Dead by Sunset

by Ann Rule

“We still kept her as our baby-sitter for months after that,” Brad replied.

  Sardo’s expression betrayed none of his private thoughts, gave no hint of the weighing and evaluating of information that was going on in his mind. Brad plunged ahead, figuratively tearing Cheryl apart so that she seemed to be a woman with no virtues whatsoever—beyond intelligence and a vigorous work ethic.

  Early on, Brad had described himself as the “primary parent.” But now he recalled that he had begun that role only after his business reverses. “My bankruptcy changed me—almost destroyed me. . . . I concluded that a career and money are just not that important and that my primary commitment to the children [takes precedence]. . . . I will not work more than forty hours a week now.”

  So, Sardo realized, Brad had not been the primary parent until the last year or so—if at all. His subject continued to talk volubly. A few moments later, Brad reversed himself again and said he had a job offer from U.S. Bank that he intended to accept, although he would also keep his current job. Sardo noted that Brad seemed unaware that a second job would mean he would be working far more than forty hours a week, and that there would be little, if any, time left for his sons. How, then, could Brad be the primary parent? Sardo didn’t ask the question aloud. And Brad still hadn’t recognized the rampant inconsistencies in his statements.

  Brad had, of course, fathered a number of children, and he listed his offspring from his three previous marriages, Brent, who was fifteen, was currently living with him. With intense feeling in his voice, Brad recalled his deep concern about Brent and Kait when they were young. He said he had begged their mother to change her “hippie” lifestyle—for the children’s sake. He had been upset at the idea of his two little children being raised in the laissez-faire ambiance of “a commune.”

  Brad admitted he had married his second wife only because he needed to be married so he could fight for custody of Brent and Kait. He always had done, and always would do, whatever he had to to make sure his children were in the safest environment possible. When the judge in his first custody hearing ruled against him, he had quickly ended his marriage of convenience.

  Sardo mentally counted on his fingers. Neither of Brad’s first two marriages had come about because he loved his brides. Loni Ann Ericksen had been pregnant and Cynthia Marrasco had been used as a means to an end, an end not achieved. There were also some glaring gaps in Brad’s review of his life as a parent. Although he claimed to have loved his third wife, Lauren, he didn’t explain to Sardo why he had left her when she was pregnant with his child—except to hint that Cheryl had seduced him. He said that he had, naturally, taken care of that little girl, Amy, who was born after he left Lauren for Cheryl.

  When Brad walked out of Dr. Sardo’s office, he was as confident as when he walked in, and quite secure in his belief that he had made a good impression. He had been calm—and yet he had shown his profound feelings for his sons appropriately. Cheryl would be nervous; she would not come off well. She was too intense, too scattered, and far too frantic in her fear that he was going to take Jess, Michael, and Phillip away from her.

  On March 24 Cheryl presented herself to be tested and it was immediately obvious that she was nothing like the foul-mouthed shrew, the sex-driven huntress, that Brad had described. If she was that woman, she certainly hid it well. Dr. Sardo found Cheryl’s demeanor much different from her husband’s. She was very intelligent and verbal—just as he had found Brad to be; no surprises there. However, Cheryl was far more responsive to his questions. Unlike Brad, she did not immediately launch into her side of the case, but rather let Sardo phrase questions for her to answer.

  Cheryl said that she felt that their temporary custody truce was working “fairly well.” But she agreed with Brad that all negotiations in the past to seek a permanent order had been utterly fruitless. These two areas were the only ones where Cheryl’s perceptions matched Brad’s. And although Brad had smiled and told Sardo that he and Cheryl could work out custody without any outside counseling, Cheryl shook her head in alarm. They could not. They had tried and it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working at all; it never could. She was insistent that they had to have someone mediate.

  Brad, Cheryl said, had become extremely difficult to deal with; even the most minor issues would spark yet another huge fight between them. In a sense, she had been surprised by Brad’s stubborn and violent response to her custody requests. “In the past, when we discussed divorce,” she said, “Brad sometimes said he wouldn’t even see the boys, and I couldn’t deal with that.”

