Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  “You own any other vehicles?” Ayers asked.

  Brad nodded. He had a pickup truck and several motorcycles. He said that his father had died in July and he had inherited his pickup truck. It was a tan Chevy, license number HS12936, parked in one of his assigned spaces in the garage of the Madison Tower. Cheryl had possession of their Toyota van, Brad said, although its final disposition was in contention.

  Finch and Ayers knew where that van was. It had been taken away by Collins Towing and was currently awaiting processing by criminalists from the OSP crime lab.

  Finch quietly left the apartment to check the garage for the vehicles Brad had mentioned. He returned some time later and silently shook his head at Ayers. The Chevy pickup and Sara Gordon’s Toyota Cressida might be there in the multilevel garage, but he hadn’t found them. Ayers kept his face blank of expression. It didn’t mean much; Cunningham’s vehicles probably were somewhere down in the cavernous garage.

  Brad told Ayers that he hadn’t actually seen his estranged wife that evening, Sunday, but he had spoken with her on the phone.

  “I called her around seven—seven-thirty,” he said. “I told her I was running late and that the boys were watching the last half of The Sword in the Stone.”

  Cheryl had been “short” with him, Brad said, and anxious to get off the phone. It had been his impression that she was not alone, that she might even have been drinking. From his demeanor, that didn’t seem to be an unusual circumstance to Brad. He said he had called Cheryl back an hour later and she had grudgingly agreed to come over to the Madison Tower to pick up their sons.

  She had never shown up.

  Ayers nodded noncommittally. If that had been Cheryl Keeton’s plan, it meant that she could have been driving east on the Sunset Highway somewhere around 8:00 or 8:30 P.M., within the same time frame when Randy Blighton found her dead in her Toyota van. That would jibe, at least partially, with the tragic event that had occurred.

  Brad’s explanation that he had expected Cheryl to pick up their sons at the Madison Tower didn’t seem unusual. Ayers did not know yet how stringent and meticulous the custody transference “rules” were in the Cunningham-Keeton divorce. But he and Finch had gone over all the facets of the case that they had gleaned in the first hour or so, and Ayers knew that Jim Karr believed fervently that Cheryl had gone to meet Brad Cunningham in her own neighborhood over on the West Slope just before she died. She had left a note that was very explicit about that. The note said nothing at all about plans to drive into Portland.

  “Cheryl left a note for her brother that she was meeting you at the Mobil station on the West Slope,” Ayers said to Brad. “She told her mother that, too, when they talked on the phone this evening.”

  “No.” Brad shook his head. “She was coming here to pick up the boys.”

  They had been talking for about forty-five minutes, and Jim Ayers had yet to detect any sign of emotion in the man sitting before him. It was very quiet, high above the city of Portland, in the early hours of a Monday morning, a long time before the city below woke up to begin the business week. Somewhere in that large apartment, three little boys slept, unaware. Brad’s older son Brent was also in the apartment, although the detectives didn’t yet know that.

  “Did you kill Cheryl?” Ayers asked, suddenly blunt.

  The question hung heavily in the air. Ayres’s dark brown eyes bore into Brad Cunningham’s. Brad stared back, unflinching.

  “No.”

  At that time, Ayers saw what he later estimated to be “fifteen seconds of emotion.” Brad seemed startled and even a little frightened. But those feelings washed over his face like a slight wind rippling a pond, gone as quickly as it blew in, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.

  Ayers pulled back. “When were you in the Toyota van last?”

  “March—March, I think.”

  March was almost six months ago. Of course, even if they found Brad Cunningham’s fingerprints in the Toyota van, they would likely be useless as far as physical evidence went. Mom-and-Pop homicides were tough when it came to physical evidence; both victim and killer had good reason to leave their prints, hair, cigarette butts, semen, urine—you name it—where they lived or had once lived. Fingerprints could be retrieved after decades, and Cunningham’s prints could be expected to be found in a van he had often driven. Unless they happened to find his prints in blood, they wouldn’t necessarily link him to this investigation.

