Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Although the dead woman had been fully dressed when she was found, that didn’t preclude the possibility that she might have been sexually assaulted. Dr. Gunson found no vaginal or rectal contusions, but she routinely took swabs from the vaginal vault and the rectum and slipped them into labeled test tubes so that an acid phosphatase test for the presence of semen could be done. If semen was present, the chemical would turn the swabs a bright purplish red.

  Criminalist Julia Hinkley of the Oregon State Police Crime Lab stood by during the autopsy and took possession of the evidence Dr. Gunson collected. Hinkley also attempted to retrieve fingernail scrapings beneath the dead woman’s nails. There was nothing there but her own blood.

  Sometimes the contents of the stomach can provide a clue to time of death, to place of death, to a myriad of other questions. Not this time. The victim had only about 100 cc of brown liquid in her stomach, most likely coffee. There was no food. She was so thin that this didn’t surprise Dr. Gunson. And there was no urine in her bladder.

  In further tests that had grown routine at a time when drug use was rampant, Dr. Gunson took blood samples and secured them in gray-stoppered tubes. If the dead woman had ingested alcohol, cocaine, barbiturates, amphetamines, psychotropics, or any of an array of drugs, a scanning electron microscope with a laser probe could isolate that. The metabolites of most of the drugs would last for years—even if the test tube was not refrigerated.

  Autopsy means, quite literally, “to see for oneself,” and there is a sad kind of justice in the fact that the body of a murder victim contains secrets that often either convict or free a suspect. But even if Dr. Gunson had seen a photograph of the woman who lay before her when she was in life, she could not have said that it was this victim. Her eyelids were blackened and swollen closed and her face was so misshapen. Beneath those closed lids, the dead woman had worn soft contact lens, tiny circles of transparent material that gave her myopic eyes perfect vision. The contacts had either been displaced during the violent beating she had endured or lost in a mass of blood and tissue.

  Dr. Gunson could only speculate about what kind of weapon had been used to inflict such terrible wounds. Certainly, it would have to have been dense and heavy and something with many sides and varying surfaces. A wrecking bar? A tire iron? A heavy flashlight, maybe? Unless the weapon itself was found, no one would ever know for sure.

  When she completed her examination, Dr. Gunson knew how this woman had died. She could not know why, or by whose hand. It would not have taken a particularly powerful person to do so much damage, but it certainly would have taken a person so full of rage that he—or, again, she—kept striking and hitting. Again and again and again and again.

  Twenty-four times.

  6

  It had, of course, been too good to last, a love affair too wonderful in a world where nothing perfect ever seems to endure. Sara and Brad would never be able to resume their untroubled, romantic courtship. From the moment he called her at 6:30 A.M. on September 22, Sara knew that everything had to change. And she knew, too, that Brad and his little boys would need her more than they had ever needed her.

  Sara couldn’t feel any personal sense of loss for Cheryl Keeton, although all human life mattered to her. That was why she was a physician. When she learned that Cheryl had been beaten to death, Sara, long inured to disasters of the flesh, would shudder. The police believed that she had been murdered, and Brad seemed to agree with them. But how could Sara grieve personally for Cheryl? She had never known her; she had never seen her except at a distance. She had never talked to her. The last time she saw Cheryl, it was through a car window, and her voice had been muted by distance and rainy wind and thick glass so that Sara had only seen her mouth moving. Cheryl had seemed angry, harried, and rather desperate on that last Friday night before she was murdered.

  From what Brad had told her, Sara knew that Cheryl’s life was untidy and full of unsavory characters. She had not been a fit mother for the children; Brad had said that often enough, too. But now Cheryl was gone, and her little boys had loved her, as all children loved their mothers. Sara’s heart broke for Jess, Michael, and Phillip, and she vowed to try to be there for them. She wondered what part she would play in their lives now. She loved them, that was certain. Would they be with Brad all the time—or would they go to Cheryl’s parents?

