Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

by Ann Rule

  Dana met a very handsome, very nice, young professional man who, ironically, had close connections with the judicial system. They dated, and Dana kept her agreement with Brad; she always came home to sleep. But one night, she didn’t come home. It was almost two in the afternoon of the next day when she returned to the huge house in Mill Creek.

  Brad met her with an accusation. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” he shouted.

  “No, I’m not,” Dana said truthfully. She had come to enjoy spending time with the young man who treated her like a lady with half a brain in her head. She didn’t love him yet, but she loved being with him.

  Suddenly, Dana witnessed a terrifying transformation. Brad slipped into the blackest rage she had ever seen. “He started breaking glass and breaking furniture—” As Dana cringed, horrified, he became almost animal-like, crouching and growling. “I guess maybe when he played football,” she said later, “they acted like that. He was making terrible grunting, growling noises, and I ran away from him. He came after me until I was trapped, crouched in the bathtub with my back against the wall.”

  Dana thought she was going to die. Brad was so infuriated because she had disobeyed him that he was going to come into the tub and kill her. Her thoughts skittered frantically; what could she say to calm him down? “I told him I loved him. I kept saying I loved him. He left for a few minutes, and then he walked back in and, oh God, he was carrying a loaded .38 in his right hand. But he had both hands closed around the gun and he was pointing it up at the ceiling. Then he said, ‘You’re gonna hurt me, aren’t you? You’re gonna hurt me like everyone else.’”

  As far as Dana knew, Brad had done most of the hurting in his relationships with the women who came before her, but she wasn’t about to argue that point with him. “No!” she cried. “No, Brad. I’m not going to hurt you. I love you!”

  “No! You’re going to hurt me.”

  To Dana it seemed that awful scene took hours and hours, but she knew it probably lasted only fifteen minutes from the time Brad erupted into his animalistic rage until it was over. She was trapped in the tub, screaming out that she loved him and wasn’t going to leave him. He was aiming the gun alternately at her and at the ceiling. “And then suddenly Brad just slid down the wall,” Dana said, “as if his legs were collapsing under him. I went to him, and he took the gun and put it to his head. He was completely relaxed then, with the gun pointed at his own head. I don’t know what he did next. I ran. I took the stairs in two leaps and ran to the neighbors.”

  She called the police from the neighbors’ house. And the local authorities soon discovered that Washington County, Oregon, investigators were very interested in the whereabouts of one Bradly Morris Cunningham. Oregon detectives came north and took Dana back with them to Portland. She was scared enough, and fed up enough, to want to tell them what she knew about Brad. The problem was, she didn’t know that much—although she gave her permission for them to go into the Mill Creek house to remove guns and other paraphernalia there.

  “I stayed in a hotel in Seattle the first night, and I didn’t sleep,” Dana remembered. “I didn’t sleep in Portland either. I finally went back to Seattle because I was tired. Brad found me. He started with the same thing, ‘You’re my wife’—but I wasn’t his wife—and ‘I can’t live without you.’ He made promises. Promises, promises.”

  Dana went back to live with Brad. She missed the little boys, and she wanted to believe his promises. It didn’t last and she knew that if she ran again, she would have to run farther. Her youngest brother, Barney,* who was only twenty, went up to Seattle to help her get away. “Barney took me to my sister’s house in Florida, and I thought I was safe.”

  She wasn’t. Frustrated, Brad was a force to be reckoned with. He reverted to type. He gathered together all the pictures he had of Dana in lingerie or revealing costumes and had dozens of prints made. He wrote a devastating letter detailing every small slip from grace that she might ever have made. And then he started faxing. “Brad faxed letters and photos to my parents, the bank in my little hometown, our church, my parents’ friends and customers, all my friends. He told everyone that I was a stripper. He told my parents if they didn’t tell him where I was, it would get worse.”

  It did. Brad put all of his business schemes on hold and drove to the little town in southern Oregon where Dana had grown up. “He actually stalked my father around town, trying to see if he would lead him to me. He contacted my high-school friends and told them lies.”

