If You Really Loved Me

  "No, something was wrong there. Cinnamon said that Linda and David weren't getting along. And she said one time she, David, and Patti came home and they overheard Linda and her twin brother—Alan—talking about getting rid of David."

  "Getting rid of David?"

  "That's what she said. 'Getting rid of David.'"

  "What was David's reaction when he heard them say that? Did Cinnamon say?"

  "No. I just know Cinnamon said the three of them backed out of the house and left without letting Linda and Alan know they'd heard their conversation."

  "Why would Linda and her brother want to get rid of David?" McLean asked.

  "I have no idea. Something was going on. Cinnamon told me that Linda was afraid David might leave her for Patti, and that David told her he might hire a detective to follow Linda."

  McLean wondered if Cinnamon had an overactive imagination. It seemed unlikely that so much intrigue had been going on behind the bland green walls of the house on Ocean Breeze Drive. "Patti's only sixteen or seventeen, isn't she?" he asked Brenda.

  "David likes them young. Linda was younger than that when he started with her," Brenda said with a touch of bitterness. "So was I."

  Asked to recall what David Brown had told her of the events leading up to Linda's murder, Brenda repeated almost word for word the familiar story detectives had heard several times now. David had told his ex-wife that he was upset over an argument with Linda, went for a drive to calm his nerves, and returned home to find his wife shot.

  "Patti told me Cinnamon shot at her and missed— because Patti ducked," Brenda said, her voice heavy with disbelief. "That just doesn't sound like Cinny. None of it does."

  "Let me throw out some names," McLean said. "Tell me if you're familiar with them?"

  "Okay."

  "Oscar . . . Maynard . . . Aunt Bertha?"

  Brenda half-smiled for the first time. "Maynard was Cinnamon's make-believe friend. Kids have them. She'd tease us, and say, 'Well, we will go tell Maynard.' There wasn't really a Maynard—she knew it, and we knew it. David made up Maynard a long time before Cinnamon was even born. There isn't any Aunt Bertha either—Cinnamon makes jokes about her."

  "And Oscar?"

  "That's new. I've never heard of Oscar."

  Just before five on March 19, Fred McLean returned to the Garden Grove Police Department where Alan Bailey waited to talk to him. The wiry man with straight reddish-blond hair and a number of missing teeth had obviously been crying. He introduced himself as "Linda's twin."

  Alan said he had last seen Linda around the first of March and had spoken to her on the phone only four days ago. There had been nothing unusual, nothing in her voice that alarmed him. And they were close—as close as twins often are. He would have known.

  But Alan said that there had been some change in Cinnamon's attitude toward Linda. "That included me. She used to call me favorite uncle'; now, suddenly, she can't stand me."

  Alan Bailey felt that Cinnamon Brown had been allowed to live "more or less where she wanted. If she was in the trailer, it would have been because she asked to be there."

  As for Cinnamon and Patti's relationship, they had never been close. "Patti has no sense of humor—none. She gets ticked when Cinnamon has fun and jokes with Oscar and Maynard, her imaginary friends. Patti can't see anything funny about it."

  As far as Cinnamon's being unstable, that characterization surprised Alan Bailey. He hadn't heard about that or any suicide threats from her. He thought that David might have attempted suicide in the past—when he was being divorced from Brenda. And Alan recalled that Patti "was very disturbed for a while."

  But not Cinnamon.

  Alan felt that Patti had caused a lot of friction in the Brown marriage, although he didn't believe the story that David was interested in Patti. He knew that Patti had a teenage crush on David, and that she was jealous of Linda's position in the household and with David.

  Alan Bailey viewed David Brown as a very dominant personality, and very protective about his immediate family and their privacy. David had often had go-rounds with Ethel Bailey, Linda and Patti's mother. Patti liked living with David and Linda, Alan thought, because she had more freedom and because she was able to have nice things.

  "Did you know Patti was no longer in school—that David hired a tutor for her at home?" McLean asked.

  "No ..." Alan said, surprised. "I didn't know that."

  Alan said that David had started dating Linda when she was around fifteen, and that they had been married, divorced, remarried.

