Jury Hears Taped Confession to Slaying

A Van Nuys Superior Court jury heard a tape-recording Monday in which a Panorama City man confessed to police that he raped, sodomized, strangled and stabbed to death the new manager of his apartment building after helping her move in.

“It didn’t really bother me,” Mark Alan Bradford told Los Angeles Police Detective Mel Arnold, after describing how two days before, he had killed Lynea Kokes in the apartment she was to share with her husband and infant son.

Bradford made the statements to detectives at the Van Nuys police station April 20, 1988, after telling detectives he wanted to talk and would waive his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

Bradford, 27, a former convalescent home cook, is on trial in Van Nuys Superior Court for killing Kokes, 28. He faces the death penalty, or life without the possibility of parole, because he allegedly killed Kokes to keep her from testifying against him, and because the slaying took place during a rape, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carole Chizever.

Bradford told Arnold that Kokes happily accepted his offer to help her move boxes into the apartment in the 9500 block of Van Nuys Boulevard, where Kokes was to become the new on-site manager. The apartment’s new owners were seeking to evict drug dealers and prostitutes who lived at the apartment complex and encourage young families to move in, officials said.

Bradford told Arnold that after helping Kokes move, he asked her to help him fight an eviction notice he had received that day. She agreed to try.

Bradford, who said he had been drinking whiskey, said he “grabbed her throat” and, “She started choking, tried to get away.” Kokes fell to the floor and Bradford raped and sodomized her as she gasped for air, he said, knocking her unconscious with his fist.

After the attack, Bradford said, he went back to his apartment and showered to wash off Kokes’ blood. Then, worried that Kokes would “rat” on him and that she might be suffering, Bradford said he took a kitchen knife and went back to Kokes’ apartment.

He found her lying on her side, still gasping for air. “I rolled her over and slit her throat. . . . Then I rolled her back over and stabbed her a bunch of times, I don’t know how many,” Bradford said, adding that the knife broke. He said he wrapped a belt around Kokes’ neck to make sure she was dead.

Police were called after Kokes’ husband, Alex, came home and found her dead at about 8:40 p.m., several hours after the killing. The couple’s infant son was with a baby-sitter at the time of Kokes’ murder, officials said.

Bradford was arrested at his apartment later that night after his roommate found a broken knife blade in Bradford’s laundry and turned it over to police.