Missing Laura : For Parents, There Is No Quitting

A year after 3-year-old Laura Bradbury vanished without a trace from Joshua Tree National Monument, the blonde Huntington Beach girl is one of the best-known missing children in America.

In heart-tugging photos, the youngster with the Little Dutch Girl haircut looks out from an estimated 2 1/2 million flyers, milk cartons, shopping bags, bumper stickers, bus shelters, newspaper coin boxes and T-shirts. Her face has appeared on national and syndicated television programs, in Quality Inn motel lobbies and at K mart checkout counters, and her name is etched on thousands of identification bracelets. There is a $25,000 no-questions-asked reward for her safe return.

Yet police investigators say they are no closer to finding the missing child, who they believe was abducted by a stranger near her family’s Indian Cove campsite on Oct. 18, 1984, at about sundown.

No Leads Reported

Capt. Gene Bowlin, head of a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department task force that has invested about 140,000 man-hours and nearly $1 million in the search for Laura, said that there are no leads in the case that he can comment on.

Mike and Patty Bradbury, the girl’s parents, and a small circle of relatives, friends and devoted volunteers, have managed to keep Laura’s name and face in the public eye through all manner of events and activities, from pizza benefits to frog-jumping contests. Celebrities, politicians and evangelists have lent their names to the effort as the national concern over the issue of missing children has verged on a national obsession.

“I can’t take any credit for it,” said Mike Bradbury, 42. “People saw that face and they reacted.”

The Bradburys admit that they have been fortunate in being able to keep Laura from slipping into anonymity. As active members of a local church, with deep roots in their community and close family members living nearby, they have been able to call on considerable resources.

Help From Many

“It’s amazing,” said Patty Bradbury, 38. “We can’t keep track of all the things people have done.”

But these days, the telephones don’t ring as often as they used to at the Laura Center, a sparsely furnished storefront where toddlers often roam while their mothers continue their yearlong efforts to recover the girl. The office in a Huntington Beach shopping center is provided rent-free--at least until a paying tenant is found. All of the labor and much of the materials have been contributed, but utilities and postage alone can run $2,500 a month.

“People keep donating money,” said Patty, but “not as much as at the beginning. It has dwindled.”

Members of the family have dealt with the shattering experience in different ways.

Patty gets the family started most days, and by mid-morning she takes her 16-month-old daughter, Emily, to the nearby center, which is opened each morning at 8:30 by Patty’s mother, Virginia Winters. Occasionally, there are speaking engagements, receptions or panel discussions for Patty to attend.

“You get up in the morning, and it’s another day, so you go on,” Patty said. “Our faith is really strong.”

Travis, Laura’s 9-year-old brother, goes to school and Cub Scout events, takes care of the cat that adopted him at the Joshua Tree campsite, and sees a therapist once a month to talk about Laura, who disappeared outside a portable restroom while Travis was inside.

“Travis is doing fine,” his mother said. “He hates school. We don’t lead a normal life. He lives with listening to these things all the time. This is the central focus of our lives. We try to do normal things. Then the phone rings.”

Mike Bradbury, who has grown increasingly disenchanted with police handling of the case, has assumed the role of a private investigator and immersed himself in the tedious details involved in any complex investigation. He has hired, for a token retainer, a professional investigator, former Santa Ana detective James Schalow, to work on the case.

Computer Helps

Much of the day, Bradbury sits at home in front of a computer console, feeding in bits of information called in by Schalow or tips phoned in to the center. He speaks of “scent pools,” where tracking dogs stop and sniff, and offers peripherally relevant information from the criminal subculture about Satanic cults and child pornography.

“He should have been a private investigator,” said Patty of her husband and his efforts. “He’s very methodical. He has this ability to detach himself.”

But Bradbury sees his daily work on the case differently: “I’m just obsessed by it.”

He has worked out two scenarios in the disappearance of his daughter, which he is convinced was an impulsive act, not a planned abduction.

One theory is that Laura came upon a group of young drug dealers who frequent the high desert and was taken by them because they saw an opportunity to sell her to a black-market adoption ring. His second theory is that the girl was taken by an older couple, perhaps childless, who wanted her for their own.

Believes She Is Alive

“It’s difficult for me to be objective as to which has the greater validity,” Bradbury said. If Laura is still alive, as he believes, she was probably not taken by a pedophile, because the typical pattern for child molesters is for them “to do what they do to the child and then drop it off after several days or weeks,” he said.

“I think we both feel she’s not in California,” Patty added.

Mike Bradbury says that, once police were informed by park rangers of Laura’s disappearance, the officers “couldn’t have done any more than they did by the time they got there.”

