Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  With Brad, there was so much to be afraid of. First, there was his own anger if anyone broke his rules. Second, there were malignant entities that he said waited in the background to destroy him and all he stood for—and he was ultimately convincing when he spoke of unseen danger. He had not married a naive and gullible woman. None of his wives had been dumb. Cheryl was, in fact, an extremely brilliant woman. But Brad could convince almost anyone of anything, and that included attorneys and big business executives.

  For Cheryl life became a constant walk through erratic situations; one misstep and the calmness she had always sought evaporated. In only a few years everything had changed so radically. At work, she was still totally in control, efficient and effective. At home, she no longer knew what Brad would do or, worse, what the people who were after him might do.

  Still, if it was true that they were all in danger, Cheryl wondered why Brad didn’t stay home with her and the little boys to protect them. When she came home to find him and his possessions gone the first time, she feared he had been abducted, even murdered. Only later would she find out that he had left of his own volition—and for his own reasons.

  Cheryl never really understood what made Brad move out or where he had gone. She was afraid to be alone on the island, but she was more afraid that Brad—or someone—would come back during the day and take more things out of the house. She asked Susan to move in with her and help her take care of Jess and Michael. “But I knew she wanted someone there too while she was at work,” Susan sighed, remembering. “Someone to guard the house. She was very upset and she was pregnant.”

  Susan loved looking after her two young nephews. “They were both smart,” she said. “But Jess was more introspective, and Michael was all high energy with a short attention span.” Michael was still a toddler then, and Jess was three. “He was brilliant,” Susan recalled. “He asked me once, ‘Where does glass come from?’ and then he went into one of his meditative states. Later, he popped up with ‘Sand! Glass is made out of sand!’ Jess always had phenomenal knowledge and concentration, even when he was a really little kid.”

  While Cheryl worried about their finances, Brad continued to drive a Mercedes. Not just one, but several. Susan, a typical teenager, thought at first that his cars were “kind of neat.” He had the mammoth Unimag. He had two four-door Mercedes sedans, a Mercedes station wagon, and a classic red two-seater Mercedes convertible. Susan was sure that Brad had to have money secreted somewhere.

  “Well, I just don’t know where it is,” Cheryl said wearily. “It doesn’t do me any good.”

  A woman who had always been in control, who thought precisely and rationally, Cheryl was now often scattered and distraught. She consulted a psychologist in 1983, hoping that she could find a way to run her life as smoothly as she ran her law practice and took care of her sons.

  Sharon McCulloch was still Cheryl’s day-care provider and continued to be a close friend. Sharon admired Cheryl tremendously. “She was Super Mom. I’ve taught school, I’ve taken care of over forty kids, and I’ve never known a mom in my life as committed to her kids. . . . She could be so busy, and if I called and said Jess had a little fever and asked her if I should have the doctor look at his ears, she would be there in twenty minutes. Every birthday, she gave a party. . . . Her kids were her life. She was the highest-energy person I’ve ever met in my life. She was a perfectionist—about herself. It’s a little thing, but one time her bra strap slipped down, and it was just pristine white. That was the way she was. Her house was spotless. . . . She was good at everything she did.”

  Sharon called Cheryl “the mother of the world.” She had to be. Jess was three and a half, Michael was twenty-one months old, she was four months pregnant, and now Brad was talking about how he might just go to live in Yakima 150 miles away for a while. He had some interest left in tribal land over there. He was thinking of starting a car wash and a laundromat. There was some acreage he thought they should buy.

  Cheryl just stared at him, appalled.

  She decided she had to move. It was too difficult and too expensive for her to stay on Bainbridge Island. She needed to be closer to her work and to her doctor. She rented a house in Somerset, an upper-middle-class neighborhood near Bellevue on the east side of King County. Now she would no longer have to depend on the ferry service to get to work, although the commute over the floating bridge could sometimes be frustrating.

