Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (44 page)

told her that Cheryl had slept with her husband.
 
It may have been

true, it may not.
 
Either way, the wife's reaction was not what Brad

had expected.
 
She was not hysterical nor was she grateful to Brad for

his report.
 
With impeccable class, she called Cheryl and asked her to

convey a message to her husband.
 
"Just tell him that I don't care to

talk to him for several days.
 
He'll understand."
 
Mortifiedþand

puzzledþCheryl passed on the message.

Annoyed that his sabotage hadn't worked, Brad went a step further.

He contacted Stuart Hennessey, who had worked with Cheryl in Seattle,

and invited him out for a drink in the bar at the Alexis Hotel near the

Garvey, Schubert offices.
 
Hennessey would remember the encounter as a

"weird experience."
 
Brad told him that he and Cheryl were separated

and quickly went on to give Hennessey offensive details about Cheryl's

supposed promiscuity.
 
Hennessey stared back at him, disbelieving and

disgusted.

"Then he asked how the firm was doing," Hennessey recalled.
 
"And he

asked how much money I made."

What Brad really wanted to know, of course, was how much money Cheryl

was making and how much her retirement fund was worth.
 
Hennessev stood

up to leave and told Brad he didn't want to discuss it þthat was

private information.
 
He left Brad sitting with two untouched drinks

while he went back to his office, shaking his head in shock at Brad's

gall and crudeness.
 
Hennessey called Cheryl to alert her to what Brad

was saying.

"Cheryl was a strong person," he said, "but she was crying.
 
She said,

Stu, he's trying to ruin me."

" Hennessey didn't know how to help her, beyond telling her that her

friends were behind her and wouldn't believe Brad's lies.

Neither reaction was what Brad had expected, and for the moment he was

thrown off stride.
 
He resented Cheryl's independence and success.

He had hoped to humiliate her and ruin her career.
 
She was humiliated,

but her job was never in danger.
 
She was also puzzled.
 
If Brad had

succeeded in getting her fired, who did he think was going to support

them?
 
It was her salary that kept them afloat.
 
She had seen him do

this beforeþact out of rage, and spite himself in the process.
 
Cheryl

was horribly embarrassed by Brad's vicious lies, but she held her head

up and her career never missed a beat.

Even so, Susan could see that the enmity in Cheryl's relationship with

Brad was intensifying.
 
And as it did, she saw, too, that the essence

that was Cheryl had begun, finally, to disintegrate.
 
As water

eventually erodes stone after an eon of continual dripping, Brad's

relentless siege against Cheryl was working its devastation.
 
She had

been so strong or so long.
 
But now she was growing thinner and

thinner, toying with her food and only pretending to eat.
 
Still,

through sheer force of will, she was able to compartmentalize her life

so that she could concentrate on her work and take care of her boys.

Brad's affair with Lily Saarnen had continued, even as he pointed

accusing fingers at Cheryl.
 
In late fall Lily was told that she

needed a kidney transplant.
 
Brad was tremendously solicitous, so much

so that he offered to pay her medical bills.
 
He gave her four thousand

dollars.

She had the transplant operation on November 28, 1985, and testifying

in a legal hearing some time later, Lily had difficulty remembering if

Brad had actually paid for her surgery.
 
Staring into Brad's dark eyes

from her position on the witness chair, she equivocated.
 
She thought

that their affair had lasted somewhere between six months and a year.

She couldn't really remember.

Lily did remember that Brad had paid the rent on her apartment in the

Madison Tower for some time.
 
Although her ground-floor unit wasn't as

expensive as the eighteenth-floor apartment he would soon rent, it

wasn't cheap either.
 
But if Brad proved to be a friend in need, his

passion for Lily faded after her surgery.
 
The immunosuppressant

medicine she had to take had side effects that repulsed Brad.
 
"She

grew facial hair and that turned me off," he said later.

And so Lily had gone on to her relationship with Dr. Clay Watson, the

surgeon at Providence, although she remained in her apartment at the

Madison Tower until late fall of 1986.
 
Earlier that year she had

introduced Brad to Dr. Sara Gordon, and apparently there were no hard

feelings.
 
Lily and Brad were like dancers who changed partners when

the song changed.
 
