Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  If Cheryl herself had set out to find a mother who would love her little boys, she could not have found a better one than Sara. But if she was sometimes disappointed that her relationship with Brad was not as idyllic as she had hoped it would be, Sara was never disappointed with Jess, Michael, and Phillip. She loved them devotedly. Without realizing it, she had given hostages to fortune.

  Brad remained the consummate entrepreneur. He was constantly thinking of ways to get back into the world of business. While he was attending classes at Portland State, he saw that there was a real need for a coffee shop close to the college; not everyone wanted to eat at the college-run cafeteria. He visualized a bakery with fresh muffins, rolls, and bread, sandwiches and coffee. He could even add a call-in/take-out lunch run. If it was managed correctly, he figured that students and anyone with business near the campus would flock to patronize his small restaurant—good smells and a warm place to get out of the rain.

  Brad checked out buildings around the college and found one that seemed perfect. They could gut it, remodel the interior, and use the lower level for the bakery/coffee shop. Later, when they got a liquor license, he envisioned a gourmet “bistro” upstairs. It was hard for Sara to imagine that the deserted building could ever be turned into a desirable restaurant. “The kids said it best, I guess,” she remembered. “The first time they saw it, they said, ‘This is a piece of junk.’”

  Brad assured them all that the building was not junk; it was a tremendous opportunity. He had not lost one whit of his sales ability. When he believed in something, it was difficult not to catch his fervor, and Sara was soon involved in his plans. “I agreed to finance the bakery,” she later said. Brad would call it the Broadway Bakery. And the money drain began when Brad wrote a check on their joint account on April 11, 1988, to the City of Portland for a building permit: $115.63. Sara would pour some $200,000 into the remodeling of the old building, transforming it into a bright, inviting restaurant.

  Brad was totally in charge of selecting the bakery equipment, and hiring contractors and employees. Sara paid the bills. The bakery opened in 1988, and the Bistro—the upstairs restaurant—in July of 1989. The bakery barely kept its head above water, even though there was an enthusiastic response from customers. The Bistro was a financial flop.

  Sara had hoped that the Broadway Bakery and the Bistro would provide some center and purpose for Brad. He had been through so many bad years. He no longer had a profession, or at least he could not find work in real estate or banking in Portland. He was only thirty-nine and she couldn’t picture him sitting around the Dunthorpe estate as some kind of glorified baby-sitter.

  Brad reassured Sara that Symptovir, his formula for the alleviation of herpes symptoms, was still viable. She had never been enthusiastic about that product, however, whose base ingredient was olive oil. But Symptovir was no longer Brad’s main interest. It wasn’t going anywhere, although Sara had paid those bills too, buying cases of olive oil and chemicals, getting business cards printed.

  Brad chose Spectrum, the name of the division of U.S. Bank for which he had recently been an executive, for his corporate name. Actually, he had several small corporations. Every time he opened up another section of the bakery building, he became another corporation. Sara could not understand why he did that, but she had never claimed to have a head for business.

  A number of puzzling things happened to Sara in the summer of 1989. She didn’t understand all the ramifications, but an old friend of Cheryl’s—an attorney named John Burke—was apparently trying to sue Brad over Cheryl’s death. Brad didn’t take it seriously, although he was incensed at almost anything Burke did. Burke and Bob McNannay administered the boys’ trust fund and Sara knew that Brad felt that they were deliberately keeping him from getting money that the boys needed.

  Sara was surprised when she learned the name of John Burke’s attorney, Mike Shinn. She had gone to college with Mike and, worried about Brad and her sons, she wrote and chided him for causing new grief in her family’s lives. They had all been through so much already. Shinn delayed a reply until he was more familiar with the case.

  In the autumn of 1989, Sara and Brad were having dinner at Jake’s, a popular downtown Portland restaurant. She recognized Mike Shinn sitting at another table and pointed him out to Brad. Later, Brad left their table briefly and she saw him bend down to say something to Shinn. Brad brushed her questions aside when he came back.

