Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  But something happened that day that completely changed Brad’s treatment of Sara. From the Bistro, he spoke on the phone with one of his criminal attorneys about this pesky civil case that some lawyer named Mike Shinn had filed against him. And for the first time, he seemed to grasp how dangerous it could be for him. The lawyer told Brad if he was found civilly responsible for Cheryl’s death, he might very well face criminal charges. Brad finally perceived that he stood a very good chance of actually going to jail. He had laughed off Shinn’s suit as ridiculous; now one of the best attorneys in Portland was telling him that it wasn’t funny. Brad later told Sara that his lawyer also advised him to keep his marriage intact. Having a woman like Sara beside him, a woman with a fine reputation in the Portland community, would make his acquittal in the civil trial far more likely. It would not look good for him if he was going through yet another divorce while he was being sued civilly over the death of his fourth wife.

  It was at precisely that moment that Sara walked into the Bistro. Brad was a pale shade of gray and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. This was not the same man who had sneered, “I know how much you like to work, and now you’ll have more time to work.” He was frightened. “Brad had a revelation on that February sixteenth,” Sara would remember wryly. The man who hung up the phone clung to her like a lost child.

  “Brad became almost nonfunctional with the realization of the gravity of the civil suit,” Sara said. His attitude toward her changed from bitter sarcasm to tender affection all in the space of a few hours. “He was on the phone with his attorney when I walked into the Bistro. He begged me to stay around the Bistro with him. He felt better just having me around. His behavior toward me changed totally. He loved me and needed me. He needed his family to be together. He couldn’t handle the boys being sad about my not being there, etcetera etcetera. His whole demeanor toward me changed to how it used to be. I told him I was in no hurry to leave, and could stay until his lawsuit was finished.”

  But Sara was not deluded. She knew that Brad needed her only as window dressing during the civil trial. She didn’t try to get out of her lease at the Riverplace apartment. She kept it as her escape spot. Brad helped her move a bed, a table, a sofa, and some chairs to the studio apartment. She knew that she would be leaving the marriage soon, but she relished the reprieve she had been given to be with her little boys.

  On February 21, 1990, Sara lived through one of the most bizarre nights of her life. She met Brad for drinks at the exclusive Alexis Hotel in Portland and they talked. He said that he was thinking of moving to Seattle or to Colorado Springs when “this is all over.” She didn’t know if he meant their marriage or the civil trial. She didn’t care which, but she started to cry because if Brad moved so far away, Jess, Michael, and Phillip would be far away too.

  Later, Sara wrote down the events of that night in her journal. “Brad became depressed when I told him I would not stay with him after the lawsuit—too much pain for too many months, all of his lying to me, etc. I left for home [the Dunthorpe house] so Rhonda [their baby-sitter] could leave and Brad went for a walk. He called me a little later from the Morrison Bridge, and made it sound like he was considering jumping. I called the cellular phone a couple of times but he didn’t answer.”

  Brad’s threats to commit suicide had worked once before when Sara had said she was leaving him. She had capitulated and promised to stay with him. But this time, she was weary of his games. Brad simply used these threats to bring people into line. Besides, the Morrison Bridge was so close to the water. Even if he jumped, he would only make a small splash and get wet. There were higher bridges in Portland—much higher—if Brad was serious about killing himself.

  “Later, he called me from the East Bank Saloon,” Sara wrote. “Said he would like to have some hope that we might stay together, wished that I would just ‘lie’ to him so that he could have that hope. Brad eventually got home about 10:15 p.m. I was in bed sleeping. He wanted to talk and I told him I needed to sleep. He got out of bed, said he should just end his life, and started reaching for the gun in his closet.

  “I got up, pulled him away from the closet. He went downstairs and I followed. He started crying, ‘I want my Daddy.’ I tried to talk him into going to the hospital for help but he wouldn’t.”

