Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (77 page)

of the fun of their outings vanished.
 
And Dana was as horrified as

Sara had been to see another form of control.
 
For some minor misdeed,

Brad would order the miscreant to stand inches from a wall, warning him

that he must not allow his nose to touch the wall itself "Sometimes

they'd have to stand that way for an hour," Dana said, "even

Phillip."

Brad was their father, Dana knew, and she never interferedþbut it

bothered her to see a little boy like Phillip doing his time against

the wall like a Marine recruit.

Sometime in the summer of 1990, Brad announced that they were all

moving to Seattle.
 
Dana assumed that he must have sold the Dunthorpe

house, and agreed to go with him.
 
The move caught Sara completely by

surprise and added to her torment.
 
"The last time I saw the boys was

July 8,1990," she remembered.
 
"After that, it would be such a long,

long time before I saw them.
 
I didn't have any idea where they

were...."

On that Sunday, July 8, Sara brought the boys back to Dunthorpe and saw

a large U-Haul truck parked down the street.
 
A little alarm sounded in

her brain.
 
Later, she learned that Brad had pulled it into the

driveway and packed it full.
 
Before he, Dana, and the boys pulled out,

he told the security force at Dunthorpe that he was "putting a few

things in storage" and taking his sons to Canada for a vacation.
 
He

said there would be no way to contact him, and he didn't know when he

would return.

When Sara called the Dunthorpe house two days later, she found the

phone had been disconnected.
 
She went to the house with two realtors

and discovered that once again all the locks had been changed to

highsecurity locks which were almost impossible to disable.
 
In order

to get in, she had to break a window in the laundry room.
 
The house

was a mess.

But she didn't know if Brad was gone for good, he had left a

house-sitter in the place.

Sure enough, he returned on July 14 and hooked up the phone.
 
When Sara

called him to once again discuss listing the house, he was curt.

"Am I going to see the boys for dinner?"
 
she asked.

"Not unless you want to go to Bellingham."
 
Bellingham was three

hundred miles north of Portland.

"Brad, you're disobeying court orders by taking them away," Sara

countered.

He hung up on her.

Neighbors called Sara to tell her that Brad had had movers at the house

and had hauled away a tremendous load of stuff.
 
He had told his

"renter" in the guest house that he was moving to Seattle for "six to

ten months to sell a drug product."
 
Sara asked the security patrol to

check the house.
 
They reported that the key she had given them still

fit in the lock in the back door, but Brad had apparently done

something to the door so that it wouldn't open.
 
All the windows on the

ground floor had also been nailed shut.

When Sara finally gained entry to the house, she was stunned.
 
The

place had been gutted.
 
"Besides removing all of his furniture and

personal belongings," she wrote shakily in her journal, "Brad removed

the washer, dryer, and refrigerator, .
 
. . a $3,000 armoire, S1800

china cabinet and coffee table that I purchased prior to our

marriage.

Most surprising, he cut wires and totally removed two Genie garage door

opening systems, .
 
. . all the closet components (shelves et al)

installed by Closets to Go .
 
.."

Brad had pried out the fireplace insert, raken down light fixtures, and

generally dismantled and removed everything that could possibly be

carried away.
 
Lightbulbs, fireplace screens, towel racks, Sara could

not imagine what use he had for them, no, Brad was simply leaving his

signature.

On July 18, Sara went to get the Ford truck she had bought Brad from the

World Trade Center parking lot where he said he had left it.
 
She felt

fortunate that he had obeyed a court order to return the dark blue

oneton pickup truck that she was paying for.
 
It was there, still with

Brad's vanity plate that said BBIIGG.
 
"The pickup would not start and

was towed to Coliseum Ford," Sara noted in her diary.
 
"They found that

both gas tanks contained at least 50% water."
 
It would cost at least

five hundred dollars to get the truck running again.

None of it mattered to Sara as much as the fact that her three little

boys had once again vanished.
 
And she had no idea how long it would be

until she saw them again.

As they moved through 1990, Mike Shinn, Diane Bakker, and Shinn's

private detectives quite possibly learned more about Brad Cunningham

than anyone ever had.
 
Perhaps confident that the police had long since

lost interest in him as a suspect in Cheryl's murder, Brad for a time

had not been as careful of his movements as he had once been.
 
