Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Betty waited anxiously for Cheryl’s call. Trying to ease her mind, Marv placed calls to both Cheryl’s number and Brad’s. There was no answer at either, and no answering machine pickup. At Betty’s urging, Marv kept calling but no one answered.

  The next call that Betty received from the West Slope house was from her son Jim. She grabbed the phone before the first ring was over and when she heard Jim’s voice, she cried, “She’s dead, isn’t she? Cheryl’s dead!”

  Jim said that wasn’t true. He didn’t know where Cheryl was, but he had found a note from her and he was going to go look for her.

  Betty was inconsolable. She knew her daughter was dead.

  And, of course, she was right.

  Brad had hired three separate attorneys to represent him in his divorce from Cheryl, dismissing them one after the other even though they were the best in the business. He had consulted almost a dozen others. He need not have bothered. How ironic that he didn’t need a divorce now. Nor would there be any more custody battles.

  Cheryl was dead.

  And Jess, Michael, and Phillip were his alone.

  PART 4

  Sara

  33

  Brad Cunningham had emerged as the prime suspect in the death of his estranged wife, but the time frame of Cheryl’s murder was vitally important in establishing the possibility of his guilt. Brad could account for his movements on that Sunday night almost to the minute. If Danielle Daniels, one of the residents living along 79th where it entered the Sunset Highway, had heard the sounds of someone beating Cheryl to death, the time of the murder would have been between 8:20 and 8:25. In order for Oregon State Police detectives to be satisfied that Brad had nothing to do with the crime, they would have to talk to witnesses who could back up his alibi for that Sunday night.

  Brad didn’t have to prove anything. In America, suspects and defendants are innocent until proven guilty. The legal burden of proof rested heavily on the detectives’ shoulders and on the Washington County District Attorney’s office. If they could not gather evidence and/or witnesses that they believed would prove Brad guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, he would go free.

  There were numerous ways of checking on Brad, and the investigation was still fresh. Investigators could check phone records. Perhaps they could find outside witnesses who had had no interest in his activities that night but who would remember seeing him. The problem was to locate everything and everyone who might be able to either validate Brad’s story or discredit it.

  Brad’s own six-year-old son had told the grand jury that his father had left the apartment on Sunday night while he was watching a video and television. Children have little sense of the passage of time, but detectives did check the running time of The Sword in the Stone and of Rambo, the two movies Jess had been watching. If the boy’s recollection was correct, Brad would have been away from the apartment for more than an hour.

  Officer Craig Ward of the Portland Police Bureau had a far better time sense than a six-year-old boy, and so did Lilya Saarnen, Brad’s former lover. Ward didn’t see Cunningham that Sunday night, although he was in the Madison Tower parking garage, but Lilya did. And so did another tenant in the building.

  Officer Ward arrived at the Madison Tower between 8:21 and 8:27 Sunday evening in response to a “car prowl” complaint from Terry Houghton, a men’s clothing salesman whose company van was parked in the garage on the B-2 level. Ward took an elevator from the ground floor to the B-1 level and then walked to B-2. His notes reflected that he had spent ten to fifteen minutes at the van. Houghton had lost more than a hundred sample suits and other items. After Ward had taken down that information, he and Houghton walked to the security gate and inspected it. “I was aware that two or three vehicles drove past,” Ward recalled, “but I never saw any foot traffic at all.”

  Rachel Houghton, however, did see a man and a child in the garage. She and her husband lived on the seventh floor of the Madison Tower and they had two parking spaces in the garage. “We returned from a weekend trip to find our van had been broken into,” she said, “and we called the police. While we were talking to the police, I saw someone come down the driveway into the parking structure—running. It was a man and a child, entering the garage in a slow run or a fast walk. I had just been telling the officer how people got into the garage. The man had on shorts and a T-shirt; he was barefoot and he had wet hair.”

  Later, Rachel Houghton would identify that man as Brad Cunningham. She sensed that he was startled to see a policeman in the garage. “He stopped abruptly, and walked to a car, and put something away, and then he headed toward the Tower.”

