Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Mike Shinn called Dr. Ron Turco. A compactly muscled man with a thick head of hair, Turco looked younger than his age and nothing at all like a psychiatrist.

  “What is your profession?” Shinn asked.

  “I’m a physician and I specialize in the practice of psychiatry,” Turco replied. “The medical model of psychiatry [which] views early development and early training as being very important in later behavior.”

  Dr. Turco said he had dealt with criminal behavior often in his studies, particularly in constructing psychological profiles. When Shinn asked him to explain to the jury what that meant, Turco said, “A psychological profile is a product of the technique that utilizes known psychological theory as well as very specific information to formulate an idea of what a person is like. This goes back a very long time. Freud himself did a profile on Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo by studying the work they did—and their family background and information available.”

  Turco went on to say that Freud had also done a psychological profile on Woodrow Wilson. Profiling was not a new technique at all. During World War II a profile was done of Adolf Hitler. President Kennedy had received a psychological profile of Nikita Khrushchev.

  Constructing a psychological profile of a criminal was slightly different. “You don’t know the person,” Turco said. “If someone has committed a crime, you take information and put it together and try to then make predictions about a person you don’t know. This is what happens with a serial murderer—several people are murdered—we take information from the crime scene. We look at the way the body has been handled, we look at the blood splatter, the kind of weapon used, the specific nature of the assault, put together, and we hypothesize. . . . We also try to take crime scene pictures and autopsy reports and study those. . . . Even when no body had been discovered,” Turco added, “we take whatever information we have and we try to formulate a profile.”

  Each type of murder has particular patterns, whether domestic, serial, stranger-to-stranger, or person-to-person. Turco and his fellow psychiatrists and criminologists had come to a place where they could predict with no little accuracy which types of human beings commit which crimes. Turco told the jurors that he himself considered four or five things when he did a profile: current behavior, development, physical health, and the psychodynamics of the crime. “If possible, I use the crime scene information.” He stressed, however, that profiling was not a technique to convict; it was a technique to predict human behavior, used to aid investigators and all those concerned with the psychopathology of the criminal mind.

  Shinn pointed out that, unlike some witnesses, Dr. Turco was not “living in an ivory tower. Tell the jury a little about yourself.”

  “I have at least ten years’ experience as a homicide detective.” Turco remarked. “I’m a commissioned police officer in the State of Oregon. I’ve investigated many homicides. Detective Rod Englert and I worked on a serial murder case together.”

  In fact, Turco had worked with the FBI, and with police agencies all over America. At Shinn’s request, he had reviewed a stack of documents on the Cheryl Keeton murder and read the long chronology of both Brad’s and Cheryl’s lives. “Almost too much—including a letter that Mr. Cunningham sent his mother,” Turco said.

  “Mr. Cunningham,” Mike Shinn began, getting down to the case at hand, “is a man who, from outward appearances, seems to have the characteristics and background that were totally inconsistent with the kind of brutal murder that killed Cheryl Keeton. . . . I want to understand what went on here between him and Cheryl Keeton.” He asked Turco what he might have found significant in the materials he had studied on this particular murder case.

  “Outward appearances are not very helpful,” Turco said. “At least, in the everyday behavior observed by strangers. This is what we call a ‘false self.’ The individual projects an image of what he is really not. It’s only in the intimate situation that you find what he is really about. That’s the so-called true self that is hidden.” Turco cited Dr. Jeffrey McDonald, the Green Beret doctor convicted of killing his wife and small daughters, as an example of an individual who projected the false self. “His public image was exemplary,” he said.

  Shinn reminded Turco and the jury of Brad Cunningham’s many achievements—his athletic stardom, his intelligence, his business career where literally millions of dollars were under his control, his love relationships with any number of beautiful, successful women. “It’s totally contradictory that he could do something like this,” he remarked.

