CA Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Case of O.C. Engineer Convicted Of 1979 Murder Of Nurse

ORANGE COUNTY, CA – The California Supreme Court refused Wednesday to review the case of an Orange County engineer who was convicted of the 1979 murder of a 28-year-old Torrance nurse he had briefly dated.

Douglas Gordon Bradford is serving a 26-year-to-life state prison term for Lynne Knight's strangulation.
At his December 2014 sentencing, he maintained that someone else committed the crime.

"I'm an innocent man wrongly convicted. I'm mad as hell I'm paying for someone else's crime," the defendant said then.

In March, a three-justice panel from California's 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected the defense's claim that much of the circumstantial evidence at trial should not have been admitted and that the jury should have been told about two other potential suspects interviewed by police.

Bradford's appellate attorney also argued that Bradford was prejudiced by a delay of more than three decades in prosecuting the murder.

In their March 13 ruling, the appellate court justices laid out the grisly details of Knight's 3 a.m. murder at her Anza Avenue backlot apartment.

"While Knight laid in her bed, naked, the killer sat astride her and pushed down on her neck with a homemade garrote -- that is, a piece of wire strung between two pieces of wood. The killer crushed her windpipe, so Knight's screams sounded more like the cries of an animal being slaughtered. Unable to dispatch her with the garrote, the killer got up, retrieved a 10-inch knife from her kitchen and proceeded to `slice, dice and butcher' her, ultimately severing her femoral artery; Knight bled to death."

Knight had more than 15 stab wounds and one of her breasts was also mutilated post-mortem.

Bradford -- an engineering student at Cal State Long Beach at the time -- had dated Knight, who worked as a neonatal nurse at Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance, for about four months earlier that year.

Bradford was living in Costa Mesa at the time of his May 13, 2009, arrest, with prosecutors crediting "old-fashioned police work" by detectives from the Torrance Police Department's Cold Case Unit for breaking the case.

The defense has maintained that Bradford was sailing off the coast of Long Beach the night Knight was killed.

Bradford told detectives that he hadn't seen Knight for nearly three months and that he was sailing off the coast of Long Beach the night she was killed. He said he headed out about 10:30 p.m. and returned about 3 a.m., forced to paddle a racing sloop back because of lack of wind.

"The alibi that he gave ... did not happen," Deputy District Attorney John Lewin told jurors in his opening statement at the 2014 trial, telling the jurors they would hear testimony from several skippers that reaching the ocean under sail without wind and paddling back were impossible and night sailing was banned by the local sailing association.

Bradford's attorney, Robert Shapiro, countered during the trial that jurors would hear testimony from an expert sailor that would prove that one person could paddle back. "We're going to prove to you that Mr. Doug Bradford told the truth," Shapiro told the panel.

The defense lawyer then noted that Bradford's car was searched about a week after Knight's killing, and that no traces of dried blood were found in the vehicle. He also said possible evidence had been destroyed, including a crumpled wedding invitation that police failed to retrieve from a trash can.

"Potential forensic evidence is lost forever," Shapiro said at the time.

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