Los Angeles Times magazine, Sunday, July 20, 1986

In March, 1986, the top portion of a child's skull was found in Joshua Tree National Monument near where 3 1/2 year old Laura Bradbury disappeared 21 months previously. For many people in San Bernardino County that both solved the mystery and closed the case. But not for the child's father. He insisted that Laura was still alive--the sheriff's department just didn't want to find her. And furthermore, it never did.

It's a warm afternoon at the Laura Center in Huntington Beach.

Photographs of missing children dominate the walls; there's a sliding board in the middle of the floor; and at a desk in back private investigator Jim Schalow is playing a cassette tape of a Black Mass.

Although Schalow got it from a man who says he recorded it at a Satanic rite, the tape is too absurd to take seriously. In a parody of a Catholic service, a Satanic priest recites the Lord's Prayer backwards, directs a (naked) teenage novitiate to do everything she can to bring "contempt and ridicule on religion," and concludes by leading his congregation in a rousing series of "Seig Heils" and "Hail Satans."

The tape is still playing when Mike Bradbury walks in the door, carrying a foot-high stack of three-ring binders. "What's that?" he says, setting the binders on the table. "It sounds like 'Mein Kampf.'"

"It's a Black Mass," explains Schalow, who is sitting at a desk, drinking coffee out of a foam cup and smoking a cigarette.

"Oh wonderful," Bradbury says.

Schalow turns off the tape. "You haven't seen this yet," he says, handing Bradbury a fat photocopied manuscript.

"What is it?"

"An FBI interrogation."

Bradbury leafs through the manuscript, which is a meandering interview with a woman who claims her father molested her as part of a Satanic rite, but he seems bored and he is more than happy to put it aside when Schalow shows him a small yellow catalog of electronic devices for determining whether there's a bug on your telephone line.

"Hey," says Bradbury. "Here's one for $4500. It does it all in one unit."

Schalow goes him one better. "Here's a portable one. Or how about a bullet proof limousine?" He flips a few more pages. "Have you ever seen a flashlight so powerful, it will knock you down?"

Although Bradbury gets an obvious kick out of such devices, he is becoming increasingly antsy to get to the real purpose of the meeting-- discussing his latest suspect in his daughter's disappearance. "Well . . . " he says, opening up a three-ring binder.

Schalow puts away the catalog. "Moving right along," he says.

When he is not accusing the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department of deliberately failing to find his daughter, Mike Bradbury is warm, personable and polite. At the small crowded Costa Mesa shop where he repairs cane seats and wicker chairs, he graciously commiserates with his customers, many of whom are older matrons, about damaged wicker, broken antiques and the unavoidably high cost of hand weaving a caned seat.

He is also uncommonly articulate, having by his own account a "near- photographic memory" for names, dates, figures and facts. Although he never finished college or even had much interest in it, he can rattle off a list of a dozen major philosophers without pausing for breath. And he can talk confidently on such disparate subjects as Oriental self-defense and the practical uses of computer data bases.

Still, the stress and frustration of not being able to find his daughter are always there just beneath the surface ready to erupt with a small incident or inadvertent remark. Sometimes, he says, he feels so frustrated he starts punching holes in the walls of his apartment and smashing doors. It's not unusual, he says, to go day after day with just two or three hours sleep. On other occasions he gets the strongest feeling that something is about to happen that he puts on his bullet proof vest, loads his shotgun and sits in the middle of the living room, silently watching the door and waiting.

When a recent visitor to his shop mistakenly attributed to the sheriff a chance comment that Bradbury's son had had diarrhea the day Laura disappeared, Bradbury suddenly put down his tools in disgust. "If they continue that kind of verbal diatribe line I am going to sue them out of the goddamn state. I mean it. Bowlin is an abject asshole. He is an incompetent, stupid, illiterate jerk. He mishandled that whole case and he knows it and I know it. If he wants to see attorneys, he is going to see them from Melvin Belli to F. Lee Bailey. That's the kind of crap that has been destroying our family--those deliberate and intentional lies."

Hardly stopping for breath, Bradbury invited the visitor to turn off his tape recorder before he broke it, wondered out loud whether Bowlin had sent the visitor down to deliberately provoke him, and pointed out that, as a long time student of Karate, he had the ability to "cave in" a person's face with a single blow.

But just as quickly his anger ran out. "That must have sounded terrible," he said. "I'm like a Pavlov experiment. Mention a name. Get a reaction."

Mike Bradbury is 43 years old. The son of a Disney cartoonist, he grew up in Orange County on Balboa peninsula in a 12-room sea view house that was first the home of a silent screen star and later a bordello.

