Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

Susan Svetkey took twelve pages of notes on Jess’s memories of the night his mother was murdered. She took only two on Michael’s recall. Michael didn’t want to talk about anything, especially the night his mother died. He crawled under the big oak table in the conference room, and he whimpered and turned away when Finch tried to talk to him. It was obvious that Michael was essentially ineffective as a witness. If he remembered anything about the time when he and his father left the Madison Tower apartment on Sunday evening, he didn’t want to answer questions about it.

  Svetkey and Finch looked at each other. They were not going to push this child. There was no point in questioning Michael further.

  Jess, a small, lonely little figure, walked into the grand jury room and was given an oath to tell the truth. There were five grand jurors there that day in the fourth week of September. None of them would ever forget Jess Cunningham. He was very smart. He was very brave. He was without guile.

  Jess’s feet dangled far from the floor as he sat upright in the witness chair and told the people on the grand jury about the night of September 21. Frank L. Smith, one of the jury members, had worked for the U.S. Post Office for almost seventeen years. He took notes as the little boy talked. Smith would remember this moment for many years to come.

  Jess told the grand jury the same things he had told Jerry Finch and Susan Svetkey. He recalled more, however. He testified that he had to unlock the door for his father when he came back. Jess said his father had told him he’d been jogging “from Sara’s hospital,” and that he was wearing red jogging shorts and a yellow and red shirt (probably meaning the vest).

  Asked if Brad was sweaty or out of breath when he came back, Jess said, “No.”

  When Brad learned that Susan Svetkey had allowed his children to be questioned by Detective Jerry Finch, he was enraged. “I was at Juvenile Court on September twenty-sixth,” Svetkey recalled, “when I received a phone call from Mr. Cunningham. He said, ‘You’re fired.’”

  8

  The successful investigation of a homicide is composed of many segments, not unlike bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Detectives have to deal alternately with human emotion, experience, recall, and prejudice—and with solid physical evidence. The testimony of human beings has always been mutable; forensic evidence has become more sophisticated and definitive with every year that passes. Fingerprints, blood tests, DNA profiles, hair and fiber identification—there are so many ways to tell if a suspect has been at the scene of a murder at the time the murder occurred.

  Did a suspect have means, motive, and opportunity to kill? Did he or she leave something behind and take something away? The answer to that last question is always “yes.” According to the great-granddaddy of all criminalists, Dr. Edmonde Locarde, every felon takes something of the crime scene—no matter how minute—away with him on his person or in his vehicle, and every felon leaves something of himself—no matter how minute—at the crime scene. Locarde’s theory does not guarantee, however, that those investigating the crime will find the infinitesimal bits of telltale evidence left behind. It is never as easy as it looks in the movies and on television. The death of Cheryl Keeton would be one of the most inexplicable and difficult murders to prove in Oregon criminal history.

  The men and women investigating the case were faced with two widely divergent assessments of who Cheryl had been. What kind of woman was she? Was she an amoral slut, as her estranged husband had characterized her—a victim just waiting for a murder to happen? Or was she the brilliant attorney, the devoted mother, the frightened near-divorcée that her family and her associates were describing to detectives?

  And just who was Bradly Morris Cunningham? Was he the man of singular accomplishment, the constant father, the compassionate lover that Sara Gordon knew—that his surroundings and possessions confirmed and that he himself claimed to be? Or was it possible that he was not what he seemed, that he was a man who had brutally bludgeoned his wife to death and abandoned her vehicle on a busy freeway, hoping to make her death look like an accident?

  More painful to consider was the possibility that if Brad had murdered his wife, he had done so in the presence of their four-year-old son, Michael. Six-year-old Jess had told Jerry Finch, Susan Svetkey, and the Washington County grand jury that his father had taken Michael and left the Madison Tower apartment for a considerable length of time that Sunday night. Brad himself said he had only run errands around the building, checking the mailbox, putting boots in his car. The running time of the two movies that Jess was positive he had watched that night would give the investigators parameters to determine the length of time his father had been gone from the apartment. Had there been time enough to commit the crime? Perhaps only young Michael knew. And either he didn’t remember what had happened on Sunday night, or he had buried his memories deep in his subconscious mind.