  Sara watched in horror as Brad got a box with a gun in it from a cupboard in the laundry. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t shoot himself, but she wondered if he might just shoot her. “I was scared beyond belief but stayed calm. I told him I wanted to leave and he said to go ahead. I had to go upstairs to get my purse and keys, and grab a coat. I only had my Mickey Mouse night shirt on and Jess’s slippers. I was very frightened that he would get the gun while I was upstairs.”

  Brad allowed Sara to leave the house. She drove away with tremendous relief and went to Providence Hospital. She called the house a couple of times but Brad didn’t answer. She knew he was trying to make her think that he had, indeed, killed himself.

  Sara realized too late that she was dealing with a manipulator, a master puppeteer. She had no idea yet to what lengths Brad would go to get what he wanted. She had begun, however, to wonder what had really happened to Cheryl.

  39

  Mike Shinn’s private investigators, Connie Capato and Leslie Haigh, had set out to walk through Brad’s past, to find the women he had married and divorced, the mother and the sisters whose existence he barely acknowledged. Somewhere in that past—some of it decades old—they might find enough to help Shinn in his civil suit against Brad.

  Connie Capato found Loni Ann Cunningham in Brooklyn, New York, on August 24, 1989. Although she had not lived with Brad for seventeen years, Loni Ann was still afraid of him. Theirs was the only one of Brad’s divorces where money was not an issue. “Neither of us had money,” Loni Ann said. “It was Brad’s power and dominance over me. He punished me by getting at me through my children.”

  With Capato’s promise that her whereabouts would never be revealed to Brad, Loni Ann began to open up. Her marriage had been hellish, she said, full of emotional and physical abuse. She had dreaded Brad’s moods. Sometimes he hit her when he didn’t even seem to be angry. She might be watching television and he would hit her and say, “Take that for a lesson,” and then sit down and watch with her as if nothing had happened.

  Loni Ann detailed the disintegration of her life with Brad from the time she was a happy young bride until the last terrifying days when she actually feared for her life. “In the beginning he would argue, and then he would throw things and then hit me. At the end, he would walk in the door after having a bad day and start beating on me.”

  Loni Ann confided that Brad had a history of fighting going back to high school. “If there was a fight going on, Brad would do anything to get involved—even if he wasn’t part of the fight in the first place.” She said Brad had told her that he and his friends had a “good time” going downtown in Seattle and beating up “winos” and “queers.” “One time he beat up one guy so badly that he didn’t know if he had killed him—but he didn’t stick around to find out.”

  Loni Ann said the most frightening time of her marriage was when Brad had worked at Gals Galore. Whether it was true or not, he had always talked as if he was heavily involved with organized crime figures.

  She described his reaction once when he was picked up for parking violations. She told Capato that Brad was livid that his fingerprints were on file.

  Loni Ann also told Capato that she thought he had a lot of money “—although you could never prove it by his paperwork.” Every time she had tried to file for support to help raise her children, Brad managed to look like a pauper on paper. Whenever Kait and Brent visited their father, they came home and told Loni Ann about “the hundreds and hundreds of dollars in cash” and all the material things their father had. “He would talk about how he was giving his ‘current’ three sons three-wheelers and very expensive toys, and Kait and Brent basically got nothing. It was as if he was
throwing it in their faces—that if they came to live with him, he would give them things, but since they didn’t, he wouldn’t give them anything.”

  She told Capato about the time Brad had taken Kait to Houston, but when she asked Loni Ann if Kait would testify about that, she shook her head. Kait wanted only to be as far away from her father as she could be.

  Loni Ann had had a difficult time surviving when she was alone with Kait and Brent. “One of the things that Brad would do was write support checks—and then stop payment on them,” she said. “He knew that if the welfare department believed I was receiving support from him they wouldn’t give me any money. I couldn’t cash his checks, but the welfare people wouldn’t give me money either. . . .”

  Hesitatingly, Loni Ann told Capato about the terrible night when Brad had left her, drunk and disoriented, standing on the cliff above the river. And as for Cheryl’s murder, she had thoughts about that. She felt that if Brad had paid someone to kill Cheryl, he would have made sure that many, many respectable people saw him in the vital time period. Since no such witnesses had come forward, she said that Brad himself had probably beaten Cheryl to death. Loni Ann had been frightened that he would murder her during their divorce and custody battles.

