Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Shinn told of hiring Charles Pollard, “who is one of the best investigators in Texas and claims he can find anyone in twenty-four hours.” Pollard had found Dana Malloy, and Jess, Michael, and Phillip Cunningham; he had not found Brad Cunningham. He had hand-delivered Judge Haggerty’s order to trial to Dana Malloy one week before the trial. Whether Pollard ever saw Cunningham wasn’t really the point. Brad had clearly gotten the message. Within two days, Brad, Dana, and the three little boys had vacated their lavish fortress of a home in Houston. “No one knows where Brad Cunningham is now,” Shinn said flatly.

  The jury then filed in to hear the story of Cheryl Keeton’s tragically short life and to listen to the witnesses Shinn had gathered to help him tell it. He held up a large picture of Cheryl. She was wearing a tan trench coat and she was smiling through raindrops at the cameraman. Ironically, the photographer had been the man Shinn alleged had killed her: Brad Cunningham.

  “In 1986 Cheryl Keeton was thirty-four—or so,” Shinn began softly. “As you can see, she was a beautiful woman. She had a brilliant future ahead of her, [she was] a woman who played many difficult roles at the same time. First of all, she was the mother of these three little boys. . . .” He held up another picture. It was a heartbreaker—Cheryl with Jess, Michael, and Phillip. “In 1986 the oldest, Jess, was six; Michael was four, and the youngest, Phillip, was two years old.”

  The jury next looked at a photograph of a laughing woman clinging to a darkly handsome, smiling man as they stepped through a doorway toward their future together. “She was the wife of this man—Bradly Morris Cunningham,” Shinn said. “This was taken on their wedding day. She thought at the time she was his second wife. She later found out she was his fourth.”

  It hadn’t been difficult to pick a jury who knew nothing of the case—there had been little coverage of Cheryl’s death, and she had been dead for almost five years. “Who were these people?” Shinn asked. “Mr. Cunningham . . . was one of the most intriguing personalities you are ever likely to encounter. . . . He had a charm about him, a charisma. . . .”

  Could Shinn do it? Could he paint a true picture of a man the jury was likely never to see? Could he bring Cheryl back to life and make her real enough for the jury to understand how devastating her murder had been to so many people? Could he explain why there was “something fundamentally disastrous” about their relationship? Would the preponderance of the evidence he presented to the jury prove that Brad had murdered his wife?

  Shinn began almost at the end of Cheryl’s life, setting up an enlargement of Cheryl’s last will and testament on the easel in front of the jury. He described the tearing hurry Cheryl had been in to have a new will drawn up—a will barring her husband from inheriting her estate or even having any control over it. “She told her friend Kerry Radcliffe, ‘I think he’s going to kill me,’” Shinn said.

  He held up another picture of Cheryl, the last picture taken of her, a shockingly graphic photograph that showed how she looked on the night of September 21, 1986. “She was beaten over twenty times,” Shinn said. No one would have recognized this battered corpse as the smiling woman in the first picture.

  The first witness was Randy Blighton, the young truck salesman who had seen Cheryl’s van bumping against the median barrier and had bravely dashed across the Sunset Highway to get it out of harm’s way—and to save approaching motorists from disaster. He told of his shock when he saw the dead woman lying across the front seat.

  Karen Aaborg was next. Brad had had so many women throughout his life that it wasn’t surprising his brief affair with Karen Aaborg had managed to escape the notice of the original investigating team in 1986. Karen had been in her early twenties when she worked for Brad at Citizens’ Savings and Loan, a young attorney fresh out of law school. Lilya Saarnen’s affair with Brad had virtually overlapped his affair with Karen. Add to that the fact that he was simultaneously sleeping with his sons’ baby-sitter, and it was easy to see why just keeping up with his sexual conquests was a challenge for police investigators. Karen Aaborg had simply slipped through the cracks.

