If You Realy Loved Me

  Undeterred by my positive comments about Robinson, he warned me nevertheless, "You're going to have to keep an open mind." I must understand, he stressed, that I was talking to a man who had always tried to play fair with people.

  He castigated Brenda, his first wife, and recalled how that divorce "tore me up." He took much pleasure in his millions because he knew Brenda regretted losing him. He explained that he had been faithful; his second wife, Lori, had been only a friend until he found himself dumped by a "cheating wife."

  David was anxious to know if I had talked to Brenda. I nodded. "A little."

  "She lied about me, I'll bet."

  "No." I told him the truth. "She told me how good you were to her when she was fifteen, how you took care of her, and how much she loved you then."

  David was put off by my answers; he had not yet been able to get a fix on me. I could sense David Brown sizing me up. What would work with me? Where were my weaknesses? My vanities? This was a man who enjoyed word games and keeping his opponent off-balance. He tried another tack with me. "You're one of the smartest women I've met in a long time," he commented. "Most of the people in here are grapefruits."

  "... Thanks a lot."

  Then David Brown wanted to talk about his betrayers. Patti's defection was uppermost in his mind. "I believed her when she said she didn't do it."

  "Who did do it?" I asked.

  "I don't know," he said impatiently. "I'm not a police detective. Linda was saying, 'It hurts—it hurts. Help me. Help me!' Anyone who could do that has to be pretty cold."

  David burned with the memory of seeing Newell and Robinson talking to Patti before an early pretrial hearing. "I swear it was an emotional conversation; I couldn't hear what they were saying, but their hands were moving. I swear they were coaching her." Indeed, he insisted that both girls had been coached to say what they did.

  David had nothing at all good to say about his own attorneys. "Pohlson didn't put on one-tenth of the defense I, wanted, not one-tenth of the witnesses. He's a spoiled brat, very egotistical. He's the one that wouldn't let me question him—he'd get real angry, real angry. I fired Pohlson. McCartin wouldn't let me. I still would have been allowed to have a Marsden hearing, but when you hire an attorney* you can fire him."

  David was convinced that Jeoff Robinson and Gary Pohlson were such close friends that Pohlson deliberately lost his case. He wished now that he had been allowed to hire C. Thomas McDonald (Randy Craft's attorney) or Milton Grimes.

  As for witnesses, Brown thought all of the Baileys should have been called by the defense. His perceptions were fatally flawed. The Baileys had not only voiced their hatred for him, they had shouted it to the media and rejoiced in his conviction, but he skimmed over that. "The Baileys swore by me. We had no problems."

  His views of Cinnamon were also skewed. "Cinnamon was a violent and abusive teenager. Patti was unstable; she tended to like a lot of guys. I felt Patti was a little bit infatuated with me."

  He gave this information to me confidentially, as if I had not heard Patti's damning testimony on his sexual abuse and the stolen episodes of sexual activity between them whenever Linda's back was turned.

  David Brown labored to convince me of Cinnamon's violence. "Cinny was verbally abusive to me—more than you'd want a teenager to be. Brenda called and said, 'She hit me! My mouth is bleeding. I never want her back!'" Long suffering, he had rescued Brenda, he explained, and had taken the "vicious" teenager into his own home. He allowed that he didn't have to face the brunt of the problems with Cinnamon. "I wasn't around her and Patti; Linda was home with them all day."

  David then revealed a new scenario to me about March 19, 1985. "They were both going home to their mothers that day—Patti and Linda were constantly butting heads, Patti disobeyed Linda, tried to borrow her jewelry and clothes, tried to run the house. . .. Cinnamon had reasons for resentment and being upset. Her mother kept yelling, 'Get out of my house—I never want to see you again!'"

  David sighed as he recalled his decision. "Linda said, 'Either she goes or I go!' It was a horrible thing for me to choose—since Cinny was nine or ten, she got on my nerves too—she was such an unusual kid. She made both Brenda and Linda hate her, and I did too. Can you understand that?"

  I didn't answer—because I couldn't understand that.

