Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Cheryl was a vulnerable woman and terribly sad. All of her successes in courtrooms and in boardrooms faded when she realized how alone she was. She was married, but her husband didn’t love her. Beyond her value as a wage earner, she had become a mere convenience, an irritant. If she had an affair or two, they were brief and born of desperate loneliness rather than passion.

  If she had an affair, Susan didn’t know about it. She smiled as she remembered a time in the late summer of 1985. “Cheryl was in Seattle and stayed with me. We went to the Red Robin [a popular upscale Seattle hamburger restaurant] and we both ordered margaritas. We were having fun. I was in college by then. Then we went to the Red Onion, down by Madison Park. These two guys came over to our table, and they were coming on to us. Cheryl just winked at me. All of a sudden, one of the guys looked close at Cheryl and he said, ‘You’re wearing married lipstick.”

  “Cheryl laughed and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s it. I’m not changing shades anytime soon.’”

  Cheryl hadn’t taken the men seriously, and Susan knew it. “Cheryl was responsible. Brad was the first dangerous thing she ever did. She was embarrassed that she was pregnant when she married him. She didn’t tell anyone in the family that she was pregnant until she was five months.”

  Brad saw accusations of infidelity as a way to harass and humiliate his wife. Smugly, armed with the names of two men he believed Cheryl had been intimate with, he embarked on a tell-all campaign that he felt sure would ruin Cheryl’s career.

  He first called the wife of a senior partner at Garvey, Schubert and told her that Cheryl had slept with her husband. It may have been true; it may not. Either way, the wife’s reaction was not what Brad had expected. She was not hysterical nor was she grateful to Brad for his report. With impeccable class, she called Cheryl and asked her to convey a message to her husband. “Just tell him that I don’t care to talk to him for several days. He’ll understand.” Mortified—and puzzled—Cheryl passed on the message.

  Annoyed that his sabotage hadn’t worked, Brad went a step further. He contacted Stuart Hennessey, who had worked with Cheryl in Seattle, and invited him out for a drink in the bar at the Alexis Hotel near the Garvey, Schubert offices. Hennessey would remember the encounter as a “weird experience.” Brad told him that he and Cheryl were separated and quickly went on to give Hennessey offensive details about Cheryl’s supposed promiscuity. Hennessey stared back at him, disbelieving and disgusted.

  “Then he asked how the firm was doing,” Hennessey recalled. “And he asked how much money I made.”

  What Brad really wanted to know, of course, was how much money Cheryl was making and how much her retirement fund was worth. Hennessey stood up to leave and told Brad he didn’t want to discuss it—that was private information. He left Brad sitting with two untouched drinks while he went back to his office, shaking his head in shock at Brad’s gall and crudeness. Hennessey called Cheryl to alert her to what Brad was saying. “Cheryl was a strong person,” he said, “but she was crying. She said, ‘Stu, he’s trying to ruin me.’” Hennessey didn’t know how to help her, beyond telling her that her friends were behind her and wouldn’t believe Brad’s lies.

  Neither reaction was what Brad had expected, and for the moment he was thrown off stride. He resented Cheryl’s independence and success. He had hoped to humiliate her and ruin her career. She was humiliated, but her job was never in danger. She was also puzzled. If Brad had succeeded in getting her fired, who did he think was going to support them? It was her salary that kept them afloat. She had seen him do this before—act out of rage, and spite himself in the process. Cheryl was horribly embarrassed by Brad’s vicious lies, but she held her head up and her career never missed a beat.

  Even so, Susan could see that the enmity in Cheryl’s relationship with Brad was intensifying. And as it did, she saw, too, that the essence that was Cheryl had begun, finally, to disintegrate. As water eventually erodes stone after an eon of continual dripping, Brad’s relentless siege against Cheryl was working its devastation. She had been so strong for so long. But now she was growing thinner and thinner, toying with her food and only pretending to eat. Still, through sheer force of will, she was able to compartmentalize her life so that she could concentrate on her work and take care of her boys.

