Believes She Is Living With Man : Father Says Bradbury Girl Was Sold for $75,000

The father of Laura Bradbury said Monday that he had received “very good information” in recent weeks that his daughter, who disappeared from Joshua Tree National Monument in October, 1984, is living with a man who bought her from kidnapers for $75,000.

Mike Bradbury, in a telephone interview, said informants were “coming out of the woodwork” with details of the alleged kidnaping to refute suggestions that a partial skull found in Joshua Tree last month was part of Laura’s remains.

“These people are telling us that the bones in the desert are not hers because they know she was sold,” said Bradbury, who lives in Huntington Beach. “The theory we now have is that someone--the kidnaper or one of his associates--went out and actually planted the skull.”

See Support of Theory

The “new information” supports the theory that Laura was kidnaped by a bearded man driving a blue van, taken out of California and possibly the country for a time, then brought back to the United States and sold to a wealthy individual for about $75,000, Bradbury said.

Investigators searched unsuccessfully for a bearded man in a Ford Econoline van in the weeks after Laura’s disappearance.

“The information these witnesses have given me has been consistently verified,” Bradbury said. “I have been told by two witnesses that they heard a man admit that they kidnaped her.”

Bradbury added that he met last week with detectives from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which is now following up the leads “full-bore.”

However, Capt. Dean Knadler said: “I don’t know if we can call this new information. We met with him (Bradbury) and his (private) investigator last week and he gave us some information on people we had already investigated in the past. We’re in the process of running out that information as well as a lot of other leads.”

‘People Watching Him’

Bradbury said that he knows who kidnaped Laura and that “we have people watching him.” But Knadler said it was premature to make any kind of a statement about a suspect.

“We do not have anyone under surveillance,” Knadler said. The Sheriff’s Department had been advised that Bradbury’s people had someone under surveillance, he said, “but that’s a long way from being able to connect that subject to Laura’s disappearance.”

Knadler said Sheriff’s Department investigators were trying to locate and interview people identified by Bradbury as informants.

“But there’s quite a divergence of opinion on what they’re saying,” he added. “They (the Bradburys) say people have told them certain things. But when they (the informants) are confronted with us, we find out that their statements have been misinterpreted and misunderstood. It’s all very time-consuming.”