Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (90 page)

integrated" person.
 
Brad Cunningham had been two widely disparate

"selves" for more than three decades.
 
His wives had been drawn to a

man who was a kind, tender loverþand had awakened to find they were

tied to a man who detested all that was female.

Was it possible that Brad had been in the grip of his own psychosis the

night of the murder, that he was insane?
 
Turco said he had studied the

murder of Cheryl Keeton and discerned the M.O. of a person who had

carefully and meticulously planned each detail.
 
Because this was a

civil trial, but mostly because Brad had chosen not to present a

defense at all, the jurors were able to hear an extremely comprehensive

overview of the psychopathology of a narcissist, an antisocial

personalityþa man certainly capable of murder.
 
No defense attorney

jumped to his feet to object.

Shinn asked Turco how a personality like the one they were discussing

would relate to his children.

"The children to him are objects, so to speak," Turco replied.
 
"In

other words, he owns them.... This is an important issue to consider

again.... The father in this case wants to say, My children love me, I

have them, I have control," even though they may not [love him].

The other part of it isþhe's going to hurt the other person by taking

control of the children, a valuable possession, from this mother."

Turco agreed that the fight over custody of the children, coupled with

Cheryl's threat to expose Brad's tax irregularities, was more than

enough to provide a murder motive for a man who fit Brad's profile.

"It's the utilitarian use of people for one's own gain .
 
. .

malignant narcissism," Turco said.
 
And this was a character and or

personality disorder that was totally untreatable.
 
Brad Cunningham was

not crazy, not insane.
 
In Turco's words, he was "totally in touch with

reality."
 
He was smart and charismatic and selfish and terribly

dangerousþand still a completely free man.

It was nearing the middle of May and Brad still had not appeared at his

trial.
 
His living ex-wives, however, were not all represented.
 
Sara

had testified in person, but Brad's first and third wives were too

afraid to do that.
 
Loni Ann's videotaped deposition had been

convincing.

Cynthia Marrasco had talked only off the record.
 
And only a month

before the trial, Shinn had traveled to where Lauren Stoneham lived to

ask her questions about her memories of Brad while a court reporter

recorded their words.
 
Although Lauren hadn't realized it, she had

important information.
 
Brad had called her on October 5, 1986, to tell

her that Cheryl had been killed two weeks earlier.
 
At that point, only

the time the van had been foundþ8:45

P.M.þhad been released to the media.
 
"Brad said that the estimated

time of her death was eight-fifteen P.M" Lauren told Shinn.
 
"He said

that he had been downstairs in the garage at his apartment house at

that time."

At 11:05 on Thursday morning, May 16,1991, Mike Shinn began his final

arguments.
 
He had to convince twelve jurors that the preponderance of

evidence proved that Bradly Morris Cunningham was responsible for

causing the death of Cheryl Keeton almost five years earlier.
 
The

jurors had listened to more than five dozen witnesses, visited the site

of the "accident," and looked at scores of photographs.
 
Shinn did not,

however, have physical evidence to offer them.
 
His case was purely

circumstantial.

Shinn's opening remarks had painted a picture of the kind of woman

Cheryl Keeton was, "one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United

States."
 
All the lawyers who had praised Cheryl, he submitted, were

effective witnesses.
 
And yet it was the secretaries, the paralegals,

the women she had worked with, who had really given the picture of who

Cheryl had been as a mother, a friend, and a human being.

"Once I got involved in the case," Shinn said, "we conducted an

exhaustive investigation, including interviews with hundreds of people,

and not one person in this entire world was found with a bad word to

say about herþexcept perhaps Lauren Swanson .
 
. . who thought Cheryl

had stolen her husband, and later we found that wasn't what had

happened at all.
 
There was nobody who had any rational reason to

murder this woman."

Shinn then moved through the facts of the case, stressing that not only

had Cheryl's killer struck her two dozen times, he had been quite

willing to murder other people who were driving on the Sunset Highway

the evening of September 21, 1986, and who would have died in a

multiple pileup of flaming cars.

Shinn admitted that one of the facets of his investigation was that he

kept getting back such "bizarre" information that he himself doubted it

þat first.
 
"Children's coffinsþletters that Mr. Cunningham wrote to

his mother, to Cheryl, to other people .
 
