Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (88 page)

Even his wives.

Even his daughter.

Even his sisters.

Even his mother.

The civil trial went on.
 
There were no objections, there was no one

there to object.
 
A long line of Cheryl's friends and former law

partners walked to the witness stand and spoke briefly of their

memories of her.

In that courtroom Cheryl came to life, and the jurors began to sense

the enormity of her loss.

Stu Hennessey, Cheryl's friend from her early days at Garvey, Schubert

and Barer, attempted to sum up what 2 superb lawyer she had been.

"Cheryl was clearly the best.
 
As the pressure grew, she just got

better and better."

He also recalled Brad's possessions.
 
"Brad really liked

MercedesBenzes," he said.
 
"He almost always had two or three at a

time."

Hennessey described the Unimag as a "huge moon buggy" with tires six to

seven feet high, a vehicle used by the Israeli Army to move troops.

"Brad told me he had the only Unimag in the United States .
 
. . it had

absolutely no purpose as a car."

"What about a yacht?"
 
Shinn asked.

Hennessey remembered that Brad had acquired a yacht early in his

marriage to Cheryl in trade for some project.
 
As he recalled, Brad was

renting it out for charters.

"Did he have a police car?"
 
Shinn asked.

"Yes," Hennessey said.
 
"That was a source of great frustration to

Cheryl.
 
Brad got in his mind that he wanted a police carþlike the

State Patrol's in Washingtonþthe big white highway cruisers?
 
They

don't sell those to regular people, but Brad wanted one.
 
He bugged

some dealer until finallyþit took monthsþthey ordered him one.
 
Poor

Cheryl would have to drive this thing .
 
. . it's like you don't have

any springs .
 
.

. it's really a horrible carþthere's nothing inside it.
 
You know, it

was kind of scary.
 
It was white.
 
Except that it didn't have a light

on the top, it was just like a police car."

"You know what he used it for?"

"I haven't a clue."

"How would you describe Mr.
 
Cunningham physically?"

"He wasn't a huge guy but he was powerfully built," Hennessey said.

"He told me he had to have all his shirts custom made because his neck

was so big."

Cheryl's familyþBetty and Mary Troseth, Susan Keegan, and Bob

McNannayþhad told their last memories of Cheryl to the initial

investigators.
 
They testified now in the civil trial, old griefs

coming back sharply.
 
And they were prepared to testify again and again

and again, if need be.
 
There were no surprises in their testimony,

nothing the Oregon State Police detectives and the Washington County

D.A."s office hadn't heard back in 1986.

Jim Karr, Cheryl's half brother, identified Exhibit 6þthe "protective

witness list" that Cheryl had prepared, the list meant to fight Brad

but which had probably been Cheryl's death warrant.
 
Mike Shinn read it

aloud while Karr nodded.
 
It included Brad's mother and elder sister

two of his former wives, baby-sitters, and Cheryl's family, friends,

and colleaguesþall people who would have been able to demonstrate

Brad's pattern of abusive behavior.

Sara Gordon's sister Margie Johnson was the "Megabucks" spokesperson for

the Oregon Lottery and her face was well known to Oregon television

viewers.
 
She was as vivacious on the witness stand as she was on the

small screen, a pretty, bubbly woman.
 
She said that when U.S Bank

bought out Brad's contract shortly after Cheryl's murder, they asked

for the return of all the pool cars he had borrowed.
 
One was in

Seattle, and she said that she had driven Brad to Sea-Tac Airport so he

could drive it back.
 
She had found Brad a nice person, but she barely

knew him.

Her sister Sara had only been dating him for a few months.
 
"He was

very upset," she testified.
 
"Even though he hadn't done it, ithe

murder] would put a cloud over the bank."

Margie had also heard yet another version of Brad's movements on : !

.

, \ S. bi .

, Z I dE L September 21, 1986.
 
"He said that they waited in the

lobby.... I was under the assumption that Cheryl was supposed to pick

up the kids about seven o'clock and he had the kids in the lobbyþ" "Did

you know she had been unwilling for months to come there to pick up

those kids?"
 
Shinn cut in.

"No.... [He said] when she didn't show up, they went back upstairs.

..

.Jess and Phillip were watching a movie, and he was with Michael, and

they went to check the mail."

According to the testimony of various witnesses, Brad had given many

different versions of what he had done between 7:30 and 8:50 on the

night Cheryl was murdered.
 
He told Jim Ayers he had left his apartment

just onceþto put shoes and work clothes in Sara's Cressida.
 
He first

told Sara that he and the boys had been in the lobby waiting for Cheryl

to come for them.
 
A day after the murder, he told her he had been

doing errandsþpicking up mail, leaving his boots in her car.
 
Brad told

Karen Aaborg that he had refused to let Cheryl have the boys at all

that night because she was drunk and with a man, and that he had gone

to the car with Phillip to get the boys' blankets and backpacks.
 
Lily

Saarnen saw Brad and Michael at 7:30, but Brad called her the next

morning and tried to get her to say she had seen him at 8:00.
 
Margie

Johnson, Sara's sister, had heard the "waiting in the lobby" story and

that Brad and Michael were doing errands around the Madison Tower.

Jess Cunningham remembered that his father said he had been "jogging"

around Sara's hospital, and that he had been gone for a long time.

Rachel Houghton saw Brad and a little boy in the garage around nine,

and Brad had been wearing shorts and his hair was wet.

Where was Brad during that hour and twenty minutes?
 
Was he in his

apartment, waiting in the lobby, watching for Cheryl from the rail

around the walkway, doing errands all around the building, jogging,

settling the boys down for the night?
 
Or was he following a carefully

thought-out plan to lure Cheryl to the deserted Mobile station and her

brutal death?
 
Were his car problems a pretense?
 
Had he selected the

weapon he would use?
 
Had he provided himself with a change of

clothing?

If this was a crime of "revenge," as Lieutenant Englert had testified,

was it also a crime of deliberate premeditation?
 
It was certainly

beginning to look that way.

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

psychologlcal 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 didþand 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 murdererþseveral people are murderedþwe 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