Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

Brad was forty-one in the spring of 1990, but he didn’t look it. He was running ten miles a day and was in peak condition. He dressed in expensive dark suits and drove a new (rented) Mercedes. “He was so charming,” Dana said, “but he was humble, too, and quiet.”

  When Brad told her that she had won the nanny job over all the other applicants, Dana was thrilled, but she looked upon it only as a job. She would care for his three little boys during the week and live in the guest house, but she planned to continue her job selling cosmetics on the weekends.

  Sara had to sell the Dunthorpe house. The cash drain of the bakery and then the bistro was bad enough, but the payments on the big house, not to mention the taxes, were more than she could handle—even if she worked twenty-four hours a day. But Brad blocked her every attempt to sell the house. It was outrageous, and it was ridiculous, but Sara understood. She knew Brad’s charisma, and she had learned how frightening and relentless he could be to get what he wanted. If she had not had Jack Kincaid to back her up, she might have buckled under the pressure.

  Sara’s money had paid for the Dunthorpe house and the Riverplace apartment, but she no longer lived in either. In truth, she really didn’t live anywhere; she was a woman in hiding. The few items she had managed to take out of the Dunthorpe house were in the Riverplace apartment—but she wasn’t. Instead she slept at Providence Hospital, feeling some slight sense of protection with her coworkers surrounding her. She never slept in the suite she had shared so many times with Brad and the little boys. Brad knew where that was, and there was always the chance he might encounter some new employee who didn’t know about him and talk his way into the suite. Sara knew what a glib talker he was. So she slept behind doors that were behind doors that were behind doors, deep in the bowels of the hospital. If anyone called for her, anyone, the ground rules now demanded that the caller never be told where she was. All of her calls were transferred to trusted friends inside Providence. Only then would the call be passed on to her.

  Once again Sara’s work was her life, just as it had been when she first met Brad in 1986. However, by 1990 she no longer took her life for granted. The memories of being able to concentrate on her work, to walk without fear into the parking lot, to live without fear in her own home, were only that—memories. Somehow Brad always seemed to be aware of where she was.

  Sara never knew what she might find. Sometimes she found black spray paint along the sides of both her cars—an Audi and a Volvo—sometimes splashes of paint across their hoods, the edges drying into segmented clots, the way blood dries. The cars were white and she saw the damage immediately. It didn’t matter where she parked. Once, when she had spent the night at a girlfriend’s house, she found that twelve nails had been pounded into her tires. For some reason the tires hadn’t gone flat and she was able to drive to a tire dealer and have them repaired. But worst—because of what they symbolized—were the flower petals. Some unseen hand had sprinkled rose petals all over her car, as if casting flowers on a grave.

  Even when she went to bed in one of the on-call suites deep in the inner sanctum of the hospital, Sara didn’t sleep well. It was hard not to think of all she had lost. Most of all, she missed her sons. “If I hadn’t been afraid of Brad, I would have sought custody of the boys—but I didn’t dare.”

  Sara harbored the hope that she might have Jess, Michael, and Phillip for three weeks in June. Seeing the boys meant seeing Brad, but she wasn’t afraid of him in the daylight. It was the unexpected that frightened her. Brad would never let her have the children for long periods, but he allowed short visits. Meanwhile, their divorce proceedings inched along. An uncontested divorce in Oregon took only three months, but Brad claimed federal law guidelines and said his pending bankruptcy gave him an automatic stay. And, as usual, he changed attorneys. It would be fall at least before Sara could hope to have her divorce finalized.

  On June 10, Sara met Dana Malloy when she returned the boys to the Dunthorpe house after they had visited her. The two women liked each other, and Sara went away somewhat relieved at Brad’s choice of a caregiver for the boys. She noticed one thing that shouldn’t have surprised her. Dana looked a lot like herself, same coloring, same general facial features. Dana was taller, of course, and about ten years younger than she was, but their resemblance was remarkable. Sara was glad she liked Dana. But if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered to Brad. He no longer listened to anything she said.

