Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (63 page)

bakery at 4:20.
 
I called on portable phone at 4:50, 5:10, 5:25 with no

answer.

"Feb 2: Brad met me .
 
. . to sign loan papers.
 
He left at

3:05-3:10.

1 know he went right back to the bakery and picked Lynn up.... I called

his phone.... He said he found the phone had been turned off

accidentally.

Sara's journal noted numerous instances almost every day whet1

Brad had not been where he said he was.
 
She also wrote that Brad was

"very resentful about my asking about her [Lvnnj being around."

In February 1986

Cheryl Keeton had changed her will and the beneficiaries of her life

insurance policy.
 
In February 1990

Sara Gordon changed the beneficiaries of her life insurance policy, and

also the terms of the loan she had just signed with Brad at First

Interstate Bank.
 
She did not tell Brad what she had done.

Although Brad always had a plausible explanation for why he never

seemed to be where he was supposed to be and why he didn't answer his

mobile phone, Sara's careful charting of his movements proved to her

that Lynn Minero was often with him.
 
Brad's behavior was now

diametrically opposed to that of the man she had first known.
 
Then,

she could count on him to be exactly where he said he would be.
 
He had

always arrived for their dates on time.
 
The only time he had faltered

was the night Cheryl was murdered.

Brad came down with stomach flu, he said, and he slept on the couch so

that he wouldn't bother Sara.
 
She had another explanation for his

behavior.

"February 6: Brad stayed down on the couch all night.... Seemed angry

with meþSaid he felt that Burke et al were persecuting him for

something he had not done.
 
Then said how he felt I was like them and

persecuting him for something he had not doneþie.
 
all,air with Lynn.

... Called me at work at 8:00

A.M.... said his Se"First Visa account had not been paid for two months

and was I intentionally not paying his bills?
 
Seemed rather upset."

Sara now knew in her heart that her marriage to Brad was not working

out, but a faithless husband is far easier to say goodbye to than three

little boys.
 
She loved Jess and Michael and Phillip so much that she

wondered if she could bear to give them up.
 
"I knew that Brad would

never let me have the boys," she would recall wistfully.
 
And she had

to remember the vicious struggle that went on between Cheryl and Brad

over their three sons.

It would not be exaggerating to say that Sara was going through

emotional agony.
 
If she stayed with Brad, she knew there would be

countless early mornings and nights when she didn't know where he was

or with whom.
 
If she left him, she would lose the children who

considered her their mother.
 
And they would lose her.

Four years had passed but police files had never been closed on Cheryl

Keeton's death, the investigators from the Oregon State Police and the

Washington County District Attorney's office simply ran out of leads.

they had been unable to link Brad to Cheryl's murder with physical

evidence.
 
They had found no weapon, no bloody clothing, and no

telltale trail of blood.
 
They had talked to scores of people and found

many who knew nothing that would help and a number who were reluctant

to become involved.
 
Those who knew Brad did not want to go into detail

about their relationships with him.

On television and in the movies, circumstantial cases move along

smoothly and charges are filed, witnesses burst out with new

information or outright confessions, and the last five or ten minutes

of fictional mysteries always seem to bring satisfactory answers to

complicated puzzles.
 
There are usually even wonderfully convoluted

"double-reverse twists" to make the denouement more suspenseful.
 
The

death of Cheryl Keeton was, however, a tragically authentic event.

Real life.
 
Real death, as it were.
 
After an exhaustive investigation,

it began to look as if the person who had caused her death was going to

walk away and any footprints left behind were going to grow fainter and

fainter until there was no trail at all.

The detectives who had worked their way back through Cheryl's life þand

through Brad's lifeþfound themselves against a brick wall.
 
Cheryl's

murder went unsolved.
 
At least, it went unprosecuted, because all of

their evidence was, thus far, circumstantial.
 
On Sunday, September 21,

1986, Brad had had ample time to drive from the Madison Tower to the

West Slope area to meet Cheryl, to strike her on the head and face two

dozen times, to send her van containing her body onto the Sunset

Highway, and to drive back to his apartment.
 
No one had seen him

between 7:35 and 8:50.
 
