Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Lauren knew that Cheryl had left Dan and was living in an apartment in Madison Park. Her mind raced as she realized that all her fears had come true. Brad was still talking. He told her that he would be moving in with Cheryl. And Lauren, now six months pregnant, would be living by herself in the condo that she and Brad had agreed to buy. Brad’s instructions were as crisp and deliberate as if he were pointing out the floor-plan for an apartment house. It wasn’t just hard for Lauren to believe, it was impossible. Couples didn’t get married, plan for a new baby and their first home, and get divorced—all in less than a year. Men didn’t walk away and leave their wives pregnant and alone. But Brad was going to do just that. He was resolute. This was the way it was going to be.

  “It was an immediate separation,” Lauren recalled, her pain blunted by the passing of years, “in that he basically never moved his belongings from the [old] condominium to the new condominium in the University District.” It was a nightmare for her. It was incomprehensible. “I had given up my teaching contract and was saying goodbye to my third-grade class, so that when Brad finally notified me that he was going to be moving in with Cheryl, I was basically unemployed, six months pregnant, and living in a condominium that cost four hundred dollars a month with no way to pay.”

  Had Lauren had any early warning from Brad that their marriage was over, she would never have resigned from her job. Under the Teachers’ Credit Union benefits, she would have been eligible for maternity leave with full pay and medical benefits. She would have had a secure job waiting for her return, a career that would help her support her child. Brad knew all that and yet he had sat back and watched her cut herself off without so much as a word. Worse, he had urged her to resign.

  “He left me financially stranded,” Lauren remembered. “I ended up going to the bank that held the mortgage on the condominium where I was living. Actually I went in when I was eight months pregnant and sat down with the vice president and described the situation. I said that I was confident that I would get some sort of settlement from the divorce. Unbelievably, the bank carried me through the divorce and let me stay in the condominium.”

  Over that lonely Christmas of 1977 and into the first months of 1978, Lauren was furious with Cheryl. She was probably angrier at her old friend than she was at the husband who had walked out on her. There was another cruelty that had been inflicted on her. “When Cheryl separated from Dan—and I am confident that she and Brad were then involved in an intimate relationship,” Lauren said, “Brad and I were the ones that helped her move into her new apartment and carried her furniture in . . . just some memories that are sort of hard to stomach.”

  Lauren hoped never to see or talk to Cheryl again. What good would words or explanations do? What had happened had happened. But a few weeks after Lauren found herself alone, she did see Cheryl again. Even as she still carried his unborn child, Brad had begun divorce proceedings against her, and Cheryl came with Brad to the tiny condo where Lauren now lived. “She was the person to hand me the divorce documents,” Lauren said. “That was salt in the wound.”

  After seeing Brad’s smug face as he watched Cheryl present her with divorce papers, Lauren realized that Brad had really left her, that he wasn’t just going through a temporary lapse. He loved Cheryl and not her. That loss was bad enough. The loss of Cheryl’s friendship was difficult too. Her behavior was totally alien to the person Lauren had known for almost a decade. It was as if she were hypnotized. She had never known Cheryl to do—or even say—an unkind thing before.

  Lauren could not have imagined that the day would come when she would forgive Cheryl, when she would begin to understand why Cheryl had changed so completely from her sorority sister and confidante and dear friend into the woman who had stolen her husband and wrecked her life. There would even come a day when Lauren would feel sorry for Cheryl.

  18

  If Lauren assumed that Brad was completely out of her life—that he had abandoned all interest in her—she was woefully mistaken. Brad was not finished with her. She still had things he wanted. Lauren had legal claim to some of his real estate holdings. But more than that, more than anything, she was carrying his child. Brad was still fighting Loni Ann to win back Kait and Brent, and he wanted this child too. He was a “child keeper,” a man obsessed with owning all the children he had sired.

  Even before Lauren gave birth, Brad filed for custody of the baby. And although she was hugely pregnant and struggling to survive financially, he began to fight her in one court hearing after another for property he considered rightly his. She met him in court or in their attorneys’ offices for almost a dozen hearings and depositions.

