Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?
Ann Rule
Praise for #1New York Times
Bestselling Author Ann Rule’s
DEAD BY SUNSET
“A cast of characters like this would provide fascinating material for any capable reporter. . . . Ann Rule is more than capable. The author . . . brings to her work the passion, the prodigious research and the narrative skill necessary to create suspense. . . .”
—Walter Walker, The New York Times Book Review
“Sufficiently creepy stuff from the master of true crime: DEAD BY SUNSET is better plotted than the murder itself. . . . This is a terrific read and a moving tale that ends with a strange redemption.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Rule . . . has immersed herself in the world of sociopaths for the past twenty-five years. . . . DEAD BY SUNSET . . . tells the sordid story of a convicted murderer named Brad Cunningham. . . . The similarities with the O.J. case are compelling.”
—Dan Webster, The Spokesman-Review (Idaho)
“DEAD BY SUNSET [is] another compelling Ann Rule crime tale. . . .”
—Jocelyn McClurg, The Hartford Courant
“True crime writer Ann Rule paints a chilling portrait of this sadistic man [Brad Cunningham].”
—Jean Graham, American Woman
“True crime queen Ann Rule has packed so many psychological details and creepy revelations into DEAD BY SUNSET. . . . Rule . . . is fascinated by personality disorders and is an acknowledged expert on the subject. The book succeeds because it is a complete record of a bizarre personality. . . . And the record is complete because the author used so many sources.”
—Fiona M. Ortiz, The Oregonian
Praise for Ann Rule’s
New York TimesBestsellers
You Belong to Me and OtherTrue Cases
“Each of these stories could be a book in itself, and each will cause you to creep out of your bed at night to double-check the locks and make your heart skip a beat at the next unexpected knock. . . .”
—Edna Buchanan, Miami Herald
“Ann Rule delivers six tales of obsession and murder with the suspense and class we have come to expect from the author of The Stranger Beside Me and Small Sacri fices. . . . Rule makes the story of each victim as fascinating as the pathology of the killer.”
—Flo Stanton, Indianapolis Star
“The cases [are] explored in chilling detail. . . . Compelling . . . Rule [is] the ruler of the whole true crime empire.”
—Kate McClare, Boca Raton News (FL)
A Rose for Her Grave and OtherTrue Cases
“Fascinating . . . each page is a gripper. . . . Ann Rule is truly a master crime writer in A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases, a book that breaks new ground in the true crime field.”
—Real Crime Book Digest
“Ann Rule . . . has a great knack for horrific detail.”
—New York Daily News
“[Ann Rule is] the undisputed master crime writer of the eighties and nineties.”
—John Saul
If You Really Loved Me
“Bone-chilling . . . a truly staggering case . . . Rule does an admirable job of drawing out the drama and the nuances.”
—Washington Post
“A real page-turner . . . a passport into perversion.”
—Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer
“A story of crime and punishment . . . bizarre enough to rivet anyone’s attention.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Meticulous reporting . . . the characters are fascinating. . . .”
—People
Everything She Ever Wanted
“Yet another true crime triumph for Ann Rule . . . a magnificently constructed book.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Ann Rule draws a chilling picture of a female sociopath who . . . manipulates and destroys the lives of all those who love her. . . .”
—Don O’Briant, Atlanta Journal/Constitution
“Ms. Rule . . . now turns her devastatingly accurate insight to the twisted mind of a modern-day Southern belle. A measure of how well she succeeds is the feeling that came over me after reading just a few paragraphs about Pat Allanson. I wanted to reach into the book and strangle her.”
—Florence King, The New York Times Book Review
Books by Ann Rule
Bitter Harvest
Dead by Sunset
Everything She Ever Wanted
If You Really Loved Me
The Stranger Beside Me
Possession
Small Sacrifices
A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 6
The End of the Dream and Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 5
In the Name of Love and Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 4
A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 3
You Belong to Me and Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 2
A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 1
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Copyright © 1995 by Ann Rule
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to Cheryl Keeton
may your sons know and remember how
very much you loved them
and
to abused women everywhere
in the hope
that they may find freedom and joy
. . . written laws, which were like spiders’ webs, and would catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but [could] easily be broken by the mighty and the rich.
ANACHARSIS, sixth century B.C.
Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.
LUCRETIUS, 99–55 B.C.
PART 1
The Crime
1
September 21, 1986, was a warm and beautiful Sunday in Portland—in the whole state of Oregon, for that matter. With any luck, the winter rains of the Northwest were a safe two months away. The temperature had topped off at sixty-nine degrees about four that afternoon, and even at 9 P.M. it was still a relatively balmy fifty-eight degrees.
Randall Kelly Blighton had traveled west on Highway 26—the Sunset Highway—earlier that evening, driving his youngsters back to their mother’s home in Beaverton after their weekend visitation with him. A handsome, athletic-looking man with dark hair and a mustache, Blighton was in his twenties, a truck salesman. His divorce from his wife was amicable, and he was in a good mood as he headed back toward Portland along the same route.
