Mike Bradbury’s Obsession : On the Afternoon of Oct. 18, 1984, His Daughter, Laura, Disappeared

It’s a quiet afternoon at the Laura Center in Huntington Beach. Photographs of missing children dominate the walls. A wooden slide for toddlers sits in the middle of the floor. At a desk in back, private investigator Jim Schalow, acting on a tip that devil worshipers kidnaped Laura Bradbury, is playing an audio cassette of a satanic rite.

Although Schalow got it from a man who claims to have recorded it at a secret meeting, the tape is too absurd to take seriously. Mostly it’s a parody of a Catholic service that ends in a series of rousing “Sieg Heils” and “Hail Satans.”

The tape is still playing when Mike Bradbury walks into the headquarters of the Laura Bradbury Organization for Stranger-Abducted Children. He is carrying a foot-high stack of three-ring binders. “What’s that?” he asks, setting the binders on the table. “It sounds like ‘Mein Kampf.’ ”

“It’s a Black Mass,” explains Schalow, who sits at a desk, drinking coffee from a plastic-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, a meandering interview with a former satanist, but he seems bored and is more than happy to put it aside when Schalow shows him a small yellow catalogue of electronic devices for determining whether a telephone is bugged.

“Hey,” says Bradbury. “Here’s one for $4,500. It does it all in one unit.”

Schalow goes him one better. “Here’s a portable one. Or how about a bulletproof limousine?” He flips a few pages.

“Have you ever seen a flashlight so powerful it will knock you down?”

For a while they talk of bugs and CIA satellites, but Bradbury is becoming increasingly anxious to get to the real purpose of the meeting--discussing his latest suspect in his daughter’s disappearance. “Well. . .” he says, opening one of his binders.

Schalow puts away the catalogue. “Moving right along,” he says.

Mike Bradbury didn’t start out doubting the ability of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department to find his daughter. During the all-out search that followed her disappearance from a campground at Joshua Tree National Monument on Thursday, Oct. 18, 1984, he publicly praised the searchers’ dedication and professionalism. In the next three weeks, when he was still living at the campground in the hope that she’d return, a sheriff’s deputy loaned him a motor home so he and his wife, Patty, and their two other children (8 1/2-year-old Travis and 5-month-old Emily) wouldn’t have to sleep in a tent. Gene Bowlin, then captain of the sheriff’s Morongo Basin Station, invited them to his house for showers and a hot meal.

In the meantime, Bowlin mobilized as many as 50 detectives to find Laura, many of whom worked 10-, 12- and 14-hour days, ringing doorbells and checking out possible suspects and Laura look-alikes. “We were busting our asses to find his kid,” sheriff’s Capt. Dean Knadler later complained. And what was their reward when tips and leads had trickled off to nothing after six months of unrelenting effort? Reading newspaper interviews with Mike Bradbury in which he charged that the department had bungled the entire investigation, if not a good deal more.

When he is not accusing the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department of malfeasance, Mike Bradbury is warm, deferential and polite. At the small, crowded Costa Mesa shop where he repairs cane seats and wicker chairs, he is unfailingly gracious to his customers, many of whom are older matrons, commiserating with them 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 use of computer data bases.

Still, the stress and frustration of not being able to find his daughter are always just beneath the surface, ready to erupt with a small incident or inadvertent remark. Sometimes, he says, he feels so angry and frustrated that he starts punching holes in the walls and smashing doors at his condominium. It’s not unusual, he says, to go day after day with only two or three hours’ sleep a night. At other times, late at night, he gets so strong a feeling that something is about to happen that he puts on his bulletproof vest, loads his shotgun and sits in the middle of the living room, silently watching the door and waiting.

Once when a reporter visiting his shop mistakenly attributed to Gene Bowlin a chance comment that Bradbury’s son had had diarrhea on the day that Laura disappeared, Bradbury set down his tools in disgust. “If they continue that kind of verbal-diatribe line, I am going to sue them out of the damn state. I mean it. Bowlin 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.”

