Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (32 page)

sat down with the vice president and described the situation.
 
I said

that 1 was confident that I would get some sort of settlement from the

divorce.

t Jnbelievably, the bank carried me through the divorce and let me stay

in the condominium."

Over that lonely Christmas of 1977 and into the first months of 1978,

Lauren was furious with Cheryl.
 
She was probably angrier at her ol(l

friend than she was at the husband who had walked out on her.
 
There

was another cruelty that had been inflicted on her.
 
"When Cheryl

separated from Danþand I am confident that she and Brad were then

involved in an intimate relationship," Lauren said, "Brad and I were

the ones that helped her move into her new apartment and carried her

furniture in .
 
.

. just some memories that are sort of hard to stomach."

Lauren hoped never to see or talk to Cheryl again.
 
What good would

words or explanations do?
 
What had happened had happened.
 
But a few

weeks after Lauren found herself alone, she did see Cheryl again.

Even as she still carried his unborn child, Brad had begun divorce

proceedings against her, and Cheryl came with Brad to the tiny condo

where Lauren now lived.
 
"She was the person to hand me the divorce

documents," Lauren-said.
 
"That was salt in the wound."

After seeing Brad's smug face as he watched Cheryl present her with

divorce papers, Lauren realized that Brad had really left her, that he

wasn't just going through a temporary lapse.
 
He loved Cheryl and not

her.
 
That loss was bad enough.
 
The loss of Cheryl's friendship was

difficult too.
 
Her behavior was totally alien to the person Lauren had

known for almost a decade.
 
It was as if she were hypnotized.
 
She had

never known Cheryl to doþor even sa›!þan unkind thing before.

Lauren could not have imagined that the day would come when she would

forgive Cheryl, when she would begin to understand why Cheryl had

changed so completely from her sorority sister and confidante and dear

friend into the woman who had stolen her husband and wrecked her

life.

There would even come a day when Lauren would feel sorry for Cheryl.

If Lauren assumed that Brad was completely out of her lifeþthat he had

abandoned all interest in herþshe was woefully mistaken.
 
Brad was not

finished with her.
 
She still had things he wanted.
 
Lauren had legal

claim to some of his real estate holdings.
 
But more than that, more

than anything, she was carrying his child.
 
Brad was still fighting

Loni Ann to win back Kit and Brent, and he wanted this child too.
 
He

was a "child keeper," a man obsessed with owning all the children he

had sired.

Even before Lauren gave birth, Brad filed for custody of the baby.

And although she was hugely pregnant and struggling to survive

financially, he began to fight her in one court hearing after another

for property he considered rightly his.
 
She met him in court or in

their attorneys' offices for almost a dozen hearings and

depositions.

Lauren had naively hired an attorney who would have been perfectly

adequate for a simple divorce, hut Brad had never had a simple

divorce.

Lauren's attorney asked her if there were any marital assets that she

might still he able to claim, and she remembered that she and Brad had

a joint bank account that had twelve thousand dollars in it.
 
The

attorney took Lauren at once to the bank so she could withdraw the

money, with that done, he was confident that she would now have

something to live on.
 
Brad was livid when he found the twelve thousand

dollars missing.
 
He filed to freeze money in Lauren's

accountþsuccessfullyþand she could use none of the twelve thousand

dollars to take care of herself as she drew closer and closer to giving

birth.

Brad battled with Lauren over everything.
 
She had an oriental rugþ a

rug that had been in her family for years before they passed it on to

her at her wedding.
 
Now Brad claimed that it belonged to him.
 
He even

deposed Lauren's mother in his efforts to get it away from Lauren.

Lauren's original attorney saw that she was in for a terrible courtroom

struggle.
 
"Within a couple of weeks," she recalled, "he told me that I

needed a big gun."

" She hired another attorney, one known for digging in and fighting.

But by the time she was nine months pregnant, the war had just begun

and she was learning that the charming, wonderfully sensitive man she

had married had an entirely different side.
 
She would remember that he

"was extremely litigious and seemed anxious to do whatever he could do

to make things uncomfortable and difficult in the course of our divorce

proceedings."

