Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?
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“My strong suspicion,” Ayers said, “and greatest fear, was that all or at least one of those children were with Brad Cunningham—”
Suddenly, Ayers’ voice faltered and he closed his eyes against tears, swallowing hard. He could not speak. Judge Haggerty realized that, for the moment, Ayers could not go on. He called for a noon recess. And when court reconvened that afternoon, the jury listened to other witnesses before Ayers returned to the stand. He had regained his composure and was able to continue his testimony in his usual professional voice. “I had substantial concern—that was shared by all the investigators in this case—that Brad had taken at least one or all the boys with him. That one or more of those boys might have been a witness to their mother’s death.”
“He never let you talk to those boys?” Shinn asked.
“No, not willingly.”
“Eventually, you had to subpoena them,” Shinn said, “and they had a lawyer by then. . . . Is it common for little children to have a lawyer when their father is a murder suspect?”
“I’ve never encountered it.”
In fact, six-year-old Jess had offered testimony to a grand jury that implied his father had been absent from the Madison Tower apartment at the time of his mother’s murder. But that had not been enough to indict Brad for the crime. And no one investigating the case had been able to speak to the boys again.
When Jim Ayers stepped down from the witness chair, he hoped his testimony would help to nail Brad Cunningham. For years, he had wanted to face Cunningham in a court of law. Brad was not there now. But it didn’t matter; the jury could still render its verdict. If it ruled against him, Cunningham could eventually face a criminal trial, and Ayers would willingly take the witness stand again.
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Ordinarily, the family of the defendant testifies for the defense. In this trial, there was no defense—only an empty table. But had there been a defense, the female relatives from Brad’s past would not have testified for him. They came to Judge Haggerty’s courtroom to testify for Cheryl’s estate.
Ethel Cunningham Bakke, Brad’s elder sister, wore a white pantsuit and a dark aqua blouse. She was blond with dark brown eyes and bore a resemblance to her brother. “Brad was so suave and so sweet-talking with the girls,” she testified. “He made money. He knew how to turn a dollar—”
“Did you know his wives?” Shinn asked.
“Yes, I met Loni Ann because she was my baby-sitter when he was in high school. I met Cynthia because I went to court to help Loni Ann keep her children. . . . I ran into my brother in a restaurant and I met Lauren, who was about to have her baby. . . . They separated within a month after that, and Cheryl came into his life. . . . My daughter got married on June twenty-eighth, 1986, and my father said, ‘Have you called Cheryl?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know Brad’s address or phone number.’”
Sanford Cunningham had told Ethel that Cheryl and Brad were having problems and that she could “be nice and invite Cheryl to the wedding.”
“Did you call Cheryl?” Shinn asked.
“I did. . . . This was in April. . . . I invited her to the wedding . . . and she said, ‘I would like to know more about you and your mother—’ I said, ‘My mom’s alive,’ and she said, ‘You’re kidding!’ and I said she would be at the wedding.”
Cheryl told Ethel that she was very afraid of Brad and that he had threatened her. “You’re not the first,” Ethel answered. And so a friendship had developed, and Cheryl, her brother, and her three boys all came to Ethel’s daughter’s wedding. Sanford, who had less than a month to live, came to the wedding too. “That was the first time I had seen my dad in all this time,” Ethel said. “My dad then died on July twenty-sixth. . . . Cheryl called me after the funeral and told me she felt partly responsible for my dad’s heart attack . . . and that Brad had told her not to come to the funeral. . . . I told her Brad had shown up with Sara and tried to pass her off as Cheryl . . . I nipped that in the bud.”
Shinn asked Ethel about her relationship with Cheryl later that summer. “Did she talk with you about ‘witnesses’?”
“Yes.”
“Did she talk to you about who they were?”
“Yes.”
“In the conversation Cheryl had with you about taxes and bankruptcy—what did she tell you in connection with the evidence she intended to present in the divorce and custody proceedings?”
