Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  “When the buildings didn’t meet plans or specs, it gave the permanent lender a way to back out. Around June fifteenth or twentieth, the construction company fired all the architects. I hired 3-D International myself, one of the largest construction companies in the United States. The contractor kept working and I withheld a million dollars because it was defective. He had ten days to fix it. . . . The contractor didn’t. I had a bond. By October 1982 I fired the contractor and tried to complete it myself. I had to correct the code violations.”

  To listen to Brad explain his maneuvers to build Parkwood Plaza was to move into a world where disbelief had to be suspended. He was a superman—financing, bulldozing, building, laying electrical conduit, lifting whole walls. Seemingly all by himself. “I was working equipment, hiring crews, on site, paving—it’s called ‘mitigating your damages.’ I finished Building D, and I opened a secretarial service. I hired out nine offices. I worked on A and tried to sell the other buildings. . . . The bonding company basically said, ‘Sue me.’”

  In reality, Brad had coaxed Cheryl away from Seattle and her thriving law practice into a monetary sinkhole. Despite Brad’s confident promises, it was apparent that they had just missed the boat. Houston was rapidly becoming—not just for Brad but for all but the most solidly grounded builders—a wasteland. Suddenly, in early 1982, the bottom of the Texas economy had sprung a leak, a leak through which first oil, and then all good things, would eventually escape. The oil boom that had promised to be endless had begun to lose momentum and a world oil glut caused gasoline prices to plummet.

  Houston’s real estate dreams of glory began to evaporate. Jobs were drying up and nobody needed, or could afford, expensive office space. Newly finished buildings stood empty and construction stopped on half-built units. Mirrored windows soon reflected only the end of an era and Brad was left with mostly never-started or half-finished buildings, and a mountain of debt.

  He had gambled, made promises with money that depended on filling Parkwood Plaza. He was in trouble. Brad blamed construction delays. He insisted that if the buildings had gone up according to his scheduling, they would have been finished and all the offices rented. What had happened, he argued, was not his fault. There had been enough money there but the construction company had let it trickle away. Now it was drying up fast, and Brad was a man who had always liked to live high. He was not about to go backward when he had long since become accustomed to fine cars, gourmet restaurants, and the best of everything. The Cunninghams could no longer afford such a life. Things looked bad for Brad and, of course, for Cheryl, too.

  They discussed their predicament. He didn’t want to leave Houston if there was a chance he could salvage what he had there, but they needed an income to keep him going. Cheryl was an attorney, and she was good. Brad suggested that they separate for a while, but only so they could rebuild their financial base. Regretfully, Cheryl agreed to his plan for her to move back to Seattle and practice law. She would take Jess and Michael with her, and Brad would remain in Houston to try to hold back, or at least slow down, financial disaster.

  In September of 1982, Cheryl took her two little boys and moved to Seattle. She was relieved to be out of the Houston climate and back home, but she missed Brad and she worried that Michael and Jess would forget their father. She put a map up on the wall and stuck colored pins in it, painstakingly explaining to three-year-old Jess and one-year-old Michael, who didn’t really understand, where their daddy was. She talked about Brad constantly so that the boys would not think of him as some shadowy figure. He was their daddy, and one day they would all be together again.

  Cheryl started work with Garvey, Schubert and Barer, moved into a house on Bainbridge Island, placed both Jess and Michael in Sharon McCulloch’s day-care center, and set out to help Brad financially. She did well. Cheryl, so cowed in her marriage, was an absolutely spectacular litigator. She had all the raw material to become a successful attorney—and more. She was a natural debater. She had the drive, and she had the staying power. She could be as fierce as any bulldog, holding on until she made her point. Senior partners at Garvey, Schubert noticed her right away. She made enough money to support herself and the boys and to send more to Brad in Houston. If she worried that Brad might be continuing his penchant for extramarital sex, she didn’t say so aloud. She may or may not have had reason to worry; Brad and the woman who worked as his secretary were extremely close during his time in Houston. He had never been a man who could exist long without the intimate company of a woman.

