Exposed

This broadcast first aired on Nov. 11, 2006. It was updated on June 29, 2007.

Over 20 years ago, police in southern California were investigating the homicide of a Jane Doe, when a tantalizing clue - and another murder - would unmask a serial killer.

Fast forward to 2006 and a star of the hit CBS show "CSI: Miami" finds herself working on an episode that draws from her true-life story, of how she came face to face with that very same serial killer.

Bill Lagattuta reports.

Over 20 years ago, in the early 1980's, Eva and her sister Nika came face to face with a real life serial killer.

"They used to have in southern California these amateur photo days," Eva remembers.

Thousands of girls would show up at these events, all chasing their dreams. "Any guys could come up and say, 'I'm a photographer and I'm gonna make you a star,' and young girls tend to believe that," remembers Alina Thompson, who like Eva, was a regular at these open model shoots.

"Anybody could come and pay the fee, just a small fee and then they had the right to photograph any of the models in any of the settings," says Tina Teets, who was also a regular.

Tina also remembers meeting the serial killer, Bill Bradford. "The scary part is he was not a bad looking man. He was very approachable, clean cut for the most part, not the persona of what you would expect the bad guy to look like," she recalls.

Bradford was one of the many amateur photographers who showed up at those photo shoots and came away with pictures of pretty young girls. He was approachable and clean cut, but he was after something else: Bradford was a serial killer, looking for victims. And when he killed - he strangled his victims - he took body parts as souvenirs.

"It turns out that there are quite a few women in this world who were last seen with Bill Bradford," says former district attorney Pam Bozanich. She says Bradford operated in Los Angeles and other parts of the country from 1975 to 1984. Police think it's possible he may even have been operating as early as 1966.

One woman who was lucky enough to get away is Bradford's ex-wife Cindy Sue Horton, who met him when she was only 15 years old. "He was gonna make a model out of me, I was gonna go places and do things," Cindy tells Lagattuta.

But once she became pregnant, Cindy says everything changed. "He'd kick me down the street, he tried to slam my stomach in the door, he was beating me up and raping me," she says.

Pam Bozanich was a young district attorney when she first heard Bradford's name. The year was 1984 and cops had just discovered the body of a naked woman who had been strangled and dumped in a lot in west L.A.

Bozanich says the badly decomposed body was found wrapped in a dirty old blanket. The body had been mutilated in a number of places, including a patch of skin on the woman's left ankle.

John St. John, a homicide detective and LAPD legend better known as "Jigsaw," got the case but initially even he was stymied by the case: the woman was classified as Jane Doe No. 60.

"So her body's found July 6th. Six days later, Tracy Campbell disappeared. The last person she's seen alive with is Bill Bradford," says Bozanich.

Campbell, 15, was Bradford's next door neighbor.

Bozanich says police went to Bradford's house to talk to him and decided to get a search warrant. Police soon discovered hundreds of photographs and undeveloped negatives of young women and one in particular caught the eye of "Jigsaw John" and his partner John Rockwood.

Rockwood zeroed in on a tattoo barely visible on the woman's left ankle. He flashed on the location of the patch of skin that had been removed from Jane Doe No. 60: it was in the exact same spot.

"They went to Bill Bradford 'Who is this girl?' 'Her name's Shari Miller,'" explains Bozanich.

Using fingerprints, detectives quickly established that Jane Doe No. 60 was Shari Miller. And her picture yielded yet another important clue.

"In the picture of Shari Miller, she's standing in front of a distinctive rock formation," says Bozanich.

Detectives figured if they could find that rock, they might unravel the mystery of what happened to Tracy Campbell. A buddy of Bradford's led cops out to Bradford's favorite camping spot in the desert.

Sgt. Dick Adams, now retired, was one of dozens of police officers who in 1984 traveled to Antelope Valley, a desert region north of Los Angeles, searching for evidence.

The police set up a command post and fanned out, some on horseback, in search of the unique rock formation. Finally, they found it.

Adams says within 100 yards of that rock, searchers found the body of Tracy Campbell. The teen, like Shari Miller, had been strangled to death.

"This was his killing ground," Adams says.

But the killer made a terrible mistake, leaving behind a devastating piece of evidence. "When they found Tracy Campbell, she had a blouse wrapped around her head that belonged to Shari Miller," Bozanich explains.

That, she says, tied them to Bradford. "No one else could have done this."

Bozanich was determined to convict Bradford and convinced a judge to tie the murder cases together. Bradford was convicted of the murders of Shari Miller and Tracy Campbell. Then, at sentencing, Bozanich brought in a parade of women who said they had been raped by Bradford.

"We had six victims lined up to testify," Bozanich remembers. "Six rape victims and he didn't just rape 'em. He tortured 'em."

