Disappeared: The Bradley Sisters (2023) Movie Script
My name is Pamela Childs.
Most people, when they hear Special Victims Unit,
think of television drama.
For me, it's been my life.
Since 2001,
People have known me as someone
who closes missing person cases.
But there's one case that has
remained unsolved for 22 years,
since my first year as a detective on the job,
until now.
July 6, 2001.
Tracy Bradley leaves her daughter's
home alone while she goes to work.
She returns to find a note saying
they were headed for this school.
They never made it.
We were all sent out,
every able body that's working for
the Chicago Police Department.
A massive police investigation by air,
water, and along the railroad tracks.
It was the biggest manhunt that
the city of Chicago ever had.
22 years, five lead detectives.
Several of them have died
since these girls disappeared.
We've since seen 911,
a housing crisis, and a major pandemic.
And yet diamond and Tionda Bradley are still missing.
From the very beginning,
there were elements to this
story that just didn't sit right,
within the community at the South Side of Chicago.
From what I understand,
there's been a great deal of
suspicion against the mother.
That's not to say that she's guilty of anything.
This case has haunted me for 22 years.
At the heart of it, the Bradley
family has changed forever.
I saw my mom coming my way,
and she was just like, Rita, have you seen Tionda and diamond?
I'm like, no.
And then she was like, Get up, they missing.
I was feeling like something is wrong.
The mystery remains and the case is wide open.
And somebody knows what
happened to Tionda and diamond.
When the Bradley girls disappeared,
In 2001,
I was a new detective.
I gave all of my missing persons
cases the dedication,
everything I had to give for 29 years
with the Chicago Police Department.
If a victim has been missing for a year,
or maybe nine months, that is so unusual.
But for Tionda and diamond, these
girls have been missing for 20 years.
My name is Ed Carroll.
I'm a retired Chicago Police detective.
I was a Chicago police officer for 26 years.
I retired in 2013.
I was a detective for 13 years.
I still missed the job.
I came upon the Bradley case when I got signed to
Bradley in the Cold case department.
This case did become the largest missing
persons investigation in Chicago,
that we had ever seen in the city at the time.
For the Bradley family, the
summer of 2001 was like any other.
The 4 July was two days before the girls disappeared.
Our July 4 celebrations in Chicago are
very robust, very loud, very crowded.
No matter where you go.
You can ride down any street in any neighborhood,
and you can smell the barbecue coming from the grills.
You can hear the kids playing.
Maybe you can see the ice cream truck.
You hear the firework.
The 4 July 2001,
was one of the last times that the family was all together.
For Tracy, the girl's mother, it was a good day.
You guys had a family outing, is that correct?
On the 4 July?
Where was that?
Washington park.
We had a little thing out there and we had fun.
- Like a family barbecue?
- Yes, something like that.
Me, my mom and some of my cousins and
my auntie now we had went to Washington Park.
That was the 4 July, we was by the lake.
Because I remember we had a ball
and diamond kept hitting the ball in the water.
So I remember that,
Keanda the only one different color that day.
We all had on purple, Tionda had on green,
-and diamond had purple.
- ponytails with the twisties going down.
How old were you in 2001 and Victoria?
- Eight.
- nine.
It's essential with missing
people to retrace their steps.
In the days leading up to their disappearance.
You never know what detail might
emerge that breaks the case open.
This is Washington Park.
This is the park that Tracy Bradley
and her family spent 4 July together.
The last place that the family spent time
with Tionda, Diamond, Victoria and Rita.
Altogether.
My niece Tracy had four kids.
We've always just been one big family.
Oh, Lord have mercy.
I write them down as each baby is born.
At the time, I was in my early 20s.
Keanda was ten and diamond was three.
Keanda was very outspoken, very mature for her age.
She knew how to cook. During that time.
She was a little mini adult, to be honest.
So she took that role of having a big personality.
So that way you knew who she were.
Diamond had borettes and beads all the time.
She was a baby.
She can talk as much as I
would say, at least 20 words.
Diamond was more the shy one.
At the time, the girl's mom,
Tracy was dating a friend of hers
named George Washington.
Reexamining the facts of this case 22 years later.
I want to ask the family more about him.
Let's talk a little bit about your relationship with George.
You had been dating him for how long?
Wow, since 90, 95, 96.
And we've been there.
She didn't like George. She loves him.
She was in love with George.
And I've never seen her as
happy as I was with George.
- What did he do?
- It was just the attention.
The attention.
He would show up at her house and
just spend time with her,
and talk with her.
We would go out for a little bit,
and at time he'd come and get me
and we'd just go to his house.
My understanding is that George
was never close to the girls.
Only time we probably been connected with Georg,
if we at my grandma house or he pick us up,
because mama she'll go pick us up from there.
She'll pick all of us up and take us
home so we get ready and go to school.
I never been to his house, never
been to eat with him, never in life.
- Moving on to the 5 July?
- Yes.
- You were home with all your daughters, correct?
- Yes.
July 5, George Washington asked,
"do we want to go camping?"
He asked you on the 5 July if you wanted to go camping?
I have to go back to refresh my memory.
It might have probably been about
a week ago or something like that.
So a week prior to July 5.
Right, here was, he say so that
he wanted to go camping.
It was over your weekend.
I did not know where it was at,
but I went to the store and bought some camping stuff,
like a tent-
Was planning to go on a camping trip,
but I was surprised that he enough
to take Tracy and her kids,
probably tougher months before.
They just kept saying that
we was all going to go camping.
But then down Atlanta was like,
we're going to take Tionda and diamond first,
and then you and Victoria the next week.
My mama, she wasn't struggling,
but come on, you have four kids.
It was a hard time, and they felt like
they couldn't afford to take all four.
Victoria explained to me that Rita and
Victoria were at their grandmother's house
the night before the evening of the 5 July,
and Tionda and Hyman stayed home with Tracy.
I didn't really understand that,
I guess, you know, people have their
reasoning for doing things that they do.
There has to be a logical reason
why the four girls were separated.
We ended up dropping them off,
and I think we went back to the house.
Diamond and Tiani was there.
They were sleeping on the bed.
- What happened the rest of that evening?
- I just have to think back a little.
Okay, take your time.
We end up dropping them off and
I think we went back to the house,
or we either went somewhere with somebody,
into the house or somewhere we went.
That was it.
I got on the capture, laid down to sleep.
The next day I told Tiandi, I'm going to work.
After that, we go camping.
Don't open the door for nobody.
George took me to work.
He dropped me off.
- So you get to work at, like, about
seven in the morning? - Yes.
- Because I have to open up. Yes.
- Okay.
So you two adults are the only
two people that had knowledge,
that Tionda and diamond was in that apartment alone.
Right.
- When you left for work that morning?
- Yes.
They was there.
- No one else knew?
- No.
- Tracy was working what they used
to call the lunch program. - Yes.
After work, she was going on a camping trip.
Okay.
- And you started checking in on the girls by calling?
- Yes.
After that that morning.
I had like, a little lunch break, so
I called and I called and I called.
It wasn't no answer. It just kept going
to voicemail, voicemail, voicemail.
And i call my mom.
My mom and she kept calling.
- She kept calling the house too.
- Okay.
- At some point, George Washington returned.
- Yes.
Guess to pick me up.
George picked me up from work and coming home,
and the back door was open,
and we walked up the stairs and everything.
I put my key in the door and
I called for Dimet Giandi.
So I was nervous and like, where are they?
When Tracy entered her apartment
from work on the morning of the 6th,
around noonish, there was a note
that was discovered in the house.
There was a note on the back of the couch,
said that they were going to the school
and they was going up to the store.
I find it odd.
When we went up the stairs,
my mom opened the door.
My mom just knocked the TV
over and got the crying,
and got the call in the family.
My sister Marie told Tracy,
do not call the police.
Let's just look for the kids,
because if you call the police,
they're going to take Vicki and rita.
I was scared. I wanted to find like on my own...
to see if I can find them,
and see who house they went to and just look around.
So we went by the lake and
all over there and everything.
Searching and accident.
"Have you seen two little girls?"
They're like, no.
And in your mind you're thinking,
I left them alone.
- I could get in trouble for this?
- Yes.
To really reacquaint myself with this case,
I had to go back to where it all began.
I am here at the Lake Grove
Village apartment complex.
This is the home of Tracy Bradley
and her four children.
Around the side of the building was a door.
A side door that was easy access from her apartment.
The side door that was always held open by
a rock or something that they
stuck in it to get in and out.
Rarely did the kids use the front entrance,
which would be right here.
They always ran around to the side entrance.
This is the back entrance to Tracy's
building where back in 2001,
this back door was always open.
And now it's 2023 and the back door is still open.
I remember just going home and
everybody just being there
and everybody just looking so devastated
because something like this happening.
You really wouldn't think it
happened to our family, but it did.
And just seeing my mama crying,
putting towels around her forehead,
just crying, devastated.
Since my kids been going
just put a totally stop on my life.
Heartbreak.
I just talked to my Lord Jesus.
I never come outside.
It was sad. It had took a lot out of me
It had took a lot out of me.
You got to just let it out.
I remember calling my mom,
Said... call the police.
- Now mom knew before 7 hours went by.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
- Mom came over.
Yes.
I was in the detectives division
for approximately one month,
when the Bradley girls disappeared in 2001.
In my heart of hearts,
I felt like it was going to be a challenge
to locate,
Tionda and Diamond Bradley.
We were all sent out.
Have to 07:00 p.m.
On that same evening.
According to their mom, the girls
were not in the apartment,
when she returned home from
work at 11:00 in the morning.
That's an eight hour jump
that any bad guy has on us.
To be successful in locating these girls
and tracking where they could possibly be.
One Chicago neighborhood is focused on
two little girls who've been missing since Friday.
A massive police investigation followed by
air, water and along the railroad tracks.
Canine search teams went through empty lots,
and more than 5000 abandoned buildings.
The playgrounds on the south side of Chicago empty.
There's no kids out here.
It's like this now every day
since the children been missing.
That evening when people were getting home,
ending their business day,
that's when the city started to
find out that the girls were missing.
So we sprang into action.
We went to bronzeville,
o the scene where they
say they were missing from,
to find out who knew something.
Any small thing could help with pieces of this puzzle.
After having a briefing in our office
we went out,
and we were on the scene.
We were in the apartment.
I observed apartment was in normal disarray,
which means that tables weren't turned over.
It didn't appear to be a fight, but it was
just normal household items in the apartment.
Family members were there.
Other police officers were there.
It sort of became a scene of concern
for all of the police that were involved.
I interviewed the mom, Tracy Bradley,
for approximately an hour,
that morning.
Tracy Bradley leaves her home knowing
that Tionda and diamond is in the house by themselves.
And Tracy Bradley had with her her friend
George Washington at approximately 06:00 a.m.
When Tracy usually left for work,
they walked out of that apartment
and closed the door.
You know, in life, especially
when you have your own family
any working family leave their children
At home alone at that age.
It was common.
When she had stuff to do,
she left us in the house by herself.
- She did.
- Okay, but you were twelve.
Yeah, I was old enough.
At the very beginning,
in the deepest part of me,
I felt that somebody had the girls.
There was no signs of forced entry at the house.
All types of things were being said.
But in my heart of hearts,
I felt like the girls were kidnapped
by somebody that they knew.
And George and Tracy were the only two people,
that we can look at to bring more clarity,
to what happened to Tionda and diamond.
When speaking to Tracy, her demeanor
ranged from distraught to afraid to defensive.
After a few hours of the investigation,
Tracy Bradley explained to me
that everybody in the entire
Bradley family knew that
there was this mad search going on.
And George Washington, Tracy's
boyfriend, never got involved.
- Did you start looking for the kids..
- Yes.
For a lot of people's searching...
All of us, we all went out.
- Everybody in your family? Friends?
- Yes, people you know.
- Is George with you?
- Yes.
I was looking, you know,
he was just stayed in a car.
He stayed in a car.
He told Tracy to call him,
later, let him know what's going on
with Tionda and diamond that evening.
He never returns.
Tracy Bradley and her boyfriend, George Washington,
were the only two people who knew that
the girls were left in that apartment.
On the morning of the 6th
at approximately 06:00 a.m..
When Tracy usually left for work.
Tracy comes back to her home.
The girls are not in the apartment.
