Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  It was an older neighborhood with houses on big lots set far off the street and well apart from each other. Huge trees edged the narrow roadway and there were no street lights. The medics’ rig lights were on, but they still had trouble seeing until they spotted the flares at the south-west corner of the Sunset and 79th. In a heartbeat, the quiet dark street ended in a usually roaring freeway. That night, they saw cars backed up to the west for miles.

  It had taken them two minutes and twenty seconds to reach the site.

  Tom Duffy was a former army combat medic who served in Vietnam. He had worked for thirteen years as a paramedic with the Washington County Fire District and Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue. Altogether, he had over twenty-eight years in the medical field. Very tall and lean, he rarely smiled. He had seen people die in all manner of ways. He had seen scores of fatal accidents, and they always bothered him. He had long since learned to shut his mind to the terrible things he saw during those moments when he fought to save lives, but he never really forgot and he would have almost crystalline recall of that Sunday night.

  Duffy and Moran saw a blue Toyota van parked facing north along 79th. A man ran up to them, shouting, “A lady’s in the van. She’s hurt really bad!”

  “How long has it been since the accident?” Duffy asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. It took me a while to find a phone. I think about fifteen minutes,” the man answered.

  “We saw the van,” Duffy would remember, “and we assessed the situation quickly. We saw no hazards around it—no power lines down or gas leaking. There was very little damage to the van itself.”

  As for the man who had run up to him, Randy Blighton, Duffy didn’t know who he was and he had no idea what had happened. Blighton’s clothes were streaked with dark stains that could have been blood. The van didn’t look wrecked. For all Duffy knew, he and Moran might be walking into trouble.

  The three men went over to the van and Blighton opened the passenger door so the paramedics could see the woman inside. “She’s in here,” he said. “The van was crosswise over there in the fast lane.”

  Duffy attempted to find some sign of life in the woman who lay sprawled across the front seat in the shadows of the van. He put a hand on her shoulder and asked, “Are you all right?”

  There was no response.

  He exerted more pressure and gave the woman a “trapezius squeeze” on her shoulder muscle. Someone even semiconscious would have reacted to that force.

  There was no response.

  Duffy held sensitive fingers to the carotid artery along the side of her neck and felt nothing. “There was no response at all,” he would remember. “I could palpate no pulse. No respiration.”

  Turning to Mike Moran and three firefighters who had arrived at the scene in a firetruck, he said, “We need to get her out of this van fast.”

  They maneuvered her limp body out of the front seat with extreme caution, careful not to aggravate any cervical-spinal injuries she might have sustained in the accident. They circled her neck with a bracing collar so that her spinal processes would not be jostled as they took her out of the van. If by some miracle she was alive, they didn’t want her to be paralyzed. They placed her on the road beside the van and began attempts to resuscitate her, even though they were quite sure it was an exercise in futility.

  The gravelly shoulder alongside the Sunset Highway now bristled with people who wanted to help when there was no longer any way to help—a Buck Ambulance and its crew, Mike Moran and Tom Duffy, the firefighters and EMTs, and a half dozen state police. In the yellow rays of headlights and flashlights, they could all see that the victim who lay on the ground had suffered massive trauma. The top of her head was, in the blunt words of an observer, “like mincemeat.” One of the paramedics thought he saw brain matter leaking. There was so much blood—so terribly much blood. It was as thick as curdled sour milk, already beginning to coagulate. Duffy knew that meant that more than five or ten minutes had passed since the woman had last bled freely. Depending on her own particular clotting factor profile, it might have been up to half an hour.

  There was no hope of saving her. The dead do not bleed.

  “The patient fit into the category of a patient who could not possibly be resuscitated,” he would say later. “Not at all. She was in cardiopulmonary arrest.” That meant her heart no longer beat; her lungs no longer drew breath. Even without the tremendous loss of blood, the assault to the brain itself would have been fatal. An injured brain responds by swelling, and as it does so, it bulges into centers that control heart rhythm and breathing, effectively shutting down all activity needed to continue life.

  By 8:53 P.M., when Oregon State Police Traffic Officer David Fife arrived, the paramedics had given up. There was no hope. The victim lay still, covered partially by a blanket. Fife walked around the Toyota van and saw it had virtually no damage. But when he lifted the blanket to look at the dead woman, he was appalled at the wounds on her head. How could she have suffered such massive injuries when the van was scarcely marred at all?

  Fife moved his patrol unit to the west of the scene and turned on his overheads and emergency lights to warn the drivers who were inching along the Sunset Highway. They weren’t going to get to Portland by this route, not for a long time. When his sergeant, James Hinkley, who had been dispatched from the Beaverton substation, arrived, Fife turned the immediate scene over to him and pulled out his camera. He took thirty-six photographs of the victim and the Toyota van, routine for any accident. By this time, Senior Troopers Bill Duggan and Lloyd Beil, along with Washington County Chief Criminal Deputy D.A. Bob Herman, had also arrived to join the group of investigators at the nightmarish scene on the Sunset Highway.

