Drinking The Cool Aid

Tina Mott // 206 // Tim Bradford // 622 Minor Avenue

• Megan and Hanna Hawkins • Season 1 • Episode 206

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On August 7th, 1996, Tim Lyons and TJ DeJohn (Dee-John) were heading out to the lake to go fishing. The boys didn’t catch any fish that day, but they caught something else. Any guesses? They reeled in a skull. They were stunned. The boys didn’t think it was a real skull, they thought it was a Halloween decoration, so they set it on the bank of the river. Tim said that he told his parents about it that night, but they didn’t believe him, they thought he was making it up. Some of the articles said that the boys and their parents went back to the river the next day, but according to Forensic Files, the boys said they went back, and there was no mention of their parents being with them. The skull was still sitting where they had left it, so they decided to call the police. They said that the first officer that arrived threw a rock at the skull and said, yeah, it’s real, you boys just opened up a big investigation. They said the officer made them feel like they had done something wrong. Like, oh great, we have to investigate something now, nice job.  

 

Investigators arrived at the scene at Linden River, and they sent out boats and scuba divers. There were scratches all over the skull and it didn’t have any teeth. The scuba divers weren’t able to locate any other body parts or any of the missing teeth. The local coroner examined the skull and determined it had only been in the lake for a few weeks. There was soft tissue on the skull and the coroner could tell that the flesh had been forcibly scraped off, which explained the scratches all over the skull.  

 

The skull was sent off to Beth Murray. She was 1 of only 63 board-certified forensic anthropologists in the United States. She said that this skull was one of the most challenging and frustrating cases she has ever worked. When viewing the skull, here are a few of the things she noticed right away: 

-There was a deep indentation on the top of the skull, it looked like a machete was used 

-Cuts were all over the skull and that told her that someone had sat with this skull in their hands and stripped the flesh off 

-Jagged marks on the skull appeared to be from a serrated knife 

-Cut marks on the cheek bones showed the jaw was forcefully removed with a small single edged blade such as a pocketknife 

-Puncture wounds in the eye sockets showed that the killer removed the eyes 

-There was a broken tooth root in the upper jaw, which meant the teeth had been deliberately pulled 

 

As Beth looked at the skull, she noticed that when she held it at a certain angle, she could see the marks in the bone where needle-nose pliers had been used to snap the teeth out. If you aren’t familiar with that type of tool, it’s used for things such as gripping, bending, or reaching into small spaces to get things. The tool has a pointed tip, and each side of the pliers has indents tapering down. So, the indented pattern of the tool, could be seen in the bone where the pliers had been used to snap the teeth out. 

Beth had never seen anything like this in her life and she didn’t think the police would believe her findings. It was so gruesome, and she may have been second guessing things herself. She consulted two other experts and when everyone came back with the same findings, she gave the information to the police. Now, they needed to figure out who this skull belonged to, and they didn’t have a lot to go on. Based on the measurements inputted into a computer, the skull belonged to a Caucasian woman who was under 35-years old.  

 

The investigators began combing through the missing persons cases and they discovered that four individuals had been reported missing. One of them was 21-year-old Tina Mott and she had been reported missing 2 months prior to the skull being found. Tina was a single mother of an 18-month-old boy. She had been living in an apartment with her 24-year-old boyfriend Tim Bradford. Tina was from New York and Tim was from Ohio, but the two of them met when she was selling magazines door to door. After they moved in together, Tim was working as a framer at an art shop and Tina was a clerk at a local store. 

 

The police talked to Tim, and he said that Tina had gone back home to New York to visit her family and she had left her child behind. Her family was contacted, and they said she was not in New York. You may think that Tim was the one that reported his girlfriend missing, but you would be wrong. His mother, Elizabeth Bradford, did. She thought it was strange that Tina would go to New York without her son, it just didn’t add up, so she called Tina’s family in New York. When they said she wasn’t there, she knew something was terribly wrong. Elizabeth called the police and said she was afraid of her son and his temper, but she had to report Tina missing. 

 

-Kudos to that woman 

-She called even though she was afraid 

-I’m sure that can’t be easy 

 

Investigators were trying to determine if the skull actually belonged to Tina Mott, but it was difficult to know for sure. Typically, teeth are used to identify a victim, but the skull didn’t have any teeth. The lower jaw was missing, and the upper teeth had all been forcefully removed. They used skull photograph superimposition. An anthropologist takes an image of the skull and superimposes it on an image of the person it might belong to. This is used to see if there are any matching characteristics. Other techniques: they attempt to put a face on the skull, using facial reconstruction and forensic sculpture. Forensic anthropologists have only had a 70% success rate with these techniques because certain features such as eyelids, ears, mouth, and lips, aren’t indicated by the shape of the skull. So, these techniques are typically used as a last resort. 

 

The killer had removed all visible teeth, but there were two wisdom teeth that hadn’t dropped. They were embedded in the gums. Inside teeth there is something called tooth pulp which contains DNA. The doctor extracted tooth pulp from the teeth and sent this to a lab for testing along with some DNA from Tina’s child. Unfortunately, they were not able to make a match with the tooth pulp. It’s possible that this is because the teeth weren’t fully formed yet, so the roots were open. Also, the skull had been in the water. The tiny, single cell microorganisms called diatoms could have altered or damaged the tooth pulp. 