  Having sprung his most straightforward question on the man before him and gotten little in the way of response, Ayers excused himself and went out on the walkway to have a cigarette, allowing the events of the evening to sink into Cunningham’s mind. Sometimes silence was more intimidating and productive than questions. At this point, Ayers and Finch knew next to nothing about Cheryl Keeton or her estranged husband, other than that there seemed to have been no love lost between them. The two detectives were akin to researchers just beginning a scientific project. They would weigh any number of variables that might eventually bring them to the truth.

  Brad had not spoken of his newly deceased wife in hushed, shocked tones. Whatever love or respect or friendship he might once have felt for Cheryl, it was patently clear he felt it no longer. He was coarse and voluble about the woman who had been his wife for seven years, who had borne him three sons. He told the two detectives that Cheryl had been “fooling around” with a large number of men—primarily other attorneys with whom she worked at the law firm of Garvey, Schubert and Barer. These men, he said, were all married. “There are a lot of mad wives,” Brad said a little smugly.

  Of course, he admitted with a half grin, half grimace, he had not been exactly celibate himself. Why should he have been faithful, once he found out Cheryl was cheating on him? He told Ayers and Finch that, initially, he had been involved with a woman named Lilya Saarnen who worked with him while he was a bank executive in Salem and then in Lake Oswego. Coincidentally, Brad said, Lilya also lived in the Madison Tower. “In fact, it was she who introduced me to Dr. Gordon, and we started dating.”

  Ayers let Brad continue his odd, almost stream-of-consciousness conversation until he eventually wound back around to Cheryl. His description of his dead wife was hardly flattering. He said that she had been a great fan of country music and had often hung out at the Jubitz Truck Stop south of Portland alongside the I-5 freeway, where she went to pick up men.

  Finch and Ayers exchanged glances. Why would a woman who was a partner in a prestigious law firm be picking up truck drivers? But then, why not? The OSP detectives had seen all varieties of human sexual peccadillos.

  Brad went on to describe Cheryl as “narcissistic,” a woman who enjoyed going to nude beaches along the Columbia River. “And she hung nude photographs of herself around the house.” Ayers had, in fact, noted several artistic photographs of a nude female on the walls of Brad’s apartment. He couldn’t know if they were of Cheryl; at this point, he didn’t know what Cheryl Keeton might have looked like in life. She had been so brutally beaten that she was unrecognizable. And the nude’s head was cropped from the photographs, revealing only an exquisite torso. They weren’t “Playboy shots”; they were beautifully done.

  The woman Brad was describing sounded as if she had been a wanton creature who might very well have been a set-up for violent murder. Ayers had no way of knowing if he was hearing an accurate description of Cheryl Keeton, but her alleged avocations and preferences certainly sounded bizarre. Maybe she had been one woman in the courtroom and another after dark.

  Ayers asked again for specific details on Brad’s movements during the hours preceding Cheryl’s death. Brad seemed calm and confident as he thought back over the evening. After he returned to the Madison Tower from the pizza parlor with his three sons, he said, he had left only once, and that was just long enough to put some things in his car—shoes and work clothes he needed because he had an on-site inspection of some property the next day. “In fact,” he said, “I talked to a cop in the garag
e. He was talking to two people down there, and he nodded at me.”

  Ayers made a note to check on that. He asked if it might be possible for him to ask a few questions of the three Cunningham children.

  “No,” Brad said firmly. “Not until I talk to an attorney about it.”

  Again the two detectives’ eyes met, but they said nothing.

  Glancing at the jogging outfit Brad wore, Ayers asked, “Are you athletic?”

  “No. I used to jog, but I haven’t for some time.”

  “Was Cheryl athletic?”

  “Cheryl?” Brad looked surprised. “No—not at all.”

  As Brad became more expansive, seeming to relax slightly, Ayers commented that he himself had been through a divorce and could empathize with the stress and frustration involved. And then he caught Brad up short again by repeating the question he had asked earlier. “Did you kill your wife?”

