Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (69 page)

happened to Cheryl.

Mike Shinn's private investigators, Connie Capato and Leslie High, had

set out to walk through Brad's past, to find the women he had married

and divorced, the mother and the sisters whose existence he barely

acknowledged.
 
Somewhere in that pastþsome of it decades oldþthey might

find enough to help Shinn in his civil suit against Brad.

Connie Capato found Loni Ann Cunningham in Brooklyn, New York, on

August 24, 1989.
 
Although she had not lived with Brad for seventeen

years, Loni Ann was still afraid of him.
 
Theirs was the only one of

Brad's divorces where money was not an issue.
 
"Neither of us had

money," Loni Ann said.
 
"It was Brad's power and dominance over me.
 
He

punished me by getting at me through my children."

With Capato's promise that her whereabouts would never be revealed to

Brad, Loni Ann began to open up.
 
Her marriage had been hellish, she

said, full of emotional and physical abuse.
 
She had dreaded Brad's

moods.
 
Sometimes he hit her when he didn't even seem to be angry.

She might be watching television and he would hit her and say, "Take

that for a lesson," and then sit down and watch with her as if nothing

had happened.

Loni Ann detailed the disintegration of her life with Brad from the

time she was a happy young bride until the last terrifying days when

she actually feared for her life.
 
"In the beginning he would argue,

and then he would throw things and then hit me.
 
At the end, he would

walk in the door after having a bad day and start beating on me."

Loni Ann confided that Brad had a history of fighting going back to

high school.
 
"If there was a fight going on, Brad would do anything to

get involvedþeven if he wasn't part of the fight in the first place."

She said Brad had told her that he and his friends had a "good time"

going downtown in Seattle and beating up winos" and "queers."

"One time he beat up one guy so badly that he didn't know if he had

killed himþ but he didn't stick around to find out."

Loni Ann said the most frightening time of her marriage was when Brad

had worked at Gals Galore.
 
Whether it was true or not, he had always

talked as if he was heavily involved with organized crime figures.

She described his reaction once when he was picked up for parking

violations.
 
She told Capato that Brad was livid that his fingerprints

were on file.

Loni Ann also told Capato that she thought he had a lot of money

"þalthough you could never prove it by his paperworl<."
 
Every time she

had tried to file for support to help raise her children, Brad managed

to look like a pauper on paper.
 
Whenever Kit and Brent visited their

father, they came home and told Loni Ann about "the hundreds and

hundreds of dollars in cash" and all the material things their father

had.
 
"He would talk about how he was giving his current' three sons

threewheelers and very expensive toys, and Kit and Brent basically got

nothing.
 
It was as if he was throwing it in their facesþthat if they

came to live with him, he would give them things, but since they didn

t, he wouldn't give them anything."

She told Capato about the time Brad had taken Kit to Houston, hut when

she asked Loni Ann if Kit would testify about that, she shook her

head.

Kit wanted only to be as far away from her father as she could be.

Loni Ann had had a difficult time surviving when she was alone with

Kit and Brent.
 
"One of the things that Brad would do was write

support checksþand then stop payment on them," she said.
 
"He knew that

if the welfare department believed I was receiving support from him

they wouldn't give me any money.
 
I couldn't cash his checks, but the

welfare people wouldn't give me money either...."

Hesitatingly, Loni Ann told Capato about the terrible night when Brad

had left her, drunk and disoriented, standing on the cliff above the

river.
 
And as for Cheryl's murder, she had thoughts about that.
 
She

felt that if Brad had paid someone to kill Cheryl, he would have made

sure that many, many respectable people saw him in the vital time

period.

Since no such witnesses had come forward, she said that Brad himself

had probably beaten Cheryl to death.
 
Loni Ann had been frightened that

he would murder her during their divorce and custody battles.

Loni Ann told Connie Capato that she had never known anybody who was so

vindictive and had such a strong need for revenge and control as

Brad.

That was the major reason that she had fled the Northwest and found

work as a kinestheology therapist as far away from him as she could get

and still be in America.
 
Asked if she would testify against Brad in

the civil trial, she turned white and stammered "N-n-no!"
 
She wasn't

even sure about a deposition.
 