  Dana had settled happily into her job at the Dunthorpe house. If she couldn’t have babies of her own, Brad’s sons were great little kids and she soon became very attached to them. She looked after Jess, Michael, and Phillip, saw that they got to school, cooked, washed dishes, and made the beds. The work wasn’t hard, and Dana enjoyed being with this little motherless family. She did not know, of course, that there had been two mothers whom Brad had ruthlessly cut out of their lives.

  Before a month had passed, Dana was surprised but a little pleased, too, when it became obvious that Brad was attracted to her. “When I went to work for him, I had my own life,” she said. “I had my weekend job. He didn’t even know me but, within a month, he didn’t want me working weekends. He got obsessed with me—I guess that’s how you’d describe it. He put me on a pedestal. He wouldn’t let me make beds or wash the dishes. After I was with him thirty days, he hired ‘Molly Maid’ to come in. But cleaning was supposed to be part of my job.”

  Dana believed that Brad was a wealthy businessman. She had no idea that the house they lived in belonged to Sara and that Brad had no income at all—beyond $1,608 a month he collected in Social Security survivors’ benefits for Cheryl Keeton’s boys, and the sporadic payments that he got from the Colville tribe.

  Brad began to court Dana avidly and she was dazzled. “He ordered these exotic flowers flown in from Hawaii—flowers I’d never seen before. I didn’t even know you could buy flowers that way.” The five of them—Brad, Dana, Jess, Michael, and Phillip—went out to dinner often as a family. It was pleasant and fun, and Dana found herself falling in love with Brad. It wasn’t much more than a month after she began working for him that they became intimate. “He was a wonderful lover—a passionate lover. When he kissed you, you believed you were the only woman in the world for him.”

  Dana had been ignored by her husband, but now she had become the center of Brad’s universe, completely unaware of the bitter divorce and the terrible struggle he and Sara were having over the house. Dana never knew about things like that; Brad took care of his own business affairs. He dictated what they would do, where they would go, how she would dress, whom she would see. She was so happy to be with him that she didn’t notice how short her leash was becoming.

  Life with Brad was sheer joy, but it wasn’t perfect. Dana’s awe of him lasted for a relatively brief time, and some things really bothered her. She didn’t like the way Brad disciplined his sons, even though he seemed to love them. She watched him administer the precise number of “swats” that he had toted up during the boys’ lapses when they were away from home. Once they knew that punishment was awaiting them, most of the fun of their outings vanished. And Dana was as horrified as Sara had been to see another form of control. For some minor misdeed, Brad would order the miscreant to stand inches from a wall, warning him that he must not allow his nose to touch the wall itself. “Sometimes, they’d have to stand that way for an hour,” Dana said, “even Phillip.” Brad was their father, Dana knew, and she never interfered—but it bothered her to see a little boy like Phillip doing his time against the wall like a Marine recruit.

  Sometime in the summer of 1990, Brad announced that they were all moving to Seattle. Dana assumed that he must have sold the Dunthorpe house, and agreed to go with him. The move caught Sara completely by surprise and added to her torment. “The last time I saw the boys was July 8, 1990,” she remembered. “After that, it would be such a long, long time before I saw them. I didn’t have any idea where they were. . . .”

  On that Sunday, July 8, Sara brought th
e boys back to Dunthorpe and saw a large U-Haul truck parked down the street. A little alarm sounded in her brain. Later, she learned that Brad had pulled it into the driveway and packed it full. Before he, Dana, and the boys pulled out, he told the security force at Dunthorpe that he was “putting a few things in storage” and taking his sons to Canada for a vacation. He said there would be no way to contact him, and he didn’t know when he would return.

  When Sara called the Dunthorpe house two days later, she found the phone had been disconnected. She went to the house with two realtors and discovered that once again all the locks had been changed to high-security locks which were almost impossible to disable. In order to get in, she had to break a window in the laundry room. The house was a mess. But she didn’t know if Brad was gone for good; he had left a house-sitter in the place.

  Sure enough, he returned on July 14 and hooked up the phone. When Sara called him to once again discuss listing the house, he was curt.

  “Am I going to see the boys for dinner?” she asked.