  Loni Ann told Connie Capato that she had never known anybody who was so vindictive and had such a strong need for revenge and control as Brad. That was the major reason that she had fled the Northwest and found work as a kinestheology therapist as far away from him as she could get and still be in America. Asked if she would testify against Brad in the civil trial, she turned white and stammered “N-n-no!” She wasn’t even sure about a deposition. There was no guarantee that Brad wouldn’t come after her. Even if he was found responsible for Cheryl’s death, she knew he wouldn’t be locked up.

  Connie could see how afraid Brad’s first wife still was of him—even though he had had four other wives since she divorced him. She asked if Loni Ann would think about giving a videotaped deposition that Mike Shinn could present in the civil trial.

  Loni Ann said she would think about it.

  Leslie Haigh located Brad’s older sister Ethel. Ethel—who went by “Edie”—was living in the Northwest, although she, like most of the women in Brad’s past, didn’t want her address revealed to him. Unlike Loni Ann, Ethel wasn’t hesitant to relate her memories of her brother. She remembered him as being violent since his high-school days. He had beaten her and he had beaten their mother.

  Ethel regretted that she had persuaded Brad to marry Loni Ann when she became pregnant at seventeen. She hadn’t realized the abuse that Loni Ann had suffered in her marriage. “She was just beginning to establish a relationship with my husband and me and she finally opened up to us. . . .” Ethel looked at Leslie Haigh and confided, “I have no doubt in my mind that Brad murdered Cheryl. What is so sad is that all the women who have been involved with Brad truly believed that he wouldn’t hurt them. They believed that he loved them.”

  Ethel had never really known Cheryl—not until near the end of her life. They had talked in the spring of 1986 after Cheryl and Brad had separated. Ethel had offered to help Cheryl in her divorce and custody proceedings, and she had invited Cheryl to her daughter’s wedding.

  Ethel said that Cheryl had told her about one time when Brad disappeared for two weeks. Cheryl had asked him where he’d been and why he had left. “Brad’s response to Cheryl,” Ethel said, “was ‘If I ever hit you, I’ll kill you.’”

  Cheryl had called her the Friday before she died and told her about the deposition she had given a few days before. “She told me, ‘I’m going to nail him—I’m not going to let this happen.’ I begged her, ‘Don’t be alone this weekend. He’ll try to get you to come to him. Under no circumstances should you go to him.’ Cheryl said, ‘I’ll be careful. I’ll tell somebody if something looks like it will happen.’”

  Ethel made a strange comment to Haigh about Brad’s perception of children. “Children are nonentities,” she said. If Brad were to strike his wife and the children were present, it would be as if they were not really there—not in Brad’s mind. “It is quite conceivable that the child [Michael] was with Brad on the night of Cheryl’s death,” Ethel said, “and he might actually have seen what he did. It is quite conceivable that he took no precautions to make sure that the child did not see anything because no child was ‘there’ to see anything.”

  It was a chilling thought—almost as if Brad equated children with dogs or cats. Crimes could be committed in front of animals with impunity. Who would ever know?

  As far as Michael Cunningham’s memory went, the police files weren’t very encouraging. Mike Shinn saw that Michael had refused to talk with Jerry Finch and Susan Svetkey in the days immediately following his mother’s murder. He had been four then; now he was almost eight. The chance that he remembered more after three and a half years was almost nil. But like Jim Ayers, Shinn hoped in his heart that Michael hadn’t seen the terrible violence done to his mother.

  In September 1989 Connie Capato found Brent Cunningham, who was still living in Portland—but not with his father, who had thrown him out a year earlier. Brent agreed to talk to Capato. His memories of his childhood were not particularly pleasant. His father had left his mother when he was only a year old, and during the next ten years he saw him only during summer vacations and sporadic visits. When Capato asked Brent to describe his father, he said he was more a “competitive parent” than a “loving father.” Brad had always flashed money in front of him and Kait and told them that when they were old enough they could decide which parent they wanted to live with.

