Jennifer Schuett: A Survivor’s 19-Year Journey to Justice

February 21, 2025 ~ By Shari Rose

After surviving a kidnapping, vicious assault, and life-threatening injuries to her neck, Jennifer Schuett would spend the rest of her childhood never knowing who her attacker was – until DNA matching identified him as Dennis Bradford, 19 years later

In the summer of 1990, a little girl named Jennifer Schuett lay bleeding in a Texas field with her neck cut from ear to ear. Her kidnapper left her for dead, believing he had silenced the only living witness to his heinous crimes. But Schuett eventually gained her voice and transformed her story into testimony for nearly 20 years in hopes of identifying the man who nearly killed her. Today, her voice reaches beyond the walls of that hospital room to support other survivors and advocate for the use of DNA testing to solve cold cases like hers.

• Jennifer Schuett’s Life Before the Kidnapping
• Her Brutal Assault with Life-Threatening Injuries
• Schuett Fights for Her Life
• Scribbled Notes & Forensic Sketch of Her Assailant
• The Jennifer Schuett Case Goes Cold
• Dennis Bradford Identified as Schuett’s Attacker
• Bradford Faces Kidnapping, Attempted Murder Charges
• Jennifer Schuett Now

Jennifer Schuett’s Life Before the Kidnapping

In August 1990, 8-year-old Jennifer Schuett was enjoying her summer break while living with her mother in Dickinson, TX. She had recently finished second grade at Silbernagel Elementary School, just a couple miles from the apartment complex where she lived with her mother, Elaine Schuett.

“I just loved life,” Schuett recalled in a 2018 interview with CBS News. “I loved school. I loved learning.”

The close-knit relationship between Schuett and her mother was perhaps best demonstrated by their nightly routines. Like other young children her age, she found comfort in her mother’s room during the night and spent far more nights there than in her own bedroom.

“As far as I can remember back in my childhood, I just didn’t like the dark or sleeping alone,” Schuett explained. “So I found comfort in going to bed with my mom. We were all that we had, was each other.”

But the night of August 9, 1990 was different. Elaine Schuett had to go to work early the following morning and needed a good night’s rest. Bucking their tradition, she asked Jennifer to sleep in her own room that night, to which the 8-year-old responded, “Just because I love you, Mom, I’m going to sleep in my own room tonight.”

After reading a few books by the light of her bedroom’s lamp, Jennifer Schuett fell asleep. She would soon wake in the arms of a man she did not know, 21-year-old Dennis Earl Bradford, as he kidnapped her from the ground-level apartment through an open window.

Schuett Survives a Brutal Assault with Life-Threatening Injuries

The first thing Jennifer Schuett remembers is being carried by Bradford outside her mother’s apartment.

“He was running with me, carrying me down the sidewalk,” Schuett said. “And I immediately tried to scream but he covered my nose and mouth.”

Dennis Bradford put Schuett in his car and drove away. He told her he was an undercover police officer to convince the 8-year-old to trust him. But Schuett had a lot of questions.

“I was a very curious eight year-old little girl, and would ask a lot of questions,” Schuett said in a 2017 interview with ISHI. “So, I started to ask him, ‘If you’re a police officer, where’s your gun? Where’s your badge?’ You know, prove this to me.”

Bradford soon turned into the parking lot of Schuett’s elementary school. He offered her candy, but she refused to take it because she had been taught to be wary of strangers in school. However, Schuett had also been taught to trust police officers, so she felt like she “was being pulled in two different directions.”

But ultimately, the soon-to-be-3rd-grader knew something was wrong even before the assault started: “My gut was telling me that something just wasn’t right about this entire situation.”

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Her kidnapper told her that her mother would be picking her up soon, but after about five minutes, Bradford started up his car and drove them to an overgrown lot off a gravel road. Without warning, he attacked the child.

“He held a knife to my throat and said, ‘Am I scaring you little girl? Am I scaring you?’” Schuett recounted in an interview. “He choked me as hard as he could … And then he tried to break my neck.”