Unlike his older brothers, both of whom became research scientists in neurophysiology, Mike Bradbury spent his adolescence body surfing and playing the guitar. Then at age 21, while a student at Orange Coast College, he got into what he now calls "an unfortunate confrontation" with a friend and lost the little and third fingers of his right hand.

At the time, Bradbury was cutting string beans with a serrated knife on a cutting board. Unable to endure his friend’s taunting, he grabbed him by the throat with one hand and with the other slammed the knife into the cutting board so hard that his hand slipped down over the blade, practically cutting his fingers off. Then when they took him to the hospital, he developed an allergic reaction to the anesthesia and fell into a coma for 36 hours.

After that, Bradbury says, he spent the next "year and a half in the hospital, getting tendon grafts and watching my college career go down the drain."

He never did recover the use of his those fingers. Not only were they painful and arthritic, they started to curl up backwards. In disgust, he had them amputated. And then, to hide the fact that he'd lost them, he covered that hand with a leather glove.

To help forget his problems, he got a job driving a flatbed truck for the YMCA and organizing caravan camping tours of national parks. Later he returned to college, but with no particular direction he dropped out to make leather belts and work in handicrafts.

In the early seventies, Bradbury moved with his wife Patty to Juneau, Alaska, where he managed a firm which made jewelry out of gold nuggets. After a slow start, business began to boom. Politicians and celebrities visited the shop. He sold jewelry to Nieman-Marcus and became friends with FBI agents. Together he and his wife earned over $100,000 a year.

Although Bradbury now wore Pierre Cardin suits and silk shirts, he suffered a heart attack from the stress, whereupon he moved back to California and opened a cane shop in Costa Mesa. He didn't make much money, but at least he still could enjoy taking the family to the beach after school, body surfing with his son, Travis, building sand castles with his daughter, Laura, and watching the setting sun.

In the fall of 1984, the birth of their third child with a heart condition and cleft palate left the Bradburys with staggering medical bills. Their two bedroom condominium in Huntington Beach felt too crowded for five people and feeling that they just had to get away, they decided to leave a day early for their church group's annual October trek to Indian Cove campground in Joshua Tree National Monument.

The Bradburys arrived at Indian Cove at 3:35 p.m. Despite the absence of running water and other amenities, the Bradburys loved the beautiful desolation of the place, which was one reason they had come back to Joshua Tree for the last eight years running, even to the point of using the same campsite each time. To the south, Indian Cove butted up against a 5 mile stretch of garage-sized boulders strewn all over the landscape like a granite rummage sale. Inside the campground itself, massive hunks of quartz monzonite stood vertically out of the ground while off in every direction, cacti and creosote bushes dotted the desert floor.

For Mike Bradbury, it was a quiet carefree life. In the early morning light, coyotes played in the desert and Bighorn sheep scampered in the rocks overhead. For amusement, the Bradburys launched toy hot air balloons over the desert and, at night, sat around a campfire, singing songs while Mike played the guitar.

On that afternoon, while Mike hurried to set up the tent and put out the sleeping bags before it got dark, his wife held Emily and Laura played in the sand nearby, making little piles of flat rocks.

Laura stood three feet tall in her rainbow colored flip flops and weighed 30 pounds. She had blond hair and dark brown melancholy eyes. At times she was so shy it used to embarrass her father. They'd be in a supermarket and some old lady would be trying to talk to her and touch her under the chin and Laura would be clinging to her mother's leg and growling at the lady like a baby bobcat. "She wanted her mommy and her daddy and her Travis and that was it," says Bradbury.

Never much of an eater, she had just entered a junk food phase in which she liked only hot dogs, peanut butter, M&M's and frozen peas. Her heroine was Mary Lou Retton and for months after the Olympics she used to imitate Retton's triumphant pose, chin up, chest thrust out, and arms down and back. Like many kids her age, she had a favorite blanket. It had big pink, yellow and blue squares. No one could take her out of bed or her car seat without it.

While Mike Bradbury finished making camp, Travis went off to use the fiberglass toilet 100 yards away and Laura padded after him. Within five minutes Travis came back from the toilet, whereupon Mike Bradbury asked him, "Where's Laura?"

"Isn't she here?" asked Travis.

Bradbury took off toward the toilet while Patty ran after him with Emily, asking "What's the matter? What's the matter?"

Bradbury was dumbfounded when he arrived at the toilet. It was in the middle of a big wide open space. Where could she have gone? Where was there to go? He frantically began looking over bushes and under cacti. Horrifying thoughts began popping into his mind. "What if a coyote had gotten her?" A mountain lion. He called her name until he was hoarse. He climbed up on a big rock to get a better view while Patty Bradbury drove up and down the campground with Emily, frantically calling Laura from the car.

