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UNION COUNTY — About 2½ weeks ago, 52-year-old Stephanie Cunningham took a car ride with members of the Union County Prosecutor's Office to Clark, mere miles from the hardscrabble streets of Elizabeth that had haunted her for much of her life.

A former heroin addict from Elizabeth who’d finally gotten clean after moving to Pennsylvania in 2004 — Cunningham had to testify, yet again, in the gruesome murder of Lois Zukowitz, a longtime friend and fellow addict who prosecutors said years before was beaten to death by a drug dealer both women had known.

This time, though, Cunningham would never make it to the witness stand. Prosecutors found her body lying face-down in a Clark motel room on June 21, just hours before she was scheduled to testify.

A preliminary medical examiner’s report says Cunningham appears to have died of natural causes pending the results of a toxicology report. But her family says waiting for those answers has raised suspicions about the possibility of foul play in a death whose timing seems hard to fathom.

"We just want to know how she died," said Cunningham’s sister, Mary Ellen Mele. "I’m hoping that she went peacefully. But no one’s telling us anything, which makes it feel so suspicious."

Meanwhile, an Elizabeth jury this week convicted the drug dealer, Gary Suttle, 48, in Zukowitz’s March, 11, 2004, death in which she was beaten with a hammer. As part of their case, prosecutors planned to call Cunningham to the stand and identify Suttle as the man from whom she and Zukowitz would purchase drugs in Mrvlang Manor in Elizabeth.

Cunningham testified in the first trial in April 2008, which ended in a hung jury, and in the second in June 2008, which resulted in a conviction that was overturned after an appellate panel ruled the trial court excluded pertinent testimony.

The morning Cunningham was found dead, prosecutors read to the jury from previous statements she’d made.

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In the nearly 20 years leading up to Zukowitz’s death, Cunningham’s family watched drug addiction consume her. An animal lover and one-time high school softball star, she’d gotten tied up with the wrong crowd and eventually hooked on heroin, family members said.

By 2003 she was unemployed and living with fellow drug users in Elizabeth, spending much of her time with Zukowitz.

Both Cunningham’s and Zukowitz’s families have described each of them as kind, intelligent women taken prisoner by an addiction they tried to hide.

Soon after the tragedy, Cunningham’s father, Richard Cunningham, drove to New Jersey and pulled his daughter out of the Elizabeth neighborhood he was convinced would kill her, too. He brought her back to Bethlehem, Pa., where he was living, to what he thought would be a safer and calmer environment.

For the next eight years, Cunningham stayed clean and turned things around, family members said. She made a group of new friends and lived with her dog, Boy, in an apartment on Main Street.

"If it weren’t for my dad, she would have died long ago," Cunningham’s brother Richard Cunningham Jr. said. "He really did everything he could for her."

Last month, when the call from prosecutors came for Cunningham to return to Elizabeth, she packed a bag and prepared to look her friend's accused killer straight in the eye and testify against him for the third time.



When staff from the prosecutor's office picked her up in Bethlehem on June 20, she appeared to be in good health, her family members said. She left Boy with her father and told her sister, who lives in Linden, she'd be in touch about getting together.

But when prosecutors returned to get her from the Clark motel room the next morning, she was lying fully clothed on a bed and was unresponsive, police Capt. Alan Scherb said. Neither Clark police nor the prosecutor’s office suspect foul play, pending the return of the toxicology report, which takes six to eight weeks.

In the meantime, Cunningham’s five siblings, her father and stepmother are dealing with the loss, but they’re also asking hard-to-live-with questions about the tragic and unusual timing of her death.

"We always said, when my father finally got her out of there, if she ever goes back to Elizabeth, she’ll likely die," Cunningham’s brother Richard said. "It’s bizarre."

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