  The second time was too much. Brad got up from the table and walked to a phone. He called Wayne Palmer, a Portland lawyer, and left a message with his service.

  Within a short time, the phone in the apartment rang and Jerry Finch answered. Wayne Palmer, who said he was representing Bradly Cunningham, asked that all questioning of his client stop. He informed Finch that he didn’t want the children to be questioned either. “Don’t wake them up.”

  So, at close to 2 A.M., the questioning had to end. After Brad denied for the second time that he had killed Cheryl Keeton, and after his attorney demanded that the detectives’ questioning stop, there was nothing more for them to do. They had informed Brad of his estranged wife’s death and he seemed no more troubled than if they had told him someone had dented the fender of his truck. Now he wanted them out of his apartment.

  Whatever had happened to Cheryl Keeton, the answers were not going to come easily. Her almost-ex-husband—now her widower—was most assuredly not devastated to learn that she was dead. He wasn’t surprised either, he said—not given the lifestyle she had chosen. But he had assured the detectives that what had happened to Cheryl had nothing to do with him, with his children, or with his activities during Sunday evening, September 21, 1986. His duty now was to protect his children, and he intended to do just that.

  5

  At 6:30 on Monday morning, September 22, Brad called Sara Gordon at Providence Hospital with news so shocking that she could scarcely believe what he was saying.

  “Cheryl’s dead. The police came by at eleven last night and informed me.”

  “Brad!” Sara gasped. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb your sleep.”

  Disturb her sleep? Didn’t he know that her profession disturbed her sleep all the time? Way back when she was an intern, Sara had learned to fall asleep leaning against a wall if she had to. She could wake in an instant, be perfectly alert during delicate surgery, and then immediately fall back asleep. All doctors could. They had to learn to sleep when they had a chance or they wouldn’t survive. Sara couldn’t understand why Brad hadn’t called her the moment he learned the awful news. When his father died only two months before, he had called her at once, begging her to come home and be with him. And she had moved heaven and earth to go to him. Of course, he had loved his father deeply, and he detested his ex-wife, but even so.

  Sara and Brad talked for five or six minutes, as she tried to assimilate the fact that Cheryl was dead. Brad said he didn’t know how Cheryl had died; the police hadn’t been specific but they had said it wasn’t in a traffic accident. Finally, he hung up, and Sara’s hand trailed down the phone.

  She sat, leaden, wondering what on earth could have happened. And then Sara simply had to call Brad back. In some ways she and Brad had had such a strange weekend; they had even had an uncharacteristic squabble on the phone the night before. Earlier, Brad had said something about Cheryl that was almost unbelievable. “Brad had told me Friday night—when we picked up the boys—that Cheryl and her mother were planning to poison him,” Sara remembered. “He had told me that before—that he had listened in on their phone conversation while they plotted against him . . .”

  Sara had never known Brad to be frightened of anything before—except for the safety of his children. Now she had to find out more. She called Brad back. There was something she had to ask him. She hoped he wouldn’t be hurt or angry, but she was aware that the rage between Brad and Cheryl had escalated tremendously over the past few weeks. She had seen his face when he talked to her on the phone.

  “Brad,” Sara said quietly, “do you swear that you had nothing to do with Cheryl’s death?”

  His voice was firm and clear. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  She believed him. She didn’t sense a trace of deception in his voice. Reassured, she hung up the phone.

  Sara was scheduled to administer anesthesia for two eye surgeries. There was nothing she could do to help Brad at the moment, and so she walked to the operating room.

  Dr. Karen Gunson, a forensic pathologist and deputy state medical examiner, was a soft-spoken woman with blond hair, high cheekbones, and lovely large eyes usually hidden behind glasses. On Monday afternoon, September 22, she performed a postmortem examination of the body of a young woman who had been found dead the evening before. Dr. Gunson had been with the State of Oregon’s M.E.’s office for about eight months; to date, in her training and career, she had performed approximately three hundred autopsies. But this one among the hundreds would prove to be memorable for many reasons, one dead woman whose foreshortened life and sudden death she would never forget. Seldom had Dr. Gunson seen so many injuries inflicted upon one person. In the end, she would estimate that the victim had been struck approximately two dozen times—twenty-one to twenty-four separate and distinct blows—but some of the injuries’ edges merged into others, so she could make only an educated guess.

