Editor’s note: This story features reporting about sexual abuse and human trafficking and may be disturbing to some readers. The National Human Trafficking Hotline can be reached at 1-888-373-7888 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What Helen-Marie Rivera remembers the most about Tiffany Bradley was the slight lisp that curled around the words she spoke.
“I would always call her Birdie, ’cause she sounded like a bird when she would speak,” Rivera said, clutching the yearbook that featured photos of her and her dear friend, pages apart. “And I would say, ‘OK, Birdie,’ and she called me Pocahontas, because my hair was always long.”
The two young women grew up in east Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the ’90s. Even though they attended different middle schools — Rivera went to Raub Middle School, and Bradley attended Harrison-Morton Middle School — they became fast friends because Rivera lived right around the corner from Bradley’s school.
Rivera and Bradley became even closer friends when they entered ninth grade at Dieruff High School. They walked to school together every day alongside Bradley’s brother, Steffon.
But one November morning in 2000, when the two were juniors at Dieruff, Bradley was not by her brother’s side.
“He just said, ‘She didn’t come home. I don’t know where she went. She just left,’ ” Rivera recalled in a recent interview. “And I was like, ‘What happened?’ And he’s like, ‘She’s not there.’ And I said, ‘What did she — what did she do? Did she run away?’ He was like, ‘She’s not going to run away.’ “
Tiffany Bradley’s family reported her missing Nov. 8, 2000. She was 16 years old.
Several friends recalled that Bradley was “labeled a runaway by authorities,” but they believed that she would not have run away on her own.
Her loved ones never stopped wondering what happened to her, and trying to find out.
Last month, 26 years after her disappearance, authorities made an announcement that no one wanted to hear.
Tiffany Bradley was identified as the murder victim whose remains were discovered Nov. 13, 2000, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Her body was found just days after she was reported missing, but she was only identified this year thanks to advanced DNA sequencing.
According to the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney’s office, Bradley was trafficked across state lines, decapitated, dismembered and dumped in the back of a parking lot in the Massachusetts town.
It is unclear how the teenager from Allentown ended up trafficked to Massachusetts. Some family members suspect another close family member, who is now deceased, was involved.
Even though the family finally knows what happened to Bradley, other questions remain unanswered. Why did this happen to her? Could more have been done to identify her sooner, or stop her from meeting such a terrible end?
Who was Tiffany Bradley?
Tiffany Bradley, born Nov. 12, 1983, was a smiley child who was close with her two older brothers and had a shy demeanor that gave way to a more exuberant personality once you got to know her.
Tiffany Wiggins, who lives in Colorado, is about 10 years older than the younger cousin who was named after her. She was “Big Tiff,” and Bradley “Little Tiff” in their family’s vernacular, she recalled.
Wiggins remembered Bradley as a “jolly” young kid who tried to keep up with her older brothers. Wiggins grew up in Colorado, Bradley in Allentown, so the two only saw each other a few times a year.
“Tiffany was very smart and bright, a little tomboy. She was good at sports, good at basketball. I saw her in the summers when we got together in Florida, which was our hometown,” Wiggins said. “I used to babysit her and as far as how she was, she was an amazing kid. She was your typical teenager. Very loving, very outgoing, very sporty.”
Wiggins was looking forward to a visit from Bradley and her brothers in the summer of 2001. That visit never came.
Heather Boehmer, who lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, attended Ritter Elementary School with Bradley. The two were in the same friend group of young girls who got together for sleepovers and birthday parties.
Even after she moved to Parkland School District in fifth grade, Boehmer said, she remained close with Bradley throughout middle school.
“We would talk on the phone for hours all the time, the typical ’90s: laying on the bed, talking to your friends,” Boehmer said. “I just remember she was just a really, really sweet girl. We loved being around her. We used to do all the fun sleepover games like ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board,’ just giggling.”
They grew more distant once they entered high school, as they attended different schools and made new friends. Boehmer recalls finding out that her friend was reported missing when she saw “missing” posters with her face on them around the city.
She was shocked, she told The Morning Call, and recalled rumors among those who knew her that Bradley ran away from home. That, she said, did not sound like the girl she knew.
Still, she thought of Bradley from time to time, particularly when she would walk past “missing” posters bearing her face on them for years, as police and family members made no in-roads finding her.
