She begged Jay Newell to "go slow—'cause it really hurts. I just now woke up and realized she's really gone; she's not going to come back. 'Cause I'd find myself driving down the street trying to find her. So go slow. Go slow and deep if you have to, but it's going to hurt."
Newell left the room to find Patti some Kleenex, and she bent her head and sobbed. She did not know she was on camera; the tears were real, whether for herself, for her baby, or for her dead sister, whom she described as "more a mother to me than a sister."
Patti expected to hear a tape from the night of the murder, and she was afraid to hear it. No, Newell explained, he was going to play her a tape of David discussing her involvement—a recent tape.
Patti stared at Newell, uncomprehending. She insisted she and David never discussed anything about Linda's murder. They discussed only details of the house, buying clothes for Krystal. "He knows I don't understand what happened in the past."
Patti said she and David didn't get along.
"Why are you living there?"
"Because I take care of Krystal the best I can. That's the only key I have left to Linda. I don't want to lose it. Until I feel more stable about myself, or until there's someone to take care of Krystal, I'll stay. ... I wouldn't leave unless he told me to get the hell out of his house."
Patti denied the slightest connection to David Brown in any way beyond father-daughter.
She did not—or would not—recall any conversation with Cinnamon at Ventura, nothing beyond talking about Krystal. Even when Newell played snatches of David's voice on the tape, implicating Patti in the murder, she balked. She did not remember. She would not connect David ... or Cinnamon ... or herself to Linda's death.
"Everybody's pointing at you?" Newell asked. "Why?"
"I don't know."
Patti's affect was flat. She scarcely reacted when Newell played the portion of the tape where David told Cinnamon he was "scared to death" that Patti was going to "do him" next.
"Maybe I don't want to remember. . . ."
"... It's about time to start remembering. . . . David's pointing fingers at you, saying you did it."
"He can point all he wants. I didn't do it."
"What involvement do you have in Linda's death?"
"None."
"David is saying, Patti did it.'"
"I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I hurt someone—I can't tell Krystal no, or spank her. I can't yell at my mother without calling her to apologize," Patti argued.
Nudged to remember something, anything, about the night of May 18-19, 1985, Patti now recalled that David had summoned her and Cinnamon into the living room, but she had no idea why. She had no more memory of that night. "I go on and off. I really don't—that's the truth."
She would not talk. Even with the sound of David's voice on the tape from Ventura School, with the sound of her own voice on the tape—confirming that she had some part in a conspiracy to kill her own sister—Patti still clung to her position that she did not remember.
She was as white as paper; she looked scared, and the hidden camera recorded her sighs and her despair when Newell left the room from time to time. And still she protected David.
"Okay, Patti," Newell said, "we've got to start jogging your memory more . . . we're going to play this entire tape for the jury. They're going to hear that you got up in the middle of the night and discussed whether or not to go through with killing Linda. . . . You better start jogging your memory right now, Patti, because this is first-degree murder. Are you going to ride this out all by yourself?"
"If I have to."
Newell discussed the medication given to Cinnamon, suggesting that Patti had given the pills to her.
"I wouldn't even give her Tylenol without her father's permission."
"Ah, bullshit!" Newell shouted—this man who rarely raised his voice. "You tried to kill her that night!"
"I did not, " Patti hissed, the first show of hostility.
"And we're going to prove that!"
The moment Jay Newell raised his voice, Patti said between clenched teeth, "I want an attorney if you're going to be nasty."
The interview was over.
Patti Bailey, Orange County prisoner #1058088, was booked into the women's jail. She wore a gray jail sweatshirt with yellow numbers on it as she gazed stolidly into the mug camera.
Her baby, the only thing she had ever had that was her own to love, was in the care of Manuela Brown, a woman who detested Patti. David, the man she had loved for a dozen years, had betrayed her to save his own skin. Linda was dead. Linda was ashes now.
It was all ashes.