Without stopping, Bradbury next invited the reporter to turn off his tape recorder before Bradbury broke it, wondered aloud whether Bowlin had sent the visitor over to deliberately provoke him, and pointed out that, as a longtime student of karate, he could “cave in” a 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 on Orange County’s Balboa Peninsula in a 12-room Victorian that had been the home of a silent-screen star and, later, a bordello.

Unlike his older brothers, both of whom became research scientists in neurophysiology, Bradbury spent his adolescence bodysurfing 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 Mexican guy” and lost the third and fourth fingers of his right hand.

At the time, Bradbury was cutting string beans for dinner with a serrated knife. Unable to endure the taunting of the other fellow, whom he usually considered a good friend, 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 over the blade, almost cutting off two fingers.

After that, Bradbury says, he spent the next year and a half in and out of hospitals, getting tendon grafts and “watching my college career go down the drain.” Eventually, the fingers had to be amputated. For a while, he covered the hand with a leather glove.

To help forget his problems, he got a job driving a 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 other handicrafts.

In the late ‘60s, he met Patty Winters at a Presbyterian church fellowship group in Newport Beach. In 1969, they were married at her parents’ house in Menlo Park. In 1972, Mike and Patty moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he worked his way up to managing a raw-gold jewelry manufacturing firm. After a slow start, business began to boom, he says. Politicians and celebrities visited the shop, and through the business he became friends with FBI agents. The Bradburys sold gold-nugget jewelry to Neiman-Marcus. Together they earned more than $100,000 a year.

Although Bradbury now wore Pierre Cardin suits and silk shirts, he began to lose weight from stress. After suffering a frightening heart attack, he gave up the business and moved to Huntington Beach, started a cane shop in Costa Mesa and became an expert on wicker. Although he didn’t make much money, he could enjoy taking the family to the beach after school, bodysurfing with Travis, building sand castles with Laura and watching the setting sun.

In 1984, Emily was born with a heart condition and cleft palate. By that fall, the Bradburys were facing staggering medical bills. Their two-bedroom condominium was too crowded for five people. Feeling that they simply had to get away, they left 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 or other amenities, Mike and Patty loved the beautiful desolation of the place, which was one reason they had come to Joshua Tree every year for the last eight, always using the same campsite. To the south, Indian Cove butts up against a stretch of garage-size boulders strewn about like a giant granite rummage sale. In the campground, massive hunks of quartz monzonite rise out of the ground, while in every direction, cacti and creosote bushes dot the desert floor.

For Mike Bradbury, it was a quiet, carefree retreat. In the early morning, he could see coyotes playing in the desert and hear bighorn sheep in the rocks overhead. The Bradburys launched toy hot-air balloons over the desert, and, at night, sang around the campfire while Mike played the guitar.

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

Laura stood three feet tall in her rainbow-colored flip-flops, and she weighed 30 pounds. She had blond hair and dark brown, melancholy eyes. At times, she was so shy it embarrassed her father. They’d be in a supermarket and some old woman would try to talk to her and touch her under the chin, and Laura would cling to her mother’s leg and growl at the woman 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 mostly hot dogs, peanut butter, M&M;’s and frozen peas. Her heroine was Mary Lou Retton, and for months after the Summer Olympics she had imitated Retton’s triumphant pose, chin up, chest thrust out, arms down and back. Like many kids her age, she had a favorite blanket. It had big pink, yellow and blue squares. And woe to anyone who tried to take her out of bed or her car seat without it.

While Mike finished making camp that day, Travis went off to use the fiberglass camp toilets 80 yards away, and Laura padded after him.

When Travis came back, Mike asked him, “Where’s Laura?”

“Isn’t she here?” asked Travis.

Dropping everything, Bradbury took off toward the toilet while Patty ran after him with Emily, asking: “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

When Bradbury couldn’t find Laura at the toilet, a feeling of horror set in: “What if a coyote had gotten her?” In a panic, he began looking over bushes and under cacti. He called her name until he was hoarse. Other campers came running, and he dispatched them in various directions while he climbed a big rock to get a better view. Meanwhile, Patty drove around the campground with Emily, frantically calling Laura from the car.

