Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Like almost all women, Lauren found Brad fascinating. He was even better looking than he had been in college and he sounded as though he was doing wonderfully well in the business world. She was delighted when he asked her out. They were soon dating steadily, and in a whirlwind courtship they were engaged just a few months later. Lauren introduced Brad to her circle of friends, and so it was that he met Cheryl and Dan Olmstead for the first time. The two couples rapidly became very good friends and socialized often. Brad was fun and he was obviously a real mover and shaker in business.

  After Cheryl Keeton had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington and married Dan Olmstead, he began law school while she took a job doing actuarial work for an insurance firm. She would follow Dan to law school as soon as they could afford it. It was what they had always planned to do; Cheryl had never foreseen anything different in her life. She and Dan would get started in their careers, and at some point they hoped to have a family.

  In the meantime, Cheryl remained close to her family in Longview and continued to play second mother to her half sister, Susan McNannay. Betty and Bob McNannay had separated and were in the process of divorce. Cheryl adored Bob—she always had—and she was impatient with her mother for leaving him. Susan, who was Bob’s only child, was eight or nine then, and she was the light of Bob McNannay’s life. She stayed in the ranch house in Longview with her father.

  Susan spent any number of weekends with Cheryl, doing “girl things.” Bob would put her on the train that ran up from Portland, and Cheryl would pick her little sister up at the King Street station in Seattle. In the years that followed, Betty would marry two more times, but she would always remain friends with Bob McNannay. And Cheryl would look upon him as a father figure until the day she died.

  Susan would remember that Cheryl’s marriage was happy and comfortable. Dan adored her and she had really never known any other man. But she married so young and when she walked out of the church in September 1971, Susan recalled, her sister had “cried and cried.”

  Cheryl had a degree in economics. When she worked at Unigard Insurance as a financial analyst, she met another would-be law student who would become one of her most devoted friends—a very tall, dark-haired man named John Burke. Cheryl and John were never more than friends, but she could not have had a better friend.

  “Cheryl and Dan lived in a little studio basement apartment just outside the University District at first,” Susan remembered, “and later they bought a house on North Forty-fifth.” But with the wisdom that came when she herself was a grown woman, Susan realized in retrospect that Cheryl had worried that her marriage wasn’t strong enough for her to have children. She put off thinking about it, concentrating instead on her career. She and Dan had been sweethearts all through high school and college, and she wanted their marriage to work. “The women in our family don’t have a great track record in our marital history,” Susan observed. “But Cheryl’s marriage to Dan just kind of collapsed on its own. I think Cheryl had doubts from the beginning, but they had dated for so long. . . .”

  Lauren Swanson was amazed at how far Brad had come by the age of twenty-seven. He was a real estate developer and had contracts to do projects with well-known Seattle architects and contractors. Lauren loved her job teaching elementary students, but Brad suggested that she might consider becoming involved in his projects—at least part-time. That way, they could work together and she could learn some of the intricacies of his profession. Lauren was both flattered and excited. By this time, she hoped to become involved in every part of Brad’s life.

  She was in love.

  Lauren still knew next to nothing about the details of Brad’s two divorces. She had never met either Loni Ann or Cynthia; she had no reason to. But she did know that Brad was distraught about losing the custody battle for his children. He worried about them continually. “He said that Loni Ann led a vagabond and often promiscuous lifestyle, and that it wasn’t healthy for his children,” Lauren said later. “He wanted to raise them—they were being exposed to situations that he did not approve of. . . . A lot of men visited, a lot of moving from one location to another.”

  Lauren loved children so much herself and she felt sorry for Brad. She thought it must have been hell for him to have to walk away from his children, to always wonder if they were safe and cared for. It touched her heart to see how much Brad’s kids meant to him. It made her love him even more.