After an hour of fruitless searching, one of the other campers volunteered to drive down to the Ranger station to notify officials. He in turn called the local sheriff and within hours the park was flooded with deputies, park rangers, man trackers, horses, scent dogs, three helicopters, a crash truck, a self-contained trailer command post, rock climbers and an Army chuckwagon to serve steaks and eggs to the nearly 300 searchers.

The first night everyone assumed that Laura was merely lost or sleeping under a bush and come morning that they'd spot her wandering through some portion of Indian Cove, which was really a small self-contained area, ringed by impenetrable rock walls on three sides and a public highway on the other.

When the dogs arrived, Patty Bradbury felt a surge of confidence. From having seen them in movies, she just thought they'd put the dogs down, pick the scent and go right to Laura. Then when it didn't happen, her feelings went clear through panic and came out as numbness on the other side.

On Friday afternoon, Captain Gene Bowlin put Patty Bradbury in a patrol car and drove all over Indian Cove as Patty's voice came out the loudspeaker: "Laura this is Mommy. Don't be afraid. Come out where we can see you." In the meantime, the deputies and rangers stood by, tears streaming down their cheeks.

The worst part for Patty Bradbury was Friday afternoon when the rest of the church group arrived at Indian Cove with all of Laura's little friends and playmates. Because the children were still too young to understand, they went running and playing as if nothing were wrong. "It was hard to see them acting normally," says Patty Bradbury. "I didn't want to see anything normal going on."

For Mike Bradbury, the first three days were an exhausting nightmare. "I was up all day and all night," he says, "climbing over rocks and rattlesnakes, walking through cactus like a zombie, almost hysterical calling her name. I was sure she was out there somewhere. She had to be somewhere."

At 5 p.m. Sunday evening, after 72 hours of round-the-clock operations, the sheriff, the park rangers and the search and rescue team leaders all agreed it was time to call the search off. In all that time, searchers had found numerous beer cans, old bones, a wallet, a comb and a dried out bag of marijuana, but there was no trace of Laura--not one of her little rainbow colored flip-flops, which after three days one might think would have fallen off, not her Kelly green sweat shirt which she might have been expected to take off during the afternoon heat, not a single thread from her lavender pants stuck on the Cat's Claw bushes which scratched and tore the searchers' trousers.

Even more convincing, perhaps, were the conclusions of the man trackers and dog handlers. The night Laura disappeared, trackers working with flashlights and crawling on their hands and knees had found Laura's footprints 75 feet to the north of the family campsite. They meandered north for a while, turned west around the base of a big rock outcropping, crossed the main access road to the campground, crossed another road to the group campground area and proceeded down the soft shoulder. At one point, they climbed up on the berm, as if a vehicle were approaching, and then suddenly turned back toward the asphalt and disappeared.

Still, the whole thing was so inexplicable. Laura had walked within 75 feet of the Bradbury campsite. "She almost had to have heard us calling her," says Mike Bradbury. Furthermore, her tracks looked so confident. They were 15 to 17 inches apart. She never panicked. She never fell down. "She walked as if she were out for a stroll."

Gene Bowlin, Captain of San Bernardino's Morongo Station, had a bad feeling about the disappearance of the Bradbury girl from the moment he first arrived. There was no way a timid 3-year-old child could have gotten herself into a place where searchers couldn't see her, dogs couldn't smell her or helicopters couldn't pick her up on infrared.

At 56, Bowlin had spent more than 25 years in police work. A chain smoker with tattoos on both arms who was not adverse to an honest drink in a friendly bar, he was, to his friends, an honest, straightforward, country cop with an impressive conviction rate but to Bradbury he was a tactless blunderer in over his head.

On the Tuesday following Laura's disappearance, he convened the first meeting of his hand-picked 15-man investigative team and told them the raw truth. Despite statements from other campers about suspicious blue vans and bearded men in ball caps, the truth was they didn't have a single pursuable lead. Under the circumstances, they had no alternative but to go public. "We had nothing," Bowlin says.

From descriptions provided by people in the campsite, a police artist was able to put together a composite of a bearded man wearing wire-rim glasses and a ball cap which they distributed to the press. In the first two days they had some 760 calls. "I had seven or eight deputies working 12 to 14 hours a day doing nothing but answering phones," says Bowlin. And the minute they hung up, their phones would ring again.

Unfortunately, most of the calls were useless or worse: "I saw Laura riding down the 405 freeway at 6 p.m. with an older man." No, the caller didn't know his name, license number or where he was now.

Other callers reported little boys, Mexican kids, black kids. And if the officer taking the report had the temerity to suggest it probably wasn't Laura they'd get mad.

"When did you last see this child?" the detective would ask.

"Thirty seconds ago," the answer would come back.