But a man cannot be arrested because he hated

his wife and because no one had either seen or talked to him for an

hour and fifteen minutes, not even if his wife had died a brutal death

during those seventy-five minutes.

If Brad had killed Cheryl, he had found a place to wash himself clean

of blood afterward (although blood spatter experts would one day

testify that "cast-off' blood from a bludgeoning weapon doesn't

necessarily land on the killer who holds that weapon).
 
When Lily

Saarnen saw Brad at 7:35, he had been wearing casual slacksþjust as

Sara recalled.
 
Sara never again saw the wine-colored shirt that Brad

had worn to the American Dream Pizza Company earlier that evening,

although that was something else she had not volunteered to the police

during their initial investigation.
 
If Brad washed up, no one knew

where he had done it.

When Rachel Houghton saw him entering the garage around nine, he was

wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he was barefoot and his hair was wet.

That was forty minutes after Cheryl's estimated time of death.
 
Had he

come through the pool area of the apartment tower?
 
Had he stopped in a

gas station restroom somewhere along the way home?
 
Had he made it back

to his apartment without being seen at all and washed up in his own

kitchen or bathroom?

These questions had never been answered.

Cheryl Keeton's coworkers at Garvey, Schubert and Barer had felt a

certain sense of serenity after the memorial service they held for her

in Seattle's Public Market the week after her death.
 
"We did have

closure," managing partner Greg Dallaire said, "but we expected the

police to do something...."

Civil attorneys are not usually trained in criminal law, nor are they

any more aware of police procedure than someone in an entirely

unrelated profession.
 
It is necessary to be caught in the middle of a

criminal case þin one manner or anotherþto really understand how very

difficult it is to bring criminal charges against a murder suspect and

then to actually convict that defendant.

But Oregon State Police detectives Jerry Finch and Jim Ayers hadn't

forgotten Cheryl.
 
Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Scott Upham

and Assistant D.A. Bob Heard hadn't forgotten her.
 
Nor had O.S.P

Sergeant Jim Hinkley and his wife, O.S.P criminalist Julia Hinkley.

Every officer and every paramedic called to the side of the Sunset

Highway on the evening of September 21, 1986, remembered Cheryl

Keeton.

But they didn't have enough to arrest someone.
 
Brad remained their

only suspect, but they couldn't bolt under pressure and arrest him too

soon.

Brad also remained the prime suspect in the minds of Cheryl's family,

friends, and colleagues.
 
Greg Dallaire and other partners at Garvey,

Schubert knew that Cheryl had been convinced for months before her

murder that Brad was going to kill her.
 
They knew that she had begged

her friends to see that her boys did not go to their father if she

should die.
 
They knew that, fearing she would die, she had done

everything humanly possible to prevent Brad from gleaning one penny

from her estate.

Cheryl had insurance and her estate had money coming from her Garvey,

Schubert retirement account.
 
"The firm also gives five thousand

dollars in the case of death," Dallaire said.
 
"We didn't want to give

it to Brad.
 
And we were concerned about the kids.
 
We did hire a

Portland attorney to help get custody from him so that the boys could

go to Betty and Mary Troseth.
 
But Brad was taking care of themþand we

couldn't prove otherwise.
 
That petered out."

Sharon Armstrong, Kerry Radcliffe, Eric Lindenauer, and Dallaire were

"extraordinarily frustrated" as they saw everything that Cheryl had

feared become reality.
 
Both Sharon and Kerry had tried to be

emotionally supportive of Cheryl, as only women can be with one

another.

Neither of them could be with her on the last weekend of her life and

they may well have wondered if things would have been different had

they been thereþif somehow, some way, they might have protected her.

It would be only natural.

Eric Lindenauer had been there for Cheryl as often as he could be.

He had made the trip to Bridlemile School with her to try to protect

her þand the boysþfrom Brad's rage.
 
But he couldn't be with her all

the time.
 
No one could, and in the end, all Eric had been able to do

was call the Oregon State Police the day after her death and tell them

about the horror she had been living through in the months before her

murder.

Greg Dallaire had never been as close to Cherylþhe had seen her around

the office, of course, and had lunch with her once or twiceþ but she

had almost always seemed happy and vibrant.
 
Dallaire was a gentle man,