  24

  Brad’s affair with Lilya Saarnen had continued, even as he pointed accusing fingers at Cheryl. In late fall Lilya was told that she needed a kidney transplant. Brad was tremendously solicitous, so much so that he offered to pay her medical bills. He gave her four thousand dollars. She had the transplant operation on November 28, 1985, and testifying in a legal hearing some time later, Lilya had difficulty remembering if Brad had actually paid for her surgery. Staring into Brad’s dark eyes from her position on the witness chair, she equivocated. She thought that their affair had lasted somewhere between six months and a year. She couldn’t really remember.

  Lilya did remember that Brad had paid the rent on her apartment in the Madison Tower for some time. Although her ground-floor unit wasn’t as expensive as the eighteenth-floor apartment he would soon rent, it wasn’t cheap either. But if Brad proved to be a friend in need, his passion for Lilya faded after her surgery. The immunosuppressant medicine she had to take had side effects that repulsed Brad. “She grew facial hair and that turned me off,” he said later.

  And so Lilya had gone on to her relationship with Dr. Clay Watson, the surgeon at Providence, although she remained in her apartment at the Madison Tower until late fall of 1986. Earlier that year she had introduced Brad to Dr. Sara Gordon, and apparently there were no hard feelings. Lilya and Brad were like dancers who changed partners when the song changed. Lilya did seem a little chagrined, however, when she later learned that Brad was having an affair with Marnie, his teenage baby-sitter, at the same time he was sleeping with her.

  Lilya had first known Brad in Salem when he was hired by Citizens’ Savings. And then Brad, Lilya, a secretary, and a young lawyer named Karen Aaborg* were transferred to the Lake Oswego branch of the bank. Karen would later testify that federal bank examiners had questioned the Lake Oswego books; the branch’s president and most of its directors had been summarily fired, and Brad was elevated to a position of extreme trust as he and his three female assistants evaluated the extent of the damage. They soon suspected that they would only be tidying up loose ends and closing the branch down. It was doubtful that the commercial loan division in Lake Oswego was going to survive. But as long as the branch was still open, Brad was the boss.

  He was also a sultan with his own little harem. Brad had scarcely ended his affair with Lilya when he became very close to Karen Aaborg. Another man might have felt ill at ease working in the same small office as two of his girlfriends, but it didn’t bother Brad. Lilya was aware that her ex-lover was engaged in daily disputes with his wife. Karen was not—at least for a time. When she first went to work for Brad, she knew almost nothing about his personal life.

  Brad had hired Karen to work for him in Salem in the summer of 1985. She was very young, barely out of law school, and she was Brad’s type: small, attractive, slender, smart. He liked blond or light brown hair and pretty, small-featured faces. At the bank her title was “Loan Closer,” and later Brad chose her to go with him and Lilya to close the Lake Oswego branch. To Karen’s somewhat naive eye, Brad seemed happily married when she first went to work for him. “It seemed to change rather rapidly,” she recalled. It wasn’t long before Karen suspected that Brad and Lilya had had a physical relationship, but she wasn’t positive. It was just something in the way they exchanged glances, and the sentences they left unfinished when she walked into an office where they were. She found out later that she had been right.

  Brad told Karen even more about his personal life. Although he had not told Lilya, he was quite open with Karen about his affair with his sons’ baby-sitter. “Cheryl doesn’t know,” he said, grinning. “We did it at my house when the kids were napping and Cheryl was at work.�
� But he lied to Karen when he said his liaison with his nineteen-year-old baby-sitter was not a long-running affair. “Cheryl was working, and I wasn’t. That was before I came to Citizens’.”

  Karen soon saw—or rather heard—that the Cunninghams’ marriage was not a happy one. Cheryl often called the Lake Oswego branch of Citizens’ and Karen could tell from Brad’s reaction that he was “pretty upset. . . . He would slam the phone down . . . there was a lot of anger.” Indeed, there was more rage surfacing in Brad than Karen could ever remember seeing. In his business world he was always in control, completely charming and affable. Whatever he and his wife were fighting over, Karen was shocked by the violence involved. Brad seemed to truly hate Cheryl, and although Karen couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, she appeared to hate him too.

  Nevertheless, the phone scenes she overheard didn’t diminish Brad’s charisma for the young attorney. It was easier for her to feel a little sorry for him; his wife seemed to be a ranting shrew. Except in his phone conversations with Cheryl, Brad always struck Karen as such a nice guy.