  Brad moved with his family to Somerset, but then he left for Yakima. Cheryl pinned up the big map again, to show Jess and Michael where their daddy was. Despite everything, she was still fighting to hold the image of the perfect little family together. The boys were probably too young to understand, but she felt it vital that she keep talking about Brad, letting them know that they did have a father.

  If Cheryl was beginning to be afraid for Brad, she was also often afraid of Brad. Even so, she clung to her hope that somehow things were going to get better. Sometimes her sister and her friends wanted to shake her and tell her to wake up and smell the coffee. One day Sharon McCulloch and her daughter Mary visited Cheryl in the Somerset house. “I remember that there was this huge stuffed animal there, and I said something to Cheryl about it,” Sharon recalled. “She said, ‘Brad bought it, and I’m going to be paying for it for a long time.’” As they left, they walked through the garage to get to their car. Sharon was stunned to see the number of guns in the garage. She was more shocked to see an elongated woven basket; it looked exactly like a coffin—an Indian child’s coffin. Her jaw dropped, and she turned toward Cheryl to ask what it was.

  “Oh,” Cheryl said, embarrassed. “That’s Brad’s idea of discipline—keeping that in the garage for the boys.” When they were naughty, she said uncomfortably, Brad took them out and showed them the coffin. “He . . . tells them that . . . well, that’s where bad boys end up.”

  “Brad was into killing things—death,” Sharon remembered. “He would take the boys to Yakima and they’d come home with boxes of things they had killed. Squirrels and rabbits and snakes. Prairie dogs. They weren’t killing anything; they were just tiny boys, but that’s what Brad brought back for souvenirs of their trip. It used to just make Cheryl crazy.”

  On one of the trips in August 1983, Brad sent back a postcard to Cheryl. It was addressed, “Wife Cunningham,” and the message was one word, written in huge letters: “SEX.” A card from Jess—but written by Brad—said, “I’m really getting bigger. I take care of Michael almost all the time, especially at night so Dad and Shaun can go out drinkin’ and dancin’. Dad said I did real good.”

  It was, of course, a joke. Jess was only three. In October, Brad wrote a letter to Jess for his fourth birthday, apologizing for not being there. He sent three gifts. The first was a “tooth” from Brad’s backhoe that had broken off when he was digging a waterline to a house he was renovating on property he and Cheryl had purchased in Tampico. “You can keep this on your shelve [sic] downstairs to remind you of our backhoe.” The second present was shell casings. “These are spent bullets from one of Dad’s rifles. A pack of wild dogs came into Tampico last week and started raising havoc. . . . Daddy shot two of these wild dogs near your house, and these are the ‘bullets’ from my gun. . . .

  “I hope you had a nice and happy birthday. I love you very, very, very much and promise to see you again some day when things are better.

  “Love, Dad”

  Cheryl was all alone with the little boys for week after week. Nevertheless, she continued to make excuses for Brad. When he missed one of the boys’ birthdays, she said, “Daddy can’t be here because he’s making money,” or “Daddy can’t call you because he doesn’t have a phone.” If Brad was making money, Cheryl saw none of it. And as 1983 waned, so did her hopes for a happy ending. If she sometimes felt she was being punished for taking away another woman’s husband, no one could blame her. She was living at the edges of hell with a man who had become a stranger. Instead of things getting better, they were growing immeasurabl
y worse.

  Cheryl knew Sharon well enough by this time that she no longer tried to mask her true emotions. She was afraid. On November 18, 1983, the Friday night before Cheryl’s third son was born, the two women met for dinner at Bellevue Square. Sharon could see how miserable and terrified Cheryl was. They sat in a quiet booth while Cheryl poured out her fears. She was as pregnant as a woman could be—nine full months—and she trembled and cried softly as she tried to tell Sharon how bad things were in her marriage. A no-nonsense person herself, Sharon could not understand why Cheryl clung to a marriage that seemed more like a prison sentence.

  “How can you live like this?” she asked Cheryl.

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “You always have a choice. You don’t have to live like this.”

  Cheryl tried to explain. “No, you don’t understand. If I leave, he’ll kill me.”