"What color were her eyes?"

"What color are they supposed to be?"

"You tell me," the detective would say.

"Blue."

"That's not Laura."

"What do you mean, it's not Laura?"

At least 400 or 500 people called to tell the sheriff to check the campground toilets. Although Bowlin had checked them (and the trash barrels too) in the very first hour and later called in a pumper truck to pump every toilet in the entire campground, the volume and frequency of these tips about the toilet made him so paranoid that the following week he sent out two detectives to check them all over again. "That's all we would need," Bowlin would later say. "It would ruin the county" if, after launching a nationwide search for a kidnapper, it turned out that Laura had fallen into a toilet.

After getting a computer printout of some 4400 nearby registered sex offenders from Sacramento, Bowlin assembled a special force of 50 investigators for a 6 a.m. briefing, gave them lists of suspects and sent them out to start checking people out. But, says Bowlin, it turned into a total fiasco. In 90% of the cases, the addresses were wrong, non-existent or out of date. perverts crimes

In the meantime some of the tips pouring into the Morongo station hotline were so imminently plausible that investigators were absolutely convinced in some half--a-dozen different instances that they'd have Laura back in a matter of hours. Once in Shasta County, police found a little girl who answered to the name Laura, who looked just like Laura, who knew Laura's nicknames, who knew both Travis and Laura's grandfather, Dana Winters. But she wasn't Laura. She was the daughter of Mike Bradbury's barber who once lived in Costa Mesa and personally knew his family there.

On another occasion a missionary from Orange County reported that he had talked to a taxi driver in Puerto Vallarta who reported that a Mexican citizen had found a little blond haired girl in a shack near the border and had brought her into Mexico to live with him in a Mexican village. Normally the missionary would have discounted such a story but the cab driver was a responsible family man who had put two kids through law school.

Bowlin took the tip seriously enough to fly down to Puerto Vallarta himself and make his way to the village. And it was true. A man had found a little blond haired child in a shack and brought the kid to Mexico. But it had happened 10 years ago, not a few months previously. And it was a boy not a girl.

In one unhappy incident, a Pasadena woman who went to pick up her 4- year old daughter at a day-care center in her husband's blue van was stopped by police who, thinking they had found Laura, handcuffed the mother and jailed her on unpaid traffic warrants.

In another instance, acting on the tip of a witness under hypnosis, Bowlin sent one of his lead investigators, Sgt. Gil Waite, to Santa Rosa to find a man with a dog named Sam. "It took four of us a week," says Waite, "and we never did find the right dog."

At times when the investigation seemed to be going nowhere, Bowlin would stop everything, call back his lead investigators, and hold a brainstorming session. The worst part was they had so little to go on. They weren't even sure that a crime had been committed. And if a crime had been committed, where was the body?

Dean Knadler would later call it the most discouraging, frustrating case he'd ever been involved in. People were so worn out from working long 10 and 12 hour days that they would shout at one another in the brainstorming sessions. For Bowlin, the pressure was terrific--from the department, from the media and from Bradbury himself. Meanwhile, not a single lead was working out. "He was an excellent investigator," Sheriff's Sgt. Gil Waite would later say, "but he felt he was being whipped."

Because of all the frantic activity, it was hard to think coherently at search headquarters at the Morongo station. Instead, Bowlin would wake up in the middle of the night, drink a pot of coffee and smoke a pack of cigarettes, all the while thinking, "What didn't we do? What did we miss?"

At these times he would entertain any scenario, including the possibility that Mike Bradbury had gotten so mad at Laura for getting lost at the toilet that when he found her he slapped her so hard he killed her, and then hid the body.

To rule out just such a possibility, Bowlin asked Mike Bradbury and his wife to come in for a polygraph.

"I have to do this," Bowlin explained. "Any police department will tell you the same thing. I don't think you did it. And if you did, I don't know how you did it. But if in two years this case is still going on and someone takes over, the first thing they're going to ask is, 'Why wasn't this done?'"

The polygraphs themselves took about three hours--twenty minutes for Patty Bradbury and 2 1/2 hours for Mike. "Mike drove them crazy," Patty would later say. "He has a very precise way of answering questions. If there is a cat on a table by the window and you ask him if the cat is by the window. He will say no, it's on the table." Still, Bowlin was able to conclude from the test that Mike Bradbury was probably not involved in his daughter's disappearance. ("Just because you're an ass," he says, "doesn't mean you kidnapped your daughter.")

The thing that most ate at Gil Waite was the lack of response to the $25,000 no-strings-attached reward for Laura's safe return. "That," he thought, "should have brought people crawling out of the woodwork." The fact that it didn't led Waite to two conclusions--either Laura was dead or only one person knew what had happened and he wasn't talking.



