Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (4 page)

The checks bore the same name as the driver's license: Cheryl Keeton.

However, the address imprinted on the checks was 2400

S.W. 81st, located on the West Slopeþonly three-tenths of a mile from

where they now stood.

The woman lying on the ground was probably Cheryl Keeton, whose date of

birth was listed on her driver's license as October 27, 1949.
 
That

would make her less than a month away from her thirty-seventh birth

day.
 
The height and weight on the license seemed to fit the slender

victim.
 
Hair color didn't matter much anymore on a driver's license,

women changed their hair shade so often.
 
But it was listed as brown

and the victim's hair appeared to be brown, although it was now matted

with dried blood.

"I don't think she lived in Gresham," Finch told Ayers.
 
"I think

that's an old address.
 
You hang in here, and I'll take a run up to the

address on Eighty-first."
 
* Oregon State Police Sergeant Greg Baxter

radioed the Portland Police Department dispatcher, who relayed a

message to Al Carson, calling him back from Gresham.
 
The next of kin

of the victim were no longer there.

Ayers was relieved to let Jerry Finch notify whoever might be waiting at

the West Slope address for Cheryl Keeton to come home.
 
Of all the

responsibilities of a policeman's profession, that was always the

hardest.
 
Sometimes the survivors scream, and sometimes they stareX

unbelieving, at the officers who bring them tragic news.

Ayers wanted to be sure that the tow truck driver from Jim Collins

Towing understood that the Toyota van was a vital piece of evidence and

should be hooked up to the tow rig with extreme care.
 
Collins's own

son, Harley, had arrived to remove the van from the edge of the

Sunset.

"I told him not to touch it any more than he had toþand not to go

inside at all," Ayers said later.
 
"Not to strap the steering wheel the

way they usually do .
 
.."

Harley Collins said he would be careful and promised to lock the van

behind the cyclone fence of Jim Collins's personal yard so that no one

could come near it.
 
Ayers felt better hearing that.
 
Although he

didn't know the tow driver, he knew that the tow company's owner was

reliable.

All the steps that were post-tragedy protocol had been followed.

The investigators at the scene radioed a request for Eugene Jacobus,

the Chief Deputy Medical Examiner for Washington County.
 
The body was

released to Jacobus at 11:35

P.M. The hands were "bagged," and Jacobus was careful to see that the

body itself was placed in a fresh plastic "envelope" inside the heavier

body pouch so that any trace evidence would be preserved.
 
He also took

possession of the victim's purse and locked it in a drawer in his

office on Knox Street.

It was after midnight before the scene alongside the Sunset Highway was

cleared, and the many men and women working there with measuring tapes

and sketch pads were all gone.
 
This death was not a normal death.

Nor was it an accident.
 
It was almost certainly a homicide, one that

investigators felt confident would be solved in forty-eight hoursþ just

as Washington County's other homicide that weekend was.
 
A male murder

victim had been found stabbed multiple times in western Washington

County on Friday, September 19.
 
By six o'clock on Sunday night, police

had arrested and charged the suspected killer.

But the investigators on this new homicide were wrong when they

expected a quick solution.
 
It was as if they were grasping the end of

a thread, expecting to pull it loose.
 
They could not know that the

thread was only one infinitesimal piece of a fabric so snarled and

tangled that it might well have been woven by a madman.

And, in a certain sense, it had been.

The good weather on the weekend of September 19-21, 1986, made little

difference to Dr. Sara Gordon.* She was working on trauma call at

Providence Hospital in Portland and there was no day or night, no sense

of the seasons, in the operating rooms.
 
The only sounds were muted

voices or the music some surgeons preferred, the only lights were

focused on the operating field.

Trauma duty is by its very nature unpredictable.
 
Sara Gordon often

worked a full day's shift and all through the night too.
 
She was an

anesthesiologist, called in for emergency treatment of accident

victims, or for the innumerable surgeries that could not wait, some

life-threatening and some more routine.

A beautiful, delicate woman, Sara looked more like a kindergarten

teacher than a physician.
 
She had huge blue eyes and dimples, and her

figure was slender and petite.
 