“I do remember the old Aharts Market on 15th and Tilghman there, they had her picture in that window for the longest time,” Boehmer said. “And that would kind of recall it every once in a while, I’d walk by there in the area, and I would still see her picture, and I would, every once in a while, Google if there was any information. And, nope. It was still, she was missing, no leads.”
When Arielle Arbushites, another elementary school friend of Bradley’s, thinks of her girlhood friend, she remembers her sideways smile and quiet demeanor that gave way to a spunkier, sillier personality once you got to know her.
Arbushites and Boehmer both sang with Bradley in the Apple Tree Girls, a children’s choir group at Ritter Elementary that performed 1930s-era music for veterans and retirees around Allentown.
“She and I were the tallest girls in fifth grade, so the way they placed the formation of the girls singing, we were both in the middle,” Arbushites said. “So we always got to stand next to each other.”
Like Boehmer, Arbushites and Bradley grew more distant as they got older.
Even though both attended Dieruff High School, their classes did not overlap, so their friendship dwindled to friendly hellos in the hallways.
When Bradley went missing, Arbushites recalled being shocked, but said that she and other friends gradually accepted that maybe Bradley decided to leave on her own.
“I hadn’t been spending a lot of time with her, so I thought, well, maybe we were very different now, and she really did want to leave,” Arbushites said. “Maybe there were things that I didn’t know about. I definitely thought about her after that, but after time, I think we just assumed she had gone somewhere, and chosen a different life. And God, I wish that was what had happened.”
Rivera, who was close with Bradley until the day she disappeared, remembers watching her show up late to gym class in her ROTC uniform, smoking cigarettes with her in large groups of friends in Stevens Park, and singing Destiny’s Child songs together in the halls of Dieruff High.
She confided in Bradley about how scared she was when she became pregnant at 16.
Bradley told her, “It’s going to be fine.”
“She was just the sweetest person. Everyone knew that she was the sweetest person ever,” Rivera said.
Tiffany’s disappearance and a final phone call
Tiffany Bradley was reported missing by family members after she did not come home the night before.
Friends, including Michele Weiand, another elementary school classmate, said her disappearance didn’t make sense.
Bradley never showed any outward signs that she was unhappy or experiencing abuse in any way, several of them said.
“A lot of disbelief, it didn’t make sense. Wherever she went, her brothers went,” Weiand said. “I was only allowed to go trick or treating with her because her brothers were coming with us, they were very protective. … There was never any kind of inkling at all that there was any kind of unhappiness that would indicate why she would go missing or run away.”
She recalled hearing from her own parents that authorities believed Bradley ran away.
But family members and others close to Bradley said they never stopped trying to find her, or wondering what happened as the years went by and their hope dwindled that she was still out there.
Tiffany Wiggins’ sister, Shakirah Wiggins, told the audience at a news conference last month that friends and family searched in New York and Philadelphia for her. At one point they believed she might have left the country, Shakirah recalled, but their efforts to search for her became complicated when no leads turned up.
Both of Bradley’s parents died not long after her disappearance.
According to accounts from her family members, Bradley made a phone call to one of her cousins after her disappearance. She sounded scared, according to Shakirah Wiggins, but she did not disclose what was going on and hung up before her cousin could get any more details.
Rivera believes that phone call was Bradley’s last cry for help.
“She was manipulated. She was taken from us, and pretty much put in that position where she could not get out,” Rivera said. “And I feel like that last phone call that she had, it was her trying to code something, to speak and say, ‘I need help,’ but she couldn’t say it. She couldn’t say it.”
A breakthrough in the ‘Chelsea Jane Doe’ case
While Bradley’s family members lost hope in their search, investigators in Massachusetts got closer to a breakthrough in a case that had haunted their state for decades.
On Nov. 13, 2000, police officers discovered what they now know were Bradley’s remains in a parking lot at the Soldiers’ Home in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
“The disturbing circumstances surrounding the discovery launched an extensive investigation involving numerous detectives, prosecutors, forensic specialists and law enforcement agencies,” according to a Chelsea Police Department news release.
The investigation brought officers to Eugene McCollom, who confessed to the murder of the unnamed girl — labeled a “prostitute” in news articles at the time — and pleaded guilty to murder in February 2005.
Even though they made an arrest in the case, Massachusetts authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had no leads on the identity of the victim at the time.