  As unhappy as she had become in her marriage, she could not rob her sons of their father. But currently that was not a concern. Brad was resisting every one of her suggestions about the boys, wanting to be part of the most minuscule decisions about their lives—so much so that they seemed unable to reach any resolution of their children’s future.

  Cheryl told Sardo that she had no problem any longer in accepting that her marriage was over. She was at peace with her decision to divorce. Her marriage was completely dead. There was nothing in the world that could revive the love she had believed she and Brad felt for each other, and she was anxious to get on with her life.

  As for the “primary parent” question, Cheryl recalled for Sardo all the times Brad had left her and the boys. She had always been the parent who stayed with the children. She told him that it was she who had been alone with her sons most of the time since October 1982, when she returned to Seattle from Houston to resume her law practice to help fund Brad’s business in Texas. Until they had moved to Portland in early 1985, Brad had lived away from them, except for short visits.

  When Sardo asked her to describe Brad, Cheryl said that he was very demanding, very harsh, and used physical discipline—including beatings with a belt—on the boys. Pondering his parenting stance, she finally characterized it as “militaristic.” The father Cheryl described was like a Marine D.I., expecting his sons to obey instantly and without question. In his testimony, Sardo didn’t mention the child’s coffin in their garage, or the dead animal “trophies” Brad had the boys bring back from their trips to Yakima. Perhaps Cheryl worried about what Dr. Sardo might think of her for having allowed such things to go on.

  Cheryl told Sardo that she was the caregiver, she was the nurturer, although she had always tried not to say anything negative about Brad to the boys. He was their father, and she had wanted them to know him and respect him—even when he was always gone. Little boys needed to believe in their father.

  But even when Brad was unemployed, Cheryl said, he had never stayed home to care for the boys. He was always leaving on trips—to Yakima, to Houston, to California, to wherever—always working on some mysterious projects. She had had to hire baby-sitters. Brad was simply not a man who would submit to being tied down with regular child care.

  In the weeks to come, in sessions with Cheryl and Brad together, Dr. Sardo would observe the interaction between them. When Cheryl was in the same room with Brad, she seemed to shrink and become very quiet. Sardo was surprised. Although Cheryl was the attorney, it was obviously Brad who had a “very intrusive style” in transacting. Sardo noted that Brad applied pressure in a great many different areas at different times, controlling the conversation as floodgates control the ebb and flow of a river. If he had not known better, he would have thought that Brad, not Cheryl, was the experienced trial attorney.

  Sardo also saw that Cheryl was actually a “little intimidated” by her husband. She made no attempt at all to negotiate with Brad alone. He ran the show. Very occasionally, Cheryl stood up to him on issues that were vitally important to her. There were certain lines that she had drawn in her mind and she would not let Brad cross over. Even so, Cheryl was always the one on the defensive. It was she who sat braced for Brad’s next verbal assault.

  In the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests that Sardo administered—tests consisting of more than five hundred carefully worded questions to be answered “yes” or “no
”—Brad’s and Cheryl’s personalities emerged clearly, like mountain peaks thrusting through clouds. The MMPI test has many deliberate “lie” questions which appear several times. Anyone who tries to “fool” the test tends to answer the way he believes the test designers want him to, and that “desire to please” is transparently clear to those who chart test results.

  Dr. Sardo’s evaluation of Brad’s MMPI test results was that he “presented himself as an individual who was very much in control, very selective about the information he was providing, and very concerned with trying to provide an appropriate picture. The picture he tried to put forth was one of sensitivity and tenderness.” But Sardo also detected other traits in Brad’s MMPI scores. The test revealed that he was a “very guarded individual, who does not allow intimacy with others, and who has little genuine insight.”

  Sardo noted that Brad had a strong tendency to “project” onto someone else undesirable traits he himself might have. Either he had virtually no awareness of his own personality, or he contrived to slough off negative traits and attribute them to others. Moreover, Brad Cunningham, whose facade was that of an extremely strong—even macho—male, scored much higher than normal in feminine traits.