  Brad had denied having any part at all in Cheryl’s murder. He had been at home with the three boys at the time of her death. It was true that his voice had sounded rather flat when he told Sara about Cheryl, but he had probably been in shock. When you lose someone who has been a part of your world for as many years as Cheryl was part of Brad’s, shock is natural. And then he had been furious with Cheryl for blocking him at every turn in his efforts to give his children a peaceful home. Sara reasoned that Brad couldn’t be expected to mourn the woman who had made his life miserable for so long.

  Sara had continued with her scheduled surgeries that Monday morning. Once she was masked and gowned, she had always been able to shut away the outside world. Her only concern was for the patient beneath her hands. She had to monitor pulse, respiration, oxygen content in the patient’s blood. For those hours she was in the operating room, she didn’t have to think about how Cheryl died.

  Brad paged her sometime before ten that morning. He said he had lost the single car key she had given him for her Cressida. He needed to come and pick up his Suburban, which was parked in the hospital lot. Sara arranged to meet him between surgeries.

  Carrying two-year-old Phillip, with his two older boys trailing behind, Brad hurried into the hospital cafeteria and told Sara that he had taken the MAX, Portland’s rapid transit light rail system, to get to Providence. If he had lost the key to her Cressida, Sara wondered why he hadn’t driven his father’s pickup truck; it was parked at the Madison Tower. Brad shook his head impatiently. Maybe he hadn’t even remembered the pickup. He said he wanted his Suburban. He needed to consult with an attorney.

  Sara watched the little boys as they ate breakfast in the cafeteria. They seemed completely normal. They hadn’t caught the nervous energy that seemed to vibrate from Brad. When they had finished eating, Sara gave Brad his keys and walked with him and the boys as far as the parking lot.

  “Do the kids know—about Cheryl?” Sara asked.

  “I told them she was killed in a car accident,” Brad said.

  After he drove off, Sara returned to the operating room. She had back-to-back surgeries scheduled until three or four that afternoon, and when she was finally able to come up for air, she realized that she had no way to get home. Her Cressida was at the Madison Tower. She called her sister Margie and asked for a ride there. On the way, she stopped at the Broadway Toyota dealership and arranged to have keys made so that she could drive her car. It had been such a weird, upside-down day. Who could remember keys and cars and details when the specter of Cheryl’s death loomed over everything? Sara just wanted to get to Brad and the boys and help them through whatever might lie ahead. Then suddenly, incongruously, she remembered that Michael’s birthday was only three days away and asked her sister to turn into the Toys ‘?’ Us parking lot to buy him a present.

  When she got back to Brad’s apartment, to her shock, Sara found him in a state of silent terror. She had never—ever—seen him like that before. He had always been a man totally in control, fully capable of handling whatever came his way. But she could see that something was very wrong, something more than Cheryl’s strange death. Brad drew Sara away from the windows and asked her to sit down. He told her softly that he had no choice but to warn her that they might all be in terrible danger. Cheryl’s murder was only the beginning, he said, only the “first shoe” dropped in a massive plot to eliminate him—and everyone connected to him.

  “But who? Why?” Sara gasped.

  “It’s too complicated for me to explain. You’ll just have to trust me to take care of us.”

  Brad showed Sara a loaded handgun he was carrying for prote
ction. Then he led her around his apartment. showing her where he and Brent had tied ropes between interior door handles to prevent anyone who crawled through a window from gaining entrance to the center of the apartment. He and Brent had also arranged pop cans and coffee cans filled with pennies so that they would crash and warn them of any unexpected entry through the main door. Brad had even loaded another gun and given it to his fifteen-year-old son; two guns would be better than one. Even though they were in a security building, he told Sara they couldn’t count on protection. The people they were dealing with were far more sophisticated than the rent-a-cop security guards at the Madison Tower.

  “Who?” Sara asked again, baffled. “Who would try to hurt us?” But Brad wouldn’t tell her whom he feared. It was enough for her to know that they all might be in danger. He said the little boys would sleep in his king-sized bed, and Brent would stay in his own room—where he had a good view of the walkway around the eighteenth floor. If someone could murder Cheryl, Brad said tightly, that meant that none of them was safe.

