A father asks: ‘When will this ever end?’

Mike Bradbury felt the air cooling and saw the sun sliding into the horizon, so he hurried to put up the tent where he and his family would sleep.

He heard his son’s small voice. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Travis was telling his mother, who directed him to a portable toilet nearby. Travis was 8. Padding after him, as always, was his sister Laura, 3½.

Laura was groggy after the long drive from the family’s condominium in Huntington Beach to Indian Cove in Joshua Tree National Park. She wore lavender cotton pants and a green sweat top. Framing her round face were flat, blond locks cut to look like her first hero, gymnast Mary Lou Retton, an Olympic star that summer.

Mike listened for his children, but the wind, rising as night fell, hid the crunch of Travis’ sneakers and the patter of Laura’s rainbow-colored flip-flops.

Travis ambled back to the campsite looking bewildered. While he’d been inside the toilet, Laura had walked away. He figured she’d made her way back to camp, but now he didn’t see her.

“Where’s Laura?” he asked.

Mike’s heart began to race. Laura was not a child who wandered off. He sprinted toward the toilet. His wife, Patty, followed, clutching their infant daughter, Emily. They scrambled through the cactus and the creosote. “Laura!” they yelled. “Laura, Laura! Where are you?”

Mike Bradbury is 67, and bags hang wearily beneath his eyes. For two decades, he has not spoken much about Laura or what has happened since she disappeared: How he refused to give up hope. How the tragedy has clung to his family, like a storm that can’t be escaped.

But enough time has passed, and now he’s ready to talk. It was the night of Oct. 18, 1984, that his little girl went missing.

“It felt like doom,” he recalls. “Like somebody had ripped our hearts out. Just ripped them out.”

Park rangers arrived first. Then deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Then men with the bloodhounds. One of the dogs picked up Laura’s scent. Someone spotted sandal prints arcing away from the portable toilet and wrapping back toward the campsite.

But then the prints curved and headed for a road. They disappeared. No more steps. No scent. Nothing.

Word spread quickly through the forlorn towns that ringed the park. Newspapers and newscasts led with the story. Helicopters thumped through the sky. Hundreds of volunteers searched on foot.

It was that way for weeks. During the days, the commotion was strangely comforting to the Bradburys. But nights, when everyone else went home and they holed up in a donated RV, their minds filled “with this bizarre, unaltered, foreboding emptiness,” Mike says. “We were surrounded by the feeling: When will this ever end?”

*

Mike Bradbury grew up in Newport Beach, the son of a Disney cartoonist. He possessed a rapier wit and an excellent memory, but he never made it past a few classes in community college. He was a maverick, a loner, a taker of risks.

“I was the scrapper who always stood up,” he says. His left hand brushes across his mustache and his ruddy face. He speaks quickly, forcefully, as he tends to do when remembering the past. “If you were the little guy and there were four guys picking on you, I would go over and kick sand in their faces, even though I was little myself. It got me a lot of beatings, but I simply would not quit.”

Patty Winters was quiet, stolid and deeply religious. She calmed him. In 1969 they married, and in the late ‘70s, flush with cash after running a gold jewelry business in Alaska, they moved to Orange County, where Mike repaired wicker furniture.

Travis was born. Then Laura. Mike had never been around a little girl. Her innocent sweetness captivated him. He’d lift her in his arms, twirling her, tickling her until she begged him to stop. “Daddy’s little punkin!” he called her. Most nights, she wouldn’t sleep until he’d read to her from Winnie-the-Pooh.

By 1984, they were a family of five, cramped in their two-bedroom condominium. Because Joshua Tree offered a break, they were regular visitors. Patty felt particularly at home there — the sunsets, the night stars far from city life.

Joshua Tree, Mike says, “had always been a place that brought us solace and peace.”

*

I send this letter to you with love and prayer, my first baby girl. There is a hole in our life now. Life was perfect for us but now it seems hallow (sic) … I sometimes feel guilty in continuing at all … I get so angry that you’re missing seeing Emily grow and missing your play with Travis. I wonder if you’ll have a stocking when you wake. Another Christmas gone — cheated from sharing it with you. God please protect her — give her Christmas … God return our Laura. Make our family complete again … Laura I love you. Please don’t forget me … Mommy.

— Letter from Patty to Laura, Christmas morning, 1985

*

Months passed. The media were still covering the search.

“People still cared,” Mike says. “It was hard to keep things together emotionally, but at the time there was a sense of optimism that we’d find her.”

In a donated space at a Huntington Beach strip mall, the Bradburys had opened the Laura Center, a nonprofit office where tips were gathered and millions of fliers mailed. Laura was one of the first missing children to be featured on the back of milk cartons.

Then, in the spring of 1986, a hiker stumbled upon a small skull two miles from the campground. A sheriff’s captain publicly speculated it was Laura’s and proffered a theory. Maybe, he said, she meandered away from the toilet, stumbled and was somehow buried by collapsing sand. Only recently, he continued, coyotes or a mountain lion had dug up all that was left.

Early forensics were inconclusive: The skull was a child’s, but little else could be determined — not the blood type or the gender. More tests were ordered. The results would not be known for years.

