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 runs 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 TVA 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 TVA 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 first 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 in-side. 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.

It was an older neighborhood with houses on big lots set far off the street and well apart from each other. Huge trees edged the narrow roadway and there were no street lights. The medics' rig lights were on, but they still had trouble seeing until they spotted the flares at the southwest corner of the Sunset and 79th. In a heartbeat, the quiet dark street ended in a usually roaring freeway. That night, they saw cars backed up to the west for miles.

It had taken them two minutes and twenty seconds to reach the site.

Tom Duffy was a former army combat medic who served in Vietnam. He had worked for thirteen years as a paramedic with the Washington County Fire District and Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue. Altogether, he had over twenty-eight years in the medical field. Very tall and lean, he rarely smiled. He had seen people die in all manner of ways. He had seen scores of fatal accidents, and they always bothered him. He had long since learned to shut his mind to the terrible things he saw during those moments when he fought to save lives, but he never really forgot and he would have almost crystalline recall of that Sunday night.

Duffy and Moran saw a blue Toyota van parked facing north along 79th. A man ran up to them, shouting, "A lady's in the van. She's hurt really bad!"

"How long has it been since the accident?" Duffy asked.

"I don't know for sure. It took me a while to find a phone. I think about fifteen minutes," the man answered.

"We saw the van," Duffy would remember, "and we assessed the situation quickly. We saw no hazards around it -- no power lines down or gas leaking. There was very little damage to the van itself."

As for the man who had run up to him, Randy Blighton, Duffy didn't know who he was and he had no idea what had happened. Blighton's clothes were streaked with dark stains that could have been blood. The van didn't look wrecked. For all Duffy knew, he and Moran might be walking into trouble.

The three men went over to the van and Blighton opened the passenger door so the paramedics could see the woman inside. "She's in here," he said. "The van was crosswise over there in the fast lane."

Duffy attempted to find some sign of life in the woman who lay sprawled across the front seat in the shadows of the van. He put a hand on her shoulder and asked, "Are you all right?"

There was no response.

He exerted more pressure and gave the woman a "trapezius squeeze" on her shoulder muscle. Someone even semiconscious would have reacted to that force.

There was no response.

Duffy held sensitive fingers to the carotid artery along the side of her neck and felt nothing. "There was no response at all," he would remember. "I could palpate no pulse. No respiration."

Turning to Mike Moran and three firefighters who had arrived at the scene in a firetruck, he said, "We need to get her out of this van fast."

They maneuvered her limp body out of the front seat with extreme caution, careful not to aggravate any cervical-spinal injuries she might have sustained in the accident. They circled her neck with a bracing collar so that her spinal processes would not be jostled as they took her out of the van. If by some miracle she was alive, they didn't want her to be paralyzed. They placed her on the road beside the van and began attempts to resuscitate her, even though they were quite sure it was an exercise in futility.

The gravelly shoulder alongside the Sunset Highway now bristled with people who wanted to help when there was no longer any way to help -- a Buck Ambulance and its crew, Mike Moran and Tom Duffy, the firefighters and EMTs, and a half dozen state police. In the yellow rays of headlights and flashlights, they could all see that the victim who lay on the ground had suffered massive trauma. The top of her head was, in the blunt words of an observer, "like mincemeat." One of the paramedics thought he saw brain matter leaking. There was so much blood -- so terribly much blood. It was as thick as curdled sour milk, already beginning to coagulate. Duffy knew that meant that more than five or ten minutes had passed since the woman had last bled freely. Depending on her own particular clotting factor profile, it might have been up to half an hour.

There was no hope of saving her. The dead do not bleed.

"The patient fit into the category of a patient who could not possibly be resuscitated," he would say later. "Not at all. She was in cardiopulmonary arrest." That meant her heart no longer beat; her lungs no longer drew breath. Even without the tremendous loss of blood, the assault to the brain itself would have been fatal. An injured brain responds by swelling, and as it does so, it bulges into centers that control heart rhythm and breathing, effectively shutting down all activity needed to continue life.

By 8:53 P.M., when Oregon State Police Traffic Officer David Fife arrived, the paramedics had given up. There was no hope. The victim lay still, covered partially by a blanket. Fife walked around the Toyota van and saw it had virtually no damage. But when he lifted the blanket to look at the dead woman, he was appalled at the wounds on her head. How could she have suffered such massive injuries when the van was scarcely marred at all?

