by Ann Rule
Some members of the family, with a bit of envy, would recall that Sanford used credit lavishly, and nobody ever knew whether he really made that much more money than Jimmy or if he was paying on everything by the month. Either way, Sanford and Rosie were happier when they were poor.
The Cunningham cousins all went to Cedarhurst Grade School, Cascade Junior High, and Evergreen High School. They celebrated birthdays and holidays together. They were beautiful children, a happy melding of their Anglo-Saxon and Indian genes. Jimmy’s son Gary was the handsomest by far of the boys, and his son Terry—who was Brad’s age—was the biggest. But Brad was the natural athlete and unquestionably the smartest. As a child—and later as man—he had uncommon brilliance. He was a leader, a bossy, confrontive boy who could be a bully at times. In every family snapshot he stood out, grinning broadly, dominating each celebration. He mugged for the camera outrageously, pushing his cousins out of the way as if to say, “Look at me! Look at me!”
As they got older, many of the Cunningham cousins grew to dislike Brad. Some were afraid of him. “When Brad showed up to play, I always went home,” one girl cousin remembered. “I knew that pretty soon somebody would be crying, or maybe that someone was going to get hurt.” And Brad was highly competitive with his cousin Terry. Terry was always larger than Brad—maybe not by a lot, but there was no question that he was the taller. He was a month younger than Brad, and it rankled Brad that Terry outgrew him. His cousin Gary had trouble with reading. He was dyslexic long before the deficit was commonly diagnosed, and Brad teased and tormented him about that. Brad could read anything from an early age and he always had superior report cards. Even after they were adults, Gary didn’t care to be around Brad.
No one really knew what went on inside Rosie’s and Sanford’s house, no one but the family who lived there. There were secrets kept inside those walls. As the years went by, the marriage that had begun with such high expectations right after the Second World War wasn’t turning out the way Sanford and Rosie had hoped. While things appeared calm on the surface, the family dynamics were ugly and hurtful and, ultimately, explosive.
11
Brad’s birth may have been the catalyst for the inexorable disintegration of the Cunningham family. At the very least, his arrival marked the end of Ethel’s small place in the sun. He was a man child and Ethel was only a girl. Sanford was delighted to have a son.
As an adult, Brad would recall that he had been told his mother’s labor for his birth had been prolonged and arduous, and she had always blamed him because he had such a large head. He was a big baby with a disproportionately large and rounded head—a physical characteristic that would stay with him. When Rosemary developed uterine (or perhaps cervical) cancer four years after his birth, Brad said she blamed him for that, too.
When Rosemary became pregnant for the third time, she faced an agonizing decision. She took a gamble with her health to deliver Susan safely. “My mother was diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant with me,” Susan recalled. “She wouldn’t have an abortion—she delayed treatment until I was born.” After Susan’s birth, Rosemary underwent a complete hysterectomy. She was still in her twenties. “She had to have chemotherapy and radium treatment,” Susan said. “Those treatments were in their infancy in the 1950s, and Mom suffered severe internal burns. And she had to take hormones, too, and they didn’t work right. Everything went wrong. She even grew a mustache.”
It may have been Rosemary’s health that changed her personality. Susan would remember that her mother was a woman of mercurial moods. “She never disciplined us, though. She kept track of who was supposed to be punished and told my father when he came home. Dad would rather have been anyplace but there. Sometimes we’d all been waiting for four hours to get whipped and we were all terrified.”
The children sensed that Sanford didn’t want to beat them—that when he came home after a day’s work, he would have much preferred to be greeted with something other than a list of his children’s misdeeds. But he nodded as Rosemary told him which of the children needed punishing, and he unbuckled his belt. “He beat us with a strap,” Susan recalled. “Mostly Ethel and Brad. I was younger. One time, I saw that Ethel had welts all up and down her back and legs. She had to go to school like that, but she wore stockings and clothes that hid the marks.”
