If You Really Loved Me Page 10

  She could not bear to lose her daddy.

  Dr. Anderson searched for a diagnosis. Cinnamon Brown did not fit easily into any of the standard classifications of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual She was too oriented to be psychotic, and she seemed too sincerely contrite and sad to be an antisocial personality. If she was truly a human being without any conscience at all, she was a superlative actress.

  As she gave her life's history—albeit a short history over only fourteen years of life—Dr. Anderson asked Cinnamon if she could remember ever being sad for two weeks or more. She recalled that her dog had died when she was nine. Looking back, she thought she probably had cried for more than two weeks. It seemed her tears would never stop, and she could never love another dog.

  That recounting might allow Cinnamon to be wedged—if not cleanly fitted—into a diagnostic slot. Five years since the first lengthy depression. And now—another. Dr. Anderson found Cinnamon to be in the grip of a "major clinical depression," a recurrent major depression—another episode quite like the one she had suffered when she was nine.

  After speaking with Cinnamon for two hours, and taking other factors into account, Dr. Anderson decided that she was so depressed that she did not know the nature or the quality of the act of murder she had committed. That is, under the M'Naughton rule, Cinnamon had not known the difference between right and wrong at the time of the murder.

  It was a diagnosis that a defense attorney could run with.

  Al Forgette cared about the girl in the hospital bed, and a diagnosis that would allow him to invoke M'Naughton would probably ensure that Cinnamon Brown would go into a mental hospital—and not to prison.

  Still, Forgette had an uneasy feeling that his case was incomplete. There were things he didn't know. With absolutely nothing but instinct to go on, the defense lawyer believed that there was someone besides Cinnamon involved in Linda Brown's murder. He didn't know who, and he didn't know why—but there it was.

  And it bothered him.

  Forgette talked with David Brown, pointing out that it was Cinnamon—and only Cinnamon—that he represented. "For instance, I do not represent you, Mr. Brown. If our investigation should indicate to us that there was someone else involved—even you—we would go after that person—even you. "

  Al Forgette, who looked all-Irish although his name is French, sat at his desk with his football shoulders straining at his suit jacket, his Knute Rockne face solemn as he gazed unflinchingly at David Brown. He explained that detectives always look closely at all members of a murder victim's family. Forgette had discussed the case with Fred McLean; he had a good grasp of the facts as they had come forth the night of the murder.

  "It's conceivable that you might be charged with murder, Mr. Brown. If that were to happen, I would still be representing your daughter and only your daughter. Is that clear to you? Would you still want to retain me as Cinnamon's attorney?"

  David Brown shifted nervously in his chair and seemed concerned, even stunned, to hear that he might be considered a suspect. He lit a cigarette and pondered Forgette's words.

  Then Brown's tension eased. As he absorbed the unsettling news, he was still adamant that he would protect Cinnamon. He agreed totally with Forgette. No matter how the cards fell, David Brown was prepared to continue to retain Forgette as Cinnamon's attorney.

  Cinnamon had looked forward to being home with everyone within a week or two and was hopeful at a detention hearing on March 26 that the judge would let her out of "jail." But Juvenile Court judge Betty L. Lamoreaux ordered that she be returned to Juvenile Hall. For the first time, perhaps, Cinnamon Brown realized that she might not be going home soon.

  It mattered little to her that she could not be tried as an adult because she was under sixteen. All that mattered was that she was alone in a world she had never even imagined.

  David was a frequent visitor for his daughter—first in the hospital and then in Juvenile Hall where she was transferred when she was fully recovered from the effects of her suicide attempt. Her daddy had not deserted her. Cinnamon depended on him and on his advice. She listened raptly to David's voice and searched his face to see how he was bearing up under the strain.

  And at some time while Cinnamon Brown moved through her days in the strange new world she had been plunged into, her mind closed over. She no longer talked about the reasons for the murder of her stepmother, or about how it had taken place.

