50 Missing Women Linked To Jailed Man

LA Cops Suspect Photographer May Have Raped Or Murdered Them Over 9-Year Period

(CBS/AP)  Homicide investigators are trying to find at least 50 women they have linked to a man who is in prison for killing two women in the early 1980s, officials said.

Detectives are investigating whether the women were raped or killed between and 1975 and 1984 by William Richard Bradford, said Los Angeles County sheriff's officials, who posted numbered photographs of the women on a department Web site in hope that the public could help account for them.

The Los Angeles Times reported that after Bradford, a photographer, was convicted in 1987 of murdering two aspiring models, may have made a taunting statement to jurors deciding whether he should be sentenced to death.

"Think of how many you don't even know about," Bradford said.

The photographs, some of them pornographic, were found in the mid-80s among the Bradford's possessions, CBS News correspondent Vince Gonzales reported.

One of the missing women has been identified as Donnalee Campbell Duhamel, 31, whose decapitated body was found in a Malibu canyon in 1978 a few days after meeting Bradford at a bar, said sheriff's Capt. Ray Peavy.

"What we have here is a very large group of pictures of women that we do not know for the most part who they are," Peavy said. "Some of these women we ... identified; several of them were his wives, ex-wives. But for the most part the majority of these folks we do not know who they are, who they were.

"Many of them could have likely been homicide victims themselves. Many of them may have just been women that he met in bars and took home and took photographs of."

Following a televised press conference in which the photos were shown, phone calls began pouring in from people claiming to be women in the photos or having information about them, said sheriff's Sgt. Alfredo Castro. Some of the women have called in to say they were safe, Gonzales reported.

"The phone hasn't stopped ringing," Castro said. "I'm pretty sure we're going to identify a lot of them soon."