Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (30 page)

"But Cheryl's marriage to Dan just kind of collapsed on its own.
 
I

think Cheryl had doubts from the beginning, but they had dated for so

long...." Lauren Swanson was amazed at how far Brad had come by the

age of twenty-seven.
 
He was a real estate developer and had contracts

to do projects with well-known Seattle architects and contractors.

Lauren loved her job teaching elementary students, but Brad suggested

that she might consider becoming involved in his projectsþat least

part-time.

That way, they could work together and she could learn some of the

intricacies of his profession.
 
Lauren was both flattered and

excited.

By this time, she hoped to become involved in every part of Brad's

life.

She was in love.

Lauren still knew next to nothing about the details of Brad's two

divorces.
 
She had never met either Loni Ann or Cynthia, she had no

reason to.
 
But she did know that Brad was distraught about losing the

custody battle for his children.
 
He worried about them continually.

"He said that Loni Ann led a vagabond and often promiscuous lifestyle,

and that it wasn't healthy for his children," Lauren said later.
 
"He

wanted to raise themþthey were being exposed to situations that he did

not approve of.... A lot of men visited, a lot of moving from one

location to another."

Lauren loved children so much herself and she felt sorry for Brad.

She thought it must have been hell for him to have to walk away from

his children, to always wonder if they were safe and cared for.
 
It

touched her heart to see how much Brad's kids meant to him.
 
It made

her love him even more.

Their wedding in March of 1977 was very simple.
 
The wedding party

included only Lauren's immediate family, Brad's father and his second

wife, and Brad's children, Kit and Brent.
 
Kit was almost seven and

Brent was five.
 
Loni Ann had won custody of her children, but she

acceded to Brad's requests to have them visit him from time to time.

At this point, Brad was still paying his court-ordered child support

and Loni Ann wanted to keep things between them as peaceful as

possible.

Although Lauren and Brad's wedding was a quiet ceremony at her parents'

home, the couple threw a wonderful party to celebrate their marriage

and, of course, Cheryl and Dan Olmstead were there.
 
The two couples

continued to spend many evenings and most weekends together.

Lauren was very happy in the spring of 1977.
 
She and Brad rented a

spacious condominium and she kept her job teaching a third-grade

class.

She also helped Brad with his construction projects.
 
His career was in

high gear and he was working hard to achieve the success he had always

visualized.
 
To their many friends, including Cheryl and Dan, they

seemed perfectly matched.

Just as he had with Cynthia, Brad took Lauren to Yakima often.

They headed over the Snoqualmie Pass to eastern Washington to visit

Sanford and Mary.
 
Brad's father had sold the Burien house and moved to

Tampico, a tiny hamlet near Yakima.
 
Lauren could see how close Brad

and his father were.
 
But she found it a little odd that he had

nothing at all to do with his mother.
 
When she asked him about it, he

told her his mother had always blamed him for something he could not

help.
 
"I was an unusually large baby," he said."
 
I guess that was why

she had such a difficult delivery.
 
Later, my mother got some kind of

female cancerþ and she always blamed me."

"But that wasn't your fault!"
 
Lauren said.

Brad shrugged.
 
He really didn't want to talk about his mother.
 
He

said that his father had suffered through years of an unhappy marriage

with her, and hadn't been able to leave until he was grown.

The woman Brad described to Lauren sounded like a cruel harridan.

Rosemary had made his life miserable when he was a little boy,

according to Brad, both with her sharp tongue and with physical

punishment.

He told Lauren about the day his mother had made him dress up like a

girl and clean the house.
 
He had been humiliated, he said,

embellishing his story of child abuse.
 
When his father came home and

found his son in girls' clothes, he had been outraged.
 
And from that

moment on, his mother was virtually banished from Brad's life.
 
His

father had told him that he didn't have to pay any attention to her at

all.
 
That, Brad explained, was the end of his relationship with his

mother as far as he was concerned.

Brad also said there were episodes of physical abuse until he had

finally grown big enough to defend himself "When I was fourteen or

thereabouts, she came after me one day with a vacuum hose and I took

her wrist and bent it back.
 