Fife moved his patrol unit to the west of the scene and turned on his overheads and emergency lights to warn the drivers who were inching along the Sunset Highway. They weren't going to get to Portland by this route, not for a long time. When his sergeant, James Hinkley, who had been dispatched from the Beaverton substation, arrived, Fife turned the immediate scene over to him and pulled out his camera. He took thirty-six photographs of the victim and the Toyota van, routine for any accident. By this time, Senior Troopers Lloyd Dillon and Ray Veal, along with Washington County Chief Criminal Deputy D.A. Bob Herman, had also arrived to join the group of investigators at the nightmarish scene on the Sunset Highway.

Tom Duffy and his fellow paramedics had quickly reassured themselves that the dead woman had been all alone in the van. Just as with Randy Blighton, breath had caught in their throats when they noticed the child's carseat behind the driver's seat of the van. They knew the woman was beyond their help; they did not know if a baby or a toddler lay somewhere in the darkest spaces of the van or was, perhaps, caught beneath a seat. They steeled themselves to feel with their bare hands all around the inside of the van, running their fingers through the rapidly cooling blood that had spattered, stained, and pooled there. Finally they were satisfied that the child who used that safety seat had not been present in the van when the woman died. The paramedics' hands and arms came away covered with the blood of the female victim.

"There was a lot of blood," Duffy would recall much later. "A pool of clotted blood -- a big circular pool on the carpet behind the passenger seat. There was blood on the ceiling and on the inside of the windows." Blood has its own smell, metallic, and that odor clung to the paramedics now.

No one knew who the dead woman was. No one knew what had happened to her. But Tom Duffy was certain of one thing. He had seen literally thousands of car wrecks, and he knew that he was not looking at the aftermath of an automobile accident; he was looking at a crime scene. "The mechanisms of injury -- the damage to this vehicle -- could not have produced what we found," he said later. "The blood on this person was dried and clotted. There was absolutely no sign of life."

The Oregon troopers came to a similar conclusion. A slight dent, a few shards of glass from a broken signal light, and a couple of paint chips out by the Jersey barriers that divided the freeway were the only signs that the van had hit anything. The woman hadn't died in an accident. Her injuries had nothing to do with this "wreck."

There are always acronyms for official records. Those on the scene at the Sunset Highway used familiar shortcuts now as they filled out forms: DOS -- Dead On Scene, MVA -- Motor Vehicle Accident, and finally POSS -- Possible Homicide. And because this bizarre incident seemed indeed to be a "POSS," Oregon State Police Sergeant Hinkley radioed in a request that detectives from the OSP Criminal Division respond to the scene. In Oregon the state police investigate homicides and other felo-nies as well as traffic accidents.

Detective Jerry Finch wasn't on call that night, but he was the first investigator the dispatcher could raise. Finch ran to his unmarked Ford LTD II and headed for the Cedar Mill home of Detective Jim Ayers. Ayers, in his mid-thirties, had been assigned to the Beaverton OSP station for three years and was just arriving home from an evening out when he heard the crunch of tires on gravel and saw Finch's car turn into his driveway. Finch told Ayers they had a "call out" to a possible homicide.

Jim Ayers had investigated all manner of felonies in his fourteen-year career with the Oregon State Police. Like most officers who hired on as troopers, he was tall and well muscled. He had thick, wavy hair and a rumbling deep voice. He had worked the road for eight years, investigating accidents. And like Tom Duffy, like all cops and all paramedics, he had seen too much tragedy. But he had also learned what was "normal" tragedy -- if there could be such a thing -- and what was "abnormal" tragedy.

Ayers had become an expert in both arson investigation and psychosexual crimes, and he had investigated innumerable homicides. Jerry Finch had a few years on him, both in age and in experience. Together the two men drove to the scene at 79th and the Sunset, not knowing what to expect. The best detectives are not tough; if they were, they would not have the special intuitive sense that enables them to see what laymen cannot. And Jim Ayers was one of the very best. But like his peers, he usually managed to hide his own pain over what one human can do to another behind a veneer of black humor and professional distance.

It was two minutes after 10 P.M. when Finch and Ayers arrived at the scene, and as Ayers gazed down at the slender woman who lay on the freeway shoulder, her face and head disfigured by some tremendous force that had bludgeoned her again and again, he was still the complete detective -- curious and contemplative.

The two detectives walked around the blue Toyota van and saw the minor damage to its right front end and where a turn signal lens was broken out. There was a "buckle" in the roof of the van on the right. That could be explained easily enough; it was unibody construction, and a blow to the front end would ripple back along the side. Randy Blighton was still on the scene and he told Finch and Ayers how he had found the van butting against the median barrier of the freeway. That would have broken the signal light. They found the signal lens itself lying on the freeway in the fast lane. And they also saw the beige purse that had been forcing the accelerator down before Blighton kicked it away. It would have been enough to keep the engine running while the car was in gear.

