Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Brad continually isolated Kait and tried to destroy any vestige of ego she might have left. He didn’t want her to have any confidantes. He told her that none of the secretaries at his office really liked her. “You’re just the boss’s daughter.”

  Kait called Loni Ann every day from school and cried. It seemed to her that she was never going to get away from her father. She was afraid to show it on the outside, but Kait was angry. She was also a gutsy little girl, and she began to formulate an escape plan. She squirreled away every bit of money her father gave her, going without lunch and any of the movies or other treats she might have bought. She hid her money in her closet, counting it carefully as it grew closer to the amount she would need for a one-way plane ticket.

  Brad kept the alarm system on whenever they were home, so Kait could not open any door without setting it off, but she knew where the keys were and she finally figured out how to disarm it. If she actually made it onto a plane, Kait knew that her father would check the airline rosters out of Houston. She planned to book flights on her departure day on every airline under her own name. On one of the flights, she would use a false name. That would be the plane that would carry her far away from Houston.

  But Kait, as smart as she was, was only twelve. Brad had asked one of his women friends to befriend her and Kait trusted her. “I told her about my plan, and she told him. And I went on restriction again.”

  By the spring of 1983, Brad’s grip on his Texas fortune was loosening. But he apparently had a plan. As a grown woman she could no longer recall the details, but Kait remembered how Brad laughed as he told her how he was going to beat the bankruptcy courts. Kait recalled that he showed her a page he had typed, listing his assets. She was impressed, and baffled when he filed for bankruptcy in June. “He used his credit cards because he didn’t have to pay the bills. When I came back and told my mother, she didn’t believe me because she said, ‘No one does that,’ but he did.”

  Verbal abuse from her father had long since become an almost everyday thing for Kait, but there was one incident so frightening that she would remember it years later as clearly as if it had just happened. She had almost finished the school year in Houston; she was in her last week in the eighth grade when some gaffe of hers set Brad off into the most violent episode she had yet endured. “He had told me to come straight with him about everything—meaning any single secret or lie I could have ever possibly had. At this moment, I was supposed to tell him. I told him everything, except there was just one thing that I wanted to keep secret to me. I felt it was my ‘secret garden,’ that it didn’t hurt anyone and it wasn’t any of his business.”

  Brad had had to make a trip to Seattle, but he wanted to be sure that Kait remained in Houston, and he had arranged to have her stay with the family of an employee. This man—who worked in one of Brad’s warehouses—had casually mentioned some facet of Kait’s life that Brad didn’t know about. Certainly nothing big. But Brad’s overweening possessiveness was akin to his need to know the most minute information about his children, right down to what kind of cereal Jess had been given. That someone other than himself would know anything about Kait that he didn’t know was anathema.

  When Kait got home from school that day, Brad was talking on the phone with the man whose family had cared for her while he was away. She saw that her father was coldly angry, but she had no idea why.

  It began as sadistic teasing. Brad took a pen and ran it up and down Kait’s nose. She pushed it away and he asked in a puzzled tone, “You don’t like that?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said sarcastically.

  He kept running the pen along the bridge of her nose, and Kait, annoyed and a little frightened, backed away from him, around and around the room, around the coffee table. “I would back up, going out of my room into the living room. He was trying to push me down. I’d lose my footing and take two or three steps back. . . . That’s when he was screaming at me. I didn’t even know him at that point. It was like he was a different person. There was a whole different fire in his eye and he scared me.”

  Brad ordered Kait to take off her clothes; they were, he said, his because he had bought them. “You didn’t come straight with me,” he yelled, and he grabbed armfuls of her clothes out of her closet until it was empty except for a few “bummy” garments. Then he threw a large pre-folded cardboard packing box at Kait as if he were throwing a Frisbee, hitting her in the mouth with a sharp corner and bruising her face. He ordered her to put it together.

  “I started to really get scared and I was shaking,” Kait remembered. “And he told me I’d better put it together and that I’d better catch this tape he was throwing at me, or I’d be in really big trouble. I started to really freak out.”

  Kait managed finally to fit the complicated tab-and-fold box together and Brad tossed her clothes inside. Then he walked to the kitchen and grabbed the garbage and poured it in the box on top of her clothes. “He was screaming at me,” she recalled years later, her voice betraying the damage done. “He told me that I was no longer part of this family, that my little brothers would grow up not knowing I existed.”

  Brad grabbed Kait and drew his mammoth fist back and told her “that he would just love to hit me. But he knew I would tell—that I had a big mouth and I would tell everybody. But he said one day he was going to do it, and how bad he wanted to hit me.”

  Brad ordered Kait to carry the box down the stairs of the apartment building. It was terribly heavy for a slight twelve-year-old girl. She was tall for her age—about five feet five—but she didn’t weigh very much, and the only way she could hold the box was to bend her knees, balance it on the front of her thighs, and take the steps one at a time.

  “He tried to kick me in the butt, which was something he liked to do to my brother and me when he wanted to be ornery,” Kait said. “And so I tried to dodge him while I was carrying this thing. Then he told me to go put it in this big garbage bin. I was crying because these were all my belongings. . . . This man had come over, and I was crying and I asked him to help me get my clothes into the garbage, because I couldn’t reach, and my father came over and said, ‘Hey! Get away from her!’ I finally got it in the garbage.”