But now

that the civil action had been filed against him, Shinn was always

right behind him and Brad was once again moving frequently.
 
Shinn had

yet to wrest so much as one deposition from him.
 
Forrest Rieke's law

firm no longer represented Bradþnot since Sara's attorney, Bill Schulte

informed them that she would not be paying his legal bills.
 
And he and

the boys had abruptly moved to Washington State.

In May of 1990

Shinn believed he had finally succeeded in getting Brad to give a

deposition.
 
It meant that Shinn had to travel to Seattle to obtain it,

but it was worth the two-hundred-mile trip.
 
He arrived at the

appointed place and time, and at the last minute Brad did appear,

carrying some kind of legal document.
 
"There!"
 
he exclaimed and threw

the document on the table.
 
"There will be no deposition.
 
I have an

automatic stay of all legal action."

The document was a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing.
 
By switching from his

Chapter 11 bankruptcy action to the Chapter 7, Brad had indeed removed

himself from the requirement of giving a deposition in the civil action

against him concerning Cheryl's murder.
 
Without Sara's support, Brad

arguedþcorrectlyþhe had no funds.
 
And he would not have funds until

his pending Houston suit came to fruition.
 
As a virtual indigent,

without legal counsel and protected by Chapter 7, he was temporarily

untouchable.
 
To the best of Shinn's knowledge, he had seen Brad only

twiceþonce when he came over to his restaurant table in Portland and

once when he slapped his Chapter 7 papers down on the conference table

in Seattle.

Shinn began to wonder if it was humanly possible to get Cunningham into

a courtroom.
 
The guy wasn't an attorney, but he had been involved in

so much litigation over the years that he was savvy about how to delay

and distract.
 
Shinn became a regular in bankruptcy court in Seattle,

appearing several times over the next six months to file motions to

lift the stay.
 
Finally, in December of 1990, Judge Samuel J. Steiner

did accede to Shinn's motions.
 
Brad named a date when his Houston

trial would take place, and then ignored one deposition request after

another.

For Shinn, it was like jousting with a shadow.

That fall, Mike Shinn had learned to his disgust that the date Brad had

given for his civil suit against the Parkwood Place contractor and the

bonding company in Texas was false.
 
There was no trial date set in

Houston.
 
But Shinn moved steadily ahead on the civil case in Oregon.

Depositions or not, Brad was going to have to answer questions he had

avoided for four years.

Shinn wanted to re-create, if he could, the events of September 21,

1986.
 
He had to prove that it was possible for Brad to have left his

sons þor at least Jess and Phillipþin his apartment in the Madison

Tower and driven to the Mobile station on the West Slope to confront

Cheryl Keeton.
 
He had to allow time for the killer to strike the

victim more than twenty times, send her van onto the freeway, run back

to the Mobile station, and then drive home and answer Sara Gordon's

phone call at 8:50

P.M. If that wasn't possible, Shinn wouldn't have a case.
 
Lily had

seen Brad at 7:30.
 
The window of opportunity was, almost certainly,

little more than an hour and fifteen minutes.

It was now the third week of September 1990.
 
No moment in time is ever

exactly like any other, no sunset or sunrise, no ebb and flow of

tide.

But Shinn chose the night of September 21, 1990, to run his test.

Conditions were as close as he could get to the night Cheryl was

murdered.
 
The weather was almost the same, warm and pleasant.
 
Only it

was four years later, and September 21 was a Friday, not a Sunday.

Traffic would be a little heavier.

At 7

P.M. the test car pulled up to the exit of the parking garage at the

Madison Tower.
 
The man who was playing the "killer' was driving, Shinn

was in the backseat.
 
It was still full daylight and there were two

reasons why Shinn figured that Brad would not have left the Madison

Tower until an hour later.
 
He would have waited for darkness to carry

out a murder, and Betty Troseth had talked to Cheryl just before eight

on the night she was murdered.
 
The last thing Cheryl had said to her

mother was, "I'm going to meet Brad at the Mobile station."

Diane Bakker was playing the "victim" in the test.
 
Shortly after 8

P.M the time when Cheryl had ended her conversation with her mother,

she left the West Slope house that Cheryl had rented.
 
Driving a Toyota