  “Not at all,” Turco said. “The ‘I-5 Killer’ fits the profile you just gave of Mr. Cunningham. He was a football player, well liked, had lots of girlfriends, very smooth, very social.”

  “That’s [Randy] Woodfield?”

  “Yes. Ted Bundy is another person who would fit that category. . . . We did the profile of Mr. Woodfield in 1980–81. . . . It’s not unusual. That’s a typical pattern. It’s one of the reasons why these people surreptitiously murder. Why not just get a divorce? Why not just leave town? But these people maintain a facade—an image. In order to do so, these people have to destroy someone who can show that they don’t meet that image. They’re destroying the ‘evidence,’ so to speak. That’s one of the reasons they always profess to be innocent. In a sense, they even believe . . . that they had the right to do what they did. . . . It’s a narcissistic presentation . . . malig nant narcissism.”

  Turco explained that people like Woodfield, McDonald, Bundy, and Cunningham had character disorders; they were unable to relate in any meaningful way to anyone. They had no consciences. “It’s the way they live,” he said bluntly. “Narcissists cannot love in a genuine way. It’s an incapacity.” It was indeed, he testified, a kind of blindness, an inability even to see that one is doing something harmful.

  “In the materials about Mr. Cunningham . . . I see projection. Particularly in the letter he wrote to his mother,” Turco said. “In projection, there’s a tendency to take one’s own feelings—usually negative feelings—and to project them onto the environment, and anticipate that they will be coming back at you. He accuses many people in his life of doing things to harm him—a representation of his underlying rage—I think it’s intimately tied up with the parental relationships.”

  Turco went on to note a number of deliberately cruel patterns of behavior that Brad had exhibited, behavior he had seen again and again in depositions and testimony from both his former wives and his family. He commented particularly about the fact that his first wife Loni Ann had been totally dependent on Brad’s child support checks, and yet he had invalidated them after he gave them to her—so that she would be destitute.

  Speaking of this kind of cruelty carried to the point of murder, Turco said, “We call it sadism—egosyntonic sadism—which means there are people in this world who are just basically very comfortable with cruelty. It’s almost a way of life for them to be cruel to others—in small ways and in big ways. Reading through these records, that pattern becomes apparent.”

  “Could you give us an example?” Shinn asked.

  “. . . behavior toward his former wives—to the women in his life. That’s pretty well documented,” Turco responded. “I think there’s really a very serious indication of loss of impulse control. This person is not just cruel on a level of canceling checks or cheating. It has an aggressive component that’s really quite substantial.”

  Shinn held up the letter that Brad had written to his mother on January 28, 1974, when he was twenty-five years old. “What does that reflect about his feelings about his mother?” he asked Turco.

  “Briefly stated,” Turco said, “this letter reflects his perception of his mother as being very cruel, and being a very inhumane person who is out to destroy his life and the life of his father. . . . Actually there are two elements to this letter. We would have to assume that his allegations are false. . . .”

  The letter that Brad had sent to his mother was three pages of single-spaced typ
ing. It was packed with vituperative accusations, beginning by castigating her for her “thinly veiled offensive . . . to cover your own tracks because you had opened and destroyed my first-class mail,” and moving on: “. . . You liken me and my father to conspirators in your divorce. . . . You clearly . . . know that your bizarre and unexplainable actions . . . caused the man to seek out peace of mind away from you. His most serious heart attack [was] caused by one of your relentless ranting and raving sessions. . . . Your threats to kill people . . .

  “I have made a concerted effort to divorce myself from your sphere of influence,” Brad continued in his hate letter to his mother. “You have ignored my right to quiet enjoyment, harassed my person . . . ostracized and impugned my character and reputation . . . attempted to alienate my children’s affection. . . . You have physically attacked the woman with whom I associate, calling her a slut and a whore, and threatening to kill us both. . . . You have pawed through my personal belongings like an animal. . . . I can subpoena witnesses to state . . . they heard you threaten to kill various people. . . . You also said you should blow off my father’s head with a gun. . . . I speculate and believe that you will need the professional help of a psychiatrist. Without this assistance, I fear you may commit an irretrievable act in carrying out one of your earlier . . . threats.” Brad had ended his letter to his mother, “Consider yourself informed as to my feelings on these matters via this letter. Any continuance of further actions on your part to harass, intimidate, or malign me or my family or friends will be met with appropriate and swift legal restraints.

