Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  It was a sunny October day when Loni Ann was finally able to get their car for the afternoon. Unerringly, almost instinctively, she retraced the road she had crawled along to reach the gas station and she found the place where Brad had left her; the same smell she had detected that night wafted in the air. The leaves of the trees were gold and russet now instead of the bright green they were in May. That night she had seen nothing but black, but she now knew where she had been.

  Loni Ann suddenly felt nauseated again, sicker than the alcohol had made her. Her own husband had pulled her out of their car, pushed her to this strip beside the road, and told her to stay there. Her back had been to the road. But only steps in front of her, in the place where she had reached out her hands and touched nothing, she could now see why. Brad had left her inches away from a sharp drop-off above the Duwamish River. If she had gone forward instead of back, she would have plunged thirty feet down onto the rocks or into the river, and almost certainly drowned.

  “I looked down and I felt sick,” she said a long time later. “I realized how close I came to walking off that cliff. . . .”

  Loni Ann drove home, the taste and smell of death in her mouth. If he ever found out where she had been, Brad would probably finish what she was quite sure he had meant to do that night. She thought back to when Brad had picked her up at his parents’ house the morning after he left her by the river. She wondered if he was only waiting for another day, another opportunity. How odd it was that things had gone on between them as they always had. He had to know what he did, but never spoke of it. And she cared for the apartment house and for Kait and Brent, and acceded to whatever Brad asked of her.

  She had loved him so much; now Loni Ann found it hard to remember love at all. Sex continued, but it was all for Brad. “He forced me to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it,” she said. When she finally gathered up enough courage to ask for a divorce, Brad listened coldly and then told her she would never be allowed to keep their children. He reminded her of that every time she repeated her request. “You’ll come crawling back to me,” he jeered.

  She could not leave her babies behind, and so she stayed, all the while trying to think of a way for the three of them to escape. Although Brad seemed to find Kait and Brent a nuisance and spent little time with them, he always reminded Loni Ann that they were his—that he would never let something that belonged to him go.

  Still, on the surface, everything appeared to be normal. No one knew how bad things were between them. Brad occasionally allowed Loni Ann to play softball with a local girls’ team, they took fishing trips to the ocean, and Loni Ann invited Brad’s father and sisters over for dinner.

  Perhaps inevitably, there were also dark undercurrents in Sanford and Rosemary’s marriage. Brad and his father were now such close confidants that he was fully aware that Sanford had begun an affair with a woman named Mary. He reportedly told his son that he was tired of Rosemary. And that may well have been true. “My mom was really out of hand,” their daughter Susan recalled. “She lost her temper and was hard to deal with.”

  Sanford traveled a great deal, all over Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. “You know,” Susan later said, “I never really did know what my dad did. I know that he designed storefronts; he was always bringing home blueprints to work on, and he was always gone, but to tell you precisely which stores—or where—I can’t remember.”

  To read Sanford’s letters to Rosemary and to hear of the gifts he gave her in 1972, it would have been hard to believe there was trouble in their marriage. He may have been devious, he may have felt guilty, or both. “My father bought my mother a new wedding ring, and it was loaded with diamonds,” Susan recalled. “And that was just before he left her.”

  When Rosemary visited her mother that summer at the Kanakanak Native Hospital in Dillingham, Alaska, where Ethel Edwards was working as a nutritionist, Sanford wrote letters to her that were almost as full of longing as those he had sent when he was a lovesick bridegroom in Fresno in 1946. He wrote her a stack of long letters, and all the time he was in love with another woman and trying to figure out a way to leave Rosemary and go to Mary. On July 22, Sanford wrote to her from their cabin in Darrington:

  Hi Sweetheart!

  . . . Sunday, Susan and I stood at the window in the airport waiting for you to look out of the plane but you didn’t. . . .

  The letter went on to tell of meals at Ethel’s, visits from Susan and Brad and Loni Ann.