George comes up with her to the apartment.
George decides to leave.
Like everything else in this case,
it's hard to point at any one thing
as indicative of innocence or guilt,
but the timing adds to the other suspicious
activities and facts that have kind
of been piling up in this case.
But it's important to note that George
told the press that he, quote,
tried to help investigators
find them at the beginning.
According to their mom, she didn't
report them missing until after 07:00 p.m..
That's almost 8 hours that those girls were gone.
So I needed to find out what Tracy was doing,
during those 8 hours before police got involved.
This is the 31st street beach area.
They're at 31st street.
They lived at 35th street,
so that's a five block radius.
This is one of the first areas that Tracy Bradley came to,
as she have again informed us that
she was dropped off on the bridge,
by George Washington and
she walked over to the lakefront.
This is the area that Tracy Bradley walked to.
This is the area that the Chicago
Police Department searched,
and there were no signs of Tionda and Diamond Bradley.
Things kind of start kicking in for Tracy,
so she starts calling around to various neighbors,
various family members,
asking if they've seen the girls.
George Senior is the family friend who
lived nearby, tracy and the daughters.
And he was a family friend.
He was known.
So he was also just part of the family,
but not part of the family.
Would Tionda know enough to go over George Senior's apartment?
Yes, she knows.
The kids used to call George SR. Porgy.
- Porgy.
- Exactly.
- Did he babysit for you on occasion?
- A couple of times.
Did you happen to go to his house that
day and ask him if I'd seen the kids?
I think I went up there or either I called him.
Oh, you called. Okay.
He told you he had?
He said, yeah, I haven't see them.
He said, I haven't seen them.
July 6, 2001.
Tracy Bradley leaves her daughter's
home alone while she goes to work.
She returns to find a note saying
they were headed for this school.
They never made it.
I remember my mom just kept
saying she just left a letter,
and she just showed me the letter.
Me and diamond are not going
to the store into the school.
And I remember the exact words
because I read the letter.
The note said, we going to the store.
What store?
I was nervous and where are they? You Know?
Right. Of course
after speaking more with the family,
the note doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Tionda was ten, diamond was only three.
So it seems to me like a stretch that
a three year old could walk very far.
So I decide to retrace the route the
girls could have taken to go to the store
to determine the plausibility of that theory.
This could have possibly been the store
that Tionda and diamond was going to,
amongst other stores that's in the area.
We are a few blocks away from the complex,
Not a great distance for adults and children to walk,
but a great distance for children alone,
to walk to get to the Jewel Food Store.
It has not been stated that this is
the store that was indicated in the note,
but this is a store that's close by.
That could be the location that Tionda was speaking of.
Another theory important to reexamine,
is that the girls went to the nearby school playground.
This is the James Doolittle Elementary
School that Tionda attended.
And Tionda was also enrolled
in summer school in 2001.
But on July 6, Tionda did not attend school.
We don't have any reliable information
that they actually showed up there.
At least a dozen FBI agents have been working the case.
Diamond and Tionda's family found the note unusual,
because they said that the way the note was written
didn't reflect how she would usually have written something.
After the FBI got involved in the case,
fairly early on, after the girl's disappearance,
they did take the note that Tionda wrote
for her handwriting analysis,
to confirm that it was Tionda's
handwriting and not someone else's.
The results of which had not returned yet.
It wasn't going to come back for
a little while, and it's a process.
It takes time.
The next morning, the morning of July 7,
Faith, who is Tracy's sister,
was there in the apartment.
And Faith had recently set up
all of the family's cell phones.
She decided to listen to Tracy's voicemail,
and the family was shocked to find
there was a message from Tionda
from the day of the disappearance.
Does anybody know what time that message was left?
Does anybody recall?
I remember it was either 08:02 or 08:20 A.m..
I remembered that.
How did you guys come about?
Did she bring it to you?
Did she say, hey,
listen to this.
We were all sitting in Tracy's home
on the couch when we heard it.
Myself.
It was my mom.
Tracy was in the other room,
and it was a few other people that
was actually in the home during that time.
Okay.
It was majority of the family, and then
it was some of Tracy's closest friends.
- You don't recall who actually played?
- I don't recall.
- Did you hear the message?
- I did.
Tell me about it.
I said, is mommy, I'm going to the store with George.
So would it be unusual for George to show up at the door,
George Washington to show up at this door,
trying to get her to open that door?
I would say yes, it is.
Do you know where the message is?
Supposedly it got into the wrong
hands and it was deleted.
Whose hands?
Tracy said there was the voicemail left by Tionda.
The voicemail left so many questions unanswered,
and it actually lent to the speculation
that they really were abducted.
This was orchestrated, it was planned,
and they were trying to find out who.
Did you hear?
Tell me what you remember.
She said, mom, after the phone,
George is at the door.
He said something about Victoria cake.
Okay.
- And did you hear it? Victoria?
- Yeah, I heard the voice, mom.
That was about it.
Was there anything mentioned about a cake?
Yeah, her exact words were, "going to the store to
pick up Vicky a cake with George."
- When's your birthday?
- July 7.
That'll be why they'll get her a cake or something.
The thing that's strange about the
voicemail is that it mentions George.
So there's George Washington,
who was Tracy's boyfriend at the time.
There was also a neighbor named George.
This has caused some confusion in the
media because people said,
what if she was talking about the other George?
Perhaps he should be a suspect.
Look at these two Georges,
ask them to take polygraphs.
Another thing, Nancy.
Just because the girl said,
hey, George is at the door,
doesn't necessarily mean that it was George at the door.
Somebody may have presented themselves at George.
George, the neighbor went by
a very distinctive nickname
that the girls would have called him by.
George Senor was also referred
to by the family as Porgy.
We never called porgy. George. Never in our life.
- We never went by that name.
- So there's no misunderstanding.
No misunderstanding.
They found the note at 11:50 or so.
11:50 tutor at George Senor's house.
She tells George Senor that she's looking for the kids.
- George Senor used to babysit the kids, remember?
- Yes.
There's a lot of speculation in my mind.
Tionda had to be talking about George Washington,
tracy's boyfriend at the time.
Would it have been normal for George
to want to buy a cake for Vicky's birthday?
No.
Okay. So what do you think about the message?
It was weird to me because...
how are you supposed to go
camping and you weren't about a cake?
F they go to camping on the six or something,
why would you buy a cake for
my birthday if y'all gonna be gone.
I always found it odd.
Odd.
That was Victoria's birthday, one of the days
that they were supposed to go camping.
Speaking with Rita and Victoria,
I'm impressed by how much they remember.
But I never stopped asking myself different questions.
As to if you're going on a camping trip,
why go to the grocery store for Victoria?
Another thing that's strange about
the voicemail is that outside of the family
no one has ever been able to confirm its existence.
Some people say that it was accidentally deleted.
Some people say it's in the possession of the FBI.
But no one that I've spoken to in law enforcement
has been able to confirm the existence of the voicemail.
But multiple family members say that they did hear it.
I recorded it from the speaker on there with my phone.
- Okay.
- And I took it and sent it to my email,
my email address as an audio file.
Okay.
- You sent the recording to your email?
- Yes
- Do you still have it?
- I do.
- Can we hear it?
- I can't.
I would love to be able to access it,
but if I don't put the correct code in it to get it,
because I had some technical
help to protect my emails,
if I could, I would, but I'm sure that it'll destroy it.
Okay.
While re interviewing the family,
their statements have me questioning some things,
the note and the voicemail.
In my opinion, it feels like
everybody has a different story.
I have to explore this more.
Shalia Smith, tracy's aunt, has a copy of the message.
I begged her to give that to me.
I told her I'd fly anywhere
in the world on my own dime,
with a tech from Chicago to get that message.
And we have never, to this day heard that message.
This whole situation is just and like I told you,
this is really a messed up situation.
She's holding on to it.
That doesn't make sense.
Why would anybody hold that message?
- What do you think about that message?
- Well, he's real.
It had to be. If she left the
message on the phone.
There is really a message that
Tionda left that George is at the door.
George Washington has also confirmed to the media,
that he, quote, took Tracy to work that morning,
but denied showing up at the apartment later,
when the girls allegedly called their mom,
to say someone was at the door.
I asked George Washington about that message.
What did he say?
He said, I don't know why she would
say I was at the door. I wasn't there.
Did you ever speak with Tracy about what happened?
Well, after I got there, and
she was still being questioned.
Questioned by the police department, Chicago police.
Bradley a single mother of four,
she's had to withstand the subtle,
and not so subtle accusations that she
somehow was to blame for the girl's disappearance.
How were you feeling about the police when
they took you in to question you and talk to you,
and more than one time, am I right about it?
How did you feel about that?
- I felt really kind of angry.
- Okay.
- You felt like you were being tortured.
- Yeah. They hit the table.
You know, where those damn kids at?
My first conversation with Tracy about
that is when they were questioning her.
And I had asked them how long she been in there.
And she came back to the house.
And so I looked at Tracy, and Tracy says,
why is everybody looking at me
like I did something to my kids?
And at that point, I think I was so angry,
like, you supposed to know where your kids are.
You're supposed to know what the hell happened. Okay.
So I jumped up to grab her because
i was going to just push her off.
It's okay. Take your time.
I just wanted to push her out the window,
because I felt if you would have left them,
they would be gone.
And Tracy left.
She waited till I went in the
back and left out the door.
She didn't want to have a confrontation with you.
Nobody wanted to have a confrontation with me.
Tracy couldn't deal with the
questions for her,
in a citywide. Manhunt,
we're looking at everybody,
whether you're the mother, the brother,
sister, father, it doesn't matter.
We need some answers.
Tracy shut down.
We were trying to identify
certain things that we were told.
Such as they were going on a
camping trip later that evening.
I expected to see something that would say,
" yes, we are really doing this,
we're going on a camping trip."
But I didn't see anything that told me,
they were going camping.
I just wondered where the tent was at.
Or were they just going to go for a picnic and come back?
Maybe that's what they call the camping trip.
It was Victoria's birthday, one of the days
that they were supposed to go camping.
So maybe mom was going to
celebrate it when they got back.
But I always thought that that was odd.
I understand leaving Tionda with Diamond because
Tionda and Diamond were very close.
But how they made the determination to take
Rita and Vicki to Grandma's house that night,
usually when they would go over there,
the four of them would go together,
or at least three of the four.
How they determine that is, I don't know.
I would love to find that out.
It's definitely a question that needs to be asked.
So Rita and Victoria were not going camping.
And I get it that you say you don't really have an answer
as to why all four girls were not going, right.
There was not enough to charge Tracy with anything.
I suspected George Washington as being the
offender of the two girls going missing.
I felt that way because he and Tracy knew that
Tionda and Diamond were alone in the apartment
when Tracy Bradley left, and they
were the only two people who knew.
There were several things going on in
Tracy Bradley's life with George Washington
that I don't think has ever really come
to light as to why George would hurt these girls.
Also, it's since come out Tracy had sued
George for paternity, saying that diamond was his.
I don't get the impression that
George wanted to pay for a child.
So Tracy sued him for paternity.
hey took his DNA,
the results of which had not returned yet.
When George found out that you
had diamond, what was his reaction?
He was upset because I think
during that time he was married.
He was married.
I believe that he didn't want diamond,
and that's why he wasn't claiming her.
He didn't ever want Diamond. I don't know if it's
because he had a wife or he had other women.
I don't know what the case is, but I
feel like he didn't want to deal with that.
- So you were kind of going it on your own with Diamond?
- Yes.
Sometimes you don't know which
way the anger this man is coming from.
What threats did he make?
Used to always say, if you leave me, I kill you.
He always threw a lot of threats to me and my family.
Do you think that he gave you
the respect that you deserve?
Not at all. No respect.
- But you still loved him. Why?
- Yes.
Because I saw interest in him.
I just really loved this man,
you know what I'm saying?
Thought that he to be the right one
for me and all and everything.
He was the trickster in Tracy's life,
but Tracy loved him.
Tracy wanted him to be in her life,
but Tracy wanted more from him.
She wanted him to love her.
Something that he was never going to do.
The investigation was starting to
focus in on George Washington.
Several days after the girls disappeared,
George Washington's house and car were searched
Receipts that they found in his
home indicate that on July 7.