After an hour of fruitless searching, one of the other campers drove down to the ranger station to notify officials. Within hours, the sheriff and the park rangers flooded the campground with man trackers, rock climbers, horses, scent dogs, three helicopters, an emergency crash truck, a trailer to be used as a command post and an Army chuck wagon to serve steaks and eggs to a group that quickly grew to nearly 300 searchers.

The first night, everyone assumed that Laura was merely lost or sleeping under a bush and that, come morning, they’d spot her wandering through some portion of Indian Cove, a 10-square-mile, self-contained area bordered by impenetrable rock walls on three sides and a public highway on the fourth.

When the dogs arrived, Patty felt a surge of confidence. From having seen them in movies, she thought they’d pick up the scent and go right to Laura. When that didn’t happen, her panic turned to numbness.

On Friday afternoon, Bowlin put Patty on a patrol car loudspeaker and drove all over Indian Cove: “Laura, this is Mommy. Don’t be afraid. Come out where we can see you.” By this time, many of the deputies and rangers were emotionally caught up in the search, and hearing Patty’s voice sent tears streaming down their faces.

The most difficult time for Patty was Friday afternoon, when the rest of the church group arrived with Laura’s little friends. The children, too young to understand, ran and played as if nothing was wrong. “It was hard to see them acting normally,” Patty says. “I didn’t want to see anything normal going on.”

At 5 p.m. Sunday evening, the sheriff, park rangers and search and rescue team leaders agreed that it was time to call off the search. After 72 hours of round-the-clock operations, they had not found a single 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 remove in the afternoon heat; not a single thread from her lavender pants stuck on the cat’s claw bushes that scratched and tore the searchers’ trousers.

Besides, it was fruitless to continue when, according to the trackers and dog handlers, Laura wasn’t in the campground anyway. The night she disappeared, trackers crawling on their hands and knees with flashlights had found what they believed to be Laura’s footprints just north of the family campsite. The footprints meandered north for a while, turned west around the base of a large rock outcropping, crossed the main access road to the campground, crossed another road to a 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 turned back toward the asphalt and disappeared.

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

Bowlin had a bad feeling about the disappearance of the Bradbury girl. There was no way a timid 3 1/2-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 their infrared scanners.

At 56, Gene Bowlin looked like a somewhat more weathered Arnold Palmer . A chain smoker with a tattoo on his arm who was not averse to an honest drink in a friendly bar, he was, to friends and fellow officers, a decent, straightforward country cop with 25 years’ experience and an admirable record when it came to solving open cases. But in Bradbury’s eyes, he was a genial blunderer, in over his head.

On the Tuesday after Laura’s disappearance, he convened the first meeting of his handpicked 15-person investigative team. Their first step, in the words of one reporter, was to “round up the usual suspects,” in this case, known sex offenders. Using a state Department of Justice computer printout, Bowlin assembled a special force of 50 investigators for a 6 a.m. briefing and sent them to check out about 4,400 registered sex offenders from a five-county area. But, says Bowlin, it turned into a “fiasco.” In 90% of the cases, the addresses were wrong, non-existent or out of date.

Under the circumstances, Bowlin had no alternative but to go public. It was by far the biggest case they’d ever handled at the Morongo Basin Station and, says Bowlin, “we had nothing.”

From descriptions of a suspicious man in a blue van, provided by people in the campsite, a sheriff’s artist was able to put together a composite of a bearded man, wearing wire-rim glasses and a baseball cap, which was distributed to the press. In the first two days the department received about 760 calls.

Unfortunately, most were useless: “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 current location.

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

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

“Thirty seconds ago.”

“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?”

More than 400 people called to tell the sheriff to check the campground toilets. Although Bowlin had checked them--and the trash barrels--the first hour and had every toilet in the campground pumped the next day, the frequency of these tips made him so paranoid that he sent out two detectives the following week to check the toilets yet another time. “That’s all we would need,” Bowlin would later say. “It would ruin the county” if, after launching a nationwide search for a kidnaper, it turned out that Laura had fallen into a toilet.

In the meantime, some of the tips pouring into the Morongo station hot line seemed so plausible that investigators were convinced in half a dozen different instances that they had the case solved. 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 a Bradbury family friend who had once lived in Costa Mesa.