  Under the direction of Oregon State Police Lieutenant James Boyd Reed and Sergeant Greg Baxter, the investigation into Cheryl Keeton’s murder proceeded—both the search for physical evidence and the less precise evaluation of the personalities and characters of the victim and the suspects that would emerge. Jerry Finch would continue to be the lead investigator, along with Jim Ayers—with backup from OSP detectives Al Carson, Gus Bradford, and Richard McKeirnan. And in the beginning, the only thing they could do was fan out and try to cover as much territory as possible.

  Cheryl Keeton had had so many facets to her existence: her career, her family, her friends, her failing marriage. Each contact the OSP investigators made led to another. But little by little, they added to their store of knowledge of Cheryl’s life and of Brad’s life too.

  Greg Baxter talked to Cheryl’s mother, Betty, who was now married to Marv Troseth. She was grief-stricken, but she took a deep breath and tried to reconstruct the last day she had seen her oldest child alive. She remembered the previous weekend all too well. Although Cheryl often visited her hometown of Longview on the weekends when Brad had her three little boys, this visit had been different somehow. It had been almost as if she had known that it would be her last. Betty and all the rest of Cheryl’s family knew that she was going through an agonizing divorce and custody battle. But they had been shocked to see that Cheryl, always slender, was bone thin and that her face was drawn with worry and tension.

  Cheryl had spent Saturday and most of Sunday visiting relatives, and then had left in the afternoon so she could be at her house on the West Slope before Brad brought Jess, Michael, and Phillip home at seven Sunday night. Every moment of that weekend was etched in the minds of Betty Troseth, her daughters Julia and Susan, and Cheryl’s stepfathers Marv Troseth and Bob McNannay. Theirs was a large and closely knit family and they could scarcely absorb the fact that Cheryl had been murdered. They all adored her.

  At only thirty-six, Cheryl Keeton—who had never taken her husband’s surname—was already a full partner in the law firm of Garvey, Schubert and Barer. On Monday morning, September 22, the unbelievable rumor that Cheryl was dead had begun to circulate in the Seattle offices of the firm. Cheryl had begun her career with Garvey, Schubert in Seattle, and she had often commuted from Portland to work on unfinished litigations in Washington State.

  Greg Dallaire was the managing partner of the Seattle office. When he arrived at work before eight on that Monday, he heard the rumors and Cheryl’s face flashed in his mind, an image of a young woman so alive, so vital, so tremendously competent in her work as a litigator for the firm. He could not imagine that she was dead.

  Dallaire started calling Portland to see what he could find out. It was a chilling thing to phone law enforcement agencies and morgues searching for a friend. Dallaire really didn’t want to confirm the rumors. “I called the Multnomah County Sheriff’s office first,” he said. “I just assumed she would have been in Portland or in Multnomah County; I didn’t know she lived in Washington County. The sheriff’s office referred me to the coroner’s office.”

  Even years later Dallaire still could not speak of t
hat awful morning without pain. “I called the coroner and I got somebody who worked there. He left the phone for a moment, and then he said, ‘Yeah, she’s here. We have her here.’ Just like that. It was true. Cheryl was dead. It must have been about eight-thirty or nine that morning. The coroner said that she’d been bludgeoned to death.”

  Dallaire went around to speak with the Seattle staff. “There would have been about fifty people with the firm then—lawyers and staff. Everyone was absolutely stunned.”

  Several members of the Garvey, Schubert staff attended Cheryl’s funeral services in Longview the Thursday after her murder. It was an ordeal she would not have chosen to put anyone through, and it was not the kind of service she would have wanted.

  Almost paralyzed with grief and shock, her sister Susan and her mother had made the arrangements. Susan would recall going to Steele’s Funeral Home the Monday night after the murder. Eerily, she already knew what her sister had wanted. Cheryl had had a presentiment of doom and she had confided to Susan that she wanted to be cremated. “They released Cheryl’s body to us right after the autopsy that first night,” Susan remembered. “It sounds terrible, but we were so upset at the funeral home that we got the giggles. I think we were too shocked to cry, and I know Cheryl would have understood. She always used to say, ‘Buy me flowers when I’m alive,’ and we were trying to do what she would have wanted. We arranged for the cremation as Cheryl wanted.”

