A grieving mom who phoned cold case detectives every year since 1986 when her little boy was found stabbed to death got a much-awaited callback from the police this month.
Ana Bradshaw said she always believed the killer of her 6-year-old son Miguel Antero would get caught, but that she wept for a long time after the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department finally notified her that he was in custody.
Idaho authorities first nabbed 53-year-old Kenneth Rasmuson this spring, after DNA tests linked him to another young boy’s equally-brutal sex assault and murder more than 30 years ago.
In 1981, Rasmuson abducted first-grader Jeffrey Vargo from his Anaheim Hills neighborhood, then dumped the strangled victim’s partially naked body at a nearby construction site.
A few years later he did the same to Ana Bradshaw’s son, snatching Miguel just as the youngster was getting off a school bus and leaving his semi-mutilated corpse in scrubland close to his parent’s house.
This past March, the known child-molester was arrested in Vargo’s cold case slaying; and, when a retired LAPD sergeant saw coverage of it on television, he instantly “knew” that the suspect was Miguel Antero’s killer too.
John Laurie then contacted a colleague who still worked at the LA sheriff’s office, and that individual gathered old files and evidence together, ordering a DNA test to see if it matched Kenneth Rasmuson’s.
The two samples were identical.
Miguel’s mom Ana Bradshaw was by now living in Georgia -- she says she “broke down in tears” when California detectives called to tell her that her son’s cold case murder was finally solved.