With flashlights Finch and Ayers looked into the van, playing light over the child's carseat, the blood spatter on the interior roof, the splash of blood on the hump over the transmission, and the pools of blood on the floor behind the front seats. A white plastic produce bag fluttered on the passenger-side floor. It too bore bloodstains.

The van would have to be processed in daylight, but Jim Ayers had already come to a bleak conclusion, based on the physical evidence he saw, and on Blighton's description of how he found the victim and his recollection that the driver's-side window had been rolled partway down. "I felt the victim had been beaten while she was in the vehicle," he would say later. "My conclusion was that whoever had beaten her had intended to send it [the van] across the eastbound lanes of the Sunset Highway so that it would be hit by other vehicles."

Had that happened, the cars approaching at fifty-five to sixty-five miles an hour would have rounded the curve and smashed into the driver's side of the Toyota van. Even if the van hadn't burst into flames, that would have destroyed every bit of evidence on the woman's body and in the vehicle itself. The massive head injuries she had suffered would have been attributed to the accident. Worse, in all likelihood, she would not have been the only fatality.

State policemen have seen too many chain reaction accidents in which a dozen or more people die. Met by the horrifying sight of another vehicle directly in front of them, drivers cannot stop or even take evasive action. Usually chain reaction pileups happen on foggy nights or when smoke from burning crops drifts across a highway. But this van, deliberately left crosswise in the fast lane of the Sunset, would have been like a brick wall appearing suddenly in the night. Clearly, whoever had bludgeoned the woman to death had not given a thought to how many more might die. All he or she had cared about was that the crime of murder would be covered up in a grinding collision of jagged steel, flying glass shards, and broken bodies.

The dead woman's purse contained her driver's license and other identifying documents -- or, rather, it contained some woman's identification. This woman, lying beside the road, was so disfigured by her beating that it was impossible to be sure that she was the woman whose picture appeared on the driver's license. However, given the laws of probability, Ayers and Finch were reasonably sure that the purse belonged to the victim. The address on her license was 231 N.E. Scott in Gresham, a suburb about as far east of downtown Portland as the accident scene was west.

Ayers and Finch had just dispatched Senior Trooper Al Carson to the Gresham address to notify the victim's next of kin of her death when Finch carefully lifted a checkbook from her purse. "Look," he commented to Ayers. "These checks are personalized, and the address is different than the one on her registration."

The checks bore the same name as the driver's license: Cheryl Keeton. However, the address imprinted on the checks was 2400 S.W. 81st, located on the West Slope -- only three-tenths of a mile from where they now stood.

The woman lying on the ground was probably Cheryl Keeton, whose date of birth was listed on her driver's license as October 27, 1949. That would make her less than a month away from her thirty-seventh birthday. The height and weight on the license seemed to fit the slender victim. Hair color didn't matter much anymore on a driver's license; women changed their hair shade so often. But it was listed as brown and the victim's hair appeared to be brown, although it was now matted with dried blood.

"I don't think she lived in Gresham," Finch told Ayers. "I think that's an old address. You hang in here, and I'll take a run up to the address on Eighty-first."

Oregon State Police Sergeant Greg Baxter radioed the Portland Police Department dispatcher, who relayed a message to Al Carson, calling him back from Gresham. The next of kin of the victim were no longer there.

Ayers was relieved to let Jerry Finch notify whoever might be waiting at the West Slope address for Cheryl Keeton to come home. Of all the responsibilities of a policeman's profession, that was always the hardest. Sometimes the survivors scream, and sometimes they stare, unbelieving, at the officers who bring them tragic news.

Ayers wanted to be sure that the tow truck driver from Jim Collins Towing understood that the Toyota van was a vital piece of evidence and should be hooked up to the tow rig with extreme care. Collins's own son, Harley, had arrived to remove the van from the edge of the Sunset. "I told him not to touch it any more than he had to -- and not to go inside at all," Ayers said later. "Not to strap the steering wheel the way they usually do..."

Harley Collins said he would be careful and promised to lock the van behind the cyclone fence of Jim Collins's personal yard so that no one could come near it. Ayers felt better hearing that. Although he didn't know the tow driver, he knew that the tow company's owner was reliable.

All the steps that were post-tragedy protocol had been followed. The investigators at the scene radioed a request for Eugene Jacobus, the Chief Deputy Medical Examiner for Washington County. The body was released to Jacobus at 11:35 P.M. The hands were "bagged," and Jacobus was careful to see that the body itself was placed in a fresh plastic "envelope" inside the heavier body pouch so that any trace evidence would be preserved. He also took possession of the victim's purse and locked it in a drawer in his office on Knox Street.