Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  8:30:50: The “killer” arrives back at the Mobil station where his car is parked.

  8:32:28: The “killer” gets in his car, checks traffic carefully, pulls out of the Mobil station, and heads toward the Sunset Highway going east. He is slightly out of breath from his jog.

  8:37:40: The “killer” is back on the Sunset Highway, headed east toward the Madison Tower.

  8:38:13: He is in the tunnel going east.

  8:42:07: He pulls into the Madison Tower parking garage.

  8:42:34: He exits his parked car.

  The reenactment of Cheryl’s murder was only a drama. It wasn’t real—but it seemed real. “I relived it,” Shinn recalled. “I was sweating, my heart was pounding like crazy, even though we knew it was just a reenactment. It was almost as if it was really happening.”

  Brad could have easily been back in the Madison Tower garage at 8:42 P.M. In two more minutes, he would have been able to ride the elevator to the eighteenth floor and enter his apartment in time to take a phone call. With ten minutes to spare.

  “If Brad had not answered the phone when Sara called just before nine,” Shinn commented. “He would not have locked himself into such a tight time frame. . . .”

  But it was loose enough. The test run had proved that it was, indeed, possible to drive from the Madison Tower to the West Slope and back in thirty-five minutes—even allowing for almost five minutes in which to strike a helpless victim almost two dozen times. But if Brad was Cheryl’s killer, he may not have had ten minutes to spare. Later, experts estimated that it would take almost fifteen minutes to bludgeon someone two dozen times.

  * * *

  In late 1990, Mike Shinn’s office was in the Bishop’s House, in a remodeled parish house that was once a part of a church complex. Because it had been built in a time when crime in Portland was not a major concern, the Bishop’s House had had to be beefed up with security devices. Iron grilles were placed over windows on the ground and second floors—not just in Shinn’s offices but for all the offices located in the building.

  Brad Cunningham was a man who resented anyone snooping into his business and his life. Judging by the huge stack of reports from Connie Capato and Leslie Haigh, there was ample evidence that Shinn had done both. And the civil trial was fast approaching. It seemed a wise thing that his office was secure.

  Diane Bakker began to receive obscene phone calls at Shinn’s office. The male voice was Asian, or at least disguised to sound Asian. “I know who you are,” he breathed. “And I’m going to come up there and rape you.” He added some ugly details about what he planned to do.

  By the third call, Bakker was ready for him. She kept saying, “I can’t understand you—could you repeat that, only slowly?” and every time the obscene caller tried again, she pretended she couldn’t understand the string of obscenities he uttered because of his accent. “I don’t think it was Brad,” she recalled. “But maybe it was someone Brad hired. The guy finally got so exasperated with me because I couldn’t ‘understand’ him that he hung up. That was the end of the phone calls.”

  But not the end of the pretrial incidents. Diane Bakker went to work early one morning and found Mike Shinn’s office a mess. Someone had come in during the night, someone with a very explicit mission. It was easy enough to find the point of entry. Powerful arms had twisted the iron bars away from the bathroom window of the second-floor office complex. “Someone broke the window to the bathroom and took powdered cream and sugar from next to the coffee machine in the hall and scattered it all over the hall and Mike’s office,” Bakker said. “They didn’t touch the other two attorneys’ offices.”

  What was odd—and disturbing—was that nothing of value was missing. There were computers, typewriters, all manner of office machines, and Shinn had any number of paintings and sculptures in his offices that were worth thousands of dollars. The intruder had taken nothing, nor had he damaged anything in Shinn’s offices. He seemed, rather, to have broken in just to leave a message.

  “The only thing that was disturbed,” Shinn said, “was the Brad Cunningham case file. Whoever broke in had taken that from where I kept it and scattered it all over the hall. That was what was under all that spilled sugar and cream. Whoever came in during the night may have read the file, but he didn’t take it away with him. He just left it in sheets scattered all over my office—like a calling card.”

  Shinn figured he must be getting to somebody, forcing him to look over his shoulder and annoying the hell out of him. But he was not about to quit. He was hot on the trail.

