Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  “When is the next time you actually heard from Mr. Cunningham?” Shinn asked.

  “He called me at the hospital right at seven-thirty. . . . He said that Cheryl was coming to the apartment to pick up the children. . . .”

  “When is the next time that you actually talked to Mr. Cunningham?”

  “That was at ten minutes to nine.”

  “That was an hour and twenty minutes later?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think he had been doing? . . . At eight-fifty, when you finally got him on the phone—tell us what was said?”

  “I asked him where he had been,” Sara said. “He said he had been waiting for Cheryl to pick the boys up. He sounded very escalated—very excited.”

  “Did he say anything about ever leaving the apartment?”

  “. . . I recall in my first conversation, I thought they were in the apartment. He said they were actually down in the lobby. . . . The next day, he started saying no, Michael was with him. They were doing errands, getting the mail, taking shoes down to my car.

  Shinn asked Sara how long such errands would have taken, the elevator ride and then the walk to the garage or the mailboxes.

  “Five minutes.”

  Sara was no longer on Brad’s side. She now had come to realize what kind of man be really was, and she was testifying to everything she remembered from the night of Cheryl’s murder, knowing full well that the details she recalled did not mesh with Brad’s explanations to the police or to Karen Aaborg. She could understand now what Cheryl had lived through in the last months of her life.

  Sara went on to describe how they had kept on the move the first week after Cheryl’s murder, and how Jess, Michael, and Phillip were taken out of state.

  Shinn asked how long it was before she saw Brad and the three little boys again.

  “They eventually came back and I think they stayed with his aunt and uncle in Seattle—Herman and Trudy Dreesen.”

  “Were you in love with Mr. Cunningham by then?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I was very committed to him and his children by that summer.”

  “You married him?”

  “Yes . . . in November of 1987.”

  “You adopted his children . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  The testimony moved into the rapid deterioration of their marriage, the huge amounts of money Sara had given Brad to finance his various ventures and expensive lifestyle, and the tremendous debts she had been saddled with when they separated and divorced. Nothing she had to say helped Brad’s case. She no longer cared. She had been frightened when her testimony began, but as the hours passed, she seemed to experience a catharsis. She could almost see the humor in Brad’s constant manipulation, She had been much more frightened during her marriage. And she had had to tell this same story in her deposition before the civil trial while Brad was sitting at the same table. Only his attorney Joe Rieke was between them then. Even though she faced away from Brad, she had been frightened. Today he wasn’t in the courtroom; no one knew where he was. Telling her story to Mike Shinn and the jury was so much easier than what she had already been through, and she seemed to relax as her testimony drew to a close.

  “When did you file for divorce?” Shinn asked.

  “March seventh, 1990.” And then Sara recounted the terror she had lived through during their divorce: the threats and harassments, the sudden appearances and disappearances, the demands for money, the destruction of the Dunthorpe house, the stalkings. Now all that was in the past. Brad had cost her a million dollars. But even that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had not seen the three boys she had legally adopted and had loved as her own for so long. Her sons were growing up without her. She didn’t even know if they were safe, living with a father who was capable of violent rages and physical abuse.

  “One final question.” Michael Shinn asked. “During that second phone call to Brad on September twenty-first, when you found him at home, what did you say to him?”

  “I was angry. My first response was, ‘When I can’t get hold of you, I don’t know if you’re out killing Cheryl of Cheryl’s killing you.’”

  “You were kidding, weren’t you?”

  “. . . no, I was serious. I was really concerned. I didn’t know where he was. It was so unlike him not to be in touch with me. . . .”

  “That relationship had reached such a peak . . . where you were actually partway serious . . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was his response?”

  “He didn’t respond.”

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  Dr. Karen Gunson, who had performed the autopsy on Cheryl, used photos during her testimony that showed the terrible damage done to the victim. Dr. William Brady, a legend in forensic pathology who had been Oregon State’s medical examiner for more than twenty years, testified next. Tall, slim, and dapper with a neatly trimmed snowy-white mustache and Vandyke beard, he had studied the Cheryl Keeton case at Shinn’s request.

  “Of all these autopsies and homicide investigations you’ve been involved in,” Shinn asked, “how would you rate the level of violence in the Cheryl Keeton case?”

  “The amount of violence . . . would certainly have to be at the top of my particular scale. . . . Actual physical assaults or beatings are uncommon. . . . Of those I have had experience with, they fall into two categories . . . a few blows . . . and the other narrow category of repetitive, extreme violence, of what we call ‘overkill.’ Of that now exceedingly small group, . . . this one certainly with the number of injuries, the distribution, character type of the injuries . . . would rank this . . . right up at the top of anyone’s scale.”

  Dr. Brady went over each injury and told the jury that there were minutes—“quite some minutes”—before Cheryl actually died. Her death had not been instantaneous. “She may well have been alive for a good time after eight o’clock. . . .”

  “As much as twenty minutes or thirty minutes?” Shinn asked.

  “That’s not unreasonable. Probably less, but it may have been that long.”

