Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (104 page)

Dr. Gunson.
 
He switched his emotions on and off as if he were pulling

on the string of a bare lightbulb.

Brad asked Dr. Gunson if she had observed petechiae (small blood

hemorrhages associated with strangulation) in Cheryl's eyes.
 
Was she

wearing glasses?
 
Contacts?

"I didn't see any," she replied.

Brad was pleased, as if this proved her incompetence.
 
He commented

that Cheryl was very nearsighted and should have been wearing either

her glasses or contacts.

Scott Upham was aware of Brad's strategy.
 
"Contact lenses were of no

significance to you in this type of situation?"
 
he asked Dr. Gunson

on re-cross.
 
"Is that correct?

"That is correct," she answered.
 
Given the force of the blows the

victim sustained, the transparent slivers of contacts could have been

knocked out, hidden in the massive amounts of blood, or lost hack in

the swollen eyes.

"How do you determine time of death?"
 
Upham wanted to reinforce Dr.

Gunson's earlier testimony about when Cheryl died.

In reply, she explained that even the best guess of a medical examiner

would be "plus or minus four or five hours."
 
The very best way to

establish time of death, she told the jurors, is by determining when

the victim was last seenþor, in Cheryl's case, heard.
 
She had

telephoned her mother just before 8

P.M and Randy Blighton came upon her body less than a half hour

later.

"Witnesses and the scene investigation tell far more than anything we

can do at autopsy," Dr.
 
Gunson said.

Julia Hinkley testified that afternoon.
 
She and Jim Avers had done a

re-enactment of Cheryl's actual murder, and Brad tried to forestall

discussion of it.
 
Judge Alexander denied his motion, and again anger

suffused Brad's face with scarlet.

Julia Hinkley was a smiling, cheerful woman.
 
She also knew her

stuff.

This jury had not yet heard of the evidence she had collected in 1986

and she went through it all for them.
 
Then she offered photos to show

the re-enactment that she and Ayers had done in 1992 to check out her

findings and Dr. Gunson's.
 
With Hinkley as "Cheryl" and Avers as "the

killer," the re-enactment was only theory, but it was chilling theory.

And it was chillingly exact.

All of the forensic evidence indicated that Cheryl had been assaulted

while she was sitting in the driver's seat of her Toyota van and had

been bludgeoned with a multisurfaced blunt instrument.
 
Hinkley

demonstrated the positions of the crime, explaining that she had

suffered an injury herself in the re-enactment, an injury much like one

of Cheryl's.

"Now, she attempts to escape toward the passenger door," Hinkley said

quietly.
 
"She gets the door partially open."
 
At this point in the

re-enactment, Ayers had yanked violently back on the waistband of

Hinkley's jeans.
 
In the interest of forensic science, Hinkley had

suffered exactly the same linear abrasion that Dr. Gunson had found on

Cheryl's waist, the deep red mark of the jean material cutting into

soft flesh.

All independently, Hinkley and Ayers had come up with almost ex I actly

the same sequence of a violent death struggle that Lieutenant Rod

Englert had presented at Brad's civil trial.
 
Blood will tellþin more

ways than the poets ever knew.

Upham asked Hinkley why the graphic equalizer knobs of the Toyota's

radio were broken off.

"It probably was done by her kicking when she was on the console.

There were elongated scrapes on the bottom of her shoes that match .

.

."

Near the conclusion of her testimony, Upham asked Hinkley about the

hairs she had retrieved from the crime scene.
 
The hairs had been

sealed in glass slides in 1986, and in the custody of Oregon State

Police investigators since.
 
"The chain of custody is impeccable,"

Hinkley commented.
 
DNA matching was not possible at that time, but she

found later that some of the hairs had DNA possibilities, and she gave

them to DNA specialist Cecilia Von Beroldingen in 1993 for analysis.

"I was looking for a rootþusing a stereo zoom scopeþfor a follicular

tag.... I found four for DNA," Hinkley said.
 
Von Beroldingen was

scheduled to testify for the State later in the trialþif Judge

Alexander ruled in favor of the admissibility of DNA evidence.