The Sunset Highway, which is actually a freeway, can often be a commuter’s nightmare. It runs northwest from the center of Portland, past the OMSI zoo and through forestlike parks. Somewhere near the crossroads of Sylvan, the Multnomah/Washington county-line sign flashes by almost subliminally. Then the freeway angles toward the Pacific Ocean beaches as it skirts Beaverton and the little town of Hillsboro.
The land drops away past Sylvan, giving the area its name West Slope. Route 8 trails off the Sunset Highway down the curves of the slope, past pleasant neighborhoods, until it r
uns through a commercial zone indistinguishable from similar zones anywhere in America: pizza parlors, supermarkets, car dealers, strip malls. Approaching Hillsboro, the Washington County seat, Route 8—the TV Highway—slices through what was only recently farmland. The Tualatin River valley, once richly agricultural, is now a technological wonderland. Its endless woods are dwindling and the area has become known as the Silicon Forest. There are acres and acres of corporate parks in Washington County now: Intel, Fujitsu, NEC, and Tektronix. Intel is already the largest single employer in Oregon; soon there will be more workers in the computer and electronics industry in Oregon than there are timber employees.
Apparently serenely untroubled by the encroachment of modern technology, the Sisters of Saint Mary have been stationed along the TV Highway for many years, their nunnery and school on the left, their home for wayward boys on the right.
In an instant Route 8 becomes Tenth Avenue in Hillsboro. A left turn on Main Street leads toward the old city center and the county courthouse. Main Street is idyllically lined with wide lawns, wonderful old houses with gingerbread touches, jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween and spectacular lights during the Christmas season. But it hasn’t fared so well commercially since the new Target store and the mall went up south of town; its chief businesses are antique stores and, except for the Copper Stone restaurant and cocktail lounge, the kind of restaurants where ladies linger over tea.
The Washington County Courthouse is surrounded by manicured grounds with magnolias and towering sequoias planted more than a century ago. It smells like a courthouse; at least the original structure does: wax, dust, the daily lunchroom special, and old paint baking on radiators. The people employed there are comfortable and at home, bantering with one another as they go about their work; the people who come there on all manner of missions are more often than not angry, worried, grieving, frightened, annoyed, or apprehensive. Some walk away with a sense of justice done, and some don’t walk away at all; they are handcuffed and locked up in the jail next door.
Not far from the courthouse, something terrible happened on the Sunset Highway on September 21, 1986, at the Sylvan marker, just inside Washington County. And in the end, it would all be settled in this courthouse, as Christmas lights glowed in the branches of a tall fir on the corner of Main and First Streets and icy rain pelted court watchers and witnesses alike.
The end would be a long time coming.
It was about 8:30 on that Sunday night in September, and dark enough so that Randy Blighton needed his headlights to see what lay ahead of him on the curving Sunset Highway. He was startled as he came around one of those curves near Sylvan in the West Slope area and saw that cars a half mile ahead of him were suddenly swerving out of the fast lane into the right-hand lane. It looked as if there might be something in the road ahead that they hadn’t been able to see until the last moment. A dead animal perhaps, or maybe a truck tire. Whatever it was, it had to be dangerous; a last-minute lane switch only worked if the right lane was clear.
Blighton traveled another hundred feet and now he could make out the dark hulk of a Toyota van turned crosswise on the freeway. Its lights were off and it was in a perilous position, completely blocking the fast lane. Luckily, the drivers ahead of Blighton had been alert, but it would be only a matter of time before someone came around the curve in the fast lane and smashed into the van. People usually drove the Sunset Highway between fifty-five and sixty-five miles an hour and a crash like that would undoubtedly escalate rapidly into a fatal multicar pileup. Blighton was grateful that, for the moment at least, the freeway was not heavily traveled. And that was only a freak circumstance. At 8:30 on a Sunday night after a weekend of good weather, there had to be hundreds of vehicles heading back to Portland from the coast.
Randy Blighton’s first inclination was to swerve around the van; he had things to do at home. “I was going to go on by too,” he later recalled, “but then I spotted the silhouette of an infant seat in the van. I couldn’t ignore that. I’d just left my own kids, and I could never live with myself if there was a baby or a little kid in that van.”
Blighton’s reflexes were good. He tapped his brakes, pulled his car over on the right shoulder, grabbed a couple of flares, and then ran across the freeway toward the van. As he got close to it, he could see that it was perpendicular to the median that separated the eastbound and westbound lanes, its front bumper repeatedly tapping the concrete Jersey barriers. The van’s engine was still turning over, and it was in gear, inching forward and then being held back by the barriers.
