Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (64 page)

a man who used his legal knowledge to help others.
 
In 1970 he set up

the first battered women's program in America through his work with the

Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle.
 
He had never realized how

emotionally battered Cheryl was.
 
When he did, it had been far too late

to help her, and he agonized over that.

Three months had passed since Cheryl's death without an arrest.
 
It was

early 1987.
 
Somewhere, her little boys had their first Christmas

without their motherþbut none of Cheryl's former coworkers knew where

Brad and the boys had completely disappeared.
 
As much as they wanted

to fulfill the promises that Cheryl had extracted from themþthe

promises that they wouldn't let Brad have her little boysþthey had no

legal avenue to stop him.
 
He was their father.
 
Their mother was

dead.

And if Brad had killed Cheryl, no one had vet found a way to prove

it.

Yet it didn't seem possible that someone as alive as Cheryl could die

so horribly and that no one would be punished.
 
"We went to Hillsboro,"

Dallaire recalled.
 
"Eric Lindenauer and myself.
 
We talked to Bob

Heard and Jim Ayers.
 
They said that they were attempting to put a case

together, but they told us it was a circumstantial case.
 
They said, We

know he did it, but .
 
.."

" The civil attorneys were learning more about the criminal side of law

than they had wanted to know.
 
Some months later, they returned to the

Washington County Courthouse and talked once more with Bob Heard.

"All he could tell us was that it was still under investigation,"

Dallaire said.

Eighteen months after Cheryl died, Lindenauer and Dallaire traveled

again to Hillsboro.
 
They could sense at once that their meeting with

Bob Heard, Jim Ayers, and Jerry Finch would not be a fruitful one.

None of the three men seemed to want to meet their eyes.
 
They made

small talk and glanced at the thick files in front of Heard.
 
Finally

Heard took a deep breath and spoke the words that he didn't want to say

and none of them wanted to hear, "We're declining to prosecute."

The room was silent as the words began to sink in.
 
Dallaire and

Lindenauer were stunned and disappointed.
 
More than disappointed, they

were outraged that Brad seemed to have beaten the men and women who had

been on his trail for eighteen months.
 
"The cops were unhappy,"

Dallaire remembered.
 
"You could tell they didn't like this decision."

The five men in the room all wanted the same thing, although they were

coming at it from different angles.
 
There had to be some way to

construct a case against Brad Cunningham that would hold up in court.

Cautiously, they explored the possibility that a civil case might be

brought against him, a case that if successfulþmight put enough

pressure on Brad to force his hand.
 
"Ifþifþ" Dallaire began, "if we

brought a case that would establish civilly that he killed her, would

that be helpful?"

The room was silent and then Heard, Ayers, and Finch said, "Yes!"

almost in the same breath.
 
"Yes, that would help."

It was a backdoor way to convict a suspected killer who had apparently

escaped every criminal investigation ploy, but it was a way to begin.

The Washington County D.A."s office provided Dallaire and Lindenauer

with a copy of the police files on Cheryl's murder, and Avers and Finch

offered whatever help they could give.

Dallaire returned to Seattle carrying a heavy box of files.
 
Alone, he

began to read the official follow-ups that described Cheryl's death and

the aftermath.
 
"I was devastated," he said later.
 
He read the autopsy

report in horror, fully aware for the first time of how brutal Cheryl's

murder had been.
 
He tried to visualize the sunny, bubbly, brilliant

young woman he had known and, for the moment, could not.
 
He decided he

couldn't share the awful details of her murder with most of his

staff.

And then Dallaire came to a copy of the note Cheryl had left behind as

she went to meet her killer.
 
He held it in his hand, unbelieving.

"I have gone to pick up the boys from Brad at the Mobile station next

to the I.G.A.
 
If I'm not back, please come and find me .
 
. . COME RIGHT

AWAY!"

It was almost as if Cheryl was in the room, talking directly to him.

"I was flabbergasted when I came across the note.
 
And I got really

angry," Dallaire said.
 
"I thought, W didn't they DO something2" Maybe

there hadn't been enough for the prosecutor's office to go with a

criminal charge against Brad, but Dallaire knew that the note he held

in his hand was enough evidence to bring a wrongful death suit in civil

court.
 
