Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (70 page)

less than a year.

Brent's first prolonged contact with his father in years was on the

Tampico property.
 
He was eleven then and he was given so many chores

that he felt like a "slave."
 
And just as Brad had once had Jess,

Michael, and Phillip collect "souvenirs" of dead things on their trips

to Yakima, he had made up for lost time with his eldest son.
 
He

decided that Brent needed to learn how to kill and he forced the

eleven-year-old to watch as he killed a young steer.
 
But Brad didn't

know how to carry out a clean kill.
 
In the end, he took a hatchet and

finally a chain saw to the animal, and the barn stall was a bloody

abattoir.
 
It was an image burned forever into Brent's mind.

Brent had hay fever and farm chores aggravated it.
 
His father hadn't

believed him and told him he was "faking it" and "lazy."

"He grabbed me by the back of the neck and said, You're your mother's

product and I don't want you around if you are going to be like that."
 
"

Then he threw Brent onto the ground.
 
In a rage he ordered Brent to

stay in the barn all day, and promised to deal with him later.

Frightened, Brent ran away to his maternal uncle's house.

My dad called and said I could come back and take my punishment or go

back to my mother and forget that I ever had a father.
 
I decided to go

back to my mom's."
 
But first, Brad insisted that Brent return all the

clothes he had bought for him over the summer.
 
Brent collected them

and returned them to the Tampico ranch, but Brad noticed that he was

still wearing clothing he had purchased for him.
 
"I had to take them

off and leave them," Brent remembered.
 
"I left with half my clothes

gone and barefooted.
 
That was the last time I heard from my dad for

about four years."

The passage of time since his days on the Tampico ranch had faded his

bad memories of his father, and Brent visited Brad in Oregon in the

late spring of 1986.
 
Brad had just left Cheryl.
 
"Everything went

really well, and I stayed in Portland," Brent said.

And so he became witness to the bitter divorce between his father and

his third stepmother.
 
He remembered well the night that Cheryl was

murdered and the fear they had all lived through in the days that

followed.
 
Brent said he had gotten home from his scuba diving trip

about 10:30 that Sunday night.
 
"When I asked my dad why the message

machine wasn't on when I tried to call, he told me he'd just gone down

to check the mail.
 
After this .
 
. . we all went to bed.
 
Sometime

later the police were beating on the door but no one could hear them

.

. . the apartment was near the freeway.... I went in and woke my father

up and we were scared because we didn't know who was pounding at the

door in the middle of the night.
 
My father got two pistols out and

gave one to me."

Brad went to the door and opened it cautiously to find the police

there.
 
"The police said, You don't want your son to hear this," so my

father told me to go back to my room .
 
. . but I listened from the

door and I could hear the police say, Your wife's been killed."

" After a long time, Brad came to Brent's room with tears in his

eyes.

He told him that Cheryl had been murdered and that he was a suspect.

Brent told Connie Capato that when his father had his heart attack in

Phil Margolin's office two days later, all of his four sons had ridden

to the hospital with him.
 
But it was Brent that Brad wanted to talk to

privately.
 
"He pulled the curtains and got real close and we talked

secretly about trying to get the boys out of town.
 
He gave me a lot of

business cards and names of people who could help get the boys hidden

so that Cheryl's mother wouldn't take them.
 
My dad told me to drive

them out of town myself if I had to."

Brent wasn't yet sixteen at the time and it was an awesome

responsibility.
 
He looked at the names in his hand and saw that his

father had listed his attorney Phil Margolin, Jerry Elshire, a private

investigator, his sister Susan in Seattle, his uncle Jimmy Cunningham,

and Herman and Trudy Dreesen.
 
As it turned out, of course, Brad's

heart attack did not prove fatal and the burden was off Brent.
 
But he

had been caught up in the paranoia that followed Cheryl's murder and he

fled with Brad and the boys to the ranch in Tampico, back to the scene

of his black summer of 1981.

Once the pressure over Cheryl's murder was somewhat off Brad, he

started in on Brent again.
 
He didn't like his personality, he was too

quiet, and he was boring.
 
He told Brent that he thought he would

probably turn out to be a serial murderer or someone like John Hinkley

because he was too quiet.
 
Brent was smart enough to feel that his

father was projecting his own personality onto him.