So the day after the girl's disappearance,
he went to a hardware store where he purchased a
large package of industrial trash bags,
and two pairs of gloves.
When the police came to his home, there
were five trash bags missing from that roll,
and one of the pairs of gloves was never found.
George Washington told the police that the trash
bags had been used in a home renovation project,
and that he had filled them and disposed
of them in a dumpster in a nearby park.
This is the same location that George Washington
claimed to have brought those garbage
bags over to the lagoon area.
He rode with CPD detectives over here
to give them the exact location
as to where the garbage cans were and where the garbage was,
but by the time they got here, it had been taken.
When they spoke to George's neighbors,
the neighbors said that they had seen George
Washington burning something in a barrel in his garage.
I actually found one of the young men sitting on the porch,
and he said George Washington was
burning the barrels in his backyard,
and had taken the barrel after it cooled
and threw the barrel in the trunk.
George Washington denied that this ever
happened and also denied even owning a barrel.
However, when the FBI went to investigate, they found
evidence of charring on the rafters of his garage.
And in the trunk of his car, they found
striations that were consistent with the
size and shape of an industrial barrel,
the kind of industrial barrel that his neighbors
said that they saw him burning something in.
George Washington was really scrutinized.
But again, nothing much led to him being a person of interest,
just questions and no answers.
George gave a statement to the media saying,
I don't know who did anything.
I just know that I had nothing to do with it.
But I have had a lot of different scenarios
go through my mind as to why George would hurt these girls.
It has crossed my mind that it's the possibility,
George didn't want to pay Tracy child support,
kill diamond, and Tionda saw it.
Therefore, he had to kill Tionda as well.
Is that a possibility? Absolutely, it is.
George Washington. We put him on
a polygraph back in 2001.
The brass of the police department just loved polygraphs.
I think they just thought the sun rose and set on them.
Although they're not admissible,
polygraphs are a tool that we use.
They're not the be all, end all.
I've seen people that I've known
were guilty pass them.
I've seen people that were innocent fail them.
But in George's defense, he passed a polygraph.
The consensus was,
wherever the girls are, they went
with someone that they knew.
And then all of the speculation at that
time was around George Washington,
where it led all of us to believe if he
didn't do it, he knows something.
And what is he hiding?
- George, can we talk to you for just a moment?
- No comment at all?
There's no comment at all.
There was not enough to charge
George with anything.
Charge Tracy with anything.
At this point, they're just two people might
have the answers to the last steps
that Tionda and Diamond took inside of that apartment.
After a few days of the investigation,
Tracy shut down.
Tracy stopped communicating with the police
department when the questions for her got tough.
I get it. I understand that.
Not being able to deal and just the initial
trauma of dealing with your two daughters,
that's missing. I understand that.
But as a detective, I still need to do my
due diligence and probe this further.
At some point, you shut down and no longer wanted
to communicate with the Chicago police department.
Like, they took.
Like I was a criminal.
I wasn't.
You took...
me being afraid. You know what I'm saying?
Scared.
Tell me what you're afraid of.
You didn't want what happened.
I go to jail.
I took Rita and Victoria to school.
You know, they followed me everywhere.
Detectives and everything.
And detectives, get out the car, threw me to the gate,
put me in a car, had me handcuffed and everything.
They take me through a tunnel and stuff.
They take me out through there.
The sergeant came in,
and he found out who I was,
and he told them, take them damn handcuffs off right now.
Why did they arrest you?
For no reason.
No reason at all. I didn't talk to them.
I didn't do anything to them.
And, see, that's another reason
why I kind of went back a little bit,
because I felt that, you know.
You felt what?
Disrespectful.
It's sad.
It's sad she shut the police department
down when they were trying to help her.
But it doesn't make sense.
It just doesn't make sense.
- She had, I think, two arrests her entire life.
- I know that.
Why would she shut us down?
This case has always been very complex,
but one of the most solid leads we have to go on,
is the note that Tionda left in the apartment.
After a certain amount of time,
The note that Tionda left,
it was examined by law enforcement,
and it was confirmed that it was her handwriting.
Would Tionda have left a note on her own?
Reading it? I'm like, nah,
that's not the way Tionda speaks.
Well, Tionda did have a minor reading disabilities,
Okay.
That's why she was in summer school,
because she had reading problems.
Okay.
For example, if you said, need
write the word, "I need to go",
it'll be I need, but
it might have been N-E-I-D versus N-E-E-D.
Do you think Tionda wrote the note?
Yeah, I think she wrote it.
She was forced to write it, but it was her handwritten,
because we never had to write a
note when we knew my mom's number.
If we was always in the house by ourselves, we'll call her.
My sister fate without another note that
Tionda had wrote and compared the two.
- The grammar doesn't sound like it.
- It doesn't match.
It doesn't match.
I felt that it had to be somebody that t
hey knew who forced Tionda,
but who.
Chicago hasn't given up on diamond and Tionda.
A private investigator even volunteered his services.
I'm Foster. I'm a local private investor
in the Chicago, Illinois area.
Late August of 2001,
I was asked to join the case to assist
the local law enforcement agency,
interviewing people that did not have a good
relationship with Chicago police department at the time.
Investigator Foster is an excellent investigator.
Gave me a bridge to the family.
When I did my due diligence on them,
I found that they didn't have
much of much contact with the police at all.
Yeah, I talked to Foster
and we sit up on the phone sometimes
at twelve 01:00 in the morning,
and I'll be crying.
And he gives me good vibes.
And then at the end of the day, he prayed with me.
I had got acquainted with the investigator foster,
and my mind was set that this would be the
firm that helped look for Tionda and Diamond.
These would be the private investigators.
With diamond before her disappearance,
Tracy had asked George to take a paternity test.
And three weeks after the girls disappeared.
But after George Washington's house and car
were searched, the results of it came back.
Dna testing was completed.
And it's safe to say that the test came back positive.
That George Washington is the father of Diamond.
Yes, that right.
The hairs kind of go up on my neck.
Because there could be several things
that could have taken place.
Especially George was so determined
to not pay child support.
It just brings to life so many other conclusions
that we can come to about what
happened to Tionda and Diamond.
We're talking about a three year old and a ten year old.
They just don't walk off the face of the earth.
The first thing that popped into my mind was to
do more of a serious investigation of George Washington.
The paternity came back positive that
George was the father diamond.
So when diamond and Tionda went missing,
George got out from underneath paying paternity.
George's first wife from Detroit was named diamond.
When Tracy told me that in the interview,
you could have knocked me over with a feather,
I'm like, oh, boy, this is getting interesting.
But he denied paternity, so George knew
he was going to end up paying.
George has maintained that he is not Diamond's father.
This has always perplexed me,
so I feel that I need to dig deeper on this.
- He was married to a woman named diamond?
- Yes.
And I named my baby after her,
because...
she's the normal.
He just didn't want. I don't think he
really wanted to be to have that baby.
He was upset.
He was just upset.
He was upset.
He already lied.
Said he couldn't have any kids
because he had a vasectomy.
So when diamond came,
i knew he lied about that.
And then when...
- He lied to you a lot, didn't he?
- Yeah, exactly.
But all the time...
I never saw the wife,
but I think the wife when the wife
found out about Diamond,
I think she completely left.
And you've been in a relationship with this man for,
at least... I mean, Diamond's three.
Three, yes.
So at least three years.
George Washington was the biological father of Diamond.
And it seems like all the evidence
seems to point to George Washington.
But it's always been circumstantial evidence.
Unfortunately, we live in the world where there has to
be certain evidence to meet the burden of proof.
Months have passed. Leeds had gone.
Cold.
And when leads start to go cold,
resources are diverted to other
more pressing cases that are fresher.
Without fresh leads, there's not
much more that they can do.
The unthinkable happened today.
The World Trade center, both towers gone,
and we are all witnesses to it.
And to some degrees, degree, we are all victims.
The girls disappeared on July 6 of 2001,
and two months later was the September 11 attacks.
At the time, huge amounts of resources
were suddenly being diverted
to potential terror attacks and that sort of thing.
And so not only did the media attention on the case dry up,
but I believe also some of the interest from
law enforcement,
because of kind of the situation in the rest of the country.
I'm staying in the house 24 24.
I don't even come outside no more.
I even stopped it.
I think the further that the Bradleys got
from the day of the disappearance,
the more difficult things became.
They were left almost on their own.
Whoever you are, your family knows what you did.
Y'all need to break the silence.
Every year, there's a vigil.
Every year, you know, there's a little bit on the news,
and every year it becomes less and less.
When my nieces were missing, I was 39.
Going on 40.
2001 was a felt like a death sentence.
2002 felt like an execution. 2003 felt
like I was up on the chopping box.
But they still had it in their mind
that they would probably find them.
Four difficult years later, Tracy Bradley's
prayers have yet to be answered.
Some leads were coming in that could just
change the trajectory of an investigation,
including a discovery of some bones.
And when that came across, it was immediate,
like, let's find out what's going on
in a missing person's case.
That's a total game changer.
Back in May 2005, there was a major
discovery on the south side of Chicago.
So I decide to drive out to that location
about 20 minutes from the Bradley's home,
to see if anything new will come back to me.
There were some workers working out
here along these railroad tracks,
and some bones were discovered.
And so, of course, the police department came out
immediately, and they brought forensics with them,
and they did gather the bones that were found.
Human bones found at a far south side construction
site are being sent to an FBI lab in Virginia
or DNA testing.
It's possible that the bones could have belonged
to one of the missing Bradley sisters.
News of the bones has been both good
and unsettling at this southside church.
Ten year old Tionda and three year old
Diamond Bradley's family or members,
revered forensic scientist Dr. Clyde Snow, best known
for working with the John Wayne Gacy case,
was called in to analyze and test the bones that were found.
They were of a teenage girl.
There was reason for concern because of her age,
and they didn't quite have her ethnic
background profile worked up.
And of course, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't Tionda,
because she would have been too old to
be diamond, according to the bone sizes.
Friends at the church say the girl's family would like some closure,
but at the same time, they still hold up
that Tionda and Diamond are still alive.
Course, you know, the FBI came out, forensics came out,
and the FBI did a DNA analysis on the remains that were found.
And it turned out to not be any association
with Tionda or Diamond Bradley.
It was not them.
There was a sigh of relief,
because that still gives you hope that the girls are still alive,
with a case that was this big.
I mean, there's, I think, six file cabinets
full of information on the case.
I still forged forward. I would work leads when they came in.
And a very good bit of advice that the lieutenant
gave me was start from the beginning.
So that's where I started.
And I came upon what I thought at the
time was a tremendous piece of evidence.
There was hairs recovered from the trunk
of George Washington's car in 2001,
when detectives had gone to George's house
a couple of days after the kids had gone missing,
For some unknown reason, the hairs
were never submitted to the crime lab.
Investigators did find evidence,
including a hair in a trunk of a car,
but nothing conclusive enough to make an arrest.
To know that there was evidence or potential evidence,
that was just sitting there knowingly, untested.
Is disappointing.
It's actually infuriating.
You have two girls that are missing.
Whatever evidence you come across,
you make sure it's processed.
You don't leave it out. You just don't.
This is the first positive piece of evidence
that we've recovered in years,
and it was recovered from George's trunk.
So I submitted these hairs to the FBI crime lab at Quantico,
to see if it was a match to Tionda and diamond.
I was sitting in the state's attorney's office with an
assistant state's attorney that was...
I was keeping up to date on the case,
and we got a call that the hair came back a
mitochondrial match to Tionda and Tracy.
And I was ecstatic.
And the state's attorney's office
kind of tempered my enthusiasm,
by saying it wasn't going to be enough to bring anybody in,
and I'm not an expert on that kind of stuff, so...
kind of burst my balloon at that point.
I still took it as a positive.
I was energized by it.
That does sound a bit incriminating when you hear it on its face,
but there are a variety of ways that may have happened.
The little girl may have put her backpack in
Tracy's boyfriend's car on her way to school one day,
or she may have placed an object in the trunk that
may have had a piece of her hair on it.
And so there just wasn't enough evidence.
George had always denied that the hairs
were in his trunk for any suspicious reasons,
but I still have questions.
In a prior interview, Washington had said
he used to put the kids in the trunk,
and sneak them into the drive in.
Well, I couldn't find any drive ins that were
open in the Chicagoland area back in 2001.