“She was going to break Brad. Break the bankruptcy statements. She was going to prove that he was getting money . . . he was avoiding taxes with the IRS. . . . I gave her any information she needed. . . . She told me she had prepared a list; she was keeping it secret—”
“Did you have conversations with her,” Shinn asked, “where she was afraid of the consequences?”
“Not only was she afraid of the consequences to her but to those of us who were going to testify. . . . She made a list but it was a ‘protective’ kind of list. She told me that on the Friday before her death.” It was clear from Ethel’s testimony that she believed her brother was capable of violence, of revenge, of murder. She said he had beaten her too.
Shinn elicited testimony from Ethel about her final conversation with Cheryl. It had been on Friday, September 19, 1986, after Brad picked up the children. Cheryl said they had argued as usual, and she had insisted he have the boys home on time on Sunday because they had school the next morning. “They’d started to argue and fight,” Ethel said, “and he was raising his arms and everything, and all of a sudden he stopped and said, ‘What’s the matter with me? Sunday! You’re not going to be here after Sunday. I don’t have to worry about you.’ I sat right up and said, ‘Cheryl, Cheryl. He’s not just making threats anymore. He means to do it this weekend. He’s got a plan. I know Bradly . . . He doesn’t have to argue with you because it’s settled in his mind. . . . He’s going to do it.’ I even tried to warn her. I said, ‘Cheryl, listen to me. . . . He’s not going to attack you in your house. Has he ever threatened you with the children being harmed if you don’t do what he tells you to?’ and she said, ‘Yes, I’d lay down my life for my kids, you know that.’”
Sobbing on the stand, Ethel recalled that she had warned Cheryl that Brad was going to do something to call her out of her home, alone, tell her that something was wrong so she would have to go out to get the kids, that he would draw her away from security.
“How did you know this?” Shinn asked.
“He plans and he creates and he figures out how he’s going to go after somebody,” Ethel said. “He was this way in junior high.”
Rosemary Kinney, Brad’s mother, took the stand next. She looked nothing like snapshots of the lovely young girl Sanford had married, or the attractive middle-aged woman standing next to him on a camping trip. The years had been unkind to her. Her hair was still raven black, but it was pulled into a knot on top of her head, and her face was deeply lined, her eyes almost hidden by pouches of flesh. Shinn asked her what the nature of her relationship with Brad had been over the previous decade.
“I haven’t seen my son,” Rosemary said, the pain of many losses bringing tears to her eyes. “I saw him at his father’s funeral in July. [Before that] it had to be at Loni Ann’s [custody] hearing.”
“You testified against your son?”
“Yes, I did—of his treatment of the children. He came to the cabin with the children and I had fixed dinner. He dished their plates up—they were small—and he walked into the kitchen and said, ‘Eat that food!’ Kait said she couldn’t eat any more. He started force-feeding them. Kait finally vomited her food into her plate. . . .”
“Did you know Mr. Cunningham’s second wife?”
“Only time I seen her was in court. She was quite a bit older than Brad.”
“. . . his third wife, Lauren Swanson?”
“No, I didn’t know her. I got a glimpse of her one time. Loni Ann was going to let me have the children one weekend, because Brad would never let me see them. I went to Loni Ann’s mother’s house, and I p
ut my car behind the house so Brad wouldn’t see it. They drove up, and I got a glimpse.”
“Were you invited to their wedding?”
Rosemary looked astonished. “To Brad’s wedding? No.”
Rosemary told of the first time she ever met Cheryl Keeton. Kait had given her Cheryl’s address, and she wrote a letter to “explain who I was, and my nationality—I’m a registered member of the Colville Confederated Tribe, and I’m French, Indian, English, Hawaiian. I knew Cheryl probably didn’t know anything about me, and I wanted her to realize that Brad did have a mother, and I did care about the children. When she got my letter, she called me. It was really wonderful to get to talk to her.”
