Car of Missing Lake Forest Man Found in Santa Ana

Police investigators got their first clues Monday in the case of a missing Lake Forest man when his car was found unlocked and ransacked behind a Santa Ana photo store, authorities said.

Clifford Wraymond Leighton, 42, an electronics technician, was last seen Thursday as he left a Southern California Edison Co. facility in Redondo Beach, where he was doing consulting work for his employer, KVB Inc. of Irvine.

His fiancee, Jennifer Bradford, 46, said he left a message on their home answering machine at 5:55 p.m. Thursday saying that he was leaving Edison “in about 30 to 40 minutes and was running late” but that he was on his way home.

“He logged out at the job site at 6:25,” said Bradford, who works for an Irvine-based private investigating firm, “but he never got home.”

On Friday morning, the owner of South Main Photo in Santa Ana told police that a 1985 tan Buick Somerset was parked illegally on his property. When he returned to the shop Monday and saw that the car was still there, he called police again, Bradford said.

Officers then linked the car to Leighton. Police said a tool box and computer tools, a metal detector and a laptop computer had been stolen from the trunk but that there was no sign of forced entry.

Bradford said that Leighton would have driven home on the San Diego Freeway and that she had no idea how his car could have got to downtown Santa Ana. She said Leighton was a quiet, very predictable man who rarely missed a day of work.

“You can set your clock by him,” Bradford said. “He is the most dependable person I have ever met. He has worked for the same company for 11 years and hasn’t missed more than 10 days in all that time.”

Bradford reporting him missing about 2 a.m. Friday after she spent Thursday night calling “hospitals, the CHP and the police.”

“I figured he might have been involved in an accident,” she said.

Leighton, who goes by Jerry among his friends, met Bradford when the two played in the same bowling league, she said. They have been shopping for a home to buy and plan to marry, although they have not set a date.

Leighton is 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighs about 155 pounds and has blue eyes and gray-brown hair--”more gray than brown,” Bradford said. He was last seen wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a dark blue jacket, she said.