  Karen had had some misgivings about Brad’s activities in late September 1986, the time of his wife’s murder, but she hadn’t wanted to hold up her hand and say, “I was involved with Brad too!” In fact, she had been relieved when no one questioned her about him. She hadn’t really known anything that would help the police anyway. But then Mike Shinn’s private investigator Chick Preston had discovered her relationship with Brad and seemed fascinated with her recollections. He urged her to talk to Shinn—whose eyes lit up when she told him about events of the week after Cheryl died.

  Karen walked to the witness chair, a slender, almost girlish-looking woman, her golden hair swept back from her face and caught in a black ribbon. If she wore makeup at all, it was so lightly applied that it was invisible. Shinn had noted that Karen was what seemed to be Brad’s type—the same small features, the same symmetry and delicacy. And she was nervous. All of the women in Brad’s life were nervous when they spoke of him, and most of all when they did so for the public record.

  Karen told the jury that she had been interviewed for the first time only about ten days before this civil trial—when Chick Preston approached her. She had worked for Brad for a little less than a year at Citizens’ Savings and Loan in Lake Oswego, beginning in June or July 1985. An attorney, she was a loan closer, while Lilya Saarnen was a loan officer.

  She said she started going out with Brad in May or June 1986.

  “How long did you date him?” Shinn asked.

  “Two or three months.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “No.” There was no emotion in Karen Aaborg’s voice.

  “Did you have an amicable parting?”

  She nodded. She and Brad, who was fifteen years older than she was, had remained friends and had been in contact.

  “Do you remember when Cheryl Keeton was killed?”

  “Yes. . . . It was a Monday around lunchtime [when I heard]. . . . One of our temps from Citizens’ called me and said a person named Cheryl Keeton had been killed—or found killed—and wasn’t that Brad’s wife?”

  Karen didn’t know Cheryl; she had met her once very briefly. She had immediately called Brad. “I said, ‘Hi. How are things going?’ He said, ‘Okay,’ and I said, ‘Brad, what’s going on, really—I heard that Cheryl was dead,’ and he said that, yes, that was what had happened.” He had told her that he was just leaving to go talk to an attorney.

  “This is the Monday following Cheryl’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  Karen testified that Brad had come to her apartment the next day, Tuesday, and talked to her about his movements on Sunday night. He showed up unexpectedly and spent an hour or so, telling her what he had done on Sunday night in much detail. She repeated to the jury what Brad had told her.

  His story began very like the version he had told police—about eating with Sara and the boys in the pizza place. Then he had had trouble with “bad gas” or “water in his gas tank” with his Suburban. Brad told Karen that after he got back to the Madison Tower, he was supposed to return the boys to Cheryl. He said he called Cheryl to tell her he was having car trouble but it was his impression that she was busy, that she had someone there and wasn’t interested in talking with him. “[He said] she sounded mad at him—just leave her alone—she’d been drinking, she didn’t care about getting the kids back. Then he decided the kids would stay with him that night.”

  But from that point, the version Brad had told Karen became a little different.

  He told her he had gone down to the parking garage to get the boys’ backpacks and especially Phillip’s blanket, and took Phillip—not Michael—with him, leaving the two older boys in the apartment. He said he ran into Lilya Saarnen in the garage and he also mentioned seeing a police officer in the garage.

  “Was this all in the same trip?” Shinn asked.

  “Yes, I think so. . . . [He said] he got wh
atever he needed to get out of the car. He went back upstairs—the kids watched a movie, they fell asleep, and the next thing he knew there was a police officer knocking on his door about midnight or one o’clock.”

  “Did he tell you that he had more than one conversation with Cheryl that night?”

  “. . . Yes, at least two—maybe three . . . I think what I remember is that Cheryl called him and suddenly wanted those kids—changed her tune—and wanted him to return those kids right now. I think he argued with her . . . because it sounded like she was with somebody and had been drinking.”