But Bradford wasn't finished with them. He fired his lawyers and questioned the women himself, including ex-wife Cindy Horton, who told jurors what it was like to live with Bradford.

Pam Bozanich argued Bradford should be put to death and he didn't disagree: he shocked everyone in the courtroom by telling the jury: 'Think of how many you don't even know about,'" implying he killed other women.

The jury sent Bradford to death row but the question lingered: how many others did bill Bradford kill?

Once Bradford was sent to San Quentin's death row, the hundreds of photos he took of young women seemed to disappear along with him.

"They just got lost in the shuffle. For years, we've been looking for the photos," says Bozanich.

But by a lucky accident, the photos were found in the summer of 2006 in an unmarked folder in the back of a filing cabinet.

Some of the pictures were of nude women, others were in bikinis, explains Captain Ray Peavy, "Some looked like professional models that he had picked up."

The goal now, says Peavy, is very simple. "We wanna find out who these women are. We wanna find out if they're alive. We wanna find out if they're not alive. Could these possibly have become victims of Bradford?"

The hundreds of photographs are giving detectives another chance: police always believed that he began killing in 1975 and didn't stop until he was arrested in 1984. Bradford taunted the jurors who convicted him that there were other victims, and detectives are determined to find out.

With newfound urgency, detectives pored through hundreds of old Bradford photographs; forensic artists worked their magic; and in July 2006, the L.A. Sheriff's Department was ready to attack this massive cold case.

They released a poster featuring 47 women Bradford had photographed and asked for help in identifying them. The response was immediate.

When amateur photographer Larry Gray read about the renewed investigation, he went to the Web site police set up to look at the women in Bradford's photos. "As soon as I brought it on screen, I recognized two girls immediately and I thought - 'Oh my God, what's going on here?'" Gray remembers.

Back in the early 1980's, Gray was a regular at group model shoots that were held around southern California. Bradford was at some of those same shoots, but Gray has no memory of him.

Gray studied the photos online and compared them with his own photos from the shoots. In the end, he identified six of the women on the poster - all of them alive and well.

Tina Teets was one of those models. "I was shocked. I thought possibly I was mis-id'd."

"Using photography to get young girls is as old as photography," says Bozanich.

She says that back then, people simply were not as suspicious then as they are now. "You have to remember, we're talking about the early '80s. Now we have all been through the last 25 years or so where we now know that perverts and weirdoes are everywhere," Bozanich says.

Monique Gabrielle also attracted the attention of Bradford "I was posing in one of the cars and he said, 'I wanna do a shoot with you, with a car, one day. Where I can really shoot and there's no other distractions.' I ended up calling him and talking to him on the phone a couple of times. Then he said that he was gonna shoot for a car magazine. He said it was gonna be out in the desert," she recalls.

But when Monique asked Bradford a few more questions, her gut told her something was wrong. "The more I talked to him, he just got a little stranger to me," she says.

For one, Monique says Bradford was contradicting himself when she questioned him about hair and make-up arrangements for the desert photo shoot. She decided to back out and now knows all too well that Shari Miller and Tracy Campbell went to the desert with Bradford and never returned.

Alina Thompson was just 12 when she tried her hand at modeling. Too young, she says, to be aware of who might be behind the many cameras pointing at her. For Alina, going to the group model shoots was a family affair. She went with her parents and older sister.

"Mostly it was a safe situation, my parents were there," she says.

But on one occasion, one of the men behind a camera was Bradford. 'I was taking pictures with a lot of photographers around me. And he came up to me right in the middle of me shooting and said, 'I need you to come over here with me, and I can shoot you in a better light and I can get better pictures than these guys,'" Alina remembers. "So I took off with him; there were some photographers who knew me. They went up to my mother and they told my mother, 'Hey this photographer just took off with your little girl.'"

Alina's father Carl went looking for her and found his daughter alone with Bradford in an alley.

"My dad stood next to him and started taking pictures of me like he was another photographer. He just wanted to make sure I was safe," Alina remembers. "And Bill said, 'Excuse me, can you get out of here?' And my dad didn't even say anything, just kept taking pictures. And then he got really agitated and he was like, 'You know what? I am out of here.' He got mad and left."

Twenty-two years later, when the sheriff's poster came out, Carl was shocked to see photos of both his daughters. "It really tore me up. I thought, this predator had pictures of my girls. Maybe he was thinking of them as the next victim," he says.

For Capt. Peavy, the pictures tell stories. "I look at their faces, I look at the smiling faces and I say, 'What was going on in their minds? What was he telling them at the time?' And then I look at some of the other pictures, where the women actually look terrified. And I wondered, what was he doing to them? What was he saying to them to cause them to have this look?' And was that the last look they ever had?"

And now the case is going places Peavy never even considered.

