Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (19 page)

They bought a good-sized L-shaped house on a large lot.
 
A huge step up

from the project, it had an impressive-looking stone facade, and they

planted trees as a buffer against the traffic noise on 128th.
 
Jimmy

bought a house a few blocks away.
 
And while it was true that Jimmy and

Sanford were closer than most brothers, and that they had depended on

each other since they were little boys, it didn't mean they weren't

competitive.

Sanford always seemed to have a newer, more expensive car than Jimmy

did, and a nicer house.
 
And he always seemed to have more money.

Through the years, Sanford held a variety of jobs, sometimes as a

contractor, sometimes in the glass business, and later with Associated

Grocers.
 
"My dad was a consultant on building projects and landscaping

Susan would remember.
 
"He traveled most of the time.
 
He was the only

really financially successful man in his family.
 
My dad never felt

that anyone really liked him, but he thought he could make them like

him with money.
 
It seemed as though my father was gone most of my

life.
 
He showed his love by buying things for me.
 
When I was older, I

was getting a hundred-dollar-a-month allowance.
 
If I said I was

interested in skiing, my dad would take me out and buy me skis, boots,

the whole outfit."

Some members of the family, with a bit of envy, would recall that

Sanford used credit lavishly, and nobody ever knew whether he really

made that much more money than Jimmy or if he was paying on everything

by the month.
 
Either way, Sanford and Rosie were happier when they

were poor.

The Cunningham cousins all went to Cedarhurst Grade School,

Cascade Junior High, and Evergreen High School.
 
They celebrated

birthdays and holidays together.
 
They were beautiful children, a happy

melding of their Anglo-Saxon and Indian genes.
 
Jimmy's son Gary was

the handsomest by far of the boys, and his son Terryþwho was Brad's

ageþwas the biggest.
 
But Brad was the natural athlete and

unquestionably the smartest.
 
As a childþand later as manþhe had

uncommon brilliance.

He was a leader, a bossy, confrontive boy who could be a bully at

times.

In every family snapshot he stood out, grinning broadly, dominating

each celebration.
 
He mugged for the camera outrageously, pushing his

cousins out of the way as if to say, "Look at me!
 
Look at me!"

As they got older, many of the Cunningham cousins grew to dislike

Brad.

Some were afraid of him.
 
"When Brad showed up to play, I always went

home," one girl cousin remembered.
 
"I knew that pretty soon somebody

would be crying, or maybe that someone was going to get hurt."

And Brad was highly competitive with his cousin Terry.
 
Terry was

always larger than Bradþmaybe not by a lot, but there was no question

that he was the taller.
 
He was a month younger than Brad, and it

rankled Brad that Terry outgrew him.
 
His cousin Gary had trouble with

reading.

He was dyslexic long before the deficit was commonly diagnosed, and

Brad teased and tormented him about that.
 
Brad could read anything

from an early age and he always had superior report cards.
 
Even after

they were adults, Gary didn't care to be around Brad.

No one really knew what went on inside Rosie's and Sanford's house, no

one but the family who lived there.
 
There were secrets kept inside

those walls.
 
As the years went by, the marriage that had begun with

such high expectations right after the Second World War wasn't turning

out the way Sanford and Rosie had hoped.
 
While things appeared calm on

the surface, the family dynamics were ugly and hurtful and, ultimately

explosive.

Brad's birth may have been the catalyst for the inexorable

disintegration of the Cunningham family.
 
At the very least, his

arrival marked the end of Ethel's small place in the sun.
 
He was a man

child and Ethel was only a girl.
 
Sanford was delighted to have a

son.

As an adult, Brad would recall that he had been told his mother's labor

for his birth had been prolonged and arduous, and she had always blamed

him because he had such a large head.
 
He was a big baby with a

disproportionately large and rounded headþa physical characteristic

that would stay with him.
 
When Rosemary developed uterine (or perhaps

cervical) cancer four years after his birth, Brad said she blamed him

for that, too.

When Rosemary became pregnant for the third time, she faced an

agonizing decision.
 
She took a gamble with her health to deliver Susan

safely.
 
"My mother was diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant

with me," Susan recalled.
 