  At about the same time, Brad hired a young woman named Lynn Minero* to work as assistant manager of the bakery. He was telling Sara about his new employee when he suddenly volunteered, “You don’t have to worry about her, Sara—she’s happily married and has two daughters.”

  Sara laughed at first. “You’re happily married and you have two daughters and four sons.”

  Sara had never been concerned that Brad might be unfaithful to her. They had had their differences, but this was simply not a problem that had ever crossed her mind. Now she looked up at him sharply. Why would Brad tell her not to worry about a new bakery employee just because she was a woman? He had been extolling Lynn’s virtues and telling Sara how attractive she was, but that hadn’t worried Sara.

  For the first time, she wondered. Was Brad protesting too much? They spent most of their days apart now; both Sara and Brad had to leave the Dunthorpe house so early in the morning—she to go to surgery, he to head for the bakery—sometimes as early as 4 A.M. Their baby-sitter, Shannon Farrell, lived in the guest house on the property, and they knew the boys were well taken care of.

  If Sara had a flaw, it was that she could be too trusting, too accepting, too generous. But she was an extremely smart woman and, once the first atonal ding of doubt sounded, she didn’t have to be told twice. In retrospect, she realized that Brad had been much too complimentary of his new manager’s appearance and much too enthusiastic about her as an employee. But he made his fatal error when he tried to allay suspicions his wife hadn’t yet felt.

  Now she was suspicious.

  They spent Thanksgiving of 1989 on Sara’s brother’s huge ranch in eastern Oregon. Brad was not the same. Sara’s feminine instincts told her that something was going on. And hell hath no better private detective than a suspicious wife. Sara began to keep a journal, just as Cheryl had written notes before her. She began writing down her thoughts on Saturday, January 17, 1990. Her marriage was slightly more than two years old, she had adopted Brad’s three youngest sons, she had invested almost a million dollars in his enterprises and in their Dunthorpe home, and now she had the sickening apprehension that he was cheating on her at the very workplace she had funded to give him one more chance for financial success.

  “Jan 27: Brad went in to bakery at 4 a.m. At 8:30, I called and he wasn’t at bakery. . . . He called at 9. Said he had put his new tire on and had gone to a cycle shop to fix something he had broken.

  “Feb 1: Brad met me at Fulton’s Pub. . . . He said he had given Lynn a ride, . . . said she couldn’t get hold of Gary* [Lynn’s husband] so she called him and asked him to give her a ride home. . . . Brad left bakery at 4:20. I called on portable phone at 4:50, 5:10, 5:25 with no answer.

  “Feb 2: Brad met me . . . to sign loan papers. He left at 3:05–3:10. I know he went right back to the bakery and picked Lynn up. . . . I called his phone. . . . He said he found the phone had been turned off accidentally.”

  Sara’s journal noted numerous instances almost every day when Brad had not been where he said he was. She also wrote that Brad was “very resentful about my asking about her [Lynn] being around.”

  In February 1986 Cheryl Keeton had changed her will and the beneficiaries of her life insurance policy. In February 1990 Sara Gordon changed the beneficiaries of her life insurance policy, and also the terms of the loan she had just signed with Brad at First Interstate Bank. She did not tell Brad what she had done.

  Although Brad always had a plausible explanation for why he never seemed to be where he was supposed to be and why he didn’t answer
his mobile phone, Sara’s careful charting of his movements proved to her that Lynn Minero was often with him. Brad’s behavior was now diametrically opposed to that of the man she had first known. Then, she could count on him to be exactly where he said he would be. He had always arrived for their dates on time. The only time he had faltered was the night Cheryl was murdered.

  Brad came down with stomach flu, he said, and he slept on the couch so that he wouldn’t bother Sara. She had another explanation for his behavior.

  “February 6: Brad stayed down on the couch all night. . . . Seemed angry with me—Said he felt that Burke et al were persecuting him for something he had not done. Then said how he felt I was like them and persecuting him for something he had not done—ie. affair with Lynn. . . . Called me at work at 8:00 A.M. . . . said his SeaFirst Visa account had not been paid for two months and was I intentionally not paying his bills? Seemed rather upset.”

