Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Shinn started with nothing but a three-ring black binder—the summary of the police investigation of Cheryl’s murder in 1986 and 1987. If he was lucky, somewhere in that list of witnesses and law enforcement personnel he might find someone whose perception and recall would help him in his civil case. “I didn’t really expect to find new witnesses,” he said. “I hoped to expand on the witnesses who were around. Maybe my style was different, I could analyze differently, and my philosophy was different. I had the advantage of coming into this case fresh.”

  To reinterview people who had not been very receptive to interviews in the first place was going to take some innovative and empathetic private investigators. As he always did, Shinn went to experts for advice on how to find the best. “Steve Houze is one of a handful of the best criminal defense lawyers in Oregon, and I asked him who he would recommend as an investigator,” he said. “I told him about the case, and that, although this was a civil case, it was going to be almost like prosecuting a homicide, I need an investigator who’s used to doing criminal work.”

  Houze pondered Shinn’s question and then said, “Well, the very best investigator in the state is Chick Preston—but you can’t have him because he’s working for me.”

  “Later,” Shinn said, “I found out I’d played football against Chick when he went to Whitman University.”

  “Second,” Houze said, “would be Connie Capato, but she’s working on the Dayton Leroy Rogers case right now.”

  Shinn grimaced. Rogers was a suspect in the serial murders of Portland prostitutes whose bodies, their feet neatly severed, had been found in a lonely Oregon forest. Fortunately, Connie finished her work on that case in time to help Mike Shinn.

  Connie Capato had come to the field of private investigation by a circuitous route. At one time she had considered becoming a nun but found that the religious calling was not for her. She liked people, she was good with people, and for her the “calling” of the P.I. was a better way to connect with them. Along with Connie, Shinn hired another female P.I., Leslie Haigh, who worked in Connie’s business, CLC Investigations.

  When it came time to file the complaint and serve Brad with the official notice, Shinn didn’t know where he was living. “Somebody had heard he was working for a doughnut shop or something. Eric Lindenauer thought that was hysterical because he’d known Brad as this hotshot bank executive. I was sitting in the ‘Y’ in the sauna room one day, going through the Downtowner, and there’s a picture of Brad. It says, “New Guy on the Block,” and there’s Brad with this new Broadway Bakery. So that’s how we found him,” Shinn said with a laugh. “With great detective work. So I called Connie’s office and said we needed someone to serve the complaint. She said she’d send Leslie Haigh over, and I said, ‘Maybe you’d better send a guy. . . .’”

  When slender little Leslie showed up, Shinn had his doubts. “This case has some elements of danger—that’s why I asked for a guy,” he told her. “This guy you’re serving a complaint on is suspected of murdering his wife.” Her eyes sparkled, and she said, “Oh, really? That’s interesting.”

  “Yeah, it’s interesting, but it might be dangerous. Are you sure?”

  Leslie was sure. Shinn arranged to have a male P.I. follow Brad when he left the Broadway Bakery after Leslie had served the complaint. And Leslie promised to return to Shinn’s office and report on how Brad had reacted to the news that he was being sued in civil court for responsibility in his former wife’s death.

  She was back in a short time. “I went in the bakery,” Leslie reported. “It’s a really nice little place. And there was this long, cafeteria kind of line you stand in, and Brad Cunningham was at the end of the line—”

  “Yeah?” Shinn asked expectantly.

  “So I got to Brad, and he said, ‘Can I help you?’ and I told him I had some papers for him. I handed them to him—”

  “Yeah?”

  “He read them.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Yes, he did. He said, ‘Thank you,’ and then he looked at me and said, ‘Would you like a muffin?’”

  For weeks after that, Brad Cunningham was referred to in Mike Shinn’s office as “the muffin man.”

  * * *

  A civil suit accusing a man of murder was not the kind of story that a newspaper would ignore—and the Orego nian and the wire services did not. The headlines hit in July 1989.