  "They killed her because they were going home that day. Patti had to eliminate Linda to take her place. Cinnamon wanted to be in a loving home. They both had motives. It may sound weird, but I wish to God Linda was here to testify."

  Why would that sound weird.. . ?

  I asked, "How do you feel about Cinnamon now?"

  "It's rough." He sighed, lighting a cigarette. "Coming to terms. She killed my wife. What's it matter to kill me too? She knew I faced the death penalty at the time she changed her story. Her father could die, and she didn't care. She's cold . . . and evil."

  David attributed Cinnamon's treachery to the fact that she was in love with a boy at Ventura School. "She was in a whirlwind of love . . . she was desperate to get out. She's proved what a liar she is."

  I asked Brown about the four insurance policies. Just as he had in the interview with Newell and McLean, he tensed up at the mention of insurance. I noted that, when he was hard-pressed for an answer to a difficult question, his eyes slid right while he constructed his response. "I never spent the insurance money. I don't need that money."

  "You didn't?"

  "I cashed the checks," he answered cagily.

  "What did you do with the money?"

  "Let's just say it's invested."

  "Where?"

  "I can't say. I don't want Patti and Cinny to know how that money was invested. I don't want the Baileys to know where it's invested."

  Ten minutes before, David had told me he got along fine with the Baileys, and now he denigrated them as criminals, drug users, whose decadence shocked him. He reminded me of his many, many beneficences to the Baileys, all unappreciated. "I'm not guilty—that family was. Ethel was greedy," David said. "She wanted to sell Patti to Linda for twenty-five hundred dollars, and Linda just told her she was crazy! I think Ethel was planning to put Patti out for prostitution, and she thought she'd lose money if Patti came to live with us. We were willing to go to court to keep Patti."

  "But you took Patti back home—at Linda's insistence— didn't you?" I asked.

  David explained that was true, but that it was he who had decided Patti couldn't live with them any longer. "Frankly, she was coming on to me, and I couldn't have that, so I took her home to Riverside. Then she called up and said that one of her brothers had raped her, so we went to get her. We had her checked at Martin Luther King Hospital, and there was no sign of rape. But we brought her back home."

  Once on the subject of the Bailey family, David was reminded of more of their vices. "It's true I didn't like to visit the Baileys," he said. "Ethel would sit there and go through a six-pack in an hour. They did drugs in front of us. I don't believe in drinking or doing drugs or abusing your children," he finished.

  David Brown was a fascinating interview. He was expansive and generous with details in areas that had no particular bearing on his case, and cryptically stingy when I probed too close to perilous aspects of the case or asked questions he had no canned answers for.

  He described his hardscrabble childhood. He was Horatio Alger reborn, a boy who struggled to survive and now helped others less fortunate. There was the sense that I was hearing a memorized spiel. Many of the anecdotes were familiar. I had heard them on tape, seen him on videotape saying the same words:

  I asked him if his childhood had been happy, and he quickly reversed the question. "Was yours?. . . What's happy?"

  David Brown clearly did not like direct questions. I asked him, just to change the direction of the conversation—and because I had found it to be a good interviewing technique to relax subjects—"If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you choose?"

  He froze. "Why would you w
ant to know that?"

  "No reason. I'm trying to get to know you."

  Then I realized that he suspected I was seeking information about some eventual escape destination. I had no doubt at all that, even as we talked in this totally secure jail, the man on the other side of the glass was devising schemes once again.

  When I asked him what was wrong with his heart, David looked wary again. "It's a physical problem," he said shortly.

  "I imagined it was. What are your symptoms?"

  His eyes slid to the right, and there was a long silence.

  "Do you have an irregular heartbeat?" I pushed.

  "No."

  "Do you have tightness in your chest?"

  "No."

  "Do you feel pain?"

  "No."

  "Do you have shortness of breath?"

  Finally he nodded. "And I have numbness. I can't feel my arms sometimes."

  It was obvious even to a layman that David Brown's heart was fine; he suffered from the classic symptoms of panic attacks. But for once, he didn't want to talk about his many ailments; he wanted to talk about how he was seduced and threatened into the murder-for-hire plot by Irv Cully and Richard Steinhart.