Arthur Brown, looking tired and worn, entered the little interview room at two-thirty that long Thursday. Jay Newell had heard that Grandpa Brown was present during the trip to the mountains the night before Linda's murder.
"Was Cinnamon there too?"
"Yeah."
"Did Cinnamon get in that conversation?"
"No . . ." Art struggled to recall. "But that may be what I told her [at Ventura] that upset her so much."
"Did David get in the conversation?"
"He never said a half dozen words the whole evening when we were heading up the mountain."
"Just Patti's—"
"It was mostly Patti—running off at the mouth. I thought that's all it was—just static—and then this come up."
Arthur Brown could remember only that it was close to a weekend, and they had been planning a barbecue which was canceled by a "real bad storm."
That was the only conversation about getting rid of Linda that Grandpa Brown recalled hearing. He had told Patti there were a whole lot better ways to handle the situation. "But it don't do no good. She's like that—in one ear and out the other. I've tried to correct her, but it doesn't do any good 'cause David always takes her side."
It was clear that Art cared little for Patti Bailey. He felt all the lavish remodeling on Chantilly Street was David's attempt to please Patti. He was almost glad they had been arrested. "It's the best thing that ever happened to David," he said, wondering if now his son would "turn around and straighten out."
A familiar and pathetic blindness, the inability of parents to see flaws in their young, but Jay Newell said nothing, waiting. It was clear that Grandpa Brown viewed Patti as the killer, the only one involved. If that should be true, he could have his son and his favorite granddaughter back, and a semblance of a happy ending.
"I was in hopes it might help Cinny, 'cause as far as I'm concerned, she's a doll."
"Well, the truth can't hurt her—that's for sure. It's been so many years that nobody's known the truth," Newell agreed. "She went through a lot."
"That's the trouble with these two guys right now. They tell one goddamned lie and then they have to turn around and tell another one to cover it up. . . . David didn't used to be that way at all. If he told you the truth, that was his word."
Newell tried to keep Art on track—to be sure the old man was not fantasizing. Or engaging in wishful thinking.
The elder Brown said he worked with David in his business, although he was privy to few secrets. David was still working for Randomex, his father said, and then looked around nervously. "I'm not supposed to discuss it."
"Because it's government work, or because it's David's business?"
"No, it's David's idea, and his work. Nobody in the world knows it but him."
Arthur Brown explained that Alan Bailey had once again fallen into disrepute and was no longer connected to David's business. Alan had only known how to do part of The Process anyway; it had been Linda who knew it all. Linda could have run the business all by herself.
Newell could see that the old man was thoroughly awed by his son's genius. Even intimidated by it.
Brown said that David seldom went into the Randomex plant in Long Beach. "He used to—but since he's been so sick, he gets out in the heat and it just tires him up. A year—a year and a half now, maybe. He goes in occasionally, but not on a
hot day."
Brown wasn't exactly sure what was wrong with David. Lately, it had been his gallbladder, but the doctors had never been able to put their fingers on a precise diagnosis. He didn't drink, never had, even though dozens of grateful customers sent him liquor at Christmas, especially brandy.
"Who drinks all the brandy?"
"Nobody, unless it's Patti. It's sitting right there next to the bed."
"Whose bed?"
"David's bed."
Newell didn't change expression. He was convinced that Patti and David slept together, but he wasn't sure that Art Brown knew it. Or rather, that he was ready to acknowledge that his son might be sleeping with the girl he had just called a killer.
The old man clearly considered Patti Bailey an interloper. She seemed to wield so much power, to act as if she were mistress of the house. "I don't want her dead or anything. I just want her out of the house."
Jeoff Robinson stepped in to talk with Brown. "Wasn't David along and talking with Patti about killing Linda?" he asked.
"No ... he didn't say half a dozen words."
"But you were in the motor home on the way back from Ventura—they were obviously upset the last two visits?" Robinson pressed.
