Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (37 page)

sister-has no brains.
 
Don't be like your sister, she has no common

sense."

"We'd be on vacation or something and I wouldn't be allowed to swim,"

Kit said.
 
"I'd have to take care of the towels because of something

I'd done.
 
I was nine or ten.
 
Maybe I told stories or I would

exaggerate, and that made him mad."
 
Brent felt sorry for her and tried

to help.

Later, when her father was married to Cheryl, Cheryl too felt sorry for

Kit.

She was always being confined to her room for something she had done to

displease Brad.
 
It was Cheryl who would let her out, and tell her to

come to dinner with the rest of them.

But Kit Cunningham had a resilience about her, she was a strongminded

girl.
 
She would need that strength.

Brad remained in Houston in late 19X2 and through the spring of 1983,

while Cheryl tried to keep his face alive in the minds of Jess and

Michael and make him a part of their family even though he was so often

far away.
 
When Brad returned to Seattle, Loni Ann and Lauren were

forced by law to permit visitation with their children.
 
They both

longed to have Brad out of their lives, but he insisted on contact with

his offspring.
 
If his visits were sporadic, he wanted it that way.

When Brad claimed Kit or Brent or Amy, he behaved with them as he did

with Jess and Michael.

They were his.
 
They belonged to him.
 
The women who had given them

birth and cared for them were only convenient vessels, and quite

dispensable.

On one of his visits to Seattle, after he had learned that Kit was

living with her grandparents, Brad picked her up one evening to take

her out to dinner with Jess and Michael.
 
But when he headed back

toward her grandparents' after dinner, he drove right past the turnoff

to their street.
 
"Are you going to be living with us on Bainbidge?"

Jess asked Kit excitedly.

"No," Kit said.

"Yes, you are," Brad said, and Kit realized that he must have already

announced that to her little half brothers.

Kit didn't know what to say.
 
She wanted to live with her mother, and

she had only been visiting her grandparents.
 
She didn't want to live

with her father.
 
"I went to court and got an order to have you live

with me legally.
 
I'm now taking custody of you," her father told her,

adding that Loni Ann was not a fit mother.
 
He said that Loni Ann

couldn't deal with her any longer, and that Kit would now be living

with him.

When her father said something, it was so definite.
 
Kit didn't even

consider protesting.
 
From the time she could remember, she had sensed

that her mother was afraid of her father.
 
She had seen that her mother

always backed down, capitulated, struggling to maintain peace.

Kit did not live on Bainbridge Island long.
 
When Brad returned to

Houston, he took her with him.
 
She would never understand why.

Maybe he wanted company.
 
Maybe he simply wanted a whipping boy (or, in

her case, a kicking girl).
 
Everything she did seemed to annoy him, and

he apparently had little use for anything female.
 
It was to be the

beginning of a horrendous ordeal for Kit.
 
It was also, perhaps, a

period that would demonstrate for the first time what a tremendously

strong girl she was.
 
She may well have inherited the best of her

father's traitsþhis self-confidence, his refusal to give up in spite of

great odds, and a hard pride.
 
She would need all of that armor to

survive so far away from her mother, her brother, and her

grandparents.

Brad enrolled Kit in junior high school in Houston and she tried,

tentatively, to make friends.
 
She was graceful and athletic, as both

her parents were.
 
She won a medal in track and brought it home to show

her father.
 
Instead of being proud of her, Brad was annoyed.
 
"He took

it away from me," Kit recalled.
 
"I don't really know why.
 
He told me

I wasn't to leave my roomþthat I was being punishedþbut I didn't know

why.... I won several ribbons and other awards.
 
[He took those too.] I

never got them back from him."

Kit was continually confused.
 
She wasn't sure why she was in Houston

in the first place, and she never knew what was going to make her

father angry.
 
Her punishments were usually the removal of privileges

or of the belongings that meant the most to her.
 
"He did that

frequently," she recalled.
 
"I wouldn't know exactly what I did.

