Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  “Did you ever seek professional counseling or help for the psychological or emotional effects Mr. Cunningham’s abusive conduct during your marriage had on you?” Shinn asked.

  “Only just recently. . . . I was told that everything would probably be all right in time, to give it time, but it’s been seventeen years and it’s not okay.”

  “What’s not okay about it?” Shinn asked.

  “It just still stays with me . . . I have problems because of it.”

  Loni Ann said she had allowed Brent to live with his father in the spring of 1986 because he hated living in Brooklyn, where she was working.”

  “When and why did he stop living with his father?”

  “In July of 1987. His father threw him out—he didn’t want him anymore.”

  Loni Ann said that her daughter Kait did not want to talk to Mike Shinn “or to be involved in any of this.” Both her children had suffered pain during the long separations from their father, and “when they did see him, they were never happy when they came home.”

  “Did you ever witness any abuse to Brent when he was a baby?”

  “When we were married . . . his father would throw water at him for crying or throw water at him for not wanting to eat. He didn’t beat him too much . . . he was only two. I didn’t see any reason for disciplining a two-year-old . . .”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “He would slap him. . . . After we were divorced, and Brad returned the children from visitations, I noticed that my son had bruises on him on his backside, almost from his waist to his knees, and he said his father had spanked him . . . for wetting the bed.”

  Asked about weapons Brad owned, Loni Ann had seen a rifle and a small machine gun. “He said he knew people who—for the right price—would do anything he wanted them to do. . . . ‘You know I can do whatever I want . . . I always win. I never lose.’ . . . He told me I should know better than to mess with him.”

  Reluctantly, Loni Ann answered Mike Shinn’s questions about an incident that had occurred after her divorce. Brad had come very early in the morning to pick up the children when she was still asleep and he told her he would wake them up and get them dressed. “I went to take a shower. He unlocked the bathroom door with a screwdriver and he came in and he just took me into the bedroom. He told me not to make any noise or it would wake up the kids, and he didn’t care if the kids saw it . . . and afterward, he said he didn’t know anyone could hold their breath that long.”

  “Did you report this to the police?”

  “No . . . I didn’t think anybody would believe me.”

  “And after you discovered that he had left you on the cliff, did you report it to the police?” Shinn asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference. They couldn’t do anything about it, and if he found out, things would only be worse. . . . I just knew I had to get away from him . . . somehow.”

  Mike Shinn finished his questions; his part of the deposition had taken an hour and a half, and Loni Ann looked devastated. When Rieke began to question her in more detail about the night that Brad left her beside the river, she suddenly began to sob and ran from the room.

  Diane Bakker went with Loni Ann to the ladies’ room and held her. “Her whole body shook with racking sobs,” Bakker said later. “She started talking to me. I guess I didn’t ever know that someone could be so afraid of somebody. She told me how Brad terrified her—even to this day—and to remember that incident, and how close she came to dying, was something that she could hardly deal with. Not only that, it brought back all the memories of her marriage to him. She proceeded to tell me many things that didn’t come out in the deposition that were unbelievable.”

  Loni Ann told Diane what she could not bring herself to describe in detail in the deposition. Brad’s idea of sex had been, as she testified, “that I would do anything that he wanted, when he wanted it.” But it was more than that. She said having sex with Brad was like being raped.

  Loni Ann was finally able to retake the witness chair and face Joe Rieke. Rieke reasserted his client’s express desire to bar all privileged marital communication. Any attorney working for Brad Cunningham would have sought to strike the devastating deposition Loni Ann had just given, citing Brad’s marital privilege. But this was not a task that any defense attorney, much less Joe Rieke, would relish. The woman was so frightened.

  Rieke asked Loni Ann about the incident at the party, apparently in an effort to imply that she had been responsible for Brad’s behavior. He also attempted to establish that she and Brad had had consensual sex after their divorce. If possible, Loni Ann shrank even further into the witness chair. It was obvious that the thought revulsed her and when he asked her why she had not fought back when Brad opened the bathroom door with a screwdriver and raped her, she looked at him with a hopeless expression. She had never been able to fight back. “Brad always outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds—except when I was pregnant. . . .”

  The deposition had begun at one that afternoon of the first day of spring in 1990. It was over at 3:38 P.M. Loni Ann had smiled only once in two hours and forty minutes—and that was when Mike Shinn stumbled over pronouncing “kinesiology.” But it was all on videotape, and Shinn would be able to use it in the civil trial.

  Sara didn’t know that Shinn had taken Loni Ann’s deposition. She didn’t know Loni Ann. She had known none of Brad’s former wives; Cheryl was the only one she had ever seen and they had not spoken. She had yet to realize how much they all had in common. Her own deposition was scheduled for August 20—five months away.

  On April 25, someone from Sara’s past returned, someone who sparked mostly happy memories for her. She had not seen Jack Kincaid for a long time, not since they had stopped dating in the spring of 1986. And there was an irony in his coming back into her life at that particular moment. If he had not taken another woman to Easter brunch in March of 1986, Jack and Sara probably wouldn’t have broken up. She would not have been inclined to accept a second date with Brad Cunningham. Kincaid had often regretted losing Sara, but when he heard she was involved with Cunningham—and then married to him—there was nothing he could do.

  “It was funny,” Kincaid would recall. “Clay Watson and I had been in the service together, and after he was a surgeon at Providence, it was Clay who introduced me to Sara in the first place—back in 1986. And he told me I’d blown my chance and I was a fool to let her go. He called me in April of 1990 and said, ‘Well, it looks like you’ve got another chance—Sara’s filed for divorce.’

  “Clay told me a little bit of what Sara was going through. I didn’t waste time. I sent flowers to Sara at the hospital, and then I called her. It was April twenty-fifth when we met for drinks at the Harborside near her Riverplace apartment. She told me she couldn’t live in her apartment—she was afraid.”

  Jack and Sara went for dinner at Nick’s Coney Island, and they talked about the decisions they had made over the last four years. He could see that she was thinner than she had ever been and more worried. The circles beneath her eyes seemed permanently etched there. If ever Sara needed a strong, solid man to lean on, it was now. And Jack Kincaid was that kind of man.

  As far as anyone knew, Brad and the boys were living in an apartment in Houston. He had been served with a court order to have Jess, Michael, and Phillip appear for a hearing in Portland on April 16, 1990. On April 13, his attorney reported that Brad’s Houston case had been postponed yet again, and that he expected to move back to Portland in the next few weeks. His attorney told Bill Schulte that Brad had no money to move, no money to have a phone at home, and that he had to sell his luggage to have “money for food.” That would explain the “children’s letter” to Sara Gordon, begging for a ticket home.

  And then suddenly on May 27, Brad was back in Portland and in the Dunthorpe house. So far he had won every flurry. He wanted the house and he told
Sara that he would stop at nothing to keep it. Along with the wives he had left behind, he had walked away from some wonderful houses—but none as grand as this one. He liked the huge gray house, the sweeping circular driveway, the guest house. He and his sons were living in one of the best neighborhoods in the most desirable suburb of Portland. He informed Sara that he was in no hurry to leave.

  Sara had wanted the Dunthorpe house to be there for Jess, Michael, and Phillip. But that was before she found out she had co-signed too many times for Brad and was now responsible for bills all over the Portland area. As hard as she tried, she didn’t see how she was going to be able to pay the bills and keep the house too.

  Brad was unemployed. Since U.S. Bank bought out his contract in the fall of 1986, he considered his suit against the Houston contractors his real profession, a kind of “legal career.” The Broadway Bakery—even the Bistro—had never been his true style. He had only been marking time, and now he was bored with the bakery. In any event, he had run it into the ground financially.

  There were so many papers to be filed in Brad’s marathon legal suit, so many details to keep abreast of. Vinson and Elkins—the second largest law firm in the state of Texas, with five hundred attorneys in its employ—still believed in his case. There was still the chance that Brad would be awarded several million dollars. If he won, they won. Several of the firm’s top litigators, including the dynamic and colorful Wes Urqhart, had been working on it for years now. And Brad’s input was so vital that Vinson and Elkins always made a private office available to him whenever he was in Houston.

  For the moment, however, Brad was comfortably ensconced in the Dunthorpe house, living there with Jess, Michael, and Phillip, who were now ten, eight, and six. Sara missed the boys terribly. She was their legal mother, and she had been their mother in every sense but biological since Cheryl’s murder—but Brad made it very difficult for her to see them. Nevertheless, he was prepared to sue her for child support. They were her Achilles’ heel, and Brad knew it. Sara had seen the boys only once—for two and a half hours—since she filed for divorce in March. But then, surprisingly, Brad allowed her to take them out for a visit on June 10. They had a good day together and Sara bought them clothes. Whatever might happen in the civil suit against Brad and their divorce proceedings, she hoped that this might be the start of regular visitation.

  PART 5

  Dana

  43

  Brad had long since dismissed Rhonda, but he did need someone to take care of his sons while he was involved with his business endeavors. He advertised for a nanny who could live in. He placed ads in the Oregonian for months and interviewed scores of women. The applicant he finally chose would have to be just right, the perfect woman for his sons and, quite possibly, for him too. He was, after all, alone now.

  Brad’s ads for a nanny were enticing. The successful applicant would earn a thousand dollars a month and would be provided with all living expenses. She could choose whether she wanted to live in “the mansion” or in her own guest house on the property. There would be travel, some entertaining, and flexible hours. There were many applicants and Brad eliminated most of them because they were too old, too dowdy, too stodgy, had no social graces, or they did not live up to the picture he had in his mind. He wanted class, he wanted physical beauty, and he wanted a malleable female who would fit into the lifestyle he envisioned for himself.

  Brad had told applicants that he would need someone who could start in May of 1990. Some of them he put on hold; he told the patently unsuitable ones that the job had been unexpectedly filled. When he had winnowed the profusion of applicants down to a handful, he called his first choice back.

  Dana Malloy* was twenty-three years old, although she could have easily passed for eighteen. She was tall and slender, with a spectacular figure and luxuriant ashblond hair that surrounded her face like a halo and fell to the middle of her back. She had smoky green-blue eyes and the small, even features that Brad always seemed to seek in each new woman whose path crossed his, each woman who became his wife—and his victim.

  Until she was twenty-two, Dana Malloy’s life had been as normal and wholesome and happy as any small-town girl’s in America. “I grew up in a little town in southern Oregon,” she remembered. “There were four of us kids, and we were raised strict Catholic. I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. I was a cheerleader from the fifth grade until I graduated from high school. My folks sent me away for my last two years of school so I could graduate from a Catholic school.”

  Dana and her sister Allie* were in 4-H, and Dana grew up crazy about horses. She could ride bareback; she could ride facing forward, backward, or crosswise. She was such a complete country girl that it was hard to picture her any other way. “My mom saw that we had tap dancing lessons, and ballet, and baton twirling. She didn’t push us; she just wanted us to have the best chance to succeed. I was in every beauty pageant I heard about. But it was fun. It was just the ‘girly thing’ to do. If I didn’t win, nobody cared. It wasn’t as though my folks were pushing me. It was just fun.”

  Dana kept a scrapbook with a blue gingham cover, and in the pictures of one of the early pageants she was in, pretty, slender teenage girls were wearing modest formals in pastel colors as they walked along a runway covered with red velvet and edged in white fake fur. The audience beaming in the background was full of parents, sisters, brothers, and townspeople. Dana’s lovely eyes were slightly tilted and her smile was wide and confident even though, inside, she was scared and her knees trembled. She usually placed in the top two or three contestants.