  Brad thought that he had aced the MMPI, that he had snowed Sardo completely and succeeded in convincing him that Cheryl was a temperamental bitch who cared more for her career and her sex life than she did for her sons.

  Sardo had seen an entirely different woman.

  Cheryl’s MMPI test scores supported the statements she had given in her earlier interviews with Dr. Sardo. Although she jousted very successfully with males in a profession where females were still in the minority, the test revealed that Cheryl identified with a “very traditional female role.” She was far less guarded and defensive than Brad in her answers. She showed herself to be a person with a great deal of energy, and also as someone who could be impulsive. And most interesting to Dr. Sardo, given the reason for the MMPI tests, Cheryl’s answers disclosed who she was at her very center. Despite her very high-profile and assertive career, she was at heart a mother, a wife, a nurturer.

  Weighing what he knew about Brad and Cheryl, Dr. Sardo next visited with their sons. Jess was six, Michael four, and Phillip two. And it was clear that someone had taken very good care of them. Remarkably untouched by the custody squabbles that swarmed around them like angry bees, they were active and playful little boys. When Dr. Sardo asked them who they lived with, Jess said, “Mom.” Michael said, “Mom—and Dad.” When he asked them which parent was more fun, Michael instantly said, “Mom!” Jess said, “Mostly Mom,” and then quickly said, “Mostly Dad.”

  Sardo found the Cunningham children spontaneous, alert, curious, and extremely intelligent. The two older boys said they could play chess and did so with both of their parents. In fact, the boys seemed so well adjusted that Sardo could only conclude that both Brad and Cheryl must be concerned with their children’s well-being—just as each of them claimed. Despite the struggle he had observed between Brad and Cheryl, he could not find that either parent’s behavior had been detrimental to the boys; they certainly seemed to be unstressed and happy little kids.

  In the couple’s joint sessions with Dr. Sardo, Cheryl kept hoping that she and Brad could reach a reasonable custody agreement, but Brad would not give an inch. Time after time, Sardo watched Brad flare up and stride toward the door, saying flatly, “I’ll see you in court.” Why did Brad have to make this process so much worse than it needed to be? he wondered.

  Dr. Sardo’s decision wasn’t easy. It never was, but this couple was more difficult to evaluate than most. In good conscience, he could not say one parent was a monster and the other a saint. He couldn’t even say that one parent would be harmful to the children. It was just that the odds were that Cheryl had been the more consistent parent, and he recommended that the children would probably be better off with their mother.

  As to reaching a rational and equitable division of the parents’ time with Jess, Michael, and Phillip, Sardo realized that was never going to happen. In the end, although both Cheryl and Brad had said they were seeking a way to achieve joint custody of the boys, Sardo was unable to effect any happy resolution at all. He had to decide, then, which parent would be deemed the parent.

  Dr. Sardo determined that Cheryl had always been the major caregiver. She had been more reliable, and showed fewer inconsistencies in her statements. And she had been all alone with her children for long periods while Brad had pursued his business interests. Much of that time, Brad had been more than a thousand miles away, and it was hard to picture him as the key parent. Moreover, Sardo suspected that Brad’s sense of competition over the boys was a major factor in this bitter and ongoing dispute. He was quite clearly a man who wanted to win any battle he was engaged in.

  He did not win this battle. Cheryl was deemed the primary parent of Jess, Michael, and Phillip Cunningham. The question now was whether Brad would let go. He wanted his three boys. He wanted to shut their mother completely out of their lives if he could, and he was still determined to accomplish that.

  27

  Cheryl had married Brad—as Johnny Cash and June Carter sang in their country song—“in a fever.” She had stayed with him years longer than most women would have, almost blindly determined to make their marriage last. At first, his life before he came into hers hadn’t mattered. And later, she was quite probably afraid to go poking around into Brad’s business, too wary to search for the secrets she was sure existed. But now, as she met Brad on the battlefield of divorce, she set about turning over the rocks of her estranged husband’s past.