"The way that motor home is, you have to get your head right down between the seats to hear anything." Art Brown shook his head.
All fingers pointed at Patti Bailey, and it seemed she had not one friend left in the world. David had his parents staunchly behind him, defending him as a fine young man, led astray by the wicked Patti. Cinnamon had the support of her mother, and of Newell, McLean, and Robinson, who believed she had been treated badly by the law.
Patti had no one. Except Heather. David had thrown her to the wolves the first chance he got. If it turned out that Patti had killed her own sister over her passion for Linda's husband, would her own family desert her? Probably. She had left them behind long ago to go to David.
All the pieces were beginning to fit.
But still . . . Newell and Robinson felt hinky; what was missing?
Jay Newell put in a call to the Ventura School. He wanted to let Cinnamon know that her father and Patti had been arrested before she heard it on the radio or saw it on television. He got a counselor on the phone and told him to warn Cinnamon that the arrest story would be all over the media.
And it was.
From the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register to the Weekly World News and the voracious tabloid television shows, the David Brown family murder was headline material nationwide.
"Man Charged with Murder, Making Daughter Confess" (Orange County Register). "Businessman Arrested for Murder for Which His Daughter Is in Prison" (LA. Times). "Teen Took Murder Rap for Her Greedy Father, Say Cops" (Weekly World News). The Associated Press wire story was headlined a bit less sensationally "Teen Recants Her Murder Confession."
Orange County residents were mildly surprised. Most of them vaguely remembered the girl with the unusual name— Cinnamon—who had been tried for her stepmother's murder a few years back. They hadn't given her a thought for years. There were always new murders, new scandals, to erase yesterday's news from memory. The father? He had never been mentioned much. The fact that the sister of the murder victim had been arrested too made the case kind of titillating.
Not for everyone. David Ira Brown, a computer expert who lived in Farmington Hills, Michigan, president of Data Recovery Inc., was less than enthusiastic with the headlines about the man with a name so similar to his own, and with a business name almost identical. His office fielded calls from people who wanted to know, "What in God's name happened to Dave Brown? Why would he do this?"
The nonarrested David Brown had incorporated under the Data Recovery Inc. name in Michigan in 1981. David Arnold Brown first registered his company name in Anaheim in 1988, after using a similar name in 1982.
David Arnold Brown was ordered held without bail. So was Patti Bailey. They waited in their separate cellblocks for the next step in their confrontation with the law, the preliminary hearing, set to begin the week before Christmas, 1988.
David hired Joel Baruch, a well-known—if somewhat flamboyant—Orange County defense attorney to represent him. Joel Baruch and Jeoff Robinson were an incendiary combination; if the case had not already promised sensational courtroom revelations, the combination of these two attorneys in one courtroom would have. Robinson had beaten Baruch twice in jury trials, and Baruch was not about to let it happen again.
Patti Bailey was represented by Donald Rubright, a tall, handsome defense attorney, also well-known in Orange County. David paid for both attorneys, just as he had paid for Cinnamon's defense in 1985.
David was arraigned on Monday, September 26, 1988, before West Orange County Municipal Court judge Dennis S. Choate. He pleaded innocent and was ordered held without bail. Patti awaited a hearing to see if she would be tried as an adult or as a juvenile.
For a very short time, there was a spate of rest, a chance for Jay Newell and Jeoff Robinson to catch their breaths, before they plunged into preparing for the trial that lay ahead.
Newell only rarely talked to the press. Robinson would say only—somewhat inscrutably—"Who pulled the trigger is really not important in the totality of the circumstances. We believe that we have all the parties arrested."
Jay Newell kept in touch with Cinnamon infrequently. During the week before Halloween, 1988, Robinson and Newell voiced some doubts that had been niggling at them. There were areas in the tapes of Cinnamon's conversations with police in 1985 that didn't mesh with what she was saying now. There were good reasons that she might forget, but one lie now would give Baruch and Rubright a chance to tear Cinnamon apart on the stand.
