Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (5 page)

worked with her last ex-husband, Dr. Geoff Morrow,* head of the

contagious disease department at Providence, theirs was an amicableþif

finalþdivorce.

Perhaps she just wasn't meant to be married.

Sara was thirty-three and she had been in school for twenty-eight years

of her life.
 
She still had medical school loans to pay back, and she

worked every extra shift she could at Providence Hospital.
 
But despite

her native intelligence and her sophistication in all things medical,

she was a trusting, almost naive woman.
 
Because she always told the

truth and took great pains never to hurt anyone's feelings, she tended

to believe that other people worked under the same moral code.
 
When it

came to evaluating men, Sara had made some misjudgments.
 
She had never

expected to be divorced even once, much less three times.

Without children, with little trust in the permanency of relationships

between men and women, Sara had immersed herself in her career,

doubtful that she would ever find true love.
 
There was another

obstacle, she earned so much more money than most rmen that many of the

eligible males she was attracted to were scared off.
 
It would take a

highly confident and liberated man to feel secure dating a woman who

was not only beautiful and extremely intelligent but whose projected

income was close to half a million dollars a year.
 
And she certainly

didn't want a man who was attracted to her because of her money.

In the spring of 1986, Sara was dating Jack Kincaid,* who had a

successful advertising agency with several offices on the West

Coast.

Kincaid was divorced.
 
with two teenage daughters and he was a

confirmed born-again bachelor.
 
He and Sara were not dating

exclusively.

Kincaid was also seeing a woman in her twenties.
 
If Sara had been

completely frank about her feelings, she would have admitted to a

smidgen of jealousy about that.
 
But even so, she and Kincaid were good

friends, she counted on his being around, and she didn't expect that he

would commit either to her or to his other girlfriend, Sandi.* One

night Sara and Jack and her friend Lily Saarnen,* who was dating one of

Sara's fellow doctors, Clay Watson,* were attending a dance at the

Multnomah Athletic Clubþthe "MAC," one of Portland's more exclusive

clubs.
 
Lily didn't feel that Jack was good for Sara, he was too much

of a playboy.
 
When the men were away from the table, Lily expressed

her feelings and said she knew the perfect man for Sara.
 
She wanted to

set her up with a blind date with an old friend of hers.
 
"His name is

Brad Cunningham," Lily said.

Sara wasn't looking for anyone else to date and, like almost everyone

else, she hated blind dates.
 
Men that friends described as "really

fascinating" too often turned out to be anything but.
 
Nevertheless,

Lily persisted.
 
She had once dated Brad Cunningham herself.
 
Now she

was happy with Clay Watson, Lily said, but she and Brad were still

friends, he was newly single, and she felt he and Sara would be a

perfect fit.

She described him as a very special man.

Actually, Lily went into such graphic detail about how skilled Brad

Cunningham was as a lover that Sara was a little embarrassed.
 
She had

never heard a woman speak so openly about a man.
 
Indeed, she wondered

whyþif this Brad was such a marvelous loverþLilya had let him get

away.

But she said she had no romantic interest in Cunningham any longer, and

she thought Sara would like him.

A little reluctantly, Sara said it would be all right for him to call

her.
 
"He got my phone number from Lily," she later recalled.
 
"He

phoned me and we agreed to meet for dinner.
 
I had a date with Jack

that week þthe last week in Marchþtoo, and he had to change the date so

I called Brad and we switched days."

Sara spoke to Lily early on the day of her blind date.
 
"She kept

talking about the relationship they had hadþhow she had been in love

with him.
 
I still thought it was weird that she'd want to introduce me

to Brad, but she insisted."
 
Sara had no intention of meeting Brad

Cunningham alone.
 
What would they talk about?
 
She didn't even know

him.

So she arranged to have her friend Gini Burton,* who worked as an

operating room technician at Providence, and Gini's boyfriend, Gil,

come to dinner that night too.

"I was in a security building, so I could see Brad on the monitor when

he buzzed to get in," Sara remembered.
 
"I went down and met him.
 
He

was very good looking."
 
In fact, Brad Cunningham looked as if he

wouldn't need someone to fix him up with a blind date.
 
When Sara let

him in, she found Thim tremendously attractive, he was a big,

hroadshouldered man with thick dark hair and sloe eyes.
 