  The Malloys were strict parents, but loving. Their values were a little old-fashioned, shaped by their own parents and the church. When Dana went to the prom, she wore a modest high-necked dress with long sleeves, daisies in her hair, and a corsage of white carnations. Her cheerleader’s costume was a long-sleeved red sweater, a swingy red and white miniskirt, red and white saddle shoes, and huge matching pom-poms.

  Dana had been in love with Mark Rutledge,* a tall, dark-haired basketball star, for as long as she could remember. Everyone who knew them assumed they would get married within a few years of graduation. In the meantime, they dated and Dana sold cosmetics and cut hair.

  After high school she still entered beauty pageants, but where she had been merely pretty, Dana had become startlingly beautiful. Her hair was a few shades blonder and her gowns were sewn with glittering sequins. She strutted along the runways with more confidence now, even during the bathing suit competition of the “Miss Oregon, U.S.” pageant. The audience was more sophisticated, but she was still having fun. Dana had no particular aspirations beyond marriage and babies.

  “I really loved Mark and my parents thought that ‘living in sin’ was wrong. I was twenty when we got married. It was July 26, 1986—how could I ever forget that date?” It was a beautiful wedding. Mark wore white tails, and Dana’s dress had a flouncy lace train. She carried a white lace fan decorated with pink flowers as her father walked her down the aisle. Her mother and her bridesmaids wore gowns of pale dusty rose.

  It should have been a happy ending, but it wasn’t. “Mark was a workaholic. I mean, he worked eighty hours a week,” Dana said. “We bought a nice home with land in a little town twenty miles north of Portland. But I was alone there all the time. Mark worked on projects in Las Vegas or in California, and he couldn’t even come home on weekends. He told me there was no point; he’d just get home Saturday and have to fly back on Sunday. He came home about once a month.”

  Dana knew that Mark worked all the time before she married him, but as so many woman before her have believed, she thought marriage would change him. “He didn’t change,” she said. “I couldn’t go out because I was married, and besides, I didn’t want to. I wanted children. I wasn’t a women’s libber. I believed a woman should stay home. But I couldn’t have babies with Mark—I would have had to raise them alone. I felt he was hurting me.”

  The marriage was probably doomed from the beginni
ng. It just kind of wore itself out by September 1988. Dana moved to Portland and got a job selling high-end cosmetics in a department store. Sometimes she cut hair to supplement her income. “I sold Estée Lauder—I went to the brands and the stores where I could make money.” Dana was divorced from Mark in 1989. It was not an acrimonious divorce. Not at all. “We’re still great friends today,” she said. “We just couldn’t be married.”

  Deep down, Dana knew she was pretty, but she wondered if she had anything else to offer. Her own husband hadn’t cared enough about her to come home more than once a month, even during the honeymoon phase of their brief marriage. Her confidence was shaken, and she was particularly vulnerable to men who responded positively to her. She dated some; men came on to her everywhere she turned. There was one man, Nick Ronzini,* who sold men’s clothes in the department store where she worked. Dana liked Nick a lot and he was very handsome, but when he drank, his personality changed.

  Dana was at a crossroads in 1990. If nothing came along to change her life, she might stay with Nick. Or she might go home to southern Oregon and stay with her family. As it turned out, something—someone—did come along: Brad Cunningham. “He called me and told me that he remembered me,” Dana said, “even though there had been people ‘standing in line’ for the nanny job.” She had almost forgotten that she had applied for the job.

  When she went to the Dunthorpe house for her second interview, Brad told her that he was separated from his wife, Dr. Sara Gordon. “We aren’t getting along,” he said. “I live here with my sons.”

  Dana assumed that the huge home with its sprawling grounds and two-story guest house belonged to Brad. She found him “very distinguished.”