Alberta-born nurse Lynne Knight was murdered in California in 1979. The ex-boyfriend of a Canadian nurse murdered 35 years ago in California has been found guilty of the crime after a cold-case investigation prompted by the dead woman’s sister and a six-week trial that featured one of O.J. Simpson’s former lawyers defending the accused.
Douglas Bradford, a 62-year-old retired engineer from Orange County, was convicted Thursday in the August 1979 strangling and stabbing death of 28-year-old Lynne Knight of Stratford, Ont., an Alberta-born nurse who had recently moved to the U.S. to pursue a promising nursing career.
Investigators were unable to make a case against any suspect at the time of Knight’s murder. But pressed by persistent inquiries from the victim’s sister, Donna Knight Wigmore of Markham, Ont., a cold-case squad in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance finally laid charges against Bradford five years ago, citing new evidence about the wire used for one of the murder weapons — a homemade garrote — and other fresh facts that pointed to Knight’s former boyfriend as the killer.
“It’s just fantastic,” Wigmore said in an interview with Postmedia News after the jury’s decision was announced just before noon Pacific time. “It was just so right. They saw a monster, and that monster had to get off the street.”
Wigmore, 61, credited “incredible police work” for building a case against Bradford three decades after the murder, and for the “absolutely fantastic” work of prosecution lawyers after the trial began in early July.
Douglas Gordon Bradford of Costa Mesa has been arrested in the 1979 murder case of Canadian nurse Lynne Knight.
When news of Knight’s death came on Aug. 30, 1979, Wigmore had been awaiting her sister’s return to Canada to serve as maid of honour at her wedding. In the years that followed, she wrote letters, called detectives, lobbied politicians and emailed California newspapers to push for the case to remain under investigation.
After her mother died in 2005, Wigmore said she felt even more driven to pressure police to solve her sister’s murder.
Bradford was finally arrested and charged in May 2009.
“Now Mom and Lynne can rest in peace,” she said Thursday.
“We’re just sitting down and relaxing and coming off cloud nine,” added the victim’s younger brother, Harry Knight, 62. He had driven to Calfornia from his home in Nanton, Alta., to hear last week’s closing arguments and Thursday’s verdict.
“We’re just so relieved,” he told Postmedia News. “It’s like this whole weight taken off of our shoulders and out of our minds after 35 years.”
Alberta-born nurse Lynne Knight was murdered in 1979. Los Angeles have charged a 57-year-old engineer, Douglas Gordon Bradford of Costa Mesa has been arrested in the 1979 murder case.
He and his 84-year-old father, Clair Knight of Sauble Beach, Ont., were present with Wigmore in the Los Angeles County courthouse where Bradford was pronounced guilty.
Bradford’s defence attorney, Robert Shapiro, had helped win an acquittal for Simpson in the same courtroom nearly 20 years earlier.
In his closing argument in the Bradford case, Shapiro had slammed what he called “unequivocally the worst investigation” and the “worst collection of evidence that I’ve ever seen,” insisting that his client’s alibi — that he was sailing alone on the evening when Knight was killed — was sound, and that there was no DNA or other convincing evidence linking Bradford to the crime.
But lead prosecutor John Lewin cast doubt on Bradford’s story, calling expert witnesses to suggest wind conditions would have prevented the accused man from sailing where and when he claimed he had.
Other evidence linked the garrote used in the crime to a type of wire Bradford’s mother, an artist, used for hanging her paintings.
Bradford “got to live a life he never should have had,” Lewin said in a statement released after Thursday’s verdict by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
The conviction means Bradford faces up to 26 years in prison.
Sentencing is scheduled for October.
For Postmedia News
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