Laura Bradbury

Case background and investigation

Laura Ann Bradbury was three and a half years old when she disappeared on October 18, 1984, during a family camping trip to the Indian Cove campground in what was then Joshua Tree National Monument in San Bernardino County, California. The family, Mike and Patty Bradbury and their three children, lived in Huntington Beach. According to United Press International and the Los Angeles Times, Laura had followed her eight-year-old brother to a portable toilet near the campsite and was not seen again. A bulletin from the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner's Department says the family had only just arrived and begun unpacking when they realized she was gone.

A large search of the desert followed, on foot, on horseback, in off-road vehicles and by helicopter, the Los Angeles Times reported. UPI reported in late October 1984 that authorities had set aside the idea that the child was lost and believed she had been taken by a man driving a blue van who had been seen in the area. That man was never publicly identified. The sheriff's department formed a task force that, according to the Los Angeles Times, spent more than $1 million and about 150,000 hours on the case in the first year and a half. No arrests were made. Laura's photograph was printed on flyers and milk cartons across the country.

On March 22, 1986, a couple hiking near the western edge of the campground found a child's skullcap and other bone fragments in rugged terrain. The county coroner said the bones came from a child between two and five years old. Experts could not say at the time whose remains they were, and Mike Bradbury told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that he did not believe they were his daughter's.

In January 1989 the sheriff's department said a first genetic test was consistent with Laura but not conclusive, and a second laboratory was asked to examine the sample, according to UPI. In December 1990 the department announced that DNA tests comparing the fragments with the parents' blood showed a greater than 99 percent probability that the remains were those of a child of the Bradburys. A department spokesman said investigators would no longer follow up reported sightings of a living child, while the investigation into her death would stay open.

Doubts persisted in the family. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2010 that the death certificate Mike Bradbury eventually obtained carried no official signature, and that he asked the county for another test. In August 2010 the coroner informed him that the new DNA profile gave strong evidence that the remains were the child of Mike and Patty Bradbury, confirming the identification. He told the newspaper he accepted the result but still wanted to know what had happened to her. Patty Bradbury had died in 2001. Mike Bradbury wrote a book about the search.

The cause and manner of Laura's death have not been publicly established. The sheriff's department lists the matter among its cold cases and asks anyone with information to contact its homicide detail. In September 2026 the Valley News reported that a woman living near Twentynine Palms says she believes she is Laura; the newspaper stated that the claim had not been verified by law enforcement and that the earlier DNA findings weigh against it.