Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?

  “Brad!” she exclaimed. “Where on earth did you get that?”

  “What?”

  “That bruise under your arm.”

  “Oh—that. I was playing on the jungle gym in the park blocks with the kids on Sunday while you were sleeping. I slipped at the top, and caught myself on one of the bars on that arm.”

  It was a terrible bruise. And strange. Sara had never before seen a bruise on Brad. Maybe it was his darkish olive complexion, one of the few signs of his American Indian heritage, that made a bruise hard to detect.

  That same Thursday, September 25, Brad and Sara spent the night in yet another location. The children were safe with Margie, and they checked into the Sheraton Hotel at the Portland Airport. For the first time since Cheryl’s murder, they were by themselves and Sara didn’t feel as if some unknown terror was waiting just outside their door. No one but her sister knew where they were. Brad told her a little more about Sunday evening, almost as if he was trying to establish an alibi. After he left her at the hospital, he said, he had taken the boys back to the apartment and waited for Cheryl to pick them up. She never came. And he had left the apartment only to do some errands around the Madison Tower. He had seen people and they had seen him. “I saw Lilya outside her apartment on the first floor at eight,” he told Sara. “And I saw a policeman talking to a couple in the garage at eight-fifteen.”

  “Did they see you?” Sara asked.

  Brad shook his head sadly. He didn’t think so.

  Exhausted, they fell asleep to the sound of jets taking off nearby. And it must have been well after midnight when they woke to the sound of someone pounding on the door. Sara ducked into the bathroom and began to dress while Brad went to the door.

  Jerry Finch and Jim Ayers stood there, accompanied by uniformed officers. They had been looking for Brad Cunningham for several days. They needed blood, hair, and fingernail scrapings from him, but he had been anything but cooperative with the investigators working on his estranged wife’s murder case. Finch and Ayers had located Brad by a fluke. A Multnomah County deputy had been cruising through the parking lots at the airport when he spotted Brad’s Suburban and called in the location to the Oregon State Police. The vehicle had been on a “hot sheet” on the dashboards of every law enforcement agency in the Portland area.

  Clearly irritated, Brad got dressed and went with Finch and Ayers to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s substation at 92nd and Powell to give them their damn samples. For Sara it was yet another blow. Obviously the police considered Brad a suspect in Cheryl’s murder.

  In 1986, criminalists did not have the benefit of DNA testing. Julia Hinkley did what forensic tests she could do, given the state of the art. The results were disappointing:

  Hair from driver’s door: Microscopically similar in class and characteristic to Cheryl K’s.

  Oral, vaginal, rectal swabs: Negative for semen.

  Hair from victim’s hand: Microscopically similar in class and characteristic to Cheryl K’s.

  Alcohol in victim’s blood: None.

  Brad had told Jim Ayers that he thought Cheryl had been drinking when he last talked to her on the Sunday evening she died. But the percentage of alcohol in her blood was zero. Death can sometimes raise the alcohol reading in blood; it never diminishes it.

  The investigators reached an impasse when Hinkley wasn’t able to come up with any clues that would lead to Cheryl’s killer. The OSP criminalist had Brad’s samples, but it was a hollow victory. They didn’t find any matches. Whatever their suspicions about Brad, they couldn’t arrest him. There was absolutely no physical evidence linking him to the crime. And there were no eyewitnesses who could place him at the scene. He was a free man, free to go to Venezuela if he wanted to—although if he did go, they’d have found that interesting.

  But after all the physical evidence was collected, tested, and dismissed as borderline, one idea kept surfacing. The solution to this murder might lie not in blood tests or latent fingerprints. It might lie somewhere in Cheryl Keeton’s life, or in Brad Cunningham’s past. Maybe recently. Maybe far, far back in time. Generations, perhaps.