  Tom Duffy and his fellow paramedics had quickly reassured themselves that the dead woman had been all alone in the van. Just as with Randy Blighton, breath had caught in their throats when they noticed the child’s carseat behind the driver’s seat of the van. They knew the woman was beyond their help; they did not know if a baby or a toddler lay somewhere in the darkest spaces of the van or was, perhaps, caught beneath a seat. They steeled themselves to feel with their bare hands all around the inside of the van, running their fingers through the rapidly cooling blood that had spattered, stained, and pooled there. Finally they were satisfied that the child who used that safety seat had not been present in the van when the woman died. The paramedics’ hands and arms came away covered with the blood of the female victim.

  “There was a lot of blood,” Duffy would recall much later. “A pool of clotted blood—a big circular pool on the carpet behind the passenger seat. There was blood on the ceiling and on the inside of the windows.” Blood has its own smell, metallic, and that odor clung to the paramedics now.

  No one knew who the dead woman was. No one knew what had happened to her. But Tom Duffy was certain of one thing. He had seen literally thousands of car wrecks, and he knew that he was not looking at the aftermath of an automobile accident; he was looking at a crime scene. “The mechanisms of injury—the damage to this vehicle—could not have produced what we found,” he said later. “The blood on this person was dried and clotted. There was absolutely no sign of life.”

  The Oregon troopers came to a similar conclusion. A slight dent, a few shards of glass from a broken signal light, and a couple of paint chips out by the Jersey barriers that divided the freeway were the only signs that the van had hit anything. The woman hadn’t died in an accident. Her injuries had nothing to do with this “wreck.”

  There are always acronyms for official records. Those on the scene at the Sunset Highway used familiar shortcuts now as they filled out forms: DOS—Dead On Scene, MVA—Motor Vehicle Accident, and finally POSS—Possible Homicide. And because this bizarre incident seemed indeed to be a “POSS,” Oregon State Police Sergeant Hinkley radioed in a request that detectives from the OSP Criminal Division respond to the scene. In Oregon the state police investigate homicides and other felonies as well as traffic
accidents.

  Detective Jerry Finch wasn’t on call that night, but he was the first investigator the dispatcher could raise. Finch ran to his unmarked Ford LTD II and headed for the Cedar Mill home of Detective Jim Ayers. Ayers, in his mid-thirties, had been assigned to the Beaverton OSP station for three years and was just arriving home from an evening out when he heard the crunch of tires on gravel and saw Finch’s car turn into his driveway. Finch told Ayers they had a “call out” to a possible homicide.

  Jim Ayers had investigated all manner of felonies in his fourteen-year career with the Oregon State Police. Like most officers who hired on as troopers, he was tall and well muscled. He had thick, wavy hair and a rumbling deep voice. He had worked the road for eight years, investigating accidents. And like Tom Duffy, like all cops and all paramedics, he had seen too much tragedy. But he had also learned what was “normal” tragedy—if there could be such a thing—and what was “abnormal” tragedy.

  Ayers had become an expert in both arson investigation and psychosexual crimes, and he had investigated innumerable homicides. Jerry Finch had a few years on him, both in age and in experience. Together the two men drove to the scene at 79th and the Sunset, not knowing what to expect. The best detectives are not tough; if they were, they would not have the special intuitive sense that enables them to see what laymen cannot. And Jim Ayers was one of the very best. But like his peers, he usually managed to hide his own pain over what one human can do to another behind a veneer of black humor and professional distance.

  It was two minutes after 10 P.M. when Finch and Ayers arrived at the scene, and as Ayers gazed down at the slender woman who lay on the freeway shoulder, her face and head disfigured by some tremendous force that had bludgeoned her again and again, he was still the complete detective—curious and contemplative.

  The two detectives walked around the blue Toyota van and saw the minor damage to its right front end and where a turn signal lens was broken out. There was a “buckle” in the roof of the van on the right. That could be explained easily enough; it was unibody construction, and a blow to the front end would ripple back along the side. Randy Blighton was still on the scene and he told Finch and Ayers how he had found the van batting against the median barrier of the freeway. That would have broken the signal light. They found the signal lens itself lying on the freeway in the fast lane. And they also saw the beige purse that had been forcing the accelerator down before Blighton kicked it away. It would have been enough to keep the engine running while the car was in gear.

  With flashlights Finch and Ayers looked into the van, playing light over the child’s carseat, the blood spatter on the interior roof, the splash of blood on the hump over the transmission, and the pools of blood on the floor behind the front seats. A white plastic produce bag fluttered on the passenger-side floor. It too bore bloodstains.

  The van would have to be processed in daylight, but Jim Ayers had already come to a bleak conclusion, based on the physical evidence he saw, and on Blighton’s description of how he found the victim and his recollection that the driver’s-side window had been rolled partway down. “I felt the victim had been beaten while she was in the vehicle,” he would say later. “My conclusion was that whoever had beaten her had intended to send it [the van] across the eastbound lanes of the Sunset Highway so that it would be hit by other vehicles.”

  Had that happened, the cars approaching at fifty-five to sixty-five miles an hour would have rounded the curve and smashed into the driver’s side of the Toyota van. Even if the van hadn’t burst into flames, that would have destroyed every bit of evidence on the woman’s body and in the vehicle itself. The massive head injuries she had suffered would have been attributed to the accident. Worse, in all likelihood, she would not have been the only fatality.

