That day, my father was playing 'shark' with me, and I remember being so frightened.... Sometimes my dad would keep playing even after I was frightened already."
Although Lori had accepted Cinnamon eagerly, David's second marriage foundered in four years. They separated on October 13,1978. David cited "incompatibility." It was not surprising that they were incompatible or that Lori left him. Her husband had long since found someone else.
David encountered Linda Bailey for the first time while he still lived with Lori. His attraction to her was immediate, much as it had been when he was first drawn to Brenda. The fact that he had grown older mattered not at all.
Linda Bailey was only thirteen or fourteen when she caught the eye of the man who lived two houses down the street. She was pretty and blond and sweet. It was as if David had found Brenda again—the Brenda who thought he was God a long time ago and had laughingly come to call him "King David."
Like Brenda, Linda Bailey was one of eleven brothers and sisters in a home held together only tenuously by a single mother. From oldest to youngest, the Baileys were Sheri, Rick, Jeff, Tom, Pam, Linda, Alan, Randy, Larry, Ralph, and Patti. Ethel Bailey, born Ethel Anderson in Nebraska and trapped now in Riverside, California, was forty-two years old and overwhelmed by the emotional and financial responsibility for a near-dozen offspring. Like Brenda's family, Linda's family lived on welfare payments.
"There were seven little kids at home, living on noodles, rice, and Kool-Aid," David said. "No meat. Ethel spent her check on beer and cigarettes. I gave them a turkey and a large ham for Christmas." Nobody recalled exactly when David Brown began to visit the Bailey household in Riverside, but once he entered their lives, he became a familiar face, and he seemed at first like a godsend.
Ethel Bailey said that David came to her and explained that he was dying of colon cancer; he wondered if her teenage daughters might help out with cleaning his house-— for a wage, of course. The doctors had told him that he probably wouldn't live more than six months. His marriage was disintegrating, his house was a mess, and he desperately needed help.
Ethel Bailey accepted David Brown at face value. A sick man who needed help—but who was also willing to help others. "How do you say no to a dying man? I had no reason to doubt him—then." Beyond that, David had the ability to stay cheerful, despite his grim prognosis. He had a great sense of humor and he was a pleasure to have around. It seemed rather brave of him to go off to work each day, with the death sentence hanging over his head.
Ethel Bailey didn't know that David Brown was playing Fagin to several of her daughters. He delighted in persuading them that it would be a "trip" to see if they could steal tools that careless owners had left lying around in the backs of pickup trucks. They grew quite adept at lifting things. David made it a game. He could make anything sound reasonable and doable. Later, he would urge Cinnamon to steal small items.
The months passed and David didn't die—nor did he seem to be getting worse. He couldn't explain his miraculous remission. He still complained of pain and rectal bleeding, but it looked as if he wasn't going to die soon, after all.
David first began to date Pam Bailey, a girl in her midteens, almost ten years younger than he was. He became a fixture at the Bailey house, his eye really fastened on thirteen-year-old Linda. If he dropped in and saw the young Baileys were eating com flakes for supper, he simply headed down to McDonald's or to a pizza place and brought back food for everybody. Or he would pile two or three of the kids in the car and take them along. Because they were so dirt-poor that there seemed no way out, so young and poor that schoolmates' gibes about clothes cut to the heart, David Brown had an enormous impact on the Bailey children— particularly Linda, who soon supplanted her older sister as his special friend. David was Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and their savior. With no father in the home, or even in contact, with a mother who blunted her misery with alcohol, the younger Baileys quickly learned to depend on David.
He was making good money working with computers, and he spent a good deal of it on the Baileys. "I bought those kids the first store-bought clothes they ever had. I bought them clothes, toys. ... I took the whole stinkin' family to Disneyland and Magic Mountain. Yeah ... I'm a horrible man," he later said sarcastically. "The older kids didn't care that the younger ones had no Christmas."