  Brad and Loni Ann and their kids are sleeping out in the front yard in their new tent they bought. . . . Your nasturshims [sic] are all in bloom and are quite pretty. The hummingbirds were sure complaining about their feeder being empty, so I whipped up a batch and filled the jars. . . . Boy, it sure is lonesome around here. The cabin is so quiet. I’ll be glad when you get home. . . . Well, Mama, it’s 12:30 in the morning and I’m tired. . . . So good night, sweet dreams, and I love you. . . . Your Old Man

  In other letters Sanford wrote about pets, family, cooking, gardening, and how much he missed his wife. He kidded her that their living room looked like a warehouse for Luzier—the cosmetic line that Rosemary sold. If his plan was to reassure her that everything was normal at home, his letters were masterpieces of deceit. The only thing that seemed to trouble Sanford was his father. At the age of forty-eight, he still had a prickly relationship with Dr. Paul Cunningham. He wrote about it to Rosie.

  Friday, I came up to the cabin but my Dad had to complicate things for me. He called me at the office and wanted to have me drop off the air compressor for him. I told him I was going straight to the cabin after work. This didn’t faze him at all. He wanted to use that compressor so I had to go back home and help him load it on his pickup. I sure was unhappy about that.

  Paul Cunningham was the father who had kicked his first wife out of the house and farmed their sons Sanford and Jimmy out for their whole childhood, and Sanford, at least, had never quite forgiven him. Otherwise, Sanford’s letters were full of love and plans for a future with Rosie.

  “I know it’s hard to understand how my father could do that—write such nice letters when he was planning to leave my mother,” Susan said later. “But you have to understand that my father always prided himself on his letter writing. He always wrote long letters full of news. But, most of all, the way he did it was the only way he could have left my mother. If she’d known—she would have feigned illness, she would have screamed and made scenes.”

  For the two weeks in July and August of 1972 that Rosemary was in Alaska, Sanford wrote every third day or so. She had no inkling that her husband was not as lonely as he sounded. “I haven’t seen anyone or called anyone. . . . But there again,” Sanford wrote, “you’re the only one I want to talk to anyway. Or at least be around. I really miss you honey. I didn’t think it would be this lonesome. I guess I love you so much and you’re so much of my life . . . I really am anxious for you to get home again so I can hold you in my arms and squeeze you till you holler.”

  Rosemary came home from Alaska to a husband who was, apparently, devoted to her. But sometime later that year, Sanford told Brad that what he really wanted was to live with Mary. Brad thought that was a reasonable plan and offered to help his father defect from his marriage with a minimal loss of assets. Brad was twenty-two when he learned that his father was involved with another woman. He hated his mother so much that it probably gave him pleasure to know that his father was cheating on her. The two men talked over Rosemary’s head, using double entendres and winking. And she didn’t have a clue.

  Although her marriage had been far from perfect, Rosie loved her husband. She was touched and amazed when Sanford bought her a new car, a Pontiac GTO. To top that off, he and Brad urged her to consider taking another vacation. She looked from one to the other in surprise. She had no idea that either her son or her husband cared whether she needed a vacation.

  “You’ve worked so hard, Mom,” Brad said. “We think you deserve a vacation.”

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bsp; “Why don’t you fly down and visit your sister Jewel in California?” Sanford urged.

  After a lot of coaxing, Rosemary agreed that it would be wonderful if she could take a trip like that. Her husband and son helped her pack and waved goodbye.

  She was gone for two weeks. And as soon as she had left, Sanford called his children and said, “You gotta come help me move.” Susan would acknowledge that she helped pack. Her father was in such a panic to get out without a scene. It seemed the only way. She knew how bitterly her parents fought; they were never going to stay together.

  When Rosemary returned two weeks later, she was rested and anxious to get back to Sanford. But her homecoming was anything but happy. When she opened the front door of their house on 128th Street, she thought at first they had been robbed. Everything of any value was gone. The place had been ransacked, almost totally cleaned out. About the only objects left behind were her “Indian” things—stools with deer legs, old photos, “Dream catchers,” a few linens, and some furniture that was almost worn out.