Although Mike Bradbury liked and trusted Gene Bowlin, Dean Knadler, Gil Waite and the rest of the investigators, people from missing children groups warned him not depend entirely on the police. "You have to get the kid's name out there before the public and keep it out there. The police will not be the ones to find her. They never have. They never will."

In the meanwhile, the Bradburys had begun to become aware of what they say was the sheriff's haphazard system for handling tips. Many times, says Patty Bradbury, "People would call here and say, 'We called (the sheriff) and they laughed at me.' Or 'They said it was after hours. Call back Monday.'"

For Mike and Patty Bradbury, the most disturbing, frustrating and ultimately demoralizing calls were those from psychics. "We must have gone through 200," says Mike Bradbury. "People would call and say, 'Why didn't you answer my letter? I know where she is.'" Or else someone would call long distance and casually say, "I'll be down in a couple of weeks. We'll go and pick her up." Laura/Bradbury psychics

Although most of the psychics were genuinely eager to help, says Patty Bradbury, they all wanted to be driven out to the desert. And they all want something of Laura's that hasn't been handled by other people. "And then if we refused their help, they thought we didn't really want to find Laura."

One man simply said he had a powerful mind and the problem was that nobody else looking for Laura was smart enough.

"I didn't say anything," says Patty Bradbury, "but if psychics know so much, how come the walls of the Laura Center are covered with pictures of missing children?"

Another woman said, "I hate to tell you this, but Laura is dying of malnutrition in a barn."

"Do you have a location?" asked Patty Bradbury.

When she said no, Patty felt enraged. "How dare you call me up and tell me this," she thought, "if you can't tell me where she is?"

As it became increasingly clear to Mike Bradbury that the sheriff's department either would not or could not find Laura, he hired a private investigator named Jim Schalow to conduct his own search. Schalow was a former Airborne Ranger, deputy sheriff in Arkansas, arson investigator in Texas and would-be country/western guitar player who had spent the last 10 years supporting himself as a private investigator. A casual dresser who often wore sleeveless T-shirts and a ball cap with the word "detective" on the front, Schalow agreed to work for $30/day plus expenses.

At first, Schalow would take Bradbury along on stakeouts and interviews, but he soon discovered it was not always a good idea. "When Mike heard that his daughter was being held somewhere," Schalow says, "his technique was to go knock down the door." Or if a potential witness was being coy, Bradbury's instinct was to pull the guy across the table.

"It took me the longest time to teach Mike how to talk to witnesses," says Schalow. "He'd spend the first hour telling them everything he knew. And then they'd spend the next hour regurgitating it back." Schalow once spent two or three days, he says, checking out a hot-sounding tip from a witness, only to discover that the original source was Bradbury himself.

Of much greater use to the investigation was Bradbury's ability to pull information out of a data base. By selling his late mother's wedding ring, he was able to buy an Apple IIe computer with a telephone modem. Thereafter Bradbury spent 12 to 14 hours a day searching through commercial data bases, running down a suspect's license plates, employers, physical descriptions, marriages, property, lawsuits, bankruptcies and credit checks. Bradbury eventually filled up seven three-ring binders with computer printouts on suspects from the Morongo Basin. And a lot of what he learned, he says, left him terrified.

Because the Morongo Basin was both isolated and sparsely populated with numerous dry lakes (on which it was possible to land small planes with South and Central American contraband), the area was a thriving center for the drug trade. Up narrow winding canyons, past belligerent "No Trespassing!" signs, there were fortified buildings occupied by armed men who manufactured amphetamines or processed cocaine. Over the years so many people have turned up dead or missing (there are hundreds of abandoned mine shafts in the area) that Jim Schalow began calling it the Morongo Triangle.

The thing that astonished Bradbury was the extraordinary number of sex offenders living in the area. "The sheriff criticized me for not keeping closer watch on Laura," he says. "If I had known what kind of creeps were out there, I would have tied a chain around her."

Bradbury got what he thought was his first big break in December of '84 when a man called to say he knew who took Laura. According to the caller, who wanted Bradbury help him find a job and move to another part of the state, he had a distant violent relative who took amphetamines with bourbon, belonged to a white supremacy group called The Order and earned his living selling dope, machine guns and fragmentation grenades. Small children excited him. The man owned a blue van and was known to have been in the Joshua Tree area the day Laura disappeared.

Most importantly of all, the caller said that the suspect had bragged in front of five people that he had kidnapped Laura Bradbury, that he had her in Barstow two hours before the sheriff even knew she was missing and, after molesting her, he had sold her for a five digit figure.