  The child and the running man in the shorts with wet hair hadn’t meant anything to Rachel Houghton—not until she read about Cheryl Keeton’s murder in the papers. She hadn’t mentioned it to her husband, who was busy showing Craig Ward how the security gate operated. Later, she called police and told them what she had seen. She estimated that it was sometime around 9 P.M. when she saw the man and the little boy. Officer Ward cleared the Madison Tower at “roughly nine P.M.”

  Lilya Saarnen, who lived on the first floor of the Madison Tower in G-42, had been late for a shower given by a friend’s mother that night. It was just past 7:30 P.M. when she stepped out of her door and encountered Brad and his small son Michael. Brad was carrying keys in his hand.

  Early the next morning—Monday—Brad had called Lilya before she was even out of bed, asking her if she remembered seeing him in the hall the evening before. When she said she did, he said, “At eight P.M., right?”

  “No, Brad,” she corrected. “I saw you at seven-thirty.”

  Brad abruptly hung up the phone.

  Lilya told her surgeon boyfriend that something about Brad’s manner worried her. Later that morning at work, a friend called and asked, “Have you read the paper?”

  Lilya said she hadn’t had time.

  “Cheryl Keeton got murdered last night,” her friend said.

  “That’s funny,” Lilya said. “I just talked to Brad, and he didn’t say anything about it. . . .”

  Lilya told Detective Jerry Finch about seeing Brad on Sunday evening. “My front door was one of four on the ground-floor level. The elevator is on one side and the garden gate on the other. I was moving toward the garden gate at seven-thirty and Brad and Michael were leaving the elevator. . . .”

  “How was he dressed?” Finch asked.

  “Casually . . .”

  “How casually?”

  “Khaki pants, I think—and a jacket.”

  “When Mr. Cunningham and his son left the elevator, where were they headed?”

  “Toward the garage.”

  * * *

  On October 10, Oregon State Police investigators served a search warrant on Brad Cunningham’s apartment. Richard McKeirnan, Greg Baxter, Les Frank, and Jerry Finch conducted a search and found nothing that seemed truly helpful in their probe—either in the apartment or in Brad’s storage locker at the Madison Tower. They did see a reflectorized vest with orange or yellow stripes which they seized and marked into evidence. It might have been the vest that Jess said his father was wearing when he came back from “jogging” on the night of the murder. Or it might not have been. Brad would claim later it was a seldom used hunting vest.

  Tests revealed no evidence of blood on the vest.

  If the detectives had hoped to find a heavy blunt instrument with many surfaces that might match the wounds Dr. Karen Gunson noted on Cheryl Keeton’s autopsy report—and they had—they were disappointed. They found no weapon, no bloody clothes, and no running shoes with traces of red still etched in their bas-relief bottoms.

  To solve a murder, investigators need to show means, motive, opportunity, and physical evidence. The detectives assigned to the Keeton case were convinced they had a motive. Brad had hated his estranged wife, particularly after the deposition she gave five days before her murder. Brad also had the means. He was a strong man and had access to all manner of weapons. A
nd he could have had the opportunity—if he had been able to fit a murder into an extremely tight timetable.

  Some of those who could verify where Brad had been that night or establish time sequences—Dr. Sara Gordon, Officer Craig Ward, the Houghtons, Lilya Saarnen—would make impeccable witnesses if they chose to cooperate with the State. Then there were his own little boys, although Jess, the oldest, was probably the only one whose recall might be accurate. But Sara Gordon loved Brad Cunningham and they had plans for the future. Lilya Saarnen had once been intimate with him, and she was still his friend—as well as Sara Gordon’s. And his own sons idolized their daddy. Detectives hoped that more witnesses would either come forward on their own or surface during the investigation.

  Just as a medical examiner may find that the last time the deceased was seen alive is the best way to establish time of death, the activities of a murder suspect are best charted by the last time he was seen before the murder by competent witnesses, and the first time he was seen after the crime. Lilya Saarnen had seen Brad and Michael emerge from the elevator at the Madison Tower at 7:30–7:35 P.M. that Sunday. Cheryl was murdered between 8:20 and 8:30 P.M. And at around 9:00 P.M. Rachel Houghton saw Brad and a small boy in the garage of the Madison Tower. For an hour and a half, Brad’s whereabouts were unaccounted for.

