Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (10 page)

at once, begging her to come home and be with him.
 
And she had moved

heaven and earth to go to him.
 
Of course, he had loved his father

deeply, and he detested his ex-wife, but even so.

Sara and Brad talked for five or six minutes, as she tried to

assimilate the fact that Cheryl was dead.
 
Brad said he didn't know how

Cheryl had died, the police hadn't been specific but they had said it

wasn't in a traffic accident.
 
Finally, he hung up, and Sara's hand

trailed down the phone.

She sat, leaden, wondering what on earth could have happened.
 
And then

Sara simply had to call Brad back.
 
In some way.s she and Brad had had

such a strange weekend, they had even had an uncharacteristic squabble

on the phone the night before.
 
Earlier, Brad had said something about

Cheryl that was almost unbelievable.
 
"Brad had told me Friday

nightþwhen we picked up the boysþthat Cheryl and her mother were

planning to poison him," Sara remembered.
 
"He had told me that

beforeþthat he had listened in on their phone conversation while they

plotted against him .
 
.."

Sara had never known Brad to be frightened of anything beforeþ except

for the safety of his children.
 
Now she had to find out more.
 
She

called Brad back.
 
There was something she had to ask him.
 
She hoped

he wouldn't be hurt or angry, but she was aware that the rage between

Brad and Cheryl had escalated tremendously over the past few weeks.

She had seen his face when he talked to her on the phone.

"Brad," Sara said quietly, "do you swear that you had nothing to do

with Cheryl's death?"

His voice was firm and clear.
 
"I had nothing to do with it."

She believed him.
 
She didn't sense a trace of deception in his

voice.

Reassured, she hung up the phone.

Sara was scheduled to administer anesthesia for two eye surgeries.

There was nothing she could do to help Brad at the moment, and so she

walked to the operating room.

Dr. Karen Gunson, a forensic pathologist and deputy state medical

examiner, was a soft-spoken woman with blond hair, high cheekbones, and

lovely large eyes usually hidden behind glasses.
 
On Monday afternoon,

September 22, she performed a postmortem examination of the body of a

young woman who had been found dead the evening before.
 
Dr. Gunson

had been with the State of Oregon's M.E."s office for about eight

months, to date, in her training and career, she had performed

approximately three hundred autopsies.
 
But this one among the hundreds

would prove to be memorable for many reasons, one dead woman whose

foreshortened life and sudden death she would never forget.
 
Seldom had

Dr. Gunson seen so many injuries inflicted upon one person.
 
In the

end, she would estimate that the victim had been struck approximately

two dozen timesþtwenty-one to twenty-four separate and distinct

blowsþbut some of the injuries' edges merged into others, so she could

make only an educated guess.

How long does it take to strike a struggling adult human being

twenty-four times?

The yellow band on the victim's right wrist gave a tentative

identification and an estimated ageþthirty-seven.
 
She was still

dressed in the blood-soaked clothing she had worn when she was found: a

pullover, a T-shirt, blue jeans (zipped), a white bra, beige bikini

panties, black socks and loafers.
 
She wore a gold chain with a pendant

containing clear stones around her neck, and a watch on her left

wrist.

There was a blue cord with a key attached to it wrapped around her

other wrist.

Undressed, the dead woman was almost anorexically thin, so thin that

her ribs and hip bones glowed through her skin.
 
She was five feet five

and one-half inches in height, but she weighed a mere hundred pounds.

Only her face was swollen and puffy.
 
There, Dr. Gunson saw a mass of

injuriesþlacerations, contusions, and abrasions.
 
She counted five

different shapes of lacerations on the top of the head, some were

linear, some were IJ-shaped, and some were too ragged to label

accurately.
 
The facial bones themselves had been fractured, but the

skull had not.

Dr. Gunson dictated into a tape recorder as she listed the fractures

to the left mastoidal areaþsix in all, "lour horizontal and roughly

linear, one oblique, one vertical."
 
There were bruises on the left

upper neck.
 
The cartilage on the top of the left ear was fractured.

"There are a series of lacerations and contusions involving all planes

of the faceþlinear, Y-shaped, triangular, all full thickness

lacerations .
 
. .

including contours of the upper and lower eyelids .
 
