Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  He had also moved a lot of heavy equipment onto the property that he and Cheryl owned in Tampico. Cheryl was not sure where the equipment had come from, or how he was paying for it. There were tractors, backhoes, bulldozers, a crawler loader, and a number of trucks and trailers. Brad was bankrupt, but he never stopped acquiring things, and Cheryl knew she too was liable for his debts. She worried about it, staying awake nights.

  In late 1984, Cheryl received an offer that seemed to be a lifeline she could grab onto. Garvey, Schubert was growing and prospering, and the firm credited her for a good deal of its success. There were now forty attorneys in the Seattle office, a smaller number in Washington, D.C., and a new branch in Portland, Oregon. Would Cheryl be interested in transferring to Portland? It would mean a full partnership for her. Of course, she would still be returning often to Seattle to work on her cases in progress, and she knew almost all of the Garvey, Schubert staff who were already in Portland. Eric Lindenauer had moved down there a few months before and they often worked on cases together.

  Careerwise, it was a wonderful opportunity for Cheryl. Personally, it could be either a chance to separate from Brad or—in the best of all possible worlds—a fresh start for them in a new city. A geographical solution, perhaps, to the doubts and recriminations that had well nigh crippled their marriage.

  Although Cheryl hated to leave Seattle, it wouldn’t be the cultural and climate shock it had been to move to Houston. Portland and Seattle both have beautiful summers and rainy winters. Seattle has Mount Rainier and Portland has Mount Hood, snowy mountain peaks to gaze at, and both cities are built around water. In one way, Portland seemed an even better place for Cheryl to live; it was an hour closer to her old hometown of Longview, old friends, and her family.

  Tentatively, she broached the subject to Brad. To her surprise, he agreed that a move to Portland might be a good idea. While he still didn’t have a regular job, he was confident he could find something that suited him just as well in Oregon as he could in Washington. And so, in January 1985, they moved into a rental house in Gresham. It was not a lavish home, but pleasant and roomy. The rent was something over nine hundred dollars a month, and Cheryl paid it, just as she paid all the household bills.

  Garvey, Schubert’s Portland offices were state of the art, very plush, with thick carpets, lovely paintings, and expensive furnishings. Even the lighting was computerized so that each office’s lights went on when someone walked through the door. Cheryl would have her own paralegal assistant and her own secretary, and she herself would continue to mentor young attorneys fresh from law school. She was finally at a place in her legal career that she had always dreamed of.

  Maybe, somehow, things would be all right after all.

  Since Brad would be job-hunting, he and Cheryl hired a baby-sitter, nineteen-year-old Marnie O’Connor.* She was a very pretty girl and the little Cunningham boys liked her right away. Cheryl was glad to see that, and she was reassured by how dependable Marnie seemed to be. That was important, because she expected to be shuttling between Portland and Seattle over the next year or more. She would be working on a huge ongoing medical malpractice litigation until it was settled, and when she was in the Portland offices of Garvey, Schubert, she knew she might sometimes have to work seven days a week. Brad was the furthest thing from a househusband anyone could imagine. Even when he was unemployed, Cheryl couldn’t count on him to stay with the boys. She had to have Marnie there or she would never have a moment’s peace while she was away from her children.

  Brad found a job in Oregon in the spring of 1985, and it was a position with no little prestige. He was hired to head the income property loan department of the Citizens’ Savings and Loan Bank in Salem. He would have a private office, and three employees would report to him. Oregon’s capital city is forty-seven miles south of Portland, a fairly easy commute along the I-5 freeway. Besides that, Brad would be going in the opposite direction from most commuters, so he could expect less than an hour’s drive each way as he cruised along in one or the other Mercedes.

  Citizens’ Savings and Loan had hired a most impressive department manager. Brad dressed like a GQ model, his smile was wide and confident, and his résumé showed more than fifteen years of experience in one aspect of real estate or another. The Houston credits alone were imposing. He clearly knew income property, and he presented himself extremely well in his interviews. (Whether Brad mentioned his ongoing litigation in Texas or his bankruptcy filing is not known.)

