Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (21 page)

stuck in a ditch.
 
Some guy with a great big semi had to pull him out,

and we took pictures.
 
He was mad."

Brad Cunningham had begun to pull ahead of the pack early on.
 
He was

still quite young when he showed great athletic potential.
 
Even in

grade school, Brad had begun to lift weights and work on his body.

He made high-school coaches salivate.
 
Tlaeywatched him at

Cascade Junior High School and could hardly wait until he moved up to

Evergreen High.

He was such a strong kid, broad-shouldered and thickly muscled, and yet

light on his feet and graceful.
 
He had Sanford's size, but except for

his jutting chin, he had Rosemary s coloring and facial features.

He was very handsome.

Like Sanford, Brad always had money.
 
From the time he was fourteen, he

had some angle to work.
 
His sister Ethel called him the "local black

market kid."
 
Girls watched Brad, too, and he watched them.
 
Not

surprisingly, as a teenager he adopted his father's and his

grandfather's philosophy: women were placed on earth to pleasure men.

Although he always had his eye on one girl or another, he did not allow

himself to become emotionally dependent upon them.
 
It was understood

among his peers that if he asked a girl out on a date, he expected

sex.

Otherwise, he saw no point in dating.
 
Enougl girls were willing to

play by Brad's rules that he never wanted for dates.

There were family stories about Brad's coming of age sexually.
 
One

version held that his first sexual experience was with a prostitute,

and when his fatherþor motherþfound out, he was taken to the family

doctor, who diagnosed venereal disease.
 
In truth he found no

disease.

This was to be a lesson to Brad, and the doctor scared him badly and

then administered a series of painful shots to "cure" him.
 
Another

story had Brad going to a doctor for a sperm count: he was worried

because he had slept with so many girls and none of them had become

pregnant.

It is doubtful that either of these stories was true.
 
If anything,

Brad would prove remarkably fertile in later years.
 
When he was

seventeen, he was dating a senior named Arlene* who became pregnant,

but her parents wouldn't even consider her marrying Brad.
 
Theirs had

been a stormy relationship.
 
Rosemary and Ethel remembered that Arlene

had done something once that made Brad so angry that he painted "Whore"

on her front door in red paint and threw cvervthing she had given him

on her front lawn.
 
"Arlene just disappeared," Susan remembered.
 
"Her

parents whisked her away.
 
from Brad.
 
They were afraid for her,

somehow.
 
We don't know if she had the bahv or not."

Arlene was Catholic and she probably did carry Brad's first child to

term.
 
If so, Brad was not told.

Everyone who ever went to high school remembers one student who was a

shining light, so sought out and sought after that heþor sheþ seemed to

have been blessed by some benevolent gods with luck and beauty and

talent.
 
At Evergreen High School in Burien in the years between from

1965 to 1967, that student was Brad Cunningham.
 
He was tremendously

popular.
 
He had one ambition, the goal he had worked toward since he

was about ten.
 
He wanted to get a scholarship to the University of

Washington and play for the Huskies.

Brad quickly moved into the upper echelons at Evergreen High School.

He macle the varsity squad for the Evergreen Wolverines, and he was

elected president of the sophomore class.
 
His sister Ethel remembered

that he wanted to join Demolay, but decided not to when he found he

would have to swear to respect women.
 
By his senior year in the autumn

of 1966, he was captain of the football team, vice president of the

Lettermen's Club, and a member of the Wolverine Guard, the Honor

Society, and the Modern Language Club.
 
"Brad was Mr. Popular, " a

classmate recalled.
 
"He was Mr.
 
Everything.

Brad was also charmingly outrageous in high school, particularly in his

debates in Contemporary Problems class, he was the bane of his teachers

but his classmates found him hilarious.
 
He once argued that the crime

of rape was an impossibility.
 
And one of his friends echoed that

chauvinistic opinion by writing in Brad's yearbook, "No girl can be

raped because girls with their skirts up can run faster than boys with

pants down."

Although he rarely drank as an adult, comments scribbled in Brad's

yearbook referred constantly to his drinking exploits.
 
But nothing

kept him off the football squad, and everyone who knew him expected

that he would one day be an All-American.
 
