40. The Game Show Killer and The Shutterbug Murderer
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You're listening to an Ono Media Podcast. Hi everyone and welcome back to the show. I hope you guys are all having a great Wednesday. I know I am over here and I can't wait to dive into this week's episode. So let's do it. Last week we talked about two murders in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s. Two murders that appeared to be linked. In fact, they were almost identical.

Both victims were up-and-coming models who disappeared after going to meet an unidentified photographer for a photoshoot. All the circumstances were similar. Even the location where the victim's personal belongings were found were the same. And yet, as time would reveal, each woman was killed by a different man.

LA is a city full of young, ambitious people. Aspiring actors, aspiring writers, and aspiring models. And it's also a city that's lousy with predators, eager to take advantage of these up-and-comers, especially models. Both men in last week's cases preyed on young models by using the ruse of a photography session to get the women alone with them in isolated places.

On today's episode, we'll be taking a look at two serial killers who operated similarly and left behind a trove of photos of women, many of whom remain unidentified. And we're hoping you might even be able to help put a name to some of the women in these photos. If you've heard about Rodney Alcala, you probably know him as the dating game killer.

But it's a bit of a misnomer because although it sounded good in the headlines, he never killed anyone he met on the dating game. But he was a contestant on the dating game in 1978 at a time when he had already murdered multiple women. I mean, that's pretty insane. He appeared on the show and competed against two other men for a date with a contestant named Cheryl Bradshaw.

And he literally won. Cheryl chose him. But she got creepy vibes from him almost immediately from the point he appeared from behind the curtain. And she eventually backed out of the date. Which could very well have been a life-saving choice. By this point in his life, 35-year-old Rodney had served time for a violent child rape...

and was unbeknownst to anyone yet, a serial killer. So when he was found guilty for five cold case murders in 2010, and it was learned he had appeared on the dating game, that clip was all over the news and it's a great story. And so is Rodney Alcala's other brushes with fame and infamy, like when he studied film under fellow sex offender, Roman Polanski at NYU.

or when he worked in the same office as sadistic serial killer Richard Cottingham, or when he murdered the goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.,

But Rodney Alcala himself was a gray nothing, a blip on the radar who seemingly only came to life when he was raping and killing. Alcala's first brush with the law happened in Hollywood, California in 1968. A man named Donald Hines was driving down Sunset Boulevard when he observed a man appearing to lure a little girl into his vehicle, a beige car with no license plates.

Once the girl was in the car, the man drove away. Donald Hines followed the car to a nearby apartment complex where it parked, and he saw the man lead the little girl inside the building. That's when Donald Hines made his way to the nearest phone and called police.

Not long after, LAPD officer Chris Camacho showed up at the address on DeLong Prey Avenue and knocked on the door. He heard footsteps pacing around the apartment before a naked man suddenly appeared at the window. And in a nervous sounding voice, the man told the officer he had just gotten out of the shower and needed some time to get dressed.

Officer Camacho sensed something wasn't right with this situation. And the guy, though he was claiming he'd just gotten out of the shower, wasn't at all wet. So he told the guy to open the door immediately. And the man said, "Wait, just let me put my pants on." "You've got three seconds," Officer Camacho then said.

Suddenly, the officer heard a moaning coming from inside the unit, as though someone were injured or in pain. So he kicked down the door and forced his way inside the apartment, and that's where he found the eight-year-old girl, nude and unconscious, on the floor surrounded by a pool of her own blood.

As soon as the officer heard the girl gag and realized she was still alive, he attended to the injured child and the man fled through the rear of the residence. But he left something behind that gave his identity away.

his wallet, and the ID inside of it belonged to Rodney James Alcala. The girl was rushed to the hospital. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten with a steel bar, which was then used to strangle her. She spent the next month in a coma. It was pretty touch and go. And when she came out of it, she would later tell police that the man, now identified as Rodney, had pulled alongside her and offered her a ride in his car.