The dream of becoming a famous actress or model is an old one although it looks a lot different when imagined by the creators of CSI: Miami.

Eva La Rue, an actress on the show, says she and her sister Nika had the same dream back in the 80s when they traveled to amateur modeling competitions, looking for attention.

"It's a big ego stroke to have someone say 'You look like a model, I could really help you,'" Eva says.

Because there was no Internet back then, the girls willingly gave the photographers their home phone numbers and addresses in order to get copies of the photographs. That's exactly what Bradford was hoping for when he met and photographed Eva and Nika as teenagers. Years later, it was a Bradford photograph of Nika that would eventually wind up on the L.A. County sheriff's poster.

Asked what she thought when her sister's picture turned up, Eva says, "I don't know how to answer that because I don't think that I was thinking. You are looking at a picture of your little sister, of your baby sister who is found amongst the cache of missing and unknown girls that came from a serial murderer.

Eva called the police to identify her sister and she did tell the story to the writers at CSI: Miami.

John Haynes, a writer for the show, used Eva's real life tale as inspiration for an episode titled "Dark Room" that airs Monday, Nov. 13.

"Our killer on the show is an amateur photographer who tries to take advantage of his position locating naïve girls, promising certain things, fulfilling their dreams, and then ultimately taking advantage of them," Haynes says.

Haynes wrote a big part for Eva's character, who learns that her sister has been abducted by a rogue photographer. "It was stunning for me," Eva says of shooting the episode. "I had hit an emotional wall in the scene because I couldn't be connected to it, as crazy as that might sound because I hadn't yet connected to it for myself."

Seeing the problems Eva was having, the show's star David Caruso stepped in to help. "David was the one who sort of pulled me aside and he actually gave me a really great note," she says.

Whatever Caruso said, it worked.

Fortunately for Eva, Bradford never got any closer to her real-life sister Nika than through the camera lens.

Asked what she thought when she found out that her picture was in Bradford's group of photos, Nika says, "It could have been me just as easily as it could have been any of these girls because I was there, just as they were. I was doing the same thing they were. Like a sniper in a group of people: that person wasn't lucky, and that person wasn't lucky."

Nika has a small role in the CSI episode, written by Haynes.

Haynes knows a lot of crime, because for years he was a well-respected detective for the L.A. County Sheriff. "There were a lot of turf wars, a lot of dope rips that occurred, a lot of murders and we were out there trying to do something about it. And Bobby and I worked together in South Central and southeast L.A. as young detectives in gangs and narcotics back in the early 80's," he recalls.

"Bobby" is Sgt. Bobby Taylor, now in charge of finding the women on the poster - it's another real life connection between the Bradford story and the make-believe world of CSI: Miami.

"When you think about it, do you think about the contrast between make-believe and real life?" Lagattuta asks Haynes.

"I do," he replies. "Sometimes when we're gathered in the writer's room, someone will be telling a story about something they saw on the news or whatever, it does impact me in a different way. It was hard to change hats from being a cop and then being a writer and I used to tell people that, 'Hey it's not as whimsical as that.' There really are lives that are truly affected forever."

Of all the photos on the sheriff's poster, one in particular hits home for Lisa Mora and Lori Duhamel whose long-lost mother, Donnalee, was No. 28 on the sheriff's photo board.

It's been decades since 31-year-old Donnalee Duhamel vanished, leaving behind her two daughters, who were then ages 11 and nine.

"She dropped us off at my grandma's house and never came back," Lisa remembers. "I definitely cried every night, you know? I really missed my mom. She just - she never came back."

The questions haunting Lisa and Lori about their mother's disappearance resurfaced in July 2006 when police went public with the Bradford photos.

The story of Donnalee's disappearance dates back to 1978, on a night when she was out with boyfriend Jake Karcher at a local bar in Culver City.

"I was in a place called 'The Frigate,'" Karcher remembers. "I was playing pool and she was having a couple of margaritas. She seemed in good spirits."

Once again it seems that being photographed was the killer's lure: Donnalee met a man in that bar who told her she could be a model. She left her purse, keys and her car, and told her boyfriend she'd be back soon.

"I was hopin' it was legitimate. I didn't wanna have her not have an opportunity to do something with herself," Karcher says.

He now believes that photographer was Bill Bradford. Karcher waited all night in the bar for Donnalee but she never returned.

After several days, Donnalee's mother went to the police. "It didn't seem like anything was getting done about it," says Lori. "They posted a few fliers around Culver City, around where the bar was and that's all I knew."

Years passed and then in 1985, police contacted Lisa and Lori. Investigators had found photographs of Donnalee in Bradford's apartment and Bradford admitted taking them the night he met Donnalee in the bar, according to Sgt. Bobby Taylor.