Still, he is critical of subsequent handling of the case by Capt. Bowlin of the Sheriff’s Department. The Bradburys also charge that San Bernardino County Sheriff Floyd Tidwell has been unwilling to communicate with them about any developments in the case.

“I don’t want to get into a verbal confrontation with the family,” said Bowlin. “I can’t think of any police agency that would have made the commitment that this one has” in the effort to find Laura.

Frustrating Probe

Bowlin admits that there has been a “lack of progress,” which is “extremely frustrating for me, and I can imagine how the family feels.”

For the first six months or so, Bowlin said, nationwide circulation of Laura’s photograph by the Bradburys and their supporters was very helpful and “was the only way we could have gone” in the investigation. The 27-year department veteran cautioned, however, that the photo, taken 15 months ago, diminishes in value as the months pass.

“To some degree, it is counterproductive,” Bowlin said. “We do use up a lot of manpower running these Laura look-alikes down.” A new, “age-enhanced” sketch, commissioned by the Bradburys in order to provide an artist’s conception of what Laura might look like now, may be useful when completed, Bowlin said. “It certainly couldn’t hurt.”

Explosion of Interest

The search for Laura coincided with a nationwide explosion of interest in missing children. But focusing--and keeping--media attention on disturbing social issues is difficult.

Media critic Edwin Diamond believes there is a limit to “how many crises the national psyche can hold at any one time.” Diamond, professor of journalism and director of the News Study Group at New York University, says that for an issue to move to the forefront, it must be “fresh, new and different,” with the high-water mark usually measured by made-for-TV movies, books and cover stories in Time or Newsweek magazines.

He cautions, however, that “the hype works both ways,” with the media discarding issues that, precisely because of this extensive coverage, are no longer “fresh, new and different.” It is, he said, “a dynamic situation.”

Holiday Efforts

No one is more aware of this dynamic than Mike Bradbury. He camped out at Joshua Tree for 20 days after the abduction, long after police felt Laura had been taken from the area, and in so doing, focused continuing attention on the case. Holiday after holiday--Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, Laura’s birthday and now the anniversary of her disappearance--the family has opened its home and private life to reporters. There have been vigils, tree-plantings, swap meets and other activities to call attention to the disappearance.

“There is a competitive mentality from the marketing standpoint,” Bradbury said. “Like anything that runs in the public awareness as a cycle, interest goes up and down.”

If an issue is accepted onto the national agenda, a period of saturation may follow, until “the point is reached where the issue is no longer newsworthy as a positive, consciousness-raising story,” said Jay Howell, director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington. “At that point the media begins to pick it apart and look for potential weaknesses.”

Conflicting Figures

On the missing children issue, the first potential weakness found was in the initial estimates of how big the problem was. No uniform national or statewide figures exist. Early news accounts cited figures for missing children that proved to be inflated, as many as a 1.5 million annually. The figures failed to make plain that the vast majority of children listed as missing were either runaways, or had been taken by a divorced parent or family member, or had been abducted for short periods by strangers, then released or found dead.

The number of children abducted by strangers and missing for a long period of time, like Laura Bradbury, is quite small.

But Patty Bradbury thinks such distinctions are meaningless.

On a recent television panel, Patty refused to be drawn into the numbers controversy, saying: “I don’t make distinctions. For whatever reason, a child is gone.”

‘One Is Too Many’

Later she said: “Stranger abductions are obviously a minute part of the problem. I don’t think anybody knows how many there are. I don’t think anyone has a handle on it. Why divide those children? When a child is missing it may be hurting, and parents are still hurting. People who put down parental kidnaping don’t understand, and it breaks my heart. I don’t think you can put down the problem; it bothers me when people do that. . . . I think if there’s one child missing, it’s too many.”

“We haven’t gone out of our way to cite figures,” said Mike Bradbury. “We need to be a little careful about throwing numbers around. Our focus is primarily looking for Laura.”

The FBI recorded 68 cases of child stealing by non-family members in 1984, and 11 more in the first five months of 1985, according to spokesman Bill Carter. Carolyn Zogg, associate director of Child Find, one of the oldest organizations concerned with missing children, puts the annual figure at 500 to 600. The National Center’s Howell puts the number of non-family abductions of people under 18, including those murdered or taken for a short time, at between 4,000 and 20,000 a year. By contrast, according to a 1984 Louis Harris Associates poll, the number of parental abductions may be as high as 500,000 a year.

Key Factors

According to Howell, Laura Bradbury is one of the half-dozen best-known missing children in the United States. Among the factors that determine how well known a missing child’s face becomes, he said, are “the age of the child, the particular abilities of the parents to seek out media exposure, the circumstances of the disappearance and the location of case,” that is, the proximity to major media outlets.

