Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Dana had grown used to dining in fine restaurants. She was seduced by Brad’s grand lifestyle. She loved that part, but he still urged her to go to strip joints with him in Houston—just as he had tried to get her to go to girlie spots in Seattle—and she still refused. One night in 1991 Brad took her to a sumptuously decorated restaurant called the Men’s Club. Dana had never been to a club that was so impressive; she believed it to be a place where Houston’s high society went. “I thought it was a ‘five-star’ restaurant,” she remembered. “Everyone was eating filet mignon and lobster. All the women wore sequined gowns.”

  Dana was eating her meal when she had a shocking revelation. Suddenly, beautiful young women, scantily clad, emerged from behind curtains and strutted down a stage in the center of the room. The Men’s Club was not an exclusive restaurant at all; Brad had finally succeeded in getting her into a topless dancing club. It was much nicer than any of the Seattle area clubs, but Dana saw well-dressed men slipping bills into the garter belts and G-strings the girls wore. She turned and looked at Brad accusingly.

  He gave her a big smile. “You’re more beautiful than any of those girls up there,” he said.

  It took a while before Dana realized that Brad must be working on another of his plans. He bought her sequined G-strings and spike heels and filmy little costumes. He had always liked to see her dressed that way. Now he suggested that she could be a star at the Men’s Club. All she had to do was wear the things he bought her to wear in the privacy of their bedroom.

  Dana was shocked. If Brad loved her so much, how could he ask her to get up on stage and dance for other men?

  “You’re a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year girl, angel,” he murmured. “You make everyone else look plain. You could do it, baby.”

  “But, Brad—” she protested.

  “You know what your problem is, angel? You’re suffering from ‘Malloyism.’ Your parents raised you up in a repressed, small-town way. They have little, closed-down minds, they do everything the same way their parents and their grandparents did. They never opened up their eyes to possibilities. And you’re just like them. You’re not living in reality, angel.”

  Besides, Brad patiently explained, he needed her to work, to take a job that would help them get by until his lawsuit was settled.

  “But you always said you didn’t want me to work,” she argued.

  “Not just any job,” he said. “You have it all, Dana. You have class. Your body is your fortune.”

  She couldn’t do what he asked—not at first. Although she admired the statuesque beauties who danced at Houston’s most popular club for males, Dana couldn’t picture herself out there wearing only a G-string. Parading in front of strangers nearly nude was not the way she had been raised. She knew Brad would scoff at her for her “Malloyism” mentality, but she couldn’t do what he wanted. “If we need the money that bad, Brad,” she finally said, “I’ll be a cocktail waitress. Those girls get really good tips too.”

  Brad grinned. “Get dressed, angel. We’re going out.”

  Dana began as a cocktail waitress at the Men’s Club, but it wasn’t long before Brad convinced her she was wasting her most valuable assets. When he opened the packages he brought home and produced beautiful—if tiny—costumes, when he told her that the Men’s Club wasn’t some sleazy honky-tonk place but rather a showcase for the greatest beauties in Houston, Dana began to believe him. Finally she agreed to dance, and just as he predicted, she was a real moneymaker. “It was different in Houston,” Dana would remember. “When you were one of the popular dancers at the club, you were almost a celebrity. People would come up to me in the mall and ask for my autograph. It didn’t seem cheap.”

  Dana was “Angel” now—and she was much in demand. With her natural beauty, her professional knowledge as a makeup expert, and her exquisite long-legged, full-breasted figure, she was as lovely as any movie star and more graceful. All of her years of tap, ballet, and beauty pageants made her a natural on the polished stage of the Men’s Club.

  Brad had promised his “Angel” she would have his full support, his protection. And every night, after the boys were tucked in, they went to the Men’s Club. Dana didn’t like leaving the boys alone, but Jess was ten and extremely capable, and Brad assured her he could handle any emergency that might come up. He had the number of the club and Brad’s beeper number. But it was ironic, Dana thought. She had been hired as a nanny—someone to look after Jess, Michael, and Phillip. Now they were home alone almost all night while she danced at the Men’s Club and Brad watched, gloating that the woman up there desired by every man in the room was his woman.

  “Each private dance was for four minutes, and we got twenty dollars for that,” Dana said. “If a man wanted you to come to his table, he would slip a five-dollar bill into your G-string . . .” She usually danced for eight hours every night and was making three hundred dollars an hour or more, but Brad didn’t allow her to keep any of the money for herself. “He was waiting to take my money right after work. He told me I was selfish when I wanted to keep some.” She never had time to count the money she made dancing for rich men. She might have been surprised if she had. She wasn’t a lawyer like Cheryl or a doctor like Sara, but Dana was bringing in almost twenty-five thousand dollars a month.

  And as the dawn turned rosy over Houston, Brad and Dana drove home to one or another of the fine homes he had rented for them and his sons.

  Brad told Dana very little about the civil suit against him in Portland, nothing more than that the charges were trumped up, and that he was the fall guy because no one really knew who had murdered Cheryl. According to what he said about Cheryl’s promiscuity, it sounded as if anyone could have killed her. He warned Dana not to give out information about him to anyone. If he was on one of his trips, she wasn’t to tell where he was. If he was in Houston, that went double.

  46

  With the the civil trial set to begin in the first week of May 1991, and no indication at all from Brad Cunningham that he would be present for that trial, Mike Shinn tried every channel possible to notify him. The last thing Shinn wanted was for Cunningham to be able to say he had not even known there was a trial.

  First of all, Shinn sent subpoenas to every attorney that Brad had ever employed—at least those Shinn knew about—and that list alone was formidable. “I must have contacted more than a dozen of Brad’s former attorneys,” he said. It appeared that he had spent most of his adult life involved in litigation. “They all said they were no longer in touch with him, they had no idea where he was, and they had no way of contacting him.” Or if they did, they weren’t saying.

  Since Shinn knew that Brad spent a great deal of his time in Houston, he decided to look there. In early April he hired a private investigator in the Houston area, Charles Pollard of Greenwood, Texas. Shinn gave Pollard Brad’s date of birth (October 14, 1948) and his Social Security number (537-48-7732) and told him that Brad supposedly was living with his three small boys who were attending St. Ann’s Catholic School in Houston. He should have been fairly easy to find. But Brad had become a master at hiding in plain sight.

  Pollard first tried the usual routes to trace an individual. He did computer checks of voter registration, assumed names, marriage license records, criminal records, and deed records in Harris County. He came up with a driver’s license for Bradly Morris Cunningham, but Brad had moved from the address listed. Pollard searched through all Texas vehicle registrations and found nothing. He finally got a hit. Houston Lighting and Power had Bradly Cunningham in their records as a customer at 4824 Bel Air Boulevard. And Pollard discovered why Brad was so hard to trace. He had routinely changed one digit in his Social Security or driver’s license numbers, a subtle adjustment in the age of computers that was enough to prevent someone from being found.

  On April 18 Pollard went to the Bel Air Boulevard address. The neighborhood was definitely upscale, and the home where Cunningham was supposed to be living was opulent. Pollard spoke with
the woman who lived next door and she said that a dark-haired man was living there with three boys.

  Pollard reported this to Shinn, who sent him documents to be served on Brad about the upcoming civil trial. On April 24 Pollard returned to the Bel Air Boulevard house at 4:30 in the afternoon. He noted a blue Volkswagen van parked in the garage with the Washington license plate 567-CZD. It was the vehicle that Sara learned Brad had bought in Washington after he dumped the pickup truck with the BBIIGG license.

  Pollard assumed that he would find his quarry inside the house. But it wasn’t going to be as easy as it seemed at first. He rang the bell and after a time the door was answered by a dark-haired boy with freckles who looked to be about eight or nine.

  “Is this where Bradly Cunningham lives?” Pollard asked.

  The dark-haired boy nodded. “But he’s asleep.”

  Before Pollard could say anything, the boy disappeared and an extremely pretty young woman with long blond hair came to the door. When he asked her name, she shook her head, refusing to identify herself. Pollard wondered if she might be Dana Malloy, the woman Shinn believed to be living with Brad. But he wasn’t going to find out from her. She seemed nervous.

  “I’m the baby-sitter,” she told him with little inflection in her voice. She said Mr. Cunningham was in Portland, Oregon. “The only way I have to reach him is through some relatives of his. A Dr. Dreesen and his wife in Lynnwood.”

  Grudgingly, the “baby-sitter” gave Pollard a telephone number to the Dreesen home.

  Pollard doubted that Cunningham really was in Portland; he suspected he was hiding in one of the bedrooms of the huge house. It was obvious that Cunningham didn’t want to talk to him or to accept any papers from a lawyer in Oregon.

  Pollard was stubborn, however. He figured the next best place to confront Cunningham was at St. Ann’s School. He arrived there the next morning at 7:30 and parked where he could watch parents dropping children off. The blue Volkswagen van didn’t appear, nor did the Cunningham children. Pollard then returned to the Bel Air address. This time he saw a white Chevrolet Beretta parked in the driveway. It bore Texas plates that identified it as a rental car. He knocked on the door again, and again the same young boy answered. “My father’s out of town,” he said immediately.

  “Where’s Dana?”

  “She’s asleep. She worked late last night.”

  Pollard asked the boy to waken Dana, and when she came to the door, he handed her the summons informing Bradly Cunningham of his impending trial. There was also a letter from Judge Ancer Haggerty, dated in February, advising the defendant of his May 6 trial date and requesting that he appear to give his deposition on May 4.

  Later that day Pollard searched deed records for the legal owners of the house on Bel Air Boulevard. As he suspected, Cunningham was renting it. The couple who owned the house said that it was indeed rented by a man named Bradly Cunningham, although it was also currently for sale. With no job and no money, and even in hiding, Brad was living well. The landlords said he was paying rent of $1,900 a month and was prompt with his payments, but they understood he was moving soon to somewhere in the Northwest—either Washington or Oregon, or perhaps even Alaska.

  On May 1, 1991, Pollard delivered copies of the legal documents to the secretary at St. Ann’s School. “I probably won’t see Mr. Cunningham,” she said. “He took his children out of school about a month ago. Someone in their family is very ill, and he said he was taking the boys to Portland, Oregon.” Pollard didn’t tell her that the Cunningham boys weren’t in Portland at all—that they were spending their days behind the closed drapes of the house on Bel Air Boulevard, only blocks from the school.

  There was little question in Mike Shinn’s mind that Brad knew about the May 6 trial date. Beyond all Shinn’s notifications, he had proof from Brad himself that he knew about the civil trial. Brad had written a letter to the editor of the Oregonian complaining of the odious plot against him. And in that letter, he referred to the upcoming trial.

  He knew. In the end, however, Brad could not be bothered with such a penny-ante legal event as this civil trial. But it would proceed even if the defendant’s chair was empty. Defendants in a legal action have the right to face their accusers and to defend themselves in a court of law; it is not illegal for civil defendants to absent themselves from their own trials. It is, however, highly unusual.

  Mike Shinn had gathered scores of witnesses for the trial to be held in Judge Ancer Haggerty’s courtroom. Many of them had new information—or information that they had been hesitant to reveal before. Many of them were very frightened. Sharon McCulloch, who had been Jess Cunningham’s first caregiver and who had become Cheryl’s close friend, wanted to testify but vacillated. “I was afraid to testify in the civil trial,” she remembered. “I knew Brad. I knew the things he could do and how he just broke a strong woman like Cheryl. One day I would decide I would do it—and the next day, I’d lose my nerve.”

  Chick Preston had come on board to work the Cunningham case with Shinn after Connie Capato’s death. He was a remarkably good private investigator, and just before the May trial he went to Shinn bearing good news. “Doc Turco always told me to ‘follow Brad’s women,’ and Chick had talked to yet another one,” Shinn said. “I remember Chick telling me a week before the trial, ‘I’ve found somebody! I have found you a dynamite witness! Wait until you hear what she has to say.’”

