Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (25 page)

her.

They were supposed to be the perfect couple, and Loni Ann knew that

perfect wives don't anger perfect husbands to the point that those

wives must be punished.
 
Brad was a stickler about appearances.
 
No one

outside their marriage had any hint that they were anything but "the

ideal, happy couple."
 
Brad wanted it that way.
 
He was a young

business prodigy on his way up.

It was Memorial Day 1971, and they had been married two years.

Loni Ann had snapped and she had broken a number of Brad's rules.
 
The

party was a going-away party for one of Loni Ann's friends, a woman she

had come to depend on.
 
The fact that one of her few close friends was

moving away was a blow to her.
 
Although she had never told anyone

about Brad's beatings, her friends were still important to her.
 
She

hated to lose even one.
 
Maybe that was why she had had too much to

drink.
 
Brad was incredulous that she could embarrass him that way.

But then she had committed an even more terrible offense.

Before she passed out, Loni Ann had crossed another invisible,

forbidden line.
 
She blurted out secrets too long pent up.
 
She told

about Brad's brutality.
 
Even as her alcohol-loosened tongue babbled on

about how awful things were in her marriage, she knew somewhere deep

inside that Brad would never in this world forgive her.
 
Never.

And then she had became violently ill.

Her girlfriends led Loni Ann into the bathroom and one of them held her

head while she vomited.
 
She was neither the first nor the last wife

who drank too much, told secrets, and thoroughly embarrassed her

husband.

But Brad was capable of a singular kind of rage, an emotion so inherent

and dominant in his nature that it defied opposition.
 
Loni Ann had

seen it.
 
His mother, Rosemary, had glimpsed it.
 
And his father had to

be aware of his compulsion to control, though Sanford accepted whatever

Brad did, Brad was his son and not unlike himself.

Even with all the beatings she had gone through, Loni Ann had never

seen Brad as angry as he was at the party.
 
He had pounded on the door

of the bathroom and demanded to be let in.
 
Her friends saw that she

was terrified and refused to open the door.
 
Brad simply broke in and

grabbed Loni Ann by the arm, half pulling, half dragging her to their

car.

She didn't remember that part, she had passed out.

When she awoke, they were on a dark road.
 
"I was sick.
 
I was very

tired," she remembered.
 
"When he stopped the car, he walked me a few

feet away from the road and told me, Just stay here."

" Loni Ann was still too drunk to walk and frightened half out of her

wits.
 
Brad propped her up at the edge of the road and drove off,

leaving her surrounded by absolute pitch-black night.

She stayed.
 
The ground seemed to undulate beneath her, and she

struggled to keep upright.
 
Finally she began to crawl, reaching out in

the darkness, trying to find the road.
 
She could feel nothing in front

of her, so she turned around.
 
Then she saw lights in the distance,

lights that would prove to be miles away.
 
In a daze she made her way

to an all-night gas station where she called the police.
 
She knew they

didn't quite believe her, she knew she smelled like vomit and alcohol,

but she was too tired to explain any further.
 
They took her home, but

Brad wouldn't come to the door and so they left her at Sanford and

Rosemary's house.

Because Loni Ann was only rarely allowed to drive their car, she had to

wait five months before she could retrace the route to the dark place

Brad had taken her.
 
The night after the Memorial Day party haunted

her.

She had a sense of where she had been, the general area, because she

had actually been relatively close to home.
 
But there wasSanother

feeling that gripped her when she tried to remember.
 
It was terror,

and she didn't know why.
 
She had already been punished for her

behavior at the party, and Brad had apparently smoothed over her

revelations as the ravings of a woman who couldn't hold her liquor.

What she felt wasn't fear of reprisal or humiliation, it was a

compelling need to know.
 
If she didn't find out where she had been,

she feared she might go back there one night and never return.

It was a sunny October day when Loni Ann was finally able to get their

car for the afternoon.
 
Unerringly, almost instinctively, she retraced

the road she had crawled along to reach the gas station and she found

the place where Brad had left her, the same smell she had detected that

night wafted in the air.
 
The leaves of the trees were gold and russet

now instead of the bright green they were in May.
 