Rosemary had finally met Cheryl at Ethel’s daughter’s wedding in June 1986. “I was standing in the church, and this pretty lady came up in front of me with these three beautiful boys, and she said, ‘This is your grandmother,’ and these little boys gave me a hug—”
Rosemary put her head in her hand and sobbed. She had never even hoped that she would meet Cheryl or her youngest grandsons. She got a chance to visit with Cheryl at the reception and to have her picture taken with her and the boys. “I told Cheryl, ‘I’ll tell you one thing—don’t ever trust Brad—’”
“Why do you say that?” Shinn asked.
“Well, after my first husband left me, I got a job as a teacher’s aide in eastern Washington, and it was a break from school and I came home because I still had the house. I’d changed the locks so no one could get in. I drove up and there was lights on and I went in and my son was there. There was this woman—Brad’s second wife. He said he was there to get his things. We had words. He hit me and knocked me on the floor. I tried to get up, and every time I tried, he hit me again. . . .
“Finally, he went out the door, and every time I tried to go out, he hit me with the screen door. He finally hit me so hard in the chest with his arm and fist, I landed out in front of the house on my neck and shoulders. I went to the neighbors and called the sheriff.”
When the deputy arrived, Rosemary said, Brad came charging in and said, “I’m the one that called you.” But the deputy didn’t believe him. He waited until Brad had removed some things he had in his mother’s garage and left the house.
“The following Monday, I went to Roxbury Court and filed charges against my son,” Rosemary said, beginning to cry again. “I figured that if I filed charges against him, he would never do anything like this to anybody else. I knew he had been cruel with Loni Ann—so I filed the charges. The day he was supposed to go to court, I was there—but Brad had an attorney. The judge said Brad wouldn’t be there. I had to leave to go back to work. Nothing ever happened about that.” Rosemary went on to tell the jury that she had been afraid of Brad, her own son, ever since he was in high school.
Shinn handed her a letter that Brad had once sent to her. It was remarkably similar to the letter he would send to Sara, and to any number of women who had angered him. He warned her that, if she didn’t change her ways, she might end up killing someone.
Like her daughter Ethel, Rosemary testified that she would have done “anything in the world” to help Cheryl keep her children. In the end, of course, there was nothing they could do. The “protective witness list” that Cheryl had drawn up, the battle plan that she believed would bring Brad down and protect her little boys, had been as fragile as a cobweb held up against a bazooka.
Loni Ann Cunningham testified through her videotaped deposition. Her taut, pale little face filled the screen and the jurors listened as she recalled the horrors of her marriage to Brad. Kait Cunningham testified by phone. In a flat voice, she told about the spring she had spent in Houston when she was twelve or thirteen and had been humiliated and held captive by her father. One overwhelming fact was becoming obvious. The women in Brad Cunningham’s life had been disposable, dispensable, the objects of derision and hatred—and ultimately expendable.
Even his wives.
Even his daughter.
Even his sisters.
Even his mother.
The civil trial went on. There were no objections; there was no one there to object. A long line of Cheryl’s friends and former law partners walked to the witness stand and spoke briefly of their memories of her. In that courtroom Cheryl came to life, and the jurors began to sense the enormity of her loss.
Stu Hennessey, Cheryl’s friend from her early days at Garvey, Schubert and Barer, attempted to sum up what a superb lawyer she had been. “Cheryl was clearly the best. As the pressure grew, she just got better and better.”
He also recalled Brad’s possessions. “Brad really liked Mercedes-Benzes,” he said. “He almost always had two or three at a time.” Hennessey described the Unimag as a “huge moon buggy” with tires six to seven feet high, a vehicle used by the Israeli Army to move troops. “Brad told me he had the only Unimag in the United States . . . it had absolutely no purpose as a car.”
“What about a yacht?” Shinn asked.
Hennessey remembered that Brad had acquired a yacht early in his marriage to Cheryl in trade for some project. As he recalled, Brad was renting it out for charters.
“Did he have a police car?” Shinn asked.