Although Sanford dreaded taking his belt to his children, he soon fell into a kind of frenzy. “He really got into it,” Susan remembered. “He hit harder and harder. He really lost control.” But, in Susan’s recall, it was Ethel who was the psychological whipping girl in their home. Pictures in the family albums show Ethel and Brad when they were toddlers. They were only a year apart and Brad was so large that they looked like twins. Indeed, Rosemary often dressed them in matching sunsuits. But it was definitely Brad who drew most of the positive attention in the family. Other family members would agree that Ethel was left out, but felt that Susan wasn’t. “Their whole house was decorated with Brad and Susan,” one cousin recalled. “Brad had so many athletic honors and Susan was so pretty that their pictures were all over, but you hardly ever saw any of Ethel.”
As a child, Susan adored her big brother. She saw Brad as a protector and a hero. He took her along with him, and he didn’t seem to find her an annoying baby sister. She felt proud to be with him. “Brad taught me how to catch a football. He built a bicycle for me. Brad was the only one who listened to me. Later, when I dropped out of college for a while, he listened to my reasons and he didn’t say I was stupid. He was my idol.”
Rosemary tried to discourage Susan from bonding with her brother. “When I was little, she told me that Brad was evil,” Susan remembered. “I didn’t know why she said that.” And although Sanford favored his son, Brad still took his lumps along with the other children when Rosemary said he needed punishing.
Both Susan and Ethel recalled that Brad had suffered a concussion from falling down the basement steps. Ethel remembered that when Brad was five or six, he was helping his father move wood from the woodpile. He had tied a rope to a log and was tugging it behind him. But as he tugged, he lost his balance and fell backward about ten feet, down the steps to the basement, landing on his head. Ethel said her parents took Brad to a doctor who told them to watch for “personality changes such as acts of violence.” But if Brad was only five or six when he landed on his head, Ethel would have been only six or seven and probably the doctor story was apocryphal.
Susan, who would have been little more than a toddler at the time of the “log on a rope fall,” said she had watched Sanford knock Brad down the basement steps when he was twelve. “Brad was stunned. He was saying funny things, all garbled up, and he didn’t make any sense.” Susan would have been about seven when that happened. But she had quite clear recall of other acts of violence and abuse that bounced off the walls inside the house in Burien.
To the outside world—even to Sanford’s brother Jimmy and his wife Caroline—life was normal in Sanford’s and Rosie’s family. Only the children caught in the love-hate relationship between Sanford and Rosie would witness the venom that Rosie sometimes spewed after the flawed hormone treatment following her hysterectomy. Only the children knew how bad it could get.
Susan would remember being beaten only twice. “I was about eleven and my father never beat me again because I called the authorities and he was forbidden to touch me. After that, he put me in a dark closet to punish me. It was my safe place to hide from all the fights. I’d sit there on top of my shoes, holding my dog, and feel safe.” She would blame Rosemary for instigating the violence in her family. “She controlled all of it. . . . My dad was squashed. He did what she said, and he never stopped any of the abuse.”
Rosemary allegedly belittled Brad and tried to break down his aggressive personality. When Sanford was away, she made him do housework. Then something bad happened when Brad was about eleven or twelve, something that alienated him from his mother for the rest of her life. According to Brad, he stayed home fro
m school one day and Rosemary thought he was malingering. To punish him, she made him put on a dress and clean the house. When Sanford came home and found his son dressed that way, he hit the roof. From that moment on, Rosemary had no say whatsoever in Brad’s life. When she spoke to him, it was like shouting into the wind. He didn’t listen to her. He didn’t respect her. He certainly didn’t obey her. The family itself was sliced right down the middle. Sanford and Brad were on one side, Rosie and Ethel and Susan were on the other. “Brad could do anything he wanted,” a relative recalled. “The girls were out.”
Brad’s story about being forced to dress as a girl may have been true; it may also have been a confabulation that he fashioned from articles he had read about the actor James Garner, whose stepmother had done the same thing to him. Brad’s rendition was startlingly like the oft-published account of Garner’s bitter childhood in which he told of grabbing a broom from his stepmother’s hands and chasing her with it. He also recalled that his father was shocked to find out that his stepmother made him dress in girl’s clothes, and that she had been banished.
