N.L.’s most notorious unsolved murder remains a mystery even years after DNA breakthrough

14-year-old Dana Bradley is seen in this undated image. (W5 / CTV News)

ST. JOHN’S, N.L.- In the spring of 2016, as public attention in Newfoundland and Labrador returned to one of the province’s most notorious unsolved murders, police said they had finally made a “breakthrough.”

DNA evidence, connected to the 1981 murder of 14-year-old Dana Bradley, had been isolated and sent for further testing. Police announced in May of 2016, that they received results pointing to a yet-unknown male suspect, and further testing would continue.

Pat Cahill, the lead for the RCMP Major Crimes division in Newfoundland and Labrador, at the time, called the step a “significant breakthrough in the investigation.”

Ten years later, that investigative trail has gone cold. The RCMP told CTV News that investigators have since been able to rule out any connection between the “contributor” of that DNA evidence and Dana Bradley’s murder.

Now, nearly 45 years since Bradley was murdered, a resolution in the crime that shocked Newfoundland and Labrador — and forever changed a generation — seems even further away.

“After Dana, the city changed,” said Doug Murdoch, who knew Bradley as a child. “Our innocence was gone.”

Dana was returning from a friend’s house on the evening of Dec. 14, 1981, hitchhiking from a bus stop near a McDonald’s on one of the busiest streets in St. John’s, when she was picked up by a driver in a four-door sedan.

Her body was found four days later, nearly 10 kilometres away, in a wooded area outside of St. John’s.

She was dressed in her school clothes, and schoolbooks were carefully tucked under one of her arms. Police investigators believed that may have been a sign of remorse.

Newfoundland and Labrador had a perception of being “immune” to extreme violent crimes, said St. John’s-based author Mike Heffernan, who has been writing a book about Dana Bradley’s case and investigation.

“The Dana Bradley abduction and murder shattered that perception.”

To both Heffernan and Murdoch, Bradley’s disappearance and murder was the event that defined a generation in St. John’s. Dana’s murder even changed the common practice of teenagers hitchhiking throughout the city.

Murdoch says though Bradely grew up in the same neighbourhood and went to the same school, she was closer to his sister. Dana was a guest at his house several times.

“Dana was a nice girl,” Murdoch remembers. “She was always a very pretty girl, and part of the, you know, the in-crowd you would say.”

“She always had time for you.”

Public twists and turns in Bradley’s investigation

The RCMP’s announcement in 2016 wasn’t the only news that spring that brought the then 34-year-old murder case back to the public eye.

Terry Hynes, a St. John’s resident, who had organized a vocal “Justice for Dana Bradley” Facebook page, brought a lawsuit against the RCMP seeking to compel the police to dig up two vehicles in the Witless Bay area that he believed contained valuable evidence.

In May 2016, three days after police announced the advancement of DNA evidence, Hynes and a group he helped organize, dug up the cars themselves.

The dig, along with Hynes’s Facebook organizing efforts, was controversial.

Hynes had developed a frosty relationship with Dana’s parents, Jeff and Dawn Levitz, who had called for Hynes to stop the online page in an interview with The St. John’s Telegram in 2015. Levitz told the newspaper he felt the page was distracting the police investigation and resources.

Hynes’ excavation of the two vehicles yielded no evidence.

Terry’s daughter Martina Hynes, said the dig up “was a real letdown.”

“After, you know, 30 years, it was kind of understandable. But we were sickened by it, honestly, and dad never did get over it.”

It was just one of the many public twists and turns that marked the investigation into Dana’s murder. In 1986, police had arrested and charged a man named David Somerton on the strength of a confession that he later recanted, alleging police coercion.

Hynes’s interest in digging up the two cars were fuelled in part by another twist in the case, one that played out in the pages of the St. John’s Telegram.

A confidential source told the newspaper in 2014, he had recovered repressed memories of seeing Dana enter the backseat of a vehicle that he was in as a child.

A police investigation, the paper said, found those memories were not reliable.

Hynes died in 2019. His daughter, Martina, has also taken an interest in the investigation. She’s now studying criminology at Memorial University in St. John’s.

Despite gaining disapproval from Bradley’s parents, Martina said her father was genuinely hopeful for a resolution to the case, a hope that she shares too.

“The RCMP needs to be taken out of it,” she said. “If they haven’t solved it in 45 years, then let somebody else come in and look at the evidence.”

Police still following leads

The investigation, police had said, was one of the most expensive in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador.

While preparing for his book, Heffernan has spoken to some of the original police investigators of the Bradley case. He said his research has also included some previously unseen primary sources and police files.

He said he’s interested in answering who killed Dana Bradley, but he is also asking what social conditions in the province led to her murder, and what institutional failures allowed her killer to go free.

“My burden of proof, as a historian, is much different than the legal system’s,” he said.

“There’s this negative space that exists in my research because she should be probably a grandmother herself now, and she didn’t get to live a full life,” he continued. “I think that by talking to her friends, Dana’s friends, the people who knew and loved her, that’s (an) important part of this as well.”

The RCMP in Newfoundland and Labrador did not respond further to questions from CTV News about what how they investigated the DNA evidence discovered, and how they were able to identify the source of the DNA.

They also did not respond to requests for interviews about the investigation.

“We continue to follow up on leads, and are still encouraging the public to contact RCMP with information, no matter how small it may seem,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Murdoch said an answer would be relief to the province, as Dana Bradley’s name still comes up frequently with people who are old enough to remember the case.

“Decembers are hard,” he said. “My dad still lives [in the area], so I’m there pretty much every day. And every year when they start putting Christmas trees there, it comes back.”

“I’d like some closure — I think some closure for her family, you know, and for all of us,” he said. “Dana had some really close friends who I know it drastically affected their lives. And maybe it gives a little peace that, you know, maybe Dana can rest now.”

With files from the Canadian Press