  Their wedding in March of 1977 was very simple. The wedding party included only Lauren’s immediate family, Brad’s father and his second wife, and Brad’s children, Kait and Brent. Kait was almost seven and Brent was five. Loni Ann had won custody of her children, but she acceded to Brad’s requests to have them visit him from time to time. At this point, Brad was still paying his court-ordered child support and Loni Ann wanted to keep things between them as peaceful as possible.

  Although Lauren and Brad’s wedding was a quiet ceremony at her parents’ home, the couple threw a wonderful party to celebrate their marriage and, of course, Cheryl and Dan Olmstead were there. The two couples continued to spend many evenings and most weekends together.

  Lauren was very happy in the spring of 1977. She and Brad rented a spacious condominium and she kept her job teaching a third-grade class. She also helped Brad with his construction projects. His career was in high gear and he was working hard to achieve the success he had always visualized. To their many friends, including Cheryl and Dan, they seemed perfectly matched.

  Just as he had with Cynthia, Brad took Lauren to Yakima often. They headed over the Snoqualmie Pass to eastern Washington to visit Sanford and Mary. Brad’s father had sold the Burien house and moved to Tampico, a tiny hamlet near Yakima. Lauren could see how close Brad and his father were. But she found it a little odd that he had nothing at all to do with his mother. When she asked him about it, he told her his mother had always blamed him for something he could not help. “I was an unusually large baby,” he said. “I guess that was why she had such a difficult delivery. Later, my mother got some kind of female cancer—and she always blamed me.”

  “But that wasn’t your fault!” Lauren said.

  Brad shrugged. He really didn’t want to talk about his mother. He said that his father had suffered through years of an unhappy marriage with her, and hadn’t been able to leave until he was grown.

  The woman Brad described to Lauren sounded like a cruel harridan. Rosemary had made his life miserable when he was a little boy, according to Brad, both with her sharp tongue and with physical punishment. He told Lauren about the day his mother had made him dress up like a girl and clean the house. He had been humiliated, he said, embellishing his story of child abuse. When his father came home and found his son in girls’ clothes, he had been outraged. And from that moment on, his mother was virtually banished from Brad’s life. His father had told him that he didn’t have to pay any attention to her at all. That, Brad explained, was the end of his relationship with his mother as far as he was concerned.

  Brad also said there were episodes of physical abuse until he had finally grown big enough to defend himself. “When I was fourteen or thereabouts, she came after me one day with a vacuum hose and I took her wrist and bent it back. I told her, ‘Don’t ever come after me again.’” He didn’t tell Lauren about how he and his father had tricked his mother to leave on “a vacation.” He just said he had sided with his father when he divorced Rosemary. “My sisters went with my mother.” His sisters, Ethel and Susan, according to Brad, were “petty and not very bright.”

  The only member of his mother’s family that Brad seemed to care about was his maternal grandfather. He always spoke of Simon Edwards fondly to Lauren. He said he himself was part Colville Indian through his grandfather’s lineage. Lauren knew that Brad received small checks periodically from timber sales on the Indian land.

  Brad didn’t tell Lauren, and she had no way of knowing, that his mother had remarried. She had gone to college and done rather well
. Her name was Rosemary Kinney now, and she was also living in the Yakima area, where she was employed as a caseworker in a social service agency on the Colville Reservation.

  Knowing how splintered Brad’s family was, feeling sad for him that he didn’t have Kait and Brent with him all the time, Lauren was thrilled when she discovered she was pregnant in the summer of 1977. Together, she and Brad would build a solid new family to make up for all that he had lost. Brad seemed as happy as she was when she told him about her pregnancy.

  Brad rented office space in the building on Eastlake Avenue in Seattle where architect Felix Campanella was headquartered. He incorporated his newest business—he would always be a firm believer in the sheltering aspects of corporations—and began to teach Lauren how to present his real estate projects at meetings he was too busy to attend. Lauren felt that she basically played only a supportive role. She represented Brad in a couple of meetings and he was pleased with her, but she was never given any decision-making tasks. That was fine with her; she was a neophyte in real estate development. She would have years to learn the more intricate details of buying land, financing, leveraging, and land use studies. Brad was a walking encyclopedia on everything and anything to do with commercial real estate.