  LAWSUIT BLAMES HUSBAND FOR SPOUSE’S DEATH

  Portland, Ore. (AP) Family and friends of a slain lawyer have filed a $15 million wrongful death lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court against her estranged husband.

  Court documents say that for months before she was bludgeoned to death on September 21, 1986, Cheryl Keeton had feared she would be killed by her estranged husband, Bradly M. Cunningham, a developer, entrepreneur and banker.

  But neither Cunningham nor anyone else has ever been charged in Keeton’s death. Despite an investigation that a prosecutor called exhaustive, the homicide case remains open.

  Portland lawyer Michael Shinn filed affidavits and court documents to support the lawsuit Monday. . . .

  The wire services quoted an outraged Brad Cunningham who said that the lawsuit was clearly an abuse of the legal system, the result of a “vendetta” against him by John Burke, the personal representative of his wife’s estate. He said that his three sons—nine, seven, and five, who lived with him and his new wife—believed that their mother had died in a car wreck. “It’s very upsetting to me that the system will let someone go and file something like this,” Brad told reporters. “It was bad enough to live through the death of my wife, and now we have to live through this . . . just when we thought life was normal again.”

  When Shinn’s legal assistant read the paper, she was appalled. She had no idea what he had undertaken, and she didn’t like it when she found out. “I’ll never forget,” Shinn said. “She read the article in the paper and she walked into my office with her hands on her hips. She just looked at me and said, ‘What have you done?’” And within a few days, she resigned.

  Shinn didn’t really blame her. It was going to be heavier and more dangerous work than any legal assistant in her right mind would choose to take on. But he was now involved in what would be the biggest case of his life, and he didn’t have a legal assistant. He had never needed a good right arm more than he did at this moment, and he realized a little ruefully that he was going to have to find a woman who was something of a daredevil—as he was.

  Shinn went to several attorney friends and asked if they knew of anyone who might meet his rather unusual specifications. He was looking for someone who would work overtime and have an uncanny ability to talk to people and get them to trust her enough to share secrets they had kept for years. She would have to have the soul of a detective, and she would have to be utterly fearless.

  One of Shinn’s former partners, Mark Bocci, heard him out and then said, “You should have asked me before. I know who you need. I know the one who’s the best in the State of Oregon, and she was looking for a job too—but she just got hired. She’s working for a company that defends civil cases.”

  “See if she’s really happy there,” Shinn urged. “See if she’ll leave and come with me.”

  The best legal assistant in the state turned out to be Diane Bakker, a slender and striking blonde in her thirties. Fortunately for Shinn, she was already bored with her new job, and she was intrigued with the Cunningham case, listening avidly as Shinn gave her an overview of what lay ahead. “There’s a negative to this,” he said finally. “If you come in on this, there’s likely to be some danger.” He looked up apprehensively, expecting that he was about to lose any chance he had with Diane. Instead, she was grinning.

  “She lit up like a Christmas tree,” Shinn recalled. “It turns out she’s fascinated with true crime books. Diane is into the ‘Serial Killer of the Week’ and all that stuff that I knew nothing about. I didn’t read those kinds of books. Diane did. Nothing scared
her; it only whetted her appetite for the job. I was fortunate that she came on this project. I never could have done it without her.”

  Brad Cunningham, who had accepted his complaint papers with such seeming equanimity, was not the sanguine “muffin man” at all, of course; he had the capability of being a sinister and dangerous presence. And he resented some guy named Mike Shinn interfering with his life.

  “It must have been the fall of 1989, a few months later,” Shinn remembered. “We were at Jake’s, and I was having dinner with Dave Jensen, who was president of the Oregon Trial Lawyers’ Association two years after I was. We were still on the board together. We were standing in the bar waiting for a table, and Dave asked me if I had anything interesting going on. I said, ‘Funny you should ask.’ So I was telling him about this Cunningham case. Then we moved to the tables near the bar to eat, and we were sitting there, still talking about the case. I’d noticed out of the corner of my eye that some guy seemed to be looking at me. All of a sudden, he looms up over me and he’s got this funny grin on his face.