  Lauren had naively hired an attorney who would have been perfectly adequate for a simple divorce, but Brad had never had a simple divorce. Lauren’s attorney asked her if there were any marital assets that she might still be able to claim, and she remembered that she and Brad had a joint bank account that had twelve thousand dollars in it. The attorney took Lauren at once to the bank so she could withdraw the money; with that done, he was confident that she would now have something to live on. Brad was livid when he found the twelve thousand dollars missing. He filed to freeze money in Lauren’s account—successfully—and she could use none of the twelve thousand dollars to take care of herself as she drew closer and closer to giving birth.

  Brad battled with Lauren over everything. She had an oriental rug—a rug that had been in her family for years before they passed it on to her at her wedding. Now Brad claimed that it belonged to him. He even deposed Lauren’s mother in his efforts to get it away from Lauren.

  Lauren’s original attorney saw that she was in for a terrible courtroom struggle. “Within a couple of weeks,” she recalled, “he told me that I needed a ‘big gun.’” She hired another attorney, one known for digging in and fighting. But by the time she was nine months pregnant, the war had just begun and she was learning that the charming, wonderfully sensitive man she had married had an entirely different side. She would remember that he “was extremely litigious and seemed anxious to do whatever he could do to make things uncomfortable and difficult in the course of our divorce proceedings.”

  Lauren’s due date was during the week of March 26, which included the Easter weekend, a three-day holiday. Since she now lived alone, she would have to depend on her telephone to call for help when she went into labor. She was appalled one night during that long weekend when she picked up her phone to make a call and heard only dead air. She discovered that Brad had had her phone disconnected. “I went through some frantic time,” Lauren said, “to get the phone hooked up because I was alone.”

  When she did go into labor, Lauren had to count on her family and friends to get her to the hospital. She went through her labor alone, delivering her baby on a soft spring night. She might as well have been an unwed mother. In truth, she would have been better off.

  Amy Cunningham, a beautiful little girl, made up for a lot of the pain her mother had gone through in the months before her birth. But the pain was not yet over. The phone in Lauren’s hospital room rang the day after Amy was born. It was Brad.

  “I understand that we have a daughter.” he said flatly, and before Lauren could reply, he went on, “I wanted to let you know that I have had your car repossessed.”

  Lauren wasn’t even very surprised. This was the Brad she had come, bitterly, to know all too well. He didn’t seem thrilled or even moderately happy about the baby. Even so, Lauren knew that Amy would be used as a pawn in Brad’s war against her, and she felt a chill.

  When she had left for the hospital, Lauren’s car was parked, she thought safely, in an underground garage at the University Towers where she lived. She learned later that Brad had talked the property manager into letting him into the parking area. The car was gone when she returned from the hospital. “I don’t know how he did it,” Lauren said. “He probably had keys.” She never got her car back.

  Even before Lauren regained her strength after child
birth, the legal fight with Brad accelerated. She was asking for full custody of Amy, while Brad requested joint custody. Their divorce trial was held before Superior Court Judge Stanley Soderland, who had just been voted the most respected judge in King County, Washington. “My attorney was not hopeful about my efforts to basically erase Brad from my life,” Lauren recalled, “but he said, ‘You are hiring me, and if this is what you want to go for, this is what I will ask for.’”

  Lauren had requested that Brad undergo psychiatric testing—and he, of course, countered with a request that she be tested too. In the end, the results were a wash. According to the doctors who evaluated the test results, neither Lauren nor Brad showed any emotional pathology.

  Ultimately, Lauren put her faith in pure common sense. She was the abandoned spouse, and she figured that when Brad deserted her, he had walked away from Amy too. “My point was that Brad had relinquished his paternal rights when he walked out before she was born. And the judge said, ‘You are wrong.’ He said, ‘He is the biological father.’” Judge Soderland awarded Lauren sole custody of Amy but he said he could not prevent her father from seeing her. Soderland set up very rigid visitation schedules for the first four years of Amy’s life, commenting that he hoped that Lauren and Brad could work out their own custody arrangements after Amy was four.

