Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Brad could see how tired Sara was, so he thoughtfully took the boys out to play in the park after breakfast. Grateful, she crawled back into bed until one, and was back on duty at the hospital at 3 P.M. She had scarcely seen Jess, Michael, and Phillip all weekend, so she suggested that they all have supper with her that Sunday evening. The American Dream Pizza Company was kitty-corner from one wing of Providence, and the boys loved pizza. At 5 P.M. Sara left the medicinal-smelling hospital corridors and walked to the restaurant, enjoying the sunny September afternoon.

  Brad was always on time. That was just one of the many things Sara liked about him. If he said he would be someplace, she could count on him. She thought he looked handsome as he strode toward her with his sons, but then Brad always looked handsome to Sara. Later, she remembered he was wearing a burgundy golf shirt, casual slacks, and a brown leather jacket. She couldn’t recall if he was wearing boots or tennis shoes. At the time, it didn’t matter.

  They had a leisurely meal, enjoying each other’s company and the beautiful Sunday evening. Grinning devilishly, Brad urged the boys to drink more and more Pepsi. Cheryl had delivered them to him with their bladders full of orange juice; now he would return the “favor” and take them home full of soda pop.

  Toward the end of their meal, Brad told Sara that something was wrong with his Suburban; it was missing and stalling, and he suspected he had probably gotten a tank of dirty gas that was plugging his gas line. He asked the boys to demonstrate the sound his van made and they all laughed when Jess and Michael obliged by snorting and hiccuping.

  “Could I borrow your car to take the kids back to Cheryl?” Brad asked.

  Sara nodded. She wouldn’t be needing her Toyota Cressida that evening, anyway. She would be either in the doctors’ lounge, in the on-call room, or in surgery.

  Brad drove his Suburban over from the pizza place and parked it next to Sara’s car in the doctors’ lot. Sara walked back with the boys, reluctant to leave the clean air and dappled sunlight of that lovely evening. Brad was pouring some kind of gas additive into the tank of his van when they caught up with him. “It needs to sit in the tank for a while,” he said. “It’ll work better that way.”

  Sara knew absolutely nothing about the inner workings of a car. She didn’t know that a gas additive doesn’t even start to work until the vehicle is actually driven and the additive circulates through the adulterated gas lines. She gave Brad her key ring. He took off her car key and handed back her other keys and the keys to his Suburban, although neither one of them expected she would need them. If Brad was nervous about driving the Suburban because the engine was missing, she certainly wasn’t about to venture out in it. Anyway, Brad promised he would be back to visit with her in the doctors’ lounge within the hour.

  It was about ten minutes to seven when Brad and the boys were ready to go. As usual, things were a little hectic. Brad suddenly remembered that he had left Jess’s “special blankey” back at his apartment. “Maybe I’ll call Cheryl and have her pick up the boys for a change,” he said. “I can hand her the blanket then.”

  As far as Sara knew, Cheryl had never before picked up her sons at the Madison Tower, nor had she delivered them there. She wondered if Cheryl would even agree to that. She seemed to give Brad such a hard time about everything. One thing Sara did know. There was no way that Brad was going to get to Cheryl’s house in the West Slope area by seven—not from Providence Hospital. He still had to go through downtown Portland and then swing west onto Route 26, the Sunset Highway.

  Brad gave Sara a quick peck on the cheek and again promised he would be back to spend the evening with her until about nine. Brent had been gone all weekend on a scuba diving trip to Hood Canal and was due home after that. Brad wanted to be there when he got back.

  When Brad and the boys drove off, Sara waved goodbye and headed back to the doctors’ lounge. Her schedule demanded that she remain on trauma call all night. The hospital provided a suite, not unlike a nice hotel suite, for physicians who were on call overnight. She would begin her regular operation schedule first thing Monday morning. It was possible that she would be working almost around the clock. If she was lucky, she would get a good night’s sleep. At about 7:30 she was watching television in the lounge when the hospital operator paged her and she picked up the phone. It was Brad.

