If You Really Loved Me (18 page)

But then, like the phoenix itself, he always pulled himself together and rebounded. He now had his technical degree from the Control Data Institute. However much he tended to embroider and pad his résumé, to boast of his accomplishments, one thing was immutable. David Brown proved remarkably adept in the burgeoning computer industry.

After working for Century Data in Anaheim, he moved steadily upward over the next five or six years, employed by a half dozen other computer companies. "I doubled my salary. In this business, they'll bid for you if you're good— and I am good."

He saw a way to become wealthy and respected.

15

M
ore than most people, David had lived his life in clearly defined phases, the demarcation points generally determined by the beginnings and endings of his marriages. He was thirty-two, and there had been five of them, so many in such a relatively short time frame that his confusion with dates might have been expected. Each wife changed his life, but he had long since forgotten the dates of his many weddings and divorces.

Records show that David married Lori Carpenter on October 4, 1974, in Yorba Linda, and then moved into a rental house on Randolph Street in Riverside. It was a drab house and so was the street it sat on. David could not recall how old he was or how old Lori was, beyond his impression that she was "a couple of years younger than I was." He was actually twenty-two and she was nineteen, a bit older than he preferred. Lori loved four-year-old Cinnamon, and Cinny visited them regularly on weekends.

"My dad was fun," Cinnamon remembered. "He played with me, tickling me and acting silly, or he'd build things like a railroad track. He included me in the things he did ... or shared enough to please me. That was when I'd visit him on the weekends after my parents divorced. I got attention from him that my mom didn't—
couldn't
give me because of work."

Brenda worried. One weekend, she had a nightmare that Cinnamon was drowning. "It was so real that I called David and asked him to check on Cinny. He just got mad and said I was stupid." Cinnamon, however, remembered that she
had
almost drowned. "It was in a pool by his and Lori's house. 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 corn 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 twenty-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."