Every prosecution witness who had faced Brad had managed to present a

bland face to him, keeping private feelings hidden.
 
During his

testimony, Jim Ayers had accorded him a flat civility that was,

somehow, more telling than if he had allowed his disdain to show.
 
Now,

Julia Hinkley's eyes bore directly into Brad's as he questioned her

interminably on how she retrieved and preserved evidence.
 
Whatever she

was feeling, she did not betray it.

Brad wanted to know what "contaminants" might be on the hairs

preserved.
 
"What is a contaminant?"
 
he asked Hinkley.

"[Something] not expected to be thereþforeign," she replied.

"Trace evidence is invisible to the naked eye?"
 
Brad asked.

"It depends."

Brad was obsessed with what he considered the missing fingernail

scrapings.
 
How did Julia Hinkley take scrapings?

"With a fresh scalpel."

"With my wife, you did that?"

"That's the only way to do it."

"There was nothing there?"

"Nothing you could see."

Brad obviously knew something about trace evidenceþblood, fiber,

hairsþand yet it was apparent his knowledge was superficial.
 
He

latched onto anything that he deemed "missing," including Cheryl's

garage door opener.

"I left it for the police," Hinkley said.

There was no argument from the prosecution.
 
That device was missing.

What significance it might have had was obscureþbut Brad would ask for

it again and again.

Cheryl's Toyota van was also gone, sold a long time ago after it had

been thoroughly processed and photographed.
 
Brad considered its

absence an important point in his favor.
 
But it was of no consequence,

nor was the other "missing" evidence.

"Detective Finch gave you human teeth on October first, 19867" Brad

asked Hinkley.

"No, I went to the van and got them.
 
There were some in the back and

some in the front."

Brad asked about the missing "gold ring."

"I don't know where that is," Hinkley said, explaining that she had

kept only those items that were "forensically important" to her.

The ring and the teeth were not, nor were the buttons kicked off the

radio.

"You are married to Sergeant Hinkley?"
 
Brad asked.

"Yes."

"He was first on the scene," Brad said, suggesting that the Hinkleys

had collaborated on their recitation of events.

"We have not discussed the case," Hinkley said firmly, and most

believably.

The re-enactment of the crime still rankled Brad.
 
"This re-creation is

your scenario?"
 
he asked.

"That is correct."

"And there could be many other scenarios," Brad stated confidently "Is

that correct?"

Hinkley shrugged.
 
"There could be.
 
That is correct."

As in the civil trial three years earlier, only one of Brad's former

wives agreed to testify.
 
Upham and Carr made numerous out-of-state

trips to speak with Loni Ann, Lauren, and Cynthia.
 
The women were all

cooperativeþbut not to the point that they felt they could face Brad in

court.

Sara Gordon would.
 
This trial was drawing more media attention than

the last, and what she had to tell was personally embarrassing.
 
It

didn't matter.
 
She had Brad's sons to think about, and that did

matter.

The boys were in limbo, she could not guarantee them anything about

their future.
 
If Brad was acquitted, she knew he would come for them

and she would have to give them back to him.
 
If he was convicted, she

had pledged to raise them to adulthood.

As Sara took the stand for the prosecution on November 22, she was the

third witness of the day.
 
Cheryl's secretary, Florence Murrell, and

Sergeant James Hinkley had preceded her.
 
Sara was very pale and

terribly thin.
 
She wore a black suit and a white blouse, making her

look even smaller than she already was.
 
She was so pretty that the

jurors must have wondered why Brad had described his marriage to her as

one of financial convenience only.
 
Sara was apprehensiveþnot of direct

testimony but of cross-examination.
 
She spent hours on the stand

answering Upham's questions about her relationship with Brad, from

their first meeting to their marriage and her discovery of his

infidelity.

Four years.

With the jury out of the room, Upham asked Sara about Brad's veiled

threat as their relationship finally disintegrated.
 
"Brad told me that

the person who killed Cheryl might kill me," Sara said.
 
"He said,

Never be alone.
 
Make sure you have someone with you...."

" Brad, of course, objected on the grounds of "marital privilege."