In truth, she was a workhorse, a woman

whose hand was steady no matter if blood might spray chaotically from a

nicked artery in the patient she hovered over, no matter if a heart

stopped beating or lungs stopped expanding.
 
She had struggled too many

years to win her medical degree to be anything less than professional,

and she often worked sixty hours a week, napping in the on-call suite

between operations.

Sara Gordon had grown up in McMinnville, Oregon, one of ten children.

She and her sister Maren* were identical twins, but mirror image tThe

names of some individuals in the book have been changed.
 
Such names

are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the

narrative.

twins.
 
"I'm right-handed," Sara would explain.
 
"My twin is

left-handed.

We're identicalþbut opposite.
 
Math and science were always easy for

me, and Maren was the creative one.
 
When I graduated from high school

with a 4.0 grade point average and she got a 3.8, she felt dumb, but it

was only because I had a slight edge in math."

Looking at Sara and Maren, their teachers could not tell them apart,

and they played the usual twin pranks, attending class for each other,

fooling their friends.
 
They would always be close, but as adults they

would look more like just sisters than twins.
 
Sara was thinner, her

blond hair lighter than Maren's, and her face often showed signs of

stress, perhaps to be expected in her profession.

All the Gordon children were intelligent.
 
One brother was an

attorney.

Another was a millionaire who owned thousands of acres of prime Oregon

grazing land and as many head of prize cattle.
 
Their grandfather

pioneered in the Lake Oswego suburb of Portland, long before it became

a suburban paradise.
 
Grandfather Kruse's land turned out to be

virtually worth its weight in gold.
 
His old house, barns, and

outbuildings remained in Lake Oswego just as they always were, but they

were surrounded by posh homes, condos, office buildings, and

parkways.

Sara's father was not rich, however, and it was a struggle to raise his

large family.
 
He was a dairy farmer, and dairy farmers rarely have the

money to finance medical school.
 
Sara's parents had no money even to

send her to college, much less medical school, and, like the rest of

her siblings, she worked her way through college, graduating from

Willamette IJniversity in Salem, Oregon, in 1973 with a Bachelor of

Science degree.

At Willamette she dated a young man who would one day be a deputy

district attorney in Washington County, Oregon.
 
She also knew Mike

Shinn, who was a football star at Willamette and would become a

prominent civil attorney in Portland.
 
She never dated Shinn, and they

didn't expect to see each other much after college.

Sara had always wanted to be a doctor.
 
Most of the men who were

attracted to her didn't take her ambition seriously, she was too

pretty, too diminutive, and she was always so concerned about other

people's feelings.
 
Maybe she didn't fit the accepted picture of a

physician, but she was completely committed to achieving her goal.

Sara married a young teacher, who convinced her he supported her dream

of a career in medicine.
 
He didn'tþnot really.
 
He Vanted a

stayat-home wife.
 
Accepted at Oregon Health Sciences t Jniversity in

1974, she decided not to go.
 
She tried to be a perfect housewife, but

she yearned to continue her education, and after a frustrating year in

Astoria on the coast of Oregon, her marriage ended.

Sara also had to convince the University of Oregon's medical school in

Portland that she was really serious.
 
Her application was passed over

in 1975, but she was finally reaccepted in 1976 and she put herself

through medical school by working as a cocktail waitress at a Red Lion

Inn in Astoria.
 
The job was far afield from her ultimate ambition, but

the tips were good and she had the perfect figure for the abbreviated

outfits she had to wear.

Sara's second marriage worked, CVCII though slIc began medical school

in 1976, probably because her husband's job kept him out at sea as much

as he was ashore.
 
She wanted very much to prove that she could succeed

at marriage, but she also wanted desperately to be a doctor.
 
She was

able to juggle the demands of medical school and marriage until 1980,

when she received her degree.
 
But when she began a four-year rcsidencv

in anesthesiology at the same medical school, her second marriage ended

too.
 
There was just no time for an thing but her career.

Nevertheless, she tried again during her residencyþthis time with a

physicianþbut her third marriage was as abbreviated as the first two.

In 1984, she finally finished her residency and established her own

practice as an anesthesiologist.
 
She regretted her three failed

marriages, but they had all ended with little acrimony.
 
She still