Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (40 page)

eerie.

He turned on me a couple of times and frightened me too...."

After Brad moved back to Washington from Houston, he was often moody

and angry and hard to please.
 
Not hardþimpossible to please.
 
Jess and

Michael had been so anxious for their daddy to be home with them, but

when he was around, he ignored them.
 
He wasn't working, but he

continued to spend money as if he were.
 
When Cheryl demurred, he

turned on her, enraged.
 
It didn't matter that she was supporting him

and carrying his child.
 
He would brook no interference with his

preferred lifestyle.

Cheryl's sister Susan saw it too.
 
Despite all the covering up Cheryl

tried to do, she was a woman clearly miserable.
 
Worse, she was

afraid.

Susan had been a child when Cheryl started seeing Brad, and even then,

she knew that something was wrong.
 
Now Susan was a very mature

seventeen and had become more of a confidante to her sister.
 
She had

also become a close-up observer to the steady disintegration of

Cheryl's marriage.

It might be expected that a man who had seen his multimillion-dollar

project evaporate would be morose, particularly when his wife's career

was soaring.
 
Despite his boast that he would win his suit against the

construction company, Brad's financial picture was grim.
 
He had had it

all.
 
He had lost it all.
 
His temperament, never predictable, became

even more mercurial.
 
Cheryl had done everything she could to support

him þboth financially and emotionallyþand yet he seemed to blame her

for his troubles.

Then, inexplicably, Brad suddenly moved out of their house on

Bainbridge Island.
 
"Cheryl would come home from work and Brad's

furniture' would be gone," Susan recalled.
 
"There wouldn't be anything

left that was really valuableþthe rolltop desk, the leather chairs, the

T.V.

[were gone].
 
He would leave their bed and the kids' stuff."

Cheryl was constantly off balance.

Brad was home.

Brad had moved out.

Brad was traveling.

Brad was back.

As far as she could determine, he wasn't working, and he certainly

didn't seem to be earning any money.
 
He had filed for Chapter 11

bankruptcy.
 
He blamed the bonding and construction companies for

that.

Brad warned Cheryl that his legal action had unleashed sinister forces

that would have no compunction about destroying him, her, and the

boys.

With Brad, there was so much to be afraid of First, there was his own

anger if anyone broke his rules.
 
Second, there were malignant entities

that he said waited in the background to destroy him and all he stood

forþand he was ultimately convincing when he spoke of unseen danger.

He had not married a naive and gullible woman.
 
None of his wives had

been dumb.
 
Cheryl was, in fact, an extremely brilliant woman.
 
But

Brad could convince almost anyone of anything, and that included

attorneys and big business executives.

For Cheryl life became a constant walk through erratic situations, one

misstep and the calmness she had always sought evaporated.
 
In only a

few years .everything had changed so radically.
 
At work, she was still

totally in control, efficient and effective.
 
At home, she no longer

knew what Brad would do or, worse, what the people who were after him

might do.

Still, if it was true that they were all in danger, Cheryl wondered why

Brad didn't stay home with her and the little boys to protect them.

When she came home to find him and his possessions gone the first time,

she feared he had been abducted, even murdered.
 
Only later would she

find out that he had left of his own volitionþand for his own

reasons.

Cheryl never really understood what made Brad move out or where he had

gone.
 
She was afraid to be alone on the island, but she was more

afraid that Bradþor someoneþwould come back during the day and take

more things out of the house.
 
She asked Susan to move in with her and

help her take care of Jess and Michael.
 
"But I knew she wanted someone

there too while she was at work," Susan sighed, remembering.
 
"Someone

to guard the house.
 
She was very upset and she was pregnant."

Susan loved looking after her tWO young nephews.
 
"They were both

smart," she said.
 
"But Jess was more introspective, and Michael was

all high energy with a short attention span."
 
Michael was still a

toddler then, and Jess was three.
 
"He was brilliant," Susan

recalled.

"He asked me once, Where does glass come from?"
 
and then he went into

one of his meditative states.
 
Later, he popped up with Sand!
 
Glass is

made out of .sand!"
 