  "Did they argue?"

  "Oh, yeah. But she usually gave in. He always convinced her he was right. David can turn things around with his words."

  "You don't like him?"

  Alan Bailey shrugged. "We had a falling out over a paycheck. I took the matter to the Labor Board. I work landscape gardening now with my brother."

  "Did you ever threaten David's life?"

  "What?"

  McLean's voice was casual, despite the questions he was throwing at Alan. "Maybe you and Linda were angry at David? Even kidding, did you ever say anything about getting rid of him?"

  "No way." Linda's twin seemed genuinely surprised at the question. "I don't kid like that."

  McLean switched gears. "Would you have thought your sister and David were happily married?"

  "Yeah ... I think so. Especially since the baby. David is so proud of that baby. They've both seemed happy since Krystal was born."

  So far, no one, beyond her father and Patti Bailey, had described Cinnamon as anything but a normal, overdisciplined, sometimes rebellious teenager. If there was some pathology working in Cinnamon Brown, she had kept it well hidden from most of the people she was close to.

  Steve Sanders moved on to Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove, hoping he might find some information there that would either confirm or deny what he and McLean had been told about Cinnamon. This wasn't the way a homicide investigation was supposed to evolve. Almost always, background checks on the suspect elicited witnesses who firmed up the charges—not the other way around.

  Cinnamon and Patti had both attended Bolsa Grande High from September of 1984 until March 6—two weeks before the murder. They were well-known at Bolsa Grande. The school counselor, Bill Reynolds, was as stunned as everyone else about Linda Brown's murder. He had never had occasion to meet Linda—or David, for that matter. Cinnamon and Patti had occasionally come to his office to have a "typical sibling problem" settled, but never anything major, and they seemed to him to get along very well. Even though Patti was actually Cinnamon's step-aunt, they interacted more like sisters. Cinnamon was the spunky one, the mischievous one—and Patti was the quiet one.

  Bolsa Grande principal Don Wise had talked to Linda Brown and Patti and Cinnamon about two weeks before they withdrew from school. It was to have been a family conference, but David Brown had said he was too busy to come in.

  Cinnamon and Patti said they had both had radios stolen from their lockers, that some students had weapons in the classroom, that some of their teachers did not know how to teach, and that they allowed dope dealing in the classroom. Wise perceived at once that the girls wanted to transfer from Bolsa Grande, and that they were simply making up outrageous complaints to effect their withdrawal.

  In retrospect, the principal felt that Linda, Cinnamon, and Patti got along well with each other, and he had seen no hostility at all among them. Linda had brought her baby with her to the conference. If anything, it seemed to Wise that it was the father who was blowing incidents all out of proportion, and that David Brown seemed to be the catalyst in the group—even though he was not physically present at the conference.

  Two weeks later, David Brown did appear—to remove Cinnamon and Patti from Bolsa Grande High School. School officials recalled a short, florid man who seemed extremely hostile. Brown had shouted, "This one [pointing to Patti] is going to Nebraska!" and "That one [indicating Cinnamon] is going to Loara High School!" With much huffing
and puffing, David Brown had unceremoniously withdrawn his two charges from Bolsa Grande on March 6, 1985, leaving behind school personnel puzzled by his anger.

  The girls themselves had been compliant and easy to get along with, and until the conference with Linda two weeks earlier, there was no reason to think they were unhappy in school. Sanders found that they both had good attendance records, and that Cinnamon had only two minor incidents that had brought her to the vice principal's office: she had "disrupted the class" with her antics on Halloween, and she had been truant from two class periods.

  Sanders talked to several of Cinnamon's teachers, and he got reviews as mixed as the teachers' own personalities. Cinnamon's food-services teacher found her "a sweet kid, nonaggressive, nondisruptive, well liked, and never foulmouthed. ... We had a blind girl transfer in, and Cinnamon went out of her way to help her."

