If You Really Loved Me (10 page)

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 some
one
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

F
red 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.

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.