On another occasion, a missionary from Orange County reported that he had talked to a taxi driver in Puerto Vallarta who said that a Mexican citizen, while returning to Mexico, had found a little blond girl in a shack near the border and had taken her to live with him in his village.

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

In one bewildering 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.

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 problem was that they had so little to go on. They weren’t even sure that a crime had been committed. And if so, where was the body?

Dean Knadler would later call it the most discouraging, frustrating case he’d ever been involved in. The investigators were so worn out 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 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 times like these, he would gladly 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 that he killed her and then hid the body.

“I have to do this,” Bowlin explained to Mike when he called the Bradburys in for polygraphs. “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 else takes over, the first thing they’re going to ask is, ‘Why wasn’t this done?’ ”

The polygraphs took about three hours--20 minutes for Patty and 2 1/2 hours for Mike. “Mike drove them crazy,” Patty says. 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 probably was not involved in his daughter’s disappearance. “Just because you’re an ass,” he says, “doesn’t mean you kidnaped your daughter.”

The thing that most nagged 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 other investigators, right from the start people from missing-children groups warned him not to trust the police entirely. “You have to get the kid’s name out there before the public and keep it out there,” said a representative of one group. “The police will not be the ones to find her.”

Furthermore, an accumulation of little things had already started to annoy Bradbury. A sheriff’s dog handler borrowed Laura’s blanket to help arouse the scent dogs, and then promptly lost it. Sheriff’s investigators, says Mike, never interviewed Patty. And, most aggravating of all, the Bradburys began to hear that the Sheriff’s Department was ignoring potential leads. “People would call here and say, ‘We called (the sheriff ) and they laughed at me,’ ” says Patty. “Or, ‘They said it was after hours and to call back Monday.’ ”

Of all the phone tips that the Bradburys received, the most disturbing and demoralizing were from psychics. “We must have gone through 200,” says Mike. “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.”

One woman said, “I hate to tell you this, but Laura is dying of malnutrition in a barn.”

“Do you have a location?” asked Patty.

“No,” said the woman, leaving Patty enraged. “How dare you call me up and tell me this,” Patty thought, “if you can’t tell me where she is?” In the end, Mike says, the psychics didn’t give us “one iota” of useful data.

By March, 1985, Mike Bradbury had come to the conclusion that the Sheriff’s Department either would not or could not find Laura, and he hired a private investigator named Jim Schalow. Schalow, a former Army Ranger, deputy sheriff in Arkansas, arson investigator in Texas and would-be country/Western guitarist, had supported himself as a private investigator for 10 years. A personable man who often wears sleeveless T-shirts and a baseball cap with the word detective on the front, Schalow agreed to work for $30 a day plus expenses.

At first, Schalow would take Bradbury along on stakeouts and interviews, but he soon discovered that 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 person 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 computer data base. By selling his late mother’s diamond wedding ring, he was able to buy an Apple IIe computer with an extra-large memory. Thereafter Bradbury spent 12 to 14 hours a day searching commercially available data bases, running down suspects’ 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.

The Morongo Basin runs east from Yucca Valley toward Twentynine Palms on the other side of the Little San Bernardino Mountains from Palm Springs. Because it is both isolated and sparsely populated--with numerous dry lakes on which it is possible to land small planes carrying South and Central American contraband--drug dealers find it a convenient place to base their operations. Up narrow, winding canyons, past belligerent “No Trespassing!” signs, are fortified buildings occupied by armed men who manufacture amphetamines or process cocaine. Over the years, so many people have turned up dead or missing there that Schalow began calling the area the “Morongo Triangle.”

The thing that astonished Bradbury was the extraordinary number of sex offenders living in the area. “If I had known what kind of creeps were out there,” he says, “I would have tied a chain around Laura.”

When Bradbury received his first major tip about a possible suspect in his daughter’s kidnaping, in December, 1984, he thought the case was solved. According to Bradbury, the caller, who wanted help in finding a job and moving to another part of the state, said he had a distant relative, a violent man who took PCP with Jack Daniels, belonged to a white-supremacy group called The Order and earned his living selling dope, machine guns and grenades. The man owned a blue van and was known to have been in the Joshua Tree area the day Laura disappeared.