She told him she didn't talk to strangers and that's when he told her that he knew her parents. He wasn't a stranger. So she got into his car and he drove her to his apartment where he told her he wanted to show her a picture. Once she was inside, he attacked her. At the time, the little girl was in the second grade and lived with her family at West Hollywood's famous Chateau Marmont.

It would take her months to recover from her injuries, and it was an attack that would haunt her for decades. Although she had blocked the incident itself out of her mind and remembered none of it. But if it hadn't been for the alert Good Samaritan named Donald Hines, the little girl may not have lived. She wouldn't have lived to have a family of her own, to have a successful career, an amazing life.

But Rodney slipped through the authorities grasp that day and would brutally close the chapters on at least eight human lives in the decade that followed. With a warrant out for his arrest, Alcala left LA, relocated to New York and began using an alias. He was now John Berger.

And under that name, he enrolled in NYU's film program and began studying under director Roman Polanski, who six years later would himself rape a child, a 14-year-old girl, and would ultimately flee the United States to escape charges.

and he has not stepped foot back in the U.S. since. I'm sure you know the story, and it was while Alcala was living in New York under an assumed name that he began approaching women on the streets of Manhattan, presenting himself as a photographer and soliciting them for private photo shoots.

None of them knew that he was, by this time, one of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives. And in the summer of 1971, he got a job working as an arts camp counselor in Sunopee, New Hampshire. And amazingly, two of the campers noticed a wanted poster with his face on it while mailing something from their local post office.

They contacted police, and that's when Alcala's true identity was discovered, and he was placed under arrest and extradited back to California to face charges. The family of the little girl, Alcala's victim, had relocated to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico shortly after her attack.

And to protect their child's well-being, they refused to put her through the ordeal of testifying against him and putting her back in the same room with him. You'd think that authorities already had enough to put the guy away for life. I mean, essentially, an officer walked in on the attack.

Unfortunately though, because there were no other witnesses, prosecutors struck a plea deal with Alcala where he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, the charge of child molestation, and he was sentenced to, get this, one year in prison. One year, folks. This is a guy who at the age of 25, he commits his first offense, his first known offense.

and it's straight up child abduction, rape, and attempted murder, which almost certainly would have been murder had it not been for Donald Hines, the Good Samaritan, who called police, and for Officer Chris Camacho, who showed up and busted down that door.

At the time he committed this crime, Alcala had just graduated from UCLA School of Fine Arts and had no criminal record. So he not only had a sadistic sexual streak, but he was gearing up to live a double life and probably also wanted to kill the little girl so he wouldn't get caught. And if things had gone to plan for him, who knows how long he would have continued killing and getting away with it without entering law enforcement's radar.

They had him in their grasp, a guy who was a strong candidate for reoffending and probably for committing murder. And he only got a year.

By 1974, he was out on parole and in no time he was out prowling the streets again. This time in Huntington Beach, California, a hunter seeking prey. And just a mere two months into his parole, he found some when he abducted a 13-year-old girl and took her out to an isolated stretch of beach where he made her smoke marijuana with him before he forced her to kiss him.

He was arrested again, but was only charged with giving marijuana to a minor, which was a violation of his parole, landing him back in prison for another two years. He was paroled again in 1976, and then his parole officer granted him permission the following summer to visit New York City. Despite him being a flight risk and a known repeat sex offender,

And it was during the week that Alcala was in New York that a 23-year-old woman named Ellen Jane Hover disappeared after being seen in the company of a young, ponytailed man who may have been, according to her date book, a photographer named John Berger.

Ellen was the daughter of a wealthy New York City attorney named Ruben Schwartz. She was also the goddaughter of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. of the legendary Rat Pack. So these connections made Ellen's disappearance widely covered. Ellen's remains wouldn't be found until June of 1978, when her skeleton was excavated from the grounds of a hospital in North Tarrytown in Westchester County, north of New York City.