  PART 2

  Brad

  10

  In 1948, Seattle, Washington, had a downtown with lights that were reflected in the night sky, and department stores so big that everyone from miles around came to shop, to eat out at fancy restaurants, to see first-run movies. Always a wondrous city, surrounded by water, shrouded in green foliage, softened by constant rain, and watched over by a beneficent Mount Rainier, Seattle never had slums, only neighborhoods less appealing than others. And eventually it had suburbs that were a world, rather than miles, away. By 1986, Seattle was struggling to maintain its center. After the Second World War, young professionals migrated east across Lake Washington to Bellevue. Doctors and lawyers settled on Mercer Island. Probably the most desirable spot to live was Bainbridge Island, a ferryboat ride across Elliott Bay.

  South of Seattle, the Boeing Airplane Company is on one side of the Duwamish River, and South Park and the Cheerie Daze tavern are on the other. South Park used to be pastoral. And the Duwamish was once a clear, sweet river. Now, fish caught there are suspect, eaten only by the extremely hungry or the very reckless. Some years ago, a young woman from east of the Cascade Mountains was murdered and thrown into the Duwamish. She was buried in an unmarked grave as a Jane Doe. Her parents had reported a brown-eyed girl missing, and the corpse’s eyes had been turned blue by the chemicals in the Duwamish.

  As the Duwamish River curls south, it parallels Boeing Field, Seattle’s smaller airport, then pulls away from the hamlet of Riverton and edges a golf course in Tukwila. Once the center of fertile truck farms, Tukwila is now the location of Southcenter, a huge shopping mall. Midway through Tukwila, the Duwamish becomes the Green River, site of the discovery of the first five bodies of young prostitutes in America’s worst outbreak of serial murders to date, a chain of slaughters that would claim almost fifty similar victims between July 1982 and April 1984. The Green River Killer has never been caught.

  Burien, Washington, is a south-end town too, sitting five miles due west of Tukwila by freeway. If possible, Burien is even less distinguished than Tukwila, a prosaic little town located near the flight path into the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The south-end Park-and-Ride station is located there. Old Burien is quaint and quiet; the newer downtown has no particular charm. There are a number of small ranch-style homes with carefully groomed yards, numerous antique and secondhand stores, an inordinate number of Asian restaurants, and, down along the banks above Puget Sound, expensive waterfront homes accessible only by private funiculars on steep tracks slicing down through the maples and fir trees.

  Although few who met him as a grown man knew his background, Bradly Morris Cunningham grew up in Burien along with his two sisters, his cousins, and scores of friends. His progenitors were from two proud and completely diverse backgrounds. Brad’s mother, Rosemary Edwards, was a Colville Indian; his father, Sanford Cunningham, had roots in the British Isles. Rosemary was slender and beautiful with thick dark hair and flashing black eyes. Sanford, often called Stan, was big, blond, and florid, with a strong, almost prognathous jaw. In the early years of their marriage, they loved each other passionately, they had wonderful plans for the future, and they wanted nothing but the best for their children.

  If every marriage started fresh with no memories and nothing from the past, the odds for success would be far better, but each partner inevitably brings along old scars, prejudices, and unrealistic expectations. Stan and Rosie were no different; indeed, they probably carried more baggage than most. Each generation before them had added another stone to the load, and by the time they got together, some patterns were so thoroughly entrenched that one could almost predict that they would continue their destructive erosion through a family begun with love and happy plans.

  The Cunningham clan was proud, loyal, and spread out all over western Washington, although its home base was orig
inally on Whidbey Island. That was where they always held their annual summer reunions with huge barbecues and potluck picnics. Sanford and his younger brother Jimmy were born to Dr. Paul L. Cunningham and his wife Bertha* in the decade after the First World War—Sanford Morris in 1924 and James Lincoln in 1926. Dr. Cunningham had a successful chiropractic practice in North Seattle. He was a handsome man with an aquiline nose, and he was also a talented artist and wood carver, with many of his best pieces on display in the Museum of Art and History at the University of Washington. He carved a scale model of the campus, and he carved a statue that still stands outside the Pullman Library at Washington State University. It is the figure of a man reading a book, and it was cast in bronze.

  Except for Dr. Paul’s belief that it was possible to receive messages from the spirit world, he and Bertha lived a fairly unremarkable life until 1927. When Sanford was three and Jimmy still a babe in arms, Bertha became pregnant with her third child and confessed tearfully to her husband that he was not the father. She had no other choice; her lover was reportedly Hispanic and it was highly unlikely that this baby would resemble her first two fair-skinned, fair-haired sons.