  Until the summer of 1986, Cheryl had known only one of Brad’s previous three wives—her onetime sorority sister and former friend Lauren Swanson. After what she and Brad had done to Lauren, Cheryl could hardly expect to go to her now and ask for help. Brad had made Lauren sound like the next thing to an ax murderess. Belatedly Cheryl understood that she had been duped into believing what Brad wanted her to believe. He had lied about Lauren, just as he was lying about her now. No, Lauren had just been another of Brad’s wife-victims. And Cheryl wondered how many more there might be. How many women had Brad victimized in the past? More important, how many would talk about it?

  Cheryl had never really had a reason—or an excuse—to contact Loni Ann Cunningham before. Both Kait and Brent had visited in Cheryl’s various homes, but Brad had allowed Cheryl precious little say about their care. They were not her children, they were his. Cheryl hadn’t known about Kait’s terror during her months with her father in Houston. Had she known, she would have tried to rescue the little girl—but Kait’s ordeal in Houston was only one more of Brad’s secrets.

  During this bitter summer of 1986, Cheryl knew that Brent was in Portland and living with Brad in the Madison Tower. Cheryl feared for him. He was a nice young man, not even sixteen yet. He didn’t have Brad’s aggressive, superconfident personality—nothing like it. He could be so easily crushed by the sheer force of his father.

  Loni Ann Cunningham wasn’t easy to locate; Cheryl discovered that Brad’s first wife had done her best to hide from him for more than two decades. Her address was not listed in public records. It took weeks for Cheryl to find Loni Ann in Brooklyn, New York, where she was working as a kinesiology therapist. Cheryl called to warn her that Brad’s apartment was not the best place for Brent to be living. Although Loni Ann was worried, there was little she could do. Brent had gone to school in Brooklyn until his freshman year in high school. With his red hair and blue eyes, he had stuck out like a sore thumb, the only fair-haired student in a school where every other student had brown eyes and black hair. “They walk around me as if I spoke a foreign language,” he told his mother, and he begged to go back to the Northwest to live.

  Loni Ann had hoped that Brent was faring well with his father. He was a son, and Brad had always treated his sons better than his daughters. Although Loni Ann was still afraid, she did give Cheryl some details about
her own life with Brad. She recounted the bitter custody hearings for Brent and Kait. Cheryl was even able to get a half-promise from Loni Ann that she might give a deposition to help in her own custody struggle.

  Slowly, very slowly, after all her years with Brad, Cheryl began to uncover the real truth about the man she had married, and to learn the almost unbelievable story of the years before he came into her life. Brad had never allowed her to know his mother or his sisters. True, he had taken Cheryl to some of the Cunningham family reunions, but his mother, Rosemary, had never been there—she had long since been banished. Brad had never wanted to talk about his mother and instantly quashed any mention of her. And he preferred that Cheryl maintain a very low profile at the family celebrations, and not mention her career. So she had said scarcely anything, just engaged in woman-talk about babies and recipes. The men had seemed to dictate the way the reunions would go. The women brought the food and stayed in their place.

  Cheryl knew almost nothing about Brad’s sisters, Ethel and Susan. He had said they weren’t worth knowing. He had cared about his father, and he had suffered the presence of his father’s wife Mary because Sanford wanted her with him. The rest of his family hadn’t really existed for Brad. It was the same with his Indian roots. Brad didn’t want to talk about them and he never wanted Cheryl to ask questions about his relatives.

  In her legal cases, Cheryl had always been so meticulous in her research that she was prepared for any eventuality. In her personal life, she had chosen to believe what Brad told her about his childhood, his family, his mother, his sisters, his ex-wives. At first she hadn’t questioned him because she loved him. Later she was cautious about making waves. But now she jotted down notes and the names of people who might testify in her divorce case. If it got nasty—and she was quite sure it would—she would have a list of potentially devastating witnesses who could recall the days when Brad Cunningham was part of their lives.