He appeared to

be a few years older than she was.
 
He dressed impeccably and he had an

air of success about him.
 
He was certainly self-assured.
 
itoo

self-assured for Sara's taste.
 
"I didn't like him on our first date,"

she recallcd.

iHe talked too much about Lily, and about himself, and he seemed

egotistical."

Brad monopolized the conversation that first night, while Sara, Gini,

and Gil listened politely.
 
"It was very obvious that Brad had once had

a lot of money," Sara remembered.
 
But his convcrsatioll about his

wealth and his possessions didn't impress her.
 
Besides that, Brad

seemed so taken with Lily Saarnell that Sara wondered WTI1V he wasn t

still dating her.
 
She had raved about Brad, and now Braal kept going

on about her.
 
I really thought that he wouldn't he interested in me

because he kept talking about Lily."

Easter Sunday was on March 30 that year.
 
Although she had expected him

to, Jack Kincaid didn't invite Sara out Tfor Easter brunch.
 
It didn't

really bother her, he said he was going to take his daughters out to

brunch.
 
"I told him I'd just leave his Easter basket on his front

porch," Sara said.

Kincaid looked uncomfortable when he said, "You'd better not do that,

Sara.
 
I'm going to be with Sandi."

Sara didn't take an Easter basket to lack TKincaid, and she accepted a

second date with Brad Cunningham when he called.
 
Even though her three

months of dating Kincaid hadn't been an exclusive arrangement, her

feelings were a little hurt that he was with Sandi.
 
She undoubtedly

said "yes" to another date with Brad Cunningham more quickly than she

ordinarily would have.

She was glad she did.
 
"On our second date Brad was charming," she

said.
 
"He asked about me."

Sara figured that he had been just as nervous about their first date as

she was He wasn't really conceited, he had just been hiding his own

discomfort and trying too hard to fill the conversational silences.

After all, he hadn't known Sara or her friends that first night.

The man .Sara met for their second date was considerate and concerned,

and she found herself extremely drawn to him.
 
Her feelings for Brad

were not what she had expected.
 
But there it was.
 
She was surprised

at how wrong she had been about him.
 
Every time she saw him, she liked

him better.

And from the beginning, she had found him physically attractivcþnot

classically handsome, but there was something about him.
 
Maybe it

was his eyes.

Bradly Morris Cunningham was not yet fora.
 
hut he was a bank executive

at Citizens' Savings and Loan.
 
And shortly after he met Sara, he had a

new job, he was hired to be part of the top echelon of the Spectrum

Corporation, a branch of the U.S. Bank in Portland.
 
He told Sara he

would oversee all of their commercial accluisitions.
 
He also told her

he had been a real estate entrepreneur involved in a huge project in

Houston, Texas, where he had controlled six hundred million dollars.

Although that project had gone sour when the oil disaster hit Houston,

Brad said he had brought suit against his contractor and the bonding

companyþlitigation that, he said, would eventually net him millions of

dollars.
 
And, as if that weren't enough, Brad also had his own company

which had diversified interests, some having to do with construction

and others in the biotechnology field.

Sara and Brad dated often that spring, going out to dinner and to

plays.
 
He invited her to his home, a two-bedroom apartment on the

fourteenth floor of the Madison Tower along the Willamette River in

downtown Portland.
 
Brad introduced Sara to his fifteen-year-old son,

Brent,* who lived with him, a child of his first marriage.
 
He told her

he had two daughters, Amy* and Kit,* by former marriages, and three

other sons, Jess,* Michael,* and Phillip,* who were, six, four, and two

respectively.
 
By the end of April, Sara had also met Brad's younger

sons.
 
They were adorable little bosrs, with their father's dark hair

and eyes, polite and endearing children.
 
"I thought they were

wondeMul," Sara remembered.

Brad told Sara that he shared custody of his three young boys with his

estranged wife.
 
He planned to move to a larger apartment on the

eighteenth floor where they would have their own room furnished and

decorated especially for them.
 
The little boys were with him as much

as they were with their mother.

Sara was touched when she saw how deeply Brad cared for his children,

he seemed to build his whole life around them He confided that their

mother was totally unfit, and that he was struggling to gain full