Their only clue was that the decedent had gone by the name “Lisa,” which happened to be Bradley’s mother’s name. She was labelled “Chelsea Jane Doe,” and authorities circulated a composite image of her nationwide, seeking leads on anyone who might have recognized her.
According to FBI Special Agent Ted Dawkes, investigators in Boston began an “investigative genealogy” process three years ago, using advances in DNA sequencing technology, in an attempt to identify Chelsea Jane Doe.
That DNA sequencing led investigators to Bradley’s brother, James, who lives in Texas; a cheek swab revealed that James was the biological brother of the body they found, allowing them to confirm that Tiffany Bradley was that victim.
Shakirah Wiggins, at the news conference announcing her cousin’s identification in early June, said learning Bradley’s fate was “bittersweet.” Though it was not the answer she hoped for, it gave her a sense of closure after a quarter century of wondering.
“It was bittersweet but we were so happy and relieved that they even cared after this amount of time,” she said. “It’s just truly a statement on humanity and we’re not in such bad shape after all.”
Questions remain
Some troubling questions about Bradley’s disappearance and death remain.
How did a teenage from Allentown end up trafficked across state lines to Massachusetts, where she had no known family or connections?
Could more have been done to intervene before she was killed?
“The thing that hurts me the most is we looked so hard. We did anything we could to find her, but if you know the story of how she was found, who would have known to go there?” Tiffany Wiggins said. “God, so far away from home, how in the world did she get all the way over there at 16, you know what I’m saying? Nobody knew.”
According to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, any investigation into the circumstances of Bradley’s trafficking and disappearance would not result in any criminal charges due to the statute of limitations expiring.
Rivera, Bradley’s high school friend, said that while the two confided in each other about experiencing sexual abuse as girls, Bradley never said that she might have been trafficked while living at home. The fact that she was labeled a prostitute at the time of her death just does not add up, she and other friends said.
According to the nonprofit Committee for Children, victims of sexual abuse often do not confide in others about the abuse for a variety of reasons — including shame, feeling confused because the offender is someone they trust, or because they have been convinced that the abuse is normal.
Rivera also was frustrated that the identification took so long, leaving her family and friends without answers for more than two decades.
“I’m so flabbergasted that that was her. And why did it take so damn long, right?” Rivera said. “Why did it take over 20 years to identify her? Why couldn’t they identify her any other way?”
However, according to one forensics expert, Bradley went missing and was killed at a time long before today’s advancements in forensic investigative technology.
Bradley was found in a different state, at a time DNA technology was only 10 years old and far from the advances it had made today, and before the era of widespread internet and social media, which can be a tool to spread the word when someone goes missing.
All of those factors made it harder for investigators to identify Bradley sooner, according to Ralph Ristenbatt, an associate professor of forensic science at Penn State University.
“This happened back in 2000 so DNA is still relatively — we didn’t have forensic genealogy back then, the DNA was still 10 years young at that point, so there’s lots of things that I think could have impeded this progress here,” Ristenbatt said. “They don’t know who she is, no clue on the family, family reports her missing in Pennsylvania, but that is several states away, so these are some of the challenges they have had to overcome.”
Remembering Tiffany Bradley
While the news of Bradley’s death has been little solace to those that loved her, the headlines about her have brought together a community of those with fond memories of Little Tiff.
Rivera, Arbushites, Wiggins and others interviewed for this story are part of a Facebook group that has shared photos and stories about Bradley. It has reconnected some long-lost friends from Ritter, Harrison Morton and Dieruff who have fond memories of her, as well as extended family members who lived outside of Pennsylvania but recall joyful visits from Bradley and her family.
Rivera and Arbushites are both published writers who have written poems in Bradley’s memory. Both told The Morning Call that writing about their dear friend helped them process the news and honor her memory.
“We were all bright voices and dreams, // never knowing one of us // would become a ghost story // before she had the chance // to become a woman,” Arbushites wrote in a somber poem titled “Apple Tree Girl.”
“For all these years, the world held a question mark — // where your laughter used to be. // They gave you an unknown title, // Jane Doe // a box on a shelf to collect the dust of passing time.// But truth is a patient light,” wrote Rivera in her piece titled “Never Forgotten, Just Never Identified Correctly.”
Bradley’s extended family has a memorial service planned Sept. 5 in Pensacola, Florida, where some of her family members live. Her ashes will be returned to her oldest brother, James.
Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.