  When Dr. Seawright Anderson examined Cinnamon for the second time in July of 1985, he found that his patient did not recognize him; he might have been a complete stranger. Moreover, she had completely blocked all memory of the murder.

  "She knew it all the first time, and the second time she didn't even remember me. All she would say was, 'If they said I killed Linda, I want to be in a mental hospital. If I'm convicted, I'd go crazy. If I didn't do it, I want to go home with my father and my sister.'"

  Dr. Anderson now had a different diagnosis for Cinnamon Brown. He found her to be suffering from amnesia— psychogenic amnesia, originating in the mind, rather than due to physical trauma—and dissociative disorder, along with recurrent depression.

  Cinnamon just didn't remember any longer, she said. She only knew that she wanted desperately to go home again.

  During the spring and summer of 1985, "home" as Cinnamon Brown remembered it had begun to change. With Linda gone, things were not the same—nor would they ever be. Neither David nor Patti had realized how much Linda had done to make the place home. Without her, things began to fall apart.

  The week that followed Linda Bailey Brown's death had passed in a dull blur. Patti Bailey went to her sister's funeral, "but I still couldn't believe she was dead. If I was riding in a car, it still seemed as if she was there."

  Through it all Krystal wailed steadily. She was too young to know that her mother was dead. But old enough to sense some profound change around her. When Krystal cried, Patti sobbed. She seemed utterly bereft. At the same time she refused to accept that Linda was dead, she knew down deep that her sister was gone. David told people that no one seemed able to help Patti cope with her loss. Ethel Bailey was so caught up in her own grief that she had no emotion left for Patti. Alan, Linda's twin, was inconsolable.

  Both David and Patti were spooked. They heard sounds in the night, strange crying and wailing they could not explain rationally. They had been afraid at first to go back to the house where Linda was shot. It was as if Linda were still somewhere in the house.

  Patti and David prevailed upon friends and relatives to move back into the house with them so that they would not have to be alone with their imaginings. One of the friends who had come in and out of Linda and David's life was a pretty twenty-one-year-old woman named Denise Summers*, who lived in Riverside. Denise was originally a friend of Alan Bailey's, and through him, she had met and become close to Linda and David Brown when they were living in Yucca Valley, and subsequently, when they moved to Brea.

  "David told me about this company he was going to form, and that I could have a job," Denise recalled. "The commute for me would have been a long way—so I moved in with David and Linda in Brea."

  It was a full house in 1983. During that period, Patti and Cinnamon both lived there too, plus Ethel Bailey and Alan. Denise lived with the Browns and the Baileys until three months before they moved into the house on Ocean Breeze Drive. Ethel had not lasted as long.

  "I would say that Linda was my best friend—but that I was good friends with Patti and Cinnamon," Denise explained. "After they all moved to Garden Grove, I kept in touch with them—mostly by phone."

  During the summer of 1984, when Linda was pregnant with Krystal, she had confided to Denise that she suspected that her sixteen-year-old sister, Patti, and her husband, David, "had an affair going." When Denise asked her why on earth she would think such a thing, Linda said that David was devoting more of his time and attention to Patti—and very little to his pregnant wife.

  At one point, Linda told her friend s
he had blown up and told David that she wanted him to take Patti back home to Riverside and leave her there. He and Patti left the house on Ocean Breeze with suitcases full of Patti's things. But when David reached Riverside, he called Linda and said, "I'm not coming back without her. That's the way it's going to be."

  Denise Summers recalled that Linda tried, in vain, to get Patti out of her home and her marriage. As always, David prevailed. Her friend knew that Linda had always deferred to him, that he won every argument. Linda told Denise she had let him bring Patti home, but she had screwed up her courage and confronted him, asking him if there was anything "funny" going on between him and her sixteen-year-old sister.

  "David finally admitted to Linda that Patti had a crush on him," Denise said. "He said he didn't want to mention it—that it wasn't important. But Patti made a pass at him. He said he just told her to back off, that nothing happened, that she was a kid."