Linda Bailey was barely budding into puberty when David first saw her, and he was cautious in his infatuation with her. She was slender and fresh faced, so compliant and so impressed with everything David Brown said or did. She hung around him and gazed at him with adoring eyes. There was little doubt that she loved him, quite literally, until the day she died.
Linda was the seventh of Ethel Bailey's eleven children, a twin; one of the last half dozen fathered by one Clyde Dalrymple of Pennsylvania—a man long gone from her life. She told David she was miserable at home. He was a most sympathetic listener. Linda confided her problems and her fears to David, grateful that, at last, she could tell someone.
He was the first hope she had of getting out.
Still legally married, David finally began to date Linda. She was no more than fifteen at the time. A mature fifteen, but still a young teenager. He was twenty-four. Then David announced one day that a miracle had occurred; he had beaten the cancer. The doctors were cautious—but it looked as if he might be around a little longer than they had originally estimated.
Linda went to her brother Rick's wife, Mary, and explained that she wanted to be sexually active. She asked about birth control. Mary tried to dissuade her, but when she realized Linda was determined to sleep with David, she advised her to go down to the free clinic and get birth control pills. When Ethel Bailey heard about Linda's plans, she was furious. There was an argument, and neither mother nor daughter would back down.
Linda left home and moved in with Rick and Mary. "She was quite a basket case when she first came to us," Mary recalled. "She felt bad about splitting with her mom. She lived with us for about two years. Then she decided she was going to marry David."
Six months later, when Linda was seventeen, Ethel Bailey finally gave her consent, and Linda and David, accompanied by Ethel and Linda's twin brother, Alan, drove to Las Vegas where they were married on June 21, 1979.
David was working as "the youngest manager of a worldwide customer-service department" for Memorex and making good money. For the first time in her life, Linda Bailey Brown had the home she had longed for. The man so sexually attracted to her was her husband, and she welcomed his attentions. Even so, David's third marriage ended even sooner than the first two, despite his avowed infatuation with his young bride. Maybe Linda was too young for marriage. After living together only one month and twenty-four days, they separated on August 14, 1979. On September 18, David sued Linda for divorce.
"David kicked her out of his house and divorced her," Mary Bailey remembered. "She moved back in with us. She dated other guys, and I would have chosen any one of them over David."
Mary Bailey, a robust, take-charge woman, was relieved that Linda's marriage had ended. She didn't like David Brown, found him "weird," and thought that Linda should be dating boys closer to her own age—not living with some man who was nine years older than she was, had already had two wives, and always had an eye out for other women. Mary Bailey felt she had his number. "Linda had other boyfriends, lots of them," she said. "It wasn't as if David was the only one who wanted her. But he had some kind of hold over her—she just never really wanted anyone but David. Don't ask me why."
David insisted that the marriage foundered because of Linda's immaturity and her lifestyle. "We were married, for, I think it was like several months. And I found out that, uh, I'm not even positive if it was alcohol or drugs, but she knew that I was against both very strongly, and, uh, she couldn't break it, so we got a divorce and I immediately bounced to a girl that worked for me, while I was manager at Memorex. Cindy."
David was married again, for the fourth time, almost immediately. He was tw
enty-seven, and in his own words, "on the rebound." But true to form, he could not recall his age or Cindy's age, or their wedding date or where they got married. The wedding date of record was May 24, 1980. They separated on Christmas Eve of the same year, and David sued Cindy for divorce on January 28, 1981.
David described Cindy as "a gorgeous one" and sounded slightly guilty at the way he had deceived his fourth wife. He had never truly let go of Linda. "I was cheating on Cindy— Linda and I kept seeing each other while I was married to Cindy." But David also complained that, although Cindy was absolutely beautiful, she had a "limited intellectual capacity," and while they had a steamy sexual relationship, they had had little in common beyond that. Cindy also had two children for whom David felt no affinity.
