find the proverbial smoking gun, they will not take this case to trial. this case did not have a lot. everything just kind of like went cold case. blow off the dust. fan the ashes. and even an ice-cold case can heat up again. when i read the file, my response was, oh, my gosh. how s this guy walkin around? how is he not in custody? some worried answering that question could cost this d.a. his life. they tell me that he is making plans to murder you and your family. this is a guy who is on a mission. he killed once. would he kill again? when will he stop being dangerous to you? when he s dead. hello and welcome to dateline. joan lockwood was an outgoing divorced mother of four excited about her next chapter in life. she was packing her bags and moving to a new home when five
this is an 85-year-old guy who is on a mission. if he is able to still command his wits, then we have a problem still, because he was able to command his wits when he made the first threat. here we are now. we have not done something that has lessened his anger. now there was one more step before his release. california s then governor jerry brown would review the decision and could reverse it to keep him in prison. the l.a. county d.a. s office wrote a letter to the governor urging him to do just that. so did bradford s family. i contacted the governor s office. i wrote a letter. my brother wrote a letter. and i had two senators actually cosign a letter. lewin acted too, through the media, trying to persuade california governor jerry brown to keep bradford locked up. he s looking to even up scores before he dies. then, a week after memorial day 2018, came this letter from
cellmate has come forward. and he has said that bradford is very angry at you, and he is talking about making plans to murder you and your family. of course in lewin s line of work idle threats from resentful jailbirds were not exactly new. but this bill bradford guy caught his attention. he seemed as cold-blooded as they come. so lewin went to talk to the informant. normally, if somebody comes to you with a story like that, they want a little time off their sentence or something. they want something, absolutely. so not this guy? nothing. one of the first thing i asked is why are you coming forward? and he said, um, i hate the guy. i couldn t believe how he would talk about his wife and how he killed her. and he said, now he s talking about killing somebody else s family, and i just couldn t stay quiet. lewin polygraphed the
murdered. i m sorry to see her dead, but um, we never had a very good relationship. that s a very unusual way to answer that, right? about your wife. yeah. you didn t want to see her dead. a tacit admission in that you f were the one person who could actually say that you last saw her dead. then there was bradford s strange story about spending two nights at the pier, in his car. he even had a parking stub to prove it. when you talked to his family, and you brought up hey, is your dad is he that kind of, you know beach, meditation, put on my sandals and relate to the ocean kind of guy? um, no. except he was very upset. maybe you doubt him, but it s a reasonable thing for a person to say. to sleep in their car for two days? lewin and wallace were both convinced there was another reason bradford stayed at the pier. it just happened to be where joan s attorney had an office. the very same attorney who helped her garnish that forty thousand dollars from her ex-husband
lost. i haven t the slightest idea of where it went. wallace did a little research on the hollow-tip bullets bradford admitted he once had. remember, those were the same kind of bullets that killed joan. and wallace discovered that particular type of hollow point is rare. less than one percent of all the ammo sold. wow, what are the odds? he s either the unluckiest person in the world, who just happens to have all of these causal factors that happen to align perfectly, to make this perfectly innocent person look really guilty. or he s really guilty. so with all those circumstantial clues and a clear motive and means, lewin and wallace drove out to the desert and arrested bill bradford. it was may 2001. 13 years after joan was murdered. he had just popped open a beer. i don t think that bill realizes that you will never see this ever again. this is a guy we re just going to vacuum suck out of his life