  Linda told Denise that she had had to let it drop. She wanted to believe David. But she had been very hurt—to think that David would choose Patti over her when it came to either-or. Even if nothing had been going on, she felt diminished.

  This was, Denise Summers said, the beginning of a distinct change in Linda Brown. Linda, who had always been warm and friendly, became distant. It was as if she was disillusioned—no distrustful—even with Denise. Linda's alienation grew more intense after the Christmas holidays. Their phone conversations seemed cold and stilted.

  "Part of the problem might have been that David was listening in," Denise told police. "They had these speakerphones all over the house, so every conversation was heard by anybody nearby. David had a lot of conference calls in his business."

  Denise seemed as dumbfounded as everyone else that it had apparently been Cinnamon who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Linda. She had seen the family up close, lived with all of them, and she had never noticed the slightest problem between Linda and Cinnamon.

  The last time Denise had seen the Browns before the tragedy was after Linda's baby shower in November 1984. "Everything seemed to be okay." The last time Denise talked to anyone in the Brown household had been at the end of February 1985. "David called me—just to see how I was. It was a short conversation because he was on his way somewhere."

  Denise Summers talked to Patti Bailey on the phone after the shooting. She told Sgt. John Woods what Patti had told her about the night of March 18-19. The story was almost identical to the versions the investigators had heard earlier —except Patti had told Denise that she was hiding in her bedroom when David Brown came home and was not waiting for him in the front hallway. She said she had refused to come out, arguing, "There's shooting out there!"

  "She said David asked her, 'Who?' and she said she didn't know, and then he just ordered her to come out, and she said for him to look around first. She said that David looked into the bedroom and saw Linda hanging over the bed. . . .

  "Then David came into the room and caught her on the phone with me, and she couldn't talk anymore."

  Compared to the other versions of the night of the shooting, it was still another variation. No one had said that Linda's body had been hanging over the bed; in fact, she had been found lying as if asleep—with one arm flung up. And David had always described Patti, with the baby in her arms, waiting for him in the front hall when he arrived home.

  Probably the slight variations meant nothing.

  Denise Summers had returned to the house on Ocean Breeze Drive with the family after the funeral on Friday, March 22. She sat with David and Patti in the master bedroom, and they discussed having her help clean up the house and assist them in moving out the things that had to go. They all agreed that it would be too painful to see some of Linda's things every day.

  "Patti pointed to a robe and asked David what he wanted done with it. It was David's robe—but Patti said Linda had been wearing it during the evening she was shot. I picked it up real carefully because I expected it to have bullet holes and blood on it—but it was clean. I guess she only wore it before she went to bed. David said he didn't want to talk about it. He couldn't stay there that night either. We all went over to his parents' house in Carson. He said he was going home later that night, but he didn't.

  "I talked to him the next day, and he said he was definitely moving back home. I told him to call me if he needed anything."

  David Brown and his baby girl did move back into the house on Ocean Breeze Drive, and Patti came along to care for Krystal. Manuela Brown moved in temporarily to help.

  David couldn't sleep on the bed where he had made love to his wife the night she died. Instead, he dragged a mattress onto the floor of his office and tried to sleep there. Manuela slept on the couch in the living room.

  There were reminders of Linda everywhere. A beautiful stained-glass hanging of a woman, with Leo astrology symbols for Linda, still rested against the wall in Krystal's nursery. Nobody to hang it up now. The teddy-bear calendars in the kitchen had notations of events-to-be, written in Linda's hand. God, there were even leftovers in the refrigerator that Linda had carefully stored in Tupperware containers, but it had been five days and a dusting of green mold covered the food. The little plants she had coaxed to root were all over the kitchen, drying out now.

  The fragrance of L'Air du Temps, Linda's favorite perfume—which David had given her in huge decorative decanters—seemed to drift in the air.