That night she had

seen nothing but black, but she now knew where she had been.

Loni Ann suddenly felt nauseated again, sicker than the alcohol had

made her.
 
Her own husband had pulled her out of their car, pushed her

to this strip beside the road, and told her to stay there.
 
Her hack

had been to the road.
 
But only steps in front of her, in the place

where she had reached out her hands and touched nothing, she could now

see why.

Brad had left her inches away from a sharp drop-off above the Duwamish

River.
 
If she had gone forward instead of hack, she would have plunged

thirty feet down onto the rocks or into the river, and almost certainly

drowned.

"I looked down and I felt sick," she said a long time later.
 
"I

realized how close I came to walking off that cliff...."

Loni Ann drove home, the taste and smell of death in her mouth.
 
If he

ever found out where she had been, Brad would probably finish what she

was quite sure he had meant to do that night.
 
She thought back to when

Brad had picked her up at his parents' house the morning after he left

her by the river.
 
She wondered if he was only waiting for another day,

another opportunity.
 
How odd it was that things had gone on between

them as they always had.
 
He had to know what he did, but never spoke

of it.

And she cared for the apartment house and for Kit and Brent, and

acceded to whatever Brad asked of her.

She had loved him so much, now Loni Ann found It hard to remember love

at all.
 
Sex continued, but it was all for Brad.
 
"He forced me to do

whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it," she said.
 
When she finally

gathered up enough courage to ask for a divorce, Brad listened coldly

and then told her she would never be allowed to keep their children.

He reminded her of that every time she repeated her request.
 
"You'll

come crawling back to me," he jeered.

She could not leave her babies behind, and so she stayed, all the while

trying to think of a way for the three of them to escape.
 
Although

Brad seemed to find Kit and Brent a nuisance and spent little time

with them, he always reminded Loni Ann that they were hisþt' .
 
he

would never let something that belonged to him go Still, on the

surface, everything appeared to he normal.
 
No one knew how had things

were between them.
 
Brad occasionally allowed Loni Ann to play softball

with a local girls' team, they took fishing trips to the ocean, and

Loni Ann invited Brad's father and sisters over for dinner.

Perhaps inevitably, there were also dark undercurrents in Sanford and

Rosemary's marriage.
 
Brad and his father were now such close

confidants that he was fully aware that Sanford had begun an affair

with a woman named Mary.
 
He reportedly told his son that he was tired

of Rosemary.

And that may well have been true.
 
"My mom was really out of hand,"

their daughter Susan recalled.
 
"She lost her temper and was hard to

deal with."

Sanford traveled a great deal, all over Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and

Montana.
 
"You know," Susan later said, "I never really did know what

my dad did.
 
I know that he designed storefronts, he was always

bringing home blueprints to work on, and he was always gone, but to

tell you precisely which storesþor whereþI can't remember."

To read Sanford's letters to Rosemary and to hear of the gifts he gave

her in 1972, it would have been hard to believe there was trouble in

their marriage.
 
He may have been devious, he may have felt guilty, or

both.
 
"My father bought my mother a new wedding ring, and it was

loaded with diamonds," Susan recalled.
 
"And that was just before he

left her."

When Rosemary visited her mother that summer at the Kanakanak Native

Hospital in Dillingham, Alaska, where Ethel Edwards was working as a

nutritionist, Sanford wrote letters to her that were almost as full of

longing as those he had sent when he was a lovesick bridegroom in

Fresno in 1946.
 
He wrote her a stack of long letters, and all the time

he was in love with another woman and trying to figure out a way to

leave Rosemary and go to Mary.
 
On July 22, Sanford wrote to her from

their cabin in Darrington: Hi Sweetheart!

. . . Sunday, Xusan and I stood at the window in the airport waiting

for you to look out of the plane but you didn't....

The letter went on to tell of meals at Ethel's, visits from Susan and

Brad and Loni Ann.

Brad and Loni Ann and their kids are sleeping out in the front yard in

their new tent they bought.... Your nasturshims [sic] are all in bloom

and are quite pret.
 
The hummingbirds were sure complaining about

their feeder being empty, so I whipped up a batch and filled the