They could not risk that.
On October 27, Newell drove up to the Ventura School and talked with Cinnamon. The preliminary hearing was coming up in December. The decision about whether or not to hold David and Patti over for trial would be made then. There had never been a time when it was more vital that Cinnamon tell the absolute truth. If her testimony should be shaken, there would be no going back.
Ever.
Cinnamon had never testified in court before; she had not been allowed to in her own trial, and she needed to be fully aware of the consequences of evading the truth on the stand. Newell gave Cinnamon a "layman's" explanation of perjury. It was possible that she could get another charge if she lied on the witness stand. If she had held back anything from him, she had to tell him before they got into court.
Newell supplied copies of Cinnamon's earlier tapes to her, and transcripts of the hidden-wire tapes with her father and Patti, and asked her to listen to them, to read the transcripts. "Don't answer now. Listen to the tapes. Think about it. I'll leave my number with your counselor. He'll always be able to get in touch with me. If anything you've told me isn't true, let me know?"
She nodded.
The next day was a busy one for Jay Newell, and he had no chance to return a call left on his answering machine. The call was from Cinnamon's counselor at Ventura.
Weekends in the Newell household were devoted to kids or dogs—or both. On October 29, Jay Newell was getting ready to take his children to a Halloween parade. He nodded yes or no to last-minute decisions on costume additions, dodged big yellow dogs galloping through the recreation room, and reached for the phone.
It took a while to summon Cinnamon to the phone in her counselor's office. Newell had no idea what she had to tell him. He wasn't really apprehensive.
Her voice came through, that small, childlike voice. She might have been ten years old from the sound of her.
"Jay?"
"Yeah. What's up?"
"You said to call. What are you doing?"
"Getting ready to go to my kids' parade. What are you doing?"
"I have something to tell you."
". . . Yeah?"
"I was ashamed before—to tell you the whole truth. I just couldn't say it," she said softly.
"What?"
"Jay ... I did it. I was the one who actually pulled the trigger. ... I lied to you. I'm sorry."
Newell hung up the phone. How did he feel? He wasn't sure at first, and then he felt a surge of relief. Deep within his bones, he knew he had just heard the final truth, the terrible secret Cinnamon had kept submerged for years. They would no longer have to worry about the tiny tears in the fabric of Cinnamon's story. Jay Newell had been fairly certain that David himself hadn't pulled the trigger; the man was a coward.
Patti's part of it all was still a question mark.
He remembered Cinnamon saying plaintively, "Daddy, does it really matter who pulled the trigger?" Under the law, it really didn't.
When Jeoff Robinson heard that Cinnamon had admitted the shooting, he remembered being "totally relieved." Both Robinson and Newell were still convinced that David had set the whole murder scheme in motion, orchestrated it, pulled all the strings, and let someone else do the unpleasant part.
That still made him guilty as hell in the eyes of the law. It is a tenet in California law (and in almost every other state): "vicarious liability." Principals who aid and abet a crime are equally guilty. Anyone who aids, abets, instigates, promotes, or encourages murder is guilty of that murder, just as guilty—if not more so in some cases—as the actual killer.
32
It was Halloween when Newell headed north to see Cinnamon once again, this time to hear it all. The air grew crisp. It smelled like Halloween, and he thought of how excited his own kids were. His oldest daughter was now the same age Cinnamon had been on the night Linda died. Fourteen. He remembered now the Ocean Breeze neighbor girl's scorn as she laughed at Patti and Cinnamon for dressing up on Halloween. They had had such precious little time to be children; that night in 1984 had to have been one of their last attempts.
Patti, at least, must already have been playing David's "killing" game.
Even though, as a detective, Newell was eager to hear what Cinnamon had to say, this day would be rough. She looked pale and frightened when she came over from her "cottage." Newell took his time. They had lunch and talked about easy things, until he could sense that Cinnamon was relaxing.