  At 9:15 that night, a loud knock sounded at the door and Brad signaled Sara to be quiet. They peered out a security peephole and saw a uniformed man standing there. He was an extremely big man, probably six feet four or five and solidly built. He looked to Sara like either a Portland policeman or a state trooper. The uniformed man waited, balancing on one foot and then the other.

  Brad held a finger to his lips, shushing them, and shook his head. He wouldn’t let anyone answer the door.

  “But, Brad, why?” Sara asked again, appalled.

  He sighed and said he guessed he would have to level with her. He told Sara he had every reason to believe that Cheryl’s family was going to come after him and that, quite possibly, they meant to murder him. If they didn’t come in person, he felt they would hire someone in a cop’s uniform to do it.

  Sara, who had never led anything but a safe existence, who had never known anyone involved in such James Bond–like intrigue, was frightened. Cheryl was dead and Sara knew absolutely nothing about her family, nothing beyond Brad’s conviction that Cheryl and her mother had planned to poison him. She supposed there could be people like that. If Brad was scared, then she was scared. Sara wondered if she might be next. And Brad. And maybe even the little boys.

  Sergeant James Hinkley walked away from Brad’s door, but he came back and knocked again a few minutes later. He was there to serve subpoenas summoning Jess and Michael Cunningham to appear before the grand jury. Senior Trooper Keith Mechlem and a Madison Tower security guard stood behind Hinkley. After a long wait, Brad opened the door a crack. He was holding a gun, which understandably gave Hinkley pause. Hinkley was armed with a steel Smith & Wesson .357 revolver and he recognized the gun in Cunningham’s hand as the same kind of weapon. Reluctantly, Brad opened the door wide enough for Hinkley to step inside the apartment.

  “For the reasonableness of this situation, I think you can put your gun down,” Hinkley said quietly. “You can see we’re police officers.” Glancing around the apartment, he noticed that the doors were tied shut with white rope that extended from door to door.

  “I just wanted to make sure who was out there,” Brad said. “I’m afraid for my children’s lives. I rigged those ropes for their safety—but only the doors facing the walkway.”

  “Could you put the gun away?” Hinkley asked again.

  Brad set it down on a low bookcase. He called his sons from the master bedroom and Hinkley handed them the subpoenas and left.

  Now Sara was more puzzled than ever. Why were the boys being asked to testify? Was Brad suspected of Cheryl’s murder? She needed more answers, and Brad insisted that he had been in his apartment with his sons all of Sunday night—except for two short errands. “Michael and I checked the mail,” he said. “And then we went down to the garage to put my shoes in your car. I was going to inspect that land this morning—”

  “Why did you take Michael with you?” Sara asked.

  “You know Michael,” he said. “He was horsing around and keeping Jess and Phillip from watching the movie.”

  “But why did you put your shoes in my car?” Sara persisted. “Weren’t you coming over to the hospital to get the Suburban?”

  Brad looked at her, distracted. He didn’t need this aggravation. He had enough on his mind. “I’d better not answer any more questions,” he said, putting an end to her worried queries.

  There hadn’t been a subpoena for her yet, Sara thought, but there probably would be when the police found out how close she was to Brad.

  Brad’s tension was contagious and Sara spent a restless night. But she had to go to work the next morning, and so she called the Madison Tower security guard to escort her to her car. The little hairs on the back of her neck stood up as she kept close to the guard in the underground garage. She didn’t ever want to go back to that apartment.

  * * *

  Beyond the fear that someone was stalking him, Brad had other worries. He knew that the husband of a woman who dies under suspicious circumstances is always the prime suspect. He hadn’t liked the way Jim Ayers and Jerry Finch stared at him when they questioned him on Sunday night, or the big state cop showing up with subpoenas for his boys. He had been involved in many civil litigation cases and always believed in hiring the best attorneys for the job. Early Tuesday morning Brad called Sara at the hospital and told her he had retained Phil Margolin, a prominent criminal defense attorney in Portland. Margolin paged Sara at Providence later that morning to ask her questions about the events of Sunday night. “He told me that he’d talked to Brad, and that he was convinced of his innocence,” she recalled. “And that reassured me.”

