Former LAPD detective, once a rising star, accused of kidnapping woman in 1994 cold case

A former star investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department’s organized crime division is in custody after being charged with a 1994 kidnapping during a store robbery in Thousand Oaks.

Former Det. Michael D. Brambles is accused of kidnapping a woman, identified as SW, at a gift boutique and using a gun during a sexual assault a month after he retired from the LAPD, ending a career that saw the late Police Chief Daryl F. Gates call him “one of the smartest ... most innovative detectives I’ve ever known ... exactly what you’d want in a detective.”

The alleged April 19, 1994, kidnapping and attack was part of a series of armed hold-ups and sexual assaults across the L.A. region. Brambles received 102 years in state prison in 1996 for his L.A. County crimes. Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryoff said investigators identified Brambles and he was charged, but because of his sentencing in L.A., the case was dropped.

But Fryoff said as part of a Ventura County sexual assault kit initiative, all sexual assault cases are being reviewed and retested with modern technology. As part of investigating the assault on SW, detectives learned that Brambles had been released from custody under California’s parole laws for elderly inmates.

“As you can imagine, this was devastating news for SW. The man she believed would spend the rest of his life in prison had been released,” Fryoff said.

Earlier this summer, authorities informed SW about the results of their investigation and asked if she wanted to press charges, said Ventura County Dist. Atty. Eric Nasarenko. She said yes.

“I was shocked to hear not only this man was walking free, but he’d been out of prison six years,” SW told reporters at a press conference Thursday. As a policy, The Times does not identify sexual assault victims. “The justice that I and his other victims deserved was denied when he was only required to serve a fraction of his sentence.”

Brambles, now 77, was arrested Wednesday in Santa Maria after Ventura County prosecutors charged him with kidnap for robbery and use of a weapon during a sexual assault, along with a plethora of other special circumstances that could lengthen any prison sentence. He is being held on $2 million bond in Santa Barbara County jail. He is expected to be arraigned Friday. He was not charged with a sex crime due to the statute of limitations, officials said.

His storied LAPD career was overshadowed by revelations that in the last year on the job, while on medical leave, he moonlighted as an armed robber and, in some violent hold-ups, sexually assaulted victims.

In 1996, Brambles was found guilty of 26 felony counts stemming from a four-month string of robberies in which a lone gunman entered restaurants, shops and dry cleaners around Los Angeles — many along the Ventura Boulevard corridor of the San Fernando Valley — to clear out their cash registers at closing time, twice sexually assaulting female clerks. For the crimes, he got a 102-year sentence with a judge, himself a former cop, declaring Brambles had “no remorse whatsoever.”

But in 2020, Brambles was freed from prison.