Most of them were closed.
Did you and George and the girls ever go to a drive in,
a drive in theater that you can recall,
or a movie theater, for that matter?
Do you ever recall George putting your girls in
the trunk of his car to sneak them into a drive in?
No.
Why would he say he took your girls and you to the drive in?
Why would he say that?
I don't say that he took me to a drive in.
I don't recall.
You taking me to no drive in.
He said, that never happened.
You never remember nothing like that?
I talked to George about that.
I said, george, why was Tionda were in your car?
And he said that he snuck him into the movie theater.
And I say, but Tracy said, y'all never went to the drive in.
He said, that's a damn lie.
He never put you in the trunk of his car?
I never got in his trunk or nothing.
Never.
Never went to a movie with him, never went on.
- Not to Chuck E. Cheek?
- It was never like that.
That's all I'm like, no, never went to the movies with him.
Never got in his trunk, never went nowhere,
ever.
In 2003, there was a very interesting
development that piqued our interest.
Tracy had another baby, George Washington.
Now, there's a little boy, George Jr.
And so George took her to court in 2011 to get custody.
I believe that George played mind games with Tracy.
He would make her feel like he
loved her at some sometimes,
and then at other times, he would make her
feel like she was the dirt under his feet.
- Eventually. You had a second baby.
- Yes.
- Which is George Jr.
- Yes.
- You lost custody of George Jr.
- Yes, I did.
I fought the best fight I can I could,
and I didn't have a lawyer.
I didn't have no money.
You know what I'm saying?
- He disappointed you in your life?
- Yeah.
And you feel like he stole your children out of your life?
I feel like he snatched a lot of stuff for me.
My dignity, my heart, my mom.
I know she's passed away.
She's turning over now.
My children,
me knowing that late night in the house with me.
Can't sleep. Sometimes.
To live in fear is no way to live.
As time went on, despite the case remaining unsolved,
occasionally the media would revisit the story,
which has helped in keeping this
case present in people's minds.
I do appreciate the national media outlets
who did highlight this case all the time.
Tv one, they had a show called find our missing,
and one episode was dedicated to diamond and Tionda.
We reached out to George Washington
via Facebook, and he responded.
He said he wouldn't agree to an
interview, but he did say this.
It's funny that the family points the finger at me,
but the courts seem to feel differently.
A woman in Indiana named Letitia Hicks
commented on that piece on their website,
saying that she had information about where George
Washington was the day that the girls disappeared,
and that that information implicated him in their disappearance.
- My next person that I'm going to bring up, Ed.
- Yes.
Is Miss Letitia Hicks.
What do you know about this lady, Letitia Hicks?
So, I received a message from her stating that
she know what happened to the girl.
Had to get it off her chest that
George showed up at her house.
He had been drinking, he was shaken.
So received a message from her that she
think George has something to do with it.
- So you text her back?
- Yeah, of course.
Because I want to answer.
Well, when I interviewed Letitia, she said
that George had blood on him.
He had a pair of oversized gym shorts underneath his pants.
He took a shower at her house.
- Took a shower at her house?
- Yes.
When police followed up with her about that, however,
the timeline did not match up
at all with the facts of the case.
So she first claimed that this incident had happened on the 4 July,
which is two days before the girls disappeared.
In addition to that, even if she had gotten the date wrong.
So even if this alleged incident had happened on July 6,
when the girls did disappear,
Washington's cell phone records do not match up
at all with her version of the story.
So she lives in Indiana,
and his cell phone records show him to be definitively
in the Chicago area for the entirety of the day.
I'll be the first one to say I dismissed her too quickly.
I wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.
It won't be the last.
But again, I just wish I could find something that ties her to him.
- And that's why the negative Nellie is coming up.
- Okay.
Despite the fact that this case is 22 years old,
every year brings new surprises.
And in May of 2023, I learn of a new development.
Good afternoon. We begin today with a possible break in a
Chicago missing persons case that's more than 20 years old.
A woman claims she is diamond,
and she's gone to the FBI.
Here with Diamond Bradley.
This is Diamond Bradley.
Can I see your scar?
She still have that scar?
Shalia Bradley Smith said this young woman submitted a swab
of DNA and fingerprints at an FBI office in Texas earlier this week.
If what this woman in Texas is saying is true, this
could be the biggest break in the case in 22 years.
The Bradley family and I decide to fly to Texas,
where this woman is located,
to try to meet her and see if there's any truth to her story.
So we're sitting here with Tracy Bradley
and April Bradley and investigator Foster,
and we have traveled from Chicago to Houston, Texas,
all because a young lady put on
TikTok that she is Diamond Bradley.
And Tracy's feeling was that you wanted to come here
to meet the girl that could possibly be your daughter.
Just to meet my daughter that
has been missing for 22 years.
- And you would know immediately,
- and I would know immediately
to know that that's my daughter. Yes.
If she really are diamond, I want to make sure that
she gets the help that she needing to the right peoples.
So I end up facetiming her while I was at work.
And I just asked her, I said, what
made you think that you're diamond?
And her response was, the way that she grew up and,
and her parents are treating her wrong every
time I ask a question about where I'm from.
And I said, well, you know what? I have the
right person for you to get in contact with.
So that's when I contacted Detective Foster.
Okay, so all of these conversations
has led us to where we are right now,
right here at this moment.
Once in Texas, we set up a phone call
with the young lady claiming to be diamond.
Our hope is that she will meet with us
that afternoon to reunite her with Tracy,
and determine if she really is diamond after all.
Yes, I'm here. I'm here.
I'm here.
The point is, we're working that.
If it's not, no DNA came in.
Why did y'all fly all the way from Chicago to Houston?
What was the point to be here?
Because the mother of diamond wants to
meet her daughter. That's all.
Okay, that's fine. I know. I understand that.
But why does she want to meet her without a DNA?
Listen, we don't know when the DNA is going to come back.
At the end of the day, we are here trying to unite a family.
That's all we're here for.
Yeah. I'm sorry.
You said you're not comfortable
until you get the results back.
Yes, to be honest,
and I honestly feel like we should all meet
at the FBI office if that's what it's given
because I don't feel comfortable meeting anybody anywhere.
Let me ask you this. Would you be comfortable
doing a zoom right now or not?
Why would I do a zoom?
And I haven't even got the DNA back.
I've had to deactivate all my social media.
No, I don't want to do anything.
I don't even want nobody to see me.
I let my auntie see me, and that was good enough.
Until I get that DNA back, I don't want to see nobody.
I don't want to talk to nobody.
I don't even know if you, who you date with.
Oh, my God. I'm done.
Okay, no problem. All right.
Damn.
Now it makes me feel like it's just bull
She fool.
Let's just sit down.
People are backing off for whatever reason,
so they got all night until we leave tomorrow to make a decision.
This is the game. Back and forth.
We just wait for the given. And if anything,
whenever she want to meet again, we'll fly back down.
If she ever want to meet again, we're down for it.
Father God, as we stand here, as humble as we are,
looking for a resolution,
Father God, guide us, give us understanding.
Give this mother, Father God, your son's blood that,
the family is looking to reunite with this
individual who claimed to be diamond.
The DNA results did not come back while we were in Texas,
and have yet to be revealed.
But back in Chicago, the family has not lost hope.
It will be 22 years in July that the sisters have been missing.
Been a long, long journey, and
hopefully that this journey will be over.
I don't know when.
I can't promise you guys when,
but just hoping it'll be over.
I just hope and hope that they
return home to me and my family.
Another year has passed, and still diamond
and Tionda Bradley are not home.
I thank each and everyone for coming out again.
It has been 22 years, and,
next year is going to continue.
every year, is going to continue going on and on
until we find diamond and Tionda. Okay?
I need you guys support. I love you guys.
And continue supporting my family.
What do you think happened?
The honest, truest.
- What's in your heart,
- Man.
I think it's worse.
So you really don't want to think the worst
about a situation?
I still be thinking it's a possibility.
But I have my daddy.
I feel like they're gone.
That's my mama's seed.
That's my mama's generation.
That's my mama's blood.
I can't let that go.
I will do what I have to do to find my nieces.
These are my nieces.
Everybody in the family should be as adamant as
i am about finding Tionda and Diamond.
Everybody.
Thousands of man hours from the Chicago police Department,
people like us have been put into this.
I'm going to ask you point blank,
do you know what happened to your kids?
No. I would have told you.
I want justice for 21 years of suffering.
Couldn't go outside now.
Somebody saying they're going to miss Bradley.
She has something to do with them kids being missing.
And I'm strong and I'm better.
Even though I was just in Texas with Tracy,
we've received some new information that sends
our heads spinning about her phone records.
So I'm on my way to meet Tracy for a follow up interview,
to discuss an inconsistency in her story that has come to light.
I have to know what Tracy doesn't want to say,
what Tracy's afraid of.
On the evening of the fifth, on the night when he, say the 6th,
he's talking about anytime after midnight?
No, I was at home.
You did not go to George Washington's house?
No, because I had to go to work the next day,
just that day, on that date, midnight.
I mean, I have to be at work at 07:00.
Go ahead.
So here's what's happening.
Well, you had previously told me on the night of the fifth,
after dropping off Victoria and Rita,
that you were at your place,
is that we have some information that
calls were made to your home,
between the hours of seven and 02:00 a.m.
That's right.
I don't remember.
- And you were not home?
- on the fifth?
Well, 02:17 a.m.
Is the 6th.
- And so.
- I'm.
- Yes.
- And it's going into the 6th?
- Yes.
- No, I was at home.
- Well,
- we got the facts. We just need you.
- Maybe I did. Maybe I did.
- You did what.
- What was that, Mr. Washington house.
- That night of the 6th?
The night of the 6th.
It's possibility that you left Tionda and Diamond.
Go ahead, I'm listening.
Yeah.
- Yeah, what?
- How was that, Mr. Washington?
Tell me how you know.
Because early in the morning the sun was shining,
and I remember coming down State street.
We was coming down State street early in the morning.
We took...
We never did get on expressway. Okay.
-Okay.
- I remember coming down.
We took the spreadway,
and we was coming up from 47 ramp and we got off.
And he dropped me off right in front of the job.
- It you remember that now?
- Yeah..
Okay.
What time is that? Do you remember?
Oh, I had to be at work at
seven because I had to open up.
I had to open up and I had to because I was
doing serving lunch for the summer school.
You know, for the summer school stuff for the kids.
Park. Dystopy.
It's all right. It's all right.
Come on, we got to be strong here.
Come.
So while you were at George's house that night,
what did you guys do?
I don't know. We probably get
something to eat, you know.
Just go know to the house.
Did you guys stop any place to get company
before you arrived at his house that night?
We stopped it, burke him right down.
I don't even know.
Okay, so the question still hasn't been answered.
The question is, why did you tell the police department,
that you last saw your children that
morning before you went to find it?
-I'm sorry?
- I'm Scared.
Then just say it, Tracy.
It's okay to say it.
It's all right to be afraid.
It's okay.
We're going to see you through this.
Tracy has been so inconsistent in her behavior,
in her interviews,
she nonetheless is now stating,
which is totally different from what
has ever been reported to CPD,
that she didn't leave her house at six in the morning and said,
Tionda, don't open the door and
don't go outside for anybody.
She's telling me that she spent the night
at George Washington's house.
This means that the girls were on their own all night,
from the evening of July 5 all the way through July 6,
with no supervision.
I was shocked simply because
that has been her story all along.
Now, part of the problem is that we can't
establish some sort of timeline
of what time did all of this actually occur.
We don't definitively know what time
the kids are going missing.
Now that the timeline for when the
girls disappeared has changed,
I've decided to form a task force to get to the
bottom of what really happened to the girls.
We can bring something to the table to
try and find Tionda and Diamond.
At this point, there's a lot of information
that we're still seeking,
and we will bring a successful solution in prosecuting this case,
for the individuals that are responsible for
Diamond and Tionda being missing.
And we are going to crack this thing wide open,
and we're going to bring some peace to this family,
some peace to this city,
and some peace to ourselves.
Because this is what we've been waiting for.
We need to let the spiders out. Clear the webs.
Let us get into your secrets.
Everybody has secrets. Every family.
That's what we are going to do here
with working this investigation.
I want to know what you don't want me to know.