  “So we have fifteen to thirty minutes of beating?”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that the beating occurred all that time, because we have motion—a change of location of the automobile—”

  “For some reason,” Shinn said, “there’s a lull, and there’s more beatings?”

  “What we can say medically is that there is a period of survival during which time this lady had been beaten, lived, and died. . . . We’re not talking about a single beating and then death—no.”

  “It’s not a merciful killing, was it?”

  “That’s an understatement.” Based on his experience, Dr. Brady said that this particular type of overkill was crime of passion.”

  Dr. Russell Sardo, who had attempted to find some equitable way for Brad and Cheryl to share their custody of their three little boys, testified to his finding that—in the end—he had chosen Cheryl as the primary parent. Dr. Sardo was on the stand for a long time, and he did an excellent job of explaining the dynamics he had seen between Cheryl and Brad—his aggression and her willingness to bend as far as she could to reach some kind of a solution. He commented that often divorcing parents view children as “possessions,” something to be “won” from the other party like a house or a car or a boat. Although that was not true in Cheryl’s case, it was in Brad’s.

  Lieutenant Rod Englert of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office was a much sought-after expert in a somewhat arcane area of expertise—blood spatter evidence. He could read all manner of things from blood spatter, splatter, spray, drops, and stains. He could actually reconstruct crime scenes, showing direction of force, and he could decipher whether blood spatter was of low, medium, or high velocity. He was also an expert on crime scene psychology.

  Englert had viewed the evidence from the Keeton homicide. In his psychological reconstruction of Cheryl’s murder, Englert first considered wh
at type of person might carry out the “overkill” of two dozen violent blows. Then he tried to connect a sequence of events that had taken place inside the Toyota van. Englert began, “We have four different motives to consider: Was it a fear thing? . . . Was it revenge? Was it sex? Or was it theft? Most homicides fall into one of those categories.

  “In crimes of violence, blood is often shed. And through that bloodshed, you can make interpretations.” Englert showed the jury that round drops are usually low-velocity spatter—“cast-off blood.” If a person’s hand is bleeding or if the weapon in the hand of a killer has blood on it, and he throws it back, the blood will be cast off onto a surface in an elongated shape with a “tail.” The tail always points toward the direction of travel.

  Medium-velocity impact spatter is blood shed by blunt trauma. “If I hit Mr. Shinn with a baseball bat,” Englert said, “there will be no blood from the first blow. There will be a laceration.” He moved his arm to demonstrate and Shinn never flinched. The jury watched, fascinated. “The second blow—or even the third—will produce medium-velocity spatter. . . . As a result of my striking Mr. Shinn with this ‘baseball bat,’ we start creating a spatter pattern—and I can hit him ten or fifteen times, and you’ll see a horribly bloody scene, but you can look at me and you could swear I didn’t do it because there will be very little blood on the perpetrator. There may be some on my shoes, there may be some right here under my cuffs. There may be some on the back of my hand, but very, very little. The force is away from the person doing the striking.”

  In Cheryl’s murder, there would have been massive amounts of blood around where her head had been—but virtually no blood on the person who struck those blows. Englert had selected eleven photographs of the Toyota van to show the jury what had happened to her.

  “In my opinion, the first time she was hit was in the driver’s seat. You say, ‘There’s no blood in the driver’s seat,’ but that’s why. The blood was directed away from the driver’s seat. . . . Most of the blows are to the left side of her body and to the back of her head. . . . The first blow would not have shed any blood, but the next blow—”

  Englert pointed to the child’s carseat behind the driver’s seat. The tails of blood were there—pointing to the rear of the van, away from the direction of blows. “She was in the driver’s seat, her head leaning toward the passenger seat. There were defensive bruises on her arm where she tried to ward off the blows. That’s position number one.”

  Position number two was on the console between the seats. “She’s down. She’s bloody, . . . she’s moving her hands and transferring blood, cloth on cloth [Cheryl’s shirt moving against the upholstery], and struggling. Her only route of escape is toward the [passenger] door.”

  Cheryl was hit so many times that she was weakening. This was chilling testimony. The courtroom was absolutely still, save for Englert’s voice. Position number three, he demonstrated, was where most of the damage was done to the back of Cheryl’s head. She was down, disoriented. She was stretching for the door but her head was at the headrest. The medium-velocity spatter showed on the passenger window. At this point, Englert felt that Cheryl was rendered unconscious. “She was struggling—but slowly—to get out the door before this. See the low-velocity blood where she rested? The tails are pointed downward on the back of the seat—as they would as if from a nosebleed. She also tried to open the door to escape. There is medium-velocity spatter on the inside of this doorjamb and it couldn’t have gotten there unless the door was open.”

  There was only one more position. Position number four. “Her buttocks were on the console, her head is down and stationary, and she’s bleeding, saturating blood into the carpet on the passenger floor.” Englert held a photograph of the plastic bag found on the floor of the passenger side. There were transfer bloodstains there from Cheryl’s hair—but there was no movement at all. Englert agreed with Dr. Brady that it had taken many minutes for the attack to take place. Cheryl had bled for a long time.

  “If I understand you correctly,” Shinn said, “the blood spatter trail that you can read for us is more reliable than if we’d had an eyewitness in this case.”