  Karen had just cut a large hole in Brad’s alibi for the night Cheryl was killed. He had told everyone else that he had been waiting for Cheryl to come and get their sons. He had never said that he refused to let the boys go home to her because she was “drunk” and had a man with her. He had made a big point of saying that he had gone out on the balcony to watch for Cheryl, but that she had never shown up.

  Karen further testified that she had seen Brad several times that first week after the murder. She even took care of his boys while he was at his attorney’s office. She kept them at different times for an hour or so.

  “Did he express to you his attitude about the police investigation that was going on?” Shinn asked.

  “Yeah, he said the D.A. in Washington County was really out to get him—that this guy had almost a vendetta against him—”

  “A vendetta?”

  “Yeah, he said that he was convinced that Brad had done it, and that he was going to get him. Brad felt he was going to be arrested at any time.”

  “Did he express his attitude about Cheryl’s mother?”

  “Well, yeah. He was concerned that Cheryl’s mother . . . would get the kids.”

  “Did he ask you to do anything about that?”

  “Yeah, he asked me to take the boys and get out of the state, and just kind of keep them, get them out of town, when things were very traumatic and he could get arrested at any time.”

  “Where were you supposed to take them?”

  “Out of the state—not out of the country. He didn’t want to know where they were.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he was arrested, he didn’t want to know where they were. If he was asked [by authorities] he didn’t want to know.”

  Karen said that Brad had given her three thousand dollars he took out of an account at First Interstate Bank. She went with him to get the money. She had kept the money for a day or two, because she had tentatively agreed to help Brad hide his children. But then she changed her mind and returned the three thousand dollars.

  Karen Aaborg was finally excused. What would the jury think of a man who was willing to have his children spirited away so far that even he couldn’t find them? They had just lost their mother, yet he had planned to hide them completely, delivering them to strangers somewhere. He had wanted to take them away from their mother, but he apparently had been willing to abandon them so that their grandmother could not have them—or so that they would not be vulnerable to other enemies of Brad.

  As the trial progressed, still without Brad in attendance, Shinn varied his witnesses—some from the past, some from the present, some from Cheryl’s career world, some from her family and her social world, and some detectives and criminalists from the investigation of her murder. And gradually the jury began to see the image of Brad’s life psychopathology emerge.

  Another friend from work, Janet Blair, told of witnessing Cheryl’s new will not long before her murder. “As we were witnessing the will, Cheryl said, ‘I want this all taken care of so that if something happens on this trip, Brad will not get anything and the children will get everything.’ And the other thing she said—and I will never forget this—is, ‘If I’m ever found dead, Brad did it.’”

  Sharon McCulloch testified, and Cheryl’s cousin, Katannah King, and any number of women who had worked for Garvey, Schubert and Barer. They described a woman who had once had guts and strength and brilliance, but who had become so subdued that she lived in fear that her estranged husband was going to keep her children from her—even if he had to kill her to do it. All the women spoke in voices tremulous with tears. None of them had been able to save Cheryl; all of them had tried.

  Katannah King testified in a voice so soft that the jurors had to strain to hear her. Cheryl had told her that Brad was at least three years behind in filing his income tax. A few weeks before Cheryl was killed, Katannah said she had been alarmed when she listened to Cheryl speak on the phone to Brad. He was asking her to come and help him with his income taxes. And it made her angry. “Cheryl said to him, ‘No way. I’m not going to help you. We’re [meaning Brad’s sister Ethel] working against you, and I’m going to hang you for it.’ Brad said to her, ‘Well, I’m not going to worry about it anyway—because you’re not going to be around to do anything.’”

  “When was the last time you saw Cheryl?” Shinn asked.

  “The last time,” Katannah said softly, “. . . was on Saturday night at Cheryl’s mother’s house. She was very quiet, very quiet. She was very calm. . . . We talked and she took me home, and she said, ‘You take care of yourself, Katannah,’ and I said, ‘No, you take care of your self,’ and that was the last I ever saw her.”