And somebody knows what
happened to Tionda and Diamond.
Most people, when they hear Special Victims Unit,
think of television drama.
For me, it's been my life.
Since 2001,
People have known me as someone
who closes missing person cases.
But there's one case that has
remained unsolved for 22 years,
since my first year as a detective on the job,
until now.
July 6, 2001.
Tracy Bradley leaves her daughter's
home alone while she goes to work.
She returns to find a note saying
they were headed for this school.
They never made it.
We were all sent out,
every able body that's working for
the Chicago Police Department.
A massive police investigation by air,
water, and along the railroad tracks.
It was the biggest manhunt that
the city of Chicago ever had.
22 years, five lead detectives.
Several of them have died
since these girls disappeared.
We've since seen 911,
a housing crisis, and a major pandemic.
And yet diamond and Tionda Bradley are still missing.
From the very beginning,
there were elements to this
story that just didn't sit right,
within the community at the South Side of Chicago.
From what I understand,
there's been a great deal of
suspicion against the mother.
That's not to say that she's guilty of anything.
This case has haunted me for 22 years.
At the heart of it, the Bradley
family has changed forever.
I saw my mom coming my way,
and she was just like, Rita, have you seen Tionda and diamond?
I'm like, no.
And then she was like, Get up, they missing.
I was feeling like something is wrong.
The mystery remains and the case is wide open.
And somebody knows what
happened to Tionda and diamond.
When the Bradley girls disappeared,
In 2001,
I was a new detective.
I gave all of my missing persons
cases the dedication,
everything I had to give for 29 years
with the Chicago Police Department.
If a victim has been missing for a year,
or maybe nine months, that is so unusual.
But for Tionda and diamond, these
girls have been missing for 20 years.
My name is Ed Carroll.
I'm a retired Chicago Police detective.
I was a Chicago police officer for 26 years.
I retired in 2013.
I was a detective for 13 years.
I still missed the job.
I came upon the Bradley case when I got signed to
Bradley in the Cold case department.
This case did become the largest missing
persons investigation in Chicago,
that we had ever seen in the city at the time.
For the Bradley family, the
summer of 2001 was like any other.
The 4 July was two days before the girls disappeared.
Our July 4 celebrations in Chicago are
very robust, very loud, very crowded.
No matter where you go.
You can ride down any street in any neighborhood,
and you can smell the barbecue coming from the grills.
You can hear the kids playing.
Maybe you can see the ice cream truck.
You hear the firework.
The 4 July 2001,
was one of the last times that the family was all together.
For Tracy, the girl's mother, it was a good day.
You guys had a family outing, is that correct?
On the 4 July?
Where was that?
Washington park.
We had a little thing out there and we had fun.
- Like a family barbecue?
- Yes, something like that.
Me, my mom and some of my cousins and
my auntie now we had went to Washington Park.
That was the 4 July, we was by the lake.
Because I remember we had a ball
and diamond kept hitting the ball in the water.
So I remember that,
Keanda the only one different color that day.
We all had on purple, Tionda had on green,
-and diamond had purple.
- ponytails with the twisties going down.
How old were you in 2001 and Victoria?
- Eight.
- nine.
It's essential with missing
people to retrace their steps.
In the days leading up to their disappearance.
You never know what detail might
emerge that breaks the case open.
This is Washington Park.
This is the park that Tracy Bradley
and her family spent 4 July together.
The last place that the family spent time
with Tionda, Diamond, Victoria and Rita.
Altogether.
My niece Tracy had four kids.
We've always just been one big family.
Oh, Lord have mercy.
I write them down as each baby is born.
At the time, I was in my early 20s.
Keanda was ten and diamond was three.
Keanda was very outspoken, very mature for her age.
She knew how to cook. During that time.
She was a little mini adult, to be honest.
So she took that role of having a big personality.
So that way you knew who she were.
Diamond had borettes and beads all the time.
She was a baby.
She can talk as much as I
would say, at least 20 words.
Diamond was more the shy one.
At the time, the girl's mom,
Tracy was dating a friend of hers
named George Washington.
Reexamining the facts of this case 22 years later.
I want to ask the family more about him.
Let's talk a little bit about your relationship with George.
You had been dating him for how long?
Wow, since 90, 95, 96.
And we've been there.
She didn't like George. She loves him.
She was in love with George.
And I've never seen her as
happy as I was with George.
- What did he do?
- It was just the attention.
The attention.
He would show up at her house and
just spend time with her,
and talk with her.
We would go out for a little bit,
and at time he'd come and get me
and we'd just go to his house.
My understanding is that George
was never close to the girls.
Only time we probably been connected with Georg,
if we at my grandma house or he pick us up,
because mama she'll go pick us up from there.
She'll pick all of us up and take us
home so we get ready and go to school.
I never been to his house, never
been to eat with him, never in life.
- Moving on to the 5 July?
- Yes.
- You were home with all your daughters, correct?
- Yes.
July 5, George Washington asked,
"do we want to go camping?"
He asked you on the 5 July if you wanted to go camping?
I have to go back to refresh my memory.
It might have probably been about
a week ago or something like that.
So a week prior to July 5.
Right, here was, he say so that
he wanted to go camping.
It was over your weekend.
I did not know where it was at,
but I went to the store and bought some camping stuff,
like a tent-
Was planning to go on a camping trip,
but I was surprised that he enough
to take Tracy and her kids,
probably tougher months before.
They just kept saying that
we was all going to go camping.
But then down Atlanta was like,
we're going to take Tionda and diamond first,
and then you and Victoria the next week.
My mama, she wasn't struggling,
but come on, you have four kids.
It was a hard time, and they felt like
they couldn't afford to take all four.
Victoria explained to me that Rita and
Victoria were at their grandmother's house
the night before the evening of the 5 July,
and Tionda and Hyman stayed home with Tracy.
I didn't really understand that,
I guess, you know, people have their
reasoning for doing things that they do.
There has to be a logical reason
why the four girls were separated.
We ended up dropping them off,
and I think we went back to the house.
Diamond and Tiani was there.
They were sleeping on the bed.
- What happened the rest of that evening?
- I just have to think back a little.
Okay, take your time.
We end up dropping them off and
I think we went back to the house,
or we either went somewhere with somebody,
into the house or somewhere we went.
That was it.
I got on the capture, laid down to sleep.
The next day I told Tiandi, I'm going to work.
After that, we go camping.
Don't open the door for nobody.
George took me to work.
He dropped me off.
- So you get to work at, like, about
seven in the morning? - Yes.
- Because I have to open up. Yes.
- Okay.
So you two adults are the only
two people that had knowledge,
that Tionda and diamond was in that apartment alone.
Right.
- When you left for work that morning?
- Yes.
They was there.
- No one else knew?
- No.
- Tracy was working what they used
to call the lunch program. - Yes.
After work, she was going on a camping trip.
Okay.
- And you started checking in on the girls by calling?
- Yes.
After that that morning.
I had like, a little lunch break, so
I called and I called and I called.
It wasn't no answer. It just kept going
to voicemail, voicemail, voicemail.
And i call my mom.
My mom and she kept calling.
- She kept calling the house too.
- Okay.
- At some point, George Washington returned.
- Yes.
Guess to pick me up.
George picked me up from work and coming home,
and the back door was open,
and we walked up the stairs and everything.
I put my key in the door and
I called for Dimet Giandi.
So I was nervous and like, where are they?
When Tracy entered her apartment
from work on the morning of the 6th,
around noonish, there was a note
that was discovered in the house.
There was a note on the back of the couch,
said that they were going to the school
and they was going up to the store.
I find it odd.
When we went up the stairs,
my mom opened the door.
My mom just knocked the TV
over and got the crying,
and got the call in the family.
My sister Marie told Tracy,
do not call the police.
Let's just look for the kids,
because if you call the police,
they're going to take Vicki and rita.
I was scared. I wanted to find like on my own...
to see if I can find them,
and see who house they went to and just look around.
So we went by the lake and
all over there and everything.
Searching and accident.
"Have you seen two little girls?"
They're like, no.
And in your mind you're thinking,
I left them alone.
- I could get in trouble for this?
- Yes.
To really reacquaint myself with this case,
I had to go back to where it all began.
I am here at the Lake Grove
Village apartment complex.
This is the home of Tracy Bradley
and her four children.
Around the side of the building was a door.
A side door that was easy access from her apartment.
The side door that was always held open by
a rock or something that they
stuck in it to get in and out.
Rarely did the kids use the front entrance,
which would be right here.
They always ran around to the side entrance.
This is the back entrance to Tracy's
building where back in 2001,
this back door was always open.
And now it's 2023 and the back door is still open.
I remember just going home and
everybody just being there
and everybody just looking so devastated
because something like this happening.
You really wouldn't think it
happened to our family, but it did.
And just seeing my mama crying,
putting towels around her forehead,
just crying, devastated.
Since my kids been going
just put a totally stop on my life.
Heartbreak.
I just talked to my Lord Jesus.
I never come outside.
It was sad. It had took a lot out of me
It had took a lot out of me.
You got to just let it out.
I remember calling my mom,
Said... call the police.
- Now mom knew before 7 hours went by.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
- Mom came over.
Yes.
I was in the detectives division
for approximately one month,
when the Bradley girls disappeared in 2001.
In my heart of hearts,
I felt like it was going to be a challenge
to locate,
Tionda and Diamond Bradley.
We were all sent out.
Have to 07:00 p.m.
On that same evening.
According to their mom, the girls
were not in the apartment,
when she returned home from
work at 11:00 in the morning.
That's an eight hour jump
that any bad guy has on us.
To be successful in locating these girls
and tracking where they could possibly be.
One Chicago neighborhood is focused on
two little girls who've been missing since Friday.
A massive police investigation followed by
air, water and along the railroad tracks.
Canine search teams went through empty lots,
and more than 5000 abandoned buildings.
The playgrounds on the south side of Chicago empty.
There's no kids out here.
It's like this now every day
since the children been missing.
That evening when people were getting home,
ending their business day,
that's when the city started to
find out that the girls were missing.
So we sprang into action.
We went to bronzeville,
o the scene where they
say they were missing from,
to find out who knew something.
Any small thing could help with pieces of this puzzle.
After having a briefing in our office
we went out,
and we were on the scene.
We were in the apartment.
I observed apartment was in normal disarray,
which means that tables weren't turned over.
It didn't appear to be a fight, but it was
just normal household items in the apartment.
Family members were there.
Other police officers were there.
It sort of became a scene of concern
for all of the police that were involved.
I interviewed the mom, Tracy Bradley,
for approximately an hour,
that morning.
Tracy Bradley leaves her home knowing
that Tionda and diamond is in the house by themselves.
And Tracy Bradley had with her her friend
George Washington at approximately 06:00 a.m.
When Tracy usually left for work,
they walked out of that apartment
and closed the door.
You know, in life, especially
when you have your own family
any working family leave their children
At home alone at that age.
It was common.
When she had stuff to do,
she left us in the house by herself.
- She did.
- Okay, but you were twelve.
Yeah, I was old enough.
At the very beginning,
in the deepest part of me,
I felt that somebody had the girls.
There was no signs of forced entry at the house.
All types of things were being said.
But in my heart of hearts,
I felt like the girls were kidnapped
by somebody that they knew.
And George and Tracy were the only two people,
that we can look at to bring more clarity,
to what happened to Tionda and diamond.
When speaking to Tracy, her demeanor
ranged from distraught to afraid to defensive.
After a few hours of the investigation,
Tracy Bradley explained to me
that everybody in the entire
Bradley family knew that
there was this mad search going on.
And George Washington, Tracy's
boyfriend, never got involved.
- Did you start looking for the kids..
- Yes.
For a lot of people's searching...
All of us, we all went out.
- Everybody in your family? Friends?
- Yes, people you know.
- Is George with you?
- Yes.
I was looking, you know,
he was just stayed in a car.
He stayed in a car.
He told Tracy to call him,
later, let him know what's going on
with Tionda and diamond that evening.
He never returns.
Tracy Bradley and her boyfriend, George Washington,
were the only two people who knew that
the girls were left in that apartment.
On the morning of the 6th
at approximately 06:00 a.m..
When Tracy usually left for work.
Tracy comes back to her home.
The girls are not in the apartment.
George comes up with her to the apartment.