  Brad traveled to Seattle every once in a while. He spent more time in Yakima, where he and his father were involved in new business projects. At one point, he hired two men from Yakima to fly down to Houston and transport vehicles and equipment from the job site in Texas up to the Tampico property. Despite his grim financial situation, Brad continued to drive Mercedes cars. He usually picked them up when they were imported through Los Angeles. Cheryl went with him on some of those trips, and on one occasion they were in a near-fatal automobile accident. Though they survived, the Mercedes-Benz didn’t. Cheryl’s family never learned all the details of the crash.

  Occasionally, Brad caught up with his other children. He visited with his third child, Amy, and explained to Lauren why he was behind in his support payments. He told her he planned to sue the construction company responsible for his financial troubles and said he was confident that he would win back everything he had lost and more. A major Houston law firm was interested in his case, and he expected them to take the suit on a contingency basis.

  Brad also kept track of Loni Ann and his first two children, Kait and Brent, although Loni Ann had done her best to hide their whereabouts from him. Brad learned that Kait was living temporarily with her maternal grandparents in Seattle. He would check into that; he was always alert to any failures in parenting that Loni Ann might demonstrate. Despite the three children he had fathered since Loni Ann won custody of Kait and Brent, he never forgot the ignominy of having her beat him in court.

  During one of his visits home, Brad and Cheryl took their boys to a Cunningham family reunion. Cheryl put Jess and Michael to sleep in a tent while the adults visited and the teenagers fooled around with fireworks.

  Brad’s presence at the Cunningham reunions never went unnoticed. He was a kind of lightning rod who needed to be the center of attention. “He was always like that,” one of Brad’s cousins remembered. “A long time ago, he called a bunch of us over—he was just a young guy then—and he said he was going to show us something, but we were never supposed to tell. He opened the trunk of his car, and he had all these automatic weapons in there.”

  During the reunion in 1983, one of the rockets from the fireworks went awry and zoomed into the side of the tent where Jess and Michael napped. Smoke circled up, and Cheryl screamed. Brad, his cousin recalled, “just sat there as if nothing had happened. I remember he only said, ‘Hey, that’s a flame-retardant tent. I paid five hundred dollars for it; it had better not burn.’ Everyone but Brad ran toward the fire, but it was Cheryl who got the babies out of the burning tent. Brad acted like nothing happened at all. He wasn’t worried. He was just mad that the tent didn’t live up to its guarantee.”

  20

  In 1982 Kait Cunningham, Brad’s oldest child, was twelve, a tall, slender girl with thick dark hair like her father’s. She was also exceptionally lovely. Kait had not lived with her father, of course, since she was a toddler, and her memories of him were confusing and somewhat fearful. He was so very big and his reasoning seemed to change with the wind. “When we were little,” Kait would remember, “my father always told us to tell him the truth. He would say, ‘I won’t spank you if you tell the truth.’ And so we would tell him the truth, and he would spank us anyway. That didn’t make sense.”

  When they were eight and seven and spent time with their father, Brad played Frisbee with Kait and her younger brother Brent, paying them a quarter for every one they caught. Kait was better at that because she
was older, and that angered Brad. He wanted his son to be the athlete, not his female child. “He kicked Brent in the rump all the way to the car to punish him for being clumsy,” Kait recalled.

  Brent took after his mother in appearance; he was a cute little kid with red hair cut in the “bowl cut” popular at the time. He looked nothing at all like his father—and he never would. Even so, Kait sensed that she had always been Brad’s least favorite child. Cloaking his words in a thin veneer of humor, he would tell Brent, “God! Your sister has no brains. Don’t be like your sister; she has no common sense.”

  “We’d be on vacation or something and I wouldn’t be allowed to swim,” Kait said. “I’d have to take care of the towels because of something I’d done. I was nine or ten. Maybe I told stories or I would exaggerate, and that made him mad.” Brent felt sorry for her and tried to help. Later, when her father was married to Cheryl, Cheryl too felt sorry for Kait. She was always being confined to her room for something she had done to displease Brad. It was Cheryl who would let her out, and tell her to come to dinner with the rest of them.

