supreme Court affirms the judgment in its entirety.
1998: having given up his appeals, he is scheduled for execution on August 18; the execution does not take place.
June 2006: a cold case investigator rediscovers the photographs.
July 25, 2006: the sheriff's department publishes the photographs and asks for help.
July 28, 2006: 31 women tentatively identified, 28 believed alive.
November 2006: 39 women identified; Bradford remains on death row at San Quentin and is seeking a new trial.