  Dana shuddered, remembering. “My mother was so horrified by all the letters and pictures and the things Brad was telling people. I told her, ‘That’s not true, Mom!’ Sometimes I blamed my parents for even believing the things he was telling them about me. Brad was clever. He knew how to divide a family, and gradually he was tearing our family apart. He thought I was in Oregon, but I wasn’t; I was in Florida. It was my family that he was putting through hell.”

  Eventually Brad wore Dana down. She couldn’t let him destroy everything her parents had worked for, their position in the town that had been their home for decades. He sent her messages through her family and friends, and the message was always the same: “For every day you stay away, it’s going to be that much worse.” It was too much for Dana. Stronger women than she had been broken by Brad’s relentless campaigns. He never quit. He never let up. In time, she knew, he would find her, and in the process her family would be destroyed. She remembered the words he had said to her so often: “I can wait three years if I have to, to get back at the people who have screwed up my life—because I have patience. I can outwait anyone. . . .”

  Dana knew that Brad had a long list of people he blamed for “screwing up his life.” Mike Shinn was on it. John Burke was on it. Just as Brad insisted her own family was infected with “Malloyism,” he had invented a disease he now called “Burkeism,” whose symptoms included everything Burke had done to prevent him from dipping into the assets Cheryl had specifically earmarked for her sons.

  Brad had bragged about “stalking” Burke one day as he left the offices of Garvey, Schubert in Seattle, following him down Madison Street and waiting while Burke, unaware, browsed in a bookstore. Later he found out where Burke lived, and Dana had ridden along when Brad located his house on one of the San Juan Islands. He had brazenly driven up Burke’s road and taken his time observing his enemy’s house.

  Dana knew all too well that when Brad wanted to find someone, he would do it. And in early 1992 he wanted to find her. “I went back to him,” she later said ruefully. “I’d had it. But this time, I had a plan. If I could convince Brad that he had completely alienated me from my parents, then I figured he would stop sending letters and faxes down there. I told him that I blamed my parents—not him. And he believed me. He left them alone. I had no family any longer, but at least they were safe from him.”

  53

  Brad never stayed long in one place. He moved from state to state, from town to town, even from house to house in the same town. One day in the summer of 1992 he told Dana that they were going to Canada. So once again they packed up. It wasn’t a long trip. Brad had selected White Rock, British Columbia, which is a few miles north of the Canadian border beyond Blaine, Washington, and only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Lynnwood, where the Dreesens lived.

  Their White Rock rental was just across the railroad tracks from the beach and the endless stretches of the Straits of Georgia leading to the Pacific Ocean. It was a lovely spot, but Dana could see that Brad was becoming increasingly weird. It was difficult for her even to visualize the handsome young executive who had driven a Mercedes and lived in the Dunthorpe mansion. Brad still spent money, all right, but she had no idea where it came from. She assumed it was some kind of advance on a settlement in the Texas lawsuit. He wasn’t working, although he bragged about some projects he and his uncle Herm were discussing.

  On July 24, 1992, Brad and Dana had gone down to visit the Dreesens. They were in a grocery store, and Bra
d suddenly started shoplifting small items. He was laughing; it seemed to be a game. The things he was taking weren’t worth very much, but he was stealing them. The store’s security guard followed Brad into the parking lot and they struggled.

  “Brad maced the security guard,” Dana remembered. He was carrying Cap-STUN, a powerful pepper spray police use to stop assailants in their tracks, and he used it on the store guard. He was detained and arrested but refused to give his name. Booked into the Everett, Washington, jail as “John Doe,” he was eventually identified and bailed out, and disappeared. A felony warrant was issued for his arrest on assault and theft charges.

  Back in Canada, things were tense that summer. Brad talked a lot about the “apocalypse” that was coming. He seemed obsessed with natural disasters and what would happen to them if one occurred. Dana didn’t know what the apocalypse was, but it made her nervous hearing Brad talk about it all the time.