Jess always had phenomenal knowledge and

concentration, even when he was a really little kid."

While Cheryl worried about their finances, Brad continued to drive a

Mercedes.
 
Not just one, but several.
 
Susan, a typical teenager,

thought at first that his cars were "kind of neat."
 
He had the mammoth

Unimag.

He had two four-door Mercedes sedans, a Mercedes station wagon, and a

classic red two-seater Mercedes convertible.
 
Susan was sure that Brad

had to have money secreted somewhere.

"Well, I just don't know where it is," Cheryl said wearily.
 
"It

doesn't do me any good."

A woman who had always been in control, who thought precisely and

rationally, Cheryl was now often scattered and distraught.
 
She

consulted a psychologist in 1983, hoping that she could find a way to

run her life as smoothly as she ran her law practice and took care of

her sons.

Sharon McCulloch was still Cheryl's day-care provider and continued to

be a close friend.
 
Sharon admired Cheryl tremendously.
 
"She was Super

Mom.
 
I've taught school, I've taken care of over forty kids, and I've

never known a mom in my life as committed to her kids.... She could be

so busy, and if I called and said Jess had a little fever and asked her

if I should have the doctor look at his ears, she would be there in

twenty minutes.
 
Every birthday, she gave a party.... Her kids were her

life.
 
She was the highest-energy person I've ever met in my life.

She was a perfectionistþabout herself.
 
It's a little thing, but one

time her bra strap slipped down, and it was just pristine white.
 
That

was the way she was.
 
Her house was spotless.... She was good at

everything she did."

Sharon called Cheryl "the mother of the world."
 
She had to be.

Jess was three and a half, Michael was twenty-one months old, she was

four months pregnant, and now Brad was talking about how he might just

go to live in Yakima 150 miles away for a while.
 
He had some interest

left in tribal land over there.
 
He was thinking of starting a car wash

and a laundromat.
 
There was some acreage he thought they should buy.

Cheryl just stared at him, appalled.

She decided she had to move.
 
It was too difficult and too expensive

for her to stay on Bainbridge Island.
 
She needed to be closer to her

work and to her doctor.
 
She rented a house in Somerset, an

uppermiddle-class neighborhood near Bellevue on the east side of King

County.
 
Now she would no longer have to depend on the ferry service to

get to work, although the commute over the floating bridge could

sometimes be frustrating.

Brad moved with his family to Somerset, but then he left for Yakima.

Cheryl pinned up the big map again, to show Jess and Michael where

their daddy was.
 
Despite everything, she was still fighting to hold

the image of the perfect little family together.
 
The boys were

probably too young to understand, but she felt it vital that she keep

talking about Brad, letting them know that they did have a father.

If Cheryl was beginning to be afraidfor Brad, she was also often afraid

of Brad.
 
Even so, she clung to her hope that somehow things were going

to get better.
 
Sometimes her sister and her friends wanted to shake

her and tell her to wake up and smell the coffee.
 
One day Sharon

McCulloch and her daughter Mary visited Cheryl in the Somerset house.

"I remember that there was this huge stuffed animal there, and I said

something to Cheryl about it," Sharon recalled.
 
"She said, Brad bought

it, and I'm going to be paying for it for a long time."
 
" As they left,

they walked through the garage to get to their car.
 
Sharon was stunned

to see the number of guns in the garage.
 
She was more shocked to see

an elongated woven basket, it looked exactly like a coffinþan Indian

child's coffin.

Her jaw dropped, and she turned toward Cheryl to ask what it was.

"Oh," Cheryl said, embarrassed.
 
"That's Brad's idea of disciplineþ

keeping that in the garage for the boys."
 
When they were naughty, she

said uncomfortably, Brad took them out and showed them the coffin.

"He .
 
. . tells them that .
 
. . well, that's where bad boys end

up."

"Brad was into killing thingsþdeath," Sharon remembered.
 
"He would

take the boys to Yakima and they'd come home with boxes of things they

had killed.
 
Squirrels and rabbits and snakes.
 
Prairie dogs.
 
They