Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (65 page)

taking him on.

Try Shinn."
 
He said that Mike Shinn, while he certainly enjoyed the

company of women, had no wifeþand he was notorious for loving a good

scrap.

That's what the attorneys from Garvey, Schubert needed.
 
They knew it

would be far safer for a prosecutor to go up against Brad in a criminal

case.
 
If he were convicted criminally, he would go to prison and would

not be a threat to anyone for years.
 
But if a civil attorney should

prevail, Brad would still be free.
 
It would be a moral victory, and it

might well be the springboard for a criminal charge.
 
But even with a

win, Brad would be as freeþfor a period of monthsþas he was at the

moment.
 
And if, as the lawyers who were about to set a net for him

believed, he was a devious and dangerousþand vengefulþman, the civil

attorney who brought him down would have to watch his back.
 
Nobody but

an attorney with a rebel streak, a maverick, would touch this dicey

case.

Mike Shinn was indeed a maverick, descended from a long line of

mavericks.
 
His great-grandfather was William Jasper Kerr, onetime

president of Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and

Oregon State University.
 
Shinn's mother Miriam's ancestors had come

from Pennsylvania by wagon train, members of a religious commune with a

charismaticþbut eccentricþleader.
 
They made it to Oregon and founded

the community of Aurora.
 
His great-uncle William Kerr was the U.S.

prosecutor for the Japanese war crimes trials, the Asian equivalent of

the Nuremberg trials.
 
And Shinn's father, Bill, was an underwater

demolition expert in World War II, a fearless swimmer whose assignment

would compare to Navy Seals today.
 
Tragically, Bill Shinn died of

cancer at forty-two when his only son was in high school.

Mike Shinn was a natural athlete and particularly gifted at football.

He was one of the fastest and most nimble quarterbacks the Willamette

University Bearcats ever had.
 
He wasn't very big, but he was smart and

he was tough.
 
Like his father before him, he excelled at risk

taking.

In 1968 the Bearcats were ranked number three in their division in the

nation.
 
They were led by Mike Shinn who threw for 1,508 yards and

eighteen touchdowns.
 
The whole 1968 team was inducted into the

Willamette University Athletics Hall of Fame in 1993.

In his forties Shinn was still a risk taker and a dogged opponent.

In his forties, he played world-class rugby and checked the

weatherman's wind forecast before he glanced at his schedule for each

day.
 
If the wind was going to blow, Shinn was going to be out on the

Columbia River windsurfing.
 
He was a "board-head" and, like all

windsurfers, hopelessly addicted to gliding across the water as fast as

he could, wrestling with his sail to stay upright.

Actually, Shinn's major in college was English.
 
"What I really wanted

to do was go to film school and make movies, or go into publishing," he

said.
 
"I never thought I was smart enough to go into law because I

could never figure out who did it in the Perry Mason shows."
 
Shinn

turned out to be a lot smarter than he thought he was, of course.
 
"I

ended up in law school at Willamette," he said.
 
After Willamette,

Shinn clerked for a federal judge and then did some criminal work.

"The last criminal case I defended, I got a guy acquitted of five bank

robberies," he recalled, "and I figured it was a good time to quit

criminal lawþ while I was ahead."

It was late summer of 1989 when Mike Shinn listened as Greg Dallaire

and Eric Lindenauer took him through the tragic details of Cheryl

Keeton's death.
 
John Burke was on the phone, a participant in this

hard sell.
 
Ideally, they were hoping to convince Shinn to undertake

the civil action against Brad on a contingency basis.

Shinn was intrigued by the case, he remembered reading about Cheryl

Keeton's death on the Sunset Highway, though he hadn't heard anything

more for three years.
 
Still, as he listened to the twists and turns

the investigation had taken since 1986, he realized that this would be

a colossally complicated case to prosecute civilly, criminally, or any

way.

"There were three reservations I had about taking the case," he said

later.
 
"One of them was the very concept of filing a civil suit

against a man for murder when he'd never been indicted .
 
. . you don't

have the constitutional protection that you do in a criminal case....

My second reservation was that I might get killed.
 
I knew two other

lawyers who had looked at the case and said, I don't want to expose

myself to this kind of risk."

" When Shinn was told that Brad was now married to Sara Gordon, that

further complicated his decision.
 
"The third concern was Sara," he

said.