  Cinnamon's math teacher had negative views. "Everyone knows they cannot be excused from my fourth-period class to go to the rest room. Cinnamon insisted she had to go, and she left. I sent her to the office. The next day, she brought a note from home saying she had weak kidneys and had to be excused whenever she asked. I think she did it only to get attention."

  Sanders frowned to himself. Hardly the stuff of vicious killers.

  But one teacher had noticed a distinct change in Cinnamon Brown's behavior midway through the year. Cinnamon had been a strong B student—until after the Christmas holidays. Something or someone in her life had changed then, because Cinnamon's work and attitude disintegrated. "She no longer paid attention in class, she talked, she wrote notes. I had to change her seating arrangements. She was even worse in February. I have no idea why she changed so drastically. I wondered what might have happened at home during the Christmas break to make her so different in class."

  Even so, this teacher commented on how well Cinnamon got along with her peers. As for insolence or bad language, the teacher said with a smile, "The only foul word I ever heard Cinnamon Brown say was sheep dip—which isn't exactly profanity."

  The worst thing any teacher could say about Cinnamon Brown was that she was sometimes full of mischief, enjoyed attention, and was easily distracted. She was a chatterbox, and one teacher said Cinnamon's constant banter "drove me crazy." She laughed as she said it, recalling that she had mentioned Cinnamon's volubility once to Patti, who happened to be the teacher's student aid.

  "I know, " Patti agreed. "Me too! She's like that a lot."

  Patti Bailey was quieter, shyer. Where Cinnamon was quick, Patti was slow and seldom smiled. She confided to one teacher that her real father was in a hospital somewhere but that no one would tell her where. Later, she came in with an address in Oregon, and she asked the teacher to help her write a letter to him. "I corrected her spelling and punctuation, but I didn't pry into Patti's reasons for writing. I don't know if she even mailed the letter."

  Neither Patti nor Cinnamon ever talked about their home life in school.

  Detectives found that extended family relationships seemed more strained. Ethel Bailey, Linda's mother, and Alan Bailey, her twin, thought David was overbearing and controlling. Mary Bailey, one of Linda's sisters-in-law, didn't like him, and all of the Baileys thought Patti had a crush on David. Brenda Sands didn't trust her ex-husband and thought Linda had been afraid of him—just as she once was. David thought the Baileys and Brenda were just jealous because he was far wealthier than they were.

  Who knew? And where did Cinnamon fit in?

  9

  Fred McLean interviewed David Brown for the second time on March 20, twenty-four hours after the shooting. He noted that Brown was nervous and appeared to have slept little.

  David reconstructed once more the evening before the murder, with only minor changes for the most part. His parents had visited all day, and they had played board games. "Both Linda and Cinnamon played. Linda quit to get ready for bed. Cinnamon quit for some reason."

  The argument had been about whether or not to let Krystal cry. Linda said it was sometimes good to let a baby cry, and David disagreed. Arthur Brown had settled it by declaring flatly that Linda was right.

  Now Krystal cried all the time.

  David remembered exactly the sequence of his drive to the beach. To the letter: the kind of pie, the brand of soft drink. When he returned home and opened the front door with his key, he said he found Patti and the baby just inside the doorway. Patti was stuttering, repeating that something was wrong, that Cinnamon had tried to kill her. "When I took the baby and started to go into my bedroom, Patti grabbed me and said, 'Don't!'"

  McLean's clear blue eyes blinked. Patti had said that she had asked David to check the master bedroom, but David had refused because he was afraid. Now, David described his response to danger in a more macho, take-charge way— completely opposite to Patti's version.

  Even so, David said he hadn't gone farther than the bedroom door, where he saw his wife lying in "an unnatural position" and backed away.

  "Did you kill your wife?" McLean said suddenly.

  ". . . No. No, of course not."

  "Do you think Patti Bailey did?"

  "No ... I don't. I don't even know why Cinnamon did."

  David leaned forward. "You know, Cinny took an overdose of aspirin—about two weeks ago. I called her mother about it."

  "Does—did—Linda use any drugs, any prescriptions?"

  "No—only some suppositories that Dr. Ogden prescribed."