  Sara now knew in her heart that her marriage to Brad was not working out, but a faithless husband is far easier to say goodbye to than three little boys. She loved Jess and Michael and Phillip so much that she wondered if she could bear to give them up. “I knew that Brad would never let me have the boys,” she would recall wistfully. And she had to remember the vicious struggle that went on between Cheryl and Brad over their three sons.

  It would not be exaggerating to say that Sara was going through emotional agony. If she stayed with Brad, she knew there would be countless early mornings and nights when she didn’t know where he was or with whom. If she left him, she would lose the children who considered her their mother. And they would lose her.

  36

  Four years had passed but police files had never been closed on Cheryl Keeton’s death; the investigators from the Oregon State Police and the Washington County District Attorney’s office simply ran out of leads. They had been unable to link Brad to Cheryl’s murder with physical evidence. They had found no weapon, no bloody clothing, and no telltale trail of blood. They had talked to scores of people and found many who knew nothing that would help and a number who were reluctant to become involved. Those who knew Brad did not want to go into detail about their relationships with him.

  On television and in the movies, circumstantial cases move along smoothly and charges are filed, witnesses burst out with new information or outright confessions, and the last five or ten minutes of fictional mysteries always seem to bring satisfactory answers to complicated puzzles. There are usually even wonderfully convoluted “double-reverse twists” to make the denouement more suspenseful. The death of Cheryl Keeton was, however, a tragically authentic event. Real life. Real death, as it were. After an exhaustive investigation, it began to look as if the person who had caused her death was going to walk away and any footprints left behind were going to grow fainter and fainter until there was no trail at all.

  The detectives who had worked their way back through Cheryl’s life—and through Brad’s life—found themselves against a brick wall. Cheryl’s murder went unsolved. At least, it went unprosecuted, because all of their evidence was, thus far, circumstantial. On Sunday, September 21, 1986, Brad had had ample time to drive from the Madison Tower to the West Slope area to meet Cheryl, to strike her on the head and face two dozen times, to send her van containing her body onto the Sunset Highway, and to drive back to his apartment. No one had seen him between 7:35 and 8:50. But a man cannot be arrested because he hated his wife and because no one had either seen or talked to him for an hour and fifteen minutes, not even if his wife had died a brutal death during those seventy-five minutes.

  If Brad had killed Cheryl, he had found a place to wash himself clean of blood afterward (although blood spatter experts would one day testify that “cast-off” blood from a bludgeoning weapon doesn’t necessarily land on the killer who holds that weapon). When Lilya Saarnen saw Brad at 7:35, he had been wearing casual slacks—just as Sara recalled. Sara never again saw the wine-colored shirt that Brad had worn to the American Dream Pizza Company earlier that evening, although that was something else she had not volunteered to the police during their initial investigation. If Brad washed up, no one knew where he had done it. When Rachel Houghton saw him entering the garage around nine, he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt; he was barefoot and his hair was wet. That was forty minutes after Cheryl’s estimated time of death. Had he come through the pool area of the apartment tower? Had he stopped in a gas station restroom somewhere along the way home? Had he made it back to his apartment without being seen at all and washed up in his own kitchen or bathroom?

  These questions had never been answered.

  * * *

  Cheryl Keeton’s coworkers at Garvey, Schubert and Barer had felt a certain sense of serenity after the memorial service they held for her in Seattle’s Public Market the week after her death. “We did have closure,” managing partner Greg Dallaire said, “but we expected the police to do something. . . .”

  Civil attorneys are not usually trained in criminal law, nor are they any more aware of police procedure than someone in an entirely unrelated profession. It is necessary to be caught in the middle of a criminal case—in one manner or another—to really understand how very difficult it is to bring criminal charges against a murder suspect and then to actually convict that defendant.