Blighton knew that he was as much a sitting duck as the Toyota if a car came around the curve, and he hurriedly lit the flares and set them out in the fast lane to warn motorists, in time he hoped, to veer to the right. He had no idea what he might find as he reached for the driver’s door handle of the van—possibly someone who had had a stroke or a heart attack. It might even be a driverless vehicle that had slipped its brakes and somehow ended up on the freeway. In 1986, at this point on the Sunset, there were still some neighborhood streets from which cars could enter the freeway as if the Sunset was merely another intersection. Southwest 79th, just to the south of the accident, was one of those streets. Maybe the driver of the van, unfamiliar with the Sunset’s eccentricities, had turned far too widely and rammed into the barriers.
Blighton opened the driver’s-side door. The van was not empty. He could make out a figure lying on the front seat. The person’s legs were near the gearshift console and extended over the driver’s seat. The back was on the passenger seat, and the head was tucked into the chest and drooping over toward the floor. He didn’t know if it was a man or woman, but he saw a smallish loafer-type shoe on one foot that looked feminine.
There was no time for Blighton to try to figure out who the driver was, or how he—or she—had ended up crosswise on the freeway. He stepped up into the driver’s side, pushing the legs out of the way as much as he could. Now he could see that there was a woman’s purse jammed between the accelerator and the firewall. That would explain why the van continued to move forward. Blighton felt along the dash to try to find the switch for the emergency flashers but he couldn’t locate it; he didn’t know that it was overhead.
There was the child’s carseat right behind the driver’s seat. It was empty, but that didn’t make Blighton feel much better; the baby could be on the floor someplace. Counting on the flares to warn other cars to go around, he slid the side passenger door open and patted the floor and seats with his hands. Everything he touched was wet and he realized why it had been so hard to see through the driver’s-side window. Something dark splattered the glass. On some level, he knew he was running his hands through pooled blood, but finding the baby that might be there was more important than anything else. When he found nothing, he ran to the back of the van, opened the hatchback, and looked in. No baby. Thank God. No baby.
Instinctively, Blighton wiped his hands down his shirt and pants, wanting to get the wet, iodiney-smelling stuff off them. He shuddered, but he didn’t stop to consider how there could be blood if the van had not been hit by another vehicle. He ran back to the driver’s door, hopped into the van, expertly shifted into reverse, and backed the van across the freeway and onto the shoulder of 79th where it met the Sunset Highway.
Only when he had assured himself that the Toyota was no longer in danger of being hit by oncoming traffic did Blighton turn to look closely at the person lying across the seat. He thought it was a woman. Her hair was short and dark, but he didn’t know if she was young or old. She did not respond to his questions, but he still kept asking, “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Blighton ran around to the front passenger door and found it was slightly ajar. He opened it and picked up the woman’s hand, feeling for a pulse in her wrist. There was no reassuring beat. He could see blood on her face, and one of her eyes protruded grotesquely, as big as a hard-boiled egg. Even if he had known this woman, he would never have recognized her.
His f
irst thought was that he had to get help for her; maybe she did have a pulse but too faint for him to detect. He ran back to the driver’s side and reached in, running his hands along the dash, searching frantically again for the emergency flashers switch. He finally saw it overhead and switched them on. They clicked in eerie rhythm, but that was the only sound he heard. The woman wasn’t breathing.
Blighton stuck more flares in the gravel along the shoulder of the freeway and traffic in both lanes slowed down as it passed, hundreds of cars whose occupants had no idea how close they had come to being in a massive fatal pileup. Blighton then looked around for a place where he could call for help. He saw lights along S.W. 79th, the street that ran at a right angle onto the Sunset Highway. No one responded to his knock at the first house, even though he could hear voices inside. He pounded on the door of the second house and a young woman opened it.
“There’s a bad accident on the freeway,” he gasped. “Call an ambulance. I’m going back out there.”
It was hard to judge the passage of time, but Blighton estimated that about ten minutes had passed since he first saw the Toyota van angled crazily across the freeway. Cars were inching by in a single lane now, and he caught glimpses of curious faces darting a look at what appeared to be nothing more than a roadside breakdown.
The woman who lay across the seat hadn’t moved.
Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance, and soon Blighton could see the flashing red lights of an ambulance.
Thomas Stewart Duffy, Jr.—Tom—was on duty at Washington County Fire District Number One, the West Slope station, that Sunday night. The station was just east of the IGA supermarket between Canyon Drive and Canyon Lane at S.W. 78th Street. The alarm bells sounded at 20:44:50 (8:44 P.M. and fifty seconds), and the call came in as a “probable DOA” on the Sunset Highway. There were a lot of calls from the Sunset, and a fair amount of them were fatals, so Tom Duffy and his partner, Mike Moran, both paramedics, were familiar with the area. Running for their rig, a Chevrolet van, the two men leaped in and headed up Canyon Lane, turned left on West Slope Drive, and then went northbound on 79th toward the Sunset Highway.