  “He leans over and he’s kind of peering at me and he says, ‘Are you Mike Shinn?’ I was trying to figure out who he was, and I thought maybe he was an old fraternity brother. I was trying to buy time to remember who he was, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Mike Shinn. How ya doin’?”

  “He says, ‘I just wanted to see what you looked like.’ Then he turned on his heel and walked away. Dave says, ‘Who in the hell was that?’ and suddenly I knew who it was. I said, ‘That was him.’ I just made the connection, and then I looked closer at the woman he was with—and it was Sara.”

  Shinn’s encounter with Brad was brief. He would remember only that the guy was big and dark. He didn’t expect to see Cunningham again until they met in court—if he showed up in court. He sure wasn’t showing up to give depositions.

  38

  Brad had more problems than the legal action against him. His fifth marriage was turning sour. Marital fidelity or even discretion had never been part of his makeup, and his falls from grace were becoming more transparent.

  By February 6, 1990, Sara could no longer talk herself into believing that her marriage was working. Half the time she had no idea where Brad was; most of the rest of the time she knew he was with Lynn Minero. She knew because she had hired a private investigator to follow him. That day she told Brad she was thinking about divorce, and he barely reacted.

  Despite his flat reaction, Sara was worried because he had been very ill the night before. She tried to find Brad when she had a little time away from the OR, or when she could get to a phone. She called him and got no answer or got the answering machine. Brad always had a reason why he couldn’t answer her calls. “I was on hold on another call” or “The machine was turned off accidentally” or “The phone stopped ringing just as I reached for it.”

  Brad was running both the Broadway Bakery and the Bistro now, as well as delivering lunch orders. But he had a cell phone and there was no legitimate reason why Sara could never reach him. Half angry and half worried because of his history of heart problems, she kept trying to locate him.

  Sara jotted notes in her journal for February 6:

  “11:50—Called Bistro—Lynn answered. Said Brad had been back. She gave him message—He left again to deliver sandwiches. I asked her if he was okay. ‘Yes,’ Lynn answered. ‘He seemed okay the little bit that I’ve seen him.’ I said, ‘You picked him up this morning, didn’t you?’ She said yes.”

  Sara finally got a call back from Brad an hour later. She had agreed to pay a twelve-thousand-dollar retainer to a divorce attorney. Brad had no money. He called to say things had gone fine with the attorney. “I said I was concerned about him—He sort of grunted. Then said he didn’t believe me. I said he was scaring me. He said he was sorry—didn’t mean to. I asked him if he loved me. He said, ‘Sara, we have to talk, but I can’t talk now.’ . . .

  “13:40—I called Brad. Asked him if he was able to talk now. He said he was too busy. He said he didn’t think he’d feel like talking today. Said he felt like going out and having a few drinks tonight. I said, ‘With me?’ He said, ‘No, maybe just by myself.’ He said he felt like I wasn’t being honest with him. Would not be more specific. Just in general I was not being honest with him.”

  Brad was a master at projection; he could turn criticism away from himself as if it were a boomerang that he could direct back the way it came. He told Sara that afternoon that he felt she didn’t love him, that she was dishonest, that he would not answer her questions anymore. “He feels I grill him, and that he might want me to move out. I’m not the person he thought I was.”

  Brad told Sara he was “upset” about everything—the civil lawsuit that Mike Shinn had filed against him, the fact that she had been talking to a divorce attorney too, the knowledge that he had been followed for the past four or five days. It was true. She had grilled him and she had had him followed, and his answers never matched the truth.

  At that point, if Brad had made any effort toward reconciliation or any admission of his culpability, Sara might have stayed in the marriage—for the sake of Jess and Michael and Phillip. She might even have still loved Brad on some level, though she didn’t trust him. Perhaps she wanted to trust him.