It had been buried beneath heavy rocks on a hillside. By this time, Alcala had already been contacted and questioned by the FBI after they received a tip about his arrest in New Hampshire, back when he was using the same name, John Berger, as the one found in Ellen Hover's address book. He went so far as to admit, okay, he knew Ellen Hover because he probably believed her body would never be found.

But either way, by the time it was found, it was a skeleton and there was absolutely no evidence they could find to prove that Rodney was her killer. 1978 was an eventful year for Alcala. He got a job working as a typesetter for the LA Times and he briefly was a suspect in the Hillside Strangler investigation because of his location and his sex offender status.

He was also arrested again that year for possession of marijuana. And then he appeared on The Dating Game, which aired that September.

By this time, he had murdered half a dozen women or more. But like I said, nobody knew it yet. And certainly, the dating game didn't do background checks on its contestants because they would have learned that Alcala was a convicted sex offender. Also, I think it really tells you something about the nerve of Rodney Alcala, who rather than keeping a low profile because he was a serial killer, decides to go on primetime network TV.

And like I said earlier in the episode, the contestant, Cheryl Bradshaw, chose him. But then, the following day, she rang up the show's contestant coordinator and expressed that she thought Alcala gave off weird vibes and wasn't comfortable going out with him. In June of 1979, a 17-year-old girl named Lori Wertz was approached by Alcala while roller skating with her friend at Sunset Beach in Orange County.

He said he was a photographer and wanted to take their pictures, and the two girls agreed. But then he seemed like he wanted to separate Lori from her friend and get her to go with him in his car. She refused, and Alcala then drove to Huntington Beach, where he encountered 12-year-old Robin Samso and her friend Bridget. He took the same approach with them that he had earlier at Sunset Beach with Lori Wirtz.

But these girls declined, and then a grownup who knew the girls and sensed Alcala was up to no good, asked him what was going on, and Alcala bolted. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me. If you're wondering whether custom hair care is worth the hype, let me tell you it is, and that's why I'm obsessed with Proz.

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Let's get back into the episode. Sometimes after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my mind off things and one game I have been loving is June's Journey. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery mobile game that puts your detective skills to the test. You play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. With hundreds of mind-teasing puzzles, the next clue is always within reach.

Every new scene and chapter leads to more juicy secrets and clues being revealed about this mysterious murder that brings out the detective in everyone. Plus, you get to chat and play with or against other players by joining a detective club. You'll even get the chance to play in a detective league to put your skills to the test.

I have always loved good scavenger hunts and puzzles, and of course we all know I love a good murder mystery, and this is just the perfect marriage of the two. Right now I'm on chapter two. I've been trying so hard not to use the light bulb feature to help me search for clues. I seriously look forward to playing it every night. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Later that afternoon, the girls separated as Robin peddled away from the beach to her ballet class.

but she never arrived. 12 days later, her remains were found by a park ranger in the Sierra Madre foothills. After a sketch was published in the paper, tips began to pour in, among which was from Alcala's parole officer. Police looked into Alcala's background and decided to serve a search warrant on his mother's house in Monterey Park where he lived.

One of the items they found there was a receipt for a rented storage locker in Shoreline, Washington, kind of outside of Seattle. They got another search warrant and searched out Kala's out-of-state storage unit. Inside, they found the distinctive pair of golf ball earrings that Robin had been wearing the day she disappeared.

And they also found a trove of photographs of unidentified women and children, nearly 2,000 of them. And some of them were sexually explicit. Alcala was then arrested and charged with Robin Samsoe's murder on July 24th, 1979. He denied knowing the girl, of course, and he claimed the earrings were his. The case went to trial and Alcala was found guilty in May 1980 and sentenced to die in California's gas chamber.

And in 1983, he was publicly identified as the prime suspect in Ellen Hover's 1977 murder back in New York. But then, in 1984, the California Supreme Court overturned the verdict because the jurors had been informed of his previous sex offenses, which were not admissible. He was retried and again in 1986 found guilty and sentenced to die.