Jennifer Schuett drifted in and out of consciousness as Bradford sexually assaulted her in the car.

“There are times when I black out either from him either choking me or trying to break my neck,” she said. “The next thing I remember is waking up and him dragging me through a field by my ankles.”

After the attack, Bradford dragged Schuett’s lifeless form through an abandoned field, during which she was conscious.

“I could feel sticks poking me in the back, thorns, but I just stayed silent, and played dead at one point,” she said.

He dropped the child who weighed no more than 45 pounds on top of a fire ant mound, got in his car, and drove away. Mustering all the willpower she had left in her little body, Jennifer Schuett attempted to scream but couldn’t.

She put her right hand on top of her neck and felt a gaping wound covered in blood. She realized Dennis Bradford had slit her throat from ear to ear while she was unconscious.

In an interview 27 years after the assault, Schuett said, “I was 8 years old. I was just left to die in a field.”

Schuett Fights for Her Life

As she lay bleeding from her neck, Schuett tried to move but had no strength to even get herself away from the biting fire ants. Even as an adult today, she remembers being surprised that she was still alive.

“I would come in and out of consciousness … every time I would come to … I would be in disbelief that I hadn’t died yet,” she recalled.

Jennifer Schuett lay in that field somewhere between 12 to 14 hours before she was found by other children who were playing tag nearby. Her last memory before waking up in a hospital was a police officer kneeling beside her in the field, telling her that she’s going to be okay.

Medical personnel quickly life-flighted Schuett to John Sealy Hospital on Galveston Island. Due to the severity of her injuries, many first responders expected this to be a murder case.

Dr. Chester L. Strunk, the ENT specialist who worked on saving Schuett’s life, remembered the girl’s grave condition when she arrived at the hospital.

“When I first saw Jennifer in the emergency room, she was a fairly small 8-year-old … pale, very pale,” Dr. Strunk said in an interview with CBS News. “She would look at you and you could see, you know, that she was very fearful.”

The cut to Schuett’s neck went through her trachea but avoided any major blood vessels. Medical professionals quickly performed a tracheostomy to insert a tube and create an airway for her to breathe. They also worked on her other injuries, including ant bites and cuts to the rest of her body, and physical trauma from the sexual assault.

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As she healed in the hospital with her mother by her side, Schuett could not speak. The doctors caring for her said that she would probably never regain her voice again. She also struggled to trust the adult men who were helping her recovery.

“I was kind of a hard patient to deal with, because I had a lot of male doctors and I was scared of males,” she said. “I remember even kicking one of the male doctors in the stomach because I wanted him away from me.”

“This man that hurt me said he was a police officer … And he hurt me very bad, so in my eyes, who’s to say that these doctors could be trusted?” Schuett recalled. “Everyone was a suspect in my book.”

But at the same time, she wanted to find the man who hurt her. And that meant sharing every detail of the kidnapping and assault she could remember with law enforcement.

Scribbled Notes & Forensic Sketch of Her Assailant

Detective Ralph Garcia with the Dickinson Police Department led the investigation into Jennifer Schuett’s case. He knew it would be very challenging to learn details about the attack from an 8-year-old survivor with a lacerated trachea and deep fear of men in authority positions.

“Early on with Jennifer we knew we had a survivor that couldn’t speak,” Garcia recounted. “The challenges were to extract information from her.”

Schuett began speaking with one of the pediatric ICU nurses who cared for her, Sharon McBride. She also had an 8-year-old daughter at home, so this case hit McBride hard.

“Standing there and looking at Jennifer, this little 8-year-old girl in this bed that has suffered this … horrendous trauma and knowing that I had an 8-year-old little girl at home – my heart ached for her,” McBride said in 2018.

When Schuett was strong enough, her mother and McBride began asking questions about the man who attacked her. What did he look like? What was he wearing?

Schuett wrote her answers down in scribbled notes that were handed over to law enforcement. Despite the unbelievable trauma she endured, the 8-year-old remembered details about Bradford’s greasy hair, a scar on his face, the color of his car, and even a dent found on one of the side panels.