Bradbury rushed to the sheriff with the information but Bowlin told him it was old news. They'd checked the suspect out already--twice. And, although he was up to his ears in potential felonies, they couldn't find a single thing to connect him with the kidnapping of Laura Bradbury.

While Bradbury stormed and fumed and wondered what on earth this man had on the sheriff's department that they would protect him so, a second incident took place which brought to light yet another suspect.

On February 21, 1985, a 41 year old Pioneertown resident by the name of Bill Leville came to the Morongo station with his 22 year old girlfriend, Toby Santangelo, and announced to Gene Bowlin that he knew who took Laura Bradbury. murders shallow/graves

Bill Leville was an ex-con who drove a WWII khaki-colored ambulance and who made his living from swap meets. His girlfriend, Toby Santangelo, was a former prom queen who worked as a lab assistant at a the Hi-Desert Medical Center in Yucca Valley.

The story they told Gene Bowlin was that they knew a man who looked exactly like the composite. Or at least he used to look like the composite before he went on a crash diet, shaved his beard and started wearing contact lenses. Furthermore, they said, they had heard another man tell him during an argument, "Well, at least I don't take little girls in vans."

Because they were working on even more promising leads at the time, says Knadler, sheriff's investigators didn't follow up the charges till March 28th. But Leville and Santangelo had moved and investigators couldn't find them.

On April 9th, friends of Leville reported that he and Santangelo had disappeared from their home under suspicious circumstances, leaving the lights on, the furnace running, the stereo playing and Bill Leville's pet Samoyed behind. To Leville's friends, this was convincing proof that something was wrong. Leville never went anywhere without his dog.

Bowlin put 20 people on the case. It was clear from what their friends said that both Toby and Bill had been terrified for their lives, but nothing showed up until July 14th when a Marine from the nearby Twenty-Nine Palms Marine Base found an arm bone which had been gnawed upon by coyotes in the hills above Sunfair Dry Lake. Soon afterwards searchers found the rest of Bill Leville in a ravine, covered with dirt and tumbleweed, with two bullets in his skull.

Two weeks later, they also found Toby Santangelo, in a shallow grave wrapped in a blanket. She'd been shot twice behind the right ear, says Bradbury. The first had fractured her forehead from the inside. The second had broken two front teeth then lodged in her tongue.

After a thorough investigation, Gene Bowlin decided that the suspect named by Santangelo/Leville didn't have anything to do with Laura. For one thing, he didn't just exchange his glasses for contact lenses--he'd worn them for years. And for another, he never had a beard. He had thin facial hair and couldn't grow one if he'd wanted to.

When the sheriff refused to arrest the suspect, Bradbury and Schalow began conducting their own surveillance, flying over the suspect's house, taking pictures and videotapes, driving down the street and photographing his car. In the end, says Bradbury, "we bugged him so much he went back to Long Beach."

At the same time, says Bradbury, he so irritated the sheriff with his private investigation and public complaints that one day in the fall of 1985 he was walking up the church steps when a person who was once closely connected with the Sheriff's Department slipped up beside him and said, "You better watch your back kid. You better get a bullet proof vest and shotgun."

"Why?" said Bradbury.

"The San Bernardino sheriffs are pissed at you and are going to get you."

"That's a nice thing to say as you're walking into church."

"I'm just trying to tell you."

That scared Bradbury enough that he borrowed a .38 caliber pistol from his father-in-law Dana Winters for protection. But after a couple of uneventful months, Bradbury decided to sell the gun. Just before Christmas he was unloading the shells, when he snapped shut the cylinder and . . . click-BLAM!, the gun went off. The bullet blew out the bone in the third finger of his left hand between the knuckle and the first joint and lodged in the piano. Bradbury's ears were ringing for two hours. He wrapped his hand in a towel, tourniqueted his arm and called Dana Winters to take him to the hospital. When Winters arrived, he took one look at the blood on the wall and threw up.

Bradbury spent the next three days in the hospital, where surgeons took a piece of bone from his hip to reconstruct his finger.

To Mike Bradbury the final example of sheriff department incompetence, stupidity or outright complicity was the case of Jim Nestor. A resident of Johnson Valley, northwest of Joshua Tree, Nestor had started an informal one-man campaign to rid the area of drug dealers, says Knadler. But Nestor had no connection to the Bradbury case until early 1985, when a psychic called to say she believed that Laura Bradbury was being held in the mountains near Johnson Valley. Nestor drove to the site and, as the psychic predicted, there was a old oxidized aluminum trailer with a yellow stripe along the side. Although no one was around at the time, he did find wind strewn Pampers and a pink child's sleeper.

