Laura’s Legacy : Crime: When 3-year-old Laura Bradbury was abducted seven years ago today, there were few places family members or searchers could go for help in finding a missing child. The legal reforms made since then have led to a more cohesive, coordinated searching process.

In the sweltering evening darkness last week, several dozen grim people were shuffling into the Westminster Civic Center to play out the latest chapter in a tragedy.

Their faces were ghostly and somber in the glow of the candles they carried, and the flickering light fell on several posters and T-shirts bearing the likeness of the 11-year-old girl they were there to try to save.

They had gathered to keep alive the search for Jaycee Lee Dugard, formerly of Garden Grove, who was abducted a few blocks from her South Lake Tahoe home June 10 as she walked to a school bus stop. They talked about faith and hope, about not giving up, about family and friends and the national network of agencies, resources and laws that were in place to help find the child.

It was a moving and galvanizing show of support.

But inside the crowd was a couple who could remember a time when similar hopes for missing children often came hard, when federal authorities would start the hunt for a stolen car more quickly than for a stolen child, when parents had to rally their own support, work their own phones, make their own luck.

In the glow of the candles in their hands, Dana and Virginia Winters could remember their own granddaughter, Laura Bradbury, and how her disappearance seven years ago today became a catalyst not only for that night’s walk for Jaycee Lee Dugard, but also for a national movement.

Laura Bradbury, 3, vanished while on a camping trip with her family at the Indian Cove section of Joshua Tree National Monument.

At the time, thousands of law enforcement investigators, family members, friends and strangers searched the area for signs of the little girl with the Dutch-boy haircut.

The Bradbury family set up a nonprofit organization and distributed millions of flyers and T-shirts with Laura’s likeness. Her parents appeared on radio and TV talk shows, and Laura’s disappearance was re-enacted twice on national TV. She became one of the first missing children to have her photograph featured on milk cartons.

Two years after Laura vanished, hikers near the Bradbury campsite found bone fragments that were positively linked to the girl by forensic DNA tests in December. The agonizing years of uncertainty came to a tragic close.

The notoriety of the case put the spurs to legislators, law enforcement officials and the public, in California and across the nation as have few other abductions in U.S. criminal history. The process of finding missing children has, in the last seven years become increasingly cohesive, coordinated, wide-ranging and respected.

This is Laura’s legacy.

“The will and the desire to find a lost child has always been there, but I think in Laura’s case people could see how the media could be used to get information out,” said Dana Winters of Huntington Beach, Laura Bradbury’s grandfather.

“Everywhere people turned, there was a bumper sticker or a poster or a Laura bracelet modeled after the ones they used for the Vietnam POWs.

“We sent out over 2 million flyers,” he said, “sent them as far away as Mexico and France and England. She was on grocery sacks, milk cartons, RTD buses and taxis. The publicity was almost as much as it was for the Lindbergh baby. There’s no doubt that it gave rise to definite interest in missing children.”

In the early 1980s, when a child disappeared, the issue was often first dismissed by law enforcement as part of “runaway presumption” or “wander-off presumption,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Arlington, Va.

“America at that time was like 50 separate countries, and among all the police departments, very little information sharing and collaborative work was done,” Allen said.

“A decade ago, if a child disappeared, local law enforcement would work vigorously and the community would rally, but . . . other parts of the nation would not,” he said. “Many children end up far away from where they were taken, and it was very clear that there was not a national system for responding to these cases.”

Worse, he said, there was no provision to enter information about missing children routinely into the FBI’s immense computerized repository of crimes, the National Crime Information Computer, which is used by U.S. law enforcement agencies in gathering and cross-checking evidence.

Before 1982, Allen said, a stolen car would be immediately entered into NCIC, but a missing child’s name would not. That year, however, Congress passed the federal Missing Children Act that “set up a process by which a parent of a missing child could contact the FBI to make sure that their child was entered into NCIC,” Allen said.

It also provided to establish the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which began operating in 1984 working under a cooperative agreement with the Department of Justice and the FBI.

The center, a kind of clearinghouse for missing children that works primarily with law enforcement, other state agencies and about 60 nonprofit missing children’s groups, saw few children’s names entered into NCIC at first. By 1989, however, of the about 600,000 missing persons in NCIC’s memory, more than 90% were missing children.

Still, it was not until last year, with the passage of the federal National Child Search Assistance Act, that law enforcement agencies had to file a report that was immediately entered into NCIC, Allen said.

