The FBI is the most sophisticated law enforcement agency in the world, pursuing the most dangerous criminals. In Texas, when an 8-year-old girl is stolen from her own room in the middle of the night, it is an unspeakable crime. The bureau mobilizes.
“We knew that someone that was bold enough to do that, he’d had to have done something else. This is need-driven behavior; it goes beyond what we could even understand. I feared that he would come back and like finish me off, you know? That’s what I kept thinking of in my head.”
It’s the summer of 2008, and FBI Special Agent Richard Renison is digging into a cold case that rocks the veteran detective to his core. 18 years earlier, in a tiny South Texas town, a young girl was abducted from her home, brutally assaulted, and left for dead.
“At the time, I had a daughter who was 8 years old, and it’s just horrendous, it’s just terrible to think about.”
The girl’s attacker was never found.
“We didn’t know if he was still out there and possibly abducting children, killing children.”
The FBI has to make a difficult decision about whether to tackle this difficult case. The more they learn about the attacker, the more they realize exactly what’s at stake.
“He does have this sadistic component to his sexual fantasies, and he needs to see humiliation or torture in the eyes of his victims. That’s what’s dangerous, because at some point, you know, he may decide to play out these fantasies just on the spur of the moment.”
Dickinson, Texas, 1990. A mother wakes up and calls out to her 8-year-old daughter, Jennifer.
“Jennifer!”
But the young girl doesn’t respond.
“We’re late, Jennifer!”
The mother searches in every room, looking under beds and in closets, but Jennifer is nowhere to be found.
“Jennifer’s mother did search for probably about 30 or 40 minutes on her own. Unable to locate her daughter, the mother frantically calls police, 911.”
At first, they think she must be at a friend’s house.
“This was a real quiet area. It was not uncommon for a child to get out and go play out in the courtyard and things like that.”
But a search of Jennifer’s room reveals that her bedroom window is open. The window is dusted for prints, though it’s unlikely anything will be found.
“There had been so many people in and out of the apartment, so many people looked and examined the window, that there was really nothing that I could do.”
Police don’t know whether Jennifer left her room on her own or was taken by force, but violent crimes in Dickinson, Texas are rare, so they assume Jennifer has run away. With each moment, their concern grows.
“Even if she had run away, being 8 years old, you know, she could be lost in one of these fields or could have been picked up as she was running away or something of that nature. So the first thing we wanted to do was go ahead and start searching the surrounding area.”
Later that day, 9-year-old Cruz Nunez and his friends start a game of tag in the overgrown field behind his house.
“Be careful, guys.”
“I remember the grass was at least my height.”
The game barely begins before one of Cruz’s playmates yells for him to come out of hiding.
“But she was like, ‘Just go down the trail a little bit,’ and I said, ‘For what?’ And she kept pushing me, and I was telling her, ‘You know, what is it? Is it a snake or a dog or something?’ ‘Cause I don’t want to get bit by it.”
Reluctantly, Cruz follows the trail a few more steps.
“It started to curve a little bit, the trail did. When it curved, that’s when I—when I seen her.”
A little girl is lying in the grass, and she appears to be dead.
“She was, you know, completely nude, and I just seen a bunch of blood, and it just really bothered me. I never, you know, I was little to see something like that. What is it?”
Cruz and his friends race back to his home.
“You know, I was such in a hurry, I missed the front step and I fell inside the living room, and my mom and dad and everybody jumped up, and they were asking me what’s going on, what’s wrong with me. I told them that there was somebody out here in the field, you know, somebody was hurt. So they came running out here; that’s when we called 911.”
Police and rescue personnel rush to the scene.
“Dispatch, I’ve got a white female juvenile with a throat…”
And they immediately know the girl must be 8-year-old Jennifer Shuitt.
“Come on! And she’s barely clinging to life. Stay with me!”
“I haven’t seen a crime like it before in my years in law enforcement. It’s just… it’s indescribable.”
Jennifer is airlifted to a hospital in Galveston. There, doctors determine she has been raped. And there’s more: her throat has been sliced from ear to ear, severing her vocal cords.
“I was able to see the photographs from when she was in a hospital. The photographs that I saw depicted to me a young female that was deceased, and that’s the way she looked at me.”
Doctors labor to save Jennifer’s life.
“We just got her out of surgery. We’re not sure if she’s going to be okay.”
They deliver the devastating news to her family that if she lives, she may never talk again.
“Okay. Jennifer has been silenced, leaving authorities helpless. They had a victim who was alive, but they couldn’t communicate with her; they couldn’t get information from her as to what had taken place.”