  The employees at Citizens’ who reported directly to Brad were female. Even though he made no secret of the fact that he was a married man, it was obvious that he thoroughly enjoyed the company of women, and he was a pleasure to work for. He was compelling and dynamic, he drove fantastic cars, and he had an air of wealth about him—almost as if he didn’t need to work at all but could have chosen to remain in the leisure class he had been born into. No one would ever have guessed the truth about the modest home where Sanford and Rosemary had raised Brad and his two sisters. No one would ever have suspected his Indian heritage.

  Through plastic surgery, education, a certain natural savvy, and the liberal use of Cheryl’s income, Brad had completely re-created himself. None of his coworkers at Citizens’ knew, of course, that his cars, clothes, and money came not from his own labors but from his wife’s. Cheryl worked harder and harder, but however much money she made, Brad always managed to spend more. “If he brought home a pizza now and then,” Cheryl’s sister recalled, “he thought he was doing his part.”

  Cheryl hoped that Brad’s new job would help rebuild their financial base. After so many years when his only “job” had been his dogged attention to the suit he had filed against the Texas construction company, they were both making good salaries. Understandably, Cheryl earned a great deal more than Brad, but had they pulled together, they would have rapidly been in good financial shape.

  In truth, Brad’s salary made no dent at all in their debts. He continued to overspend, buying whatever he wanted. Cheryl had paid all the household bills since 1983—the rent, the utilities, the boys’ baby-sitters and schools, the groceries—although she deferred to Brad’s insistence that the accounts be listed in his name; he was, after all, the man of the family. He didn’t want people to know that he was living off Cheryl.

  Sometimes it seemed as if Brad spent money just to spend money, and Cheryl despaired of ever catching up, telling her sister Susan, “Look at all this stuff,” gesturing toward the piles of “toys” that Brad had bought and then left to gather dust. “And I can’t pay all the bills . . .”

  “She resigned herself to debt,” Susan remembered. “The garage in the Gresham house had four-wheelers, three-wheelers, water skis, jet skis, Brad’s clothes, Brad’s shoes. One time—and this makes me so sad now to remember it—Cheryl really needed some new underwear. Just some simple, plain underwear, and she didn’t have enough money to buy it.”

  It was ludicrous that she should be so laden down with debt. Due to transfers of other partners, when she moved to the Garvey, Schubert office in Portland, Cheryl became not only the most senior partner in that city but also an “owner” of the firm, eligible for salary, profit sharing, and benefits. In 1986 her base salary was fifty thousand dollars. She was also awarded a merit bonus of forty-five hundred dollars, and on top of that she received benefits worth another 15 percent of her salary. She had been picked for the Portland office because of her leadership ability and because litigators traditionally bring more money into a firm, and Cheryl brought in more than her share. “Cheryl was a business developer,” another partner commented. “She represented Weyerhauser, for instance.”

  In 1984 senior partner Gary Strauss attended a product liability trial involving formaldehyde ingestion. Cheryl gave her closing arguments after the others had all spoken. Strauss found her “brilliant, poignant, awesome in a roomful of attorneys. The jury told her that afterward . . . that was the way a closing argument should be.” This pleased Strauss; he
knew how embarrassed Cheryl had been about Brad’s filing for bankruptcy and his constant litigation. “She wasn’t very happy about all the lawyers battling each other in Brad’s suits,” he remembered. “She had been hesitant even about accepting a partnership because of that.”

  Even though Cheryl made Brad’s standard of living possible, he complained when she had to stay in Seattle overnight—insinuating, as always, that she was sleeping with other men. Brad himself was seldom without female company. From puberty he had had his choice of women, and they always played by his rules. Now, living in Gresham, working in Salem, with Cheryl often gone overnight, Brad essentially lived the life of a single man.

