Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (18 page)

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 ,over 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 Se"Fair 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

allegianceþat least until they had sons of their ownþwas 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 thereþthe 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 Septe,nber 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

drivewav.

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.