Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  A beautiful, delicate woman, Sara looked more like a kindergarten teacher than a physician. She had huge blue eyes and dimples, and her figure was slender and petite. In truth, she was a workhorse, a woman whose hand was steady no matter if blood might spray chaotically from a nicked artery in the patient she hovered over, no matter if a heart stopped beating or lungs stopped expanding. She had struggled too many years to win her medical degree to be anything less than professional, and she often worked sixty hours a week, napping in the on-call suite between operations.

  Sara Gordon had grown up in McMinnville, Oregon, one often children. She and her sister Maren* were identical twins, but mirror image twins. “I’m right-handed,” Sara would explain. “My twin is left-handed. We’re identical—but opposite. Math and science were always easy for me, and Maren was the creative one. When I graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade point average and she got a 3.8, she felt dumb, but it was only because I had a slight edge in math.”

  Looking at Sara and Maren, their teachers could not tell them apart, and they played the usual twin pranks, attending class for each other, fooling their friends. They would always be close, but as adults they would look more like just sisters than twins. Sara was thinner, her blond hair lighter than Maren’s, and her face often showed signs of stress, perhaps to be expected in her profession.

  All the Gordon children were intelligent. One brother was an attorney. Another was a millionaire who owned thousands of acres of prime Oregon grazing land and as many head of prize cattle. Their grandfather pioneered in the Lake Oswego suburb of Portland, long before it became a suburban paradise. Grandfather Kruse’s land turned out to be virtually worth its weight in gold. His old house, barns, and outbuildings remained in Lake Oswego just as they always were, but they were surrounded by posh homes, condos, office buildings, and parkways.

  Sara’s father was not rich, however, and it was a struggle to raise his large family. He was a dairy farmer, and dairy farmers rarely have the money to finance medical school. Sara’s parents had no money even to send her to college, much less medical school, and, like the rest of her siblings, she worked her way through college, graduating from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science degree. At Willamette she dated a young man who would one day be a deputy district attorney in Washington County, Oregon. She also knew Mike Shinn, who was a football star at Willamette and would become a prominent civil attorney in Portland. She never dated Shinn, and they didn’t expect to see each other much after college.

  Sara had always wanted to be a doctor. Most of the men who were attracted to her didn’t take her ambition seriously; she was too pretty, too diminutive, and she was always so concerned about other people’s feelings. Maybe she didn’t fit the accepted picture of a physician, but she was completely committed to achieving her goal.

  Sara married a young teacher, who convinced her he supported her dream of a career in medicine. He didn’t—not really. He wanted a stay-at-home wife. Accepted at Oregon Health Sciences University in 1974, she decided not to go. She tried to be a perfect housewife, but she yearned to continue her education, and after a frustrating year in Astoria on the coast of Oregon, her marriage ended.

  Sara also had to convince the University of Oregon’s medical school in Portland that she was really serious. Her application was passed over in 1975, but she was finally reaccepted in 1976 and she put herself through medical school by working as a cocktail waitress at a Red Lion Inn in Astoria. The job was far afield from her ultimate ambition, but the tips were good and she had the perfect figure for the abbreviated outfits she had to wear.

  Sara’s second marriage worked, even though she began medical school in 1976, probably because her husband’s job kept him out at sea as much as he was ashore. She wanted very much to prove that she could succeed at marriage, but she also wanted desperately to be a doctor. She was able to juggle the demands of medical school and marriage until 1980, when she received her degree. But when she began a four-year residency in anesthesiology at the same medical school, her second marriage ended too. There was just no time for anything but her career.

  Nevertheless, she tried again during her residency—this time with a physician—but her third marriage was as abbreviated as the first two. In 1984, she finally finished her residency and established her own practice as an anesthesiologist. She regretted her three failed marriages, but they had all ended with little acrimony. She still worked with her last ex-husband, Dr. Geoff Morrow,* head of the contagious disease department at Providence; theirs was an amicable—if final—divorce.

  Perhaps she just wasn’t meant to be married.