  Sara spoke only briefly to Margolin, explaining that she was needed in surgery. But within an hour she was paged again and was shocked to hear that Brad had been brought into the emergency room at Providence by ambulance. My God! Had someone gotten to Brad, just as he feared?

  Terrified that he had been shot, Sara rushed down to the emergency room and stood by as Brad was wheeled in on a gurney. He hadn’t been shot; at least he wasn’t wounded. He had apparently suffered a heart attack in Phil Margolin’s office. That was something she had never even thought of. Brad was such a strong man, and he was only thirty-seven years old. But her physician’s mind told her that didn’t mean he couldn’t have heart trouble. His father had just died of a massive coronary in July, and he was only sixty-one. And Sanford Cunningham had suffered several heart attacks in the years before his death; it was an ominous cardiac history for Brad.

  It was 11:45 A.M. when Dr. Steve Rinehart, Sara’s friend and a cardiologist on staff, began treating Brad. He complained of chest pains, and he winced when Dr. Rinehart touched the left front of his chest. The heart monitor showed that Brad was throwing PVCs—premature ventricular contractions. There was an early extra beat of the ventricles and his heart was contracting out of normal sequence. It was a very common condition—and sometimes it was life-threatening.

  Sara understood the potential danger of this particular irregularity of the heart’s rhythm. A lot of people under extreme stress throw PACs—premature atrial contractions—and they were not nearly as likely to interfere with life itself. But the ventricles were the largest chambers in the heart and she knew that Brad’s heart could go into fibrillation and lose all of its normal rhythm in an instant, becoming just a useless squirming organ unable to pump blood. If that happened, Steve Rinehart would have to put the electrical paddles from the Lifepak on Brad’s chest and try to shock his heart back into normal sinus rhythm.

  Sara had seen too many patients go sour and die with exactly the same condition that Brad had. She watched, stricken, as Rinehart examined the man she loved. How much emotional pain could she and Brad be expected to take in one day? Their happy time with his laughing little boys at the pizza restaurant on Sunday seemed a million years away, and it had been less than forty-eight hours ago. Now, Brent kept his little brothers occupied in the nurses’ lounge while Brad
was being treated. Sara couldn’t bear to think that they could be orphans in an instant.

  To her immense relief, Brad began to come around and his EKG tracings showed he was back in perfectly normal sinus rhythm. Despite Sara’s pleading, he refused to be admitted to the hospital. He had too much to do. Dr. Rinehart insisted, however, that Brad take a stress test on the treadmill before he would release him. Leads were attached to his chest, arms, and ankles so that his blood pressure and heart rate could be monitored as he walked on the moving belt. Every three minutes, a technician increased the rate and the incline of the treadmill. Brad’s heart picked up speed, but it beat as steadily as a clock. At 2:30 that Tuesday afternoon, he was released from the hospital.

  Brad took Sara aside and told her that they had to continue to take great precautions to protect themselves. He felt it wasn’t safe for them to stay in the Madison Tower. Whoever was stalking them, whoever had killed Cheryl, could trap them there. “That’s exactly where they will expect us to be,” he whispered.

  Phil Margolin required a retainer, Brad told Sara. That was standard, she knew. She wrote out a five-thousand-dollar check and assured Brad that she would pay for private investigators—for anything he needed so that he would be adequately represented and they could all be safe. She knew Brad, and she loved him. The world seemed to be closing in on him, and Sara wasn’t about to let that happen. He was making almost one hundred thousand dollars a year at U.S. Bank, and he said he had millions coming to him from his suit in Texas, but his assets were not as easy to get to as Sara’s were. There was no question in Sara’s mind now that they were going to be together—forever—and they would share everything.