  Someone was hot on his trail, too. His car was broken into—not at his office but where it was parked near his houseboat. The message was clear: I know where you work, and I know where you live . . .

  Mike Shinn wasn’t the only target. Some of Dr. Russell Sardo’s records of his sessions with Brad and Cheryl during their custody battle disappeared. And Sara Gordon received a scribbled letter that might have been meant to be reassuring, but it was unsigned, and anonymous messages frightened her.

  Dr. Gorden [sic],

  We heard about your testimony today. Our police friend tells us based on what you’ve said they can almost arrest him and by the end of your sworn statement we expect he’ll be in jail by end of month. Hang in there—you have our support.

  Your friends in Washington

  What friends in Washington? What testimony? Although Sara was prepared to testify in the civil trial, only a few people knew about it.

  Superstitious people, those who believe in omens and in the power of evil, might have felt a pall over the years-long quest for justice in Cheryl’s murder. Oregon State Police Detective Jerry Finch, who had been the lead detective in the criminal investigation of Cheryl’s death, had succumbed to lung cancer in 1988, almost exactly two years after Cheryl herself died. He had been in his early forties. Connie Capato, the private investigator who had been most active in Shinn’s civil investigation of Cheryl’s death, was barely thirty when she also developed cancer, a deadly last-moving malignancy of the brain. She was dead within a few months and did not live to see the civil trial she had worked so hard on come to fruition. Nor did Bob Burnett, another P.I. who had worked on the case.

  Mike Shinn and Diane Bakker were not afraid, but they had long since become cautious. Nothing about this case was going to be easy.

  45

  “We always had very nice houses. Brad insisted on a very glamorous lifestyle,” Dana would recall, speaking of their sudden move in the summer of 1990. “The Seattle house was brand new, and I’m not even sure where it was—except I remember it was close to the Sand Point Naval Air Station. It was a beautiful house, over three thousand square feet.”

  Dana had gone willingly with Brad and his sons to Seattle in July, but within weeks she had some reservations. Being chained to a pedestal was beginning to cloy. She yearned for some small bit of freedom. She had no job, she didn’t know anyone in Seattle, and her life had suddenly become only Brad. He was there everywhere she turned—not hovering, but enclosing her. He was not nearly as humble or distinguished as he had seemed to be at first. And he had a one-track mind. “Brad talked about sex all the time,” Dana said. “Sex was his thing. I asked him not to talk the way he did, but he didn’t stop.”

  Brad tried to persuade Dana to go to topless dancing bars around Seattle and she was appalled. Watching other women dance nude—or next to nude—was not something she wanted to do. Even though Brad was insistent that it would be fun, she refused.

  There were other things about Brad that puzzled her. She often found rubber gloves in his pockets and she could not for the life of her figure out why he needed them. When she asked him what they were for, he was evasive. Since his estranged wife was a doctor, she supposed it was possible that Brad had access to such things. But it was something that she tried to shut away in her mind. “Brad was crude, too,” Dana recalled. “I don’t like to repeat the words he used or the way he referred to . . . things. He’d use initial
s, but he’d tell me what they meant and it was the same as if he said it all out loud.”

  After Dana had been with Brad and the boys for four months, she began to feel so smothered that she could barely breathe. She was twenty-three and Brad was forty-one. Traits that had once seemed sweet and romantic now seemed like little fences going up around her. Brad clearly considered her far more than a nanny, far more even than a mistress. He talked of a future where they would always be together, and Dana wasn’t ready for such a commitment. She didn’t know if she ever would be.

  Brad had plans to move to Houston and he assumed that she would go along. Instead, Dana left him, went back to Portland, and moved in with Nick Ronzini. It was perhaps the first time any woman had left Brad without discussion or wavering. Dana was just gone. And she was naive enough to believe she was free and clear.

  “Brad moved to Houston. A couple of weeks later, he called and said he was in Portland,” Dana said. “He asked me to have dinner with him—just so we could end our being together on a friendly note. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t do that—so I said yes.”