But a small technical mistake that the second trial judge made resulted in the conviction being overturned once again in 2001. As prosecutors prepared to try Rodney Alcala a third time, Alcala, of course, remained incarcerated. During this period, he wrote a book called You, the Jury, where he wrote about why he was innocent of Robin Samsoe's murder and why it was another guy who was responsible.

And also during this period, his DNA was collected from an oral swab, which he protested, probably because he knew what the outcome might be. And he was right. With Alcala's DNA now on file, he was immediately connected to two

cold case murders. The 1977 murder of a 27-year-old nurse named Georgia Wickstead, who was found strangled in her home in Malibu, and the 1978 murder of a 32-year-old legal secretary named Charlotte Lamb, who was found raped and murdered in a laundry room.

And over the next year, two additional murders would be connected to him. The murder of 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, who was murdered in her Burbank apartment back in 1979, and Jill Barkholm, a 17-year-old runaway who was found dumped in a ravine in 1977.

He was recharged with Robin Samsoe's murder and also the four additional murders he had now been linked to via DNA. At first, Alcala pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity before changing his plea just to not guilty. And when the case finally went to trial in 2010, he hired as his attorney himself.

Bundy style. It was around this time that it became known he had once appeared on the dating game, Game Show. And it was also around this time that over a hundred photos of unidentified women from Rodney Alcala's storage locker were first released to the public. We've posted a link to those photos in the description on our YouTube video and in our episode notes.

When he took the stand as a witness for the defense, he asked himself questions addressing himself as Mr. Alcala in an artificially deepened voice before then reverting back to his normal tone and responding to them.

It's really a shame that cameras were not allowed in the courtroom for this. He also accused Robin's mother of making up stories and lying, and he tried to attack the credibility of this poor woman whose daughter he had brutally killed and who had been dealing with his trials and appeals and retrials for over 30 years by this point.

He gave long, rambling statements in court, and during his closing argument, he played Arlo Guthrie's song, Alice's Restaurant, in the courtroom.

And after deliberating for less than two days, the jury found Alcala guilty on all five counts and he was once again sentenced to die. Three years later, he was tried in New York for the murder of Ellen Hover, as well as an earlier murder there in 1971 when he raped and killed a 23-year-old flight attendant named Cornelia Crilley in her Manhattan apartment.

Surprisingly, Alcala pleaded guilty in these cases because he wanted to return to California to appeal his death penalty conviction. In the state of New York, the death penalty had been abolished five years earlier.

When Rodney Alcala's photos of those women and kids were first released to the public, a number of women who recognized themselves among his photo collection came forward and identified themselves. That combined with the best efforts of investigators led to 21 women being identified by April of 2010. And those women were obviously not murder victims. However, that still left over 100 unidentified and unaccounted for.

In 2013, the sister of a woman named Christine Thornton, who had been missing since 1977, recognized her sister as one of the women pictured among Alcala's photographs. Thornton was 28 years old and six months pregnant when she had last been seen hitchhiking out of Mississippi.

In the picture that was found in Alcala's collection, Christine Thornton can be seen sitting on a motorcycle on what appears to be a road in the desert. The missing woman's family provided their DNA to be uploaded into the FBI's database for comparison with unidentified remains.

And in 2015, there was a hit. The DNA was a familial match to unidentified skeletal remains found in Sweetwater County, Wyoming in 1982.

When Rodney Alcala was approached about this, he admitted to meeting Christine Thornton and taking her picture, but he denied killing her. So this girl just happened to go missing and was murdered, but he, the serial killer, who's now been linked to multiple victims, oh, he didn't kill her.

He was charged with Christine's murder in September of 2016, but by this point, Alcala's health had deteriorated and he was too frail to be extradited to Wyoming to stand trial. And in July 2021, Alcala died from natural causes at California State Prison at the age of 77.

He remains a suspect in numerous other murders and some law enforcement agencies believe Alcala could be responsible for more than 100 unsolved murders, which would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in America.