  Sara was thirty-three and she had been in school for twenty-eight years of her life. She still had medical school loans to pay back, and she worked every extra shift she could at Providence Hospital. But despite her native intelligence and her sophistication in all things medical, she was a trusting, almost naive woman. Because she always told the truth and took great pains never to hurt anyone’s feelings, she tended to believe that other people worked under the same moral code. When it came to evaluating men, Sara had made some misjudgments. She had never expected to be divorced even once, much less three times.

  Without children, with little trust in the permanency of relationships between men and women, Sara had immersed herself in her career, doubtful that she would ever find true love. There was another obstacle; she earned so much more money than most men that many of the eligible males she was attracted to were scared off. It would take a highly confident and liberated man to feel secure dating a woman who was not only beautiful and extremely intelligent but whose projected income was close to half a million dollars a year. And she certainly didn’t want a man who was attracted to her because of her money.

  In the spring of 1986, Sara was dating Jack Kincaid,* who had a successful advertising agency with several offices on the West Coast. Kincaid was divorced, with two teenage daughters, and he was a confirmed born-again bachelor. He and Sara were not dating exclusively. Kincaid was also seeing a woman in her twenties. If Sara had been completely frank about her feelings, she would have admitted to a smidgen of jealousy about that. But even so, she and Kincaid were good friends, she counted on his being around, and she didn’t expect that he would commit either to her or to his other girlfriend, Sandi.*

  One night Sara and Jack and her friend Lilya Saarnen,* who was dating one of Sara’s fellow doctors, Clay Watson,* were attending a dance at the Multnomah Athletic Club—the “MAC,” one of Portland’s more exclusive clubs. Lilya didn’t feel that Jack was good for Sara; he was too much of a playboy. When the men were away from the table, Lilya expressed her feelings and said she knew the perfect man for Sara. She wanted to set her up with a blind date with an old friend of hers. “His name is Brad Cunningham,” Lilya said.

  Sara wasn’t looking for anyone else to date and, like almost everyone else, she hated blind dates. Men that friends described as “really fascinating” too often turned out to be anything but. Nevertheless, Lilya persisted. She had once dated Brad Cunningham herself. Now she was happy with Clay Watson, Lilya said, but she and Brad were still friends, he was newly single, and she felt he and Sara would be a perfect fit. She described him as a very special man.

  Actually, Lilya went into such graphic detail about how skilled Brad Cunningham was as a lover that Sara was a little embarrassed. She had never heard a woman speak so openly about a man. Indeed, she wondered why—if this Brad was such a marvelous lover—Lilya had let him get away. But she said she had no romantic interest in Cunningham any longer, and she thought Sara would like him.

  A little reluctantly, Sara said it would be all right for him to call her. “He got my phone number from Lilya,” she later recalled. “He phoned me and we agreed to meet for dinner. I had a date with Jack that week—the last week in March—too, and he had to change the date so I called Brad and we switched days.”

  Sara spoke to Lilya early on the day of her b
lind date. “She kept talking about the relationship they had had—how she had been in love with him. I still thought it was weird that she’d want to introduce me to Brad, but she insisted.” Sara had no intention of meeting Brad Cunningham alone. What would they talk about? She didn’t even know him. So she arranged to have her friend Gini Burton,* who worked as an operating room technician at Providence, and Gini’s boyfriend, Gil, come to dinner that night too.

  “I was in a security building, so I could see Brad on the monitor when he buzzed to get in,” Sara remembered. “I went down and met him. He was very good looking.” In fact, Brad Cunningham looked as if he wouldn’t need someone to fix him up with a blind date. When Sara let him in, she found him tremendously attractive; he was a big, broad-shouldered man with thick dark hair and sloe eyes. He appeared to be a few years older than she was. He dressed impeccably and he had an air of success about him. He was certainly self-assured. Too self-assured for Sara’s taste. “I didn’t like him on our first date,” she recalled. “He talked too much about Lilya, and about himself, and he seemed egotistical.”