  When Kait went back to their apartment, Brad ordered her into her room and told her that he was putting something on the door, and it would go off if she tried to open the door and he would know. At this point, Kait was terrified. Her father had pushed and knocked her around before; he had told her how much he wanted to hit her. She crept into her closet and began to pray.

  But Brad would not permit it. He followed her and peered into the closet, demanding to know what she was doing.

  “I’m praying,” she said quietly.

  “You don’t do that in there!” he said and grabbed at her. He lifted her in one muscled arm and held her above him with her back pressing the ceiling. He threw her down on the bed and kicked her. Then he ordered her to stay out of her closet and warned her not to cause trouble.

  Kait stayed quietly in her room. She believed every word her father had told her, and she was sure he had booby-trapped her door. Frantically her mind raced, thinking of ways to escape. She thought she might be able to go out the window. She might go to the police and tell them about her father. “I’d told him once that I was going to turn him in for emotional abuse, and he laughed at me. He said, ‘Who’s going to believe you? You’re a little kid. All I’d have to do is tell them you’re just a little liar—you’re just garbage. They’re not going to believe you.’”

  Kait remembered that and figured there was no point in trying to escape her father. No one would believe her.

  Brad had allowed Kait to go to the rehearsal for the graduation ceremonies from the eighth grade, and she longed to graduate with her class. She had been in Houston over six months by now, and she wanted to finish the school year. It would be some contact with normalcy, some way to prove to herself that all those months had not been a comp
lete waste. But Kait never went back after her father ruined her clothes with garbage and forced her to throw away everything that mattered to her. How could she go to school? She had no clothes.

  Kait never knew what she had done to set her father off, to turn him into a raving, frothing stranger. She didn’t realize, of course, that she had lived out the same scenario as her aunt Susan. When Sanford Cunningham was angry, Susan had hidden in her closet too, clutching her dog close to her. Even Brad, who seemed so all-powerful at the age of thirty-four, had cowered in terror when he was a little boy, waiting for his father to come home and mete out the beatings his mother decreed.

  Kait’s mother couldn’t help her. Her father barely looked at her. She wasn’t sure how to find her other relatives; everyone was far away in Washington State. And then, finally, she learned she was going home.

  She could scarcely breathe for fear her father would change his mind. But when he left Houston, Kait was, thank God, in the car. “He drove me to Yakima,” she said.

  After that, Brad never showed any interest in having Kait with him. She saw her father a few times when she was fifteen or sixteen, and never again thereafter—not until she had a memorable confrontation with him in 1995.

  21

  June 1983 may well have been the turning point of Brad’s life. Ever since he was a little boy, he had hustled, always looking upward at the next step on the ladder of success. Financial success. Personal success. And, yes, sexual success. His older sister Ethel had referred to him in a derogatory fashion as the “local black market kid,” commenting that he was always looking for a way to make a fast dollar. His father Sanford had been the same way and was undoubtedly a model for his only son. According to his youngest daughter, Susan, Sanford had won approval from his father and uncles by being quick with his checkbook. He had always wanted a better house and a better truck than anyone in his family.

  Eventually Sanford had wanted a better wife, and Brad seemed to want a better wife often. He had been married to Cheryl longer than anyone so far. He stayed three and a half years with Loni Ann, six months with Cynthia, seven months with Lauren. Cheryl was determined to make her marriage work, sure that everything was going to be better soon.

  Sanford Cunningham’s “best house” was only a middle-class rambler on a busy street in a workingman’s suburb. His son wanted much more. Unlike his father, Brad had Indian blood in his veins, but it was a heritage that he was ashamed of. As he grew to be a man, he had distanced himself from his roots as quickly as he could. Even so, no worldly possession and no woman had ever yet lived up to his perception of what he felt he needed to enhance the persona he presented to the world.

  No woman until Cheryl. She was beautiful and brilliant and perfect. She loved Brad completely and single-mindedly, and she had bent to his will early in their relationship. She had given him two fine sons and she was once again earning a very comfortable living.

  Brad was not. His rise as a real estate entrepreneur had been almost meteoric, but when his soaring star faltered, it faltered badly. In June 1983 it plunged straight down to earth. He surely saw it coming. His abuse of Kait that spring in Houston may have indicated something more than pure meanness; Brad was more likely a man walking on the sharp edge of career disaster who defused his own anxiety by berating the only person around who was no threat to him. His behavior was hardly admirable, but if it was a reaction to the crumbling of his dreams, it was easier to understand than cruelty for its own sake.

  Brad had kept up his public facade, going each day to his fine office in his shiny Mercedes. If Kait’s perception of her father’s financial picture, her memory of his boasting about hidden assets and freewheeling charges on credit cards he would never have to pay, was accurate, Brad did not go down without a plan. Perhaps he did have money no one knew about and perhaps he did not disclose all his assets to the bankruptcy court. He had always lived an opulent lifestyle, a few steps beyond what he could really afford. He was probably grasping everything he could on his way down. But with the Parkwood Plaza project irrevocably gone, he was a man starting over.