  Brent said that he had had minimal contact with his father’s second and third wives. He recalled being in a van with Brad and Cynthia Marrasco and watching them fight. “My dad slapped her.” As for Lauren Swanson, Brad’s third wife, Brent had never seen any abusive language or physical violence. But, of course, Brad had been married to Lauren less than a year.

  Brent’s first prolonged contact with his father in years was on the Tampico property. He was eleven then and he was given so many chores that he felt like a “slave.” And just as Brad had once had Jess, Michael, and Phillip collect “souvenirs” of dead things on their trips to Yakima, he had made up for lost time with his eldest son. He decided that Brent needed to learn how to kill and he forced the eleven-year-old to watch as he killed a young steer. But Brad didn’t know how to carry out a clean kill. In the end, he took a hatchet and finally a chain saw to the animal, and the barn stall was a bloody abattoir. It was an image burned forever into Brent’s mind.

  Brent had hay fever and farm chores aggravated it. His father hadn’t believed him and told him he was “faking it” and “lazy.” “He grabbed me by the back of the neck and said, ‘You’re your mother’s product and I don’t want you around if you are going to be like that.’” Then he threw Brent onto the ground. In a rage he ordered Brent to stay in the barn all day, and promised to deal with him later. Frightened, Brent ran away to his maternal uncle’s house.

  “My dad called and said I could come back and take my punishment or go back to my mother and forget that I ever had a father. I decided to go back to my mom’s.” But first, Brad insisted that Brent return all the clothes he had bought for him over the summer. Brent collected them and returned them to the Tampico ranch, but Brad noticed that he was still wearing clothing he had purchased for him. “I had to take them off and leave them,” Brent remembered. “I left with half my clothes gone and barefooted. That was the last time I heard from my dad for about four years.”

  The passage of time since his days on the Tampico ranch had faded his bad memories of his father, and Brent visited Brad in Oregon in the late spring of 1986. Brad had just left Cheryl. “Everything went really well, and I stayed in Portland,” Brent said.

  And so he became witness to the bitter divorce between his father and his third stepmother. He remembered well the night that Cheryl was murdered and the fear they had all lived through in t
he days that followed. Brent said he had gotten home from his scuba diving trip about 10:30 that Sunday night. “When I asked my dad why the message machine wasn’t on when I tried to call, he told me he’d just gone down to check the mail. After this . . . we all went to bed. Sometime later the police were beating on the door but no one could hear them . . . the apartment was near the freeway. . . . I went in and woke my father up and we were scared because we didn’t know who was pounding at the door in the middle of the night. My father got two pistols out and gave one to me.”

  Brad went to the door and opened it cautiously to find the police there. “The police said, ‘You don’t want your son to hear this,’ so my father told me to go back to my room . . . but I listened from the door and I could hear the police say, ‘Your wife’s been killed.’” After a long time, Brad came to Brent’s room with tears in his eyes. He told him that Cheryl had been murdered and that he was a suspect.

  Brent told Connie Capato that when his father had his heart attack in Phil Margolin’s office two days later, all of his four sons had ridden to the hospital with him. But it was Brent that Brad wanted to talk to privately. “He pulled the curtains and got real close and we talked secretly about trying to get the boys out of town. He gave me a lot of business cards and names of people who could help get the boys hidden so that Cheryl’s mother wouldn’t take them. My dad told me to drive them out of town myself if I had to.”

  Brent wasn’t yet sixteen at the time and it was an awesome responsibility. He looked at the names in his hand and saw that his father had listed his attorney Phil Margolin, Jerry Elshire, a private investigator, his sister Susan in Seattle, his uncle Jimmy Cunningham, and Herman and Trudy Dreesen. As it turned out, of course, Brad’s heart attack did not prove fatal and the burden was off Brent. But he had been caught up in the paranoia that followed Cheryl’s murder and he fled with Brad and the boys to the ranch in Tampico, back to the scene of his black summer of 1981.