Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (20 page)

how bad it could get.

Susan would remember being beaten only twice.
 
"I was about eleven and

my father never beat me again because I called the authorities and he

was forbidden to touch me.
 
After that, he put me in a dark closet to

punish me.
 
It was my safe place to hide from all the fights.
 
I'd sit

there on top of my shoes, holding my dog, and feel safe."
 
She would

blame Rosemary for instigating the violence in her family.
 
"She

controlled all of it.... My dad was squashed.
 
He did what she said,

and he never stopped any of the abuse."

Rosemary allegedly belittled Brad and tried to break down his

aggressive personality.
 
When Sanford was away, she made him do

housework.

Then something bad happened when Brad was about eleven or twelve,

something that alienated him from his mother for the rest of her

life.

According to Brad, he stayed home from school one day and Rosemary

thought he was malingering.
 
To punish him, she made him put on a dress

and clean the house.
 
When Sanford came home and found his son dressed

that way, he hit the roof.
 
From that moment on, Rosemary had no say

whatsoever in Brad's life.
 
When she spoke to him, it was like shouting

into the wind.
 
He didn't listen to her.
 
He didn't respect her.
 
He

certainly didn't obey her.
 
The family itself was sliced right down the

middle.
 
Sanford and Brad were on one side, Rosie and Ethel and Susan

were on the other.
 
"Brad could do anything he wanted," a relative

recalled.
 
"The girls were out."

Brad's story about being forced to dress as a girl may have been true,

it may also have been a confabulation that he fashioned from articles

he had read about the actor James Garner, whose stepmother had done the

same thing to him.
 
Brad's rendition was startlingly like.the

oft-published account of Garner's bitter childhood in which he told of

grabbing a broom from his stepmother's hands and chasing her with it.

He also recalled that his father was shocked to find out that his

stepmother made him dress in girl's clothes, and that she had been

banished.

Perhaps Brad's story was true.
 
Perhaps both men had suffered the same

humiliation.
 
Perhaps not.
 
But if Brad was frequently knocked around

as a child, he was no angel himself.
 
Ethel remembered the time when

she was eight and he was seven.
 
He had done something wrong and

thought she was going to tattle.
 
"He came back to my bedroom and

punched me in the stomach and he said, Don't you tell on me!"

" The Cunninghams always had little, barky dogs, and Brad enjoyed

grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks and shoving their snouts

together to make them fight.
 
Other relatives would remember Brad as a

kid with a "hair-trigger" temper.
 
No one in his family denied that, by

the time he was twelve, he went after his mother with a baseball bat.

He was a big kid and Rosemary was frightened as she tried in vain to

wrestle it away from him.
 
Ethel ran to the phone and called her father

and begged him to come home.
 
When Sanford got there, he hit Brad and

barked an order, "Don't you ever raise your hand to me or ever hit your

mother again!

Photographs in the Cunningham family album looked as wholesome as any

family's: Susan sitting with her mother at a mother-daughter tea, both

of them smiling, Brad and Ethel together, Brad sitting on the couch

with his arm around his mother, Sanford and Rosie hugging.
 
They were

an extremely photogenic family, but photographs can be deceiving.

That is not to say there were no good times in the family.
 
But they

seemed to occur only when they were away from home.
 
It was as if there

was an energy in the house that kept all their old resentments alive in

a time warp, ready to reignite.
 
When they went on vacation, it was

like magic.
 
"We never fought when we went camping.
 
We were a whole

different family," Susan would remember.
 
They all became somehow nicer

to each other, less combative than the family that lived at home.

Brad got his love for cars and trucks and trailers and all manner of

heavy equipment from his father.
 
Sanford had a king cab International

truck to pull his huge camping trailer.
 
The whole family traveled

together through Oregon, California, and New Mexico.
 
They went rock

hounding and explored caves.
 
"The camping was so good," Susan

remembered many years after the fact.
 
"Our parents would sing

together, harmonizing, songs from the thirties and the forties.

Everything was really great.
 
Nobody hit anybody.
 
Bodies weren't

flying."

If only they could have kept the good feelings they had when they went

camping and brought them home.
 
