Read Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? Online
Authors: Ann Rule
Tags: #General, #Murder, #Social Science, #True Crime, #Criminology
called his apartment shortly before eight and was surprised to hear the
phone ring five, six, ten times.
His answering machine always came on
by the fourth ring, but this time the phone just rang endlessly.
At
8:30 she dialed Brad's number again.
And again the phone rang
emptily.
Until that night, Sara had never known Brad to leave his apartment
without making sure the answering machine was on.
With his business
interests, with his concern about the boys, with his graciousness in
always being available to her, he just automatically left it on.
Sara was disappointed, and a little irritated.
If Brent was due home
at nine, Brad wouldn't be able to come and spend any time at all with
her.
Their times alone together were precious because they were so
infrequent, and now they had lost another evening.
Sara kept glancing at the clock.
It was getting dark outside.
And now
she was nor only annoyed, she was getting worried.
There was such
enmity between Brad and Cheryl, Sara had seen Brad enraged, frustrated
almost to the point of tears only five days ago.
She felt a
presentiment of doom.
Maybe she was superstitious.
Just when
everything was as close to perfea in her own personal life as she had
ever imagined it might be, she didn't want to lose the man she loved.
"I remembered what Brad had said about Cheryl trying to poison him,"
Sara would recall.
"I didn't take it seriously, but .
.."
Maybe Brad had had an accident.
He had been in such a tearing hurry
when he left.
And those darling little boys wouldn't be as safe in her
sedan as in the big Suburban.
Every time she heard a siren approach
the hospital, Sara flinched.
She didn't just love Brad, she loved
Jess, Michael, and Phillip too.
It was so out of character for Cheryl to go to Brad's apartment to pick
up the boys.
Why would she agree to do that tonight?
Sara wondered.
And if she had agreed, why wouldn't Brad be there?
The night no longer
looked lovely, it looked dark and empty outside the hospital window.
Her work in the trauma unit reminded her every day that people some one
loved often never went home again.
And most of them had parted saying,
I ll see youþ" Just before nine, Sara tried Brad's number again.
This
time, to her great relief, he answered.
"Where have you been?"
she asked angrily.
Brad sounded out of breath and a little excited when he spoke.
"We've been down waiting for Cherylþ" he said.
"For an hour and a half?"
"Yes," he said, and then elaborated.
He told Sara that he had called
Cheryl at 7:30 and asked her as nicely as he could if she would come
and pick up the boys.
But it had been clear to him, he said, that she
had not been alone.
"I heard someone in the backgroundþshe probably
just went out partying."
Sara slammed down the phone.
She wasn't sure if she was mad at Brad or
at Cheryl, but she felt guilty and foolish almost immediately.
From
everything Brad had told her about Cheryl, she might very well have
left him waiting that long.
Contrite, she called Brad back.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I'm calmed down now.
I was just worried that
you were either out killing Cheryl or that she was killing you!
This is the first time since I've known you that you weren't where you
told me you would beþ" Brad sounded upset, too, as he accepted her
apology.
"What were you telling me about hearing somebody at Cheryl's house?"
Sara asked.
"I just heard some guy.
The second time I called, she wasn't home.
She probably just decided to go out and party."
"Well, where haveyou been, Brad?"
"Like I said, waiting for Cheryl downstairs.
She never showed."
They agreed it was too late for Brad to drive over to the hospital.
Besides, Brent wasn't home yet, and there wasn't anybody for Brad to
leave the boys with.
Sara told him she was going to go to bed, and he
said he would tuck the boys in at his apartment.
Sara was
disappointed, but she was no longer angry at Brad.
It was hard for her
to stay mad at him for very long.
She loved him too much.
Gheryl's last weekend was bittersweet.
She had gone to Jess's soccer
game even though Brad had told her that on his Saturdays she was not
allowed to go to the games or to speak to the boys or even to act as if
she knew her own sons.
She had called her mother either on Friday
night after Brad picked the boys up or on Saturday morning.