Please take a look at the unidentified women in the photos taken by Rodney. And if you recognize any of them, contact the Huntington Beach Police Department. Now, of course, Rodney Alcala wasn't the only black-hearted murdering creep to prowl LA and lure the victims with this seductive offer of having their picture taken. Catching serial predators like Alcala in the 1970s and 80s was honestly like a game of whack-a-mole.

Take one of them off the streets and another one pops up. William Richard Bradford was another such predator, a mole in our game of whack-a-mole.

And just like with Rodney, he was arrested decades ago and a cache of photographs of unidentified women were found during a search of his property. And those photographs would not be shared publicly until decades later. And just like Alcala, at least one of those unidentified women was later identified as a cold case murder victim.

And also like Alcala, Bradford at one point chose to represent himself at trial. It's crazy how the facts of these cases sometimes rhyme and how similar two or more serial offenders can be.

Bill Bradford's name is one you may not have heard. Although he's been linked to four murders, convicted of two, and suspected of possibly dozens more, he's received relatively little coverage in the media. As far as I know, no books have been written about his crimes.

Not much is known about his life and there are gaps in his timeline that have yet to be filled. Even when he was first arrested and charged with murdering his 15-year-old neighbor in 1984, it wasn't covered in the newspapers until his case went to trial.

Tracy Campbell was the 15-year-old neighbor. She had just moved to L.A. from Missoula, Montana, three months earlier, and she shared a one-room apartment with four other family members. Tracy kept to herself and didn't go out much. She was a loner and knew almost no one in L.A. She and her family members slept on mattresses in their studio apartment on L.A.'s west side.

When her family returned home on the evening of July 12th, 1984, Tracy wasn't there. Her purse was still there and the bedclothes and mattresses were still on the floor. And this was unusual because Tracy was responsible for putting those items away during the day. And I must tell you, knowing just this much about Tracy's life at this time makes me so sad.

Because it sounds like this family was just scraping by and had moved to one of the largest, scariest big cities in the U.S. From one of the largest, scariest big cities in Montana. Yet even at the time, Missoula was known as the murder capital of the world. So who knows why the Campbell family moved and what they were escaping from or what new life they were pursuing in L.A.?

But they were sleeping on mattresses on the floor in a single room apartment in LA. And that tells me that this family did not live an easy life.

And when they realized that Tracy appeared to be missing, they went around to their neighbors in the apartment complex to ask if anyone had seen her, but nobody had. But the person they were most interested in talking to wasn't home. And that person was their neighbor, Bill Bradford. He was the last person the family knew had contact with Tracy. The

The family had been friendly with Bradford, who told them he was a professional photographer, a fact that did not go unnoticed to Tracy, who had mentioned to him just the night before that she wanted to be a professional model. He gave her some advice on how to put together a portfolio, and when she asked him if he'd take her picture, he declined, explaining that he didn't photograph minors. But then the next morning, he knocked on the apartment door and Tracy answered.

Tracy's cousin, Todd, overheard Bradford saying he had a job for her and possibly jobs for Tracy's brother and cousin. Tracy's brother talked to him briefly and then told Bradford he had to go to work. He left about 15 minutes later, leaving Tracy alone in the apartment. That was the last time anyone saw her.

That night, Tracy's family kept vigil for both Tracy and for Bradford because they wanted to ask if he'd seen her. Tracy's cousin kept checking the garage for Bradford's car, but it was gone well into the night. The next morning, Tracy's mother filed a missing person report and the first name they gave to police was Bill Bradford, their next door neighbor.

By midday, Bradford had still not returned to the apartment complex and a private investigator who was also trying to get in touch with him happened to run into Tracy's mother who told him that she believed Bradford had her daughter.

So the PI began phoning Bradford's apartment every hour on the hour until around four o'clock that afternoon when Bradford finally answered and agreed to meet with the PI. At which point Bradford admitted that he'd driven Tracy to the store to buy cigarettes and then dropped her off on Venice Boulevard where she claimed she was going to hitchhike to the beach. And that was the last time he'd seen her, he told the PI, making him the last known person to have seen her.

