Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (36 page)

International myself, one of the largest construction companies in the

United States.

The contractor kept working and I withheld a million dollars because it

was defective.
 
He had ten days to fix it.... The contractor didn't.

I had a bond.
 
By October 19821 fired the contractor and tried to

complete it myself.
 
I had to correct the code violations."

To listen to Brad explain his maneuvers to build Parkwood Plaza was to

move into a world where disbelief had to be suspended.
 
He was a

supermanþfinancing, bulldozing, building, laying electrical conduit,

lifting whole walls.
 
Seemingly all by himself.
 
"I was working

equipment, hiring crews, on site, pavingþit's called mitigating your

damages."

I finished Building D, and I opened a secretarial service.
 
I hired out

nine offices.
 
I worked on A and tried to sell the other

buildings....

The bonding company basically said, Sue me."

" In reality, Brad had coaxed Cheryl away from Seattle and her thriving

law practice into a monetary sinkhole.
 
Despite Brad's confident

promises, it was apparent that they had just missed the boat.
 
Houston

was rapidly becomingþnot just for Brad but for all but the most solidly

grounded buildersþa wasteland.
 
Suddenly, in early 1982, the bottom of

the Texas economy had sprung a leak, a leak through which first oil,

and then all good things, would eventually escape.
 
The oil boom that

had promised to be endless had begun to lose momentum and a world oil

glut caused gasoline prices to plummet.

Houston's real estate dreams of glory began to evaporate.
 
Jobs were

drying up and nobody needed, or could afford, expensive office space.

Newly finished buildings stood empty and construction stopped on

half-.

built units.
 
Mirrored windows soon reflected only the end of an era

and Brad was left with mostly never-started or half-finished buildings,

and a mountain of debt.

He had gambled, made promises with money that depended on filling

Parkwood Plaza.
 
He was in trouble.
 
Brad blamed construction delays.

He insisted that if the buildings had gone up according to his

scheduling, they would have been finished and all the offices rented.

What had happened, he argued, was not his fault.
 
There had been enough

money there but the construction company had let it trickle away.
 
Now

it was drying up fast, and Brad was a man who had always liked to live

high.
 
He was not about to go backward when he had long since become

accustomed to fine cars, gourmet restaurants, and the best of

everything.
 
The Cunninghams could no longer afford such a life.

Things looked bad for Brad and, of course, for Cheryl, too.

They discussed their predicament.
 
He didn't want to leave Houston if

there was a chance he could salvage what he had there, but they needed

an income to keep him going.
 
Cheryl was an attorney, and she was

good.

Brad suggested that they separate for a while, but only so they could

rebuild their financial base.
 
Regretfully, Cheryl agreed to his plan

for her to move back to Seattle and practice law.
 
She would take Jess

and Michael with her, and Brad would remain in Houston to try to hold

back, or at least slow down, financial disaster.

In September of 1982, Cheryl took her two little boys and moved to

Seattle.
 
She was relieved to be out of the Houston climate and back

home, but she missed Brad and she worried that Michael and Jess would

forget their father.
 
She put a map up on the wall and stuck colored

pins in it, painstakingly explaining to three-year-old Jess and

one-year-old Michael, who didn't really understand, where their daddy

was.
 
She talked about Brad constantly so that the boys would not think

of him as some shadowy figure.
 
He was their daddy, and one day they

would all be together again.

Cheryl started work with Garvey, Schubert and Barer, moved into a house

on Bainbridge Island, placed both Jess and Michael in Sharon

McCulloch's day-care center, and set out to help Brad financially.
 
She

did well.

Cheryl, so cowed in her marriage, was an absolutely spectacular

litigator.
 
She had all the raw material to become a successful

attorney þand more.
 
She was a natural debater.
 
She had the drive, and

she had the staying power.
 
She could be as fierce as any bulldog,

holding on until she made her point.
 
Senior partners at Garvey,

Schubert noticed her right away.
 
She made enough money to support

herself and the boys and to send more to Brad in Houston.
 
If she

worried that Brad might be continuing his penchant for extramarital

sex, she didn't say so aloud.