I told her, Don't ever come after me

again."

" He didn't tell Lauren about how he and his father had tricked his

mother to leave on "a vacation."
 
He just said he had sided with his

father when he divorced Rosemary.
 
"My sisters went with my mother."

His sisters, Ethel and Susan, according to Brad, were "petty and not

very bright."

The only member of his mother's family that Brad seemed to care about

was his maternal grandfather.
 
He always spoke of Simon Edwards fondly

to Lauren.
 
He said he himself was part Colville Indian through his

grandfather's lineage.
 
Lauren knew that Brad received small checks

periodically from timber sales on the Indian land.

Brad didn't tell Lauren, and she had no way of knowing, that his mother

had remarried.
 
She had gone to college and done rather well.
 
Her name

was Rosemary Kinney now, and she was also living in the Yakima area,

where she was employed as a caseworker in a social service agency on

the Colville Reservation.

Knowing how splintered Brad's family was, feeling sad for him that

he didn't have Kit and Brent with him all the time, Lauren was

thrilled when she discovered she was pregnant in the summer of 1977.

Together, she and Brad would build a solid new family to make up for

all that he had lost.
 
Brad seemed as happy as she was when she told

him about her pregnancy.

Brad rented office space in the building on.Eastlake Avenue in Seattle

where architect Felix Campanella was headquartered.
 
He incorporated

his newest businessþhe would always be a firm believer in the

sheltering aspects of corporationsþand began to teach Lauren how to

present his real estate projects at meetings he was too busy to

attend.

Lauren felt that she basically played only a supportive role.
 
She

represented Brad in a couple of meetings and he was pleased with her,

but she was never given any decision-making tasks.
 
That was fine with

her, she was a neophyte in real estate development.
 
She would have

years to learn the more intricate details of buying land, financing,

leveraging, and land use studies.
 
Brad was a walking encyclopedia on

everything and anything to do with commercial real estate.

One of the projects Lauren participated in was an apartment building

surrounded by trees in Kirkland, at the far north end of Lake

Washington.
 
When it was finished, they named it Sylvan Habitat and all

the apartments were rented immediately.
 
It seemed that everything Brad

touched was making money.

Lauren knew he was doing well, and she was proud of him.
 
Still, she

was almost embarrassed by the way he flaunted his wealth.
 
He bought a

more expensive car every time he moved another step up in his career.

In only two years, Brad owned twelve different vehiclesþboth cars and

trucks.

They usually had three at a time.
 
Soon the only make of car that

suited Brad was a Mercedes.

He always seemed to have the money to make the payments, but sometimes

Lauren wondered what her family and friends thought when she and Brad

showed up in yet another, higher ticket, car.
 
It was difficult for her

to realize that she had been living on the salary of a third-grade

teacher only a year earlier, and now she was riding around in plush

cars whose motors were so smooth you couldn't even hear them with the

windows closed.

Although Cynthia Marrasco had reported to police a few years earlier

that Brad always carried a Colt .38, as far as Lauren knew, the only

gun he owned was a hunting rifle.
 
Lauren hated hunting.
 
Much to her

revulsion, Brad insisted that she come with him deer hunting that fall

on the Colville Indian Reservation.
 
Killing animals was totally

against Lauren's nature, hut she was in love, and whatever Brad wanted

to do she would go along with.

The trip across the Cascade Mountains was glorious as the vine maples

glowed coral orange against the sky and the tamaracks and quaking

aspens turned bright gold.
 
It was too bad the purpose of their trip

was to look for animals to kill.
 
But Brad told Lauren that everyone in

his family hunted.

That was certainly true.
 
However, one of the reasons his cousin Gary

avoided Brad was the memory of an earlier hunting trip he had taken

with him.
 
Brad had shot a deer, but it wasn't a clean kill and the

deer was thrashing around in pain.
 
Gary asked Brad to shoot it again

to put it out of its misery.
 
Brad followed the deer into the brush but

Gary didn't hear the crack of a rifle shot.
 
Investigating, he found

Brad beating the helpless animal to death with the butt of his rifle.