  McLean asked Brown about his business, how much his wife had been involved in it, about any insurance she might have had. David said that Linda was the one person who knew everything about his business. He had attempted to train Alan Bailey in some facets of Data Recovery, but he had fired him because he was unreliable.

  "He once threatened my life." David threw the remark away almost casually. "There was a witness—Sam, who owns the coin shop on Brookhurst and Ball, heard him say it."

  David seemed to have little affection for Linda and Patti's family. He said he had never been close to any of the Baileys—only to his deceased wife and her little sister.

  As for any insurance, David struggled to remember. Yes, he thought he once had about a million-dollar policy on Linda, but he had dropped it sometime earlier. "About a month ago, I got a new—small—policy on her."

  Asked why he had taken Patti out of school, David said she had been having trouble with the special ed program at Bolsa Grande, and that he felt she would do better with tutoring at home. "I've made arrangements for it."

  McLean didn't ask David Brown why he had told school authorities that Patti was moving to Nebraska.

  David Brown was agitated about newspaper reports of his wife's murder. One reporter had said that there had been people coming and going at the Brown residence at all times of the day and night, hinting that it was "suspicious activity." That was not true, David said; the activity mentioned occurred in the house across the street, and he felt the faulty reporting reflected badly on him. (Indeed, the paper would later print a retraction of this facet of the case.)

  Fred McLean wanted to talk once again to Patti Bailey, but David Brown asked him not to—he was concerned that Patti was too upset, that her grief was deepening and he didn't want her bothered. McLean told Brown that Patti had to be questioned, and that he would be as gentle and tactful as he could. Brown had finally, reluctantly, backed off.

  Patti seemed a little tired—not almost cheerful as Brenda Sands had described, but not devastated either. She answered McLean's questions without tears. Her recounting, like David's, was essentially the same as she had given just after the shooting. She now recalled that she had found the back door unlocked when David sent her outside to look for Cinnamon.

  That was new—and would surely mean that David had left the house for his drive without setting the alarm.

  Patti offered further information that Cinnamon was growing hostile to the family. "She was jealous of Krystal. She was never close to the baby, and she only called her 'little sister'
because David wanted her to."

  Patti also said that Cinnamon had tried to overdose on aspirin after she had argued with Brenda Sands. "Then she moved out to the trailer because she got in an argument with Linda and me."

  McLean shot the question out at Patti Bailey too: "Did you kill your sister?"

  "No ... I didn't."

  Patti didn't even blink.

  Al Forgette, Cinnamon's attorney, wanted to get a psychiatric evaluation of his client as soon as possible. He arranged for Dr. Seawright Anderson to interview Cinnamon on March 20. Anderson, a 1950 Harvard graduate and a practicing psychiatrist since 1952, had testified in some five hundred cases, usually as a defense witness.

  Seawright Anderson saw Cinnamon Brown for the first time as she lay in her hospital bed at the University of California Medical Center in Orange. She was doing much better than she had been, but was being carefully monitored.

  Dr. Anderson wanted to establish Cinnamon's general mental status to see if she was capable of testifying in her own behalf in any court action to come. He found the teenager coherent and relevant, quite forthcoming in her recounting of the night of the shooting. "Her account was spontaneous and set off on a long narrative on what she did," Dr. Anderson would testify later. "When she talked about that night, she really went on."

  Her stepmother had forced her to live outside in the trailer, she told the psychiatrist. It had made her feel bad, but she told people she didn't mind—that it would be better for her new puppy if they lived together out there.

  Still, it had mattered to her, she said, but she had kept her feelings to herself.

  When she described the crime itself to Dr. Anderson, Cinnamon seemed unable to respond to questions that required her to separate her feelings from the scenario she recited. "Breaking down the interview—when you break it down bit by bit and ask her why she did it—what she thought—she didn't know."

  Cinnamon denied that she wanted to kill Linda, a bizarre response considering that she admitted shooting her twice.

  When asked if she thought she needed to be in a mental hospital, Cinnamon shook her head. No, she did not. Her biggest concern was whether or not her father would still love her. She feared that he would no longer want her around him because she had shot Linda.