Golden Rule

When Ann Rule takes the podium at Auntie’s Bookstore Monday, expect her to be a bit coy.

She may start out something like this:

“I’m going to tell you tonight about a man who was a football star, who was a millionaire in his 20s, who was married to and had affairs with a number of beautiful women, who was charismatic and charming, who killed one of his wives, who had to do it in a very tightly circumscribed time period where he had to leave his home, meet the woman, commit the murder, get home without getting obvious blood on him and be back in his home and seemingly calm when the news came that she was dead.”

And the clincher, of course, will be that the man she’s talking about is not O.J. Simpson.

But forgive Rule her sense of drama. For she was working on her newest book, “Dead By Sunset,” which tells the sordid story of a convicted murderer named Brad Cunningham, a long time before someone ever took a knife to that more famous ex-football star’s exwife and her friend.

“It’s just so weird,” Rule says by phone from her son’s Seattle-area home. “I started it a full year before Nicole (Brown Simpson) and Ron Goldman were killed. And as I was working on it, I thought, ‘Boy, are there ever some parallels.”’

Of course, that shouldn’t some as any big surprise. Rule, an ex-Seattle policewoman who began her writing career as a single mother of four, has immersed herself in the world of sociopaths for the past 25 years. Some are bound to be similar.

Rule first wrote about them first in various true-crime magazines - you know, the kind with lurid covers, graphic photos and stories about the most twisted kinds of murders you can imagine. And some you can’t begin to imagine.

She stepped up in both income and reputation when she began writing books, the most famous of which remains “The Stranger Beside Me.” That book detailed her friendship with a friendly, good-looking guy who worked with her on a Seattle crisis hotline in the early ‘70s, a guy who turned out to be a serial killer. His name: Ted Bundy.

From there, Rule has gone on to write 12 books in all, all but one of which study one murderer or another. That lone non-crime effort is a coffee-table book titled “Beautiful Seattle.”

“There aren’t any murders in it at all,” she says, as if apologizing.

No problem. The others make up for it, though “Dead By Sunset” is hardly a menu of murder. It involves only one corpse, one frightening suspect and one very bizarre trial.

But at least one television network, NBC, found the story so intriguing that it has adapted it for a miniseries. “Dead By Sunset,” starring Ken Olin (“thirtysomething”), Annette O’Toole and John Terry, will be broadcast Nov. 19-20.

Rule’s book begins one warm evening in late September 1986, when a passing motorist nearly hits a stalled van on a busy Portland highway. Inside, he finds the bloody body of a woman.

It ends on Dec. 22, 1994, when Brad Cunningham is found guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Cheryl Keeton.

In between, Rule tracks down the two Cunninghams: the one he presented to the various women he seduced, and the one he turned out to really be - the one capable of murdering anyone who stood in his way.

The similarities with the O.J. case are compelling. First of all, no direct evidence linked Cunningham to Keeton’s bludgeoned corpse.

“They’re both what I call momand-pop murders where the usual evidence doesn’t help,” Rule says. “Because you would expect it to be there, you know, the hairs and the

blood and the fibers and the semen, whatever.”

Second, Keeton and Brown Simpson sent out the same message to anyone who would listen. “Both Cheryl and Nicole told people again and again, ‘He’s going to kill me. If I die, it will be Brad or it will have been O.J. who killed me.”’

Further, Rule says, “They were both feisty women. They were assertive women. Cheryl was one of the best litigating attorneys that her firm had ever had, and she was just 36 when she died. And people said, ‘If you knew her in the courtroom, if you knew her the way we did, you could not imagine that anyone could have terrified her to the extent that Brad did.’ But he just wore her down. And I think Nicole had gotten the same way. Everywhere she turned, O.J. was there. And with Cheryl, it was Brad.”

There was even a racial aspect to the case. Cunningham is half Colville Indian, a fact that he made little mention of - he’d even undergone plastic surgery in an attempt to erase some of his Native American features - until he got on the stand to cross-examine his young sons.

“Of course, Brad was willing to sacrifice anybody, including his own children,” Rule says.

But Cunningham and Simpson are different in two big ways: One, like Bundy, Cunningham tried to defend himself; two, not surprisingly, Cunningham was found guilty.

“I’ve talked to Brad’s jury since,” Rule says, “and he totally turned them off. He was inappropriate, his tears came too quickly and left too quickly. They just didn’t believe him.”

And Rule is convinced of this: “I fully believe that if O.J. had gotten on the stand and not had that high-powered legal team, he would have been convicted. And, conversely, had Brad been able to keep his mouth shut and been able to use the quarter-million-dollars worth of lawyers that the state of Oregon paid for him, he probably would have walked, too.”

Rule, who consciously attempts to avoid the grisly aspects of murder in favor of the psychological makeup of murderers, takes to her task as one would a duty. She once questioned the worth of a career that seemed to be little more than making a living off other people’s tragedies, but then a therapist cleared her conscience.

“What matters,” he told her, “is how you feel about people.”

And, he might have added, what you are able to do for them.

“Some years ago,” Rule says, “I realized that I probably saved more lives by warning young women that just because a guy’s good-looking doesn’t mean he’s safe. The nicest people are often the most prone to being victims because we do want to rush forward and help people who are handicapped. And, too, women are always waiting for the prince to come along, and when he does - and I’ll put myself among the group - we want to believe the things he’s telling us.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos