Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  “Okay,” Runstein said. “Let’s go to 1984 now. Mr. Cunningham—in early 1984—commenced sharing a residence with you again?”

  Yes, Cheryl said, he had been more or less back with them in 1984, and they had moved to Portland because Brad wanted to. “He felt he could not get employment in Seattle because of the bankruptcy and so many creditor banks in Seattle—so many enemies, as he put it.”

  Cheryl had had to pass the Oregon bar and took a bar review course. They hired Marnie O’Connor as a baby-sitter. “She did not live in until about two weeks before she was fired,” Cheryl testified.

  “When was she fired?” Runstein asked.

  “. . . late August or early September.”

  “. . . Was this the young lady that Mr. Cunningham told you he was intimate with?”

  “. . . yes.”

  Runstein went on to ask if she and Brad had discussed open marriage.

  “Brad had raised the subject numerous times, yes.”

  “Brad had? You had not?”

  “. . . no.”

  Cheryl lost her composure. Brad was making faces and comments. She said she could not continue. Runstein admonished Brad to make no comments.

  “My question,” Runstein continued, “is just prior to finding out about this young baby-sitter, had you told him that you had had intercourse with someone during the marriage?”

  “Absolutely not. And I had not,” Cheryl said firmly. She had never, ever gone along with Brad’s enthusiasm for open marriage.

  Cheryl answered questions about the terrible scene on the first day Jess went to Bridlemile School. It was still bitterly fresh in her mind; it had happened less than two weeks earlier. She trembled as she recalled that morning. Cheryl admitted that she had balled her hand into a fist and held it out “real hard to stop [Brad] from pushing me backwards.”

  “. . . You were not angry at this time?”

  “I had been upset ever since he called me the night before. I was extremely angry at this man for causing this scene [in front of] my little boy. You bet I was.” For a moment, Cheryl showed her old fire.

  It was a long and tedious deposition, and Cheryl was strung so tightly she almost vibrated. Runstein asked her questions which seemed designed to trip her up, but Cheryl remained steady. She described the weekend when Brad moved back into the Gresham house as “absolutely frightening.”

  “Does the guest room have a lock?”

  “Not to my knowledge. If it did, he put it in when he and Marnie screwed in it. . . . I did notice one there as was cleaning the room when I moved out. And I believe Brad put that on himself, as I said, probably for privacy with his baby-sitter.”

  Runstein’s questions now touched on a volatile area. He asked if Cheryl felt Brad should see the children out of her presence. She tried to avoid a direct answer. She could feel the heat of Brad’s rage. But Runstein kept needling her until she blurted, “No, I don’t think he should see them at all.”

  “Ever?” Runstein breathed.

  “Considering what he’s done lately, I don’t think he shows himself to be mature enough to be a father figure for them.” She cited the Bridlemile School spectacle. “I think that speaks for itself.”

  “Okay. When was the first occasion when he struck the children, leaving welts and bruises?” Runstein was fishing; Cheryl had not mentioned her concern about that, but now she had to speak. “You see,” she began, knowing she was on treacherous ground, “ . . . I have a feeling I didn’t know about that a lot of the times. The children got a lot of bumps and bruises that you think occur falling down. The one time we’re talking about here occurred shortly after we moved from Seattle in 1985 . . . when Michael was three years old. . . .”

  “What did you do,” Runstein asked, “when he had beaten the children so severely that they had welts and bruises?”

  “I confronted him with it. I told him that if he ever did that again, I would report him to the police . . . and he basically told me it was none of my business and that if I wanted to have a few welts myself, he could give them to me.”

  Brad could not contain himself, and Cheryl turned to look at him, alarmed. “I’m not going to sit here and be intimidated by him. He scares me.”

  Cheryl was almost beyond fear now, but she plunged on. She described welts and bruises on Michael’s thigh.

  “And did it ever happen again?” Runstein asked.

  “He struck them a lot of times after that, but generally so as not to leave welts and bruises,” Cheryl replied. She said Brad had hit the boys on their bottoms and that “he generally confined his striking of the children to times when I wasn’t around.” But the boys had told her.

  Brad was seething. Runstein showed Cheryl an affidavit she had signed six months earlier saying that Brad could see the children as often as he wanted.

  “I would agree to anything to get him out of the house, Mr. Runstein—anything to get him physically out of my house. I figured the Court would take care of him if he abused the children.”

  “Okay.”

  Cheryl drew up every inch of her frail body and fixed her eye on Ted Runstein. “If you are trying to imply I don’t care about the well-being of my children, you are off base.”

  “You are not angry, are you?”

  “Yeah, I’m real angry. You are upsetting me a great deal. It’s been a long day.”

  Runstein suggested that they break for the day. The deposition adjourned at 4:04 P.M. The court reporter, Michael King, rode down in the elevator with Cheryl and saw that she was barely holding back tears. She had every reason to be upset. She had just broken all of Brad’s rules. She had defied him, she had humiliated him in public, and most dangerous of all, she had officially accused him of child abuse. Brad viewed himself, above all else, as the perfect father. But Cheryl had held nothing back as she described him as an abusive father, a terrible father, a damaging father who was not fit to be with his sons. Never before had she made those accusations to his face and now she had not only said it, she had said it for the record. Cheryl had covered for Brad for all the years of their sons’ lives, sticking colored pins on maps, telling the little boys that their daddy loved them and would be home with them if he weren’t working so hard, letting them believe that their daddy was perfect.

  Now she had spoken what she felt to be the truth. As a father, Brad was a monster.

  When Brad returned to his Madison Tower apartment that evening, Sara Gordon saw “the most anger I’d ever seen him exhibit.” He was furious, pacing back and forth, repeating to Sara over and over again that Cheryl had lied about everything. He was consumed with his rage over her deposition, the veins standing out on his forehead. He would talk of nothing else. Finally, he strode to his bedroom to call Cheryl. Sara sat on the bed and listened. “He was so angry that his speech was pressured,” she recalled. “Brad was actually having trouble getting his words out.”

  “You lied at the deposition today,” he growled at Cheryl through a throat tight with fury. “I’m going to get even—or you’re going to pay. . . .”

  Sara sat, frozen, on Brad’s bed, her mind recording this previously hidden facet of her lover’s personality. She had never seen him out of control. She had never known him to make such a call before and she was shocked at his venom. And yet, she was amazed to see how rapidly Brad’s fury dissipated once he hung up the phone. It was as if he had blown out a pressure valve and everything was back to normal. He stopped pacing. He stopped repeating his epithets about Cheryl. Internally, something had changed. Perhaps he had made some decision. He had told Cheryl that he would have his revenge, and that seemed to make him feel better.

  31

  From the nineteenth to the twenty-first of September, Sara Gordon spent what was, at least for her, a fairly normal weekend. She had always worked harder and longer hours than any of her friends. That was a characteristic she shared with Cheryl; both of these brilliant women had fought for an education, fought for a career usually enjoyed by men, and o
nce they attained their toeholds, they had worked twice as hard as any man to succeed.

  During the summer of 1986, Sara was totally in love with Brad and she would have preferred to spend far more time with him than her practice allowed. But, in a way, she was working for both of them, for their future. She continued her usual fifty to sixty hours a week on call at Providence. It seemed even more important now that she and Brad had begun to talk about marriage. He had reluctantly told her that Cheryl was a profligate spender, and that he had had to file for bankruptcy. Although he had high expectations for the eventual windfall that would come from the suit Vinson and Elkins had filed on his behalf in Houston, the bottom was still falling out of the Houston economy and he had been temporarily brought to his financial knees.

  How difficult it must have been, Sara thought, for this proud man to tell her the details of his bankruptcy filing so he could save what little he had left. She admired him for his honesty and she had no doubt that Brad would regain his financial footing soon. The man was a genius, and he had vision. He saw what the American public was going to need, and he set out to provide it way, way ahead of the pack.

  Brad hadn’t lost everything, of course. He had his new job as an upper-echelon executive with U.S. Bank. And he told Sara that he had formed his own corporation, also called Spectrum, and that it was a going concern, untouched by the bankruptcy. Although things were in the hush-hush stage, he said confidentially, his biotechnical division scientists had come up with a drug that would alleviate almost all the pain and symptoms of herpes. It was called Symptovir and he said there was great excitement in the medical community about early test results.

  Sara was impressed. As a physician, she knew that the drugs in current use were often ineffective; they were little more than placebos. With studies projecting that a third of the population of the United States would contract genital herpes sooner or later, any company with a better drug to treat the disease would make not millions but billions. Sara’s talent wasn’t business acumen, but she knew what Symptovir could mean. Brad would be back on the top of the heap. And she was working double shifts to help him get enough money together to rebuild his financial empire.

  Brad wanted her to mention Symptovir to her ex-husband Dr. Geoff Morrow, but she was understandably hesitant to do that. He didn’t really need her to pave the way for him, anyway. But she was fully prepared to back Brad in his business, and to help him take care of his children. From those confidences he had told her so haltingly and with such embarrassment, she realized that he had never had a woman who really loved him. Sara cared deeply for him, and it seemed sad that a man with so much love to give had been so unlucky with the women in his life. Even his own mother had apparently been cold and selfish, although Brad spoke about her only vaguely, and Sara didn’t know whether she was alive or dead.

  But Brad had loved his father, and he had been desolate in July when Sanford Cunningham succumbed to his third heart attack, suffered while on a fishing trip. Sara knew that Brad was still hurting from the loss. Sanford’s pickup was parked in the basement of the Madison Tower, virtually unused now.

  * * *

  On Friday, September 19, 1986, Sara rode along with Brad in his Chevy Suburban van when he drove to Cheryl’s house to pick up Jess, Michael, and Phillip. It was his weekend to have the boys. Sara waited in the car as always; she had yet to meet Cheryl, although she was extremely curious about the woman who was putting Brad through such an emotional wringer. And like any woman, she was curious to learn what she could about all the women who had come before her.

  A wild and gusty storm hit the Portland area that Friday night and Sara could barely see through the Suburban’s windows as sheets of water shut out the world beyond the glass. She could see that Cheryl’s brother Jim’s car was still parked there. He was usually around when Brad picked up his sons. Squinting, Sara watched Brad dash into the house to get the kids. Even without sound and at that distance, she could sense that Cheryl seemed “frazzled” as she moved quickly past the windows, getting the boys’ coats, helping them push their arms into the sleeves, running back to get someone’s “special blankey.”

  Brad’s mouth moved constantly. Sara wondered what he was saying to Cheryl. She felt like the outsider as she watched the two of them interact with each other in the warm light of Cheryl’s home. They must have been in love once; they had three children together. Sara felt a little shiver of jealousy, but she told herself not to be dumb. Brad cared only about his sons. He had said often enough how he detested Cheryl. If Sara just thought rationally, she knew she had nothing at all to be jealous about. Cheryl looked attractive, but she also appeared to be a nervous wreck. Her movements were stilted and awkward. If everything Brad said about her was true, she had good reason to be nervous.

  Sara could see now that Brad was carrying Phillip as he herded Jess and Michael ahead of him through the rain. Cheryl stood silhouetted in the doorway, looking after them as if she were straining to catch a last glimpse of the boys, almost as if they were going away from her for more than a weekend. That was odd, Sara thought, since Brad said that the kids drove Cheryl nuts and she could hardly wait to be rid of them so she could go out and have fun.

  “What were you talking about in there?” she asked Brad as they buckled the boys into carseats and seat belts.

  “Remember how I told you I’d never eat anything at home when we lived in Gresham?” Brad said.

  She nodded. Sara had heard this before. Brad had told her that just before he moved out of the house he shared with Cheryl, things were so bad that he was actually afraid to eat anything she cooked. He had to have the boys taste it first because he suspected that Cheryl was trying to poison him. He told Sara now that he had reminded Cheryl that he was fully aware that she and her mother, Betty, had been trying to destroy him.