  Preston had talked to Karen Aaborg and asked her if she would come in to see Mike Shinn. She had had a brief affair with Brad in the months before Cheryl’s murder and had seen him again in the days that followed. “Karen came in with her fiancée,” Shinn said, “and she told me, ‘I’m not sure why I’m here. I have nothing that will help you.’ And I just said, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ She actually didn’t know how much she knew. I knew that Karen Aaborg was going to prove to be one of the missing links we’d been searching for so long.”

  Given Brad’s history of violence and intimidation, Dr. Ron Turco had warned Shinn to cover his back. He wasn’t just imagining things; there was every chance that Shinn was in danger. Nobody knew for sure where Brad was. Dana had said he was in Portland and perhaps he was. And he might be quietly watching Shinn, waiting for a chance to take on the attorney who was causing such trouble in his life.

  Shinn decided to listen to the advice of the experts in psychopathology he had consulted, Ron Turco among them. They suggested this was no time to be a sitting duck—or, in his case, a floating duck in his houseboat on the Multnomah Channel. He abandoned the houseboat and at least became a moving target. “I ended up living in hotels for that entire trial,” Shinn recalled. “I’d stay in one for a while and then move on. I didn’t want Cunningham to ever get a fix on where I was.”

  Brad might not be planning to go to his own trial, but he had been seen in Portland recently and nobody knew exactly why.

  PART 6

  A Civil Matter

  47

  Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Ancer Haggerty was something of a legend. Like almost every other male connected to the Cunningham case, Haggerty was an athlete. He had grown up in North Portland and played guard for the University of Oregon, where he had been All Pac-10. He had served as a Marine captain in Vietnam. In fact, Haggerty and Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Shrunk had gone through officers’ training together. Haggerty, wounded in battle, was highly decorated for valor.

  Haggerty was a massive presence in a courtroom, standing over six feet two inches tall, weighing in somewhere around 260. He had a wry sense of humor and a quick wit, but he had never looked favorably on defendants who simply ignored the justice system—as Brad Cunningham apparently intended to do. The trial was going ahead whether he was present at the defense table or not.

  By May 6, 1991, a jury had been selected. Charlene Fort, a science teacher, was elected foreman of the twelve-member panel, which was equally divided between males and females. Before testimony began, the jurors were taken for a “j
ury view” of the intersection of 79th and the Sunset Highway so they could visualize the physical dimensions of all they would hear in the weeks ahead. They knew, of course, that something of great importance to this case had happened there. They did not yet know what.

  Mike Shinn did, and he had a prickly feeling at the back of his neck and along his spine as he stood looking at the spot where Cheryl’s body had been discovered. “I hate to admit it,” he said, “but I couldn’t help but wonder if someone was back in those trees taking a bead on me. . . .”

  The trial began the next day. Judge Haggerty’s courtroom looked like all courtrooms. He sat behind the bench in black robes beneath the state seal of Oregon, the American flag on his right, the flag of Oregon on his left. Shinn was at the table of the complaining party—John Burke, representing the estate of Cheryl Keeton—who was not present. Diane Bakker sat beside Shinn, her long blond hair caught back and falling to her waist.

  Cheryl’s relatives and friends sat in the back of the courtroom. But somehow the usual air of excitement was missing. There was no one at the defense table. No defendant. No defense attorneys. As Shinn would comment later, “It was like playing tennis by yourself; there was no one to return my serves.”

  Before the jury filed in to hear testimony, Shinn detailed for Judge Haggerty the arduous steps he had taken to locate Bradly Cunningham, listing the names of all Brad’s previous attorneys whom he had notified of the trial date. He also said he had taken a deposition from Trudy Dreesen, Brad’s aunt in Lynnwood, Washington. Mrs. Dreesen acknowledged to Shinn that she talked to Brad at least once a week. “She begged me not to depose her,” Shinn told the judge, “but I had to.” Trudy Dreesen, who was now terribly ill, admitted that she had talked to Brad the morning of her deposition and informed him that his trial was due to start in Portland within two weeks.