Perhaps Brad’s story was true. Perhaps both men had suffered the same humiliation. Perhaps not. But if Brad was frequently knocked around as a child, he was no angel himself. Ethel remembered the time when she was eight and he was seven. He had done something wrong and thought she was going to tattle. “He came back to my bedroom and punched me in the stomach and he said, ‘Don’t you tell on me!’”
The Cunninghams always had little, barky dogs, and Brad enjoyed grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks and shoving their snouts together to make them fight. Other relatives would remember Brad as a kid with a “hair-trigger” temper. No one in his family denied that, by the time he was twelve, he went after his mother with a baseball bat. He was a big kid and Rosemary was frightened as she tried in vain to wrestle it away from him. Ethel ran to the phone and called her father and begged him to come home. When Sanford got there, he hit Brad and barked an order, “Don’t you ever raise your hand to me or ever hit your mother again!”
Photographs in the Cunningham family album looked as wholesome as any family’s: Susan sitting with her mother at a mother-daughter tea, both of them smiling; Brad and Ethel together; Brad sitting on the couch with his arm around his mother; Sanford and Rosie hugging. They were an extremely photogenic family, but photographs can be deceiving.
That is not to say there were no good times in the family. But they seemed to occur only when they were away from home. It was as if there was an energy in the house that kept all their old resentments alive in a time warp, ready to reignite. When they went on vacation, it was like magic. “We never fought when we went camping. We were a whole different family,” Susan would remember. They all became somehow nicer to each other, less combative than the family that lived at home.
Brad got his love for cars and trucks and trailers and all manner of heavy equipment from his father. Sanford had a king cab International truck to pull his huge camping trailer. The whole family traveled together through Oregon, California, and New Mexico. They went rock hounding and explored caves. “The camping was so good,” Susan remembered many years after the fact. “Our parents would sing together, harmonizing, songs from the thirties and the forties. Everything was really great. Nobody hit anybody. Bodies weren’t flying.”
If only they could have kept the good feelings they had when they went camping and brought them home. For whatever reason, the pressure was off when they were sailing down the road in the big old International truck, or sitting around a campfire listening to Sanford and Rosie sing. But the closer they got to home, the more the tension built. They were, essentially, a family divided: husband against wife, parents against children, brother against sisters, male against female. They had no loyalty to one another and no connections. There had been too much violence, too much punishment, too much rivalry.
Sanford always believed that money solved everything, and Brad learned that lesson well. And Sanford believed that women were inferior to men. “Your place is in the bedroom or the kitchen,” he lectured the girls. “All a woman is good for is to cook and be a whore in bed.”
His daughters would fight to prove him wrong. His son apparently believed him.
12
As Brad entered his teenage years in the early 1960s, Sanford grew even prouder of his son. He rarely punished him now, even when Brad was rude to Rosie—which he often was. Sanford would no longer back Rosie up when she tried to discipline Brad. This was his son, after all, the boy who represented his immortality, and Rosie was only a woman.
For all of her life, Rosemary would love her son, despite the tribulations he caused her, despite her doubts about him. For all of his life, Sanford would be proud that Brad was the smartest and best of the Cunningham clan. Father and son, neither could do wrong in the eyes of the other. Sanford’s values were Brad’s values, and as Brad grew older, he and his father shared their most intimate secrets.
Ethel left home and married. She had a boy and a girl, and later adopted a Native American boy. And as the years passed and Rosemary and Caroline put on a few pounds, the fragile beauty of their girlhood years blurred. Rosemary fought to keep her slender figure, and she insisted on dressing well. Even so, her husband viewed her more as a mother and a housekeeper than as a lover. The metamorphosis was gradual enough that it was accomplished before Rosemary and Caroline realized the place they had come to. It was hard to look at the fading snapshots in the old albums and remember that they had been those incandescently beautiful girls clinging to Jimmy’s and Sanford’s muscular arms.