George decides to leave.
Like everything else in this case,
it's hard to point at any one thing
as indicative of innocence or guilt,
but the timing adds to the other suspicious
activities and facts that have kind
of been piling up in this case.
But it's important to note that George
told the press that he, quote,
tried to help investigators
find them at the beginning.
According to their mom, she didn't
report them missing until after 07:00 p.m..
That's almost 8 hours that those girls were gone.
So I needed to find out what Tracy was doing,
during those 8 hours before police got involved.
This is the 31st street beach area.
They're at 31st street.
They lived at 35th street,
so that's a five block radius.
This is one of the first areas that Tracy Bradley came to,
as she have again informed us that
she was dropped off on the bridge,
by George Washington and
she walked over to the lakefront.
This is the area that Tracy Bradley walked to.
This is the area that the Chicago
Police Department searched,
and there were no signs of Tionda and Diamond Bradley.
Things kind of start kicking in for Tracy,
so she starts calling around to various neighbors,
various family members,
asking if they've seen the girls.
George Senior is the family friend who
lived nearby, tracy and the daughters.
And he was a family friend.
He was known.
So he was also just part of the family,
but not part of the family.
Would Tionda know enough to go over George Senior's apartment?
Yes, she knows.
The kids used to call George SR. Porgy.
- Porgy.
- Exactly.
- Did he babysit for you on occasion?
- A couple of times.
Did you happen to go to his house that
day and ask him if I'd seen the kids?
I think I went up there or either I called him.
Oh, you called. Okay.
He told you he had?
He said, yeah, I haven't see them.
He said, I haven't seen them.
July 6, 2001.
Tracy Bradley leaves her daughter's
home alone while she goes to work.
She returns to find a note saying
they were headed for this school.
They never made it.
I remember my mom just kept
saying she just left a letter,
and she just showed me the letter.
Me and diamond are not going
to the store into the school.
And I remember the exact words
because I read the letter.
The note said, we going to the store.
What store?
I was nervous and where are they? You Know?
Right. Of course
after speaking more with the family,
the note doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Tionda was ten, diamond was only three.
So it seems to me like a stretch that
a three year old could walk very far.
So I decide to retrace the route the
girls could have taken to go to the store
to determine the plausibility of that theory.
This could have possibly been the store
that Tionda and diamond was going to,
amongst other stores that's in the area.
We are a few blocks away from the complex,
Not a great distance for adults and children to walk,
but a great distance for children alone,
to walk to get to the Jewel Food Store.
It has not been stated that this is
the store that was indicated in the note,
but this is a store that's close by.
That could be the location that Tionda was speaking of.
Another theory important to reexamine,
is that the girls went to the nearby school playground.
This is the James Doolittle Elementary
School that Tionda attended.
And Tionda was also enrolled
in summer school in 2001.
But on July 6, Tionda did not attend school.
We don't have any reliable information
that they actually showed up there.
At least a dozen FBI agents have been working the case.
Diamond and Tionda's family found the note unusual,
because they said that the way the note was written
didn't reflect how she would usually have written something.
After the FBI got involved in the case,
fairly early on, after the girl's disappearance,
they did take the note that Tionda wrote
for her handwriting analysis,
to confirm that it was Tionda's
handwriting and not someone else's.
The results of which had not returned yet.
It wasn't going to come back for
a little while, and it's a process.
It takes time.
The next morning, the morning of July 7,
Faith, who is Tracy's sister,
was there in the apartment.
And Faith had recently set up
all of the family's cell phones.
She decided to listen to Tracy's voicemail,
and the family was shocked to find
there was a message from Tionda
from the day of the disappearance.
Does anybody know what time that message was left?
Does anybody recall?
I remember it was either 08:02 or 08:20 A.m..
I remembered that.
How did you guys come about?
Did she bring it to you?
Did she say, hey,
listen to this.
We were all sitting in Tracy's home
on the couch when we heard it.
Myself.
It was my mom.
Tracy was in the other room,
and it was a few other people that
was actually in the home during that time.
Okay.
It was majority of the family, and then
it was some of Tracy's closest friends.
- You don't recall who actually played?
- I don't recall.
- Did you hear the message?
- I did.
Tell me about it.
I said, is mommy, I'm going to the store with George.
So would it be unusual for George to show up at the door,
George Washington to show up at this door,
trying to get her to open that door?
I would say yes, it is.
Do you know where the message is?
Supposedly it got into the wrong
hands and it was deleted.
Whose hands?
Tracy said there was the voicemail left by Tionda.
The voicemail left so many questions unanswered,
and it actually lent to the speculation
that they really were abducted.
This was orchestrated, it was planned,
and they were trying to find out who.
Did you hear?
Tell me what you remember.
She said, mom, after the phone,
George is at the door.
He said something about Victoria cake.
Okay.
- And did you hear it? Victoria?
- Yeah, I heard the voice, mom.
That was about it.
Was there anything mentioned about a cake?
Yeah, her exact words were, "going to the store to
pick up Vicky a cake with George."
- When's your birthday?
- July 7.
That'll be why they'll get her a cake or something.
The thing that's strange about the
voicemail is that it mentions George.
So there's George Washington,
who was Tracy's boyfriend at the time.
There was also a neighbor named George.
This has caused some confusion in the
media because people said,
what if she was talking about the other George?
Perhaps he should be a suspect.
Look at these two Georges,
ask them to take polygraphs.
Another thing, Nancy.
Just because the girl said,
hey, George is at the door,
doesn't necessarily mean that it was George at the door.
Somebody may have presented themselves at George.
George, the neighbor went by
a very distinctive nickname
that the girls would have called him by.
George Senor was also referred
to by the family as Porgy.
We never called porgy. George. Never in our life.
- We never went by that name.
- So there's no misunderstanding.
No misunderstanding.
They found the note at 11:50 or so.
11:50 tutor at George Senor's house.
She tells George Senor that she's looking for the kids.
- George Senor used to babysit the kids, remember?
- Yes.
There's a lot of speculation in my mind.
Tionda had to be talking about George Washington,
tracy's boyfriend at the time.
Would it have been normal for George
to want to buy a cake for Vicky's birthday?
No.
Okay. So what do you think about the message?
It was weird to me because...
how are you supposed to go
camping and you weren't about a cake?
F they go to camping on the six or something,
why would you buy a cake for
my birthday if y'all gonna be gone.
I always found it odd.
Odd.
That was Victoria's birthday, one of the days
that they were supposed to go camping.
Speaking with Rita and Victoria,
I'm impressed by how much they remember.
But I never stopped asking myself different questions.
As to if you're going on a camping trip,
why go to the grocery store for Victoria?
Another thing that's strange about
the voicemail is that outside of the family
no one has ever been able to confirm its existence.
Some people say that it was accidentally deleted.
Some people say it's in the possession of the FBI.
But no one that I've spoken to in law enforcement
has been able to confirm the existence of the voicemail.
But multiple family members say that they did hear it.
I recorded it from the speaker on there with my phone.
- Okay.
- And I took it and sent it to my email,
my email address as an audio file.
Okay.
- You sent the recording to your email?
- Yes
- Do you still have it?
- I do.
- Can we hear it?
- I can't.
I would love to be able to access it,
but if I don't put the correct code in it to get it,
because I had some technical
help to protect my emails,
if I could, I would, but I'm sure that it'll destroy it.
Okay.
While re interviewing the family,
their statements have me questioning some things,
the note and the voicemail.
In my opinion, it feels like
everybody has a different story.
I have to explore this more.
Shalia Smith, tracy's aunt, has a copy of the message.
I begged her to give that to me.
I told her I'd fly anywhere
in the world on my own dime,
with a tech from Chicago to get that message.
And we have never, to this day heard that message.
This whole situation is just and like I told you,
this is really a messed up situation.
She's holding on to it.
That doesn't make sense.
Why would anybody hold that message?
- What do you think about that message?
- Well, he's real.
It had to be. If she left the
message on the phone.
There is really a message that
Tionda left that George is at the door.
George Washington has also confirmed to the media,
that he, quote, took Tracy to work that morning,
but denied showing up at the apartment later,
when the girls allegedly called their mom,
to say someone was at the door.
I asked George Washington about that message.
What did he say?
He said, I don't know why she would
say I was at the door. I wasn't there.
Did you ever speak with Tracy about what happened?
Well, after I got there, and
she was still being questioned.
Questioned by the police department, Chicago police.
Bradley a single mother of four,
she's had to withstand the subtle,
and not so subtle accusations that she
somehow was to blame for the girl's disappearance.
How were you feeling about the police when
they took you in to question you and talk to you,
and more than one time, am I right about it?
How did you feel about that?
- I felt really kind of angry.
- Okay.
- You felt like you were being tortured.
- Yeah. They hit the table.
You know, where those damn kids at?
My first conversation with Tracy about
that is when they were questioning her.
And I had asked them how long she been in there.
And she came back to the house.
And so I looked at Tracy, and Tracy says,
why is everybody looking at me
like I did something to my kids?
And at that point, I think I was so angry,
like, you supposed to know where your kids are.
You're supposed to know what the hell happened. Okay.
So I jumped up to grab her because
i was going to just push her off.
It's okay. Take your time.
I just wanted to push her out the window,
because I felt if you would have left them,
they would be gone.
And Tracy left.
She waited till I went in the
back and left out the door.
She didn't want to have a confrontation with you.
Nobody wanted to have a confrontation with me.
Tracy couldn't deal with the
questions for her,
in a citywide. Manhunt,
we're looking at everybody,
whether you're the mother, the brother,
sister, father, it doesn't matter.
We need some answers.
Tracy shut down.
We were trying to identify
certain things that we were told.
Such as they were going on a
camping trip later that evening.
I expected to see something that would say,
" yes, we are really doing this,
we're going on a camping trip."
But I didn't see anything that told me,
they were going camping.
I just wondered where the tent was at.
Or were they just going to go for a picnic and come back?
Maybe that's what they call the camping trip.
It was Victoria's birthday, one of the days
that they were supposed to go camping.
So maybe mom was going to
celebrate it when they got back.
But I always thought that that was odd.
I understand leaving Tionda with Diamond because
Tionda and Diamond were very close.
But how they made the determination to take
Rita and Vicki to Grandma's house that night,
usually when they would go over there,
the four of them would go together,
or at least three of the four.
How they determine that is, I don't know.
I would love to find that out.
It's definitely a question that needs to be asked.
So Rita and Victoria were not going camping.
And I get it that you say you don't really have an answer
as to why all four girls were not going, right.
There was not enough to charge Tracy with anything.
I suspected George Washington as being the
offender of the two girls going missing.
I felt that way because he and Tracy knew that
Tionda and Diamond were alone in the apartment
when Tracy Bradley left, and they
were the only two people who knew.
There were several things going on in
Tracy Bradley's life with George Washington
that I don't think has ever really come
to light as to why George would hurt these girls.
Also, it's since come out Tracy had sued
George for paternity, saying that diamond was his.
I don't get the impression that
George wanted to pay for a child.
So Tracy sued him for paternity.
hey took his DNA,
the results of which had not returned yet.
When George found out that you
had diamond, what was his reaction?
He was upset because I think
during that time he was married.
He was married.
I believe that he didn't want diamond,
and that's why he wasn't claiming her.
He didn't ever want Diamond. I don't know if it's
because he had a wife or he had other women.
I don't know what the case is, but I
feel like he didn't want to deal with that.
- So you were kind of going it on your own with Diamond?
- Yes.
Sometimes you don't know which
way the anger this man is coming from.
What threats did he make?
Used to always say, if you leave me, I kill you.
He always threw a lot of threats to me and my family.
Do you think that he gave you
the respect that you deserve?
Not at all. No respect.
- But you still loved him. Why?
- Yes.
Because I saw interest in him.
I just really loved this man,
you know what I'm saying?
Thought that he to be the right one
for me and all and everything.
He was the trickster in Tracy's life,
but Tracy loved him.
Tracy wanted him to be in her life,
but Tracy wanted more from him.
She wanted him to love her.
Something that he was never going to do.
The investigation was starting to
focus in on George Washington.
Several days after the girls disappeared,
George Washington's house and car were searched
Receipts that they found in his
home indicate that on July 7.
So the day after the girl's disappearance,
he went to a hardware store where he purchased a
large package of industrial trash bags,
and two pairs of gloves.