Asked about Brad's treatment of his three younger sons, Brent told

Capato he thought the three little boys were "scared to death" of their

father because of his rigid schedules and routines.
 
When Phillip was

being toilet trained, for instance, Brad had sometimes punished him for

mishaps by forcing him to sit on the toilet for as long as six and a

half hours, "half the time crying, and in the dark."

Sara had tried to intervene when she was there and asked Brad to let up

on the boys.
 
She had also gone to Brent's defense when Brad tried to

kick him out over some transgression.
 
"He threw a suitcase on the

floor, threw all the dresser drawers on the floor, and began throwing

things at the suitcase," Brent said.
 
"Sara came in crying and it was

later resolved and everything was back to normal' as if nothing had

happened."

Gradually, Mike Shinn and his investigators were going through the list

of possible witnesses against Brad Cunningham: Lily Saarnen, Betty and

Mary Troseth, Jim Karr, all of whom had informative and often startling

viewpoints on the man Shinn was about to meet in court.
 
Jim Ayers was

a tremendous help in re-creating the night of Cheryl Keeton's murder

and the investigation that followed.
 
Greg Dallaire, Eric Lindenauer,

and dozens of Cheryl's coworkers at Garvey, Schubert and Barer were

prepared to testify to the terror Cheryl had felt during the last year

of her life.

Shinn, Diane Bakker, Connie Capato, and Leslie High were peeling the

layers of Brad's life away, and the further they peeled, the darker and

more filled with poison he seemed to become.
 
Here was a man who had

had everything in lifeþgood looks, money, success, power, beautiful

women, perfect childrenþand yet nothing had been enough.
 
Again and

again, he had turned on the people who loved himþon his wives, on his

children, on his mother and sisters: He was a cruel man and he appeared

to be completely devoid of conscience.
 
The more they learned about

Brad, the more convinced they became that he had, indeed, been the

person who bludgeoned his wife and the mother of his three little boys

to death.

But could they prove it?

Sara was back in her shaky marriage, if only temporarily.
 
February

1990 was obviously a time of revelation for her, and she was coming to

terms with some brutal truths.
 
She was a strong woman, she had to be

to have come so far in her career and to survive this strange and

treacherous union with Brad.
 
She no longer felt threatened by Brad, at

least most of the time, and thought she could handle his temper

tantrums and his hysterics.
 
She recognized the "games" and the

histrionics for what they were, and she still planned to stay only

until the civil suit in Cheryl's death was over.

Since she had listened to his pleas to stand beside him through his

trial, Sara certainly didn't expect Brad to continue to cheat on her

with Lynn Minero.
 
A bargain was a bargain.

But then, Brad was Brad.
 
Sara was still wary, and still writing in her

journal.
 
"2-22-90, Thursday: Sometime during this week Brad repeated

part of a conversation I had had only with my sister Rosemary from our

bedroom phone when he was in Houston [Feb.
 
11].
 
It involved my

losing a checkbook from U.S. Bank and wondering if he had taken it.

I figured out that he must have recorded somehow in our bedroom.
 
I :',

had had numerous conversations from the kitchen phone and the office

phone without his knowledge."

Now, Sara remembered that Brad had known other things he should have

had no way of knowing.
 
He knew that she had hired a private

investigator, and he knew that she had asked her banker to change the

credit line at her bank so Brad could not withdraw any more cash.

Those were also things she had told her sister on the bedroom phone.

Something was getting to Brad.
 
He was "frantic" when he found out that

Sara had spoken to Bill Schulte, a divorce attorney.
 
"I told him no

plans were made to file for a divorceþI simply wanted information and

to secure an attorney for myself, since Brad had seen so many attorneys

in the past."

On February 27, Sara wrote: "I walked over to the Hilton to wait for an

8:30 a.m. meeting with Brad and Wes [Urqhart, Brad's Houston

lawyer].... Wes's concern was about my guaranteeing the legal fees for

Brad's civil lawsuit.
 
I told him I would do that.
 
I also told him I

had not filed for divorce and was unsure when and if I would.... Wes

met with "Joe" Rieke and Jerry Elshire.
 
Rieke also wanted me to

guarantee Brad's legal fees which I verbally agreed to do."

Sara did not delude herself that Brad wanted to keep her as his wife

because he loved her.
 
He needed financial cover, and she would do

that.
 
But she wasn't doing it for Brad, she was doing it for the