  Amy’s visits with her father began when she was a month old. Lauren was ordered by the court to take her to the King County Courthouse and give her new baby to Brad for hour-long visits. “I had to turn her over to him, and he took her into another room for an hour,” Lauren remembered. “It was torture for me. . . . I was scared to death that he was going to leave with her. . . . I was awarded sole custody, which is not what he wanted. It just made me very, very nervous.”

  Possibly only a new mother can empathize with the terror in Lauren’s heart as she carried her month-old daughter onto the creaky elevators of the King County Courthouse and then walked through the marble-lined halls to meet Brad. Every courtroom and chamber in the venerable building has at least two exits; every floor can be reached by stairways as well as elevators. One courthouse door exits onto Third Avenue and another onto Fourth Avenue, while tunnels run from the courthouse’s first floor and basement to two entirely separate buildings. Had Brad wanted to take Amy away, it would have been so easy. But at the end of each hour’s visit, he returned the tiny baby girl to her mother.

  Lauren had no idea what he did while he had the baby. Did he talk to Amy, rock her, walk around with her? Or did he simply put her on a chair and look at his watch until his time was up, relishing Lauren’s anguish as she waited beyond the thick oak door? Once Lauren had believed she knew everything there was to know about Brad; now she realized that he had revealed only an infinitesimal portion of his personality to her.

  If Lauren had hoped to “erase” Brad from her life, she had failed miserably. The next step of the visitation schedule with Amy as outlined by Judge Soderland was that Brad would come to Lauren’s home. He could stay with Amy for up to two hours, but he was not allowed to take her off the premises. “By the time she was two,” Lauren remembered, “he could take her for a couple of hours in his car somewhere, and that would gradually increase—when she was three, he could take her for a day and a half, and so forth.”

  For those first two years, Brad visited regularly. The divorce proceedings and property settlement were finally resolved and Lauren was given some interest in Sylvan Habitat, although she never did find out what had become of her missing car. Brad paid her $250 a month in child support. After a while, Lauren no longer felt the absolute terror she had gone through when her little girl was a baby, but she was still uneasy whenever Brad visited Amy. She always had a lingering concern that he might take her away.

  Lauren knew that Brad had married Cheryl, and that she was pregnant. She herself had begun to date the man she would eventually marry, Dr. Ian Stoneham,* a psychiatrist. Soon after their wedding when Amy was two, she and her new husband planned to take a sabbatical to New Zealand. As they prepared to leave for the other side of the world, they discussed how—or whether—they would inform Brad of their departure. Lauren talked with her attorney, who pointed out that there was nothing in her divorce decree that specifically prevented her from taking a sabbatical. “We both know how litigious Brad is,” he said. “My advice to you is to put a letter in the mailbox at the airport saying he can exercise his visitation in New Zealand, and tell him your address there.”

  That was exactly what Lauren did. And Brad was, predictably, very angry. He went before a judge and obtained a court order that stipulated he had the legal right to go to New Zealand and take Amy away from Lauren. He arranged with his father to accompany him. Sanford bragged to everyone that his son was treating him to a wonderful trip to New Zealand. He didn’t mention the purpose of the trip.

  The nightmare was beginning again for Lauren. On Mother’s Day 1980, Brad arrived in New Zealand and phoned her. She was taken completely by surprise. “I am on my way down,” Brad said. “Tell me where to meet you. I have a court order in my hand that says I can take Amy.”

  “Take her where?” Lauren asked, horrified.

  “Back to the United States.”

  Lauren suspected that Brad had deliberately timed his trip so that he would arrive on Mother’s Day, giving his demands an extra sadistic twist. Because Amy had always visited with her father for just an hour or two at a time, she really didn’t know him. And once again Lauren lived in fear of having her child spirited away. She didn’t think that Brad truly cared about Amy, but Amy be longed to him, and Brad didn’t let his possessions go easily whether he really wanted them or not. He was the most aggressive man Lauren had ever encountered. Years later she would describe his dominant characteristics. “He is very used to getting what he wants and having things the way he wants them. And he gets very frustrated when somebody tries to get in his way.”

  There are few forces stronger than maternal love, that visceral protective stance that grips mothers within minutes of their giving birth. There was no way Lauren could let Brad take Amy. “I called my attorney and he appealed the court order and managed to have it overturned, but there was a period of time in New Zealand when I was once again extremely anxious about leaving Amy in the room alone at night, for fear Brad would come and try to take her . . . I think it was an intuitive sense.”