  “Cheryl—”

  “No, really. He has always threatened that if I ever left him, he would kill me.”

  “Cheryl, you’re an attorney. Those kinds of things just don’t happen. You could stop him.”

  “No. If I ever tried to get custody of the boys,” Cheryl said, her voice choked with tears, “he would kill me. The only thing I could do, Sharon, if I ever got custody of the boys, is to leave the country and change my name. I’m between a rock and a hard place. If I don’t get them away from him, their lives are in danger. They’re not safe—he has enemies everywhere. They won’t live to be adults. And if I try to get custody, he’ll kill me probably.”

  Sharon didn’t like Brad; he was as abrasive and supercilious as anyone she had ever met. She had come to think of him as evil. But what kind of intrigue was he into where someone wanted to kill him and his sons? There was no doubt in Sharon’s mind that Cheryl believed he had enemies. But was it really true? And was it true that he might kill her if she tried to get custody of the boys?

  On the Monday following Cheryl’s tearful unburdening to her good friend, she presented Brad with another son: Phillip. He now had six children by three wives.

  Brad’s first two children, Kait and Brent, were, for the moment, safely out of his reach. Their mother, Loni Ann, had her bachelor’s degree in physical education; she was teaching in high school and working on her master’s in kinestheo-therapy. For a woman who had truly begun to believe that she was irretrievably stupid, she was doing remarkably well in college. Her course work involved memorizing all the muscles and tendons of the body and how they worked, and she had no trouble at all doing that. Loni Ann was smarter than anyone had realized. No matter what Brad had done to destroy all traces of self-worth in his first wife, she had survived and had even begun to thrive. Her goal was to work with patients with sports injuries and in general rehabilitative medicine.

  Loni Ann’s other goal was to get as far away from the Northwest and Brad as possible. She was grateful to have her daughter back after the nightmare months Kait had spent with Brad in Houston. She was going to need counseling. They were both going to need counseling, untold years of therapy, so they would no longer be afraid and would no longer feel like “garbage.”

  When Phillip was born, Brad came over from Yakima and visited Cheryl briefly. Mary Hilfer, one of her friends, recalled that he bought a new puppy for the boys. “That was the last thing Cheryl needed with a new baby—a puppy to look after too!”

  Now that Brad was the father of three more boys, all under one roof, he didn’t seem nearly as obsessed with keeping his other children under his thumb. Lauren Stoneham was vastly relieved when he didn’t exercise his visitation rights with Amy in anything more than a sporadic fashion. But her relationship with Brad was no longer overtly adversarial, and he sometimes called and talked to her as if they were close friends. Lauren was certainly not going to bring up the past and Brad seemed to have forgotten the agony he had put her through. He filled her in with more details about his high-stakes court battle in Texas, blaming the officers of the construction company, the architect, and the bonding company for the delays that had thrown him into bankruptcy. In his usual convincing manner, he told Lauren that if they had listened to him and met their commitments in getting the buildings done, his current financial disaster would never have happened.

  Brad explained that he had filed for Chapter 11 protection because he still had all of his assets; he just had to find a different way to tap into them. But if he did recoup any money, Lauren didn’t hear about it. After 1983 Brad never paid her any more child support for Amy. That was fine with Lauren; they didn’t need it. And it was a relief to know that Brad was no longer pushing for his parental rights.

  22

  Cheryl was the primary parent to Jess, Michael, and the newborn Phillip. As her friend Sharon later said, “Cheryl patented those boys essentially alone.” She was also the primary breadwinner in her marriage. Brad was always gone—to Yakima, to Texas, to Canada, and to any number of other places. He had mysterious missions connected with the financial fiasco in Houston, he was setting up a business for his father in Yakima, but, beyond that, Cheryl was never really sure why he had to be away so often. The map on the wall bristled with pins, as she patiently showed her little boys “where Daddy is.”