  It would be impossible to pinpoint whether he began his affair with the Cunningham baby-sitter, nineteen-year-old Marnie O’Connor, or his liaison with Lilya Saarnen first. It would be a moot point anyway; Brad had always been adept at balancing a marriage and two—or more—affairs. There was no reason that Marnie and Lilya should ever meet.

  Cheryl had no hint that Brad was sleeping with either of them.

  Lilya Saarnen had worked at Citizens’ Savings for four years when Brad took over as her supervisor. She found him tremendously attractive and very understanding. Lilya knew he was married, but that didn’t bother her. Apparently his wife was so caught up in her career that she had little time for Brad. Although Lilya dressed like the complete career woman, Brad hadn’t missed the long slow looks she gave him, or the way she “accidentally” brushed against him as they were going over loan applications. He saw that Lilya was spectacularly attractive behind her horn-rimmed glasses and her loose clothes. She had perfectly aligned delicate features and long silky ash blond hair.

  Careful not to be too obvious in the bank’s offices, Brad and Lilya began a physical affair in the late summer of 1985. They would have an oddly connected relationship that lasted for a long time. While Lilya knew about his wife, she did not know he was also sleeping with his baby-sitter. Whether she had any long-term plans for Brad is questionable. Lilya was intelligent and pragmatic, and of all Brad’s women, she may have seen beyond his complex and contrived facade early enough to steel her own emotional response. It is even possible that Lilya used Brad almost as much as he used most of the women in his life.

  Lilya believed that Brad was very wealthy. She had every reason to. He seemed not only quite rich but munificent with his money. “He was not overly generous,” she would say one day, with her usual understatement, “but he was very supportive of the sad situation I was in.” And, indeed, there would come a time when Lilya needed more than flowers, fancy dinners, and lingerie. Although she was a young woman, her health was not good, and it deteriorated further shortly after she and Brad became intimate.

  Nineteen eighty-five was an almost schizophrenic year for Cheryl. She loved her career, she adored her little boys, and she was finding wonderfully loyal friends in the Portland office of Garvey, Schubert. Along with her extended family, Cheryl’s friends kept her going. Her marriage was little more than a sham. All the Pollyanna philosophizing in the world wasn’t going to turn the home she and Brad had rented in Gresham into anything more than an armed camp. Cheryl sometimes wondered why Brad stayed with her and the boys, but she must have suspected it was because she had become his “cash cow.”

  Cheryl could count on nothing; she walked through her days awaiting the next assault, teetering emotionally on the edge of some precipice from which she might never escape. Brad still pulled his “move furniture out, move furniture in” games, but by the fall of 1985 he didn’t take just “his” furniture, he took Cheryl’s too. There was something ultimately demoralizing about coming home to a house emptied of its furniture, to see the dents in the carpet where couches and chairs and televisions should have been, to watch dust bunnies drifting lazily across bare floors when a door was opened.

  By mutual agreement, Brad and Cheryl had enrolled Jess and Michael in the Franciscan Montessori Earth School, administered by Mother Francine Cardew. It was an excellent and much sought-after school in Portland, with a philosophy that nurtured and encouraged creativity and independence in children. Exceptionally intelligent children like the Cunningham boys thrived in the Montessori atmosphere.

  Mother Francine was a serene presence, but in no way a cloistered nun; in her many years of experience in running the Montessori school she had seen all manner of problems with parents and children and dealt with them competently and tactfully. She had, however, seen nothing like the bitterness between Brad and Cheryl. Every encounter with them was unpleasant.

  Early in the 1985–86 school year, Mother Francine was informed of an altercation in the hallway; the Cunninghams were arguing loudly outside the secretary’s office. She was grateful their children didn’t observe that fight, but Mother Francine was appalled at one volatile argument that did take place in front of Jess and Michael. The boys had been waiting for someone to pick them up after school, two lonely little figures clinging together as they watched the other children leave the school one by one until they were the last ones left. “Day-care children were to be picked up by six-fifteen P.M.,” Mother Francine recalled, and the school set a dollar-a-minute penalty for late pickups, more to protect the children than to add to the school’s budget. One day “no one came for the Cunningham boys.”