Another consideration, he said, is the nature of the photograph of the missing child. Howell said he tells parents that “the more personal and personable is the photo of the child, the more likely you are to garner attention for the case,” citing as an example the disappearance of Adam Walsh, a Florida boy who was later found dead. The photograph most widely circulated was a heartbreaker, a smiling boy dressed in a baseball uniform, holding a bat.

Laura Bradbury is an attractive child, and her disappearance at a time of heightened consciousness about the problem of missing children struck a strong chord in Southern California and the nation. Mike Bradbury acknowledges that the volunteer effort has been extremely successful in getting Laura’s picture before the public and, while the family wants to do everything possible to find the girl, “I’d like to see more fairly applied exposure” for all missing children.

Endless Meetings

The campaign to keep Laura’s photo circulating involves endless meetings with elected officials and business people, as well as exploiting every tenuous connection that family members and volunteers have to celebrities. Ricky Schroeder, a distant cousin of Patty Bradbury and star of the television series “Silver Spoons,” agreed to make several appearances and TV commercials on Laura’s behalf.

One volunteer introduced the family to the Rev. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral, and the family appeared on Schuller’s nationally syndicated TV program “Hour of Power.” NBC chose Laura’s disappearance as one of those to be re-created and dramatized on a nationally broadcast program.

There have been some less savory encounters as well, including a few thinly veiled extortion attempts as well as requests for endorsements of various business propositions hoping to capitalize on the issue.

“We’ve had some real con people come in” with various deals, Mike Bradbury said. “It can get sticky.” The Bradburys have “come close” to getting involved but have always backed out, despite their precarious financial situation.

Family Finances

The Bradburys say they have survived almost entirely on $7,000 in contributions to a fund set up for their personal use shortly after Laura’s disappearance, an account that now contains an additional $7,000.

Mike Bradbury goes in to his Costa Mesa chair-caning and furniture restoring shop only once or twice a week, although his father-in-law, Dana Winters, opens the store every day and does some of the routine work to help bring in some money. Mike said he sold a diamond ring that was a family heirloom to pay for the home computer he uses.

A separate fund for the search effort has raised about $30,000, half of which has been spent in the last year. The money spent on the search is dwarfed, Patty Bradbury said, by the gifts-in-kind made to the effort.

In dealing with the tragedy, the Bradburys have much in common with the parents of America’s other best-known missing children--Adam Walsh, Kevin Collins and Etan Patz.

Adam Walsh, 6, wandered away from his mother in a Hollywood, Fla., Sears store in 1981, and was found dead two weeks later in a canal 150 miles away; Kevin Collins, a San Francisco 10-year-old, went to basketball practice Feb. 10, 1984, and was last seen waiting for a bus home; Etan Patz, 6, vanished on the way to school in May, 1979, in New York.

Television Movie

The Walsh boy was the subject of “Adam,” a made-for-television movie; Kevin appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Their parents’ grief and frustration have given way to institutional memorials, with foundations and centers established in the name of the two boys, dedicated to finding all missing and exploited children. In contrast, the parents of Etan Patz, who was also the subject of a novel and a feature film, have continued to direct their energy toward locating their son.

Like Adam’s father, John Walsh, the Bradburys have testified in Washington before a congressional committee. They cooperate with other groups, like the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, which will soon open its fifth facility, this one in Orange County, and the Kevin Collins Foundation, which recently opened a Los Angeles office, its second, as well as with broader, national coalitions like Child Find. The Bradburys post photographs of other missing children on the walls of their center.

There is no accepted standard for how families cope with a missing child.

“I don’t think anybody knows what’s normal or best” in dealing with missing children, said Dr. Roland Summit, a psychiatrist specializing in treatment of sexually exploited children at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance.

Some Give Up

Many parents simply give up the search, according to Summit, who is also a member of the U.S. attorney general’s advisory commission on missing and exploited children. “They go through the process of mourning and loss and sealing over,” he said. “The whole issue fades into the background.”

Summit said it is difficult to state how long it is healthy for parents to continue searching for a missing child. “One person’s obsession is another person’s mission,” he said.

How long do the Bradburys think they can continue to search for their daughter?

“As long as people are interested and there is something we can do,” Patty Bradbury said.

“Laura to me is too important and significant to put into words,” Mike Bradbury said. He vows to search “as long as I breathe, as long as I walk.”

And if the girl were to be found tomorrow?

“Patty would probably want to keep the center going. I would probably want to get on with my life,” Bradbury said.