A few weeks later he returned a second time and was driven off by an angry man carrying a rifle. Nestor returned a third time, but, when he encountered half-a-dozen heavily armed men, he didn't even stop. The next time he flew over in an airplane. Not only were shots fired at him, when he landed he got a follow-up call: "Stay out of the air or you're dead."

Then one morning last fall, Nestor, who was 57, left his sister's home in Johnson Valley to walk to a nearby friend's house for coffee. He never came back. planes deaths murders crimes drugs

When Grace Downer called Gene Bowlin to report her brother's disappearance, she says, Bowlin just walked in, sat down and summarily announced that her brother had taken his .22, gone out in the desert and blown his brains out.

To Downer this was absurd. That was October 22, 1985. And she hasn't seen a trace of him since.

The following March, the Bradburys were conducting a surveillance in San Francisco when they received a call from Gil Waite telling them that a Marine had found the sun-bleached top of a child's skull while hiking in a dry wash two miles northwest of the Indian Cove campsite. San Bernardino County Sheriff Floyd Tidwell held a press conference to announce the finding of the bones. Newspapers across the country carried reports. And the Bradburys started getting phone calls from relatives back east offering condolences about Laura.

Sheriff Captain Gene Knadler, who took over from retiring Captain Bowlin on March 30th, speculated that perhaps Laura had merely wandered away from the campground and stepped on an unstable portion of the dry wash, which then collapsed and buried her. The heavy December rains uncovered the body. Coyotes got to it. And the little skull cap was all that remained.

In an effort to try to determine the sex and blood type of the child, San Bernardino county officials forwarded the bones first to a forensic anthropologist at Cal State Fullerton and later to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. But studies were inconclusive.

When he got back from San Francisco, Mike Bradbury attacked the sheriff for linking the bones to Laura. All that the county's forensic anthropologist could say for sure, he pointed out, was that the bones had come from a child two to five years old who had probably been dead less than five years. In the absence of further evidence such as her Kelly green jacket, lavender pants or rubber flip-flops, it was just as reasonable to believe that the bones had been planted there, he argued, as to just assume they were Laura's. Besides, he demanded, if they were Laura's bones, what were they doing in the Smithsonian? "Why haven't they been returned to the parents' custody?" (The head Park Ranger for the Joshua Tree National Monument agrees that the bones could not be Laura's--the original search was too thorough to have missed her.)

Due to what he now perceives as an increasingly hostile attitude surrounding the case (Someone tried to force Bradbury off the road up in the Morongo Basin and someone else threatened to toss a hand grenade in Schalow's bedroom), Bradbury doesn't take chances that in any potential confrontation he might find himself outgunned. For close-in action, he bought a 12 gauge riot shotgun. ("It can blow a hole in the side of a car," he says.) For longer range firepower he has a .44 caliber Marlin lever action rifle with an eight-power scope, a 30-30 caliber deer rifle, and a double-edged commando knife. ("I can put it between a pair of eyes at 25 feet," he says.)

When he goes on surveillance missions now, he brings combat fatigues and army helmets and carries three ammunition belts. The people in Joshua Tree think he's crazy, says Bradbury, which is fine with him--that way no one will try anything.

In the meantime, says Bradbury, he knows they're tapping his phone because in the middle of a conversation sometimes the volume suddenly drops some 30%. When he hears that he just starts talking as raunchy as possible, speculating out loud, between Bowlin and Knadler, "who bends over for whom." That gets them so mad he says, he's been disconnected as many as five times in a single call.

Nor is this bug talk mere speculation, Bradbury says. Jim Schalow recently found a suspicious device on the line outside Schalow's house whereupon he connected the ignition system of his Datsun pickup to the thing and sent 18,000 volts up the line. That fixed the bug, Bradbury says. (It also fixed the line as well, and the phone company had to send a repairman out.)

The worst thing now, Bradbury says, are the vicious lies that sheriff deputies are circulating in the valley. There was one deputy recently, says Bradbury, who while taking an emergency case to the Base Hospital at Twenty- Nine Palms announced that "Mike Bradbury killed his own daughter and is getting rich off the investigation." Another deputy, says Bradbury, is going around spreading the rumor that "Mike failed the polygraph test."

"I'm going to sue the sheriff for slander when this is over," says Bradbury. "I'm through fooling around. I contacted Grey Davis. I'm going to impanel a grand jury to investigate not only my daughter's disappearance but also that of Jim Nestor and Toby Santangelo."

Besides, says Bradbury, if he's getting rich off his daughter's disappearance, why does he drive a 1972 VW van with worn tires, bad brakes and shot bearings? Why do they live in a condominium with holes in the walls? Or have his father-in-law work in the cane shop so he can sit at the computer all day? For that matter, if he kidnapped his own daughter to make money, why does he waste all this money calling data bases? Every time you go on-line it's a minimum of $6, and sometimes a good deal more. (One month, says Patty Bradbury, they had a bill for $2400.)