Lauren's due date was during the week of March 26, which included the

Easter weekend, a three-day holiday.
 
Since she now lived alone, she

would have to depend on her telephone to call for help when she went

into labor.
 
She was appalled one night during that long weekend when

she picked up her phone to make a call and heard only dead air.
 
She

discovered that Brad had had her phone disconnected.
 
"I went through

some frantic time," Lauren said, "to get the phone hooked up because I

was alone."

When she did go into labor, Lauren had to count on her family and

friends to get her to the hospital.
 
She went through her labor alone,

delivering her baby on a soft spring night.
 
She might as well have

been an unwed mother.
 
In truth, she would have been better off Amy

Cunningham, a beautiful little girl, made up for a lot of the pain her

mother had gone through in the months before her birth.
 
But the pain

was not yet over.
 
The phone in Lauren's hospital room rang the day

after Amy was born.
 
It was Brad.

"I understand that we have a daughter," he said flatly, and before

Lauren could reply, he went on, "I wanted to let you know that I have

had your car repossessed."

Lauren wasn't even very surprised.
 
This was the Brad she had come,

bitterly, to know all too well.
 
He didn't seem thrilled or even

moderately happy about the baby.
 
Even so, Lauren knew that Amy would

he used as a pawn in Brad's war against her, and she felt a chill.

When she had left for the hospital, Lauren's car was parked, she

thought safely, in an underground garage at the University Towers where

she lived.
 
She learned later that Brad had talked the property manager

into letting him into.the parking area.
 
The car was gone when she

returned from the hospital.
 
"I don't know how he did it," Lauren

said.

"He probably had keys."
 
She never got her car back.

Even before Lauren regained her strength after childhirth, the legal

fight with Brad accelerated.
 
She was asking for full custody of Amy,

while Brad requested joint custody.
 
Their divorce trial was held

before Superior Court Judge Stanley Soderland, who had just been voted

the most respected judge in King County, Washington.
 
"My attorney was

not hopeful about my efforts to basically erase Brad from my life,"

Lauren recalled, "but he said, You are hiring me, and if this is what

you want to go for, this is what I will ask for."

" Lauren had requested that Brad undergo psychiatric testingþand he, of

course, countered with a request that she be tested too.
 
In the end,

the results were a wash.
 
According to the doctors who evaluated the

test results, neither Lauren nor Brad showed any emotional pathology.

Ultimately, Lauren put her faith in pure common sense.
 
She was the

abandoned spouse, and she figured that when Brad deserted her, he had

walked away from Amy too.
 
"My point was that Brad had relinquished his

paternal rights when he walked out before she was born.
 
And the judge

said, You are wrong."
 
He said, He is the biological father."

" Judge Soderland awarded Lauren sole custody of Amy but he said he

could not prevent her father from seeing her.
 
Soderland set up very

rigid visitation schedules for the first four years of Amy's life,

commenting that he hoped that Lauren and Brad could work out their own

custody arrangements after Amy was four.

Amy's visits with her father began when she was a month old.

Lauren was ordered by the court to take her to the King County

Courthouse and give her new baby to Brad for hour-long visits.
 
"I had

to turn her over to him, and he took her into another room for an

hour," Lauren remembered.

"It was torture for me.... I was scared to death that he was going to

leave with her.... I was awarded sole custody, which is not what he

wanted.
 
It just made me very, very nervous."

Possibly only a new mother can empathize with the terror in Lauren's

heart as she carried her month-old daughter onto the creaky elevators

of the King County Courthouse and then walked through the marblelined

halls to meet Brad.
 
Every courtroom and chamber in the venerable

building has at least two exits, every floor can be reached by

stairways as well as elevators.
 
One courthouse door exits onto Third

Avenue and another onto Fourth Avenue, while tunnels run from the

courthouse's first floor and basement to two entirely separate

buildings.
 
Had Brad wanted to take Amy away, it would have been so

easy.
 
But at the end of each hour's visit, he returned the tiny baby

girl to her mother.

Lauren had no idea what he did while he had the baby.
 
Did he talk to

Amy, rock her, walk around with her?
 
Or did he simply put her on a