  “I called Cheryl,” he said. “She’s going to pick up the boys. I still should be over there before eight.”

  Sara was relieved. They chatted for about five minutes, and then she turned her attention back to the television. She expected to look up at any moment and see Brad coming through the door of the lounge. He had been there often enough to know exactly where to find her.

  But Brad didn’t appear. If she was expecting anyone else, Sara wouldn’t have been concerned, but Brad was such a punctual man. She called his apartment shortly before eight and was surprised to hear the phone ring five, six, ten times. His answering machine always came on by the fourth ring, but this time the phone just rang endlessly. At 8:30 she dialed Brad’s number again. And again the phone rang emptily. Until that night, Sara had never known Brad to leave his apartment without making sure the answering machine was on. With his business interests, with his concern about the boys, with his graciousness in always being available to her, he just automatically left it on.

  Sara was disappointed, and a little irritated. If Brent was due home at nine, Brad wouldn’t be able to come and spend any time at all with her. Their times alone together were precious because they were so infrequent, and now they had lost another evening.

  Sara kept glancing at the clock. It was getting dark outside. And now she was not only annoyed, she was getting worried. There was such enmity between Brad and Cheryl; Sara had seen Brad enraged, frustrated almost to the point of tears only five days ago. She felt a presentiment of doom. Maybe she was superstitious. Just when everything was as close to perfect in her own personal life as she had ever imagined it might be, she didn’t want to lose the man she loved. “I remembered what Brad had said about Cheryl trying to poison him,” Sara would recall. “I didn’t take it seriously, but . . .”

  Maybe Brad had had an accident. He had been in such a tearing hurry when he left. And those darling little boys wouldn’t be as safe in her sedan as in the big Suburban. Every time she heard a siren approach the hospital, Sara flinched. She didn’t just love Brad; she loved Jess, Michael, and Phillip too.

  It was so out of character for Cheryl to go to Brad’s apartment to pick up the boys. Why would she agree to do that tonight? Sara wondered. And if she had agreed, why wouldn’t Brad be there? The night no longer looked lovely; it looked dark and empty outside the hospital window. Her work in the trauma unit reminded her every day that people someone loved often never went home again. And most of them had parted saying, “I’ll see you—”

  Just before nine, Sara tried Brad’s number again. This time, to her great relief, he answered.

  “Where have you been?” she asked angrily.

  Brad sounded out of breath and a little excited when he spoke. “We’ve been down waiting for Cheryl—” he said.

  “For an hour and a half?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then elaborated. He told Sara that he had called Cheryl at 7:30 and asked her as nicely as he could if she would come and pick up the boys. But it had been clear to him, he said, that she had not been alone. “I heard someone in the background—she probably just went out partying.”

  Sara slammed down the phone. She wasn’t sure if she was mad at Brad or at Cheryl, but she felt guilty and foolish almost immediately. From everything Brad had told her about Cheryl, she might very well have left him waiting that long. Contrite, she called Brad back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m calmed down now. I was just worried that you were either out killing Cheryl or that she was killing you! This is the first time since I’ve known you that you weren’t where you told me you would be—”

  Brad sounded upset, too, as
he accepted her apology.

  “What were you telling me about hearing somebody at Cheryl’s house?” Sara asked.

  “I just heard some guy. The second time I called, she wasn’t home. She probably just decided to go out and party.”

  “Well, where have you been, Brad?”

  “Like I said, waiting for Cheryl downstairs. She never showed.”

  They agreed it was too late for Brad to drive over to the hospital. Besides, Brent wasn’t home yet, and there wasn’t anybody for Brad to leave the boys with. Sara told him she was going to go to bed, and he said he would tuck the boys in at his apartment. Sara was disappointed, but she was no longer angry at Brad. It was hard for her to stay mad at him for very long. She loved him too much.