  Sara tried, in vain, to see the boys the summer they were in White Rock. Brad always waited until the last minute to notify her that she had to be in Vancouver or Victoria within twenty-four hours if she wanted to see Jess, Michael, and Phillip. Dana knew he was making it impossible for Sara to get there in time from Portland.

  Brad had always been a stern disciplinarian with his sons, but there was one incident that summer that unnerved Dana. He had a puzzle ring, silver links that could be entwined so they looked all of a piece. One day one of the boys was playing with it and lost it. Brad was enraged. “He asked Jess, Michael, and Phillip which one of them had done it,” Dana recalled. “And none of them would admit to losing his ring. He got the car and we all went for a drive, and all the while he was trying to get the guilty kid to confess. They were scared, but they wouldn’t tell.”

  When they came to a lonely place, far from town, Brad opened the car door and ordered the boys out. “You’ll stay here until you decide to tell me the truth,” he growled, and then drove off as Dana watched the three little boys’ images grow smaller in the sideview mirror. She pleaded with Brad to go back for them, but he wouldn’t. Jess was not yet twelve, Michael was nine, and Phillip was seven. It would be dark soon. What if the boys tried to find their way back and got on the railroad tracks? What if some pervert found them out there alone?

  After a long, long time, Brad turned the car around and drove back to where he had left his sons. They were waiting there, huddled together, and Jess quickly confessed to losing the puzzle ring. “But I don’t think he did it. He just confessed to save the others,” Dana said. “Brad did that often, dumping the kids way out in the rules someplace. I think he always went back because he needed them. He used to tell me, ‘These children are my assets.’”

  The strange summer of 1992 passed. They were living in a picturesque paradise, but Dana felt as if she and the three boys were moving through a minefield, never sure what Brad might do next.

  In the fall, they went back to Washington and moved into a much smaller house in Mill Creek, rented again in Dana’s name. Dana knew she had to get away from Brad, but this time she was planning her escape carefully. “I’d cut off my family, so Brad couldn’t write to them. I had no contact with them. I really had no contact with them, so it wouldn’t do him any good to start sending letters and faxes again.”

  Dana told Brad she wanted to move out for a little while. She didn’t dare give him the impression that she was leaving him for good. “I told him, ‘I can’t live with you all the time, but I’ll still be with you. I won’t be out of your life totally. I’ll see you on Sundays, and I’ll be here for holidays and for the boys’ birthdays. You’ll all be living with Uncle Herm soon, and I’ll be with you a lot.’”

  Brad watched Dana’s face carefully, searching to see if she was telling him the truth. He had always found her transparent and, of course, he considered her vastly inferior to him in intelligence. “I guess he half believed me,” Dana remembered. “He let me go, but he stalked the crap out of me. My tires were slashed. There were bullet holes in my bedroom window. Once I found a stack of bills in his room from the Blue Moon Detective Agency. He’d hired them to follow me.”

  Dana couldn’t support herself cutting hair and selling makeup—or perhaps she could, but Brad had introduced her to a lifestyle that was hard to forget. She found a job dancing at one of the places on the strip north of Seattle. Rainbow’s* wasn’t nearly as classy as the Men’s Club, but “Angel” was back in business and was soon a favorite with the crowd. She was living the life that Brad had programmed her for.

  Dana kept her promise to be with Brad and the boys on weekends, even though she knew that he was either following her himself or paying Blue Moon to do it. She was there for Phillip’s ninth birthday party just before Thanksgiving. To this day she can recite Jess’s, Michael’s, and Phillip’s birthdays—date and year—by rote. Like all their “mothers,” she cared about Brad’s sons.

  That fall, Brad talked continually of new building projects and what he would do with all the money he was going to realize from his Texas lawsuit. Herm and Trudy Dreesen were still supportive, but Trudy was terminally ill. Her breast cancer had metastasized to her bones. Even so, she was helping take care of Jess, Michael, and Phillip.