  But Kait Cunningham had a resilience about her; she was a strong-minded girl. She would need that strength.

  Brad remained in Houston in late 1982 and through the spring of 1983, while Cheryl tried to keep his face alive in the minds of Jess and Michael and make him a part of their family even though he was so often far away. When Brad returned to Seattle, Loni Ann and Lauren were forced by law to permit visitation with their children. They both longed to have Brad out of their lives, but he insisted on contact with his offspring. If his visits were sporadic, he wanted it that way. When Brad claimed Kait or Brent or Amy, he behaved with them as he did with Jess and Michael. They were his. They belonged to him. The women who had given them birth and cared for them were only convenient vessels, and quite dispensable.

  On one of his visits to Seattle, after he had learned that Kait was living with her grandparents, Brad picked her up one evening to take her out to dinner with Jess and Michael. But when he headed back toward her grandparents’ after dinner, he drove right past the turnoff to their street. “Are you going to be living with us on Bainbidge?” Jess asked Kait excitedly.

  “No,” Kait said.

  “Yes, you are,” Brad said, and Kait realized that he must have already announced that to her little half brothers.

  Kait didn’t know what to say. She wanted to live with her mother, and she had only been visiting her grandparents. She didn’t want to live with her father. “I went to court and got an order to have you live with me legally. I’m now taking custody of you,” her father told her, adding that Loni Ann was not a fit mother. He said that Loni Ann couldn’t deal with her any longer, and that Kait would now be living with him.

  When her father said something, it was so definite. Kait didn’t even consider protesting. From the time she could remember, she had sensed that her mother was afraid of her father. She had seen that her mother always backed down, capitulated, struggling to maintain peace.

  Kait did not live on Bainbridge Island long. When Brad returned to Houston, he took her with him. She would never understand why. Maybe he wanted company. Maybe he simply wanted a whipping boy (or, in her case, a kicking girl). Everything she did seemed to annoy him, and he apparently had little use for anything female. It was to be the beginning of a horrendous ordeal for Kait. It was also, perhaps, a period that would demonstrate for the first time what a tremendously strong girl she was. She may well have inherited the best of her father’s traits—his self-confidence, his refusal to give up in spite of great odds, and a hard pride. She would need all of that armor to survive so far away from her mother, her brother, and her grandparents.

  Brad enrolled Kait in junior high school in Houston and she tried, tentatively, to make friends. She was graceful and athletic, as both her parents were. She won a medal in track and brought it home to show her father. Instead of being proud of her, Brad was annoyed. “He took it away from me,” Kait recalled. “I don’t really know why. He told me I wasn’t to leave my room—that I was being punished—but I didn’t know why. . . . I won several ribbons and other awards. [He took those too.] I never got them back from him.”

  Kait was continually confused. She wasn’t sure why she was in Houston in the first place, and she never knew what was going to make her father angry. Her punishments were usually the removal of privileges or of the belongings that meant the most to her. “He did that frequently,” she recalled. “I wouldn’t know exactly what I did. He would take my clothes away—the things you would wear out normally—and he made me wear clothes that you would use to paint the house, you know, your ripped-up, bummy clothes. I was obliged to wear those. I wasn’t allowed to do any preparation for school—like curling my hair—the things you did when you were young. . . . Sometimes, I could earn back my clothes, and I’d have them for a while, and then he’d take them away again, and I could never understand why. I got to the point where I’d go into school early and get ready in the bathroom.

  “After the after-school activities, before I’d go home, I’d get my hair all wet and take all the makeup off. I wasn’t allowed to wear that. Basically, he’d take away all my privileges. It was embarrassing for me to go into school with my hair all over the place and my bummy clothes. That didn’t feel good. Everyone in school wasn’t doing that and you had that peer pressure. I got to the point where I’d get ready in the morning, even if I had to miss a class to do it. He didn’t know I was doing that.”