Lily did seem a little chagrined, however, when

she later learned that Brad was having an affair with Marnie, his

teenage baby-sitter, at the same time he was sleeping with her.

Lily had first known Brad in Salem when he was hired by Citizens'

Savings.
 
And then Brad, Lily, a secretary, and a young lawyer named

Karen Aaborg * were transferred to the Lake Oswego branch of the

bank.

Karen would later testify that federal bank examiners had questioned

the Lake Oswego books, the branch's president and most of its directors

had been summarily fired, and Brad was eievated to a position of

extreme trust as he and his three female assistants evaluated the

extent of the damage.
 
They soon suspected that they w70uld only be

tidying up loose ends and closing the branch down.
 
It was doubtful

that the commercial loan division in Lake Oswego was going to

survive.

But as long as the branch was still open, Brad was the boss.

He was also a sultan with his own little harem.
 
Brad had scarcely

ended his affair with l.ilya when he became very close to Karen

Aaborg.

Another man might have felt ill at ease working in the same small

office as two of his girlfriends, but it didn't bother Brad.
 
Lily was

aware that her ex-lover was engaged in daily disputes with his wife.

Karen was not þat least for a time.
 
When she first went to work for

Brad, she knew almost nothing about his personal life.

Brad had hired Karen to work for him in Salem in the summer of 1985.

She was very young, barely out of law school, and she was Brad's type:

small, attractive, slender, smart.
 
He liked blond or light brown hair

and pretty, small-featured faces.
 
At the bank her title was "Loan

Closer," and later Brad chose her to go with him and Lily to close the

Lake Oswego branch.
 
To Karen's somewhat naive eye, Brad seemed

happily married when she first went to work for him.
 
"It seemed to

change rather rapidly," she recalled.
 
It wasn't long before Karen

suspected that Brad and Lily had had a physical relationship, but she

wasn't positive.

It was just something in the way they exchanged glances, and the

sentences they left unfinished when she walked into an office where

they were.
 
She found out later that she had been right.

Brad told Karen even more about his personal life.
 
Although he had not

told Lily, he was quite open with Karen about his affair with his

sons' baby-sitter.
 
"Cheryl doesn't know," he said, grinning.
 
"We did

it at my house when the kids were napping and Cheryl was at work."
 
But

he lied to Karen when he said his liaison with his nineteen-year-old

babysitter was not a long-running affair.
 
"Cheryl was working, and I

wasn't.
 
That wTas before I came to Citizens'."

Karen soon sawþor rather heardþthat the Cunninghams' marriage was not a

happy one.
 
Cheryl often called the Lake Oswego branch of Citizens' and

Karen could tell from Brad's reaction that he was "pretty upset....

He would slam the phone down ... there was a lot of anger."
 
Indeed,

there was more rage surfacing in Brad than Karen could ever remember

seeing.

In his business world he was always in control, completely charming and

affable.
 
Whatever he and his wife were fighting over, Karen was

shocked by the violence involved.
 
Brad seemed to truly hate Cheryl,

and although Karen couldn't hear the other end of the conversation, she

appeared to hate him too.

Nevertheless, the phone scenes she overheard didn't diminish Brad's

charisrma for the young attorney.
 
It was easier for her to feel a

little sorry for him, his wife seemed to be a ranting shrew.
 
Except in

his phone conversations with Cheryl, Brad always struck Karen as such a

nice guy.

Karen sometimes went to a Portland tavern called Goose Hollow and one

evening she ran into Brad there.
 
They played Scrabble, apparently a

passion for him, and then he took her back to her apartment.
 
In his

version of their affair, he would recall that they had sex there for

the first time.
 
She would insist, however, that she was never actually

intimate with Brad until after he left the bank they both worked for.

And even then, she estimated that their affair had lasted only three or

four months.
 
Their friendship, however, continued.

It was odd.
 
Brad's wives all eventually came to hate his guts, his

mistresses remained in his stable of friends.
 
Estranged and former

wives became prey and stalking targets, mistresses were allowed to walk

away.

Brad never let up on his campaign to destroy Cheryl.
 
Along with his

other accusations in late 1985 and early 1986, he complained that he

had contracted chlamydia from her.
 
Technically at least, chlamydia is

a venereal disease, an infection usually transmitted through sexual

intercourse.
 
Righteously indignant, Brad obtained two prescriptions to