  Meanwhile, Cheryl was working hard at Garvey, Schubert, where she had made many friends. Her early promise as a litigator had blossomed. She was good. She was more than good; she was partnership material. One of the partners in the firm recalled the first time he realized that Cheryl was a woman to be reckoned with. “We were at a partners’ meeting in Seattle and Cheryl was conducting a deposition. We stood outside the conference room and heard her chewing out two senior members of the bar. We all thought, wow, she’s feisty, . . . we’ve really got a great litigator. She was creative, very bright, tenacious—and the clients loved her.”

  Brock Adams was a partner in Garvey, Schubert until his election to the U.S. Senate. The law firm that began in Seattle in 1979 had had any number of top litigators but Cheryl Keeton would be remembered as “one of the best in the history of our law firm” and “top notch!” She was a woman for all seasons. Her future seemed to be limitless.

  Cheryl had kept the home fires burning for Brad. She was still living on Bainbridge Island and she depended on her sister Susan, her cousin Katannah King, or Sally Nelson,* a baby-sitter, to take care of Jess and Michael while she was at work. Sally worked for Cheryl for only four months. She said later that she was nervous because Brad had so many guns, and because she saw that he was irrationally jealous of Cheryl. He hinted that she was probably cheating on him with other men while he was in Texas. But Cheryl would have needed superhuman energy to find the time and/or the enthusiasm to carry on an affair. She left the house early in the morning to catch the ferry to Seattle, worked a long day, and headed home often after dark. What free time she had, she spent with Jess and Michael and, if he was in town, with Brad.

  Besides, Cheryl was carrying another child. She was pregnant for the third time in four years and expected to give birth around Thanksgiving 1983. With the workload she was handling at her law firm, and with all the responsibility of caring for Jess and Michael while Brad was gone, she was exhausted most of the time. It was, of course, not the most propitious time for her to be pregnant, but she was happy about it nonetheless.

  As she always had, Cheryl continued to believe that things were going to get better in her marriage. It was terrible for Brad to lose his Houston project, but she believed at least that meant he would be home and they would be living together as a family again. When Brad was away, it was easy for Cheryl to think like that. But when he was home, all the warm good things she had planned just seemed to slip away.

  She tried. She tried very hard. She and Brad socialized with Sharon McCulloch and her husband, and sometimes Brad could be charming. Even Sharon had changed her mind about him. She liked him a lot better now than in the days when she first cared for newborn Jess. If Cheryl and Brad needed a baby-sitter, the McCullochs allowed their teenage daughter to take the ferry to Bainbridge—with the understanding that Brad would be picking her up.

  When Brad wanted to be, he was the best person in the world to be around. But when he turned on someone, he was another person, the most formidable of opponents. He was so intelligent, and he had an uncanny knack at spotting a person’s most vulnerable area. Then he would go for the jugular. Sharon soon saw that she had been right about Brad in the first place. “This is a man who was so smooth. It’s hard to understand. I trusted him. And then everything fell apart. He was so cunning and so persuasive. It was just chilling. It was diabolical. It was eerie. He turned on me a couple of times and frightened me too. . . .”

  After Brad moved back to Washington from Houston, he was often moody and angry and hard to please. Not hard—impossible to please. Jess and Michael had been so anxious for their daddy to be home with them, but when he was around, he ignored them. He wasn’t working, but he continued to spend money as if he were. When Cheryl demurred, he turned on her, enraged. It didn’t matter that she was supporting him and carrying his child. He would brook no interference with his preferred li
festyle.

  Cheryl’s sister Susan saw it too. Despite all the covering up Cheryl tried to do, she was a woman clearly miserable. Worse, she was afraid. Susan had been a child when Cheryl started seeing Brad, and even then, she knew that something was wrong. Now Susan was a very mature seventeen and had become more of a confidante to her sister. She had also become a close-up observer to the steady disintegration of Cheryl’s marriage.

  It might be expected that a man who had seen his multimillion-dollar project evaporate would be morose, particularly when his wife’s career was soaring. Despite his boast that he would win his suit against the construction company, Brad’s financial picture was grim. He had had it all. He had lost it all. His temperament, never predictable, became even more mercurial. Cheryl had done everything she could to support him—both financially and emotionally—and yet he seemed to blame her for his troubles.

  Then, inexplicably, Brad suddenly moved out of their house on Bainbridge Island. “Cheryl would come home from work and ‘Brad’s furniture’ would be gone,” Susan recalled. “There wouldn’t be anything left that was really valuable—the rolltop desk, the leather chairs, the TV [were gone]. He would leave their bed and the kids’ stuff.”

  Cheryl was constantly off balance.

  Brad was home.

  Brad had moved out.

  Brad was traveling.

  Brad was back.

  As far as she could determine, he wasn’t working, and he certainly didn’t seem to be earning any money. He had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He blamed the bonding and construction companies for that. Brad warned Cheryl that his legal action had unleashed sinister forces that would have no compunction about destroying him, her, and the boys.