She may or may not have had reason to worry, Brad and the woman who

worked as his secretary were extremely close during his time in

Houston.

He had never been a man who could exist long without the intimate

company of a woman.

Brad traveled to Seattle every once in a while.
 
He spent more time in

Yakima, where he and his father were involved in new business

projects.

At one point, he hired two men from Yakima to fly down to Houston and

transport vehicles and equipment from the job site in Texas up to the

Tampico property.
 
Despite his grim financial situation, Brad continued

to drive Mercedes cars.
 
He usually picked them up when they were

imported through Los Angeles.
 
Cheryl went with him on some of those

trips, and on one occasion they were in a near-fatal automobile

accident.
 
Though they survived, the Mercedes-Benz didn't.
 
Cheryl's

family never learned all the details of the crash.

Occasionally, Brad caught up with his other children.
 
He visited with

his third child, Amy, and explained to Lauren why he was behind in his

support payments.
 
He told her he planned to sue the construction

company responsible for his financial troubles and said he was

confident that he would win back everything he had lost and more.
 
A

major Houston law firm was interested in his case, and he expected them

to take the suit on a contingency basis.

Brad also kept track of Loni Ann and his first two children, Kit and

Brent, although Loni Ann had done her best to hide their whereabouts

from him.
 
Brad learned that Kit was living temporarily with her

maternal grandparents in Seattle.
 
He would check into that, he was

always alert to any failures in parenting that Loni Ann might

demonstrate.

Despite the three children he had fathered since Loni Ann won custody

of Kit and Brent, he never forgot the ignominy of having her beat him

in court.

During one of his visits home, Brad and Cheryl took their boys to a

Cunningham family reunion.
 
Cheryl put Jess and Michael to sleep in a

tent while the adults visited and the teenagers fooled around with

fireworks.

Brad's presence at the Cunningham reunions never went unnoticed.

He was a kind of lightning rod who needed to be the center of

attention.

"He was always like that," one of Brad's cousins remembered.
 
"A long

time ago, he called a bunch of us overþhe was just a young guy then

þand he said he was going to show us something, but we were never

supposed to tell.
 
He opened the trunk of his car, and he had all these

automatic weapons in there."

During the reunion in 1983, one of the rockets from the fireworks went

awry and zoomed into the side of the tent where Jess and Michael

napped.

Smoke circled up, and Cheryl screamed.
 
Brad, his cousin recalled,

"just sat there as if nothing had happened.
 
I remember he only said,

Hey, that's a flame-retardant tent.
 
I paid five hundred dollars for

it, it had better not burn."
 
Everyone but Brad ran toward the fire,

but it was Cheryl who got the babies out of the burning tent.
 
Brad

acted like nothing happened at all.
 
He wasn't worried.
 
He was just

mad that the tent didn't live up to its guarantee."

In 1982

Kit Cunningham, Brad's oldest child, was twelve, a tall, slender girl

with thick dark hair like her father's.
 
She was also exceptionally

lovely.
 
Kit had not lived with her father, of course, since she was a

.oddler, and her memories of him were confusing and somewhat fearful.

He was so very big and his reasoning seemed to change with the wind.

"When we were little," Kit would remember, "my father always told us

to tell him the truth.
 
He would say, I won't spank you if you tell the

truth."
 
And so we would tell him the truth, and he would spank us

anyw2y.
 
That didn't make sense."

When they were eight and seven and spent time with their father, Brad

played Frisbee with Kit and her younger brother Brent, paying them a

quarter for every one they caught.
 
Kit was better at that because she

was older, and that angered Brad.
 
He wanted his son to be the athlete,

not his female child.
 
"He kicked Brent in the rump all the way to the

car to punish him for being clumsy," Kit recalled.

Brent took after his mother in appearance, he was a cute little kid

with red hair cut in the "bowl cut" popular at the time.
 
He looked

nothing at all like his fatherþand he never would.
 
Even so, Kit

sensed that she had always been Brad's least favorite child.
 
Cloaking

his words in a thin veneer of humor, he would tell Brent, "God!
 
Your