Where is Dennis Earl Bradford, and is he dead or alive? We explain the whereabouts of Dennis Bradford in 2023. This article contains details that some readers will find disturbing.
Dennis Bradford was a man accused of sexually assaulting and abducting Jennifer Schuett in 1990. He had managed to get away with his crimes due to a lack of evidence against him, meaning for over a decade, police couldn’t identify him.
But technology eventually developed to the point where police were later able to identify him and arrest him. During this time, Bradford had a wife and kids. Bradford never stood a jury because he hung himself before his trial was scheduled to take place.
Who is Dennis Earl Bradford, and what did he do?
In the early hours of August 10, 1990, Dennis Bradford broke into the Texas home of the eight-year-old Jennifer Schuett and abducted her. He covered her mouth and nose so that Schuett couldn’t scream to alert her mum. Bradford took her to an overgrown field, sexually assaulted her, and also slashed her throat.
Bradford left Schuett to die in the field. She was eventually found and rushed to the hospital, where Schuett was told she might never speak again, but she did eventually regain her voice. Schuett was able to give a written description of Bradford and DNA evidence was found at the scene, but it was too little to identify Bradford.
READ: Where is Nancy Howard Now?
The cast went cold for over a decade, at which time Bradford got married and was arrested and charged with another crime.
18 years later, Schuett’s case was revived by the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment (CARD) team, which retested the DNA evidence that was found. New technology used a small amount of DNA to find matches. In September 2009, Bradford was arrested in connection with the case.
But he would never stand before a jury, and the trial would never take place, as Bradford committed suicide before it could happen.
Is Dennis Earl Bradford dead or alive?
Dennis Earl Bradford is dead. He died in 2010 after committing suicide while awaiting trial. This means he never faced a jury for what he stood accused of.
What is Dennis Earl Bradford’s official cause of death?
While Dennis Bradford was waiting for his trial, he committed suicide, which was his official cause of death. This upset Jennifer Schuet, as she would never see him face a jury or be able to read her victim impact statement to him.
Who is Dennis Earl Bradford’s wife?
In 1991, the then-21-year-old Dennis Bradford met an 18-year-old woman named Lisa in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The two would hit it off. Six months after this meeting, they would marry each other and have a son and daughter together. But after a few years into the marriage, things went wrong.
Lisa started to notice that Bradford drank a lot more, and his behavior became more erratic. In 1996, Bradford was arrested for the rape and kidnap of a young woman in Arkansas. According to the court, Bradford choked and beat her in the head and then dragged her into the woods.
He then allegedly raped her while threatening to kill her with a knife held at her throat.
The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the rape charge, and thus Bradford was not convicted, but he was convicted of kidnapping the woman. He would be sentenced to 12 years in jail but got parole in 2000.
Lisa, who separated from Dennis at the time of his arrest, would later divorce him.
In March 2017, Lisa remarried and goes by the name Lisa Kostelic. Not many other details are known about her life. A year later, in 2018, Lisa appeared on a show called Married with Secrets to talk about her marriage with Bradford.
She explained there were times when she struggled with the fact that she never knew Bradford as much as she thought and was sad that she’d never seen Bradford get violent.