  “I was telling her about how I listened in on those phone calls she had with her mother when I had to go over there to be sure the boys were okay,” Brad said, “the calls where they talked about poisoning me to get rid of me. How they said that nobody would ever prosecute a case where a husband died like that.”

  Sara said nothing. It always struck her as bizarre that Brad could be so matter-of-fact about his estranged wife and her mother talking about poisoning his food. And she had to admit—at least to herself—that it was odd that he would risk the boys’ safety by having them taste food he thought was poisoned. Maybe it was like Solomon and the two women who each claimed to be the mother of a baby. The real mother cried out as the sword descended to cut the baby in two. Cheryl, however lacking she was as a mother, would never have let her sons taste poisoned food. And Brad would know that.

  Sara listened as Brad ranted on about Cheryl. She worried because he never censored his conversation in front of his sons. He always blurted out whatever was on his mind. The little boys were listening now, and Sara didn’t want Brad to get into the details again about some weird poison plot. Cheryl was, after all, their mother, and Brad could get a little histrionic. The boys appeared to love their mother a lot, no matter what. Sara wasn’t a mother, but she knew enough about psychology to know it wasn’t good for kids to have to choose up sides between parents, or to hear such accusations.

  “What’d you guys have for dinner?” Sara asked, changing the subject as she turned to face toward the second seat of the Suburban.

  “Orange juice,” Jess answered.

  Brad rolled his eyes. He said he was sure that Cheryl did that on purpose—filled the boys up with liquid so they would wet their beds in his apartment. Anything she could do to make life difficult for him, she would do.

  Back at the Madison Tower, Sara and Brad tucked the boys into bed in the room that Brad kept just for them—Jess and Michael in their bunk beds, and Phillip in his crib. The storm eased and everything was serene again.

  Sara was on duty at Providence the next morning. She tiptoed out of the apartment and left them all sleeping; she had to be at the hospital by 6:30 A.M. T
he mass of Portland is divided in two by the Willamette River, and the Madison Tower is in the western part, while Providence Hospital is in the eastern section. Even so, Sara had only about seven miles to drive, crossing the river via the Morrison Bridge. She drove her Toyota Cressida; it was white and she had treated herself to the deluxe leather interior. Her commute was a quick trip along the rain-scrubbed, empty streets of an early weekend-morning Portland.

  Sara knew Brad planned to take the boys to Jess’s first soccer game that day. All of them, with the possible exception of Phillip who was too young to understand, were excited about it. Jess was going to play for the Bridlemile Buddies. Then Brad was going to take the boys to Dunkin’ Donuts after the game. Sara hoped they all had a fun day.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t a fun day—at least not for Brad. When Sara got home Saturday evening, she found him fuming. He told her that Cheryl had broken the custody rules again. This was supposed to be his weekend, and Cheryl knew that, but she had shown up brazenly at Jess’s soccer game, deliberately horning in on his time with the boys. It had ruined the game for Brad. He had to look at Cheryl sitting there in the bleachers as if she had every right to be there. One of Cheryl’s Gamma Phi Beta sorority sisters from the University of Washington, Nancy Davis, had a son on the Bridlemile Buddies too, and her husband was the boys’ coach, so Cheryl had sat there with Nancy. Brad told Sara that he had picked up Phillip and Michael and walked to the other side of the field to avoid her.

  It had gotten to the point where Brad and Cheryl seemed to be fighting over even the most minute details of custody, and, to Sara at least, it seemed such a waste of emotion—but then she had never had a child and she didn’t like to judge Brad’s reactions.

  They tucked the boys in, then Brad and Sara went to bed, but her beeper sounded at 2:30 on Sunday morning and she was called back to Providence Hospital to administer anesthesia for emergency surgery. After the patient was stable and out from under the anesthesia, she went back to Brad’s apartment and caught a few hours’ sleep. Exhausted, she still forced herself to get up so she could have breakfast with Brad and the boys. She was supposed to meet a girlfriend for brunch, but she was too tired; she called and canceled.