. . Iacerations of

both cheeks, multiple small and large lacerations around the mouth .

.

."

The dead woman had four broken teeth, her upper jaw was broken, her

right lower jaw was broken, and the force of that blow had even

displaced her teeth.

Dr. Gunson continued the postmortem procedure with an internal

examination of the skull.
 
She cut the skin at the back of the dead

woman's neck with a scalpel and peeled away the entire scalp like a

tight latex mask, up over the top of the skull, and inside out, down

over the face.
 
She then sawed away the tOp of the skull so that the

brain itself was exposccl.
 
The smell of burned bone, no longer

noticeable to experienced pathologists!
 
filled the room.

Dr. Gunson found extensive hemorrhaging all over the surface of the

brain, but, again, no fracture of the skull itself Like a thousand

other variable characteristics that differentiate one human body from

another, thickness of the skull is one.
 
This victim had a rather thick

bony calvarium, it had done her no good.
 
Ironically, her strong skull

had been an unyielding force that helped to destroy her brain.

Dr. Gunson noted the thick subdural hematoma (large blood clot) over

the right side of the brain.
 
The dead woman's brain had been literally

displaced and squeezed because of traumatic swelling and tremendous

bleeding.
 
"The subject .
 
. . has suffered contra coup injuries.
 
The

head was supported on the right and struck on the left," Dr. Gunson

recorded.

A contra coup injuta to the brain occurs when the head is hit on one

side and the brain is then macerated as it is slammed forcibly against

the opposite side, it is an injury seen often, tragically, in battered

infants and children, inflictcd when they are shaken violently.
 
At the

time this victim was struck repeatedly, the right side of her head had

probably been trapped against some unyielding object.
 
When her head

did not move, her brain had bounced again and again into that side of

her skull.

It was obvious that this shockingly slender victim had not gone down

easily.
 
Her hands and left arm and shoulder bore defense wounds, even

her lower legs and feet were bruisedþinjuries that had occurred,

perhaps, as she fought her attacker or struggled to get away.
 
There

was a peculiar linear abrasion near her waist, a scarlet line where the

waist band of her jeans had been.

Dr. Gunson knew that detectives would ask how long someone could have

lived with the terrible brain injuries this dead woman had suffered.

She estimated only minutes.
 
The growing blood clot pushing her brain

to one side, compressing it until it could no longer sustain her

breathing and her heartbeat, had built up rapidly.
 
She would not have

been paralyzed, but she could not have fought back for long.
 
And while

she was still alive, the terrible hemorrhage into her brain

continued.

Paradoxically, the bleeding stopped when she died.
 
The huge hematoma

grew no larger, once it no longer mattered.

Although the dead woman had been fully dressed when she was found, that

didn't preclude the possibility that she might have been sexually

assaulted.
 
Dr. Gunson found no vaginal or rectal contusions, but she

routinely took swabs from the vaginal vault and the rectum and slipped

them into labeled test tubes so that an acid phosphatase test for the

presence of semen could be done.
 
If semen was present, the chemical

would turn the .swabs a bright purplish red.

Criminalist Julia Hinkley of the Oregon State Police Crime Lab stood by

during the autopsy and took possession of the evidence Dr. Gunson

collected.
 
Hinkley also attempted to retrieve fingernail scrapings

beneath the dead woman's nails.
 
There was nothing there but her own

blood.

Sometimes the contents of the stomach can provide a clue to time of

death, to place of death, to a myriad of other questions.
 
Not this

time.

The victim had only about 100 cc of brown liquid in her stomach, most

likely coffee.
 
There was no food.
 
She was so thin that this didn't

surprise Dr.
 
Gunson.
 
And there was no urine in her bladder.

In further tests that had grown routine at a time when drug use was

rampant, Dr. Gunson took blood samples and secured them in

graystoppered tubes.
 
If the dead woman had ingested alcohol, cocaine,

barbiturates, amphetamines, psychotropics, or any of an array of drugs,

a scanning electron microscope with a laser probe could isolate that.

The metabolites of most of the drugs would last for yearsþeven if the

test tube was not refrigerated.

Autopsy means, quite literally, "to see for oneself," and there is a

sad kind of justice in the fact that the body of a murder victim