She also remembered his name, writing in a note: “He Said His Name Was Dinnese [Dennis]”.

Schuett then met with a forensic artist named Lois Gibson to get a picture of what Dennis Bradford looked like. Despite being unable to talk and having little strength to engage, Schuett found a way to nail down what her assailant looked like.

“I couldn’t talk and I’m trying to describe a person through notes,” Jennifer Schuett said. “And I’m traumatized, I’m medicated and the attack just happened four days earlier. But [Gibson] got me … like, she just understood me.”

The sketch only took about an hour, and Schuett felt confident it looked like her kidnapper.

But despite her excellent memory and uncanny sketch of her attacker, it would take 19 years for law enforcement to finally arrest Dennis Earl Bradford.

The Jennifer Schuett Case Goes Cold

After spending a few weeks recovering in the hospital, Schuett was ready to return home. She even regained her ability to speak.

“I think I was almost sad to leave the hospital in a way … This place had kind of become a safe haven to me,” Schuett recalled. “But I had come leaps and bounds. I even regained my voice while I was in the hospital. I like to say I haven’t shut up since.”

Though her physical injuries were healing, the psychological trauma of surviving a sexual assault and attempted killing as an elementary schooler remained. And the fact that the man who committed these heinous crimes against a little child was still at large struck fear in the Dickinson community as a whole.

“I started school right on time with the rest of my classmates, third grade, and had police there at the school … because the whole community was on edge. No one knew who had done this to me,” Schuett said.

“Every day, growing up for me in the town of Dickinson was like I was on a hunt looking for a suspect,” she said. “This could be our new neighbor. This could be someone at the post office … Is he watching us? Is he gonna come back and finish me off?”

In spite of the never-ending fear and distrust she experienced growing up, Jennifer Schuett persevered through the pain to graduate high school and attend college. She eventually became a children’s librarian at a local public library.

Though she learned to thrive with a job she loved and a very supportive boyfriend named Jonathan Martinez, Schuett never stopped thinking about the identity of her kidnapper.

“As I got older … I just thought, like, how can all these years have passed and I just still don’t know who’s done this?” she said.

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Dennis Bradford Identified as Schuett’s Attacker

In 2008, 18 years after the attack, Jennifer Schuett received a call from Detective Tim Cromie at the Dickinson Police Department. He had just taken over her case, and wanted to meet with her in person.

“I was so frustrated,” Schuett explained in a 2018 interview. “I thought, here we are 18 years later … What’s this guy gonna do? I sat there in [Cromie’s] cubicle and cried.”

But Cromie was determined to succeed where other police detectives had failed. He pulled in FBI Special Agent Richard Rennison to help with the case.

Recalling the initial meeting with Schuett, Cromie told her that he would do whatever it takes to find the man who kidnapped her nearly 20 years earlier: “I said, ‘Jennifer, I will do whatever I can do in my power … until the end of my career to get you the answers that you need for this case.’”

Jennifer Schuett said this changed everything for her. She felt that there finally was someone just as dedicated as she was to solving her case.

Cromie and Rennison pulled the evidence taken from that abandoned field, which included clothes belonging to Schuett and Bradford, and sent them to the FBI lab in Quantico, VA to test for DNA matches through CODIS. Because this case was already 18 years old, it was not considered a high priority and sat in the lab for about a year.

But one night in 2009, Special Agent Richard Rennison got a call. The DNA examiner found a match. Those clothes found nearly 20 years ago belong to a man named Dennis Earl Bradford.

Bradford had sexually assaulted a woman Hot Springs, AK and was convicted for kidnapping in 1997. He had also cut her throat in the brutal attack. Bradford was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but only served 4 before he was released.

Rennison knew he had to find the link that placed Bradford in Dickinson at the time of the kidnapping, so he contacted the Texas Department of Public Safety to get a copy of Bradford’s driver’s license. His photo was taken just a few months before Schuett’s kidnapping. When he received Bradford’s photo, Rennison couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“When I opened the email, I was floored,” he recalled. “It was almost as if Lois Gibson was drawing a sketch based on that driver’s license photo. It was that accurate.”

