Killer Counts Down Days to the Death He Welcomes

For more than nine years, Bill Bradford’s days have been so empty, he slept through most of them. He prefers the night, when a condemned man can be alone with his poetry, his television set, or his demons.

Now a calendar hangs on the wall of Bradford’s “house,” Cell No. 9 on the 34-man, windowless tier that is part of the nation’s most populous death row.

The man whose long history of violence toward women culminated in his conviction for the 1984 strangulation murders of two young Venice-area acquaintances has marked a large, dark “X” over Tuesday, Aug. 18, his chosen execution date. He is volunteering to die, literally numbering the days.

“If anybody deserves the death penalty, it’s Bill Bradford,” said former prosecutor David P. Conn, who described Bradford as a “scary” thrill killer who kept body parts for souvenirs.

Today marks Day 13 on Bradford’s countdown toward oblivion. Suddenly, his hours are filled with strange new rituals and unexpected reunions. His dance card, empty for so long, is full.

Consider Monday, Day 16: He was reunited with the longtime friend who will handle his final affairs. He was asked to decide what is to be done with his tired, 52-year-old body--deciding to accept the state’s free offer to cremate his remains and scatter them at sea. He received an emotional visit from a striking young woman who has his eyes, the daughter he last saw when she was 10.

And, he spent four hours with a Times reporter.

In a rare and wide-ranging death row conversation, Bradford explained why he has abandoned his appeals.

If he can’t be free, Bradford says, he’d rather be dead.

He also provided a glimpse of the numbing routines of death row, where society’s most feared outcasts spend years without receiving a visitor.

As for the outside world, “I don’t know what grass is anymore. I don’t know what dirt is. It’s stuff like that,” Bradford said, that makes his life in prison intolerable.

Complaint Is With the Legal System

The condemned men at San Quentin fill their days with domestic routines: tending to their “houses,” resting on the buckets they use as chairs, creasing their prison-issued jeans by hand, using soap or sugar water as starch.

Bradford used to lift weights on the roof with fellow inmate Tommy Thompson, he said. Then, prison officials took the weights away. As for Thompson--he was executed last month.

“I am tired of it,” Bradford said. “There isn’t a standing chance under today’s laws for me to have freedom. The best I can do is life without [parole]. That’s not acceptable to me. It has nothing to do with my living conditions.

“I’m sure not beat up,” he said with a grin. “I’m not uncomfortable with the people I’m living with. I’ve been living with the same 34 men for the last nine years.”

Instead, his beef is with the legal system. “What gets to me is the not knowing. The waiting.”

He is wiry and pale, and wears his hair in a flattop. Above a droopy mustache, his eyes are intensely blue, and the light flooding into the cell from a window shrinks the pupils to pinprick size. His arms are decorated with tattoos, including the names of three of the seven women he says have been his wives.

Sipping from a can of Coca-Cola, he seemed relaxed as he leaned against a sticky wooden table and talked in a 7-by-12-foot cell covered with clear plexiglass for soundproofing.

Because he is next in line for execution, the biggest and best visiting room cell belongs to Bradford. Also present was Jack Leavitt, the attorney Bradford says now represents him.

‘It Doesn’t Matter, Guilt or Innocence’

With his hands cuffed behind his back, Bradford walked in shortly before 9 a.m. He backed into the cell door and placed his hands through a slot, where a guard unlocked the handcuffs. He wore no shackles during the visit, and his hands remained free. At one point, discussing a knife police found during a search of his car, he turned to his visitor, made a stabbing motion, and said, “I could do more damage to you right now with that pen.”

His manner was more joking than menacing, but the point was not lost.

Other condemned inmates conferred with their lawyers in nearby cells. A couple of condemned men slept on sofas in the family visiting area as cartoons blared on the television set. A crib stood to one side. In the background, banners depicted “The Little Mermaid” and Sesame Street characters.

When asked, Bradford maintained that he is innocent of the crimes that brought him here. He denies that he is a serial killer, although police believe he may be responsible for at least eight other murders, and perhaps more.

Bradford was convicted of strangling 21-year-old Shari Miller and 15-year-old Tracey Campbell. According to testimony at his trial, he lured the women to the desert near Lancaster by offering to photograph them so they could begin modeling portfolios.