Before the sheriff announced that he had found Laura's bones, says Bradbury, donations were coming in at the rate of several hundred dollars a week. But after the sheriff's press conference, they dropped off to practically nothing at all.

"Ever since that press conference," says Schalow, "both Mike and I have been close to bankruptcy." Schalow got three months behind in the payments on his pickup truck and one night at four a.m., he found a bank repossessor fooling around the passenger compartment. "I took out my .45," says Schalow," and invited him to leave."

Instead the bank repossessor filed a complaint, charging Schalow with brandishing a weapon, whereupon a deputy came out and seized the gun for "evidence."

Just to make sure someone doesn't try to snuff him out as a way of stopping his investigation before it exposes things that some people would prefer not to see exposed, Bradbury has, he says, made multiple copies of all his computer disk files and given them to six different people, none of whom know each other. "I've uncovered stuff that scares me," he says. And then if he ever turns up dead or missing, the people with the computer disks can make the data public.

For Dean Knadler, Bradbury has been a thorn in his side ever since the case began. "He claims to have given us a great deal of information," says Knadler. "He knows who took his daughter, why she was taken, how much he was paid. He has her location pinned down to a small part of a certain state. This is what he tells the media. This isn't what he is telling us. He conducted his own investigation from damn near day one. He didn't share his leads with us. And then he gives us tips about people we have already eliminated."

Knadler doesn't at all fit the image of a hard-drinking tough talking country cop. In person he's a soft-spoken, slow-talking pipe-smoking man who once planned to be a male nurse. But Bradbury's accusations have gotten under his skin.

Bradbury, he says, "comes in with wild bizarre accusations without any factual proof. We have to run down umpteen bogus leads that he has come up with. I try to put myself in his position. I would do everything possible to find my daughter--leave no stone unturned. But I don't think I would go out of my way to alienate the police agency responsible for the investigation."

As for Jim Nestor, says retired Capt. Bowlin, one would think from listening to Bradbury that Nestor disappeared because he was looking for Laura. But when Nestor first vanished, his family didn't mention a word about Laura--that alleged connection only developed much later, after the family talked to Bradbury.

According to Gil Waite, the other Bradbury allegations are equally dubious. After the double murders, says Waite, Bradbury said he knew who did it. He had sworn affidavits. "We got all excited. We said bring it in. He didn't have affidavits. He didn't have anything."

As for these five people who supposedly heard a citizen brag about kidnapping Laura, says Knadler, it was all checked out. And all they found were a lot of comments taken out of context by a bunch of different people.

(Well, of course, the witnesses didn't tell the sheriff what they knew, says Bradbury. The last time anyone went to the sheriff with information on Laura's kidnapper, they ended up in a shallow grave with bullets in their brains.)

Gil Waite is the one cop Bradbury has always trusted. With his small blond mustache and trim appearance, he looks like a movie version of the incorruptible small town sheriff, the one who gets killed five minutes into the film. In the early days of the investigation, he says, Bradbury used to call him up and say, "You aren't doing enough. You never have." Because Waite both understood the stress Bradbury was under and sympathized with him as well, he went beyond his official duties and became a sort of counselor for Bradbury, allowing him to "push us around a little bit if it made him feel better." At the same time, he kept Bradbury intimately informed of the progress of the investigation, a step he now says may have been a "colossal mistake."

For their part, the Bradburys are worn out by what they see as the whole long, intractable mess. Patty still spends her days at the Laura Center (they've sent out about 2 million pictures of Laura) but the number of phone calls has dropped to practically nothing at all. Recently Patty went to speak to a Neighborhood Watch group about missing children and only 12 people showed up. Laura/Bradbury

Patty's greatest regret these days is that she doesn't dream anymore. "I'd like to have dreams about Laura," she says. "It's harder and harder to remember a lot of things about her. It happens to every parent but at least they have their child there."

As for Mike, he is convinced that somewhere Laura is alive. Because the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department can't or won't find her, the only explanation that makes sense to him is an interlocking conspiracy including top Sheriff's Department officials, judges, attorneys, drug dealers and pedophiles--a charge that Knadler labels "totally preposterous." In the face of what he sees as this massive conspiracy, Bradbury doesn't know which way to turn. "There are times," he says, "when you want to give up. There are times when you don't know what to do. You get calls from crazies, psychics and creeps. I get so burned out and frustrated it drives me crazy." Still, says Bradbury, his campaign isn't aimed at Bowlin or Knadler. And for that matter he doesn't care about nailing all the drug dealers and pedophiles in the Morongo Basin either. "I just want my daughter back."