  Had he been taking care of Jess, Michael, and Phillip during that time, waiting impatiently for his heedless, drunken, estranged wife to come for them? Had he left the apartment on the eighteenth floor only briefly—to peer down over the rail to watch for Cheryl, to put boots into Sara’s Cressida, to pick up the mail? That would fill up the vital time period.

  Or had he planned every minute of that Sunday evening, and planned it with vile intention? Had he left Jess and Phillip alone in his apartment and taken Michael with him as he set out to murder their mother? That would fill up the vital time period too.

  Detectives would drive the route from Providence Hospital to the Madison Tower to the West Slope and back to the Madison Tower with stopwatches in hand to prove that Brad could have done that on the night of the murder. It was certainly possible. Still there was absolutely no physical evidence linking him to the crime.

  34

  In the days immediately following Cheryl’s murder, Brad told confidants that his biggest fear was that her mother would take his children away from him. He had been trying to spirit Jess, Michael, and Phillip away from Portland, but the best he could do was keep moving them from one house to the next over the ensuing three or four weeks. The first week, along with Sara, they were mostly at his sister Margie’s or Gini Burton’s, and that weekend they stayed with another of Sara’s sisters, Shirley, who lived in McMinnville, Sara’s hometown. Michael had his fifth birthday on September 26, and he wanted to celebrate at Chuck E Cheese’s. While the flowers were still fresh on his mother’s grave, Brad and Sara tried to give Michael a wonderful birthday.

  Then suddenly, after Brad’s three sons had become such an integral part of Sara’s life, they disappeared. It was just one more component in a world that was growing steadily sadder and more frightening. “I didn’t see the boys after that,” Sara would recall. “Not for weeks. I asked Brad where they were, and he told me that he had had them taken out of state. I didn’t know where they were.”

  Brad had been unsuccessful in preventing his oldest son from appearing before the Washington County grand jury, of course. Still, when no arrest followed his testimony, he must have felt vindicated. The damn police had come and pawed through his apartment and his storage locker, but if they were looking for evidence that he had killed his wife, they didn’t find it. How could they? He said he hadn’t murdered Cheryl, and he didn’t know who had.

  Brad’s career with U.S. Bank faltered after her murder. His superiors were understanding when he didn’t come in to work the first week. His estranged wife’s death was a shock to everyone. But Brad never really went back to work. He showed up only sporadically. He had been considered a valuable employee for the almost five months he was with U.S. Bank. He was a man with an eye for property with potential. But now he had made unsavory headlines in Portland, and that was not the image that U.S. Bank—or any bank, for that matter—would choose to project. Even so, Brad was given the benefit of the doubt.

  However, his poor attendance at work was brought to the attention of his boss, Larry Rosenkrantz. Given Brad’s apparent disinterest in his job, it was only a matter of time before U.S. Bank had to demand some response from him. Did he intend to come back to work? Brad met with Rosenkrantz and poured out a story of a life that left little time for his career. “He indicated to me that he was being harassed by the police, and that he was being hounded by his mother-in-law,” Rosenkrantz recalled.

  That might explain why Brad had checked out two bank cars from the car pool in the ten days after Cheryl’s murder. One had to be retrieved from an airport lot in Seattle. Brad had apparently used them so that no one could follow him. He had had Sara’s car, his truck, his Suburban, his Cabriolet, and the pool cars so that he could vary his transportation often. He wasn’t fired from the U.S. Bank job, but a mutually agreed arrangement was made. His contract was bought out, and he received twenty-three thousand dollars.

  Everywhere Brad looked that fall, he found another facet of his life shattering. His sons had no mother. He had no job. His suit was jammed up in the Texas courts, and he told Sara he lived in terror that he would lose his sons. He knew that Cheryl’s law firm was helping Betty and Marv Troseth, Bob McNannay, and John Burke in their efforts to gain custody of his children. Everyone but Sara seemed to be against him.