When the police came to his home, there
were five trash bags missing from that roll,
and one of the pairs of gloves was never found.
George Washington told the police that the trash
bags had been used in a home renovation project,
and that he had filled them and disposed
of them in a dumpster in a nearby park.
This is the same location that George Washington
claimed to have brought those garbage
bags over to the lagoon area.
He rode with CPD detectives over here
to give them the exact location
as to where the garbage cans were and where the garbage was,
but by the time they got here, it had been taken.
When they spoke to George's neighbors,
the neighbors said that they had seen George
Washington burning something in a barrel in his garage.
I actually found one of the young men sitting on the porch,
and he said George Washington was
burning the barrels in his backyard,
and had taken the barrel after it cooled
and threw the barrel in the trunk.
George Washington denied that this ever
happened and also denied even owning a barrel.
However, when the FBI went to investigate, they found
evidence of charring on the rafters of his garage.
And in the trunk of his car, they found
striations that were consistent with the
size and shape of an industrial barrel,
the kind of industrial barrel that his neighbors
said that they saw him burning something in.
George Washington was really scrutinized.
But again, nothing much led to him being a person of interest,
just questions and no answers.
George gave a statement to the media saying,
I don't know who did anything.
I just know that I had nothing to do with it.
But I have had a lot of different scenarios
go through my mind as to why George would hurt these girls.
It has crossed my mind that it's the possibility,
George didn't want to pay Tracy child support,
kill diamond, and Tionda saw it.
Therefore, he had to kill Tionda as well.
Is that a possibility? Absolutely, it is.
George Washington. We put him on
a polygraph back in 2001.
The brass of the police department just loved polygraphs.
I think they just thought the sun rose and set on them.
Although they're not admissible,
polygraphs are a tool that we use.
They're not the be all, end all.
I've seen people that I've known
were guilty pass them.
I've seen people that were innocent fail them.
But in George's defense, he passed a polygraph.
The consensus was,
wherever the girls are, they went
with someone that they knew.
And then all of the speculation at that
time was around George Washington,
where it led all of us to believe if he
didn't do it, he knows something.
And what is he hiding?
- George, can we talk to you for just a moment?
- No comment at all?
There's no comment at all.
There was not enough to charge
George with anything.
Charge Tracy with anything.
At this point, they're just two people might
have the answers to the last steps
that Tionda and Diamond took inside of that apartment.
After a few days of the investigation,
Tracy shut down.
Tracy stopped communicating with the police
department when the questions for her got tough.
I get it. I understand that.
Not being able to deal and just the initial
trauma of dealing with your two daughters,
that's missing. I understand that.
But as a detective, I still need to do my
due diligence and probe this further.
At some point, you shut down and no longer wanted
to communicate with the Chicago police department.
Like, they took.
Like I was a criminal.
I wasn't.
You took...
me being afraid. You know what I'm saying?
Scared.
Tell me what you're afraid of.
You didn't want what happened.
I go to jail.
I took Rita and Victoria to school.
You know, they followed me everywhere.
Detectives and everything.
And detectives, get out the car, threw me to the gate,
put me in a car, had me handcuffed and everything.
They take me through a tunnel and stuff.
They take me out through there.
The sergeant came in,
and he found out who I was,
and he told them, take them damn handcuffs off right now.
Why did they arrest you?
For no reason.
No reason at all. I didn't talk to them.
I didn't do anything to them.
And, see, that's another reason
why I kind of went back a little bit,
because I felt that, you know.
You felt what?
Disrespectful.
It's sad.
It's sad she shut the police department
down when they were trying to help her.
But it doesn't make sense.
It just doesn't make sense.
- She had, I think, two arrests her entire life.
- I know that.
Why would she shut us down?
This case has always been very complex,
but one of the most solid leads we have to go on,
is the note that Tionda left in the apartment.
After a certain amount of time,
The note that Tionda left,
it was examined by law enforcement,
and it was confirmed that it was her handwriting.
Would Tionda have left a note on her own?
Reading it? I'm like, nah,
that's not the way Tionda speaks.
Well, Tionda did have a minor reading disabilities,
Okay.
That's why she was in summer school,
because she had reading problems.
Okay.
For example, if you said, need
write the word, "I need to go",
it'll be I need, but
it might have been N-E-I-D versus N-E-E-D.
Do you think Tionda wrote the note?
Yeah, I think she wrote it.
She was forced to write it, but it was her handwritten,
because we never had to write a
note when we knew my mom's number.
If we was always in the house by ourselves, we'll call her.
My sister fate without another note that
Tionda had wrote and compared the two.
- The grammar doesn't sound like it.
- It doesn't match.
It doesn't match.
I felt that it had to be somebody that t
hey knew who forced Tionda,
but who.
Chicago hasn't given up on diamond and Tionda.
A private investigator even volunteered his services.
I'm Foster. I'm a local private investor
in the Chicago, Illinois area.
Late August of 2001,
I was asked to join the case to assist
the local law enforcement agency,
interviewing people that did not have a good
relationship with Chicago police department at the time.
Investigator Foster is an excellent investigator.
Gave me a bridge to the family.
When I did my due diligence on them,
I found that they didn't have
much of much contact with the police at all.
Yeah, I talked to Foster
and we sit up on the phone sometimes
at twelve 01:00 in the morning,
and I'll be crying.
And he gives me good vibes.
And then at the end of the day, he prayed with me.
I had got acquainted with the investigator foster,
and my mind was set that this would be the
firm that helped look for Tionda and Diamond.
These would be the private investigators.
With diamond before her disappearance,
Tracy had asked George to take a paternity test.
And three weeks after the girls disappeared.
But after George Washington's house and car
were searched, the results of it came back.
Dna testing was completed.
And it's safe to say that the test came back positive.
That George Washington is the father of Diamond.
Yes, that right.
The hairs kind of go up on my neck.
Because there could be several things
that could have taken place.
Especially George was so determined
to not pay child support.
It just brings to life so many other conclusions
that we can come to about what
happened to Tionda and Diamond.
We're talking about a three year old and a ten year old.
They just don't walk off the face of the earth.
The first thing that popped into my mind was to
do more of a serious investigation of George Washington.
The paternity came back positive that
George was the father diamond.
So when diamond and Tionda went missing,
George got out from underneath paying paternity.
George's first wife from Detroit was named diamond.
When Tracy told me that in the interview,
you could have knocked me over with a feather,
I'm like, oh, boy, this is getting interesting.
But he denied paternity, so George knew
he was going to end up paying.
George has maintained that he is not Diamond's father.
This has always perplexed me,
so I feel that I need to dig deeper on this.
- He was married to a woman named diamond?
- Yes.
And I named my baby after her,
because...
she's the normal.
He just didn't want. I don't think he
really wanted to be to have that baby.
He was upset.
He was just upset.
He was upset.
He already lied.
Said he couldn't have any kids
because he had a vasectomy.
So when diamond came,
i knew he lied about that.
And then when...
- He lied to you a lot, didn't he?
- Yeah, exactly.
But all the time...
I never saw the wife,
but I think the wife when the wife
found out about Diamond,
I think she completely left.
And you've been in a relationship with this man for,
at least... I mean, Diamond's three.
Three, yes.
So at least three years.
George Washington was the biological father of Diamond.
And it seems like all the evidence
seems to point to George Washington.
But it's always been circumstantial evidence.
Unfortunately, we live in the world where there has to
be certain evidence to meet the burden of proof.
Months have passed. Leeds had gone.
Cold.
And when leads start to go cold,
resources are diverted to other
more pressing cases that are fresher.
Without fresh leads, there's not
much more that they can do.
The unthinkable happened today.
The World Trade center, both towers gone,
and we are all witnesses to it.
And to some degrees, degree, we are all victims.
The girls disappeared on July 6 of 2001,
and two months later was the September 11 attacks.
At the time, huge amounts of resources
were suddenly being diverted
to potential terror attacks and that sort of thing.
And so not only did the media attention on the case dry up,
but I believe also some of the interest from
law enforcement,
because of kind of the situation in the rest of the country.
I'm staying in the house 24 24.
I don't even come outside no more.
I even stopped it.
I think the further that the Bradleys got
from the day of the disappearance,
the more difficult things became.
They were left almost on their own.
Whoever you are, your family knows what you did.
Y'all need to break the silence.
Every year, there's a vigil.
Every year, you know, there's a little bit on the news,
and every year it becomes less and less.
When my nieces were missing, I was 39.
Going on 40.
2001 was a felt like a death sentence.
2002 felt like an execution. 2003 felt
like I was up on the chopping box.
But they still had it in their mind
that they would probably find them.
Four difficult years later, Tracy Bradley's
prayers have yet to be answered.
Some leads were coming in that could just
change the trajectory of an investigation,
including a discovery of some bones.
And when that came across, it was immediate,
like, let's find out what's going on
in a missing person's case.
That's a total game changer.
Back in May 2005, there was a major
discovery on the south side of Chicago.
So I decide to drive out to that location
about 20 minutes from the Bradley's home,
to see if anything new will come back to me.
There were some workers working out
here along these railroad tracks,
and some bones were discovered.
And so, of course, the police department came out
immediately, and they brought forensics with them,
and they did gather the bones that were found.
Human bones found at a far south side construction
site are being sent to an FBI lab in Virginia
or DNA testing.
It's possible that the bones could have belonged
to one of the missing Bradley sisters.
News of the bones has been both good
and unsettling at this southside church.
Ten year old Tionda and three year old
Diamond Bradley's family or members,
revered forensic scientist Dr. Clyde Snow, best known
for working with the John Wayne Gacy case,
was called in to analyze and test the bones that were found.
They were of a teenage girl.
There was reason for concern because of her age,
and they didn't quite have her ethnic
background profile worked up.
And of course, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't Tionda,
because she would have been too old to
be diamond, according to the bone sizes.
Friends at the church say the girl's family would like some closure,
but at the same time, they still hold up
that Tionda and Diamond are still alive.
Course, you know, the FBI came out, forensics came out,
and the FBI did a DNA analysis on the remains that were found.
And it turned out to not be any association
with Tionda or Diamond Bradley.
It was not them.
There was a sigh of relief,
because that still gives you hope that the girls are still alive,
with a case that was this big.
I mean, there's, I think, six file cabinets
full of information on the case.
I still forged forward. I would work leads when they came in.
And a very good bit of advice that the lieutenant
gave me was start from the beginning.
So that's where I started.
And I came upon what I thought at the
time was a tremendous piece of evidence.
There was hairs recovered from the trunk
of George Washington's car in 2001,
when detectives had gone to George's house
a couple of days after the kids had gone missing,
For some unknown reason, the hairs
were never submitted to the crime lab.
Investigators did find evidence,
including a hair in a trunk of a car,
but nothing conclusive enough to make an arrest.
To know that there was evidence or potential evidence,
that was just sitting there knowingly, untested.
Is disappointing.
It's actually infuriating.
You have two girls that are missing.
Whatever evidence you come across,
you make sure it's processed.
You don't leave it out. You just don't.
This is the first positive piece of evidence
that we've recovered in years,
and it was recovered from George's trunk.
So I submitted these hairs to the FBI crime lab at Quantico,
to see if it was a match to Tionda and diamond.
I was sitting in the state's attorney's office with an
assistant state's attorney that was...
I was keeping up to date on the case,
and we got a call that the hair came back a
mitochondrial match to Tionda and Tracy.
And I was ecstatic.
And the state's attorney's office
kind of tempered my enthusiasm,
by saying it wasn't going to be enough to bring anybody in,
and I'm not an expert on that kind of stuff, so...
kind of burst my balloon at that point.
I still took it as a positive.
I was energized by it.
That does sound a bit incriminating when you hear it on its face,
but there are a variety of ways that may have happened.
The little girl may have put her backpack in
Tracy's boyfriend's car on her way to school one day,
or she may have placed an object in the trunk that
may have had a piece of her hair on it.
And so there just wasn't enough evidence.
George had always denied that the hairs
were in his trunk for any suspicious reasons,
but I still have questions.
In a prior interview, Washington had said
he used to put the kids in the trunk,
and sneak them into the drive in.
Well, I couldn't find any drive ins that were
open in the Chicagoland area back in 2001.
Most of them were closed.