For whatever reason, the pressure was

off when they were sailing down the road in the big old International

truck, or sitting around a campfire listening to Sanford and Rosie

sing.

But the closer they got to home, the more the tension built.
 
They

were, essentially, a family divided: husband against wife, parents

against children, brother against sisters, male against female.
 
They

had no loyalty to one another and no connections.
 
There had been too

much violence, too much punishment, too much rivalry.

Sanford always believed that money solved everything, and Brad learned

that lesson well.
 
And Sanford believed that women were inferior to

men.

"Your place is in the bedroom or the kitchen," he lectured the girls.

"All a woman is good for is to cook and be a whore in bed."

His daughters would fight to prove him wrong.
 
His son apparently

believed him.

As Brad entered his teenage ,years in the early 1960s, Sanford grew

even prouder of his son.
 
He rarely punished him now, even when Brad

was rude to Rosieþwhich he often was.
 
Sanford would no longer back

Rosie up when she tried to discipline Brad.
 
This was his son, after

all, the boy who represented his immortality, and Rosie was only a

woman.

For all of her life, Rosemary would love her son, despite the

tribulations he caused her, despite her doubts about him.
 
For all of

his life, Sanford would be proud that Brad was the smartest and best of

the Cunningham clan.
 
Father and son, neither could do wrong in the

eyes of the other.
 
Sanford's values were Brad's values, and as Brad

grew older, he and his father shared their most intimate secrets.

Ethel left home and married.
 
She had a boy and a girl, and later

adopted a Native American boy.
 
And as the years passed and Rosemary

and Caroline put on a few pounds, the fragile beauty of their girlhood

years blurred.
 
Rosemary fought to keep her slender figure, and she

insisted on dressing well.
 
Even so, her husband viewed her more as a

mother and a housekeeper than as a lover.
 
The metamorphosis was

gradual enough that it was accomplished before Rosemary and Caroline

realized the place they had come to.
 
It was hard to look at the fading

snapshots in the old albums and remember that they had been those

incandescently beautiful girls clinging to Jimmy's and Sanford's

muscular arms.

Just as with all families, the years brought losses.
 
First, Caroline's

baby girl dead in the driveway.
 
And then in the mid-1960s, Dr. Paul

Cunningham and his second wife, Lydia, were in a terrible car wreck in

Rose Hill.
 
Grandpa Cunningham looked worse to the ambulance crew and

they rushed him to the hospital.
 
They didn't expect him to live until

morning.
 
But it wasn't Grandpa Cunningham who died, it was l.ydia who

dropped dead of a stroke, brought on either by the accident itself or

by her worry over her husband.
 
Brad's grandfather recovered and lived

for many more years.

Jimmy and Caroline would lose another of their five children.

Terry, misdiagnosed at a local hospital and told to go home and rest,

died suddenly of meningitis.
 
All his life Brad had tried to grow

bigger and stronger than Terry, but he never succeeded.
 
Relatives were

bemused when Brad proved to be the most hysterical of the mourners at

Terry's funeral.
 
As he walked past his cousin's casket, he fell to the

floor in a dead faint.

Gary Cunningham grew up to take a job with the Washington State

Department of Transportation.
 
But in the middle and late 1960s,

Sanford and Rosie's boy, Brad, was still the standout cousin, both

athletically and intellectually.
 
Brad had always been smarter than all

of them.

And he never let them forget it.
 
If he had a flaw in his

made-for-success personality, it was that he seemed unable to downplay

his accomplishments.
 
He was so successful that sometimes it was hard

to like him.
 
When he might have shown a little humility, he crowed.

Although in later years Brad wasn't close to his extended family, he

occasionally showed up at the Cunningham reunions on Whidbey Island.

He attracted women with ease, and his romantic history was so speckled

that no one ever knew which girlfriend or wifeþhe might bring with

him.

One thing was certain, however.
 
When Brad did arrive, he could be

counted on to have the classiest vehicle of anyone there.
 
Like his

father, it was important to Brad that the family see how well he was

doing.
 
"One year," a cousin said, "he came driving up in this

superjeep."
 
He was showing off, but he showed off too much and he got