  “Not unless you want to go to Bellingham.” Bellingham was three hundred miles north of Portland.

  “Brad, you’re disobeying court orders by taking them away,” Sara countered.

  He hung up on her.

  Neighbors called Sara to tell her that Brad had had movers at the house and had hauled away a tremendous load of stuff. He had told his “renter” in the guest house that he was moving to Seattle for “six to ten months to sell a drug product.” Sara asked the security patrol to check the house. They reported that the key she had given them still fit in the lock in the back door, but Brad had apparently done something to the door so that it wouldn’t open. All the windows on the ground floor had also been nailed shut.

  When Sara finally gained entry to the house, she was stunned. The place had been gutted. “Besides removing all of his furniture and personal belongings,” she wrote shakily in her journal, “Brad removed the washer, dryer, and refrigerator, . . . a $3,000 armoire, $1800 china cabinet and $600 coffee table that I purchased prior to our marriage. Most surprising, he cut wires and totally removed two Genie garage door opening systems, . . . all the closet components (shelves et al) installed by Closets to Go . . .”

  Brad had pried out the fireplace insert, taken down light fixtures, and generally dismantled and removed everything that could possibly be carried away. Lightbulbs, fireplace screens, towel racks, Sara could not imagine what use he had for them; no, Brad was simply leaving his signature.

  On July 18, Sara went to get the Ford truck she had bought Brad from the World Trade Center parking lot where he said he had left it. She felt fortunate that he had obeyed a court order to return the dark blue one-ton pickup truck that she was paying for. It was there, still with Brad’s vanity plate that said BBIIGG. “The pickup would not start and was towed to Coliseum Ford,” Sara noted in her diary. “They found that both gas tanks contained at least 50% water.” It would cost at least five hundred dollars to get the truck running again.

  None of it mattered to Sara as much as the fact that her three little boys had once again vanished. And she had no idea how long it would be until she saw them again.

  44

  As they moved through 1990, Mike Shinn, Diane Bakker, and Shinn’s private detectives quite possibly learned more about Brad Cunningham than anyone ever had. Perhaps confident that the police had long since lost interest in him as a suspect in Cheryl’s murder, Brad for a time had not been as careful of his movements as he had once been. But now that the civil action had been filed against him, Shinn was always right behind him and Brad was once again moving frequently. Shinn had yet to wrest so much as one deposition from him. Forrest Rieke’s law firm no longer represented Brad—not since Sara’s attorney, Bill Schulte, informed them that she would not be paying his legal bills. And he and the boys had abruptly moved to Washington State.

  In May of 1990 Shinn believed he had finally succeeded in getting Brad to give a deposition. It meant that Shinn had to travel to Seattle to obtain it, but it was worth the two-hundred-mile trip. He arrived at the appointed place and time, and at the last minute Brad did appear, carrying some kind of legal document. “There!” he exclaimed and threw the document on the table. “There will be no deposition. I have an automatic stay of all legal action.”

  The document was a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. By switching from his Chapter 11 bankruptcy action to the Chapter 7, Brad had indeed removed himself from the requirement of giving a deposition in the civil action against him concerning Cheryl’s murder. Without Sara’s support, Brad argued—correctly—he had no funds. And he would not have funds until his pending Houston suit came to fruition. As a virtual indigent, without legal counsel and protected by Chapter 7, he was temporarily untouchable. To the best of Shinn’s knowledge, he had seen Brad only twice—once when he came over to his restaurant table in Portland and once when he slapped his Chapter 7 papers down on the conference table in Seattle.

  Shinn began to wonder if it was humanly possible to get Cunningham into a courtroom. The guy wasn’t an attorney, but he had been involved in so much litigation over the years that he was savvy about how to delay and distract. Shinn became a regular in bankruptcy court in Seattle, appearing several times over the next six months to file motions to lift the stay. Finally, in December of 1990, Judge Samuel J. Steiner did accede to Shinn’s motions. Brad named a date when his Houston trial would take place, and then ignored one deposition request after another. For Shinn, it was like jousting with a shadow.