  Loni Ann knew that Kait was with her father in Texas, but she had no way to bring her back; she could only try to comfort her daughter when Kait was able to sneak away to a phone booth and call. It was agony for Loni Ann to hear her sob on the phone and not be able to help her. For Kait, the only semblance of a normal family life occurred when Brad brought the little boys down for a visit and Kait baby-sat them. Sometimes Cheryl could get away too for a short time and visit Brad. He had assured Cheryl that living with him was the best thing for Kait; her mother wasn’t capable of taking care of her.

  Brad spent a good deal of his time at his office; he had to. He was still fighting desperately to save the real estate empire that had been burgeoning only a year earlier. He ran a “secretarial service,” although the details of that business enterprise were vague. Apparently he was using office space in the one building he had completed before Parkwood Plaza faltered.

  Just like her mother a dozen years earlier, Kait was required to let Brad know where she was at all times. And she soon became the target for her father’s rage and frustration. Eventually she had to go to a counselor because she had begun to break under the abuse. In her sessions, or whenever they were around other people, her father jokingly—even fondly—turned away her accusations: “Stop lying, Kait. . . . Why are you doing that? Knock it off. Be a good girl.”

  “He sounded very genuine,” Kait marveled years later. “You almost felt like you were crazy because there wasn’t a hint of maliciousness. . . . It was as if I was a liar or something, and it almost made it worse.”

  Was she somehow to blame? No. He was the one who told her over and over that she was nothing more than garbage. He was the one who told her that her mother was a bad mother who had mistreated Kait and Brent, who had kept a filthy house, who had done terrible things. He had explained to her through gritted teeth that all women were liars. All women were garbage.

  “He said I was going to be like my mother,” Kait recalled. “He said I was going to be pregnant by the time I was eighteen.” But Kait knew what Loni Ann was really like. She had chosen, always, to live with her mother. “She was sensitive. She was human. I could talk to her about things. I could come to her when I had a problem. She was a very good person.”

  All of Brad’s abuse took place behind the locked and alarmed door of his apartment. No one knew that he was anything but a concerned, long-suffering single parent. Brad would occasionally tell Kait that they were going for a drive. “Then,” she relate
d, “he would pull over and scream at me and tell me I was garbage and stupid and ugly, and I was no good and I would never amount to anything. That I was crazy . . . those things sort of stick with you after a while.”

  Kait was like a little mouse trapped in a cage, constantly beset with different signals. Sometimes, when her father raved on and on about how terrible her mother was, she would break into sobs. And then, as they were about to go out into the world that saw Brad as a suave executive and a concerned father, he would change instantly and become that person. “Come give your father a hug. I love you.”

  “I wouldn’t hug him and he’d say, ‘Oh, hug your father.’ And I’d go to school so screwed up. I didn’t have friends because people thought I was weird.”

  There was little point in Kait trying to have friends anyway. Brad insisted on having a timetable of exactly where she would be, and with whom, and pertinent telephone numbers. It wasn’t worth the effort to have friends. She was in junior high and none of the other kids had to account for every second of every day.

  Brad was especially suspicious of boys. Once, Kait got off at the wrong bus stop and called Brad’s office to ask him to come pick her up. He said he would be right there. But one of the boys in her class happened to live a few houses away and he invited her to come and see his dog’s new puppies. While she was looking at the puppies, Brad arrived to pick her up, and when he didn’t find her at the bus stop, he drove off. When she called the house, he was angry and accusing.

  “You’d better get here in fifteen minutes or you’re grounded.”

  She was two miles from home and she knew she couldn’t run that fast. “I tried—but I didn’t make it.”

  Brad accused Kait of having sex with the twelve-year-old boy. “It was ridiculous,” she recalled. “He was the class nerd. . . . I was only five minutes late to meet my father. He went on about how women are like that, and he’d tell me all about his sexual experiences—which I didn’t want to hear. He told me what I was going to be like when I was older, how I’d be around men. He was saying all it would take would be some man saying ‘I love you’ and ‘you’re going to let them screw you. . . .’ He said I was fooling around with this boy and that’s why I wasn’t there. Which wasn’t true—but he wouldn’t listen to me.”