Mike, meanwhile, railed at the Sheriff’s Department, accusing it of making a premature announcement. He feared people would assume the case had been solved and would stop looking.

“To help find my daughter — or just find out what happened if in fact she was no longer alive — I needed people to care,” he says. “And here was someone telling people it was over, she’d been found, end of story, no need to think about Laura Bradbury anymore. My God, it was just another blow … another way me and my family did not see eye-to-eye with the so-called authorities.”

For the Bradburys, the mystery remained.

*

Laura, my baby…You are 5 today and we are broken hearted not to spend your birthday with you. Do you know it is your birthday? Are you being loved? Do you remember us? … God can work miracles — I just fear that He won’t … I want you to be a girl scout, I want to buy you dresses and take you to school and the beach and the cabin and sing happy birthday to you. How can you be 5? You are still my sweet 3 year old. You can’t have changed … Please hear me, baby. Please know we still love you and will always look for you … Please come home. Mommy.

— Letter from Patty to Laura, May 29, 1986

*

Mike grew increasingly contemptuous of sheriff’s deputies for not doing enough about the many tips that flowed into the Laura Center. They were incompetent or lazy or both, he told reporters. He even speculated that someone inside the department knew that a kidnapper was involved and was covering it up.

The department said it was doing everything it could. “We met with him many times,” recalls Dean Knadler, a captain who took over the investigation in 1986.

Now a retiree living in Arkansas, Knadler says he empathized with Bradbury but regarded him as a nuisance — even a hindrance. “We were putting everything we had into this, and he was out there starting to put together all sorts of different scenarios based on bits of information that were not true. To our minds, he was getting in the way of the investigation.”

It didn’t help when Mike heard the story of Clifford Leville and Toby Santangelo. The Morongo Basin couple were said to have told deputies they had solid information about a man they believed kidnapped Laura. Knadler says his investigators checked it out and found it not credible. Not long afterward, Leville and Santangelo were found shot to death.

Laura’s disappearance, Knadler says, had nothing to do with their slayings. Mike would not believe it.

By 1987, he had lost 40 pounds. He had ulcers. He would slam doors and punch walls. He felt as if he were splitting in two. His daughter was gone forever. His daughter was going to be found any day.

His wicker repair shop foundered. He was nearly broke.

Yet he bought an expensive computer and ran streams of costly background checks on his own list of suspects: a cascade of ex-convicts and ne’er-do-wells living deep in the desert. He’d also hired a $30-a-day private investigator named Jim Schalow, a chain-smoking ex-Army Ranger with a Texas drawl.

They conjured their own theories: Laura had been sold to a child trafficking ring. Devil worshipers took her. She’d been whisked off to a foreign country.

Four days a week, Mike climbed into his beaten-up 1972 Volkswagen and drove 120 miles to Joshua Tree. Sometimes, he and Schalow donned Army fatigues and ammunition belts and crawled across the desert spying with high-powered binoculars on anyone they found.

“It felt like we were so close,” he says. “The people we were watching — these shady, extremely dangerous people who’d kill you and not think twice — some of them were involved in what happened, I was convinced. Either that or some of them knew what happened. And I was willing to do anything, put my life on the line, whatever, for my daughter. Someone had to be aggressive. “

Before Laura disappeared, he had never held a handgun. Now he possessed a 12-gauge shotgun, a .44-caliber Marlin lever-action rifle, a .30-caliber deer rifle, a .38-caliber pistol. He carried a long hunting knife.

Fear and paranoia became a part of daily life. Mike believed the people they were watching would kill anyone they caught snooping around. He believed his phone was tapped. He believed someone would bomb his VW.

He no longer slept between midnight and 4 a.m. Those were the hours, he figured, when someone, probably a “pissed-off, scumbag drug type,” would try to kill him.

*

Mike began seeing a psychologist. Patty would accompany him, but then sit in the waiting room.

Patty kept her heartache to herself. She was writing to Laura regularly, but she hid the letters. She told no one about what she was doing.

Mike kept getting worse. He felt as if he were “fragmenting into 15 different compartments, each a different survival mode.” He would not walk into a room without an exit plan. He would not sit in a restaurant with his back to the front door.

He started to weigh the unthinkable: Should he give up the search?

It was 1989 now, and his family was suffering.

Emily was 5 and living in the shadow of a lost sister she never knew. Her father was a stranger. Often, when he walked through the door, she hid behind her mother.

Travis was in his teens. He still slept in the bunk beds he once shared with Laura. For a long time, her pink blankets and dolls remained on her part of the bunk. At school, he was taunted — “I kidnapped your sister and raped her.” He was isolated and depressed. He blamed himself for what had happened. When he was 12, he says, he considered suicide.

Mike decided they would move.

So they rented a tree-shrouded home on a Sierra hilltop in Grass Valley, a bucolic town in Northern California.

They knew no one. Nobody knew them.

“This was our new start,” Mike says. “A blank slate. A new life for our children. We would put this tragedy behind us. We could get our lives back.

At least that’s what we thought.”

kurt.streeter@latimes.com

Tomorrow: A new life for the Bradbury family.