Did you and George and the girls ever go to a drive in,
a drive in theater that you can recall,
or a movie theater, for that matter?
Do you ever recall George putting your girls in
the trunk of his car to sneak them into a drive in?
No.
Why would he say he took your girls and you to the drive in?
Why would he say that?
I don't say that he took me to a drive in.
I don't recall.
You taking me to no drive in.
He said, that never happened.
You never remember nothing like that?
I talked to George about that.
I said, george, why was Tionda were in your car?
And he said that he snuck him into the movie theater.
And I say, but Tracy said, y'all never went to the drive in.
He said, that's a damn lie.
He never put you in the trunk of his car?
I never got in his trunk or nothing.
Never.
Never went to a movie with him, never went on.
- Not to Chuck E. Cheek?
- It was never like that.
That's all I'm like, no, never went to the movies with him.
Never got in his trunk, never went nowhere,
ever.
In 2003, there was a very interesting
development that piqued our interest.
Tracy had another baby, George Washington.
Now, there's a little boy, George Jr.
And so George took her to court in 2011 to get custody.
I believe that George played mind games with Tracy.
He would make her feel like he
loved her at some sometimes,
and then at other times, he would make her
feel like she was the dirt under his feet.
- Eventually. You had a second baby.
- Yes.
- Which is George Jr.
- Yes.
- You lost custody of George Jr.
- Yes, I did.
I fought the best fight I can I could,
and I didn't have a lawyer.
I didn't have no money.
You know what I'm saying?
- He disappointed you in your life?
- Yeah.
And you feel like he stole your children out of your life?
I feel like he snatched a lot of stuff for me.
My dignity, my heart, my mom.
I know she's passed away.
She's turning over now.
My children,
me knowing that late night in the house with me.
Can't sleep. Sometimes.
To live in fear is no way to live.
As time went on, despite the case remaining unsolved,
occasionally the media would revisit the story,
which has helped in keeping this
case present in people's minds.
I do appreciate the national media outlets
who did highlight this case all the time.
Tv one, they had a show called find our missing,
and one episode was dedicated to diamond and Tionda.
We reached out to George Washington
via Facebook, and he responded.
He said he wouldn't agree to an
interview, but he did say this.
It's funny that the family points the finger at me,
but the courts seem to feel differently.
A woman in Indiana named Letitia Hicks
commented on that piece on their website,
saying that she had information about where George
Washington was the day that the girls disappeared,
and that that information implicated him in their disappearance.
- My next person that I'm going to bring up, Ed.
- Yes.
Is Miss Letitia Hicks.
What do you know about this lady, Letitia Hicks?
So, I received a message from her stating that
she know what happened to the girl.
Had to get it off her chest that
George showed up at her house.
He had been drinking, he was shaken.
So received a message from her that she
think George has something to do with it.
- So you text her back?
- Yeah, of course.
Because I want to answer.
Well, when I interviewed Letitia, she said
that George had blood on him.
He had a pair of oversized gym shorts underneath his pants.
He took a shower at her house.
- Took a shower at her house?
- Yes.
When police followed up with her about that, however,
the timeline did not match up
at all with the facts of the case.
So she first claimed that this incident had happened on the 4 July,
which is two days before the girls disappeared.
In addition to that, even if she had gotten the date wrong.
So even if this alleged incident had happened on July 6,
when the girls did disappear,
Washington's cell phone records do not match up
at all with her version of the story.
So she lives in Indiana,
and his cell phone records show him to be definitively
in the Chicago area for the entirety of the day.
I'll be the first one to say I dismissed her too quickly.
I wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.
It won't be the last.
But again, I just wish I could find something that ties her to him.
- And that's why the negative Nellie is coming up.
- Okay.
Despite the fact that this case is 22 years old,
every year brings new surprises.
And in May of 2023, I learn of a new development.
Good afternoon. We begin today with a possible break in a
Chicago missing persons case that's more than 20 years old.
A woman claims she is diamond,
and she's gone to the FBI.
Here with Diamond Bradley.
This is Diamond Bradley.
Can I see your scar?
She still have that scar?
Shalia Bradley Smith said this young woman submitted a swab
of DNA and fingerprints at an FBI office in Texas earlier this week.
If what this woman in Texas is saying is true, this
could be the biggest break in the case in 22 years.
The Bradley family and I decide to fly to Texas,
where this woman is located,
to try to meet her and see if there's any truth to her story.
So we're sitting here with Tracy Bradley
and April Bradley and investigator Foster,
and we have traveled from Chicago to Houston, Texas,
all because a young lady put on
TikTok that she is Diamond Bradley.
And Tracy's feeling was that you wanted to come here
to meet the girl that could possibly be your daughter.
Just to meet my daughter that
has been missing for 22 years.
- And you would know immediately,
- and I would know immediately
to know that that's my daughter. Yes.
If she really are diamond, I want to make sure that
she gets the help that she needing to the right peoples.
So I end up facetiming her while I was at work.
And I just asked her, I said, what
made you think that you're diamond?
And her response was, the way that she grew up and,
and her parents are treating her wrong every
time I ask a question about where I'm from.
And I said, well, you know what? I have the
right person for you to get in contact with.
So that's when I contacted Detective Foster.
Okay, so all of these conversations
has led us to where we are right now,
right here at this moment.
Once in Texas, we set up a phone call
with the young lady claiming to be diamond.
Our hope is that she will meet with us
that afternoon to reunite her with Tracy,
and determine if she really is diamond after all.
Yes, I'm here. I'm here.
I'm here.
The point is, we're working that.
If it's not, no DNA came in.
Why did y'all fly all the way from Chicago to Houston?
What was the point to be here?
Because the mother of diamond wants to
meet her daughter. That's all.
Okay, that's fine. I know. I understand that.
But why does she want to meet her without a DNA?
Listen, we don't know when the DNA is going to come back.
At the end of the day, we are here trying to unite a family.
That's all we're here for.
Yeah. I'm sorry.
You said you're not comfortable
until you get the results back.
Yes, to be honest,
and I honestly feel like we should all meet
at the FBI office if that's what it's given
because I don't feel comfortable meeting anybody anywhere.
Let me ask you this. Would you be comfortable
doing a zoom right now or not?
Why would I do a zoom?
And I haven't even got the DNA back.
I've had to deactivate all my social media.
No, I don't want to do anything.
I don't even want nobody to see me.
I let my auntie see me, and that was good enough.
Until I get that DNA back, I don't want to see nobody.
I don't want to talk to nobody.
I don't even know if you, who you date with.
Oh, my God. I'm done.
Okay, no problem. All right.
Damn.
Now it makes me feel like it's just bull
She fool.
Let's just sit down.
People are backing off for whatever reason,
so they got all night until we leave tomorrow to make a decision.
This is the game. Back and forth.
We just wait for the given. And if anything,
whenever she want to meet again, we'll fly back down.
If she ever want to meet again, we're down for it.
Father God, as we stand here, as humble as we are,
looking for a resolution,
Father God, guide us, give us understanding.
Give this mother, Father God, your son's blood that,
the family is looking to reunite with this
individual who claimed to be diamond.
The DNA results did not come back while we were in Texas,
and have yet to be revealed.
But back in Chicago, the family has not lost hope.
It will be 22 years in July that the sisters have been missing.
Been a long, long journey, and
hopefully that this journey will be over.
I don't know when.
I can't promise you guys when,
but just hoping it'll be over.
I just hope and hope that they
return home to me and my family.
Another year has passed, and still diamond
and Tionda Bradley are not home.
I thank each and everyone for coming out again.
It has been 22 years, and,
next year is going to continue.
every year, is going to continue going on and on
until we find diamond and Tionda. Okay?
I need you guys support. I love you guys.
And continue supporting my family.
What do you think happened?
The honest, truest.
- What's in your heart,
- Man.
I think it's worse.
So you really don't want to think the worst
about a situation?
I still be thinking it's a possibility.
But I have my daddy.
I feel like they're gone.
That's my mama's seed.
That's my mama's generation.
That's my mama's blood.
I can't let that go.
I will do what I have to do to find my nieces.
These are my nieces.
Everybody in the family should be as adamant as
i am about finding Tionda and Diamond.
Everybody.
Thousands of man hours from the Chicago police Department,
people like us have been put into this.
I'm going to ask you point blank,
do you know what happened to your kids?
No. I would have told you.
I want justice for 21 years of suffering.
Couldn't go outside now.
Somebody saying they're going to miss Bradley.
She has something to do with them kids being missing.
And I'm strong and I'm better.
Even though I was just in Texas with Tracy,
we've received some new information that sends
our heads spinning about her phone records.
So I'm on my way to meet Tracy for a follow up interview,
to discuss an inconsistency in her story that has come to light.
I have to know what Tracy doesn't want to say,
what Tracy's afraid of.
On the evening of the fifth, on the night when he, say the 6th,
he's talking about anytime after midnight?
No, I was at home.
You did not go to George Washington's house?
No, because I had to go to work the next day,
just that day, on that date, midnight.
I mean, I have to be at work at 07:00.
Go ahead.
So here's what's happening.
Well, you had previously told me on the night of the fifth,
after dropping off Victoria and Rita,
that you were at your place,
is that we have some information that
calls were made to your home,
between the hours of seven and 02:00 a.m.
That's right.
I don't remember.
- And you were not home?
- on the fifth?
Well, 02:17 a.m.
Is the 6th.
- And so.
- I'm.
- Yes.
- And it's going into the 6th?
- Yes.
- No, I was at home.
- Well,
- we got the facts. We just need you.
- Maybe I did. Maybe I did.
- You did what.
- What was that, Mr. Washington house.
- That night of the 6th?
The night of the 6th.
It's possibility that you left Tionda and Diamond.
Go ahead, I'm listening.
Yeah.
- Yeah, what?
- How was that, Mr. Washington?
Tell me how you know.
Because early in the morning the sun was shining,
and I remember coming down State street.
We was coming down State street early in the morning.
We took...
We never did get on expressway. Okay.
-Okay.
- I remember coming down.
We took the spreadway,
and we was coming up from 47 ramp and we got off.
And he dropped me off right in front of the job.
- It you remember that now?
- Yeah..
Okay.
What time is that? Do you remember?
Oh, I had to be at work at
seven because I had to open up.
I had to open up and I had to because I was
doing serving lunch for the summer school.
You know, for the summer school stuff for the kids.
Park. Dystopy.
It's all right. It's all right.
Come on, we got to be strong here.
Come.
So while you were at George's house that night,
what did you guys do?
I don't know. We probably get
something to eat, you know.
Just go know to the house.
Did you guys stop any place to get company
before you arrived at his house that night?
We stopped it, burke him right down.
I don't even know.
Okay, so the question still hasn't been answered.
The question is, why did you tell the police department,
that you last saw your children that
morning before you went to find it?
-I'm sorry?
- I'm Scared.
Then just say it, Tracy.
It's okay to say it.
It's all right to be afraid.
It's okay.
We're going to see you through this.
Tracy has been so inconsistent in her behavior,
in her interviews,
she nonetheless is now stating,
which is totally different from what
has ever been reported to CPD,
that she didn't leave her house at six in the morning and said,
Tionda, don't open the door and
don't go outside for anybody.
She's telling me that she spent the night
at George Washington's house.
This means that the girls were on their own all night,
from the evening of July 5 all the way through July 6,
with no supervision.
I was shocked simply because
that has been her story all along.
Now, part of the problem is that we can't
establish some sort of timeline
of what time did all of this actually occur.
We don't definitively know what time
the kids are going missing.
Now that the timeline for when the
girls disappeared has changed,
I've decided to form a task force to get to the
bottom of what really happened to the girls.
We can bring something to the table to
try and find Tionda and Diamond.
At this point, there's a lot of information
that we're still seeking,
and we will bring a successful solution in prosecuting this case,
for the individuals that are responsible for
Diamond and Tionda being missing.
And we are going to crack this thing wide open,
and we're going to bring some peace to this family,
some peace to this city,
and some peace to ourselves.
Because this is what we've been waiting for.
We need to let the spiders out. Clear the webs.
Let us get into your secrets.
Everybody has secrets. Every family.
That's what we are going to do here
with working this investigation.
I want to know what you don't want me to know.
And somebody knows what
happened to Tionda and Diamond.