  Nineteen eighty-four was a year of separations and strained reunions, a year of despair and even of occasional hope. Cheryl was afraid of Brad and of the truth she acknowledged in moments of solitary—but searing—evaluation of her marriage. She realized at last that he was fully capable of killing her if she crossed him. She knew that all of the energy and brilliance and charm that had once bewitched her could just as easily be turned against her. And it wasn’t only Brad. He had warned her that there were mysterious forces stalking not only him but his whole family. He could handle himself, but he didn’t want his sons to pay a tragic price.

  Brad kept Cheryl continually off balance, constantly afraid. And yet part of her still loved him. Only a woman who has been battered either physically or emotionally can understand why. The bad alternated with the good. And when things were good, they were tremendously good. There is no creature on earth more persuasive than a contrite wife abuser, and no woman who wants to believe more than the abused wife.

  Cheryl was a woman with superior intellectual strength, but she was also a woman with a tender and romantic heart who detested the idea of a second divorce. Brad had swept her away from her first marriage. If she divorced him, she feared revealing herself as a woman who could not give what marriage demanded. Worse, this time a divorce would mean that her three little boys would lose either their father or their mother. She had grave doubts that Brad would let her keep Jess, Michael, and Phillip—he had told her otherwise often enough—and she could not bear the thought of losing them. If Brad did accede to her having custody, they would probably never see him again. He had threatened to walk completely out of their lives. There would be no need to put pins in a map, because their daddy wouldn’t be coming home and it wouldn’t matter where he was. She probably wouldn’t even know.

  Cheryl was stubborn and focused as a litigator and she was just as stubborn in hanging on to her marriage. But she was not stupid. She no longer believed that her marriage would one day miraculously metamorphose into one filled with joy and security. She adjusted her sights lower and somehow she was able to quiet the hysteria she had felt just before Phillip was born, able to relegate the fear to her subconscious—although it still lay in wait like a cancer, ready to burst forth and grow.

  Cheryl had always made friends wherever she went, both female and male, and more than ever now, they helped her maintain her equilibrium. John Burke, her old friend from the Unigard Insurance office before either of them went to law school, was still in touch. She rarely saw him, but they wrote and talked on the phone. Burke was married; so was Cheryl. They were platonic friends who admired each other a great deal.

  Eric Lindenauer was another good friend. When he had graduated from Willamette University Law School in Salem, Oregon, in 1983, the firm of
Garvey, Schubert was anxious to hire him. He wanted to work in commercial litigation and he specifically searched for a law firm where he would have a mentor, “someone to teach me the fine points of litigation—the things you can’t learn in law school.” Garvey, Schubert assured Lindenauer they would find him a skilled litigator to guide him in his fledgling years. That mentor was Cheryl Keeton.

  At thirty-four, Cheryl was a good decade older than Lindenauer, yet they became good friends as well as mentor and student. She took him under her wing and taught him the subtle nuances that separate an outstanding litigator from an adequate one. He was amazed at her professional ability and grateful that she was so generous in sharing her experience.

  In the beginning, Lindenauer knew very little about Cheryl’s personal life, nothing beyond the fact that her husband had business interests that required him to travel a lot. She was a private person and a very proud woman. No one really knew what Cheryl’s life was like. However, the people who worked in Brad and Cheryl’s home could not help but notice that theirs was a strange, edgy marriage.

  Lee Mauldin* baby-sat for them Monday through Friday in the summer of 1984. She joined a parade of baby-sitters who would go on record to say that they did not care for Mr. Cunningham. In a statement she gave six years later, Lee remembered Brad’s violence and his temper. She recalled that he once removed the tires from Cheryl’s car so she couldn’t drive. During one of his many precipitous abandonments, Cheryl had changed the locks on the Somerset house, but Brad broke in, shouting threats. Lee Mauldin heard it all and was appalled.

  Fortuitously perhaps, Brad continued to stay away from home for most of 1984, spending a lot of time in Yakima with his father. He bought Sanford a gas station in Tampico. Even though Cheryl was the only one working, nothing was ever too good for Brad’s father. The business was doomed to failure almost from the start, and it soon went belly-up. Brad was confident, however, that his plan for a laundromat and car wash would be more successful.