  How long does it take to strike a struggling adult human being twenty-four times?

  The yellow band on the victim’s right wrist gave a tentative identification and an estimated age—thirty-seven. She was still dressed in the blood-soaked clothing she had worn when she was found: a pullover, a T-shirt, blue jeans (zipped), a white bra, beige bikini panties, black socks and loafers. She wore a gold chain with a pendant containing clear stones around her neck, and a watch on her left wrist. There was a blue cord with a key attached to it wrapped around her other wrist.

  Undressed, the dead woman was almost anorexically thin, so thin that her ribs and hip bones glowed through her skin. She was five feet five and one-half inches in height, but she weighed a mere hundred pounds. Only her face was swollen and puffy. There, Dr. Gunson saw a mass of injuries—lacerations, contusions, and abrasions. She counted five different shapes of lacerations on the top of the head; some were linear, some were U-shaped, and some were too ragged to label accurately. The facial bones themselves had been fractured, but the skull had not.

  Dr. Gunson dictated into a tape recorder as she listed the fractures to the left mastoidal area—six in all, “four horizontal and roughly linear, one oblique, one vertical.” There were bruises on the left upper neck. The cartilage on the top of the left ear was fractured. “There are a series of lacerations and contusions involving all planes of the face—linear, Y-shaped, triangular, all full thickness lacerations . . . including contours of the upper and lower eyelids . . . lacerations of both cheeks, multiple small and large lacerations around the mouth . . .”

  The dead woman had four broken teeth, her upper jaw was broken, her right lower jaw was broken, and the force of that blow had even displaced her teeth.

  Dr. Gunson continued the postmortem procedure with an internal examination of the skull. She cut the skin at the back of the dead woman’s neck with a scalpel and peeled away the entire scalp like a tight latex mask, up over the top of the skull, and inside out, down over the face. She then sawed away the top of the skull so that the brain itself was exposed. The smell of burned bone, no longer noticeable to experienced pathologists, filled the ro
om.

  Dr. Gunson found extensive hemorrhaging all over the surface of the brain, but, again, no fracture of the skull itself. Like a thousand other variable characteristics that differentiate one human body from another, thickness of the skull is one. This victim had a rather thick bony calvarium; it had done her no good. Ironically, her strong skull had been an unyielding force that helped to destroy her brain.

  Dr. Gunson noted the thick subdural hematoma (large blood clot) over the right side of the brain. The dead woman’s brain had been literally displaced and squeezed because of traumatic swelling and tremendous bleeding. “The subject . . . has suffered contra coup injuries. The head was supported on the right, and struck on the left,” Dr. Gunson recorded.

  A contra coup injury to the brain occurs when the head is hit on one side and the brain is then macerated as it is slammed forcibly against the opposite side; it is an injury seen often, tragically, in battered infants and children, inflicted when they are shaken violently. At the time this victim was struck repeatedly, the right side of her head had probably been trapped against some unyielding object. When her head did not move, her brain had bounced again and again into that side of her skull.

  It was obvious that this shockingly slender victim had not gone down easily. Her hands and left arm and shoulder bore defense wounds; even her lower legs and feet were bruised—injuries that had occurred, perhaps, as she fought her attacker or struggled to get away. There was a peculiar linear abrasion near her waist, a scarlet line where the waist band of her jeans had been.

  Dr. Gunson knew that detectives would ask how long someone could have lived with the terrible brain injuries this dead woman had suffered. She estimated only minutes. The growing blood clot pushing her brain to one side, compressing it until it could no longer sustain her breathing and her heartbeat, had built up rapidly. She would not have been paralyzed, but she could not have fought back for long. And while she was still alive, the terrible hemorrhage into her brain continued. Paradoxically, the bleeding stopped when she died. The huge hematoma grew no larger, once it no longer mattered.