  That brutal trick was the way Rosemary found out about Sanford’s new woman. Her husband had left her and taken everything they had bought for their home. And Brad, her own son, had helped him do it. Susan’s part in the deception was minuscule, and Rosemary may not have known that she helped at all.

  Rosemary had not been the perfect wife and, certainly, she was not a perfect mother. But the fact that Brad had plotted against her probably hurt her as much as losing her husband to another woman. The men in her life, the ones she had loved and looked to for protection, had betrayed her. She turned now to her nephew Gary, Jimmy’s son.

  In her despair, Rosemary visited her nephew Gary and his wife for hours every day and wept and wailed about Sanford’s infidelity. She begged Gary to spy on him and his new girlfriend. Maybe he could find out something she could use to get her husband back. Gary held her hand and commiserated with her, but he wasn’t about to become a private eye. He knew that the break was final.

  “Brad introduced that woman to Sanford,” Rosemary sobbed, almost unbelieving. “That woman worked with Associated Grocers in Yakima and I didn’t know one thing about it.”

  Sanford moved in with Mary and in time they were married. He helped raise her daughter. In their divorce settlement, Sanford got the house on 128th Street and Rosemary held title to their cabin in Darrington. She never planted nasturtiums there again, and eventually she transferred it back to Sanford.

  After that, it was a long, long time before Rosemary trusted anyone. And in the end all the members of the Cunningham family would be completely estranged from one another. Some would be dead. Others would not speak. And if Brad was full of guile and cruelty in his marriage to Loni Ann, he had an expert mentor in his father.

  16

  Much to Brad’s disgust, Loni Ann had always maintained her friendship with his older sister Ethel. An assertive woman, somewhat garrulous, and surprisingly strong given the experiences of her childhood, Ethel was one of the few women in Brad’s life who were not afraid of him. In desperation, Loni Ann went to Ethel in September 1972 and confided that she had begged Brad for a divorce but that at first he would not even consider it. Then he had told her, “Fine, you want a divorce? Go for it. You’ll never keep these kids. I’ll get them. How dare you try to get away from me?”

  “Brad laid out a scenario for me,” Loni Ann would say later. “He told me what would happen to me if I left him. He said that I was a slut. He said he could kill me in our apartment and make it look like a rape killing, and that no one would ever suspect him.”

  “I believed her,” Ethel would confirm. “We moved her and the kids out of her apartment that night.”

  “You have to understand,” Loni Ann said, “that I got to a point with the relationship that I believed nothing worse could happen to me by going than by staying. . . . I had become ‘punch happy.’ I could never tell when he was going to be Dr. Jekyll and when he was going to be Mr. Hyde.”

  Loni Ann had no friends who were in a position to help her, and there were no women’s shelters to go to in the early 1970s. She was totally dependent on Brad, and he had always been the one who kept track of whatever money they had and who paid the bills. “I had no survival knowledge to exist on my own—but I had to,” Loni Ann said.

  Surprisingly, Brad didn’t put up much of a fight when she finally left him. He was finished with her anyway. Their divorce was final in May 1973, awarded to Loni Ann on her filing of “cruel and unusual treatment.” Initially they had an agreement to share custody of Kait and Brent, although the children would live with their mother.

  Loni Ann moved to Oregon to attend college. She hoped eventually to graduate from Washington State and then go on to graduate school so that she could support herself and her children. At the moment, they had virtually no resources beyond what Brad was willing to send her. And even that she could never really count on.

  In 1974, however, Brad told her that he had changed his mind about letting her have Kait and Brent. She had been accepted at Washington State University in Pullman that summer, and Brad had shown no concern that she and the children would be moving three hundred miles east of Seattle. “He waited until within four weeks of my scheduled move before trying for the court order,” Loni Ann recalled. “He contended that he was not interfering with my attending the university. . . . If I wanted to attend school . . . fine—the children could live with him. The court order was denied. Then he filed for custody a second time.”

