O.C. Engineer Convicted of 1979 Killing of Torrance Nurse He Dated

By FRED SHUSTER
City News Service

An Orange County engineer was found guilty today of first-degree murder for the 1979 killing of a Torrance nurse he had dated earlier that year.

Jurors deliberated less than three days before convicting Douglas Gordon Bradford, now 62, of the Aug. 29, 1979, killing of Lynne Knight, who worked as a neonatal nurse at Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance

He faces 26 years to life behind bars when sentenced Oct. 10, according to Deputy District Attorney John Lewin.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis B. Rappe remanded Bradford immediately into custody as Knight’s family members looked on.

“As he goes to jail, we get out of jail,” the victim’s sister, Donna Knight Wigmore, 61, of Markham, Ontario, said outside court. “We’re just ecstatic. Lynne can finally rest now.”

The 28-year-old victim was stabbed more than 15 times and strangled with a homemade wire garrote later found near her body in her small Anza Avenue apartment, according to prosecutors. One of her breasts was also mutilated post- mortem by a knife.

Bradford’s attorney maintained that his client had been out sailing at the time of the murder.

Prosecutors said Bradford made the garrote, stalked Knight, snuck into her house, attacked her as she slept and then tried to manufacture an alibi that he was out sailing that night.

“He’s a very arrogant, cocky man who thought he was going home today,” Lewin said after the verdict was read. “I don’t anticipate he is ever going to get out.”

In his closing argument last week, Lewin told jurors that the evidence against Bradford was “overwhelming,” calling the defendant “a murderous monster” who “needs to be held accountable.”

The defendant, he said, “stews for almost three months” about the couple’s break-up because “he’s an angry, angry, angry person who decided he was not going to be rejected” by a woman who wanted to date other men.

“He’s a monster, that’s what he is,” the prosecutor said.

In his closing argument, defense attorney Robert Shapiro told jurors, “This is a case that has not been proven ... Doug Bradford is an innocent man. He did not commit this crime ...”

Bradford’s attorney questioned whether wire found years later in the back of paintings belonging to Bradford’s mother even existed in 1979 -- which the prosecution contends is similar to the wire used to make the garrote.

“You’ll be the ultimate judge of how rare this wire is,” the defense lawyer said.

Shapiro told jurors that they had not seen “one real piece of evidence,” asserting that some evidence wasn’t collected while other evidence was destroyed.

“This is unequivocally the worst investigation ... the worst collection of evidence that I’ve ever seen,” Shapiro said.

In his rebuttal argument, the prosecutor said Shapiro’s attack on police was “absurd.”

Lewin said Bradford’s alibi that he started out under sail and ended up returning under “paddle power” due to lack of wind was “completely made up and fabricated.” He told jurors that Bradford’s own statements to police provided the most compelling evidence against him.

After the verdict, Rappe told the jury that, during the trial, he had “learned more about sailing than I wanted to know.”

Bradford was living in Costa Mesa at the time of his May 13, 2009, arrest. Prosecutors credited “old-fashioned police work” -- with expenses reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars -- by detectives with the Torrance Police Department’s Cold Case Unit for breaking the decades-old case.

Wigmore, who attended each day of the trial, said the family knew “right from the start” that Bradford was responsible for her sister’s death.

“We’ve had this stone in our hearts and it’s never gone away,” she said.