  Chief Criminal Deputy D.A. Bob Herman was the next witness. He testified that after Cheryl’s body was discovered in the van, he had accompanied OSP Detective Jerry Finch to her house on 81st Street. There they met her brother, Jim Karr, and the three of them went into the house. When they walked into the kitchen, Herman said, “Jerry found a note on the drainboard—”

  “Let me show you my client’s Exhibit Two,” Shinn said, holding a blowup of what Finch had found in Cheryl’s kitchen.

  Herman read it aloud. “I have gone to pick up the boys from Brad at the Mobil station next to the IGA. If I’m not back, please come and find me . . . COME RIGHT AWAY!”

  Jim Karr had told Finch and Herman about the bitterness of his sister’s divorce, and her habit of taking notes on her conversations with Brad.

  “Do you remember any evidence of alcoholic drinking?” Shinn asked Herman. “Beverage glasses? Wine-glasses?”

  Herman shook his head. “The house was neat as a pin.”

  “Thank you. You may step down.”

  * * *

  Sara Gordon took the witness stand to testify against her former husband. Almost five years earlier, she had been adamant that he was an innocent man hounded by the police. She had never lied—she was not a woman who could lie—but she had answered only those questions asked of her. Now, Sara knew through bitter experience what kind of man lurked behind the charming facade she had fallen in love with. And she was prepared to tell the jurors about the real Brad Cunningham.

  Sara was remarkably pretty, and almost fragile in appearance. For her day on the witness stand, she wore a dark wine suit with a white blouse. And it was obvious that she was nervous—perhaps even frightened. It was also obvious that she was resolute.

  As the jurors listened, enthralled, Sara relived her first meeting with Brad and all that had transpired between them since the spring of 1986. She had to open up her private life, reveal things that no woman would want to tell. It was terribly difficult for a woman of exceptional intelligence to have to admit that love had temporarily obliterated her common sense.

  She described how rapidly her affair with Brad had progressed. “He made me feel very, very special. He spent a lot of time with me, and involved me in the activities with his children. . . . He seemed like a very successful business person to me. He was a lot of fun to be with.” Brad had been Everywoman’s ideal man at first, but he had soon revealed himself to be an opportunist, adulterer, thief, and stalking predator. He was also a liar and had convinced Sara of a number of things that were not true—that Cheryl was a loose woman, that he had been designated the better parent by psychologists, that Cheryl and her mother had been plotting to poison him. “He told me that he stopped eating
at home unless he took one of the kids’ plates or ate something that they hadn’t finished,” Sara testified. “He didn’t eat until they had eaten it first.”

  Mike Shinn led Sara through the events of September 21, 1986, when she had lent Brad her Toyota Cressida, the vehicle that Shinn submitted was the car he had used when he ambushed Cheryl at the Mobil station. That whole week had been strange—Brad’s rage after Cheryl’s deposition on September 16, his phone threats to Cheryl that night, and the fight they had on the stormy night of September 19 when he and Sara picked up the boys. Sara said she was surprised at his rage, and surprised how quickly it dissipated after he told Cheryl that he would make her “pay.”

  Shinn asked Sara when she had last seen Brad without clothing during the weekend of September 19–21.

  “. . . Friday night.”

  “Did he have any bruises on his upper body?”

  “No.”

  “After Sunday night, when was the first time you saw Mr. Cunningham without clothes on—on his upper body?” Shinn asked.

  “. . . Wednesday or Thursday morning—we were taking a shower together.”

  “Did you see anything on his body that you had not seen prior to Sunday night?”

  “Yes. I saw a very large bruise under his arm—like huge . . . I can’t remember if it was the right or left arm. It seems like the left—just the back of the upper arm. . . . I remember being very shocked when I saw it—and gasping. It was very large—like this size—” She held her hands apart and demonstrated a circle the size of a cantaloupe.

  Sara gave the jurors a precise time schedule for the night of Sunday, September 21. She had said goodbye to Brad and the boys shortly before seven, she began.