  Actually, Brad had never intended that Loni Ann should have Kait and Brent. He just needed some time to build a life in which he felt he would have a better chance of having the children awarded to him. When he had done that, he initiated legal action to gain full custody of his children. Even his own parents were never quite sure why. Loni Ann was a good mother, and Brad could be an impatient, punishing father. But Brad wanted his children, and the struggle to possess them—actually to repossess them—was, in Loni Ann’s recall, “desperate . . . emotional.”

  Brad had warned her any number of times that if she ever left him, he would take the children from her. Still, he had let them go with her and she had begun to hope cautiously that Brad’s threat to fight her for the children had been empty. Now she realized he had only been biding his time. There was nothing he could do to her that would hurt her more than taking her children and he knew it.

  Brad had married again. Rapidly. He told associates that he felt he would have a much better chance of gaining full custody of Kait and Brent if he was a married man. Because he knew mothers were awarded custody more often than single fathers, Brad’s second trip to the altar was probably nothing more than a marriage of convenience. His second wife, Cynthia Marrasco,* was fifteen years older than he was and as different from Loni Ann as she could possibly be. A teacher, divorced after a long marriage to a wealthy attorney, Cynthia lived in a luxurious six-bedroom estatelike home in an upscale suburb of Seattle. She was a striking woman with black hair. One of Brad’s sisters thought Cynthia resembled their mother, Rosemary, a great deal.

  Cynthia was over forty and Brad was only twenty-five, but he seemed older because his presence was larger than life and he was tremendously self-confident. At first glance, they did not appear to be the mismatched couple that they were. She was very attractive and looked younger, and he could have passed for a man in his thirties. Cynthia had three sons, of whom the youngest, Nicholas,* was in grade school when she met Brad through their mutual interest in real estate ventures. Because she was so devoted to her own boys, she could empathize with Brad’s passion to get his children back. He seemed utterly bereft without them.

  Brad told Cynthia he was worried sick about Loni Ann’s complete disregard for Kait’s and Brent’s well-being. He said he had seen some small children playing alone in a park and had walked over to see if they were okay. “They were my own children,” Brad moaned. “And Loni Ann’s out there on the highway hitchhiking with them. Can you imagine th
e danger that puts them in?” Cynthia was appalled. She already had the perfect home for raising children, and Brad had the prospects, she believed, for a splendid future in the business world. Together they could make a team that would help Brad regain custody of his children, and he would help her raise her three boys. Beyond that, she felt they would work well together in business. Beginning in March 1973, Cynthia lent Brad money every two or three months—to help pay his child support and for investments. By January of 1974, he owed her almost fifteen thousand dollars.

  There are few women facing their forties alone who would not have been dazzled by the attention Brad paid to Cynthia Marrasco. After their wedding ceremony on June 4, 1974, which was legal if not lavish, Brad moved into Cynthia’s lovely home. But the idyllic melding of families that Cynthia had pictured never materialized. Almost from the beginning, her own sons were resentful of this young man in his twenties who suddenly appeared in their lives, moved into their home, and started ordering them around. Brad wasn’t that much older than Cynthia’s oldest son and he certainly wasn’t a tactful, considerate father figure; he was impatient and mercurial.

  Cynthia did her best to make the marriage work. Brad had often talked about how much he liked to camp out and about his love for the Yakima area. Cynthia bought a Volkswagen camper and all the gear needed for outdoor trips. The few good times they had together were their camping trips. Unconsciously, perhaps, Brad was emulating the family he had grown up in. Rosie and Sanford’s home life was marked by argument and punishment—but their times out camping were always happy and without strife.

  Now, when Brad appeared in custody hearings for Kait and Brent, he would have the advantage of being a married man living with his wife and three stepsons, while Loni Ann was a divorced woman and a student who lived in low-rent apartments, usually with another young woman so that she could make ends meet. And it was true that she had hitchhiked with her toddlers. Someone had poured sugar into her gas tank so she couldn’t drive her car and she had no choice but to hitchhike.