  The next day Brad packed his pickup and left for a trip to Seattle. Sara was certain that Lynn had gone with him, but she was surprised later to see Lynn and her husband Gary together. Sara and Gary had talked; they were both worried that their marriages were crumbling because of an affair between Brad and Lynn. Sara got more response to her concerns from Gary than she did from Brad. In fact, she already considered her marriage over, and she had made plans to move out of the big gray house in Dunthorpe and find an apartment in the new Portland complex at Riverplace. Brad didn’t seem to care one way or the other if she left. And Sara didn’t tell Gary that she was leaving Brad.

  Brad didn’t get back from Seattle until Saturday afternoon, February 10, and he left the next day for Houston. After she drove him to the airport, Sara took Jess, Michael, and Phillip to look at the Riverplace Athletic Club. The boys hoped to join, and it would be a way for her to see them often.

  Brad called Sara the next day from Houston, but it wasn’t a pleasant conversation. He was furious with her because she had talked to Gary Minero. “Lynn’s going to quit the bakery now because you’re trying to ruin her marriage. If she quits, I’ll quit too,” he fumed.

  Enough. How much more was Sara expected to take from Brad? She had gone to the bakery once late at night and found Brad alone—but Lynn’s purse was sitting out in plain sight; she had found Lynn in the restroom, and Lynn looked anything but innocent. It had happened again, or close to it. When Sara drove up to the bakery one night, she recognized Lynn’s car parked in front. She discovered that someone had taken the bakery key from her key ring, and by the time Brad let her in, minutes had gone by. There was no trace of Lynn, but when Sara left, she saw that Lynn’s car was gone.

  All this had taken an emotional—and physical—toll. Sara’s resting heart rate was way over one hundred, she was afraid even to take her blood pressure, and her weight was under ninety pounds.

  Sara rented a studio apartment at Riverplace. She had bought the big house for the boys and she wanted them to be able to live there and go to school where they had friends. Above all, she didn’t want them to be uprooted one more time. She would move and would continue to pay the mortgage on the big house so they would still have their home. “I was prepared to make the payments on the Dunthorpe house until the boys were grown,” Sara would say later. “I wanted them to be able to stay there—to have some stability, even if my marriage to Brad was over.”

  Sara and the boys picked Brad up at the airport when he returned from Houston. They went out to eat and Brad started to tell his sons that he and Sara were splitting up. She begged him not to do this in public, but he had said too much already. Michael and Phillip started to cry, and Jess bit his lip.

  “Th
e boys drew wonderful pictures for us to stay together,” Sara wrote sadly in her journal. “Brad and I talked for several hours. He was surprised that the boys were upset.”

  That astounded Sara. How could Brad not know that his little boys would be hurt by yet another loss in their lives? Their mother had been dead for only three and a half years. They had bonded with Sara and now she was their mother—both legally and in terms of love and caring. She didn’t know how she could bear to leave them. She had been going to counseling just to find the strength to do it. If Brad would let her have the boys, she would be overjoyed—but she knew him better than that. She had had a ringside seat to his terrible battle with Cheryl over the boys. The most Sara could hope for was that Brad would let her see them, and that they would still know how much she loved them. She agreed to sign a lease on a Volvo station wagon so that Brad would have transportation for the boys. He couldn’t get a lease in his own name because of his bankruptcy.

  “I always think of February sixteenth as a kind of anniversary,” Sara said later, not without a trace of bitterness. “Brad and I met early to go over property settlements before meeting with Al Menashe [Brad’s attorney].” Brad had already met with another attorney who had told him that Sara should pay him between eight thousand and ten thousand dollars a month child support. Sara was surprised and explained that she was currently spending eighty-five hundred dollars on the bakery/bistro and three thousand dollars on malpractice insurance. She said if she gave Brad what he felt he should have, “that left very little for me.” She remembered his reaction vividly. “Brad said he knew how much I liked to work and now I’d have more time to work.”

  Sara stared at this wonderful man she had once loved so much. He was a stranger.