  State policemen have seen too many chain reaction accidents in which a dozen or more people die. Met by the horrifying sight of another vehicle directly in front of them, drivers cannot stop or even take evasive action. Usually chain reaction pileups happen on foggy nights or when smoke from burning crops drifts across a highway. But this van, deliberately left crosswise in the fast lane of the Sunset, would have been like a brick wall appearing suddenly in the night. Clearly, whoever had bludgeoned the woman to death had not given a thought to how many more might die. All he or she had cared about was that the crime of murder would be covered up in a grinding collision of jagged steel, flying glass shards, and broken bodies.

  The dead woman’s purse contained her driver’s license and other identifying documents—or, rather, it contained some woman’s identification. This woman, lying beside the road, was so disfigured by her beating that it was impossible to be sure that she was the woman whose picture appeared on the driver’s license. However, given the laws of probability, Ayers and Finch were reasonably sure that the purse belonged to the victim. The address on her license was 231 N.E. Scott in Gresham, a suburb about as far east of downtown Portland as the accident scene was west.

  Ayers and Finch had just dispatched Senior Trooper Al Corson to the Gresham address to notify the victim’s next of kin of her death when Finch carefully lifted a checkbook from her purse. “Look,” he commented to Ayers. “These checks are personalized, and the address is different than the one on her registration.”

  The checks bore the same name as the driver’s license: Cheryl Keeton. However, the address imprinted on the checks was 2400 S.W. 81st, located on the West Slope—only three-tenths of a mile from where they now stood.

  The woman lying on the ground was probably Cheryl Keeton, whose date of birth was listed on her driver’s license as October 27, 1949. That would make her less than a month away from her thirty-seventh birthday. The height and weight on the license seemed to fit the slender victim. Hair color didn’t matter much anymore on a driver’s license; women changed their hair shade so often. But it was listed as brown and the victim’s hair appeared to be brown, although it was now matted with dried blood.

  “I don’t think she lived in Gresham,” Finch told Ayers. “I think that’s an old address. You hang in here, and I’ll take a run up to the address on Eighty-first.”

  Oregon State Police Sergeant Greg Baxter radioed the Portland Police Department dispatcher, who relayed a message to Al Corson, calling him back from Gresham. The next of kin of the victim were no longer there.

  Ayers was relieved to let Jerry Finch notify whoever might be waiting at the West Slope address for Cheryl Keeton to come home. Of all the responsibilities of a policeman’s profession, that was always the hardest. Sometimes the survivors scream, and sometimes they stare, unbelieving, at the officers who bring them tragic news.

  Ayers wanted to be sure that the tow truck driver from Jim Collins Towing understood that the Toyota van was a vital piece of evidence and should be hooked up to the tow rig with extreme care. Collins’s own son, Harley, had arrived to remove the van from the edge of the Sunset. “I told him not to touch it any more than he had to—and not to go inside at all,” Ayers said later. “Not to strap the steering wheel the way they usually do . . .”

  Harley Collins said he would be careful and promised to lock the van behind the cyclone fence of Jim Collins’s personal yard so that no one could come near it. Ayers felt better hearing that. Although he didn’t know the tow driver, he knew that the tow company’s owner was reliable.

  All the steps that were post-tragedy protocol had been followed. The investigators at the scene radioed a request for Eugene Jacobus, the Chief Deputy Medical Examiner for Washington County. The body was released to Jacobus at 11:35 P.M. The hands were “bagged,” and Jacobus was careful to see that the body itself was placed in a fresh plastic “envelope” inside the heavier body pouch so that any trace evidence would be preserved. He also took possession of the victim’s purse and locked it in a drawer in his office on Knox Street.

  It was after midnight before the scene alongside the Sunset Highway was cleared, and the many men and women working there with measuring tapes
and sketch pads were all gone. This death was not a normal death. Nor was it an accident. It was almost certainly a homicide, one that investigators felt confident would be solved in forty-eight hours—just as Washington County’s other homicide that weekend was. A male murder victim had been found stabbed multiple times in western Washington County on Friday, September 19. By six o’clock on Sunday night, police had arrested and charged the suspected killer.

  But the investigators on this new homicide were wrong when they expected a quick solution. It was as if they were grasping the end of a thread, expecting to pull it loose. They could not know that the thread was only one infinitesimal piece of a fabric so snarled and tangled that it might well have been woven by a madman.

  And, in a certain sense, it had been.

  2

  The good weather on the weekend of September 19–21, 1986, made little difference to Dr. Sara Gordon.* She was working on trauma call at Providence Hospital in Portland and there was no day or night, no sense of the seasons, in the operating rooms. The only sounds were muted voices or the music some surgeons preferred; the only lights were focused on the operating field.

  *The names of some individuals in the book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the narrative.

  Trauma duty is by its very nature unpredictable. Sara Gordon often worked a full day’s shift and all through the night too. She was an anesthesiologist, called in for emergency treatment of accident victims, or for the innumerable surgeries that could not wait, some life-threatening and some more routine.