Fear grips the entire hospital staff, including Sharon McBride, a registered nurse who has a daughter Jennifer’s age.
“It was terrifying to think that something like this, you know, could happen to my own daughter.”
Nurse McBride encourages Jennifer to fight for her life and to somehow communicate to police who has done this to her.
“I was just reassuring her and telling her how brave she was. ‘You have to wake up.’ She needed, if she could, to try and do anything she could to help the police to find who did this so that, you know, for one, he couldn’t hurt her again and couldn’t hurt anybody else again.”
Knowing a depraved criminal is on the loose, Dickinson police don’t take any chances; they station an armed officer outside Jennifer’s room.
“Nobody went in that room that didn’t have any business going into that room, that wasn’t a staff member that we knew. This man was determined to finish the job. We had to protect her from that. We did not know what we were up against.”
Authorities prepare for the worst in case the predator comes back for Jennifer or another child.
“This is need-driven behavior, and he has sexual fantasy. It goes beyond what we could even understand. We were very concerned. Matter of fact, this was just something unheard of. You really get uneasy about it, you know, is he going to strike again?”
August 11th, 1990, in a Galveston hospital. 8-year-old Jennifer Shuitt is fighting for her life after being found in an overgrown field, naked, sexually assaulted, and with her throat slit. Jennifer’s parents have been told that if she survives, she may never talk again. Without Jennifer’s voice, it will be almost impossible for investigators to track down her predator, and Dickinson, Texas police are desperate to find him.
“There’s always a clue, there’s going to be something there, you just have to find it, and that’s the hard part.”
Investigators scour the site where Jennifer was found using an ultraviolet light. Evidence technician John Puit discovers microscopic cotton fibers.
“Okay.”
“Detective Cromy whispered in my ear. I said, ‘I told you we’d get him.’ It was really just like the best day of my life.”
Bradford is charged with attempted capital murder. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison. While Bradford is awaiting trial, Detective Cromy and Agent Renison question him about the attack. Bradford is unaware the two men are being guided by the instruction of FBI profilers.
“We never told him that we had DNA that linked him to the case. We just asked him, you know, if he knew Jennifer and knew the name. He said, ‘Yeah,’ and it went downhill from there for him.”
Bradford surprises them by confessing to everything.
“She was innocent, and I was a sick, deranged, beat-up little fuck.”
He also tells authorities he was exposing himself to women just hours before the attack.
“I do remember getting out of the car, and I walked over to this window, don’t know why, I just peaked in.”
Surprisingly, he asks investigators what became of the little girl he brutalized. When they mentioned that she was alive:
“He began to cry. Oh thank God.”
“She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive. Um, personally, I felt like that was an act. I just find it hard to believe that after all these years and the coverage, the media coverage of Jennifer Shuitt and the fact that she was alive, that he would be completely unaware of that.”
Jennifer is waiting for her day in court when she can look Bradford in the eye and tell him how his actions have changed her life. But that day will never come. 7 months after his arrest, on May 10th, 2010, guards at the Galveston County Jail find Dennis Bradford’s body hanging from a makeshift noose inside his cell.
“Could just be his, you know, narcissistic way of telling law enforcement, ‘Look, you got me, but justice is not going to play out in this matter.’ He has control of that by killing himself.”
“I feel like I was cheated out of that moment. Like it was just like right before my eyes, it was just ripped away from me. And it was very devastating to me, and still is. I mean, that’s something that’s still fresh and new, and it’s hard for me to talk about, because that’s not what I wanted to happen. I still hate it, you know.”
There are other scars that Jennifer has learned to live with.
“I’ve always wanted, you know, a big family, and so finding out that because of the attack that I won’t be able to conceive naturally—I mean, that was heartbreaking to me. But again, there’s nothing I can do about it but move forward and keep a positive outlook.”
Jennifer has completed a 15-week course at the Dickinson Citizens Police Academy. She has returned to school and hopes to earn a degree in criminology. For now, she shares her story through speaking engagements.
“There are thousands of victims every year like Jennifer. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t live through it. And Jennifer, I think is able to give hope to people who have been victims of some horrible crime and let them know that it’s going to be okay; you can get on with your life.”
She always credits the investigators who held her hand in the fight for justice.
“I appreciate that they let me be involved, because, you know, I think that they knew as much as I did that we needed each other.”
And every time she tells her story, she is reminded of how she became unbreakable.
“I had a higher power looking out for me, and you know, there’s just that reason why I lived. Like, I knew in that field that night that I was going to die, and that did not happen. So I feel like I’m here for a reason, and my reason is to use my voice, and that’s what I’m going to keep doing.”