The police checked their records and discovered the body of an unidentified woman found in Topanga Canyon about the same time Donnalee went missing. Using dental records and fingerprints, detectives established conclusively that the woman was in fact Donnalee Duhamel.

Police still lacked enough evidence to charge Bradford, but he was sent to death row for the murders of Shari Miller and Tracy Campbell and the file on Donnalee remained open.

Cpt. Peavy of the L.A. County's sheriff's office, hoping for more information, included Donnalee's photo on their poster.

Well-known attorney Gloria Allred is assisting Lisa and Lori.

"The fact that he is sitting on death row convicted of the murders of two other young women should not stop them from trying to get answers and accountability," Allred says.

After all these years and false starts, the Donnalee Duhamel case now is at the forefront of the sheriff's investigation.

"We're absolutely convinced that he murdered her," says Peavy. "That the case will eventually be presented to the district attorney."

Lisa and Lori, who have daughters of their own now, are hoping to finally see their mother's killer held accountable.

But Bradford to this day denies he had anything to do with Donnalee's murder and in fact is still hoping to overturn his two murder convictions.

Darlene Ricker, Bradford's lawyer on his federal death penalty appeal, is determined to help him win back his freedom.

Ricker says the evidence that Bradford killed Shari Miller and Tracy Campbell was circumstantial: he never confessed to their murders and his attorney did not present any defense.

Asked how she explains the fact that Bradford looked at the jury and said, "You have no idea how many others are out there," Ricker says, "I wasn't there at the time. I surmise that Mr. Bradford was angry at the jury at that point and just kind of tossed up his hands and said, 'You know what guys, you don't believe me, do what you want with me now.'"

"When you hear him described as worse than the devil. Pure evil. What are you saying?" Lagatutta asks.

"I say he's being described by people who haven't met him," Ricker says.

But ex-wife Cindy Horton lived with Bradford for five years and she knows him all too well. "If you gave me a choice to be in the room with Charles Manson, Lucifer himself or Bill Bradford, I would rather be in a room with Lucifer and Charles Manson than Bill Bradford. I do believe that he is the devil. He is Satan himself," she says.

Cindy is one of four women who married Bradford. Each of his wives wound up on the sheriff's poster; all are alive. Bradford also has five children. One of his daughters, 32-year-old Jodeen Larson, talked to 48 Hours.

"I remember him being a doting dad. Daddy's little girl," she remembers.

She says Bradford was a good father - up to a point. "He loved to take photographs and we did that often. He was a good dad," Jodeen says.

But, Jodeen says, everything changed after Bradford was sent to prison and she visited him as a teenager. "All of a sudden, I had what those women had. He was so fixated on talking about it. You know? 'Show a little of this. Show a little of that.' You know, 'You're foxy, you're a foxy girl.' I, you know, you don't say that to your kid," she recalls.

Bradford's reaction convinced Jodeen that there is a killer living inside her father and she cut him out of her life. "It just angers me that somebody can do what they do and have no remorse or regret. Damage families the way he did. He didn't just damage them, he damaged us," Jodeen says.

Former D.A. Pam Bozanich knows the toll Bradford's actions have taken. "The whole thing is so awful and so haunting and so disgusting but for the sake of all the families and for the sake of those lost souls, somebody has to keep this thing alive," she says.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Bobby Taylor's investigation is moving ahead. He and his partner Sgt. Fred Castro have even more work to do, with scores of additional Bradford photos only just rediscovered.

"Twenty-three additional women are going to be added and in addition to that we're going to also publish nine photographs containing different individuals," Taylor explains.

With the new photographs, a new poster is created, and this poster features a belt buckle left beside an unidentified woman's body found in the desert in June 1984, not far from Bradford's killing field. That case remains open.

One of Bradford's ex-wives recognized that belt buckle as Bradford's. It's a tantalizing lead.

But his attorney, Darlene Ricker, says she knows he is innocent.

Asked if it isn't possible that she was charmed by Bradford, like police say he charmed all of his victims," Ricker says, "I doubt it 'cause I am just not that naïve. I'm pretty good at judging whose conning me and who isn't and he isn't."

Bradford's own daughter begs to disagree. "I fell sorry for the people that suffered," she says. "And if I could just reach out and say 'I'm sorry for your pain and your loss. I'm sorry for your suffering.'"

After the second poster was released to the public, 39 women have been identified. Dozens of others still have not been heard from.

Even if they only find two or three women, that's two of three more families who know what happened to their loved ones and that's what police do. They're here to solve crime," says Bozanich.

And police vow to keep searching until they know who's alive and who's dead.

Darlene Ricker has offered her resignation to the California Bar Association for actions unrelated to the Bradford case. She can no longer practice law.

Bradford has new attorneys seeking a new trial.
Produced By Paul LaRosa