  32

  Cheryl’s last weekend was bittersweet. She had gone to Jess’s soccer game even though Brad had told her that on his Saturdays she was not allowed to go to the games or to speak to the boys or even to act as if she knew her own sons. She had called her mother either on Friday night after Brad picked the boys up or on Saturday morning. “Cheryl wanted to go to Jess’s game,” Betty would recall, “but she didn’t want to make it bad for them.”

  Betty and Marv Troseth were all too aware of the terrible strain Cheryl had been under for most of that year. They lived in Longview, and so did her sisters Julia and Susan, and her former stepfather, Bob McNannay. They all loved her but none of them could do much to help—except listen. Betty and Cheryl had grown extremely close and they talked constantly by phone.

  “The main issue, of course,” Betty would say later, “was the custody of the children. At first she was afraid she wouldn’t get them. I told her that was ridiculous. Cheryl said, ‘He will lie in court. He will kill me to get them.’ I tried to talk her out of shared custody. I really preached. He wasn’t fit to have them.”

  Betty remembered that Cheryl had looked at her once and said with complete resignation, “I’ll have to put up with him. For the rest of my life, I’ll have to deal with Brad.”

  Cheryl had felt cautiously confident after Dr. Sardo decided that she was the primary parent. Right up to the last week, she believed she would have custody, although she knew it wasn’t going to be easy. She told her mother that she and Brad had both given depositions on September 16.

  After the soccer game on Saturday morning, Cheryl got in her Toyota van and headed north across the bridge that separates Oregon from Washington. She was going home to Longview. She was afraid. Her mother saw it. Betty had seen Cheryl afraid for a long time, but this weekend was different. There was a kind of tragic acceptance about Cheryl, as if she had done everything she could for her children, for herself, for the slightest chance that she and her three boys might have a happy future—or any future together.

  Cheryl was strangely low-key on Saturday. She had always been a woman of tremendous energy, and the contrast with the way she had once looked and acted was shocking. “She just looked terrible,” her sister Susan remembered. “She was exhausted, and she was so thin that you could see her rib cage. Her cheeks were caved in.”

  On Saturday night, when Betty got up from the table to wash the supper dishes, Cheryl didn’t move to join her. “She let me do the dishes alone,” Betty said. “Cheryl always jumped up to help me.” But she seemed, at last, to have run out of strength. She didn’t talk about the custody battle, but she did speak of her worries about Phillip, her baby. “She said he was starting to stutter, and she was going to take him to a doctor.”

  Betty’s role over the previous year had been to calm Cheryl down. But she wasn’t agitated that evening; she seemed beaten down. “My highs are not quite as high as they could be,” she said. “And my lows are lower.” Then she said quite softly, “I know you don’t think he’s going to kill me, Mom, but he is going to kill me.”

  Betty stopped what she was doing and stared hard at Cheryl. It wasn’t that this was the first time Cheryl had said she feared Brad would kill her; Betty had heard her say it almost a dozen times since November of 1985. She responded as she usually did. “He’s too selfish to risk his butt.” But then Betty felt a chill. This time she believed Cheryl and she warned, “Don’t be alone with him, Cheryl. Don’t try to talk to him the way you would with other people. Watch your car.”

  Cheryl sighed. “I have to live my life, Mom. There are things I have to do.”

  Cheryl spent that Saturday night at her mother’s home. They watched a movie, Queen of the Starlight Ballroom, a sentimental story about romance between lonely people in their sixties, with Maureen Stapleton and Charles Durning.

  On Sunday Cheryl told her mother that she wanted to visit her sisters. That was rather unusual; Susan and Cheryl had always been very close, but Cheryl hadn’t seen Julia for six years. When Julia graduated from high school, she had left Longview immediately and headed for Seattle. She had been back in her hometown for only a short time. “Julia lived a few blocks from Mom’s place,” Susan said. “Cheryl and Mom walked over to see Julia. Then they drove over to my house.”