  Karen sometimes went to a Portland tavern called Goose Hollow and one evening she ran into Brad there. They played Scrabble, apparently a passion for him, and then he took her back to her apartment. In his version of their affair, he would recall that they had sex there for the first time. She would insist, however, that she was never actually intimate with Brad until after he left the bank they both worked for. And even then, she estimated that their affair had lasted only three or four months. Their friendship, however, continued.

  It was odd. Brad’s wives all eventually came to hate his guts; his mistresses remained in his stable of friends. Estranged and former wives became prey and stalking targets; mistresses were allowed to walk away.

  Brad never let up on his campaign to destroy Cheryl. Along with his other accusations in late 1985 and early 1986, he complained that he had contracted chlamydia from her. Technically at least, chlamydia is a venereal disease, an infection usually transmitted through sexual intercourse. Righteously indignant, Brad obtained two prescriptions to treat himself.

  Why Brad insisted that Cheryl was the source of his infection is anyone’s guess, given the fact that he was having sexual intercourse with a number of other women. But then, Brad now blamed Cheryl for all bad things that happened to him. He no longer wanted her by 1985, but he would not simply let her go. He accused her continually of being unfaithful, but he didn’t tell her about his sexually transmitted infection, whatever its origin, and give her a chance to seek treatment. Indeed, it wasn’t until February 3, 1986, when Cheryl began to suffer symptoms herself, that she went to see her own doctor. She learned that she had contracted vaginitis.

  A painful infection of the vaginal tissues, vaginitis has many causes. It can be transmitted through sexual contact, but it can occur just as often when a woman is treated for flu or a sore throat with antibiotics which tend to kill the protective bacteria always present in the vagina. A virgin can contract vaginitis. Both men and women can carry the infection and show no overt symptoms at all. Cheryl also tested positively for chlamydia. If she had, in fact, been the source of Brad’s infection, she apparently went many weeks without symptoms after Brad had sought medical treatment.

  In those first months of 1986 Susan sensed that something in her sister’s marriage was going to explode. Maybe Cheryl could hide her growing anxiety from her fellow attorneys, but she couldn’t hide it from Susan, who noticed that she jumped every time the phone rang in her Seattle apartment.

  Susan couldn’t hear Brad’s side of their conversations, but she could tell he was always furious about something from the stricken look on Cheryl’s pale face. Although it had been more than eight years since Susan had accompanied Brad and Cheryl on the frightening sailing trip to the San Juans, she again felt the same sense of dread. This wasn’t the Cheryl she knew. The woman who could be instantly reduced to hysterical tears by a telephone call was not the real Cheryl, the Cheryl who never gave up, who never lost her confidence.

  Except with Brad. And now Brad had hostages: he had Jess, Michael, and Phillip. And Cheryl had a new fear. She confided to Susan that she was afraid that one day she would go home and find not just her furniture missing but her children too.

  Susan had seen the way Brad disciplined his sons, despite Cheryl’s desperate attempts to stop him. If they were out for dinner and one of the boys did something Brad considered inappropriate—like not eating all his food, or sulking, or crying—he would only say ominously that he’d take care of it. “Cheryl would try to protect the kids,” Susan said. “She’d say, ‘He’s tired’ or ‘He’s hungry’ or ‘He just woke up from a nap,’ but Brad wouldn’t listen to her. The boys knew that they would get ‘swats’ when they got home. Very matter-of-factly, he’d tote up the swats. Jess would get two because he was the oldest. They knew they were going to get hit.

  “Brad created an atmosphere of fear. They were obedient to the point that it was unnatural. They called him ‘Dad’—never ‘Daddy.’ Those kids were his possessions. Brad gets whatever he wants. He wanted children and he wanted boys. Those boys were like another Mercedes to him.”

  Cheryl’s struggles became so difficult that Susan began keeping a diary. On February 1, 1986, she noted that Cheryl had had to be in Seattle overnight many times in a three- or four-week period during January. She got so lonely for Jess, Michael, and Phillip that she asked her law firm for permission to bring her family up. They agreed and, somewhat uncharacteristically, so did Brad. He came up on the train with the boys. Susan offered to baby-sit on Saturday night, and Brad and Cheryl went out for dinner.