  Dr. Cunningham was not a man who could forgive, but he was something of a stoic; he could wait for his revenge. He didn’t rail at Bertha, nor did he banish her immediately. Rather, he said she could stay in his home until the baby was born, but then she had to leave. He would not, of course, allow her to take Jimmy and Sanford with her. There would be no discussion about that. She had forfeited her position in the lives of her two little sons.

  After several months of silence and frigid distance, Bertha gave birth to her third son in 1927. She named him Marcellus, although nobody in the family ever called him that. He became “Salie,” and in time “Uncle Salie.” Bertha then packed her things and left her home, her unforgiving husband, and their little boys, Sanford and Jimmy. Salie, the baby, was raised by his maternal grandmother. Bertha eventually moved to California where she remarried and gave birth to one more child, a daughter called Goldie. According to family lore, Bertha’s Mexican lover was later found murdered, and no one was ever arrested for the crime.

  As far as Sanford and Jimmy knew, their mother had left them without a backward look. Their father let them believe that, and even embellished occasionally one of his favorite themes, the treachery of women. In their formative years, Sanford and Jimmy probably never encountered a female who made them doubt their father’s teachings. They had an utterly miserable childhood after their mother left. Oddly, although he had decreed that Bertha could not have custody of Sanford and Jimmy, Paul Cunningham chose not to keep them either; he farmed them out to relatives and acquaintances where they never felt that they were important members of the family. They were always the odd boys out, and they never again had a mother figure. Not surprisingly, Sanford grew up with a basic distrust of women and with the conviction that women had to be kept in their place because they had infinite power to hurt men if allowed the opportunity.

  Even when Paul Cunningham married again, he didn’t bring Sanford and Jimmy home to live with him; perhaps they reminded him too much of their mother’s betrayal, or it may have simply been that he had long since gotten used to a life without them. So Sanford and Jimmy grew up with no one but each other. Sanford Cunningham would turn to women out of sexual need, and sometimes because he was in love, but after his mother left he never totally trusted females.

  Dr. Paul and his second wife, Lydia, had two daughters, Mary Alice and Gertrude or “Trudy.” Mary Alice married and moved to Texas. Trudy, an extraordinarily lovely girl, received Seattle’s highest accolade to beauty when she was chosen SeaFair Queen in 1955. Later she married Dr. Herman Dreesen, a highly regarded chiropractor with a practice in Lynnwood, north of Seattle.

  Sanford and Jimmy stayed tightly bound as they grew up. Their total allegiance—at least until they had sons of their own—was always to each other. Sanford married at least once, briefly, before he wed Rosemary. That wife’s name was Norma. There may also have been a second wife before Rosemary; if there was, even her name has been obscured by time. But the true love of Sanford’s life was undoubtedly Rosemary Edwards. Their courtship and early marriage was as sweet and loving as the songs played on “Your Hit Parade” in the forties. Jimmy Cunningham met Rosie’s cousin Caroline at the same time. And so the brothers married cousins, and from then on, all of their descendants would be interrelated in complex ways that were virtually impossible to explain.

  Rosemary and Caroline were Indian girls as delicately featured and slender as wild columbines. They had the blood of both the Yakima and Colville tribes in their veins, but tribal rule commanded that members choose one tribe or the other. So Rosie was officially deemed a member of the Colvilles and Caroline of the Yakimas.

  Sanford and Rosie and Jimmy and Caroline made striking couples, the big, fair, red-cheeked men and their slender, bronze-skinned brides. While Jimmy and Sanford had been almost as close as twins before, they simply enlarged their alliance and drew their new wives in. The foursome lived in Everett, Washington, at first, and then Jimmy joined the merchant marine. There was no question of the brothers living apart, so the two couples moved to California together.

  By 1946 they were living in Calwa City, just outside Fresno. Their mother, Bertha, was also living there—the mother they had never known when they were children. Jimmy and Sanford and their brides stayed in the Fresno area because the job situation, while it wasn’t great, was better than in Seattle.