  But Cheryl’s father’s sister—Ida—was horrified when she heard that Cheryl was going to be cremated. “She told us that ‘no way’ could they permit that,” Susan said. “They were Southern Baptists and they didn’t believe in cremation.” Aunt Ida put up such a fuss about it that Betty, Susan, and Julia didn’t have the energy to fight her. “Cheryl was gone and we were having such a hard time about losing her that we just couldn’t deal with all the family stuff,” Susan remembered. “They went and picked out a coffin. It was an awful bright pink. That wasn’t Cheryl. Actually, she would have laughed at the very sight of it.”

  At least Cheryl’s mother was able to stand firm that there would be no viewing at the funeral. On Wednesday, September 24, both sides of Cheryl’s family along with representatives from Garvey, Schubert attended her services. “It was awful,” Susan recalled. “Cheryl would have hated that pink coffin so much. It was raining cats and dogs. And even so, Julia got stung by a bumblebee.”

  Cheryl was buried in the Bunker Hill Cemetery, several miles north along the Columbia River from Longview. It had been established in 1889, and its gates were guarded by giant cedars. Her grandmother Edna Keeton, whom she had loved so in life, was next to her. Her grandfather Keeton was nearby.

  But it was too soon, far too soon for Cheryl to be dead.

  Jess, Michael, and Phillip, the sons she had loved more than life itself, were not present at Cheryl’s funeral. Nor was her estranged husband Brad. Later he complained that Bunker Hill Cemetery was so out of the way that it was impossible to find, and that no one in Cheryl’s family had made the slightest effort to inform him of her funeral arrangements. Some time after Cheryl’s funeral, Brad did take their sons to Bunker Hill Cemetery and show them their mother’s grave.

  A week after the “pink funeral” in Longview, Cheryl’s coworkers from Garvey, Schubert and Barer had a private memorial service for her. They gathered at The Meeting Place at Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market. “We talked about the Cheryl we knew,” Greg Dallaire recalled. “Even attorneys whom she’d opposed got up and talked about what a fine lawyer and fine person she was. We had a kind of closure.”

  Garvey, Schubert was not a criminal law firm. Like everyone else, Cheryl’s coworkers expected that the police investigation would come to a successful conclusion, and that someone would be arrested soon and prosecuted.

  Cheryl’s blue Toyota van remained parked at the Jim Collins Towing yard at 12090 S.W. Cheshire Court in Beaverton. On Tuesday, September 23, 1986, two OSP criminalists—Senior Trooper Greg Shenkle, an expert in fingerprint identification, and Julia Hinkley (who was married to OSP Sergeant James Hinkley)—processed the death car there. Shenkle also processed Cheryl’s purse and its contents.

  Fingerprints are, and long have been, one of the most valuable resources for detectives. If Shenkle got lucky and Cheryl’s killer had left prints inside the van or on her property, they could identify him, or her, through the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) easily. Unless, of course, Brad Cunningham—who had had reasons to want Cheryl out of his life—was her murderer. His fingerprints would have an evidentiary value of zero; they would be expected to be there. He had told Jim Ayers he had driven the van often, the last time six months before.

  Shenkle looked through Cheryl’s purse and found two phone cards, one for 503-555-3939 and one for 503-555-2637. He also found credit cards: Sears, Nordstrom, American Express, Visa, First Interstate Bankcard, and several gasoline cards. Credit cards are often fertile areas for fingerprints, but only Cheryl’s prints were on them.

  Using various colored powders and oblique angles of light to highlight latent fingerprints, Shenkle then processed the Toyota van inside and out and lifted several latent prints around the driver’s-door window on the exterior and several more inside. He even found one in blood on the outside passenger door handle. A print in blood is the best evidence he could hope to find. Shenkle drove to Olympia, Washington, Brad’s home state capital, carrying the fingerprint exemplar he had taken from the door handle. He held his breath as he compared the whorls, loops, and ridges to Brad’s known print exemplars. But the print proved instead to be from the right thumb of Randall Blighton, the man who had risked his life to get Cheryl’s van off the Sunset Highway. He had already told police that he touched the passenger door when he looked to see if the person inside was all right.