  Things seemed to be calm enough when Brad left for home on Sunday night, even though he was clearly annoyed that Cheryl had to stay in Seattle until the following Wednesday. But in reality the situation had not been defused at all. Brad started calling Cheryl almost from the moment he arrived in Gresham, as if he had been quietly fuming on the four-hour train ride home. Susan remembered seven or eight calls. “Cheryl was very upset. She was crying and yelling—trying to speak, and she couldn’t. She cried so hard that she couldn’t speak. It was so out of character for her. I begged her not to answer the phone when it rang—and he called all night—but she answered.”

  Brad could destroy Cheryl even over the phone. As Susan listened, Cheryl began to scream and shout hysterically. “No! That’s not true! No! I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. . . . You’re lying to me.”

  “Are you okay?” Susan whispered.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” Cheryl replied, covering the phone with her hand. But Susan saw she didn’t believe her own words. She wrote in her diary on February 3, 1986, “All hell broke loose last night and this morning. Brad and Cheryl fought, and I mean at the top of their lungs. . . . It’s very clear what she needs to do.” What Cheryl had to do was get out of her marriage before she lost her equilibrium, her sanity, her self.

  One afternoon Cheryl got a letter from Brad marked CONFIDENTIAL. She read it without comment and set it down, but when she left the room, Susan’s curiosity got the better of her. “The letter said that yes, Brad had had an affair with their former baby-sitter—but Marnie O’Connor didn’t want him to tell anyone because her boyfriend and her mother might find out about it.”

  Susan wasn’t surprised. “The guest-room bed was always mussed up in that Gresham house. And Brad had a dead-bolt lock put on that door. He was always saying, ‘Marnie likes to take naps during the day.’ He didn’t even try to hide what was going on from Cheryl.” Cheryl wasn’t surprised by Brad’s “confidential letter” either. It didn’t matter any longer.

  On Tuesday, February 5, Cheryl seemed strangely calm and resolute. She didn’t tell Susan about her visit to the doctor in Bellevue, where she had learned she was suffering from vaginal infections. She was humiliated. That diagnosis may have been the final straw. She told Susan only, “Everything’s settled today. I’m going back to Portland.” />
  “I was relieved,” Susan admitted. “My neighbors within a two-block radius could have heard their phone conversations. I was relieved she was gone.” Later, of course, she would rue her feelings.

  Cheryl found an empty house when she arrived in Gresham. Brad had moved all the furniture out again and, at first, Cheryl was exasperated with Rose,* their current baby-sitter. But Susan reminded her when she called, “You know that Rose couldn’t stop him. No one can stop Brad when he has his mind set on doing something.”

  A few days after Cheryl left Susan’s apartment, she called to say she had finally acknowledged there was no hope at all for her marriage. She wanted only to have Brad completely out of her life, although she didn’t want her three boys to lose their father. There had to be some way for her and Brad to share custody. She could bear to see him that much, she supposed, just long enough for him to pick up the boys or deliver them back to her.

  * * *

  In Seattle and Portland that February of 1986, there were breaks in the winter rains, the pussy willows budded out, and crocuses sprang from an earth no longer chained by winter. It was a season of hope and starting over, and it almost seemed as if Brad and Cheryl could separate without rancor. If they could somehow share Jess, Michael, and Phillip, they had nothing left to fight over.

  “I was glad,” Susan recalled, “that she was going to get a divorce. She just wasn’t Cheryl anymore. For her own health and well-being, I was glad they were splitting up. . . . Their marriage started out relatively normal on the surface, but somehow people were always uncomfortable around them as a couple.”

  When Cheryl asked Brad to move out, he went—uncharacteristically without a fight. He found himself an expensive apartment on the fourteenth floor of the Madison Tower, then moved to an even more expensive one on the eighteenth floor. That didn’t surprise Cheryl. Even though the place cost almost twice as much as the house their whole family had rented, she knew Brad; he always wanted the best for himself. She didn’t care if he rented the Taj Mahal as long as he was gone.