"Cheryl
wanted to go to Jess's game," Betty would recall, "but she didn't want
to make it bad for them."
Betty and Mary Troseth were all too aware of the terrible strain Cheryl
had been under for most of that year.
They lived in Longview, and so
did her sisters Julia and Susan, and her former stepfather, Bob
McNannay.
They all loved her but none of them could do much to helpþ except
listen.
Betty and Cheryl had grown extremely close and they talked
constantly by phone.
"The main issue, of course," Betty would say later, "was the custody of
the children.
At first she was afraid she wouldn't get them.
I told
her that was ridiculous.
Cheryl said, He will lie in court.
He will
kill me to get them."
I tried to talk her out of shared custody.
I
really preached.
He wasn't fit to have them."
Betty remembered that Cheryl had looked at her once and said with
complete resignation, "I'll have to put up with him.
For the rest of
my life, I'll have to deal with Brad."
Cheryl had felt cautiously confident after Dr. Sardo decided that she
was the primary parent.
Right up to the last week, she believed she
would have custody, although she knew it wasn't going to be easy.
She told her mother that she and Brad had both given depositions on
September 16.
After the soccer game on Saturday morning, Cheryl got in her Toyota van
and headed north across the bridge that separates Oregon from
Washington.
She was going home to Longview.
She was afraid.
Her
mother saw it.
Betty had seen Cheryl afraid for a long time, but this
weekend was different.
There was a kind of tragic acceptance about
Cheryl, as if she had done everything she could for her children, for
herself, for the slightest chance that she and her three boys might
have a happy futureþor any future together.
Cheryl was strangely low-key on Saturday.
She had always been a woman
of tremendous energy, and the contrast with the way she had once looked
and acted was shocking.
"She just looked terrible," her sister Susan
remembered.
"She was exhausted, and she was so thin that you could see
her rib cage.
Her cheeks were caved in."
On Saturday night, when Betty got up from the table to wash the supper
dishes, Cheryl didn't move to join her.
"She let me do the dishes
alone," Betty said.
"Cheryl always jumped up to help me."
But she
seemed, at last, to- have run out of strength.
She didn't talk about
the custody battle, but she did speak of her worries about Phillip, her
baby.
"She said he was starting to stutter, and she was going to take
him to a doctor.
Betty's role over the previous year had been to calm Cheryl down.
But she wasn't agitated that evening, she seemed beaten down.
"My
highs are not quite as high as they could be," she said.
"And my lows
are lower."
Then she said quite softly, "I know you don't think he's going to kill
me, Mom, but he is going to kill me."
Betty stopped what she was doing and stared hard at Cheryl.
It wasn't
that this was the first time Cheryl had said she feared Brad would kill
her, Betty had heard her say it almost a dozen times since November of
1985.
She responded as she usually did.
"He's too selfish to risk his
butt."
But then Betty felt a chill.
This time she believed Cheryl and
she warned, "Don't be alone with him, Cheryl.
Don't try to talk to him
the way you would with other people.
Watch your car."
Cheryl sighed.
"I have to live my life, Mom.
There are things I have
to do."
Cheryl spent that Saturday night at her mother's home.
they watched a
movie, Queen of the Starlight Ballroom, a sentimental story about
romance between lonely people in their sixties, with Maureen Stapleton
and Charles Durning.
On Sunday Cheryl told her mother that she wanted to visit her
sisters.
That was rather unusual, Susan and Cheryl had always been very close
but Cheryl hadn't seen Julia for six years.
When Julia graduated from
high school, she had left Longview immediately and headed for
Seattle.
She had been back in her hometown for only a short time.
"Julia lived
a few blocks from Mom's place," Susan said.
"Cheryl and Mom walked
over to see Julia.
Then they drove over to my house."
Susan still lived with her father, Bob McNannay, in the house that had
been Cheryl's home too when she was in high school.
The kitchen had
just been retiled in shades of cobalt blue, and this was the first time