This information was then passed on to Tracy's family, who invited Bradford into their apartment to ask him about Tracy. When he entered, Bradford appeared extremely nervous. He was trembling and wouldn't make eye contact with any of Tracy's family. And he explained that he hadn't seen her, had no idea where she was, and had been away all day taking pictures in Orange County.

Later that day, Tracy's cousin inspected Bradford's car and found that it had been recently washed. Police interviewed Bill Bradford twice at this point, and they searched his vehicle, but they didn't find anything. Nonetheless, he was arrested two weeks after Tracy's disappearance, and search warrants were obtained for Bradford's apartment and his vehicle.

Inside Bradford's apartment, investigators found a box in his closet containing women's jewelry. And in his vehicle, they found a knife, Polaroid photos, undeveloped photo negatives, camera equipment, and hidden under the floorboard, a key chain with several keys attached. They also found a camera bag containing photos of another woman, a woman that they didn't recognize.

But one of the policemen, Officer John Rockwood, saw something on the woman that caught his eye. It was a small tattoo, barely visible on the woman's ankle.

Earlier that month, the partially clothed body of a woman had been found in an alleyway behind a carpet store in Hollywood. The victim had been strangled to death, wrapped in a bedspread stripped of identification, and had pieces of her skin cut away in three places on her body, including her ankle, in the exact spot that the woman in the photo had the tattoo.

The woman who remained unidentified was being referred to as Jane Doe 60, and it appeared that her killer had possibly cut away her tattoos to prevent her from being identified. But it wasn't long after Bradford's arrest that Jane Doe number 60's fingerprints were matched to a 21-year-old woman named Sherry Miller, whom Bradford would later admit to knowing.

Bradford acknowledged to police that it was her in the photographs. He explained to investigators that he had known Sherry for about two years and had met her when she tended bar at a local dive called the Meat Market. She had recently been going through a divorce and was working odd jobs, sometimes painting houses, sometimes living out of her car. And allegedly, she had asked Bradford to take some pictures of her so she could send to her mother who had no recent photos of her.

The keys seized from Bradford's car, along with some of the jewelry from his apartment, would be identified as having belonged to Sherry Miller, the murder victim. Bradford would explain this by claiming she had given him these things a few months earlier because, according to him, she wanted some modifications done to each of them.

They also identified another woman that they found among his photos. Donnelly DeHamel, who was 31 years old when she was last seen in 1978, leaving behind two young daughters, ages nine and 11. This was after a night out with her boyfriend at a local bar. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.

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The boyfriend told police that he and Donnelly had began shooting pool at a bar called The Frigate in Culver City when Donnelly encountered a man who told her she could be a model. He said he was a photographer and offered to do a quick photo shoot with her. So she left behind her car, keys, and purse and told her boyfriend she'd be back shortly. She was never seen again.

And at the time her mother reported her missing, the police didn't seem to be doing anything about the case. But then in one of the pictures found in Bradford storage in 1985, Donnelly is photographed fully nude and appears nervous, possibly frightened. Upon reviewing their files, police zeroed in on the decapitated body of an unidentified woman found in Malibu Cannon in 1978, not long after Donnelly's disappearance.

Using the woman's fingerprints, they positively identified her as Donna Lee, the third missing woman to have been photographed by Bradford and the second one murdered.

When asked about Donna Lee, Bradford admitted meeting her in the bar that night and taking her picture. But he didn't know anything else about her or what happened to her afterward. Bradford seemed to have an answer and an explanation for everything. And after four days of questioning, they released him as they didn't have enough evidence at this point to charge him in either Tracy Campbell's disappearance or

or Sherry Miller's murder. But they kept a close eye on him, tailing and surveilling him around the clock, and he knew it. A week after his release, he paid a visit to the one-hour Moto Photo Shop, which is where he frequently brought pictures to be developed.