"I remembered her as a real perky, bright-eyed, intelligent, energetic,

charismatic, neat lady.
 
But it wasn't just Sara.
 
It was the idea of

the kind of grief that would be brought to bear on the whole family.
 
I

didn't know the kids, but it was inevitable.
 
We never asked for it,

but this was the kind of story that was going to lead to big-headline

coverage."

Shinn realized how much time it would take, how many contacts would

have to be made, how many hours would be billed by private

investigatorsþand suggested that he be paid by the hour.
 
He couldn't

afford to take the case on a contingency basis.
 
Brad had allegedly

gone through millions of dollars and no one knew if he had anything

left.

Even if Shinn won a civil suit against him, his cupboard might very

well be bare.

"It was going to be such an undertaking for me," Shinn said.
 
"It would

mean doing little else.
 
I told Dallaire and Lindenauer that I was

willing to do itþbut I'd go bankrupt if I did it on a contingency

basis."
 
He estimated that the civil case would cost about fifty

thousand dollars.

But he couldn't be sure.
 
"If Cunningham has any money left," he told

Dallaire and Lindenauer, "he'll probably hire someone like F. Lee

Bailey, and, unlike other cases, there's no bottom to this until the

guy gets convicted of murder."

Dallaire never blinked at the fifty-thousand-dollar figureþor at the

possibility that it might be more.
 
He took the information back to the

executive committee and they signed off.

"We entered into an agreement with Mike Shinn in 1989, but we had to be

cautious," Dallaire remembered.
 
"We were afraid that Brad would find

out what we were doing by somehow seeing certain bills.
 
We were the

client hiring Shinn, but we didn't want Brad to know that.
 
On paper,

then, the client was John Burke for Cheryl's estateþbut Garvey,

Schubert was paying Mike Shinn.
 
If Brad hired a lawyer to face off

John Burke, we were concerned that he would find out the firm was

paying and we'd have to grant discovery."

And too, if Brad should find out how many people from his past Shinn's

private investigators were prepared to interview, he might try to

intimidate them so that they wouldn't talk.
 
He was, demonstrably, a

past master at intimidation.

Going into what was inherently a criminal case for the first time in

many years, Shinn was a little apprehensive, but he moved ahead.
 
He

filed the civil suit, and it did indeed make headlines in the

Oregonian.

"One of the first things I remember is getting a letter from Sara,"

Shinn recalled.
 
"It said, in essence, Gee, I haven't seen you in ten

years.
 
I thought you were a nice guy.
 
And now you've done this

horrible thing to my familyþ' " She also wrote that all the employees

of the Broadway Bakery that she and Brad owned had walked off the job,

and that her sons' friends wouldn't play with them or return their

phone calls.

Shinn felt rotten.
 
But he had anticipated that Sara would be angry,

and he would just have to live with it.

"The next letter I got," he said with a grimace, "was from Brad's first

lawyer.
 
He said there wasn't a scrap of evidence against Brad.
 
Brad

had told him that probably John Burke killed Cheryl.... Then Brad's

lawyer threatens me with disbarment and a lawsuit.
 
I'd met Greg and

Eric, but I didn't know John Burke beyond his voice on the phone.
 
I

wasn't sure who the bad guy was.
 
Sometimes I even wondered if it was

Burkeþif somehow I was being set up...."

Not sure what was going to developþbut now totally committed to the

caseþShinn went ahead with traditional discovery work and the filing of

motions.
 
Bradawas scheduled to file his first deposition in early

1990.
 
"The night before, I get a phone call," Shinn said.
 
It was from

one of Portland's top attorneys, Forrest Rieke.
 
He had Brad Cunningham

in his office, along with Wes Urqhart, a bigger-than-life Texas lawyer

from Vinson and Elkins in Houston.
 
It was Brad's opinion that Shinn's

suit had been filed to keep Brad from prevailing in his Houston

lawsuits.

"It became like guerrilla warfare," Shinn remembered.

The first shots from both sides had been fired in the case, but Shinn

had yet to learn how tenacious Brad could be, and how calculating.

If he had known that he was stepping into a runaway stagecoach whose

horses were about to stampede, would he have said "no" to Greg Dallaire

and Eric Lindenauer?

Probably not.
 
Mike Shinn always loved a good fight.

There is a rule of thumb in homicide investigations.
 
The chance of