  One of the projects Lauren participated in was an apartment building surrounded by trees in Kirkland, at the far north end of Lake Washington. When it was finished, they named it Sylvan Habitat and all the apartments were rented immediately. It seemed that everything Brad touched was making money.

  Lauren knew he was doing well, and she was proud of him. Still, she was almost embarrassed by the way he flaunted his wealth. He bought a more expensive car every time he moved another step up in his career. In only two years, Brad owned twelve different vehicles—both cars and trucks. They usually had three at a time. Soon the only make of car that suited Brad was a Mercedes.

  He always seemed to have the money to make the payments, but sometimes Lauren wondered what her family and friends thought when she and Brad showed up in yet another, higher ticket, car. It was difficult for her to realize that she had been living on the salary of a third-grade teacher only a year earlier, and now she was riding around in plush cars whose motors were so smooth you couldn’t even hear them with the windows closed.

  Although Cynthia Marrasco had reported to police a few years earlier that Brad always carried a Colt .38, as far as Lauren knew, the only gun he owned was a hunting rifle. Lauren hated hunting. Much to her revulsion, Brad insisted that she come with him deer hunting that fall on the Colville Indian Reservation. Killing animals was totally against Lauren’s nature, but she was in love, and whatever Brad wanted to do she would go along with.

  The trip across the Cascade Mountains was glorious as the vine maples glowed coral orange against the sky and the tamaracks and quaking aspens turned bright gold. It was too bad the purpose of their trip was to look for animals to kill. But Brad told Lauren that everyone in his family hunted.

  That was certainly true. However, one of the reasons his cousin Gary avoided Brad was the memory of an earlier hunting trip he had taken with him. Brad had shot a deer, but it wasn’t a clean kill and the deer was thrashing around in pain. Gary asked Brad to shoot it again to put it out of its misery. Brad followed the deer into the brush but Gary didn’t hear the crack of a rifle shot. Investigating, he found Brad beating the helpless animal to death with the butt of his rifle. It made Gary sick; he hunted, but he and his family followed the rules of sportsmanship and they used the game meat for food. “Stop it, Brad!” Gary shouted. “There’s a house right there. They can see you.” Even that warning didn’t work and Brad continued striking the deer long after it was dead. He was filled with an almost inexplicable rage; he literally broke a chunk out of the rifle butt.

  Lauren didn’t know one gun from another and they all scared her. “Fortunately,” she recalled of their trip the autumn after their marriage, “we didn’t see any deer.”

  Brad and Lauren continued to see Cheryl and Dan often. If the foursome weren’t having dinner at the Olmsteads’ apartment, they were probably at the Cunninghams’ condo. They all got along, they had fun and laughed a lot.

  Cheryl had started law school, as she and Dan always planned. Although Dan was already in practice, their budget was a little lean. Brad suggested one night that Cheryl might like to work for him. It seemed like a good solution for everyone; Cheryl and Dan could use the money and Brad’s projects needed someone with Cheryl’s legal knowledge and flair for detail.

  “Yes!” Cheryl laughed. “Yes, I want the job!”

  It was only a part-time job. Cheryl still spent most of her time at law school. But they began working together in the fall of 1977, and Cheryl found Brad as bright and charming as a business associate as he was a friend.

  One night in November of that year, Brad and Lauren gave a pre-Thanksgiving party for a number of friends. Lauren was five months pregnant and still working, but Brad had convinced her that she should give up teaching and be a full-time mother. She wouldn’t be going back to school after Christmas vacation.