  Dust gathered, laundry piled up, and it was all Manuela and Patti could do to keep halfway caught up. It didn't help that Patti had always suspected that Arthur and Manuela Brown didn't like her and were always asking David why she lived with David and Linda. David wasn't well enough to do much physically to help his mother and Patti; all his ailments had flared up with the terrible stress he was living under.

  The dogs that Cinny loved so much became infested with fleas and other parasites in the muggy, shady pen out behind the garage—the pen she had shared with them for a night. Mary Bailey recalls that the fleas were so bad that, one by one, the animals died, neglected.

  And in the night, when the shrubs and the big ivy-shrouded maple tree blocked out even the moon, David and Patti still heard someone crying.

  They couldn't wait to move out; there were too many memories and too many tears here.

  David hadn't been back in his house twenty-four hours before he called Denise Summers for help. "He called about one-thirty A.M. on Sunday and he told me the baby was crying and Patti was crying."

  Denise knew that David Brown was never a man to come out directly and ask for anything. He had a way of letting his needs be known and making her feel guilty if she did not respond with help. She knew he wanted her to drive over to Garden Grove and help with the baby.

  "But I'd just taken a tranquilizer—what with the funeral and everything being so rough—and I was afraid to drive. Sunday morning, he called again and kind of talked around the subject. He wanted me to come and help them. He told me I could use Linda's car."

  It was David's way of doing things, she knew. He offered rewards for requests he never truly voiced.

  Denise told him she couldn't come that day, but promised to come over to spend the night with them Monday after she got off work. She kept her promise, arriving around eight-thirty.

  She saw a mattress on the floor of David's office. The house had an air of thinly muffled anxiety—as if something awful were about to happen; the occupants all seemed to be camping out, prepared to escape if need be.

  David Brown was too frightened, it seemed, to sleep alone. He suggested that he and Patti and Denise sleep together on one of the mattresses. He would sleep between the two girls. "I told him I didn't like that arrangement," Denise said. "We ended up with Patti sleeping in the middle—next to David."

  Even though David Brown was a bereaved widower, there was still a sexual energy about him. He said things that could be taken two ways. He could suggest sleeping with two women without thinking it at all unusual. His comforters were almost exclusively
female, just as his household was. Apparently he had no male friends.

  Denise spent several nights with David, Patti, Manuela, and Krystal. On one evening, Patti's friend Betsy Stubbs* visited from Brea. David and Denise drove Betsy home at the end of the evening while Patti stayed with Krystal. "On the way back, I came right out and told David I thought that Patti was in love with him," Denise said. "He said he didn't want to hear that.

  "When we got home, Patti started asking David why we were gone so long. She always gave him the third degree when he was with me. She never said she was jealous—but there was a tone in her voice . . . you could just feel that she was."

  Denise told Sergeant Woods that she actually began to be afraid of Patti Bailey. Maybe it was just the general feeling in the house—fear, suspicion, the strange sounds in the night —but Patti spooked Denise, and she moved back home long before she had planned to. There was a tone in Patti's voice that made Denise wonder how far Patti might go to assure that she could stay with David Brown.

  "I think Patti did it. I think Patti shot Linda," Denise Summers blurted to John Woods.

  Woods stared at Denise. "Why?"

  "Cinnamon is not capable of doing that. She got along with Linda; she looked upon Linda as a mother figure. Patti and Linda always had problems."

  Denise went further. She said that Patti had begun to replace Linda—totally. "Linda's chair is her chair now. Patti's wearing Linda's clothes."

  Detectives wondered at what point a teenage crush could metamorphose into possessive jealousy and even murder. Patti Bailey seemed so mild, and so sincerely grief stricken at the death of her sister. Besides that, the investigators had nothing to go on. It was Cinnamon who had confessed. It was Cinnamon who had swallowed an overdose, and it was Cinnamon's handwriting on the suicide note that admitted the shooting.