Despite his many intervening marriages, David asked his first wife, Brenda, to baby-sit for Cindy's kids often, and she usually acquiesced. "He told me he and Cindy could never go out because of the kids." Brenda also stayed on good terms with David's second wife, Lori. "Lori was good to Cinnamon. Even after David divorced her, she still came and got Cinnamon and bought her clothes."
Cindy, wife number four, had been impressed with David's job, but proved to be a little too acquisitive for her bridegroom's taste. "She wanted everything—monetarily —and I was unable to keep up with her demands." David was doing well at Memorex—$36,000 a year—but he had hinted to Cindy that he made more than that; it was one of his failings, that self-aggrandizement.
Whatever the true reason for his fourth divorce, David returned to his third wife, his teenage love. David said he had left Linda the first time because she took drugs or drank too much; he couldn't exactly remember which. No one else remembered that Linda had a problem with either drugs or alcohol during her first marriage to David. Years later, David's memory of Linda's fall from grace was more precise. He said that she had been using cocaine. It was a moot point. Linda was dead by then.
David's courtship of his third—and soon-to-be fifth— wife accelerated. He showered Linda with presents and overwhelmed her with promises that this time things would be different. He told her that he realized he loved her, and he always would. Their sex life had been a powerful part of their relationship, passionate and innovative. Both of them had missed that. David bragged to anyone who would listen that they made love at least once a day, and never the same way twice.
Around Christmas of 1980, Linda moved out of Mary and Rick Bailey's home—and back in with David, almost before the door had shut behind Cindy. She was older when she moved in with David again. This time, she believed they would make a go of their relationship.
It should have been a happy ending, two young people who loved each other so much they could not stay apart. Even so, Linda's return to David alienated her from her family. "We considered him a user," Mary Bailey said bluntly. "We didn't want her to go back. But she wouldn't listen to anyone.. . . David could make women feel important. Just the way he talked. His voice could convince you or persuade you. He could turn it on."
The estrangement didn't last long. Linda's family cared too much about her. Mary remembered Linda as one of the kindest people she ever met. "She couldn't stand to see anyone suffer. One time, she saw this guy in the winter without a coat, and she went and bought him a nice new leather jacket and gave it to him. I didn't have the heart to tell her he'd probably turn around and sell it. That's the way
Linda was—she couldn't do enough to help you. She couldn't stand to see anyone cold or hungry or unhappy."
Of all the Bailey sisters, Linda was the one who was the warmest, most affectionate, and fun loving. What she felt for this man so full of pretense and braggadocio was a mystery to her family, but they loved her and wanted to stay close. They had mixed emotions when Linda and David announced plans to remarry. Mary Bailey, of course, disapproved. Frankly, she thought Linda could have done better. She had argued against David as a husband until she was blue in the face—but to no avail. Linda adored the man.
"I finally gave up and said nothing. I could see it wasn't doing any good, and it was driving a wedge between Linda and me. But even when we made up with Linda, we didn't see her often. David didn't like to have her spending time with her family, our visits weren't encouraged; and he was furious if she ever discussed any problems with us. He wanted her all to himself."
Others in the Bailey family were glad to have David back in the fold. He was such a go-getter that they believed him completely when he talked about all the businesses he was going to start. He was an egomaniac and a bullshitter, but David Brown might well be a way out for more of them besides Linda. He hinted that there would be jobs for many of them when he got his enterprises going.
Manuela and Arthur Brown, while a little surprised at their son's many marriages before the age of thirty and not particularly fond of Linda, were relieved that he finally seemed to have settled down. All those marriages and divorces couldn't be good for his health. The emotional strain of having one marriage after another disintegrate must surely have contributed to his ulcers and colitis and asthma, and all the other ailments he suffered from.
The mercurial state of his health was only one of the many paradoxes about David Brown. He talked of being constantly ill and of having little energy, and yet he exuded an aura of self-confidence and can-do. Nobody he interacted with ever seemed to doubt him—in either mode. David was not a well man and had to be coddled, but he was also a winner in the world of business.