Rennison and Cromie contacted the North Little Rock Police Department, quickly pulled over Bradford in a traffic stop and arrested him on a warrant. After 19 years, Dennis Bradford would finally face justice for the horrific crimes he committed against 8-year-old Jennifer Schuett.

Bradford Faces Kidnapping, Attempted Murder Charges

When Schuett got the call on October 13, 2009 that they found him, it was a shocking revelation after nearly two decades of hoping to identify him.

“When they called me that morning and told me that they really arrested this person … It was the most surreal moment of my life. It meant everything to me,” Schuett said.

The following day, Schuett looked at her kidnapper through two way glass at the Dickson Police Department.’

“This was a person that I had wanted to find for almost 20 years at that point, and I was just so scared that it was someone that I knew, and thank goodness it wasn’t,” she said in a 2017 interview. “It was just one of those true stranger abductions, and thank God for that.”

When Dennis Bradford was arrested, he was working as a welder in Little Rock. He lived with his wife and had three adult stepsons. During questioning with Cromie, Bradford confessed to the kidnapping, sexual assault and attempted murder of Jennifer Schuett.

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After the attack, Bradford considered taking his own life, which led him to shoot a hole in the ceiling of his father’s property. In an unbelievable twist of fate, Bradford was taken to the psychiatric ward of the same hospital where Schuett was fighting for her life.

In the aftermath of his 2009 arrest, Bradford was taken to Galveston County Jail to await trial. Schuett began preparing for the court proceedings and writing her victim impact statement. But Jennifer Schuett would never be able to face her assailant in court. In May 2010, Dennis Earl Bradford took his own life in his prison cell.

When Detective Tim Cromie received the news, he made the difficult call to Schuett.

“There was just crying and screaming on the other end of the phone,” Cromie recalled. “She didn’t want to believe it. Most I could do was just tell her I was sorry.”

Schuett described the night she heard the news: “The only thing that I can describe is devastation … I felt like everything that I had worked so hard for was just ripped away from me in an instant.”

Once the shock of Dennis Bradford’s death wore off, Schuett made the decision to finish her impact statement, go to his grave and read it to him regardless. Her impact statement in full is found here.

Alongside her now-husband Jonathan Martinez, Schuett read her statement to Bradford’s grave marker on August 10, 2010 – 20 years after her attack. As she was reading, she paused for a moment to reflect.

“I turned to my husband and I said, ‘I wonder if he’s hearing me,’” she said. “And just then, a single fire ant bit me on the leg. And I took that as a sign from God that he heard me loud and clear.”

Jennifer Schuett Now

Today, Schuett is a victim advocate who shares her story of survival with students and fiercely advocates for the use of DNA sampling in arrests. When the Texas House of Representatives considered expanding DNA sampling to include arrestees, Schuett was a proponent of the measure, arguing that a simple cheek swab could prevent future violent crimes from being committed in the first place.

In her personal life, Schuett experienced many difficulties while trying to start a family with her husband. At age 25, Schuett learned she had hydrosalpinx, which is a condition where the fallopian tubes are filled with fluid. This was a direct result of the sexual assault she experienced as a child.

Schuett and Martinez decided to pursue IVF treatments to conceive a child. After hearing about her story, Houston Fertility Institute and Vivere Health agreed to donate their fertility services to the couple. In May 2012, Schuett announced she was pregnant with a baby girl.

“When Jonathan and I found out that we were expecting, we were in complete shock. But we were so happy … we just couldn’t wait to see what parenthood had in store for us,” she said.

She gave birth to her daughter, Jenna, at the end of 2012. Today, Jennifer Schuett has two children.

“It’s like pinch me; who would’ve thought that I’d have not one but two beautiful, healthy children at the end of all of this?” Schuett concluded in 2018. “They’re really my happy ending.”

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