  “It’s scientific,” Englert said. “It’s reliable—as opposed to witnesses sometimes, who are not as reliable—including myself.”

  “What kind of weapon was used?”

  “It’s a linear object.” Englert picked up a long police flashlight—a Kell light that Shinn had procured. The murder weapon, he said, would have been something similar, with many different-shaped surfaces. The blood on the ceiling of the van was cast-off blood, flung from the blunt object used to bludgeon Cheryl to death, as her killer hit her again and again.

  Shinn asked Englert what he felt was the motive for this murder. Englert wrote four words on the easel, and crossed them out one by one. “Sex? No. Theft? No. Because this is what I would term ‘overkill.’ This is one of the very few that you’ll see with that much overkill.” Englert said if he had been there on the night of the murder, he would have ruled out everything but “Fear” and “Revenge.” The fact that the van had been rolled out onto the freeway, combined with the overkill, made him believe the motive was revenge.

  “You can just see the hatred in this case,” Lieutenant Englert commented, “because of the four different positions I described to you. You see a male who has a very strong personality, a very domineering personality—he wouldn’t be afraid.”

  Both Oregon State Police Sergeant Greg Baxter and Detective Jim Ayers had always believed that Brad had taken his four-year-old son Michael along with him when he went to confront Cheryl at the Mobil station.

  “You mean her own son was used as bait to lure her to her death?” Mike Shinn asked Baxter when he took the stand.

  “That’s exactly correct.”

  Ayers testified next. He had worked closely with Shinn in reconstructing this case. When he took the stand, he was as anxious as the people who had known Cheryl Keeton in life to see that her killer was brought to justice.

  Nobody ever knew what Ayers was going to look like; he worked undercover as much as he did routine detective work. He sometimes looked like an accountant, but just as frequently he would resemble a truck driver or a bearded biker. Even those who knew him well could often stand right next to him and fail to recognize him. He was extremely proficient on any detail—be it drug enforcement, sex crimes, or homicide—and he was a natural chameleon. On the day of his testimony, his hair was cut short and he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a striped shirt, dark suit, and tie. He was, for the moment, in his “accountant” garb.

  Ayers told the jurors that when he and Detective Jerry Finch went to Brad’s Madison Tower apartment a few hours after his wife had been found dead, they were there only to inform him of her death. There had been no reason to read Brad his rights under Miranda. He was not a suspect; he wasn’t in custody.

  “When you first got to Mr. Cunningham’s apartment,” Shinn began, “you didn’t know anything about him—or about her, did you?”

  “No, other than that she was dead,” Ayers said.

  Ayers recalled the one-hour-and-fifty-minute conversation he had had that night with Brad. It was to be the last time Brad would ever talk to him about anything. After that, he had made himself unavailable to the investigators.

  “I asked him about the last time that he had seen Cheryl,” Ayers said. “And he stated he had seen her Friday evening when he had picked the kids up.”

  Ayers testified that Brad told him Cheryl had agreed to come to his apartment and pick up the boys. When Ayers said he had information that Brad had planned to meet Cheryl at the abandoned Mobil station on the West Slope, he denied it.

  “What was the next conversation?”

  “I asked him if he’d killed Cheryl.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said, ‘No.’”

  “How’d he say it?”

  “He had a very brief display of emotion—and I mean brief
. . . a fifteen-to-twenty-second display of emotion. My interpretation of what that was wasn’t emotion over Cheryl having been killed, but he was frightened by the fact that I had asked him that question.”

  Ayers repeated Brad’s oft-told stories about Cheryl’s affairs with a number of men and her fondness for country-and-western music. He said that she hung out at a truck stop and often went to the nude beach on the Columbia River. At that point in the investigation, Ayers said, he had no reason to doubt Brad’s description. Later, he said he had discovered that Brad had been lying and he saw it as an attempt to suggest that any number of people might have had a motive to murder Cheryl.

  “Did he say he ever left the apartment?” Shinn asked.

  “Yes, he did,” Ayers testified. “He said he left one time just long enough to take some things down to the garage, because he had an inspection to do the next day.”

  “Did he tell you that he and the three little boys were sitting in the lobby for a long time waiting for Cheryl to show up?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you that he took Michael with him for a while, wearing his jogging costume and his hunting jacket?”

  “No. . . . I asked Cunningham if he was athletic,” Ayers said. “He stated, ‘No.’”

  “He denied he was athletic?”

  “Yes.”

  Shinn reminded Ayers and the jury of Brad’s background as a star football player. And whoever had killed Cheryl had probably been someone of considerable strength and almost certainly jogged from the crime scene to the Mobil station to get his car. Beyond Jim Karr’s suspicions, Ayers had no reason to believe that Brad was lying. In retrospect, however, it seemed that he was denying anything that might have linked him to Cheryl’s murder. And he would not have done that unless he already knew how the crime had been committed.

  Ayers testified that at one point Finch had asked if he could talk to the boys. “Cunningham just said, ‘NO!—not until I talk to an attorney about it.’”

  “Why did you want to talk to the boys?”