  Finally, Brad came to the decision that the only way he could keep his sons was to hide them. He could not even tell Sara where they were. He had possession of his sons, and he intended to keep them. The problem was that he needed help. He wasn’t so naive that he didn’t know the police were still following him, aware of most of his movements. He couldn’t simply drive his sons away himself, he believed, without someone knowing where they were.

  His father would have helped him—he always had—but Sanford Cunningham had died two months before Cheryl. Brad detested his mother, and he had nothing good to say about his sisters Susan and Ethel. He refused to go to them for help with his sons. (Later, his sisters said that they would have gladly sheltered the little boys.) Brad was still close to his uncle Jimmy, but he lived in Burien, Washington—Brad’s old hometown—and anyone looking for his boys would check there first.

  Brad had other relatives in Washington State. Although he hadn’t seen his aunt Trudy Dreesen for decades, he thought of her now. Trudy was one of his grandfather Paul Cunningham’s daughters by his second wife, a half sister to Sanford and Jimmy, but a decade younger. She was married to Dr. Herman Dreesen, a chiropractor in Lynnwood, Washington.

  Trudy Dreesen, the onetime Seattle SeaFair Queen, was still a beautiful woman in her fifties. She was also tenderhearted, and when she received Brad’s call for help, she rushed to do what she could. She was appalled at the tragedy that had struck him and his children. And when he explained that it wouldn’t even be safe for her to keep his sons with her in her Lynnwood home, she perceived the depth of-his anxiety. She could see that Brad was shaken by what had happened and was terrified that he would lose his boys too.

  “I have friends who will help,” she said quickly.

  Trudy Dreesen talked with Florence Chamberlain, who lived in Port Angeles. Although Trudy had met Florence only twice, her son was dating the Chamberlains’ daughter, and Trudy knew that the Chamberlains were good people who lived in a three-story, six-bedroom home. After Trudy explained that Brad was a widower who needed someplace for his little boys—but only for a few weeks until he could find a permanent spot for them—Florence agreed to take Jess and Phillip in. Brad had told his aunt that his six-year-old and his two-year-old should be together, but he wanted Michael, just five, to be in another safe house. He didn’t tell her why and she didn’t ask.

 
Trudy and Herm Dreesen brought Jess and Phillip to the Chamberlains’ home. Florence showed them through the house and gave them their choice of the empty bedrooms. Jess selected the room with only one bed. It was clear that he and his little brother needed to be together. Florence saw that Trudy was very upset, truly fearful that someone was trying to snatch or somehow harm Brad’s sons.

  Trudy asked her friend Jean Count, who lived in Bothell, if she would take Michael. Jean agreed readily, touched by the pathetic story Trudy told and how upset she was. Brad and Trudy brought Michael to her home. During the two or three weeks that Michael stayed with Jean Count, Brad came only once when he picked Michael up to take him to visit with Jess and Phillip.

  In Port Angeles, Florence Chamberlain never met or spoke to Brad in person. When he brought Michael to see his two brothers, it was Trudy who took them outside to meet Brad and Michael. The three little Cunninghams romped on the lawn for about half an hour. Brad never called Florence to check on Jess and Phillip.

  Florence Chamberlain and Jean Count were women in their middle years. They were very kind to the little boys in their care, even if they were slightly puzzled about why they had to be separated from their father. The children had arrived without even a change of underwear or socks, but Trudy gave her friends more than enough money to ensure that they had whatever they needed.

  “I spent twenty-five dollars on underwear for them,” Florence Chamberlain would recall. “That was all.”

  Their mother had been dead for such a short time, and Jess, Michael, and Phillip had already been dragged from pillar to post, moving almost every day. They had stayed with Sara’s friends and family, protected by a father who feared the police, unnamed assassins, and his ex-mother-in-law—three entities he sometimes spoke of as equally dangerous. Now for most of October the boys were completely separated from their father, from Sara, from anything they could remember of their former life. It had to have been worst for Michael; he didn’t even have a brother to talk to when the lights were turned off at night.