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Other garrote murders
#1
Recently, I started researching about Garrotes.. the history... looking into murder cases where others were killed by a garrote.

I found a really interesting article about a  nurse murdered in 1979.

It was a cold case.

No fingerprints'

Local police NEVER investigated a murder like this one.

Sounds familiar...
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Lead “Dateline” correspondent Keith Morrison has told dozens of tales of murder, but even he hadn’t encountered grisly details like those of the brutal slaying of Torrance nurse Lynne Knight in 1979.

“Never have I encountered a garrote in a domestic crime, in a local crime that was committed in this way,” Morrison said in an interview Thursday. “It flummoxed everybody. They couldn’t figure it out. There were no fingerprints. It was pre-DNA. It drifted along for all those many years.”


The quest by a cold-case prosecutor and Torrance police detectives to solve the three-decades-old killing will be recounted tonightin a two-hour “Dateline” segment at 9 p.m. on NBC. In August, a jury convicted Knight’s former boyfriend, Douglas Bradford, of first-degree murder, despite his years of claiming he was sailing in the Alamitos Bay on Aug. 29, 1979, when someone slipped into Knight’s Anza Avenue home and mutilated her.


A homemade garrote built with wooden mop handles and picture-hanging wire lay hidden under her body. The device was built so strongly that it failed during the crime, slicing a gash so deep into Knight’s neck that she could breathe through it. Her killer extinguished her pig-like sounds for help by stabbing her in the leg, rupturing her femoral artery and ending her life.
Morrison said “Dateline” built its own garrote for the show.
“I’m holding it right now in my hands,” Morrison said, finishing up the production. “What occurs to you immediately — there is a lot of work that goes into it. You’ve got to cut the dowels, drill the holes, sand them down, carefully put the wire through, double it. Somebody put several hours effort into it, knowing they were going to use this weapon.”


The 28-year-old Canadian nurse hadn’t been in Torrance long. She moved to California to take a job at Little Company of Mary Hospital, working in the neonatal unit. She rented an apartment in a converted garage.
Bradford, an engineering student at Cal State Long Beach, met her while skiing. They dated for a few months. But the relationship ended when he wanted to be exclusive and she didn’t.
During his trial in July and August, witnesses recalled Bradford stalking her apartment, driving past it in his orange 240Z. One night he burst into the apartment and angrily threw a lamp at Knight because she was entertaining another man.


Although police had the garrote, and suspected Bradford committed the crime, detectives could not build enough evidence to prosecute him. Bradford claimed to be sailing at 10:30 that night and having to paddle in to the shore when the wind died.
The case went unsolved.
“I personally worked nine homicides as the lead or co-lead,” said retired Torrance police Capt. Emilio Paerels, who was called to assist at the murder scene with the lead investigator, Gary Hilton. “This was the only one that wasn’t solved. To me, this one was a bugaboo. But the problem is you know who it is. In your heart, you know you’ve identified the suspect, but you’ve gotten to a point where you know it is cold.”


In the early 2000s, Torrance police detectives reopened several unsolved cases, including Knight’s murder. Paerels, working with Deputy District Attorney John Lewin, reinterviewed the witnesses. Now retired Torrance Detective Jim Wallace visited Bradford’s mother at her house in Orange County. He noticed two facts that detectives at the beginning did not: Bradford’s mother was an artist who hung her paintings on the wall with metal wire. Some had hung there for decades.
The mother also used wooden dowels for security locks on her windows.


Tests revealed the wire was the same kind used in the garrote found at the murder scene. Bradford was arrested May 13, 2009. The wire played a central role in the trial.
Famed O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro defended Bradford, who chose not to take the witness stand to testify. Shapiro told the jury that Bradford was innocent, and presented his sailing alibi. Lewin countered that with weather and sailing experts, who described how the wind patterns that night did not corroborate his story.
Jurors came back with a verdict Aug. 14, providing relief to Knight’s father, sister and other family members who had waited so long to hear the word “guilty.” Bradford was scheduled to be sentenced to 26 years to life in prison next week, but Shapiro on Thursday requested that the proceeding be postponed until December.


Morrison said he interviewed family members and retired detectives for the program, which fittingly is called “The Wire.” Morrison said he wished Bradford would have consented to an interview.
For “Dateline,” the Knight case had all the necessary elements for a good mystery, including the fact it became Wallace’s last case, and the last trial for Shapiro, “all getting together in the same courtroom where Shapiro assisted in the acquittal of O.J. Simpson.”
“It’s a very compelling program,” Morrison said. “I wound up, as sometimes one does in these cases, particularly in this one, wishing I had had a chance to know the victim. Seems like a really quite terrific young woman — as long as she was allowed to live.
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