Parolee caught after 32 years
California corrections officials have finally caught up with a
parolee convicted of murder who had eluded them for more than three
decades. Richard Bradford had been living under the false identity of
James Edward Heard and owned several properties in the Pasadena area,
including a drug rehabilitation facility, authorities said.
Bradford was sentenced to life for first-degree murder in 1971, was
paroled in 1978, and skipped out on his parole supervision in 1980, the
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement last
Wednesday. Agents arrested Bradford last week, more than 32 years after
he had disappeared, the statement said.
A false birth certificate with Heard's name was created in Alameda
County in 1977, and a Social Security card was issued to him in 1978,
both while he was still in prison, officials said. By the early 1980s
Bradford began using the new name, and the name Richard Bradford
disappeared on paper by 1992.
A parole apprehension team began an investigation into his
disappearance in 2010 and about a year later, learned he might be the
same person as Heard. Bradford's prison fingerprints were found to be a
match with Heard's from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Bradford's attorney contacted corrections officials at about the same
time, saying he knew he was being sought and would like some time to
turn himself in, but he never did. It took investigators two years to
find Bradford, who had been keeping a low profile in the Pasadena area,
with his businesses controlled by a trust and his credit cards and
vehicles in the name of his treatment centre.
Last Sunday, while conducting surveillance, agents saw Bradford and
his wife leave their home and followed them to the Home Depot just east
of Pasadena in Monrovia, where they arrested Bradford and his wife, who
was taken into custody for being a felon in possession of pepper spray.
Her name was not released.
A search of the house turned up evidence for both of Bradford's
names, the statement said. Corrections officials did not provide the
name of Bradford's attorney, and no other contact information to seek
comment from a lawyer or family member could be found.
AP
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