In California, that information is also automatically entered into a crime computer at the state Department of Justice, said Ivan Azevedo, an assistant manager of the Missing Persons Program for the department.

Also, he said, state law requires that a police report be filed with the state Department of Justice within four hours if the child appears to be “at risk,” under 12 or a first-time runaway.

The latest updating of the interstate system occurred last month, when the West Coast Coalition of Missing Children Clearinghouses was formed. Incorporating state law enforcement-based clearinghouses from California, Nevada, Arizona, Washington and Oregon, members of the coalition share information, increase communications and develop common investigative procedures.

Was Laura Bradbury’s disappearance in 1984 responsible for all this? Yes and no.

During the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Allen said, a few missing-children cases dramatically captured the attention of law enforcement, the media and the public in several sections of the country. “For whatever reason, (they) went well beyond the community in which the child was missing,” Allen said.

Etan Patz, for instance. He was 6 when he disappeared from a school bus stop in New York in 1979, and he is still missing. The day of his abduction, May 25, is recognized as National Missing Children’s Day, Allen said.

In June, 1983, Ann Gotlib, a Soviet immigrant child living in Louisville, disappeared from a shopping mall. In 1982, a Des Moines newsboy, Johnny Gosch, 12, vanished.

The best-known case of all is that of Adam Walsh, 6, who was taken from a Hollywood, Fla., shopping center in July, 1981. His remains were found two weeks later in a canal 150 miles from the Walsh home. The family’s subsequent crusade to reform laws and procedures pertaining to missing children was dramatized in the TV movie “Adam.”

“I don’t entirely know why some cases attract a kind of awareness and visibility that they do, and others that are equally disturbing and tragic and heinous don’t,” Allen said. “Our theory is that there are some which, because of circumstances, strike parents in the heart, close to home--a sort of ‘there but for the grace of God’ sort of thing.

“Laura had impact. Her disappearance, the way the community responded and the huge outpouring of concern helped serve as a catalyst for a national movement.”

In 1983 and 1984, there was widespread belief that child abductions by strangers had suddenly increased. There really was no crisis; nearly 99% of the children in the statistics were not taken by strangers but were, rather, either runaways or victims of parental abductions in custody fights.

According to Azevedo at the state Department of Justice, there are 1,265 active California runaway cases on file in the department’s computer, 80 parental abduction cases and three abductions by strangers.

And, he added, statistics indicate that 95% of all missing-children cases are resolved within 30 days.

However, those hard numbers do not tell the whole story, said Susan Davidson, executive director of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in Westminster.

When a child is abducted and another more serious crime is committed against the child--murder, for instance--the case is routinely listed on police records as murder, not an abduction.

So, there may be a discrepancy in the number of documented stranger abductions of U.S. children of 3,000 to 35,000 cases per year, Davidson said.

Azevedo said such reporting procedures continue to be a problem for law enforcement agencies, but he added that he believes truer numbers are emerging as greater coordination among agencies and more comprehensive training programs for investigators are begun. He said the FBI reviews missing-children cases every 60 days.

Also, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has trained nearly 107,000 police officers, health-care workers and other professionals in evidence-gathering, interviewing, search techniques and other skills related to finding missing children, Allen said.

And the sheer numbers of state clearinghouses have added to the accountability, he said.

“When Laura disappeared,” he said, “there were a handful of state missing children clearinghouses. Today there are 43.”

There are dozens of small groups throughout the country, but most, like the original Bradbury organization, are set up by families or friends of a single abducted child for the sole purpose of finding that child. And most of the money that supports those groups comes from family, friends, private sources and a trickle of victim assistance money offered by some states, Allen said.

Money is--and has always been--tight at the grass-roots level. Official state and federal agencies have no programs to provide direct financial aid to families while they search for their children.

The Bradbury family spent “in excess of $200,000” in their search for Laura, said Dana Winters, who added that they are still “having a difficult time of it financially, but they’re determined to work it out.”

Winters said his daughter and son-in-law sold their business, moved their family out of Huntington Beach a year ago and now live “several hundred miles away. They had to do it to shake off the shadows of this.”

They have had difficulty, he said, even in the face of the latest evidence, in fully accepting their daughter’s death.

The little girl’s memory remains very much alive in the minds of others whose children have disappeared. For them, the legacy of Laura Bradbury is one of hope and not despair.

“The Laura Bradbury case has definitely helped,” said Dennis Bodie, a friend of Jaycee Dugard’s family. “When we started our organization in Orange County, we said if they could do it, we could do it.”