There was no guarantee that Brad

wouldn't come after her.
 
Even if he was found responsible for Cheryl's

death, she knew he wouldn't be locked up.

Connie could see how afraid Brad's first wife still was of himþeven

though he had had four other wives since she divorced him.
 
She asked

if Loni Ann would think about giving a videotaped deposition that Mike

Shinn could present in the civil trial.

Loni Ann said she would think about it.

Leslie High located Brad's older sister Ethel.
 
Ethelþwho went by

"Edie"þwas living in the Northwest, although she, like most of the

women in Brad's past, didn't want her address revealed to him.
 
Unlike

Loni Ann, Ethel wasn't hesitant to relate her memories of her

brother.

She remembered him as being violent since his high-school days.
 
He had

beaten her and he had beaten their mother.

Ethel regretted that she had persuaded Brad to marry Loni Ann when she

became pregnant at seventeen.
 
She hadn't realized the abuse that Loni

Ann had suffered in her marriage.
 
"She was just beginning to establish

a relationship with my husband and me and she finally opened up to

us...."
 
Ethel looked at Leslie High and confided, "I have no doubt in

my mind that Brad murdered Cheryl.
 
What is so sad is that all the

women who have been involved with Brad truly believed that he wouldn't

hurt them.
 
They believed that he loved them."

Ethel had never really known Cherylþnot until near the end of her

life.

They had talked in the spring of 1986 after Cheryl and Brad had

separated.
 
Ethel had offered to help Cheryl in her divorce and .

custody proceedings, and she had invited Cheryl to her daughter's

wedding.

Ethel said that Cheryl had told her about one time when Brad

disappeared for two weeks.
 
Cheryl had asked him where he'd been and

why he had left.
 
"Brad's response to Cheryl," Ethel said, "was If I

ever hit you, I'll kill you."

" Cheryl had called her the Friday before she died and told her about

the deposition she had given a few days before.
 
"She told me, I'm

going to nail himþI'm not going to let this happen."
 
I begged her,

Don't be alone this weekend.
 
He'll try to get you to come to him.

Under no circumstances should you go to him."
 
Cheryl said, I ll be

careful.

I'll tell somebody if something looks like it will happen."

" Ethel made a strange comment to High about Brad's perception of

children.
 
"Children are nonentities," she said.
 
If Brad were to

strike his wife and the children were present, it would be as if they

were not really thereþnot in Brad's mind.
 
"It is quite conceivable

that the child [Michael] was with Brad on the night of Cheryl's death,"

Ethel said, "and he might actually have seen what he did.
 
It is quite

conceivable that he took no precautions to make sure that the child did

not see anything because no child was there' to see anything."

It was a chilling thoughtþalmost as if Brad equated children with dogs

or cats.
 
Crimes could be committed in front of animals with

impunity.

Who would ever know?

As far as Michael Cunningham's memory went, the police files weren't

very encouraging.
 
Mike Shinn saw that Michael had refused to talk with

Jerry Finch and Susan Svetkey in the days immediately following his

mother's murder.
 
He had been four then, now he was almost eight.

The chance that he remembered more after three and a half years was

almost nil.
 
But like Jim Ayers, Shinn hoped in his heart that Michael

hadn't seen the terrible violence done to his mother.

In September 1989 Connie Capato found Brent Cunningham, who was still

living in Portlandþbut not with his father, who had thrown him out a

year earlier.
 
Brent agreed to talk to Capato.
 
His memories of his

childhood were not particularly pleasant.
 
His father had left his

mother when he was only a year old, and during the next ten years he

saw him only during summer vacations and sporadic visits.
 
When Capato

asked Brent to describe his father, he said he was more a "competitive

parent" than a "loving father."
 
Brad had always flashed money in front

of him and Kit and told them that when they were old enough they could

decide which parent they wanted to live with.

Brent said that he had had minimal contact with his father's second and

third wives.
 
He recalled being in a van with Brad and Cynthia Marrasco

and watching them fight.
 
"My dad slapped her."
 
As for Lauren Swanson,

Brad's third wife, Brent had never seen any abusive language or

physical violence.
 
But, of course, Brad had been married to Lauren