A jury has begun deliberations in the trial of Douglas Bradford, who stands accused in the 1979 murder of Lynne Knight, above. The trial is one of the oldest cold cases to ever reach a U.S. courtroom. Photo: Postmedia News files Nearly 35 years after a Canadian nurse was savagely murdered in her California apartment, the unrelenting efforts of her grieving sister — a Toronto-area woman who refused to let U.S. investigators, justice officials or politicians forget the August 1979 killing of 28-year-old Lynne Knight of Stratford, Ont. — have come down to this: a six-week trial of Knight’s jilted ex-boyfriend, Douglas Bradford, and a jury now deliberating the outcome of one of the oldest cold cases to ever reach a U.S. courtroom.
Final arguments were heard last week in the case against Bradford, 62, now a retired Orange County engineer who had dated Knight in the weeks prior to her horrendous death — strangulation with a homemade garrote followed by 15 thrusts of a knife.
It was the grisly work, the prosecution has argued, of an enraged and sadistic attacker, consistent with its theory that Bradford was seething with jealousy after being dumped by Knight and watching her date other men. Among the fresh evidence presented at trial was an alleged link between the killer’s makeshift weapon and the wire used by Bradford’s mother, an artist, for hanging her framed creations.
Bradford’s defence attorney, Robert Shapiro, gained fame in the 1990s as a member of O.J. Simpson’s legal team, helping to win an acquittal for the former football star in the same L.A. courtroom where Bradford’s case was heard. Shapiro has insisted that Bradford was being truthful when he told investigators — first in 1979, and then again 30 years later — that he was sailing by himself along the Pacific shore, in the dark, on the night Lynne Knight was murdered.
And Shapiro reminded jurors that no DNA evidence was ever found connecting Bradford to the crime scene.
The victim’s 61-year-old sister, Donna Knight Wigmore of Markham, Ont., endured every difficult day of testimony after the trial began in early July — a trial that, by all accounts, wouldn’t have happened if Wigmore hadn’t pressed homicide detectives for years, and then decades, to keep up the search for her sister’s killer.
The breakthrough didn’t come until 2009, when Los Angeles County prosecutor John Lewin finally announced Bradford’s arrest and credited the “old-fashioned detective work” of police in the L.A. suburb of Torrance — and Wigmore — with reviving the investigation after so many years.
“It’s been an emotional roller-coaster,” Wigmore told Postmedia News in an interview this week from Los Angeles, where she’s awaiting the verdict with her 84-year-old father, Clair Knight, of Sauble Beach, Ont.
“We’re really grieving, but at the same time it’s almost surreal,” said Wigmore. “I think your defence mechanisms take over, and you just do it. It’s for Lynne. It’s a process that’s got to be done.”
Wigmore recalled the years of agony and frustration as the unresolved mystery of her sister’s death haunted her family, including her brother Harry in Alberta, along with Lynne’s friends in Los Angeles and Stratford. She maintained a steadfast letter-writing campaign and kept in touch by phone with police in California.
As the age of the Internet dawned, Wigmore took to emailing investigators.
At one point, she said, “I got really discouraged and kept getting the same old answers. They didn’t have the (cold-case) funding for anybody full-time. Somebody would come into the homicide division for two years and you’d establish a relationship with them and then they’d be gone.”
Wigmore stepped up her advocacy efforts.
“I started writing some letters to the governor and a number of other people — even the president, believe it or not — saying that I didn’t think the case had been handled all that well and that I really wanted somebody to look into it,” she said. “So they responded and got more people working on it. It brought attention that crime victims still feel pain, that there’s still not closure, that so many crime victims just are so shattered.”
What drove her to persist, Wigmore said, was the lingering sorrow of her father and mother, Lillian, who died in 2005 with the case still unsolved.
They didn’t have the energy, she said, “to take up the fight. But that was my duty to my sister, and to my parents, who I saw grieving … it just had to be done, so I stepped up to the plate.”
When Bradford was arrested five years ago, Clair Knight praised his younger daughter for her dogged determination to see justice done for her sister. “(Donna had) really been pushing this, done a lot of work to keep the police on it,” he said at the time. “She just kept sending them emails, and asking what’s happening on the case. She sent a lot of information and pictures to help.”
Wigmore, who is also a registered nurse, had been anxiously awaiting her big sister’s return from California in the late summer of 1979; Donna was about to be married, and Lynne was to stand by her side at the wedding, the maid of honour.
Born in Alberta, Lynne had been a beauty queen in Stratford before moving to the U.S. to pursue her nursing career. The California health centre that had hired her, Little Company of Mary Hospital, was so impressed she’d been asked to spend some time during the trip home for her sister’s wedding to help to recruit other Canadian nurses in Toronto.
But the trip to Canada never happened. Instead, on Aug. 30 that year, California police informed the Knight family that Lynne had been gruesomely slain. An investigation at the time yielded no clear suspect.
Then came the quarter-century, and more, of investigative inertia, before Bradford’s 2009 arrest. Five more years of bail hearings and pretrial proceedings followed before the trial began last month.
In building his case, Lewin zeroed in on initial police questioning of Bradford in 1979 and his use of the past tense when talking about Knight — even though, at the time, she had only been described as missing. And the prosecutor targeted Bradford’s supposed alibi as a lie, arguing that an experienced sailor like he was wouldn’t have been on the water at night and couldn’t possibly have sailed when and where he claimed he had given the wind conditions at the time.
“The alibi that he gave,” Lewin told jurors at one point, according to local press coverage of the trial, “did not happen.”
Lewin contended that Bradford had grown “angrier and angrier” after the breakup with Knight: “The defendant was in love with Lynne Knight,” he stated at the opening of the trial. “He was jealous of competitors.”
Knight “died a horrific death” but “did not go quietly,” Lewin further asserted. “She fought as best she could.”
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