  “Yours, Brad M. Cunningham.”

  Analyzing this letter for the jurors, Turco said, “You basically see an individual projecting . . . his own rage, hostility, paranoia, etcetera, to another person. In this case, onto his mother. The second element . . . what is or isn’t true, whether his mother is a terrible person or an angel—is irrelevant. It is that he views her as such and that is extremely, extremely bad . . . the relationship with a mother is very important, and this [letter] is a projection of his own hostility.

  “Take this a step further. Individuals who believe that their mothers are that bad almost instinctively reenact the same rage toward other women in their lives . . . they lack the ability to not be aggressive. . . . They have the inability to relate in any fashion. . . . This man doesn’t have empathy. . . . He’s using people—only to get something out of them.”

  “Do you notice that—not just in his dealings with his wives, but with his children?” Shinn asked.

  “Yes,” Turco agreed. “I noticed that quite specifically. He’s basically relating to them with respect to wanting complete control.”

  Brad Cunningham’s whole life with other people then had been one of wanting to dominate and to control.

  “Would the words ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ be used here?” Shinn asked. Privately, he often referred to Brad as “either Prince Charming or Darth Vader.”

  Dr. Turco said that this was just another way of saying “true self” and “false self.” He explained that the more a person’s private self matched his public self, the more likely he was to be a “pretty well integrated” person. Brad Cunningham had been two widely disparate “selves” for more than three decades. His wives had been drawn to a man who was a kind, tender lover—and had awakened to find they were tied to a man who detested all that was female.

  Was it possible that Brad had been in the grip of his own psychosis the night of the murder, that he was insane? Turco said he had studied the murder of Cheryl Keeton and discerned the M.O. of a person who had carefully and meticulously planned each detail. Because this was a civil trial, but mostly because Brad had chosen not to present a defense at all, the jurors were able to hear an extremely comprehensive overview of the psychopathology of a narcissist, an antisocial personality—a man certainly capable of murder. No defense attorney jumped to his feet to object.

  Shinn asked Turco how a personality like the one they were discussing would relate to his children.

  “The children to him are objects, so to speak,” Turco replied. “In other words, he owns them. . . . This is an important issue to consider again. . . . The father in this case wants to say, ‘My children love me, I have them, I have control,’ even though they may not [love him]. The other part of it is—he’s going to hurt the other person by taking control of the children, a valuable possession, from this mother.”

  Turco agreed that the fight over custody of the children, coupled with Cheryl’s threat to expose Brad’s tax irregularities, was more than enough to provide a murder motive for a man who fit Brad’s profile. “It’s the utilitarian use of people for one’s own gain . . . malignant narcissism,” Turco said. And this was a character and/or personality disorder that was totally untreatable. Brad Cunningham was not crazy, not insane. In Turco’s words, he was “totally in touch with reality.” He was smart and charismatic and selfish and terribly dangerous—and still a completely free man.

  51

  It was nearing the middle of May and Brad still had not appeared at his trial. His living ex-wives, however, were not all represented. Sara had testified in person, but Brad’s first and third wives were too afraid to do that. Loni Ann’s videotaped deposition had been convincing. Cynthia Marrasco had talked only off the record. And only a month before the trial, Shinn had traveled to where Lauren Stoneham lived to ask her questions about her memories of Brad while a court reporter recorded their words. Although Lauren hadn’t realized it, she had important information. Brad had called her on October 5, 1986, to tell her that Cheryl had been killed two weeks earlier. At that point, only the time the van had been found—8:45 P.M.—had been released to the media. “Brad said that the estimated time of her death was eight-fifteen P.M.,” Lauren told Shinn. “He said that he had been downstairs in the garage at his apartment house at that time.”