“Yes,” Hennessey said. “That was a source of great frustration to Cheryl. Brad got in his mind that he wanted a police car—like the State Patrol’s in Washington—the big white highway cruisers? They don’t sell those to regular people, but Brad wanted one. He bugged some dealer until finally—it took months—they ordered him one. Poor Cheryl would have to drive this thing . . . it’s like you don’t have any springs . . . it’s really a horrible car—there’s nothing inside it. You know, it was kind of scary. It was white. Except that it didn’t have a light on the top, it was just like a police car.”
“You know what he used it for?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“How would you describe Mr. Cunningham physically?”
“He wasn’t a huge guy but he was powerfully built,” Hennessey said. “He told me he had to have all his shirts custom made because his neck was so big.”
Cheryl’s family—Betty and Marv Troseth, Susan Keegan, and Bob McNannay—had told their last memories of Cheryl to the initial investigators. They testified now in the civil trial, old griefs coming back sharply. And they were prepared to testify again and again and again, if need be. There were no surprises in their testimony, nothing the Oregon State Police detectives and the Washington County D.A.’s office hadn’t heard back in 1986.
Jim Karr, Cheryl’s half brother, identified Exhibit 6—the “protective witness list” that Cheryl had prepared, the list meant to fight Brad but which had probably been Cheryl’s death warrant. Mike Shinn read it aloud while Karr nodded. It included Brad’s mother and elder sister, two of his former wives, baby-sitters, and Cheryl’s family, friends, and colleagues—all people who would have been able to demonstrate Brad’s pattern of abusive behavior.
Sara Gordon’s sister Margie Johnson was the “Megabucks” spokesperson for the Oregon Lottery and her face was well known to Oregon television viewers. She was as vivacious on the witness stand as she was on the small screen, a pretty, bubbly woman. She said that when U.S. Bank bought out Brad’s contract shortly after Cheryl’s murder, they asked for the return of all the pool cars he had borrowed. One was in Seattle, and she said that she had driven Brad to Sea-Tac Airport so he could drive it back. She had found Brad a nice person, but she barely knew him. Her sister Sara had only been dating him for a few months. “He was very upset,” she testified. “Even though he hadn’t done it, [the murder] would put a cloud over the bank.”
Margie had also heard yet another version of Brad’s movements on September 21, 1986. “He said that they waited in the lobby. . . . I was under the assumption that Cheryl was supposed to pick up the kids about seven o’clock and he had the kids in the lobby—”
“Did you know she had been unwilling for months to come there to pick up those kids?” Shinn cut in.
According to the testimony of various witnesses, Brad had given many different versions of what he had done between 7:30 and 8:50 on the night Cheryl was murdered. He told Jim Ayers he had left his apartment just once—to put shoes and work clothes in Sara’s Cressida. He first told Sara that he and the boys had been in the lobby waiting for Cheryl to come for them. A day after the murder, he told her he had been doing errands—picking up mail, leaving his boots in her car. Brad told Karen Aaborg that he had refused to let Cheryl have the boys at all that night because she was drunk and with a man, and that he had gone to the car with Phillip to get the boys’ blankets and backpacks. Lilya Saarnen saw Brad and Michael at 7:30, but Brad called her the next morning and tried to get her to say she had seen him at 8:00. Margie Johnson, Sara’s sister, had heard the “waiting in the lobby” story and that Brad and Michael were doing errands around the Madison Tower. Jess Cunningham remembered that his father said he had been “jogging” around Sara’s hospital, and that he had been gone for a long time. Rachel Houghton saw Brad and a little boy in the garage around nine, and Brad had been wearing shorts and his hair was wet.
Where was Brad during that hour and twenty minutes? Was he in his apartment, waiting in the lobby, watching for Cheryl from the rail around the walkway, doing errands all around the building, jogging, settling the boys down for the night? Or was he following a carefully thought-out plan to lure Cheryl to the deserted Mobil station and her brutal death? Were his car problems a pretense? Had he selected the weapon he would use? Had he provided himself with a change of clothing? If this was a crime of “revenge,” as Lieutenant Englert had testified, was it also a crime of deliberate premeditation? It was certainly beginning to look that way.
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