  Herm Dreesen listened to Brad talk about the money to be made from multiple-unit construction projects. No one could be more convincing than Brad. He knew real estate, he knew banking, and he knew construction. If he hadn’t had a problem with his contractors in Houston, he would have been a rich man by now. But Brad was still only forty-four and he was prepared to share his knowledge with his uncle Herm, who was a dozen years older.

  Herm and Trudy Dreesen had been good friends with a couple their own age for a long time. “Herm approached us about going in together on some property development,” the wife would recall. “The way it began, Herm was going to put up the money and we were going to put in this piece of property we had. It sounded like a good idea, and Herm introduced us to his nephew, Brad Cunningham. We liked him at first; he was charming and knew the business and it sounded like a great idea. We thought it would be wonderful.”

  The Dreesens’ friends tore down an existing house on their property, a rental, in preparation for the construction of a forty-two-unit apartment complex. “Right away, we lost our income from the rental,” the wife said. “And, of course, we had the cost of the demolition and clearing. And then this Brad Cunningham, Herm’s nephew, wanted us to co-sign for a million-and-a-quarter loan! We had understood that our part was to provide the land.”

  It got worse. They also discovered that, if they did agree to sign for the loan, there were clauses stipulating that they would have absolutely no control over how the loan was administered. Brad would handle all the money. “We pulled out, and there were hard feelings with Herman and we felt bad,” the husband said. “But we couldn’t co-sign on a loan that large and have no say in how it was spent. We lost the house, but we still had the land. . . .”

  Brad was furious with them for not having the vision to let him handle their land and their money. It clearly was to have been his way back up the ladder of success. Meanwhile the suit in Texas dragged on as Vinson and Elkins continued its work on the case.

  Brad had always intimidated Dana and now he scared her. “By that fall of 1992, I had started carrying a gun for protection,” she said. “I didn’t think much about it at the time, but at Phillip’s birthday party, Brad asked to borrow my gun. He just said, ‘I need your gun,’ and I said, ‘Not a problem,’ and gave it to him. I realized later that he had something planned for me and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t armed.”

  Dana had made a platonic friend of one of the muscular bouncers at Rainbow’s, Denny Johnson.* On December 9 Brad and Dana argued, and she could sense he was working up toward the kind of rage she had seen before. She called Denny and asked him for protection. And then she decided to pack up her things and move to another location where it wouldn’t be so easy for Brad to find her.

  “I was going t
o meet Denny at the Fred Meyer [store] parking lot. I tried to put my stuff in the trunk of my car—it was a 1989 Mitsubishi—but the trunk lock seemed to be broken. I couldn’t get it to turn. I just threw my stuff in the backseat and headed for Fred Meyer. I waved Denny down, and he stood by while I forced my trunk open.”

  There was a body in her trunk. Dana screamed when the “body” moved, and Denny drew his handgun and shouted, “Whoever’s in there, get out!”

  Brad, a phantomlike figure dressed completely in a black spandex body suit, crawled out of Dana’s trunk. With Denny Johnson standing by, he had no choice but to leave. “I called my dad, and he called the Oregon State Police,” Dana said, “and we both gave reports to them. I think that Brad borrowed my gun deliberately at Phillip’s party because it was only two days after that when he was hiding in my trunk, dressed like that. If I’d been alone . . .”

  Brad had a ready excuse for hiding in Dana’s trunk. “I was only trying to hook up a listening device,” he told her—as if to say, “Doesn’t everybody?”

  A cousin recalled visiting Brad in late 1992 or early 1993. Brad bragged that the previous spring, after Dana called the authorities and they had surrounded his block, he had driven through the police lines five times and they never knew who he was. He was apparently amazed to see them there. “They tore up my house,” he said plaintively. He told his cousin that Dana had been “kidnapped” by the Oregon State Police then and that they were keeping her now in Portland against her will. Brad’s preoccupation with what law enforcement officials in Oregon were doing was obvious. And, six years after the fact, he gave his cousin yet another version of where he was on the night Cheryl died. “He started mumbling about how he couldn’t have killed Cheryl. He said he wasn’t even in Oregon the night she died. He said he was in a laundromat on Bainbridge Island.”