. . I was afraid to present

them to the jury.
 
If people see this stuff, they re going to think

it's just too impossible to belielae.
 
There was no mystery about who

had killed Cheryl.
 
The questions, Shinn submitted, were "why?"
 
and

"how?"

He then began a litany of Brad Cunningham's sins, and he used as a

framework the letter that Brad had written to his own motherþthat

diatribe filled with accusations and show-off vocabulary.
 
It was an

answer to a letter his mother had never written.
 
Brad had done the

same thing to Cherylþwritten her answers to questions she had never

asked It was a familiar dodge for him, if answers to letters existed,

then those letters must also exist.
 
But all the searching in the world

could not turn up the ugly letters Brad loved to cite.
 
They had never

been written.
 
His letter to his mother was particularly chilling in

that it was a prime example of projection.
 
All the things that Brad

accused his mother of were not her flaws, they were his own.

Shinn quoted the experts who had testified about the nature of Brad's

behavior.
 
He quoted those who had suffered because of it.
 
"The horror

is unimaginable," he commented after giving many examples, "þexcept

that it's come from so many sources."
 
But Cheryl had been prepared to

stand up to Brad and he could not allow her to live to bring her

witnesses into the courtroom.
 
He could not allow her to talk to the

IRS.
 
He could not allow her to have sole custody of her sons.

"You know what a Beefeater is?"
 
Shinn asked the jurors.
 
"I never did

until I went to the Tower of London on a rugby tour.
 
I found out a

week before this trial from Dr. Sardo that Brad asked him to keep a

secret What is the secret?"
 
I asked Dr. Sardo, and he said, Brad

believed that Cheryl and her mother were going to poison him."
 
When I

asked Sara if Brad was really serious about the poison plot, she

answered, Yes, he was so serious that he had his own sons sample his

food first to make sure Cheryl wasn't poisoning him."

"He was making them Beefeaters," Shinn said.
 
"Kings had Beefeaters who

would taste their food, and they would watch them for an hour to see if

they died of poisoning before they would eat the food.
 
That's how much

Mr.
 
Cunningham thought of his sons...."

Mike Shinn had spoken for fifty-two minutes when Judge Haggertv broke

for the day and those in the courtroom walked, blinking, into the warm

May afternoon, their minds filled with the horror of malignant

narcissism at work.

Shinn began the next morning with a description of Brad's character,

calling him a tyrant and a coward.
 
He commented on Brad's collection

of guns, his arsenal, bullet-proof vests, his hideout in the woods, and

his police car.
 
"Where's his military record?"
 
he asked the jury.

"When this country needed men who were really menþthat had to use gunsþ

where was Mr. Cunningham?
 
He's my age.
 
I haven't heard about any

disabilities.
 
Why didn't he go to Vietnam or to the desert?
 
Mr.

Cunningham was trying to get rich.
 
He was collecting automobiles.

MercedesBenzes.
 
Stables of them...."

Shinn pointed out a pattern in Brad's behavior that was so clearly

predictable.
 
"Mr.
 
Cunningham uses vehicles against women....

Stealing cars.
 
Hiding keys from his wives....When Lauren Cunningham

was delivering her baby in the hospital, he calls her up, I've just

repossessed your car."
 
" It was true.
 
Brad collected exotic cars as

symbols of his masculinity.
 
He also used them to get even with the

women in his life.
 
He had killed Cheryl in her car.

Step by step, Shinn reminded the jury of the many "bizarre" actions

that witnesses who knew Brad had testified to.
 
Using charts, photos,

maps, and the videotape of the re-enactment of the crime, he once more

called up the last moments of Cheryl's life.
 
He sounded angry.
 
He was

angry.
 
It would have been impossible to spend so much time immersed in

her life and tragic death without coming away with a compelling need

for justice.

Brad Cunningham was not there in that courtroom on Friday, May 16,

1991.
 
But his image was flayed, pinned to the wall, and laid out for

the jurors to study.
 
He was a coward, a con man, a sadist, a monstrous

father, a faithless husband, a killer.

The jury retired to deliberate.
 
Mike Shinn had not suggested to them a

specific amount of damages.
 
He asked only for a verdict that would

serve as a memorial to Cheryl "so that her life didn't end in total