  That evening with Brad was one of the weirdest Dana ever experienced. It started out well enough. She was all dressed up as Brad had suggested, and when she met him, he seemed to be his old wonderfully charming self, not even upset that she had left him. He took her to a very expensive restaurant. “It was one of those restaurants where they served course after course after course,” Dana said. “You know—salad and soup and appetizers and then sherbet, and then something else. It was very expensive and very impressive. They had special wine that went with each course. I don’t drink very much, but Brad kept urging me to. . . .”

  At some point during that autumn evening in Portland, Dana lost track of time and place. Everything took on a dreamy quality. And she would still sound puzzled when she remembered what happened next. “When I woke up the next morning, we were in Houston. I had no idea how I got there. I didn’t remember getting on a plane or leaving the restaurant. Brad just kept telling me, ‘I’m so in love with you. I can’t live without you.’ And so I stayed with him in Houston.”

  Dana had, at the very least, ambivalent feelings about Brad. She hadn’t even said goodbye to Nick. One minute she was having a wonderful meal in Portland, and the next thing she knew she was breathing in the humid, muggy air of Houston. Even if Brad loved her, he had tricked her.

  Nick Ronzini soon figured out where Dana was and followed her to Houston. When he tracked her to the apartment where she was living, he encountered Brad and the two men had a fist fight. Neither won, really, but it was Nick who left. “I would have gone back to Oregon with Nick,” Dana said. “But Nick had problems and I knew that wasn’t the way out. Besides, I was so insecure that I felt I was trapped with Brad.”

  Dana had begun her “tour of duty” with Brad. Sometimes things were good. When Brad was happy with a woman, no man could be more charming or more fun. “I don’t want to say that it was all terrible,” Dana said. “Thinking back, we had a wonderful time in Houston. We did most things as a family. Brad took us to Galveston. We had parties. We had fun. We always lived in big ‘executive’ homes. Brad always had new cars. When we were first in Houston, Brad had a new van. We needed a van because of the three boys. . . .”

  Back in Portland, Sara hoped against hope that she was free of Brad. Her divorce was finally granted on October 21, 1990. Circuit Court Judge Kathleen Nachtigal looked over the documents showing how many of Brad’s debts Sara had to pay and listened to recountings of his vandalism of their property. She awarded the house, the Broadway Bakery and Bistro, its stock, the cars, the Whitewater Jet boat, and all bonds, personal property, and pension assets to Sara. Brad received his formula for Symptovir and one lot in Tampico, Washington. In addition, Judge Nachtigal denied Brad’s petition for child support and ordered that he pay Sara the sum of fifty thousand dollars immediately. If he did not, interest at 9 percent would accrue. He didn’t pay.

  Sara had paid $220,000 for the Dunthorpe house. And she estimated that she had poured more than $100,000 into it to remodel it to Brad’s specifications. After they separated, she had made mortgage payments faithfully on a home occupied by her estranged husband and his nanny/mistress. Real estate was booming in Lake Oswego in the late eighties and early nineties, but when Sara finally managed in May of 1991 to sell the honeymoon house that had become a horror to her, she barely broke even. It had been an investment only in terror. And she still had the financial burden of the bakery and the bistro.

  Sara’s relief at having Brad gone was offset by her pain at losing her sons. From the time she had adopted them in March of 1988, she had considered them as much hers as if she had carried them in her womb. Now, she had no idea where they were. Every day there was something that reminded her of Jess, Michael, and Phillip and her heart hurt, thinking of them, wondering if they were safe, if they were happy. She didn’t even know if they were alive. Sara tried to believe that Brad loved the boys—it was a funny, skewed kind of love, but he had fought so hard to get them away from Cheryl that he must love them.

  And she took some faint comfort in the thought that Dana Malloy seemed fond of the boys. But Dana was young and would be so easily intimidated by Brad. Sara knew that if push came to shove—as it so often did with Brad—he would tromp right over Dana. Maybe Dana wasn’t even with them any longer; Brad went through women so quickly.