  Just before Christmas 1946, Rosemary reluctantly left Sanford for a visit to her mother, who lived in the Shalishan Housing Project in Tacoma, Washington. Ethel Edwards was then forty-nine, and a handsome woman. Rosemary’s father was Simon Paul Edwards, whose Indian name was Skis-Sislau. He and Ethel had eleven children, although three were stillborn. In her later years Ethel was a nutritionist who worked in Native American hospitals. In retrospect, some of her descendants would feel that Ethel was probably bisexual; she always had a very close female friend in her immediate circle. But no one thought anything of it at the time.

  Ethel Edwards had an extremely strong personality. Her husband tried to advance his philosophy that the man should be the center of the home, the master of his family. He never completely succeeded. Not with Ethel. She was bright and inventive and a rebel, and her daughter Rosemary was probably closer to her than to her father, more imbued with the old matriarchal views of the Yakimas and the Colvilles. Rosemary looked delicate, but she had inherited her mother’s will of iron. Her children would be raised with full knowledge of their Indian heritage, and she urged them to be proud that they belonged to the Colville tribe.

  Sanford Cunningham was twenty-two and Rosie twenty-one when they married. He had been taught that women had to be kept in their place or they would betray him. She had been taught that men would try to hold women down, and that women were really more capable than men and better at making decisions anyway. But they were young, and love was all that mattered. Neither of them could imagine there might come a time when they wouldn’t be in love.

  When Rosie left to visit her mother, Sanford was desolate from the moment her train pulled out of the Fresno station. He wrote to her almost daily. And a week or so later, he had enough money to take the train north and rejoin his wife. Their first child was undoubtedly conceived during that reunion. Sanford and Rosie’s daughter was born in California in September 1947, and she was named for her grandmother Ethel.

  There were more separations when Sanford couldn’t find a job that would support them. Rosie and the baby had to stay with Ethel in Tacoma while Sanford pounded the streets in Seattle. Finally, he and his brother Jimmy both got jobs. Jimmy and Caroline found a house in one of Seattle’s rent-subsidized projects. Predictably, Sanford and Rosie rented one too, and both couples began adding to their families.

  Rosie and Sanford had their only son, Bradly Morris Cunningham, in October 1948. Susan, their youngest child, was born in 1953
. Jimmy and Caroline had five children, whose ages fit in with their “double” cousins’. Penny was the oldest, Terry was born in November of 1948, and Gary in December of 1949. Later came Cheryl, and the baby Lynn, who died at the age of two when a milkman ran over her in the family driveway.

  All of the Cunningham cousins had Indian blood, although some of them looked far more Indian than others. In actuality, they were between a quarter and a half Indian. According to tribal law, Ethel, Brad, and Susan were half Colville because that was Rosemary’s chosen tribe, while Penny, Terry, Gary, Cheryl, and Lynn were part Yakima through Caroline’s official tribal papers.

  Both Sanford and Jimmy raised their families in the neighborhood between White Center and Burien. Sanford and Rosemary moved to 203 128th Street just off First Avenue South in Burien in the early 1950s. They bought a good-sized L-shaped house on a large lot. A huge step up from the project, it had an impressive-looking stone facade, and they planted trees as a buffer against the traffic noise on 128th. Jimmy bought a house a few blocks away. And while it was true that Jimmy and Sanford were closer than most brothers, and that they had depended on each other since they were little boys, it didn’t mean they weren’t competitive. Sanford always seemed to have a newer, more expensive car than Jimmy did, and a nicer house. And he always seemed to have more money.

  Through the years, Sanford held a variety of jobs, sometimes as a contractor, sometimes in the glass business, and later with Associated Grocers. “My dad was a consultant on building projects and landscaping projects,” Susan would remember. “He traveled most of the time. He was the only really financially successful man in his family. My dad never felt that anyone really liked him, but he thought he could make them like him with money. It seemed as though my father was gone most of my life. He showed his love by buying things for me. When I was older, I was getting a hundred-dollar-a-month allowance. If I said I was interested in skiing, my dad would take me out and buy me skis, boots, the whole outfit.”