According to Bradbury, the caller claimed that his relative had once bragged in front of five people that he had kidnaped Laura, taken her as far as Barstow two hours before the sheriff knew she was missing, and sold her for a five-figure amount.

Bradbury rushed to the sheriff with the information, but Bowlin told him it was old news. They’d already checked out the man--twice. And, although he was up to his ears in potential felonies, they couldn’t find a single thing to connect him with kidnaping Laura. While Bradbury fumed and wondered what on earth this man had on the Sheriff’s Department that it would protect him so, a second incident brought to light another potential suspect.

On Feb. 21, 1985, a 41-year-old Morongo Basin resident named Bill Leville came to the sheriff’s station with his 22-year-old girlfriend, Toby Santangelo, and fearfully announced to Bowlin that he knew who took Laura.

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

They told Bowlin that they knew a man who looked exactly like the composite. Or at least he used to--before he went on a crash diet, shaved his beard and started wearing contact lenses. Furthermore, they said, they had been to his house and 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 more promising leads, says Knadler, sheriff’s investigators didn’t follow up the charges until March 28. By that time, Leville and Santangelo had moved and investigators couldn’t find them.

On April 9, 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 his dog behind. To Leville’s friends, the latter was proof that something was wrong. He never went anywhere without his dog.

Bowlin put 20 people on the case. But nothing showed up until July 12, when a Marine from the base in Twentynine Palms and his visiting brother found a coyote-gnawed arm bone in the hills above Sunfair Dry Lake. Soon after, searchers found its owner, Leville, in a ravine, covered with dirt and with multiple bullet wounds in his head.

Two weeks later, searchers found Toby Santangelo nearby in a shallow grave, wrapped in a blanket and shot twice behind the right ear.

Upon investigating their deaths, Bowlin decided that the man named by Santangelo and Leville still didn’t have anything to do with Laura. Among other things, he didn’t just exchange his glasses for contact lenses--he’d worn them for years. And for another, he’d never had a beard; he had thin facial hair and couldn’t grow one if he’d wanted to.

When the sheriff refused to issue an arrest warrant, Bradbury and Schalow began conducting their own surveillance--flying over the man’s house, taking pictures and videotapes, driving down the street. In the end, says Bradbury, “we bugged him so much he went back to Long Beach.”

In the meantime, Bradbury had been holding press conferences to complain about what he called the incompetence of the sheriff’s investigators. Then one day last fall he was walking up the steps of his church, he says, when a person who was formerly connected to the Sheriff’s Department slipped up beside him and said, “You better watch your back, kid. You better get a bulletproof vest and shotgun.”

“Why?” asked Bradbury.

“The San Bernardino sheriffs 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 to obtain a .38-caliber pistol. But after a couple of uneventful months, Bradbury decided to sell the gun. Just before Christmas, he says, he was unloading the shells when he snapped shut the cylinder and 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 spent the next three days in the hospital, where surgeons used a piece of his hipbone to reconstruct his finger.

To Bradbury, the final example of Sheriff’s 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, he found an old oxidized aluminum trailer with a yellow stripe along the side. Although no one was around at the time, says Nestor’s sister, Grace Downer, he found wind-strewn disposable diapers and a child’s pink sleeper.

According to Downer, he returned a few weeks later 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 stop. The next time he flew over in an airplane. Not only were shots fired at him, but he later got a follow-up telephone call at his sister’s house: “Stay out of the air or you’ll be hurt.”

Then, one morning last fall, Nestor, 57, left his sister’s home in Johnson Valley to walk to a nearby friend’s house for coffee. He never came back.

When Downer called Gene Bowlin to report her brother’s disappearance, Bowlin came to her home, she says, and peremptorily 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 last Oct. 22. She hasn’t seen a trace of her brother since.

Last March 22, the Bradburys were “conducting a surveillance” in San Francisco when they received a call from Gil Waite telling them that a Marine master sergeant 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.