Just as with all families, the years brought losses. First, Caroline’s baby girl dead in the driveway. And then in the mid-1960s, Dr. Paul Cunningham and his second wife, Lydia, were in a terrible car wreck in Rose Hill. Grandpa Cunningham looked worse to the ambulance crew and they rushed him to the hospital. They didn’t expect him to live until morning. But it wasn’t Grandpa Cunningham who died; it was Lydia who dropped dead of a stroke, brought on either by the accident itself or by her worry over her husband. Brad’s grandfather recovered and lived for many more years.
Jimmy and Caroline would lose another of their five children. Terry, misdiagnosed at a local hospital and told to go home and rest, died suddenly of meningitis. All his life Brad had tried to grow bigger and stronger than Terry, but he never succeeded. Relatives were bemused when Brad proved to be the most hysterical of the mourners at Terry’s funeral. As he walked past his cousin’s casket, he fell to the floor in a dead faint.
Gary Cunningham grew up to take a job with the Washington State Department of Transportation. But in the middle and late 1960s, Sanford and Rosie’s boy, Brad, was still the standout cousin, both athletically and intellectually. Brad had always been smarter than all of them. And he never let them forget it. If he had a flaw in his made-for-success personality, it was that he seemed unable to downplay his accomplishments. He was so successful that sometimes it was hard to like him. When he might have shown a little humility, he crowed.
Although in later years Brad wasn’t close to his extended family, he occasionally showed up at the Cunningham reunions on Whidbey Island. He attracted women with ease, and his romantic history was so speckled that no one ever knew which girlfriend—or wife—he might bring with him. One thing was certain, however. When Brad did arrive, he could be counted on to have the classiest vehicle of anyone there. Like his father, it was important to Brad that the family see how well he was doing. “One year,” a cousin said, “he came driving up in this ‘super-jeep.’ He was showing off, but he showed off too much and he got stuck in a ditch. Some guy with a great big semi had to pull him out, and we took pictures. He was mad.”
Brad Cunningham had begun to pull ahead of the pack early on. He was still quite young when he showed great athletic potential. Even in grade school, Brad had begun to lift weights and work on his body. He made highschool coaches salivate. They watched him at Cascade Junior High School and could ha
rdly wait until he moved up to Evergreen High. He was such a strong kid, broad-shouldered and thickly muscled, and yet light on his feet and graceful. He had Sanford’s size, but except for his jutting chin, he had Rosemary’s coloring and facial features. He was very handsome.
Like Sanford, Brad always had money. From the time he was fourteen, he had some angle to work. His sister Ethel called him the “local black market kid.” Girls watched Brad, too, and he watched them. Not surprisingly, as a teenager he adopted his father’s and his grandfather’s philosophy: women were placed on earth to pleasure men. Although he always had his eye on one girl or another, he did not allow himself to become emotionally dependent upon them. It was understood among his peers that if he asked a girl out on a date, he expected sex. Otherwise, he saw no point in dating. Enough girls were willing to play by Brad’s rules that he never wanted for dates.
There were family stories about Brad’s coming of age sexually. One version held that his first sexual experience was with a prostitute, and when his father—or mother—found out, he was taken to the family doctor, who diagnosed venereal disease. In truth he found no disease. This was to be a lesson to Brad, and the doctor scared him badly and then administered a series of painful shots to “cure” him. Another story had Brad going to a doctor for a sperm count: he was worried because he had slept with so many girls and none of them had become pregnant.
It is doubtful that either of these stories was true. If anything, Brad would prove remarkably fertile in later years. When he was seventeen, he was dating a senior named Arlene* who became pregnant, but her parents wouldn’t even consider her marrying Brad. Theirs had been a stormy relationship. Rosemary and Ethel remembered that Arlene had done something once that made Brad so angry that he painted “Whore” on her front door in red paint and threw everything she had given him on her front lawn. “Arlene just disappeared,” Susan remembered. “Her parents whisked her away from Brad. They were afraid for her, somehow. We don’t know if she had the baby or not.”