  But Oregon State Police detectives Jerry Finch and Jim Ayers hadn’t forgotten Cheryl. Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Scott Upham and Assistant D.A. Bob Heard hadn’t forgotten her. Nor had OSP Sergeant Jim Hinkley and his wife, OSP criminalist Julia Hinkley. Every officer and every paramedic called to the side of the Sunset Highway on the evening of September 21, 1986, remembered Cheryl Keeton. But they didn’t have enough to arrest someone. Brad remained their only suspect, but they couldn’t bolt under pressure and arrest him too soon.

  Brad also remained the prime suspect in the minds of Cheryl’s family, friends, and colleagues. Greg Dallaire and other partners at Garvey, Schubert knew that Cheryl had been convinced for months before her murder that Brad was going to kill her. They knew that she had begged her friends to see that her boys did not go to their father if she should die. They knew that, fearing she would die, she had done everything humanly possible to prevent Brad from gleaning one penny from her estate.

  Cheryl had insurance and her estate had money coming from her Garvey, Schubert retirement account. “The firm also gives five thousand dollars in the case of death,” Dallaire said. “We didn’t want to give it to Brad. And we were concerned about the kids. We did hire a Portland attorney to help get custody from him so that the boys could go to Betty and Marv Troseth. But Brad was taking care of them—and we couldn’t prove otherwise. That petered out.”

  Sharon Armstrong, Kerry Radcliffe, Eric Lindenauer, and Dallaire were “extraordinarily frustrated” as they saw everything that Cheryl had feared become reality. Both Sharon and Kerry had tried to be emotionally supportive of Cheryl, as only women can be with one another. Neither of them could be with her on the last weekend of her life and they may well have wondered if things would have been different had they been there—if somehow, some way, they might have protected her. It would be only natural.

  Eric Lindenauer had been there for Cheryl as often as he could be. He had made the trip to Bridlemile School with her to try to protect her—and the boys—from Brad’s rage. But he couldn’t be with her all the time. No one could, and in the end, all Eric had been able to do was call the Oregon State Police the day after her death and tell them about the horror she had been living through in the months before her murder.

  Greg Dallaire had never been as close to Cheryl—he had seen her around the office, of course, and had lunch with her once or twice—but she had almost always seemed happy and vibrant. Dallaire was a gentle man, a man who used his legal knowledge to help others. In 1970 he set up the first battered women’s program in America through his work with the Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle. He had never realized how emotionally battered Cheryl was. When he did, it had bee
n far too late to help her, and he agonized over that.

  Three months had passed since Cheryl’s death without an arrest. It was early 1987. Somewhere, her little boys had their first Christmas without their mother—but none of Cheryl’s former coworkers knew where. Brad and the boys had completely disappeared. As much as they wanted to fulfill the promises that Cheryl had extracted from them—the promises that they wouldn’t let Brad have her little boys—they had no legal avenue to stop him. He was their father. Their mother was dead. And if Brad had killed Cheryl, no one had yet found a way to prove it.

  Yet it didn’t seem possible that someone as alive as Cheryl could die so horribly and that no one would be punished. “We went to Hillsboro,” Dallaire recalled. “Eric Lindenauer and myself. We talked to Bob Heard and Jim Ayers. They said that they were attempting to put a case together, but they told us it was a circumstantial case. They said, ‘We know he did it, but . . .’”

  The civil attorneys were learning more about the criminal side of law than they had wanted to know. Some months later, they returned to the Washington County Courthouse and talked once more with Bob Heard. “All he could tell us was that it was still under investigation,” Dallaire said.

  Eighteen months after Cheryl died, Lindenauer and Dallaire traveled again to Hillsboro. They could sense at once that their meeting with Bob Heard, Jim Ayers, and Jerry Finch would not be a fruitful one. None of the three men seemed to want to meet their eyes. They made small talk and glanced at the thick files in front of Heard. Finally Heard took a deep breath and spoke the words that he didn’t want to say and none of them wanted to hear, “We’re declining to prosecute.”