  There are some prime spots where fingerprint technicians find useful prints, spots criminals don’t usually think of when they wipe a crime scene clean. Shenkle tried them all, including the rearview mirror. He performed his arcane alchemy on items he found in the glove compartment: a Mobil oil receipt, a Texaco gas receipt, a lightbulb, several matchbooks, a map, Cheryl’s pen, a glasses case—even a pack of chewing gum.

  Many of the prints didn’t have enough points to make a match to anyone’s fingertips. Not surprisingly, several were Cheryl’s. And, as expected, some were Brad’s—one on a map in the glove compartment and one on a temporary registration. That meant nothing at all, since Brad and Cheryl were still living together—and both driving the van—until February or March.

  Julia Hinkley had been a criminalist with the Oregon State Police for almost two decades. She was an expert in electrophoretic toxicology and crime scene photography as well as in the collection and preservation of evidence. By her own estimate, she had worked on hundreds of homicide investigations. “I’m there to assist the police, and to collect and preserve evidence,” she said succinctly. She had also attended several hundred postmortem exams and reconstructed “many, many” crime scenes.

  Hinkley had been present at Cheryl’s autopsy the day before she processed the Toyota van. It was she who had received the blood samples and the rectal, oral, and vaginal swabs taken from the victim. She had also received the bags from Cheryl’s hands, samples of her head and pubic hair, the dark hairs caught in her left hand, and a few stray hairs and fibers found clinging to her shirt.

  Cheryl’s body had already been transported to Longview for burial when Hinkley joined Shenkle at the tow yard to process the victim’s van. Finch and Ayers were there too, and Greg Baxter, all hoping that something might be recovered that would bring a quick solution to this case.

  First, Hinkley took photographs of the Toyota van. Then she shone a high intensity light at an oblique angle to try to pick up any trace evidence not visible in direct light. There is an irony in the aftermath of murder. The ambiance is calm and impersonal, as if maniacal violence had never occurred in the now silent, empty crime scene. There is no longe
r any need for haste.

  Quietly, meticulously, Hinkley worked her way around the van inch by inch. She saved a hair from the driver’s door and a hair that adhered to dried blood on the steering wheel. She would bag and label every possible shred of evidence. She divided the van into six sections and vacuumed the contents of each section, sealing and labeling the bags. She noted clumps of dark hair, and everywhere she worked there were massive amounts of dried blood. Back at the Oregon State Police crime lab, she would carry out painstaking forensic tests on the items she bagged as she looked for some telltale marker Cheryl’s killer had left behind.

  9

  Fear traveled with Brad and Sara wherever they went that first week. Brad warned Sara that they had to be careful not to develop a pattern in their movements. The people who were stalking them would pick up on that instantly. So some nights while Brad and Sara stayed at Gini Burton’s, they hid the children at Sara’s sister Margie’s house.

  Jess had testified at the Washington County D.A.’s office for the grand jury, and Brad had fired Susan Svetkey for allowing his son to talk to Jerry Finch. It was all such a nightmare, having a six-year-old who had just lost his mother subpoenaed to testify. Meanwhile Sara was continuing to work, trying to keep them all together emotionally and physically and to keep her own feelings on an even keel. It wasn’t easy. Every time she managed to achieve some sort of equanimity about their situation, something happened to throw her off balance.

  On Thursday morning, Sara and Brad took a shower together in Gini’s bathroom. The warm water splashed over them and it almost seemed as if they could wash away all the tragedy and the ugliness of the past few days. Brad was much taller than Sara. She barely came to his shoulder. That was one of the things she liked about him; his massive size made her feel protected. She turned toward him, looking up at his face, and gasped suddenly. Brad had a huge bruise under his left arm. Her doctor’s eye noted clinically that it was dark purple, not yellow yet. She knew that meant it was three or four days old.