  Susan still lived with her father, Bob McNannay, in the house that had been Cheryl’s home too when she was in high school. The kitchen had just been retiled in shades of cobalt blue, and this was the first time Cheryl had seen the remodeling completed. They all sat around and talked. Michael’s birthday was coming up in about five days, and Susan suggested that they all come down for a birthday party. Cheryl tried to be enthusiastic.

  “Cheryl was calm, even docile,” Susan would remember. “She was usually moving a million miles an hour, but she was very peaceful. She wasn’t depressed: she was passive. She was like someone I didn’t know very well. She was subdued. That was not typical.”

  Another thing Susan noticed was that Cheryl didn’t talk about her divorce or the custody battle. That seemed strange because they had all talked about those topics for months. Susan had just baked rye bread and they all had some. Cheryl praised her sister’s baking, and then Susan played the piano for them.

  In a way, it was just like their usual visits. But Susan kept glancing at her sister and she was appalled. Cheryl looked as if she was starving; she was pale and she was so terribly quiet. “I hugged Cheryl when she left, and she felt almost nonexistent,” Susan said. “She was so thin. Our last hug was much longer than usual.”

  After they left Susan’s, Betty and Cheryl went to Sears and Cheryl bought some underwear and socks for the boys, paying with her Sears credit card. When they got back to Betty and Marv’s house, they talked with him out in the driveway. Marv had been changing the oil in his car and he noticed that Cheryl’s Toyota van was dirty. He offered to wash it for her, and she thought about it for a moment. “No,” she finally said. “I have to get back for the boys. There might be an accident on the freeway or something and I might be late. Thanks, Marv—maybe next time.”

  Late that afternoon Cheryl headed south on the I-5 freeway. The drive to Portland ordinarily takes an hour, and even though she had to stop briefly at her office at Garvey, Schubert to pick up some papers, she would be at the house on the West Slope in plenty of time to welcome her three boys home from their weekend visit with their father.

  Jim Karr had also been in Longview for most of the weekend. He headed down to Gresham on Sunday to visit a friend and watch the Seahawks game. He planned to be back at the West Slope house in time to help Cheryl put the boys to bed.

  In Longview, Marv Troseth returned from the grocery store a few minutes after seven. Betty told him that Cheryl had called, very upset. The boys weren’t home yet. Brad had called her and said that he was having trouble with his gas line. Betty was worried. She thought maybe Cheryl should call the police and ask them to look for Brad and the boys. “I told her that you couldn’t call the police just because someone was fifteen or twenty minutes late,” Marv said.

  That made sense and Betty tried to be calm. But she had caught Cheryl’s fear the way you catch a virus, and her dread grew with every passing minute. She called Susan between 7:
10 and 7:15. “Mom said Cheryl was very upset because the boys weren’t back,” Susan remembered. “Mom was on edge because Cheryl was unreasonably concerned.”

  It was unusual for Betty to call Susan and be so agitated. It was actually the first time Susan had heard her this way. “Mom wanted to go to Cheryl’s house, and I told her to relax.”

  Betty and Marv’s phone rang just before 8 P.M. It was Cheryl. “Brad called and he wants me to meet him at that Mobil station down by the IGA store—but I know that station’s closed. . . .”

  “No!” Betty said. “Don’t go down there.”

  “I have to get my kids.”

  Betty begged Cheryl to wait until she and Marv could drive down to Portland and go with her to pick up the boys, but Cheryl argued that would take an hour at least. She was going to go. She had to go.

  Betty couldn’t change her daughter’s mind. “You call me the second you get back to the house. Don’t wait for anything. I want to know you’re safely home.”

  Cheryl promised she would.

  When Betty called Susan again that evening, she was on the edge of hysteria. She was terrified that Cheryl was going to meet Brad and told Susan that she thought she and Marv should head for Portland immediately.

  “Go to Portland, if you want to go, Mom,” Susan said. Now Susan was catching the fear too.

  “Something’s not right,” Betty said. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  Susan put down the phone and told her father about Betty’s two frantic phone calls. “I got very nervous too. I had a lump in my throat all evening,” Bob McNannay said.