  "I was being strong-armed by those guys; they had pictures of the Chantilly Street house. They would have killed my mom and dad and children—one by one. They told Newell and Robinson that they could lock me in a cell and get me. The DA said, 'If you can, do it."

  Brown studied my face to see if I was buying this, and I stared back at him.

  He tried harder. "Listen, there were tons of message slips [between Cully and Steinhart and the Orange County DA's Office] that disappeared. Irv gets pizza, juice, burritos. We don't get that stuff in here."

  David had apparently perused items taken in discovery from the prosecution by his attorney Gary Pohlson. One was a scrawled note from Irv Cully: "During the discussion with Newell, Myself and 'Goldie' Steinhart would APPRECIATE two styrofoam cups and a BIG can of pineapple juice, as a token of good faith."

  Food was obviously very important in David Brown's life. He mentioned it often. Being denied his favorite foods was apparently symbolic of his loss of power in jail. He seized on Cully's modest request to show me the DA's office was crooked. There was nothing in evidence to indicate that Cully ever got his pineapple juice.

  And Steinhart, of course, never got any pizza; he only put on such a good act from his phone in the Huntington Beach

  Jail that David still thought he had. If the stakes in David's games had less potential for tragedy, his petulance about food would have been laughable.

  David suggested that I read the September 22 interview again and again. "Act out the parts," he urged. He still believed that he deported himself very well the morning of his arrest in that devastating interview with Jay Newell.

  I had read the transcript ten times; I had viewed the videotape a dozen times, alone and with others, and perceived a man who revealed his sociopathy completely. It was significant that David saw himself—and Newell—in reversed roles.

  From David's point of view, it was Jay Newell who lied. "As naive as I might sound," he said, deliberately ingenuous, "I didn't think an officer of the law could lie. I've never been arrested in my life. He caught me with a right hook, and I believed him. He flat-out lied to me. He made it sound like I admitted I was guilty! I was scared to death, Ann. He caught me with my shorts down! It shocked me to see the pictures [taken by the surveillance camera in Ventura]. I didn't know it was Cinnamon. Would I deny it—if I knew I'd done it? Wouldn't that just make her mad?"

  David Brown confided to me that he feared prison. "The cons will go after me because they think I'm rich, or they'll blackmail me."

  "Couldn't you use your money inside to buy an easier life?" I asked.

  "No way."

  I asked David if he was, indeed, still wealthy. He contemplated me and then said earnestly, "Honest to God, I'm flat broke."

  There it was again, "honest to God" as a preamble to a flat-out lie.

  I asked another blunt question. "Is Heather your child?"

  "No! . . . Patti's a slut. Patti was going out since junior high school. She was dating a contractor. A DNA test would show I'm not Heather's father. I've asked for a blood test."

  "Why did you marry Patti then?"

  "That's a hard one to explain." David's eyes moved again to the right as he formulated an explanation. The marriage was only a dummy marriage, never meant to be real, he assured me. "Hell, I won't deny that during some real lonely and emotional times, I did have some 'encounters' with Patti—she wasn't unattractive—but trust me, she couldn't have gotten pregnant. How shall I say it—she couldn't have gotten pregnant with the kind of encounter we had. I had emotional problems and physical problems that precluded —ah, sexual intercourse."

  But apparently did not preclude oral copulation, as Brown subtlely suggested, as he watched my face to see my reaction. I said nothing.

  "And then," he continued, "my folks were there, and Krystal, and Alan lived there. I was having a relationship with Betsy Stubbs right up to the arrest."

  Betsy Stubbs, the daughter of David's insurance agent, more recently the baby-sitter. Betsy Stubbs, who at nineteen, still believed she could miscarry by "throwing up a baby." Jay Newell had interviewed Betsy and learned of her affair with David—even while he was married to Patti. "I didn't have boyfriends," she had said to Newell, sobbing. "He was the first guy who made me feel attractive and a little bit important."