  Lauren and her husband soon returned to the United States, and as the years passed Brad continued his child support, but his payments became erratic and Lauren and Amy saw less and less of him. He had other interests, and he had begun a third family. By the time Amy was five or six, Brad gave Lauren one large check a year, and after a while he sent no money at all.

  Rather pathetically, although Lauren had never actually met Rosemary, Brad’s mother stayed in contact with Amy by mail and always remembered her granddaughter at Christmas and on her birthday. She and Lauren corresponded, and Rosemary had Amy’s name added to the roster of the Colville Indians. That way, she too would be eligible for tribal benefits. It was through Rosemary that Lauren learned that Brad was not a quarter Colville Indian, as he had told her; he was actually half Indian. His Indian heritage was something he apparently had tried to minimize.

  As was the existence of his mother.

  19

  Cheryl never really got over her guilt about what she and Brad had done to Lauren. Betraying a friend was completely atypical of her. Her natural inclination had always been to be there for her friends, to help them, and certainly never to destroy them. That she could have been a party to Brad’s desertion of Lauren when she was pregnant was almost unbelievable. But Cheryl had never felt as powerful an emotion as the love and commitment she felt for Brad.

  Her half sister Susan was only eleven or twelve when Cheryl met Brad, but even she had sensed that Cheryl’s marriage to Dan Olmstead was in trouble. “I remember I was in Seattle in October 1977, because my uncle had brain surgery,” Susan said. “Cheryl was working for Bra
d at the Austen Company, and he took us out to lunch in his Mercedes. Brad’s jaws were wired because he’d had plastic surgery on them. I remember that, and I remember that I knew somehow that Cheryl and Brad were having an affair.”

  It seemed impossible, because Cheryl and Dan had been together so long that their names were practically hyphenated when the family referred to them. Susan couldn’t remember a Christmas when Dan hadn’t been there. He was part of their family. And he remained part of the family, but now he came to visit alone. When Cheryl took Susan for a drive that Thanksgiving and told her she was getting a divorce, Susan knew who had caused that divorce. It was the man with the Mercedes who had taken them out to lunch a month before—the man with the wires in his jaws. Brad Cunningham. Susan was not surprised, and yet she was surprised. “Cheryl was so dignified. Things had to have a certain order. She had been so disgusted when Mom left Dad, but . . .”

  There were other changes that Susan noticed. Cheryl had always been so confident, so in charge, so confrontive. But now, when she was with Brad, Susan saw that she was different than she had ever been. She had become passive; she deferred to Brad on any and every subject. She adored him, she respected him, she loved him passionately, but Susan wondered sometimes if Cheryl might not also be a little afraid of Brad.

  After living together for a little over a year, Cheryl and Brad were married in March of 1979, a year after Lauren had given birth to Amy. Cheryl was two months pregnant at the time of her marriage, and she was eagerly looking forward to becoming a mother. Cheryl and Brad said their vows in a simple service at the home of friends, and Cheryl’s family was not invited. Like all of Brad’s weddings, save his first formal ceremony with Loni Ann, it was a legal ceremony but it certainly wasn’t romantic or sentimental.

  In retrospect, Susan could recall no “honeymoon period” at all in her sister’s second marriage. Cheryl seemed happy, yes, but Brad was not the lovey-dovey groom, not even for the first month or so. It seemed almost that Cheryl was part of some plan Brad had, and now that he had accomplished the business of marrying her, there was no point in wasting time on romance. Of course, it was Brad’s fourth marriage in ten years; perhaps he had no energy for all the typical stages of married life. He had a tiger by the tail in his real estate endeavors. He hinted that he was on the verge of making millions of dollars in a new project in Houston, Texas. And Cheryl had her law degree. She graduated from law school with a shopping list of honors; she was in the top ten percent of her class and received the “Order of the Coif.” She was a beautiful young woman and he was a handsome man. If ever there was a couple slated for success, it was Brad Cunningham and Cheryl Keeton.