 

Dr. Murray used a surgical drill to extract DNA from the skull and she carefully removed 6 bone samples from the thickest part of the skull. This was sent for Mitochondrial testing. Mitochondrial DNA only comes from your mother. So, they would be able to test the DNA from the skull to the DNA of Tina’s child and it was a match. 

 

Shortly after Tina’s disappearance, her boyfriend, Tim rented a storage locker. Police got a search warrant and they found: 

-19 kitchen knives. Small, medium, and large in size. They all had serrated blades. 

-A book on how to kill with your bare hands 

-A notebook on satanic rituals. His mother said he practiced devil worship. 

 

After Tina’s disappearance, Tim had been seen on an ATM security camera taking money from her account. The police searched the apartment and did a luminol test. They found blood on the bathroom floor in a crevice between the floor and bathtub, and near the toilet. One of the knives from the storage locker did test positive for human protein. 

 

After talking with some of Tina’s co-workers, investigators learned that Tim occasionally used drugs and Tina had told people at work that she was afraid of him when he used drugs. Tim was brought back in for again for questioning, and he talked about how he was a skilled hunter, and he knows how to skin animals, he had grown up on hunting. After several hours, he confessed to murdering his girlfriend and he took the investigators to a nature reserve where he had scattered her bones. At this point, it had been 14 months since Tina Mott’s murder, so the animals had taken most of the remains, but they were able to recover half of her body. Every single bone they found had been cut by a hacksaw or knife. 

 

Tim said that on the night of Tina’s murder, he had been doing acid. They were playing board games and they got into a fight. Tim said that he hit Tina and her nose started bleeding. She ran to the bathroom to take care of her bloody nose and Tim started cleaning the apartment. 

-To me, that doesn’t make sense 

-He hits his girlfriend, then starts cleaning? 

He says that he was putting his fishing gear away and Tina was angry as she left the bathroom. She lunged for him, and he happened to be holding a fishing knife, so he accidentally cut her throat during the fight. After he accidentally cut her throat, he just left the apartment. I don’t what he did, but I’ll tell you what he didn’t do. 

-Call the police 

-Take her to a hospital 

-Help her 

-Hold pressure on her wound 

Those are the things he was NOT doing during this time. When he got back, her body was in the bathtub, and she was dead. Tim said he had no idea how she got to the tub, but now that she was dead, he needed to make sure she would never be identified. Tim Bradford admitted to using all 19 kitchen knives that were found in the storage shed and he worked all through the night to dismember her body. He used needle nose pliers to remove all of her teeth, and he used a hacksaw and a meat cleaver. He flushed her organs down the toilet, then he carried the bones out of the apartment in a backpack and trash bag and dumped them in a field. Later, he went to the lake and threw the skull in the water. 

 

Parts of the confession: 

“After I cut Tina’s head off, I used the meat cleaver and tried to split the head in half before I got the hacksaw out. I used a hacksaw to cut up the body.” 

“I flushed some of her down the toilet....The rest I put in garbage bags....After I cut up Tina and put her in garbage bags...I put the bags in a field near the sewage treatment plant....I threw the skull into the lake. I cut the jaw off of it.” 

“I know that Tina was dead when I pulled her teeth. Because when Tina’s teeth were pulled, I had already cut off her head. I used a pair of pliers to pull her teeth.” 

“Nobody helped me do any of it. I did everything myself. I loved Tina.” 

 

Tim Bradford never provided an explanation for why he murdered Tina Mott, but he was sentenced to 25 years for manslaughter and abuse of a corpse, after taking a plea deal. He entered Ohio’s state prison system on September 24th, 1997, and was denied parole at each hearing. He served his entire 25-year sentence and was released on December 6th, of 2023. Tina’s family feels helpless and they’re very concerned that he will harm someone else. 

 

I’m truly not sure how this happened, but Tina’s baby ended up being raised by Tim’s parents.  Tina’s younger sister, and her aunt and uncle, wrote letters about Tim Bradford’s release. The letter says that Tina’s son Johnny was raised by Tim’s parents and Tina’s family wanted him to reach out and connect with his mom’s side. At the time of the letter, he would have been 29 years old. I hope that Tim’s parents were lovely people that raised this child well, but I’m still confused by this. 

 

Ed Buns was one of the Hamilton Homicide detectives on the scene. He said, “You know there are always just cases that you will keep in your mind, and you’ll never forget. We did everything we humanly could for Tina Mott.” 

Ed Buns believes that they never got the whole truth from Tim, just part of it. 

One of Tina’s neighbors believes that Tim consumed portions of her flesh after cooking it on a grill, outside on the balcony. There is absolutely no evidence pointing towards this being the truth, so I hope not, but here’s where I think they’re coming from. Tim said he cut Tina’s flesh off and flushed it down the toilet. The upstairs apartment where she was murdered had burned in April of 2020 and the fire started on the balcony where the grill was. It’s a stretch, but it’s a theory. Another neighbor said they sometimes see her shadow pass by the windows of her apartment. 

 

Tina had been murdered in the upstairs apartment of 622 Minor Avenue in Hamilton, Ohio. She expressed many times that she found it very spooky to be living across the street from the Ruppert house. Tim and Tina lived on a street that is infamous for a family massacre. 

 

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