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Hi Park enthusiasts, It's Delia. With new episodes of Park Predators releasing every Tuesday, I want to make sure that you have the best trail map possible to follow along. The best place to find that Follow Park Predators on Instagram. There you'll be able to see case photos, check out behind the scenes content, discuss episodes with other park enthusiasts, and more. Plus, it's the go to place to find updates on unsolved cases and ways you can help. So lace up your hiking boots and follow Park Predators on Instagram. I'll see you there. Hi park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I'm going to tell you about today is one that is near and dear to my heart. Seeing as how I've spent a good amount of my career living and reporting in South Florida, this case came to me in the wildest of ways. I was camping deep in the Florida Everglades with some family friends when we happened to walk into a visitor center gift shop. While we were all trying to get on the wifi, my friend saw a small book titled Death in the the Murder of Guy Bradley, America's First Martyr to Environmentalism. She brought it over to me and said it looked like it would make a great episode for park predators and man. Was she right? Stuart MacGyver's nonfiction novel, published in 2003, is a fantastic read and I highly recommend it. It was a piece of source material I leaned heavily on to put this episode together, and the reason for that is because the victim in this story, Guy Bradley, was brutally murdered 119 years ago in 1905. Which meant finding original, credible, still existing news coverage wasn't necessarily going to be easy or possible for me in this case. For those of you who don't know, the Everglades is a mammoth, protected natural ecosystem that essentially makes up a river of grass that spans the southern tip of Florida. Some of the rarest and most endangered types of wildlife and plants exist there, including alligators, American crocodiles, flamingos, Florida panthers and manatees. You can take guided tours on boats and catch a glimpse of the more than 360 species of birds that call the Everglades their home. At the turn of the 20th century, though, the skies over the ecosystem began to change. Fewer and fewer feathered creatures were seen adorning mangrove trees and nesting grounds. And the man charged with getting to the bottom of why they were disappearing found himself fighting a fearsome foe that would ultimately prove to be fatal. This is Park Pred. On the night of Saturday, July 8, 1905, a woman named Frannie Bradley nervously scanned the horizon outside her home in the small rural village of Flamingo, Florida. She knew that her husband, 35 year old Guy Bradley, should have been home by nightfall, but he wasn't. It was rare for him to miss dinner with her and their two young sons, Morel and Ellis. The last time she'd seen her husband was several hours earlier, around 9:00 in the morning. He'd taken off in a rowboat to investigate sounds of gunfire coming from two nearby islands called Oyster Keys. The pair of islands were about two miles from the Bradley's front door and housed a rookery for native birds. Because Guy was the only game warden in charge of patrolling that part of Florida, and had been for nearly three years at that point, his trip to investigate gunshots near protected bird nests was an unusual all too often, shots would ring out on islands that house nesting grounds. For years, bird poachers had been pillaging species of native birds by the tens of thousands just to earn a quick buck. The hunters were after the birds beautiful feathers, also referred to as plumes. They would kill species with particularly robust plumes, strip them of their feathers and and then sell those feathers to the millinery industry, which made hats mostly worn by women. In the late 1800s, author Stuart Maciver wrote in his book that by 1886, around 5 million birds were being slain each year to support this arm of the fashion industry. On average, the feathers would sell for a few cents, all the way up to $130 back in the day, depending on the quantity and quality in 1901. So four years before Guy vanished, this poaching issue had gotten so bad that a conservation organization called the New York Audubon Society, which boasted environmentalist and eventual US President Teddy Roosevelt as one of its key members, launched a campaign to educate the public about the environmental travesty happening to the birds in Florida. The group successfully convinced state leaders to create laws aimed at protecting native birds from being wiped out by plume hunters. These critical pieces of legislation spelled out what kinds of consequences would be leveled against folks who violated Wildlife regulations with regards to birds. Something it didn't do, though, was explain how those laws would be enforced. There was nothing in the legislation that articulated how much game wardens would be paid or how they were to handle resistance from poachers. However, thanks to some generous private donors, a fund was set up to supplement the wages for game wardens in Florida. A year after those regulations were spelled out in black and white, Guy Bradley was appointed to fill two important jobs. He was simultaneously the deputy sheriff of Monroe County, Florida, and game warden over that same area. The job title allowed him to settle down in the coastal settlement of Flamingo, which was just a boat ride away from the established city of Key west and also close to the many bird rookeries he knew hunters liked to poach in, including a particularly tempting nesting area known as Cuthbert Rookery, which was located in a remote part of south Florida. This area was deemed to be the holy grail of plume hunters and housed a wide variety of sought after birds. It was tucked away deep in the Everglades, and only a few poachers had ever laid eyes on it. It got its name from George Cuthbert, who discovered it in the late 1880s while on an expedition in the Everglades with a friend. In fact, the location of this rookery was such a tightly held secret that Cuthbert's friend, who'd helped him find it, ended up being murdered because he refused to reveal its location to another poacher. On the morning Guy left to investigate the gunshots that had come from Oyster Keys, his wife, Ronnie, followed him to the shoreline to tell him goodbye. She watched him paddle off and then return to their house, not thinking much of it. I imagine she figured her husband would just find the source of the gunshots, write the hunter a citation, and then get on with his work day. In hindsight, the only thing that had stuck out to her as abnormal was that when Guy left, he'd taken off in a small rowboat instead of his sailboat. When he'd departed, the air was still and without wind, the sailboat's sails were useless. So in order for him to conduct his investigation, he had to row over to Oyster Keys manually. The boat situation had not been ideal, but Frani knew that her husband would make it work. After all, he had been navigating around Flamingo and greater South Florida waterways for decades at that point. Though he was originally from Chicago, his family had moved to Florida when He was about 6 years old. They'd lived in Fort Lauderdale and Lake Worth before eventually settling down for good in the village of Flamingo when guy was about 28. Within a year after that, he'd met and married Frani. And it didn't take long before the couple welcomed the birth of their first son, Morel, who was followed a few years later by another son, Ellis. Making a living in Flamingo was difficult before Guy took on the role of game warden. He'd worked previously on boats, in farming and as a barefoot mailman, walking along Florida's east coast, delivering letters and packages to hard to reach addresses. The terrain in southern Monroe county was notoriously difficult to live in, and the mosquitoes were at times unbearable. So when the opportunity arose for Guy to work full time as a lawman, which paid a handsome salary of $35 a month and permitted him to hire help during bird hunting seasons, he jumped at the offer. So when the afternoon of July 8, 1905, passed, and then the evening rolled by, Frani knew something wasn't right. She still had not heard from or seen her husband that night. She tossed and turned in bed, restless and worried about where Guy was. It was out of character for him to be gone for so long. The next morning, she told a family friend in Flamingo named Jean Roberts what was going on. Jean was a great person to share that information with because he'd periodically worked with Guy as a deputy and knew the waterways around Flamingo and Oyster Keys well. Well enough to know the direction Guy may have drifted if, say, for example, he'd lost an oar or gotten shipwrecked while out patrolling the previous day. So at Frani's request, Gene set out to search for a Guy off the coast of Flamingo. But unfortunately, the weather conditions on July 9th were not ideal. Rainstorms had moved into the area overnight and made it challenging for Gene to see much of anything in front of him on the water. But despite this, he kept at it throughout the morning, and eventually, after a few hours of searching, he located Guy's boat. It was bobbing alone out on the open water a few hundred yards in front of Jean's vessel, near an island known as Sawfish Hole. Gene quickly sped over to the boat and looked inside, but the site he found was grim.