  Lauren would remember every detail of that party. As she was refilling hors d’oeuvre trays in the kitchen, Dan walked in and shut the door behind him. Lauren turned to him with a smile, and her hands froze on the tray she held. The look on Dan’s face was indescribable. It was as if he had come to tell her that someone had died. And in a sense, someone had. Dan had seen what Lauren had not even imagined. He told Lauren that his marriage—and hers—were in trouble. Although he had tried to deny his suspicions at first, he was convinced that something was going on between Cheryl and Brad, and he thought Lauren should know.

  Lauren was stunned, staring at him as if he had had too much to drink. But Dan never drank too much. Still, what he was saying couldn’t be possible. She was carrying Brad’s baby; they were still practically newlyweds. Brad was her husband and Cheryl was her sorority sister, her friend for so many years. Yes, Cheryl worked with Brad now, but that was only business. If Brad was having an affair, Lauren was sure she would know. There would have been signs, and there had been nothing.

  The rest of the evening was a blur. Lauren got through the party with a smile frozen on her face, her stomach churning, until the last guests left. As soon as they were alone, she came right out and asked Brad if there was anything between him and Cheryl beyond friendship. Was he having an affair with Cheryl?

  Brad denied it, half laughing. She was being ridiculous. She was overemotional because she was pregnant. She was seeing shadows where there were none. Dan was a troublemaker. Brad hugged Lauren and she tried to feel comfort in his arms, but something had changed. Her word had shifted off its axis and was no longer spinning smoothly.

  Nothing more was said about Dan’s suspicions. But seeds of doubt took root in Lauren’s mind. Even as her child kicked beneath her heart, she couldn’t forget what Dan had said. She tried to recall if she had seen some intimate look pass between her friend and her husband and couldn’t think of a single instance. It wasn’t that Brad didn’t have ample freedom to have an affair. Lauren never really knew where he was—his business demanded that he be here, there, and everywhere. That had never bothered her, but now she wondered.

  Whenever Lauren got the panicky feeling that Dan might be right, she reminded herself that she and Brad were going ahead with their plans to buy their own condominium. Brad wouldn’t do that if he were going to leave her, would he? The new condo was much smaller than the one they were living in, but it would be theirs. The mortgage payments would be four hundred dollars a month.

  With Brad’s urging, Lauren resigned from her teaching position. She said goodbye to her third graders as Christmas approached. She thanked them for all the presents they brought for her new baby and hugged them. She would miss them, but in three months she would have her own baby.

  It should have been such a happy time for her. But it wasn’t. Cheryl and Dan had separated. Dan had been right about that part of his disclo
sure at the party. He and Cheryl had been having trouble. And it had all come to a head when they went to Longview for Thanksgiving 1977. There Cheryl told Susan that she and Dan were splitting up. “She took me out for a drive,” Susan said. “She told me that she was young—that she’d made a mistake. She even tried to smoke a cigarette—she was so nervous—but she didn’t know how to smoke. Cheryl took the train home from Longview that Thanksgiving, and Dan stayed, and he talked with me too. It was very sad.”

  Cheryl and Dan were both well under thirty when their marriage ended. Cheryl was still on the path to her dream of becoming an attorney, but she had met someone else, someone who absolutely dazzled her, a man so charismatic and seemingly perfect for her that there was no question but that she would go to him. She was completely spellbound, surprised at the depth of her own emotion. She had always been the one who kept her head. She had never felt passion that made her teeth chatter and her skin burn.

  Now she did.

  In December, Brad and Lauren were packing boxes in the process of moving out of their rented condominium. Without warning, he turned to her and hit her with paralyzing—stupefying—news. He said that everything Dan had told her was true. He was having an affair with Cheryl. “I don’t love you anymore,” he said. When Lauren didn’t say anything, he repeated his words. “Did you hear me? I said I don’t love you anymore.”

  As Lauren stood with her arms crossed over her belly, unconsciously protecting her unborn child, Brad told her quite calmly that his relationship with Cheryl was deeply satisfying, and that Dan’s suspicions had been well founded. He wanted to be free; he loved Cheryl now. “I’m not moving with you,” he said. “You’re moving into your new condo alone.”