  Brad monopolized the conversation that first night, while Sara, Gini, and Gil listened politely. “It was very obvious that Brad had once had a lot of money,” Sara remembered. But his conversation about his wealth and his possessions didn’t impress her. Besides that, Brad seemed so taken with Lilya Saarnen that Sara wondered why he wasn’t still dating her. “She had raved about Brad, and now Brad kept going on about her. I really thought that he wouldn’t be interested in me because he kept talking about Lilya.”

  Easter Sunday was on March 30 that year. Although she had expected him to, Jack Kincaid didn’t invite Sara out for Easter brunch. It didn’t really bother her; he said he was going to take his daughters out to brunch. “I told him I’d just leave his Easter basket on his front porch,” Sara said.

  Kincaid looked uncomfortable when he said, “You’d better not do that, Sara. I’m going to be with Sandi.”

  Sara didn’t take an Easter basket to Jack Kincaid, and she accepted a second date with Brad Cunningham when he called. Even though her three months of dating Kincaid hadn’t been an exclusive arrangement, her feelings were a little hurt that he was with Sandi. She undoubtedly said “yes” to another date with Brad Cunningham more quickly than she ordinarily would have.

  She was glad she did. “On our second date Brad was charmings,” she said. “He asked about me.”

  Sara figured that he had been just as nervous about their first date as she was. He wasn’t really conceited; he had just been hiding his own discomfort and trying too hard to fill the conversational silences. After all, he hadn’t known Sara or her friends that first night. The man Sara met for their second date was considerate and concerned, and she found herself extremely drawn to him. Her feelings for Brad were not what she had expected. But there it was. She was surprised at how wrong she had been about him. Every time she saw him, she liked him better. And from the beginning, she had found him physically attractive—not classically handsome, but there was something about him. Maybe it was his eyes.

  Bradly Morris Cunningham was not yet forty, but he was a bank executive at Citizens’ Savings and Loan. And shortly after he met Sara, he had a new job; he was hired to be part of the top echelon of the Spectrum Corporation, a branch of the U.S. Bank in Portland. He told Sara he would oversee all of their commercial acquisitions. He also told her he had been a real estate entrepreneur involved in a huge project in Houston, Texas, where he had controlled six hundred million dollars. Although that project had gone sour when the oil disaster hit Houston, Brad said he had brought suit against his contractor and the bonding company—litigation that, he said, would eventually net him millions of dollars. And, as if that weren’t enough, Brad also had his own company which had diversified interests, some having to do with construction and others in the biotechnology field.

  Sara and Brad dated often that spring, going out to dinner and to plays. He invited her to his home, a two-bedroom apartment on the fourteenth floor of the Madison Tower along the Willamette River in downtown Portland. Brad introduced Sara to his fifteen-year-old son, Brent,* who lived with him, a child of his first marriage. He told her he had two daughters, Amy* and Kait,* by former marriages, and three other sons, Jess,* Michael,* and Phillip,* who were, six, four, and two respectively. By the end of April, Sara had also met Brad’s younger sons. They were adorable little boys, with their father’s dark hair and eyes, polite and endearing children. “I thought they were wonderful,” Sara remembered.

  Brad told Sara that he shared custody of his three young boys with his estranged wife. He planned to move to a larger apartment on the eighteenth floor where they would have their own room furnished and decorated especially for them. The little boys were with him as much as they were with their mother.

  Sara was touched when she saw how deeply Brad cared for his children; he seemed to build his whole life around them. He confided that their mother was totally unfit, and that he was struggling to gain full custody of the boys. He described his ex-wife to Sara as “bitchy.” Sara remembered his words. “He said she would fly off the handle and yell at the kids. He told me she was sexually promiscuous but that he really thought she hated men.”

  Sara’s heart went out to Brad. He was so worried about his kids that it seemed to color his whole life, and she saw the shadows of pain wash across his face when he thought she wasn’t looking. Even so, she found Brad “fun, bright, and attractive.” She had met very few men in her life who were not intimidated by her intelligence and her income. Not this man. Brad had a remarkably keen mind and Sara found him more and more fascinating. His lifestyle and his interests were different from anything she had ever known. But there was an almost electric energy about him. He was enthusiastic and charismatic and he had risen so high so rapidly in the business world.