  Betsy clearly mattered little to David; he mentioned her only to bolster his indictment of Patti. He expanded on Patti's black desire for him. "Patti killed Linda to get to me. I was scared to death of Patti. I thought she was the one who killed Linda. That's why my parents lived there. We were that close to having her move out when we were arrested. Patti was looking into buying property in Oregon. ... I hated Patti. I wouldn't have minded if something happened to her."

  There was a loathsome kind of fascination here. David Brown blamed everything on someone else. In the three hours we had talked, he blamed Patti, Brenda, Cinnamon, the Baileys, Gary Pohlson, Jeoff Robinson, Jay Newell, Richard Steinhart, Irv Cully, and the justice system for his misfortunes.

  He added Joel Baruch, his ex-attorney. "I was forced into PC [the protective custody wing] and they planted Irv Cully and Richard Steinhart in there to entrap me. Baruch said, 'Pay them. They're just criminals. They won't really kill Robinson.' I told Baruch to warn Robinson. I believed Baruch and he was gone to Florida." This was typical David Brown rhetoric; whatever served him best at the moment was that day's truth.

  I had a creeping sense of d6j& vu. How many times had I listened to convicted killers deflect blame before it ever touched them? In a sense, I think they all came to a place where they believed what they were saying. David Brown looked sincere, and he sounded genuinely aggrieved; I believed that, for that space in time, he believed. He actually saw himself as a victim.

  He was impatient with those who kept harping on the old truths. "Robinson says I brainwashed Cinny and Patti," he said with a laugh. "How could that be?"

  "Do you understand the steps in brainwashing?" I asked.

  He shook his head, but David was curious.

  "I wrote a book about it once," I said. "In order to brainwash someone, four criteria must be met. First of all, the victim has to suffer a profound psychic shock—"

  "They never had that."

  "They thought their home was being broken up," I said. "They depended on you completely. They didn't think they could get along without you."

  "Naw—that doesn't fit. What else?"

  "The victim must be removed from everything and everyone that makes her feel safe," I offered. "The girls weren't in school—all they had was home. They thought

  Linda was going to kill you, that the 'family' would be gone, and there would be no home."

  Already, David Brown was shaking his head. ". . . Doesn't fit."

  "The third thing is th
at the subject is 'programmed'— told what the brainwasher wants her to believe, over and over and over again."

  This time, David said nothing.

  "Fourth," I said, "the victim is promised a reward. Usually her very life. Patti said you were her 'life support.'"

  "No way. It doesn't fit. I didnt brainwash those girls. They did it all on their own."

  David enjoyed the mental jousting. I could tell he rather liked the idea of being a successful Svengali, but he would not, of course, admit that to me.

  He changed the subject. I had come too close to reality for him. He wanted me to know how very, very much he had loved Linda. He had treated her like a queen, never letting the romance go out of their perfect marriage. "I had an account with a special florist—for Linda," he recalled, his eyes actually misting. "I ordered only expensive, unusual arrangements, and I insisted on crystal vases. I had that florist scouring Nordstrom's and I. Magnin's looking for just the right crystal vases."

  David described his meticulous attention to the details of Linda's inurnment, repeating to me, as he had to anyone who would listen, how important it was to him that her ashes had a pleasant resting place. He told me how lovingly he composed the inscription for the plaque to mark her place in the "twenty-four-hour-a-day fountain."

  "What did you write?" I asked, pen poised.

  David only repeated that he had grappled to find the right words to write on the plaque that covered Linda's niche in the fountain. And yet, urged to remember, he could not.

  "The words—the words that you wrote?" I asked again.

  He looked blank and shook his head. "I don't remember. Go look at the plaque—you'll see how much I loved her."

  David said he still felt close to Linda, that they had shared an interest in communication between the real world and the other world beyond, in ghosts and psychic phenomena. "Linda and I believed in that kind of stuff," he said. "We went to psychics. We only went to the best. They told me I would be very, very successful in business, and that I would live to an old age. But Linda—well, two of them just turned white when she asked about her future. They didn't want to talk about it. The third finally came right out and told her she would die very young. I'm afraid she believed them. It troubled her, and I guess it scared her more when Krystal was born—because they'd all told her she would give birth to a daughter, and that part had come true."