Man, 64, Convicted In 40-Year-Old Cold Case: Official

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MD — A 64-year-old Laurel man has been sentenced in a recently solved 40-year-old cold case.

Howard Jackson Bradberry has been sentenced to 25 years in prison. He entered an Alford plea July 12 to a charge of second-degree murder in a long-unsolved kidnapping case dating back to the early 80s.

On March 29, 1982, Laney Lee McGadney, 28, left her apartment in Columbia to walk to a grocery
store in the Owen Brown Village Center. Witnesses described seeing McGadney being abducted as she walked along Oakland Mills Road. Her body was discovered hours later in a vacant lot, now known as Water Lily Way, according to the police.

McGadney, a mother of four children, had been raped and stabbed to death, police said. At the time of the incident, police collected evidence from the scene and conducted a lengthy investigation but were unable to identify the person who committed the crime. Since then, cold case investigators from the Howard County Police Department have revisited the evidence to try and identify
any new leads. In early 2021, DNA results performed on items discarded at the scene linked Bradberry to the crime.

“The brutal murder of Laney Lee McGadney fractured her family beyond repair and for 40 years there were very little leads in the case with no one being held responsible for her senseless killing,” said State’s Attorney Rich Gibson. “I want to thank Howard County police and our prosecutors for working so diligently on this case. We know (the) sentencing cannot bring back the matriarch of this family, but we do hope it provides some much-needed closure for her 4 kids, 22 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren knowing Bradberry will spend the rest of his life in prison for the innocent life he took and heinous crime he committed.”