Either deliberately or with some innate sense he possessed, David surrounded himself with people who viewed him as an infinitely superior man. He was smarter, savvier, better educated, and older than all his women. He really had no male friends—only employees. He had crafted his own world—where no one would question him or doubt him, or second-guess him. He was good to those he let into his life, free with his money, and he continually hinted at rewards yet to come.
He gave the women in his life jewelry and presents and promises and poems. He made jokes and kept his women laughing. He became, for three young females, as vital as the very air they breathed. Interestingly, they all used the same phrase to describe him: their life support system.
EXCERPTS FROM TWO ORIGINAL POEMS BY DAVID ARNOLD BROWN (TO HIS WIFE)
That Inward Sun Is Our Hope & Faith For Tomorrow One Good, Happy Tomorrow Can Wash Away A Lot of Ugly Yesterdays.
I Am Here For You—Today, Tomorrow, Forever.
Life Will Be Wonderful
Love Will Be Too Both Will Be Cherished While I Share Them With You
lYomantic that he was, David Brown did not let it interfere with his own ambitions. "The Process" was his breakthrough. It verified what he had always promised. The Process would bring him financial rewards far beyond what even he had visualized. And it would give him prestige and respect, which he craved even more. No one would ever remember the David Brown who had scraped by on welfare. He had already done well financially; he wanted to be a millionaire.
In a mushrooming computer age, there were inherent nightmares. Anyone who has ever relied on a computer lives in dread of losing the precious information stored on disks. Business files, customer lists, accounts payable, creative work, in the blink of an eye, all of it can disappear, swallowed up somewhere deep in the bowels of a previously user-friendly computer.
In the early 1980s, even more than today, computer data was vulnerable to siege. Fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, floods, power surges and outages, and human error can wreak computer disaster. "Disk error" was a message that sent a chill through the user. A "crashed" system could bring a company to its knees financially.
David Brown was not an "egghead"—computer-programer type; he was a specialist in a new kind of rescue service. His knowledge was deceptively simple—but there was a demand for it, and he always spoke of it in a hushed voice, enhancing the impression that he was onto something really big.
David started his own company, which he called Data Recovery, and he got a big leg up in 1981 when he wen
t to work for Randomex Inc. in Signal Hill, California, as a subcontractor. Randomex had designed a system to repair damaged computer disks so that they could be read for backup and the vital information hidden there miraculously recovered.
Randomex profited from the fact that too many computer users neglected to keep backup disks stored outside their offices or had backup systems that had failed. The specialists at Randomex had refined their techniques to the point where they could recover data from fourteen-inch removable disk packs, and from hard drives and floppy disks. They were successful in retrieving 40 to 60 percent of the data lost by their frantic customers. That salvage could mean the difference between bankruptcy or survival for the small businessman.
David Brown studied the Randomex system as he worked for the company. He learned how to treat and clean the "media"—the disks—and make the heads fly back over the damaged area, bring the drives up to speed, and copy the good data onto another disk or tape. If he could improve on Randomex's percentage, David figured he would have himself a gold mine.
As indeed he did.
Randomex made all the contacts with potential customers, and David or Linda or some other family member on David's staff would pick up the damaged disks for treatment. When David came down himself, he never talked much. The executives at Randomex didn't like him, and they didn't dislike him. They never really knew him. He was simply "Data Recovery," a little subcontractor.
David added a few twists of his own and came up with what he called The Process. It was his, and his alone. He gave no credit to those who had taught him; his improvements were the real key. He soon was able to retrieve consistently a solid 70 percent of the data on the damaged disks given to him. David's special area of expertise was minidisks, the tiny hard disks that hold an unbelievable amount of data.
Cautious almost to the point of paranoia, David trained only those people he truly trusted, or over whom he wielded some power, in The Process. Even to detectives later, he could not bring himself to describe The Process in any detail. He called it "a hands-on project—what people out there call 'the magic of making it work' ... I guess you call it the power of what we do—see, all this time, no one else can do this."