  As it happened, Dana was still with Brad. He wanted her to marry him. Brad had rarely been an unmarried man since he wed Loni Ann in 1969. When his marriage to Sara officially ended in October, Brad just naturally assumed that Dana would be anxious to marry him.

  She wasn’t. “Brad always called me his ‘wife,’” Dana said, “but I just giggled when he kept proposing to me. I didn’t want to marry him.”

  Brad had carried out a carefully choreographed plan to bend Dana to his will. She didn’t have the education that his other women had, she was younger than most of them, and she had never been an assertive person. Dana was adamant, however, on one point. Some instinct kept her from accepting Brad’s marriage proposals.

  It wasn’t easy. As he had with all his women, Brad quickly isolated Dana’s weak points. In his most loving tone, he would call her over to show her a diagram he had drawn. With his arm around her waist, he would tap his pencil on a line near the bottom of the page. “See, angel,” he would say. “You’re at this level here—and I’m way up here. You’re a beautiful woman, but you’re uneducated; you’re gorgeous but you’re not very smart. You need me—you’ll never find someone as smart as I am.”

  She believed him. But she still wouldn’t marry him.

  Brad talked to Dana about all his other wives. He hadn’t married any of them for love, he said, and he wanted her only because he loved her. He went through the familiar litany: Loni Ann had been pregnant and they were both very young when they married. Cynthia had been much older than he was and, he told Dana, “my second marriage was purely business.” He confided that he might have stayed with Lauren, “but Cheryl wouldn’t let me alone. She was completely obsessed with me, and I simply couldn’t get away from her.” As for Sara, he said she “wanted to marry me to save money on her taxes.”

  Remembering Brad’s explanations for his many failed marriages, Dana said, “At the time, that made sense to me. That made total sense to me. Especially when Brad cried and told me over and over, ‘But I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.’ ”

  They moved often in Houston. Each house was lovely, so Dana didn’t really mind. Brad told her about the civil suit that was looming back in Oregon—something to do with his fourth wife’s death. “You know, angel,” he said, “the police and the D.A. up there totally botched their investigation into Cheryl’s murder. They’re trying to get me for it because they have to have someone. The D.A. will lose his job if he doesn’t get somebody.”

  Dana would remember 1990 and 1991 as “scary.” Part of her felt sorry for Brad when she heard him
sob aloud about how much he loved her, how much he needed her. And yet part of her wanted to break free of him. “He hovered over me,” she said. “He was working for that law firm—Vinson and Elkins—that was handling his lawsuit. He brought me to his office every day so he could watch me, so he knew where I was.”

  She wasn’t bored exactly. “No, not really,” she said. “I’d sit in the corner and read magazines while he’d work a little bit in the morning, and then we’d go out to lunch. There were hearings or trials on his lawsuit and he took me to court with him. We went to the park or to the underground section or shopping. We had fun. It wasn’t so bad. But he always watched me.”

  It seemed to Dana that Brad was omniscient. He knew everything she did, everyone she talked to on the phone, and even what they had talked about. It was almost as if he could read her mind. “I’d call my mom or she’d call me, and I’d tell her that I just didn’t know what to do. That night, Brad would ask me if I was ‘confused’ about anything, and when I said, ‘No,’ he’d grin and say, ‘Oh, really—that’s not what I heard. I heard you didn’t know what to do about your life.’”

  Finally Dana realized that Brad had hooked up a tape recorder to the phones in the house. He was checking on all her calls, listening to every conversation she had while he was away from home. “He was becoming more obsessive—more possessive,” Dana said.

  Brad had been insistent that he didn’t want his “angel” to take a job in Houston. He wanted her available to him, with him all day, and on his arm looking like a million dollars when he dined out with partners of Vinson and Elkins. Dana was very impressed when they went out to dinner with his high-powered attorneys. “There I was—nobody, really—sitting there with those wealthy lawyers. I really enjoyed going out to dinner with them, and I was happy that Brad wanted me along.” It was Brad, of course, who had brainwashed Dana into believing that she was essentially “nobody,” a woman blessed with great physical beauty but with limited intelligence.