  Eventually, both Brad and Cheryl showed up, and each blamed the other for failing to pick up Jess and Michael on time. “He was very angry. She was quieter, saying to him, ‘You were responsible,’” Mother Francine said with a shudder. “I just remember I didn’t want to be there. I was embarrassed. The boys were embarrassed—and agitated. They wanted their parents to leave.”

  More and more Jess, Michael, and to a lesser extent Phillip were pulled in two directions like stretchy Silly Putty figures. Their mother wanted desperately to protect them and give them a secure world; their father used them to harass their mother. And the boys were the most vulnerable part of Cheryl’s life. She could face anything—anything—but losing them.

  The product liability cases that drew Cheryl back to Seattle on an almost weekly basis had begun in the late spring of 1985. Garvey, Schubert represented a company that had manufactured an artificial heart valve. The attorney Cheryl faced in litigating sessions, who represented patients whose heart valves had allegedly malfunctioned, was Jim Griswold, onetime president of the Oregon Trial Lawyers’ Association.

  Griswold described such litigation as “a very difficult kind of case.” Cheryl and her co-counsel, John Allison, practically had to take a course in cardiovascular surgery in order to defend their clients. Griswold had come up against hundreds of defense litigators: he had been in practice for four decades. When he was later asked to describe Cheryl Keeton, he paused, searching for words. “Excellent. Outstanding wouldn’t cover it. She was intense, professional. She always knew what she was doing. She always knew where she was going. . . . She was never thrown off.” At one time, Griswold was on a committee to compile a list of attorneys to be recommended to the Oregon governor for judgeships. Cheryl was on that list, termed “highly qualified.”

  Cheryl opposed Griswold in the artificial heart valve litigation for a year and a half, and as far as he could see, she was never less than an extremely competent lawyer. Whatever emotions might have been churning inside, Cheryl kept them there. Later, Griswold would be amazed to learn what her private life had been like. Cheryl always managed to keep her personal and-professional life separated. Drawing on some deep inner strength, she was holding herself together with brains, guts, hope, and her love for her three sons. But with every passing day, her situation was becoming more and more unbearable.

  23

  In the fall of 1985 Cheryl’s sister Susan was living in Seattle, working toward a degree in sociology at the University of Washington. Her apartment there was always available to Cheryl when she had to be in Seattle on business for Garvey, Schubert. She had her own key, and she averaged one visit a month. Occasionally she could even prevail
upon Brad to bring the boys up so they could all be together. She missed them so much.

  Sometimes Susan was there; sometimes the apartment was empty. Since Susan’s fiancé, Dave Keegan, was in Longview and she often went to see him, Cheryl was occasionally alone in Susan’s apartment. But more often they were there together. They were both grown women now and were friends as well as sisters.

  That fall of 1985 was the first time Brad explicitly accused Cheryl of having extramarital affairs, and once he had begun, he continually railed at her about her alleged infidelity. It is an all too common ploy for a man who is cheating to defuse suspicion by accusing his wife of what he himself is doing. And it is quite possible that Cheryl did have one or two fleeting relationships with other men late in 1985 and early in 1986. Who could have blamed her? “The police asked me about it later,” Susan recalled, “and I told them I didn’t know if Cheryl was seeing other men or not, but I told them I hoped she was. She needed someone in her life who made her happy, someone who cared about her. . . . She knew that Brad was cheating on her; she’d known it for a long time, but I think she tried to look away from that. She tried not to think about it.”

  Cheryl was a beautiful woman, only thirty-five, and she still drew attention from men. Her years with Brad had well nigh obliterated her self-esteem. When the men she worked with occasionally complimented her, she almost looked around to see whom they were talking about. The experience of having a man actually treat her well, tell her positive things, even hold her with tenderness, was something she had forgotten.