He grilled the employee on duty about what she had told police who had visited the store two days earlier. He then provided a stack of negatives he wanted to have reprinted, but before handing them over to the employee, he examined them carefully and at one point cut off one single frame from one of the strips, stuck it into his mouth and began chewing on it until the emulsion had been fully scraped off.

Two days after this incident, a friend of Bradford's directed police to an isolated area of the desert out in Lancaster where they'd previously camped. This friend had told police that Bradford had reached out to him shortly before Tracy Campbell's disappearance for directions to this area. So police were taken out to this area and there they found the nude, severely decomposed body of 15-year-old Tracy Campbell, just 400 yards from

from where Sherry Miller had been photographed by Bradford, as there was a distinctive rock formation in the background of the photographs that was in the same area as where Tracy's body was found. Tracy's hands were missing, suggesting someone had cut them off in an attempt to prevent her from being identified, much like how Sherry Miller's tattoos had been sliced off for the same reason.

And the body was so severely decomposed to the point that the skin was mummified and it wasn't even clear what gender it was. The small print blouse that was wrapped around the victim's face would later be identified as belonging to Tracy. The medical examiner determined that Tracy, who was identified by dental records, had been killed by ligature strangulation. Bradford was then arrested a second time and charged with both murders.

More evidence would be found in his house and vehicle that pointed to his guilt, including the presence of blood in his trunk, a wristwatch that belonged to Sherry Miller, white rope that was identical to the ligature impressions on Tracy's body, and a large number of photos of unidentified individuals, mostly women, from storage areas inside Bradford's apartment and the complex garage.

When the case went to trial in 1988, the prosecution alleged that Bradford was a serial killer.

The jury found the evidence persuasive enough to find him guilty in both murders. And during the penalty phase of the trial, Bradford fired his attorney and represented himself and essentially insisted that the jury sent him to the gas chamber. Just think about how many murders you don't even know about, he taunted them. The jury gave Bradford what he wanted. He was sentenced to death.

And after Bradford was sent to San Quentin, the case, which received little to no coverage outside of California, was seemingly forgotten about. Along with all those photos that were found at Bradford's apartment, possible murder victims. In late 1997, when an appeal was filed on Bradford's behalf, court documents revealed multiple other rapes he had committed in the 1970s and 1980s against ex-girlfriends and acquaintances.

He had pleaded no contest in a rape charge in July of 1984, the same month he killed Sherry Miller and Tracy Campbell. And he had also been linked to the 1982 murder of a 23-year-old black gay man named Misha Stewart, who was last seen leaving a Santa Monica gay bar with a man fitting Bradford's description and was later found strangled with a woman's bra across from a bar frequented by Bill Bradford.

Bradford was never charged in either Donnelly or Misha's murders. Years later, Deputy District Attorney David Kahn would remember Bradford as the scariest person he ever prosecuted. And a new generation of cold case investigators with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department decided to give Bradford's case, those old photographs, renewed attention.

And seeing that at least one of the women pictured in Bradford's collection, Donna Lee, was a known homicide victim, detectives sat down with Bradford in an attempt to identify more of these women. Although Bradford wanted to die and had even become known around San Quentin as the death row poet for the poems he wrote about welcoming death, he still denied having ever murdered anyone. And he wasn't especially helpful in identifying any of the people pictured.

So the LA County Sheriff's Department took the step of making these photos available to the public on both their website and through the press. And over the next several years, several of these women would come forward to identify themselves. William Richard Bradford died in prison from cancer in March of 2008, having never admitted murdering anyone, leaving most of the women found among his photos unidentified.

And although in the years since a number of the women have been identified and were not murdered, a majority of them remain unidentified. So we have a link in the description on the YouTube video and in the episode notes where you can look at these pictures as well. And that's it for this week's episode. When we return next week, we'll remain in the Golden State, but our story will take us further up the coast to the rocky, rugged stretch of California coastline known as Big Sur.

where 36 years ago, a woman fell to her death in what appeared to be an accident. But was it really? You probably already know the answer, but hear the full story on next week's episode. I'll see you soon.