He-would take my clothes awayþthe things you would wear out

normallyþand he made me wear clothes that you would use to paint the

house, you know, your ripped-up, bummy clothes.
 
I was obliged to wear

those.
 
I wasn't allowed to do any preparation for schoolþlike curling

my hair þthe things you did when you were young.... Sometimes, I could

earn back my clothes, and I'd have them for a while, and then he'd take

them away again, and I could never understand why.
 
I got to the point

where I'd go into school early and get ready in the bathroom.

"After the after-school activities, before I'd go home, I'd get my hair

all wet and take all the makeup off I wasn't allowed to wear that.

Basically, he'd take away all my privileges.
 
It was embarrassing for

me to go into school with my hair all over the place and my bummy

clothes.

That didn't feel good.
 
Everyone in school wasn't doing that and you

had that peer pressure.
 
I got to the point where I'd get ready in the

morning, even if I had to miss a class to do it.
 
He didn't know I was

doing that."

Loni Ann knew that Kit was with her father in Texas, but she had no

way to bring her back, she could only try to comfort her daughter when

Kit was able to sneak away to a phone booth and call.
 
It was agony

for Loni Ann to hear her sob on the phone and not be able to help

her.

For Kit, the only semblance of a normal family life occurred when Brad

brought the little boys down for a visit and Kit baby-sat them.

Sometimes Cheryl could get away too for a short time and visit Brad.

He had assured Cheryl that living with him was the best thing for Kit,

her mother wasn't capable of taking care of her.

Brad spent a good deal of his time at his office, he had to.
 
He was

still fighting desperately to save the real estate empire that had been

burgeoning only a year earlier.
 
He ran a "secretarial service,"

although the details of that business enterprise were vague.

Apparently he was using office space in the one building he had

completed before Parkwood Plaza faltered.

Just like her mother a dozen years earlier, Kit was required to let

Brad know where she was at all times.
 
And she soon became the target

for her father's rage and frustration.
 
Eventually she had to go to a

counselor because she had begun to break under the abuse.
 
In her

sessions, or whenever they were around other people, her father

jokinglyþeven fondlyþturned away her accusations: "Stop lying,

Kit....

Why are you doing that?
 
Knock it off.
 
Be a good girl."

"He sounded very genuine," Kit marveled years later.
 
"You almost felt

like you were crazy because there wasn't a hint of maliciousness.... It

was as if I was a liar or something, and it almost made it worse."

Wezs she somehow to blame?
 
No.
 
He was the one who told her over and

over that she was nothing more than garbage.
 
He was the one who told

her that her mother was a bad mother who had mistreated Kit and Brent,

who had kept a filthy house, who had done terrible things.
 
He had

explained to her through gritted teeth that all women were liars.
 
All

women were garbage.

"He said I was going to be like my mother," Kit recalled.
 
"He said I

was going to be pregnant by the time I was eighteen."
 
But Kit knew

what Loni Ann was really like.
 
She had chosen, always, to live with

her mother.
 
"She was sensitive.
 
She was human.
 
I could talk to her

about things.
 
I could come to her when I had a problem.
 
She was a

very good person."

All of Brad's abuse took place behind the locked and alarmed door of

his apartment.
 
No one knew that he was anything but a concerned,

long-suffering single parent.
 
Brad would occasionally tell Kit that

they were going for a drive.
 
"Then," she related, "he would pull over

and scream at me and tell me I was garbage and stupid and ugly, and I

was no good and I would never amount to anything.
 
That I was crazy..

.

those things sort of stick with you after a while."

Kit was like a little mouse trapped in a cage, constantly beset with

different signals.
 
Sometimes, when her father raved on and on about

how terrible her mother was, she would break into sobs.
 
And then, as

they were about to go out into the world that saw Brad as a suave

executive and a concerned father, he would change instantly and become

that person.
 
"Come give your father a hug.
 
I love you."

"I wouldn't hug him and he'd say, Oh, hug your father."
 
And I'd go to

school so screwed up.
 
I didn't have friends because people thought I

was weird."

There was little point in Kit trying to have friends anyway.
 
Brad