  That fall, Mike Shinn had learned to his disgust that the date Brad had given for his civil suit against the Parkwood Place contractor and the bonding company in Texas was false. There was no trial date set in Houston. But Shinn moved steadily ahead on the civil case in Oregon. Depositions or not, Brad was going to have to answer questions he had avoided for four years.

  Shinn wanted to re-create, if he could, the events of September 21, 1986. He had to prove that it was possible for Brad to have left his sons—or at least Jess and Phillip—in his apartment in the Madison Tower and driven to the Mobil station on the West Slope to confront Cheryl Keeton. He had to allow time for the killer to strike the victim more than twenty times, send her van onto the freeway, run back to the Mobil station, and then drive home and answer Sara Gordon’s phone call at 8:50 P.M. If that wasn’t possible, Shinn wouldn’t have a case. Lilya had seen Brad at 7:30. The window of opportunity was, almost certainly, little more than an hour and fifteen minutes.

  It was now the third week of September 1990. No moment in time is ever exactly like any other, no sunset or sunrise, no ebb and flow of tide. But Shinn chose the night of September 21, 1990, to run his test. Conditions were as close as he could get to the night Cheryl was murdered. The weather was almost the same, warm and pleasant. Only it was four years later, and September 21 was a Friday, not a Sunday. Traffic would be a little heavier.

  At 7 P.M. the test car pulled up to the exit of the parking garage at the Madison Tower. The man who was playing the “killer” was driving; Shinn was in the backseat. It was still full daylight and there were two reasons why Shinn figured that Brad would not have left the Madison Tower until an hour later. He would have waited for darkness to carry out a murder; and Betty Troseth had talked to Cheryl just before eight on the night she was murdered. The last thing Cheryl had said to her mother was, “I’m going to meet Brad at the Mobil station.”

  Diane Bakker was playing the “victim” in the test. Shortly after 8 P.M., the time when Cheryl had ended her conversation with her mother, she left the West Slope house that Cheryl had rented. Driving a Toyota van, Diane clocked the distance to the Mobil station at seven-tenths of a mile. “It took just a couple of minutes to get down there,” she remembered. She parked the van and waited.

  8:07:00: It is dusk when Shinn and the “killer” pull out of the Madison Tower parking area and head for the Sunset Highway. They will be careful to travel at legal speeds. A camcorder in their car automati
cally registers the passing of seconds and minutes.

  8:09:44: The arrow to 26 West appears; the car moves left onto the approach toward the westbound tunnel.

  8:13:28: The car emerges from the tunnel and onto the Sunset Highway. The speed is fifty-five miles an hour.

  8:16:32: They reach the location of the Mobil station.

  8:17:00: They pull in and park in the shadows there. The “killer” slips on gloves. He walks slowly around from the back of the station to the “victim’s” van parked out front. He pounds on the “victim’s” window, forcing his way in. (“I was trying to think as Cheryl would have that night,” Bakker remembered. “I sat in the van waiting, looking all around for ‘Brad.’ But even though I was waiting for someone to attack me, I didn’t see him. He was just there suddenly. . . . ”)

  8:18:20: He is inside the van. (This period could never be absolutely reconstructed. Had Brad pulled up close to Cheryl’s van so that she could see that Michael was in the car? Or had he left Michael—with orders to “take a nap”—in Sara’s car behind the station. Or conceivably, could he have left all three boys in his apartment? Furthermore, no one could really know where the savage beating of Cheryl Keeton had taken place. More than likely, it was a continuous attack in the van, although she might well have tried desperately to leap from the passenger door, only to be yanked back by the belt of her jeans. Her injuries had been inflicted by a heavy object. Shinn was inclined to believe it was a “police-type” flashlight, although he could never locate it.)

  8:22:10: The “victim’s” van, with the “killer” at the wheel and the “victim” dead or unconscious in the passenger seat, is stopped on 79th Street a minute or two away from the Mobil station. The eastbound lanes of the Sunset Highway are just ahead.

  8:22:48: The “killer” sends the van toward the freeway. He then jogs back toward the Mobil station. He is wearing shorts and a T-shirt now, and carrying a bundle of clothes under his arm like a football.