At the next executive committee meeting of the law firm, he

went in and said, "DO something!"

He got no argument.
 
Everyone at Garvey, Schubert who had known Cheryl

was anxious to do whatever they could to bring her some modicum of

justice.
 
"We figured we had two ways to go," Dallaire recalled.
 
"We

had some money that was in her estateþCheryl's profit sharing and the

five thousand dollars.
 
We thought, Let's wave the money in front of

Brad like a red flag and he'll sue us.
 
We can get him into court and

we can prove wrongful death."

The second plan for hoisting Brad on his own petard was more

complicated.
 
There had been a murder in Washington State on July 26,

1974, that had eerie similarities to Cheryl Keeton's.
 
Ironically the

killer, Anthony Fernandez, had come from Longview just as Cheryl had,

although it was unlikely she had ever known him.
 
Fernandez had been in

prison on fraud convictions by the time Cheryl was in high school.

"Tony" Fernandez was forty-eight and a paroled con man when he met a

pretty forty-two-year-old widow named Ruth Logg in Auburn,

Washington.

He didn't mention his criminal background, of course, to Ruth.
 
He

appeared at her door to look at the house she was offering for sale.

He told her he was Dr. Anthony Fernandez and was in the process of

setting up a counseling practice in Tacoma.
 
He even showed her an

article from a local paper announcing the opening of his practice.

Ruth was a wealthy woman, as Fernandez noted when she showed him around

her sumptuous home.

As it turned out, he didn't have to buy the house, he simply moved

in.

Despite her family's reservations, Ruth Logg fell in love with "Dr."

Anthony Fernandez and married him six months later.
 
With his counsel

on financial affairs, she changed her will so that he would inherit

everything she had, uncharacteristically disinheriting her two young

daughters.
 
Two years later, Ruth suffered what appeared to be a tragic

accident.
 
The Winnebago motor home she and Tony had rented plunged off

a dirt road on Snoqualmie Pass in Washington's Cascade Mountains.

Ruth was found dead halfway down a steep embankment, the Winnebago was

150 feet further down the slope.
 
She had succumbed to a fractured

skull and a blow to the stomach, but she had no wounds that

pathologists would expect to find in someone who had gone over a cliff

in a vehicle.

Tony Fernandez survived.
 
He hadn't even been in the Winnebago.
 
He

told authorities that Ruth had driven away from their campsite and he

had followed twenty minutes later in another vehicle.
 
Washington State

Patrol investigators and detectives from the King County Police were

suspicious of him, but they were working with a highly circumstantial

case.
 
There was no arrest.

Eighteen months after Ruth Logg Fernandez died on a lonely

mountainside, her daughters brought civil action against the man who

had by then spent most of the assets of their dead mother's estate.

Judge George Revelle found that Anthony Fernandez "participated as a

principal in the willful and unlawful killing of Ruth Fernandez."

The aspect of the landmark Fernandez case that appealed to the Garvey,

Schubert partners was the fact that Fernandez was then charged

criminally with the murder of his wifeþmore than three years after her

deathþand he was subsequently convicted and was serving life in

prison.

"We decided on our second option," Dallaire remembered.
 
"We would go

for the civil trial.
 
The committee at Garvev, Schubert told us Go

forward!"
 
We wanted to shop this case out to a lawyer to see if there

might be something there.
 
Eric Lindenauer started looking around

because he knew Portland attorneys.
 
John Burke backed us up."

At that point, no criminal charges had been filed against Brad.

Not in 1986.
 
Nor in 1987 or in 1988.
 
The world went on for everyone,

except for Cheryl.
 
But nothing was over in the pursuit of her

killer.

Everything was only suspended in time.

It wasn't as easy to find an attorney to go up against Brad Cunningham

as the Garvey, Schubert partners had originally thought.
 
As it turned

out, there were few attorneys in Portland who were not already familiar

with Brad.
 
He was a most litigious man, and it was his policy to

consult several attorneys on each of his legal actions before he chose

one.

After three or four turndowns, Dallaire and Burke and Lindenauer

realized that finding an attorney willing to joust with Brad would be a

challenge.
 
Lawyers with families said they didn't want to chance it.

One said, "I have a daughter who walks to school alone.
 
I won't risk