  At 11:05 on Thursday morning, May 16, 1991, Mike Shinn began his final arguments. He had to convince twelve jurors that the preponderance of evidence proved that Bradly Morris Cunningham was responsible for causing the death of Cheryl Keeton almost five years earlier. The jurors had listened to more than five dozen witnesses, visited the site of the “accident,” and looked at scores of photographs. Shinn did not, however, have physical evidence to offer them. His case was purely circumstantial.

  Shinn’s opening remarks had painted a picture of the kind of woman Cheryl Keeton was, “one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States.” All the lawyers who had praised Cheryl, he submitted, were effective witnesses. And yet it was the secretaries, the paralegals, the women she had worked with, who had really given the picture of who Cheryl had been as a mother, a friend, and a human being.

  “Once I got involved in the case,” Shinn said, “we conducted an exhaustive investigation, including interviews with hundreds of people, and not one person in this entire world was found with a bad word to say about her—except perhaps Lauren Swanson . . . who thought Cheryl had stolen her husband, and later we found that wasn’t what had happened at all. There was nobody who had any rational reason to murder this woman.”

  Shinn then moved through the facts of the case, stressing that not only had Cheryl’s killer struck her two dozen times, he had been quite willing to murder other people who were driving on the Sunset Highway the evening of September 21, 1986, and who would have died in a multiple pileup of flaming cars.

  Shinn admitted that one of the facets of his investigation was that he kept getting back such “bizarre” information that he himself doubted it—at first. “Children’s coffins—letters that Mr. Cunningham wrote to his mother, to Cheryl, to other people . . . I was afraid to present them to the jury. If people see this stuff, they’re going to think it’s just too impossible to believe. There was no mystery about who had killed Cheryl. The questions, Shinn submitted, were “why?” and “how?”

  He then began a litany of Brad Cunningham’s sins, and he used as a framework the letter that Brad had written to his
own mother—that diatribe filled with accusations and show-off vocabulary. It was an answer to a letter his mother had never written. Brad had done the same thing to Cheryl—written her answers to questions she had never asked. It was a familiar dodge for him; if answers to letters existed, then those letters must also exist. But all the searching in the world could not turn up the ugly letters Brad loved to cite. They had never been written. His letter to his mother was particularly chilling in that it was a prime example of projection. All the things that Brad accused his mother of were not her flaws, they were his own.

  Shinn quoted the experts who had testified about the nature of Brad’s behavior. He quoted those who had suffered because of it. “The horror is unimaginable,” he commented after giving many examples, “—except that it’s come from so many sources.” But Cheryl had been prepared to stand up to Brad and he could not allow her to live to bring her witnesses into the courtroom. He could not allow her to talk to the IRS. He could not allow her to have sole custody of her sons.

  “You know what a Beefeater is?” Shinn asked the jurors. “I never did until I went to the Tower of London on a rugby tour. I found out a week before this trial from Dr. Sardo that Brad asked him to keep a secret. ‘What is the secret?’ I asked Dr. Sardo, and he said, ‘Brad believed that Cheryl and her mother were going to poison him.’ When I asked Sara if Brad was really serious about the poison plot, she answered, ‘Yes, he was so serious that he had his own sons sample his food first to make sure Cheryl wasn’t poisoning him.’

  “He was making them Beefeaters,” Shinn said. “Kings had Beefeaters who would taste their food, and they would watch them for an hour to see if they died of poisoning before they would eat the food. That’s how much Mr. Cunningham thought of his sons. . . .”

  Mike Shinn had spoken for fifty-two minutes when Judge Haggerty broke for the day and those in the courtroom walked, blinking, into the warm May afternoon, their minds filled with the horror of malignant narcissism at work.