Brad could think on his feet

faster than any student in school, and he could run through opposing

blockers just as fast.
 
He was the one kid in high school whom others

envied.

The Brads of this world sometimes show up at class reunions driving

Cadillacs, and sometimes they end up selling used cars.
 
Brad

Cunningham, however, was going to make it big.
 
Everyone who went to

Evergreen with him believed that.

As a teenager, Brad was handsome the way jocks are handsome.
 
He had a

wide face and a thick neck.
 
His eyes were clear and penetrating under

lidded brows, and his body was perfect.
 
Looking back, some who knew

him suggested that by the time he went to college he might have been

into steroids.
 
His only physical flaws were a wide nose and a slightly

lantern jaw.
 
Brad's Colville-Yakima Indian heritage was more readily

apparent in those days.
 
In later years, his nose was more aquiline, in

all likelihood as the result of cosmetic surgery.
 
Maybe he had plastic

surgery to fix a septum deviated by a football injury or maybe it was

because he wanted to look less Indian.

Even in high school, Brad had aspirations to a certain kind of life.

He was determined to find a place in a world as unlike the one he had

been born into as possible.
 
He wanted nothing to do with being part of

a racial minority.
 
He hated references to his Indian roots.
 
But that

created a problem for him.
 
When he graduated from Evergreen High

School in 1967, he had his athletic scholarship to the University of

Washington as everyone expected.
 
but he needed more financial help.

The Colville tribe offered academic scholarships.
 
Although he had

always tried to play down his Indian blood, Brad accepted the Colville

tribe's two scholarships eagerly.

In his senior year, Brad also found another pretty young girlfriend.

Their relationship was the closest thing to going steady that he had

since Arlene vanished from his life.
 
Loni Ann Ericksen* was a

sophomore at Evergreen.
 
She had transferred to public high school that

year from Holy Names Academy.
 
Her mother was ill with multiple

sclerosis, the whole family had to make sacrifices and private school

tuition had to go.

Loni Ann was a pixieish girl with dark eyes and hair and a dimple that

showed in her left cheek when she smiled.
 
When she was sixteen, she

smiled often.
 
"You know," a fellow classmate recalled, "when I think

of Loni Ann then, I can never picture her without a smile."

Brad had noticed her first when she walked past the radiators in the

foyer of Evergreen, the vantage point where popular seniors

congregated.

She was thrilled when he showed up at her locker, although she tried to

act blase.
 
And he quickly became her whole world.
 
Her feelings for

Brad were scrawled over two inside covers of the Evergreen Wolverines

yearbook in 1967.

"I thought you were nice, but just another senior.... I thought you

were funny and a little different."
 
.
 
. . And then one day when I was

freezingly walking home, who should pop up in his super red car?

You."!

I wasn't so sure about that at the time, but now I'm sure glad I

accepted your offer.
 
It was then that I decided you were really nice

and I wanted to get to know you a whole bunches [sic] better.
 
Things

didn't seem to be in favor of my decision, but time changed that.

Well, now I know you better than that day and I'm terribly happy that I

do.

You're absolutely, positively, one of the mostest [sic] wonderful

persons I've had the pleasure of getting to know.... You know, BiPad,

it's really strange how things come about.
 
I never really thought

you'd ever like me or that I could ever like a guy as much as I like

you."

Loni Ann developed a huge crush on Brad.
 
She was a small girl but she

was almost as athletic as he was.
 
When she confided to her girlfriends

how she felt about Brad, they quickly apprised her of the "ground

rules" for girls who dated him.
 
It didn't really matter, Loni Ann was

so enthralled with him that she would be willing to do whatever he

wanted.

Loni Ann wanted desperately to go to "Telos," the Evergreen High

junior-senior prom, with Brad.
 
He agreed to take her to the dance,

held at the Seattle Elks Club on the evening of April 29, 1967.

Overhead a mirrored ball turned slowly, its hundreds of facets casting

circlets of light over the dancers below.
 
The class of 1968, the

juniors, presented Telos in honor of the seniors, and did all the

decoratingþwhich consisted mainly of shiny blue Greek columns placed

here and there.
 
It would have taken a lot more than that to transform