  Incredibly, just when Sara had pretty much reconciled herself to being alone, Portland’s spring of 1986 surprised her. It brought not only its usual profusion of rhododendrons, azaleas, and dogwood blossoms, but also this remarkable man who seemed to be ideal for her. She stopped seeing Jack Kincaid, and Jack dated Sandi exclusively. Sara and Jack were still friendly; it was just that they rarely met any longer.

  Brad Cunningham was everything that Sara had ever imagined she would want in a husband, and he had come along just at the time when she believed she would never find anyone. It was funny how life turned out sometimes; that the two of them should ever have met and fallen in love defied the laws of probability. Their backgrounds were so very different. Sara was Dutch; Brad was half Indian, half Celtic. She was small and blond; he was large and dark. They were both, however, determined and ambitious people who could focus on a goal and channel all their energies until they achieved it.

  Before April blossomed into May, Brad and Sara were extremely close. “He waited a long time before he would make love to me,” she recalled. “And that was thoughtful. He told me that he didn’t want to be intimate until he was sure that we were going to stay together . . .”

  Brad proved to be both a tender and an exciting lover, a caring, passionate man. “He told me over and over again how much he loved me—how beautiful I was,” Sara said. “He was always telling me what a lucky man he was to be with me, how lucky his boys were.”

  Sara had every reason to believe that Brad loved her. “A nurse friend of mine told me after a party that it was obvious Brad was in love with me,” she remembered. “She said he never took his eyes off me the whole evening.”

  Sara felt just as lucky to have found Brad. It was a transcendently perfect spring for both of them. Brad gave her a friendship ring, which they both knew meant a commitment that far exceeded friendship. He urged her to rent an apartment in the Madison Tower so that they could be closer together.

  The three round towers—Madison, Grant, and Lincoln—were the place to live in Portland in 1986. Their windows looked out on a renewed riverfront, on all the arching bridges that cr
oss the Willamette River to connect the bisected city, and on the long park blocks that are not unlike Manhattan’s Central Park. Brad had moved to a three-bedroom unit on the eighteenth floor where the rent was a thousand dollars a month.

  In June, Sara found a unit she liked on the fourteenth floor. It was eight hundred a month. In New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, their apartments would have rented for at least three times as much. The rooms were large and tasteful and there was an outside walkway running around each floor of the soaring towers. Basement parking facilities were available to all tenants. It was, of course, a security building where no one gained entrance to the tower elevators without permission of the guards on duty.

  Coincidentally, Brad’s former girlfriend Lilya Saarnen—who had been responsible for bringing Brad and Sara together—lived in an apartment on the ground floor of the Madison Tower. That didn’t concern Sara. Although Lilya was a very sexy woman, it was apparent that whatever she and Brad had shared was over, and Lilya was in love with her surgeon boyfriend, Dr. Clay Watson. He was two decades older than Lilya, but that didn’t bother her at all. She was a pragmatic woman, and Watson took wonderful care of her. Like Brad, Lilya had a career in banking, but her health was unpredictable. She needed someone like Watson.

  Sara and Lilya were very different types. While Sara was sweetly feminine, Lilya’s style was subdued. She chose loose clothing in earth tones, pulled her long hair back in a bun, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Even so, men seemed to find her almost bland but perfect features spectacularly sensuous. She had a manner about her that suggested a sexuality barely under wraps. She spoke softly, as Sara did, but Lilya had hidden promises in her voice.

  Sara was not surprised that Brad had been attracted to Lilya, but now he was completely devoted to her. He had turned her life upside down, and she was gloriously happy that summer. She was so much in love that she never felt fatigued, even though she was working such brutal hours in the trauma unit. It seemed as though everything she had longed for in life was suddenly within her grasp.