Parents often hesitate to allow their kids to take the spotlight at a young age, whether that be acting, modeling, pursuing music or, these days, social media influencing. The reason why becomes clear in Lifetime’s The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story. Based on a true story, the movie sees Alina Thompson nearly get kidnapped and murdered by killer William Richard Bradford on the set of a modeling shoot at age 15.
In 1987, Bradford was convicted of two murders and sentenced to death after posing as a professional photographer and taking pictures of young women before killing them and disposing of their bodies in the desert. Almost two decades later, in 2006, the Los Angeles police released photographs of more than 50 women who were found in Bradford's apartment at the time of his arrest. Authorities believe some of those women may have been homicide victims, too.
Though Thompson tells A&E Crime + Investigation she felt "trepidatious” about the release of The Girl Who Survived, she hopes to inspire women to stay alert.
“When you go through something so traumatic in your life, you can help people,” Thompson says. “I didn't have any kind of awareness of somebody having an ulterior motive. I'm really excited about continuing to tell my story.”
Thompson recalls how her dad saved her from the potentially deadly situation, how she’s healed and how the situation influenced her parenting style.
How did you get interested in modeling?
All I wanted to do in life since the day I was born was to be an actress, be a model. By the time I was starting to go to photo shoots, I thought I was going to become a big famous model. All the time, my parents were there, but most of the girls at that time would go alone without their parents. I didn't ever see any other parents there. So I was going through these photo shoots thinking that I was safe.
What do you remember about the day that Bill Bradford approached you?
I was at a set and photographers were taking pictures of me. My dad was supposed to be watching all the time, but that particular day, my sister was with me at the photo shoot, so he was with her. Then that photographer, he steps forward and he says, “Come here.” He pulls me aside and he says, “I'm really well connected, and these guys are just amateur photographers. So if I could do a private shoot with you, we would get some really good work. I can pose you in different poses, and then I'm going to be shooting for a magazine coming up. I can put you in it.” So I went with him, and then he took me down into an alley by myself with nobody around. And to make this worse, his car was parked right there. He set the whole thing up.
He's pumping me up, telling me he's going to do this and that, and putting me in different poses and everything. Other photographers [on the set] who had known my family and were really big supporters of me becoming a model went to my parents and they said, “A photographer just took your daughter off all by herself.”
How exactly did your dad get you out of this situation?
My dad found me, and he comes up behind this guy, then he just starts taking pictures of me. The guy starts telling my dad, “What is wrong with you? I'm professional, and I'm sitting with this model. You got to get out of here. Get out of here, bro.” And my dad didn't say a word. He just kept photographing pictures of me and ignoring the guy completely. The guy finally got completely freaked out and frustrated was like, “F— you. F— this. I was going to do something for her career, but you know what? I'm out of here.” And then he leaves and we see that the car was right there. It was like, oh my God, he wasn't just taking pictures of me. He was going to take me with him. My dad saved my life.
When did you learn that Bradford was a killer?
Fast forward years and my dad is looking at the front page of The Los Angeles Times, and he sees pictures of me in the lineup of, are any of these girls still alive? There was also a picture of my sister and I within the three pictures of me. He called The Los Angeles Times, they said, “She's still alive.” For two years, every weekend, he had been following me, and he had been taking pictures of me. He had been warming up to that day he was going to take me. That was a huge shock. Detectives come to my house, there's news crews at my house and everything. I went outside and I just said, “Never trust somebody who's going to say they can do this without their career.” After the initial shock, I did a lot of shows to warn girls, to warn girls that these kind of predators are out there.
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How did you heal from this?
I am extremely resilient and strong. I don't have that deep feeling of pain or sorrow at all, and that's probably due to a lot of therapy. My life actually turned around completely. I went on to become a very big model. I went on from there to live in Italy, Japan, Spain, Australia, Turkey, France, modeling legitimately with a legitimate agency. I never experienced any kind of creepy stuff during my career. So things turned out fantastic. I'm strong. I have power, and I want to help.
Are these ways in which your insecurity still resurfaces?
I do things now like lock my door at night and don't go out to parties because I feel like even if I have a glass of water, I can't trust it. I don't go out anymore because last October, somebody at my friend's Halloween party brought ketamine. After my second drink, [my friend] puts me on the couch to fall asleep, and I wake up bleeding all over in a bathtub. My friend calls the ambulance, and I find out later it happened to another girl there too. Now I don't go out to parties at all, even at my friend's house. I'll have people over at my house. I still don't feel safe around random groups of people.
Has your past experience influenced how you’ve approached motherhood?
Oh my God, that's huge. I was a hover mother with my child. I was very overprotective, especially of my daughter. My daughter wasn't allowed to leave the house until she was like 15. I didn't allow her to have sleepovers because tragedy had happened to me at a sleepover with somebody's father, my son's dad. So she wasn't allowed any sleepovers. When she turned 16, I let her do social media. She became famous on social media for about two or three years and then died down. She's so naive and is so trusting, and I can't seem to get through to her on that. She's going to have to learn with her own life experiences. My daughter is like me, and she's a little social butterfly and a little model or online Instagram model girl. She flew to China to do work for her influencing. She did it twice. The first time she did it, I almost died. I was thinking I was saying goodbye to her forever. And then when she went the second time, I was more at ease. But still, my fears for my daughter all stem from my childhood and from how you can't trust strangers.
How can aspiring models take caution today?
Never to go alone with somebody who calls themselves a photographer. That's the No. 1 thing. These days, every girl who's on Instagram says their model. There's always photographers online that are like, “Hey, you want to come shoot now?” If my daughter didn't know any better through me, she could just show up alone. I almost died, and that could easily be any of these girls on the internet.
Do you feel that justice has been served? Is there anything that you would want to say to Bradford if he was still alive today?
I don't think justice has been served because there's so many dead women with no answers and cold cases out there. I have a lot of sorrow and anger towards the families of the girls that he killed. I survived, but I didn't fall into the trap. People like him are missing empathy and they're missing the emotions. I really, really was upset when I found out he died of natural causes. I was disappointed that he is not alive today serving time for what he's done, because he hurt young, innocent women. Dying just a few years after going in there, it was kind of a disappointment for me. So what I would say to him? A lot of bad things come to mind.