Miller, a some-time barmaid, lived out of her car. Campbell lived with her family in a one-bedroom apartment in a building adjacent to Bradford’s. They had just moved there from Missoula, Mont.

The slayings were linked by a distinctive rock formation in photographs seized during a search in connection with a separate rape case against Bradford. He pleaded guilty to that rape charge after his arrest for the murders.

Whether or not he killed these women seems of little consequence to Bradford. “It doesn’t matter, guilt or innocence. It’s beyond that. It’s about how to end this,” he said.

As the date of his execution draws near, Bradford has brought a new twist to California’s capital punishment debate. He is volunteering for death not out of despair or depression, remorse or religious zeal, but because he has grown weary of waiting.

There are plenty of other condemned inmates who feel the same way, he said. “We’re the new generation of the condemned.”

Bradford said that when he arrived at San Quentin in 1988 there were 185 men on death row. Now, there are 509. Two of them are in their 70s. A dozen are in their 60s, according to the most recent monthly report from the state Department of Corrections.

The report also contains other revealing facts about the state of capital punishment in California: 13 people have committed suicide on death row since 1978, when California’s death penalty was reinstated after a short hiatus. Another 13 have died of natural causes.

If Bradford goes through with his execution, his would be the sixth. His anger toward the legal system is chillingly apparent when he focuses his rage toward his court-appointed appellate lawyer.

He believes he should have the right to drop his appeals without having his mental state questioned. And, he believes he should be represented by a lawyer of his choosing. The courts have declined to appoint Leavitt.

Poem Expresses Wish for Death

Bradford is refusing visits from the California Appellate Project, which opposes capital punishment and provides legal assistance to death row inmates. And, when other groups opposed to capital punishment write, urging him to reconsider, Bradford writes back, enclosing an original poem:

“Many nights I have dreamed of death

Greeting me with welcome comfort

Tempered with a searing seduction.

Within these dreams I have discovered a

Private

Serene, extreme place

Which dissolves the last drop of fear . . . “

From the inception of his murder case, Bradford has chosen death over a defense based on family history or mental health evidence.

“So what if I raced motorcycles and fell off and hit my head? I was wearing a helmet,” he scoffed.

At his trial, attorneys Charles Lindner and Dale Rubin tried to call Bradford’s mother to the witness stand during the death penalty phase. Rather than subject her to a prosecutor’s “badgering,’ Bradford said, he fired the lawyers and delivered a closing argument certain to draw a death sentence.

His attorneys, Bradford said, would have considered life without the possibility of parole to be a victory. “I feared life without, and no appellate action,” he said. The death sentence offered a plus--an automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court.

That appeal was rejected a year ago, launching Bradford’s legal death march.

With 22 days left on his calendar, he held out his arms so prison officials could inspect the veins to make sure they hadn’t collapsed from drug use. Officials confirmed that his veins are, indeed, healthy enough to perform their final task--carrying the poisons that sedate the brain, then shut down the lungs and stop the heart.

He’s giving away his property--legal files and photographs, mostly. His lawyer, Leavitt, gets the cameras police seized during their murder investigation 14 years ago.

With 20 days to go, Bradford spoke with a Los Angeles police detective who believes he is a serial killer.

“Who’s that girl?” Det. Chuck Worthen asked time and again, showing Bradford photographs he had taken years ago. The photographs, found in Bradford’s apartment, depict young women in tortured or sexually suggestive positions.

“He told me, ‘You’re probably better than [serial killer] Ted Bundy.’ I thanked him and compared him with Mark Fuhrman,” Bradford said. Worthen, who was accompanied by retired LAPD Det. Brad McGrath, said Bradford wasn’t in a confessing mood.

“He talked in circles. He was in total denial and stated he committed zero murders,” Worthen said. When the detective compared Bradford to Bundy, “All he did was smile and get a little gleam in his eye and five seconds later, he changed the subject.”

Only time will tell us whether Bradford is a dead man walking or a con man bluffing.

He appears to be sane and sincere, if not entirely focused on the concept that dying is an extreme way to make a point about one’s legal representation.

“I’m totally relaxed because I know what’s going to happen. I know I have the power to stop it. I’m not walking into this blindly. I’m scared. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, we’re all geared to the idea of life and death and heaven and hell. Am I going to be floating around purgatory like the Catholics say? Who knows? Who knows what’s out there?”