Dead by Sunset

Author:Ann Rule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

32

Cheryl’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 Marv 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 help—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 future—or 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.

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