"She wouldn't have an abortionþshe delayed

treatment until I was born."
 
After Susan's birth, Rosemary underwent a

complete hysterectomy.
 
She was still in her twenties.
 
"She had to

have chemotherapy and radium treatment," Susan said.
 
"Those treatments

were in their infancy in the 1950s, and Mom suffered severe internal

burns.

And she had to take hormones, too, and they didn't work right.

Everything went wrong.
 
She even grew a mustache."

It may have been Rosemary's health that changed her personality.

Susan would remember that her mother was a woman of mercurial moods.

"She never disciplined us, though.
 
She kept track of who was supposed

to be punished and told my father when he came home.
 
Dad would rather

have been anyplace but there.
 
Sometimes we'd all been waiting for four

hours to get whipped and we were all terrified."

The children sensed that Sanford didn't want to beat themþthat when he

came home after a day's work, he would have much preferred to be

greeted with something other than a list of his children's misdeeds.

But he nodded as Rosemary told him which of the children needed

punishing, and he unbuckled his belt.
 
"He beat us with a strap," Susan

recalled.

"Mostly Ethel and Brad.
 
I was younger.
 
One time, I saw that Ethel had

welts all up and down her back and legs.
 
She had to go to school like

that, but she wore stockings and clothes that hid the marks."

Although Sanford dreaded taking his belt to his children, he soon fell

into a kind of frenzy.
 
"He really got into it," Susan remembered.

"He hit harder and harder.
 
He really lost control."
 
But, in Susan's

recall, it was Ethel who was the psychological whipping girl in their

home.

Pictures in the family albums show Ethel and Brad when they were

toddlers.
 
They were only a year apart and Brad was so large that they

looked like twins.
 
Indeed, Rosemary often dressed them in matching

.sunsuits.
 
But it was definitely Brad who drew most of the positive

attention in the family.
 
Other family members would agree that Ethel

was left out, but felt that Susan wasn't.
 
"Their whole house was

decorated with Brad and Susan," one cousin recalled.
 
"Brad had so many

athletic honors and Susan was so pretty that their pictures were all

over, but you hardly ever saw any of Ethel.

As a child, Susan adored her big brother.
 
She saw Brad as a protector

and a hero.
 
He took her along with him, and he didn't seem to find her

an annoying baby sister.
 
She felt proud to be with him.
 
"Brad taught

me how to catch a football.
 
He built a bicycle for me.
 
Brad was the

only one who listened to me.
 
Later, when I dropped out of college for

a while, he listened to my reasons and he didn't say I was stupid.
 
He

was my idol."

Rosemary tried to discourage Susan from bonding with her brother.

"When I was little, she told me that Brad was evil," Susan

remembered.

"I didn't know why she said that."
 
And although Sanford favored his

son, Brad still took his lumps along with the other children when

Rosemary said he needed punishing.

Both Susan and Ethel recalled that Brad had suffered a concussion from

falling down the basement steps.
 
Ethel remembered that when Brad was

five or six, he was helping his father move wood from the woodpile.

He had tied a rope to a log and was tugging it behind him.
 
But as he

tugged, he lost his balance and fell backward about ten feet, down the

steps to the basement, landing on his head.
 
Ethel said her parents

took Brad to a doctor who told them to watch for "personality changes

such as acts of violence."
 
But if Brad was only five or six when he

landed on his head, Ethel would have been only six or seven and

probably the doctor story was apocryphal.

Susan, who would have been little more than a toddler at the time of

the "log on a rope fall," said she had watched Sanford knock Brad down

the basement steps when he was twelve.
 
"Brad was stunned.
 
He was

saying funny things, all garbled up, and he didn't make any sense."

Susan would have been about seven when that happened.
 
But she had

quite clear recall of other acts of violence and abuse that bounced off

the walls inside the house in Burien.

To the outside worldþeven to Sanford's brother Jimmy and his wife

Carolineþlife was normal in Sanford's and Rosie's family.
 
Only the

children caught in the love-hate relationship between Sanford and Rosie

would witness the venom that Rosie sometimes spewed after the flawed

hormone treatment following her hysterectomy.
 
Only the children knew