Dean Knadler, who took over the investigation from retiring Capt. Bowlin on March 30, speculated that Laura had merely wandered away from the campground and stepped on the unstable edge 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 determine the sex and blood type of the child, San Bernardino County officials sent the bones first to a forensic anthropologist at Cal State Fullerton and later to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the FBI. But the results were inconclusive.

When he got back from San Francisco, Bradbury criticized Bowlin for linking the bones to Laura in newspaper interviews, pointing out that all the county’s forensic anthropologist could say for sure was that the bones had come from a child 2 to 5 years old who had probably been dead less than five years. In the absence of further evidence, such as her Kelly green sweat shirt, lavender pants or rubber flip-flops, it was just as reasonable to believe that the bones had been planted there, he argued, as to assume they were Laura’s. Park rangers also contend that the bones could not be Laura’s--the original search was too thorough to have missed her.

Because of what he now perceives as an increasingly hostile attitude surrounding the case, 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 defense he has a .44-caliber Marlin lever-action rifle with an eight-power scope, a .30-.30-caliber deer rifle and a six-inch throwing knife. (“I can put it between a pair of eyes at 25 feet,” he says.)

When he goes on “surveillance missions” of possible suspects, he says, 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.

He believes his phone is tapped, saying that sometimes in the middle of a conversation, the volume suddenly drops. When that happens, he starts talking raunchily, speculating about the investigators, about “who bends over for whom.” That gets them so mad, he says, he’s been disconnected as many as five times during a single call.

One of the things that most irritates Bradbury, he says, are the vicious lies that he claims sheriff’s deputies are circulating in Morongo Basin. According to a friend at the Marine base, Bradbury says, a deputy recently was heard to say at the base hospital 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 (Beverly Hills Assemblyman) Gray Davis (chairman of a statewide organization to recover missing children). 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 Volkswagen van with worn tires, bad brakes and shot bearings? Why do they live in a condominium with holes in the walls? Why does his father-in-law work in the cane shop so he can sit at the computer all day? For that matter, if he kidnaped his daughter to get rich, why does he waste all this money calling data bases? A single background trace costs at least $32, and often a good deal more. (One month, says Patty, they had a data-base bill of $2,400.)

Before the sheriff announced the discovery of the bones, says Bradbury, donations to the Laura Center were coming in at the rate of several hundred dollars a week. But after the sheriff’s press conference, they dropped to practically nothing.

“Ever since that press conference,” Schalow says, “both Mike and I have been close to bankruptcy.”

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 1. He didn’t share his leads with us. And then he gives us tips about people we have already eliminated.”

Knadler doesn’t fit the image of a hard-drinking, tough-talking country cop. He’s a soft-spoken family man who smokes a pipe and once studied to be a nurse. But Bradbury’s accusations have gotten under his skin.

Bradbury, he says, “comes in with wild, bizarre associations 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.”

Regarding Jim Nestor, retired Capt. Bowlin says that the way Bradbury talks, one might think Nestor disappeared because he was looking for Laura. But when Nestor first vanished, his family didn’t mention a word to Bowlin about Laura--that connection only developed after the family talked to Bradbury.

According to Knadler, other Bradbury allegations are equally dubious. After the double murders, says Waite, Bradbury said he knew who did it. He had sworn affidavits. “But it was mostly imagination and hope,” says Waite. “He didn’t have anything.”

As for the five people who supposedly heard a citizen brag about kidnaping Laura, Knadler says, the department brought them all in for polygraphs, and none of Bradbury’s claims checked out. “They were,” says Knadler, “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 people to go to the sheriff with information on Laura’s kidnaper ended up in shallow graves with bullets in their heads.

Waite is the one cop Bradbury says he’s always trusted. With his small blond mustache and trim appearance, Waite looks like a movie version of the incorruptible small-town sheriff. Because Waite understood the stress Bradbury was under and sympathized with him, he kept Bradbury informed of the progress of the investigation, a step that in light of Bradbury’s accusations, 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. Recently, Patty went to speak to a Neighborhood Watch group about the problem of missing children and only 12 people showed up.

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 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.” Faced with that, 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, Bradbury says, 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.”