Search in Desert for Missing Girl Yields Only Animal Bones

JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL MONUMENT —  A crew of 180 searchers sifted, shoveled and raked over three square miles of desert floor Saturday for clues to Laura Bradbury’s disappearance but found mostly animal remains.

Investigators with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said the daylong scouring through brush and rocky terrain yielded no new evidence in the disappearance of the 3-year-old Huntington Beach girl. Last weekend, searchers gathered several pounds of bones in the area after hikers found a child’s skullcap there.

Laura was last seen Oct. 18, 1984, near Indian Cove campground, one mile northwest of where the skullcap was found.

Sheriff’s Lt. Dean Knadler, who coordinated the small army of deputies and volunteers, said no more searches will be scheduled unless the county pathologist’s and crime lab’s analyses of the finds in the desert reveal a link to the missing child.

The skull fragment found by the hikers here March 22 still has not been identified. Judy Suchey, a Cal State Fullerton anthropologist, said Friday that she could determine that the skullcap came from a child between the ages of 2 and 5. But Suchey said it is impossible to determine the race or sex of the child.

‘At Square 1.5’

The discovery of the bones, therefore, has shed no more light on whether Laura is alive or dead.

“If we were back at square one before, we’re at square 1.5 now,” Knadler told three members of the Laura Bradbury Organization, a Huntington Beach group founded by the Bradbury family and dedicated to finding missing children. The three from the group had traveled to the search site Saturday to be on hand if more human bones were discovered.

Lori Flask, a member of the group, said: “We’re just concerned with finding out if, in fact, these are Laura’s remains.” Referring to the Bradbury family, she said: “I think they’re really interested in letting the weekend take its course. I believe they’re having a hard time dealing with this.”

Patty and Mike Bradbury, the missing girl’s parents, were on vacation when the skull fragments were discovered, but the Sheriff’s Department notified them immediately of the finding because of “the coincidence” of the age of the child whose bones were found and where they were found.

The Bradburys are expected to arrive back in Huntington Beach by the middle of this week. Mike Bradbury lambasted sheriff’s officials in a statement to the press Friday for allegedly indicating, “without solid evidence of any kind,” that the bones were those of his daughter. He said the alleged remarks had caused his family “extreme mental anguish.”

‘Make That Association’

As they combed through the rugged terrain, members of the search team said they had never unequivocally connected the bone fragments to the Bradbury case but were obligated to check for other remains that might.

“You find one thing at Point A, and another thing in close proximity at Point B, and I think we’re paid to make that association and check it out here,” said Hugh Gonthier, a homicide investigator.

“No one’s saying for sure that it’s her,” he added.

Added Larry Walsh, a member of the Bear Valley Search and Rescue Team: “We found bone chips the size of a nickel or quarter, and we don’t know if they’re human or not. We’re trying to put the jigsaw puzzle together without a picture.”

In a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles the volunteers drove to the back reaches of a cove known as the Wonderland of Rocks about 8 a.m. and began loosening the ground searching for human remains. “We’re raking the whole area to see if there’s anything that’s been pushed under the sand or vegetation that we didn’t see Monday,” Knadler said. “We’ve already checked this area three times before. This is where our search and rescue people have been (undergoing) training exercises and tracking to kill two birds with one stone.”

The lack of any previous findings, Knadler said, indicates two things: “Somewhere in this area in the past three to five months some animals have found some human remains of a child. Maybe the child was covered with a rock and the erosion of the soil has uncovered these things.”

However investigators said that it appeared that their efforts had found no new evidence of Laura’s whereabouts.

James Schalow of Joshua Tree, the family’s private investigator who traveled to the site with the search group on Saturday, said: “Obviously, these are some child’s remains that were lost in the desert, and they (sheriff’s deputies) have the responsibility to find out whose they are and how they got there. But there is no physical evidence to prove it’s Laura.

“There are 45 kids missing in the United States, four from San Diego alone, that could have been brought up here, and I certainly don’t want to notify the parents of those kids yet.”

The findings Saturday were mostly animal bones, investigators said. There were also a few bits of cloth that “probably blew in here,” Knadler said.

He added: “It’s being collected and noted where we find it, and a pathologist will have to look at it Monday. But there was nothing of any major consequence at all.”