If You Really Loved Me (36 page)

PART THREE

The Arrest
and the
Death List

30

A
t 6:39
A.M
., on Thursday, September 22, 1988, Jay Newell and Fred McLean met at the 7-Eleven on Ball Road and Sunkist with a male "uniform" and a female "uniform" from the Anaheim Police Department for backup. At seven
A.M
., Newell and McLean would knock on the door of the big blue house on Chantilly Street, and they wanted every eventuality covered. They had come this far; they wanted no minuscule mistake now.

"I put tape into the recorder in the squad car," Newell recalled. "The female uniform would drive, and we planned to put David and Patti together in the backseat. If they said anything, I wanted to know what it was."

"At seven
A.M
., the blue house was quiet, but the nearby Orange Freeway was buzzing with commuter traffic. Newell knocked at the door, and he and McLean stepped back a bit and waited.

Nothing.

Newell knocked again.

An intercom near the door startled them as David Brown's voice sounded, "Yeah?"

"Mr. Brown," Newell said. "Can you come down here? There's a problem we need to take care of."

There was another wait, and then the door opened and David Brown stood there, muttering that he had been asleep. He had had to get dressed. He wore white slacks and a white T-shirt. His mood was anything but welcoming, but the moment he stepped back, the two detectives and the male police officer stepped in.

"You are under arrest, Mr. Brown, for the murder of Linda Marie Brown," Newell said quietly.

He searched Brown's face for some trace of emotion and found none. David didn't seem surprised, or shocked. He simply stared back at Newell with his inscrutable blank eyes.

This house was so much more expensive than the little avocado-colored stucco rambler on Ocean Breeze Drive. But it was a mess inside. Cartons of business papers and work to be done were everywhere. The furniture was the same—at least it looked just like the stuff that Newell and McLean had seen on the day of the murder. But that house had looked as if a woman had taken care of it lovingly. This place looked unlived in, messy.

Newell headed up the staircase to the second floor. He looked into the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. Patti, wearing a nightgown, was in bed there, with Krystal. The four-year-old sat up in bed and stared at him.

"You are under arrest for the murder of Linda Marie Brown," he said to Patti.

She looked at him without expression. There were no tears in her eyes, and she seemed no more surprised than David was.

"This your room?" Newell asked, knowing that it wasn't.

"No, I sleep down the hall with Heather," Patti said, pointing in that direction.

Newell looked in the room and saw Heather in a baby crib. There was a bed, but it was completely covered with neatly folded and ironed clothes. Patti had not slept there. He doubted that she had ever slept there.

David asked to go to the bathroom, and Newell nodded, but advised him he would have to go along. The master bath was in David's bedroom, a huge room obviously recently remodeled. It had a large television set and an expensive stereo system.

The bed was rumpled.

Behind the bed, the carpeted floor rose to another level, and the area appeared to be an office. There was a refrigerator. Newell opened it idly; the shelves were packed with dozens and dozens of bottles of Perrier.

There was no argument about shutting the bathroom door; there
was
no bathroom door—the room was still in the last stages of remodeling. It was large and luxurious, with a bay window and a large circular tub with whirlpool jets.

"Can I take a Xanax?" David asked, pointing to a bottle of the heavy-duty tranquilizers.

Newell opened the container, handed one to David, and left the bottle where it was. He wanted to talk to David and he wanted him alert. He handcuffed his prisoner and walked him down the stairs.

Once in the squad car, David Brown began to call piteously, "Help me. Someone help me. I'm going to be sick. I'm claustrophobic."

Patti Bailey dressed quickly in white slacks, a pale-blue hooded sweatshirt, and white sneakers. Neither Patti nor David wore any jewelry. Newell discovered later that David had instructed her to give him her rings, and he had removed his own, secreting close to a hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on top of his medicine chest before he answered the door.

Patti held her hands out silently as she was cuffed.

"Your children, Patti—" Newell began. This was the difficult part. The babies hadn't done anything to anyone. They were victims too. He fought to keep emotion out of his voice. "Your children can be taken to the Albert Sitton Home in Orange, or if you have someone you can call who could care for them?"

"Grandpa Brown," she murmured. "Call Grandpa Brown."

The Anaheim police officer waited with Heather and Krystal until Manuela and Arthur hurried over to take charge of them.

David recovered quickly from his panic attack. By the time the Anaheim police car headed down Chantilly, he seemed in control. When he saw the driver was headed for the freeway, he pointed out that they had taken the wrong route.

"He said the freeway would take forever that time of day," Newell recalled, "and he was right. But he directed us along this circuitous route that got us right to the Orange County Courthouse in no time. I don't know if it occurred to him that his route just got him to jail quicker."

Patti and David said little. The tape on the recorder in the police car, retrieved later, added almost nothing to the investigation. "Except for one thing," Newell remembered later. "David kept asking Patti about Heather. He kept saying, 'Now, who
is
Heather's father really?' He was doing it for our benefit. Well, why not? We believed he'd thrown away one daughter already to get what he wanted. Why not throw away Heather? She was only a mistake to him."

In denying Heather, the child who had come to mean more than life itself to Patti Bailey Brown, David may well have made the biggest mistake of his life. Patti would have done anything for David until Heather was born. When he failed to love their child, the tiniest seed of rebellion took root in Patti.

Was it possible that David was not her savior, her ultimate lover, the most wonderful man who had ever lived?

31

I
nterview room A-224 in the Orange County District Attorney's Office wasn't a very large room. Perhaps deliberately so. The subjects interrogated in that room and their questioners were close enough so that their eyes were forced to meet, so that sudden intakes of breath echoed loudly.

A-224's decor smacked of the sixties. There was a rectangular table, made of melamine in a dark wood pattern, scratched and marred, six faded orange-and-yellow-zigzag-upholstered chairs, and yellow walls with framed prints. A frenetic Jackson Pollock. An Henri Rousseau. Saint Francis. A Museum of Modern Art poster dated "April 5-June 4, 1967," which definitely established the era the room was last decorated. A mirrored clock ticked away on one wall.

The chairs were slightly sprung from years of suspects shifting, turning, some of them
squirming,
as questions grew invasive and close to the bone. Many of the interrogations were both audiotaped and videotaped.

Now, just before eight-thirty on the morning of September 22, 1988, David Arnold Brown sat heavily in one of those orange and yellow chairs, Jay Newell sat obliquely across from him, and Fred McLean took a chair at the near end of the table. David had requested Perrier, and he sipped from a plastic cup, then lit the first of many, many cigarettes.

He seemed quite calm, even confident—but faintly annoyed.

Newell's interviewing techniques were so low-key that the most tautly strung suspect tended to relax. Newell could say, "Now, you're under arrest for PC-187—ahhh, that's murder," so casually that it somehow didn't sound so bad, after all.

It may have been the remnants of a barely detectable Oklahoma drawl. More likely, Newell's approach to interrogation was the result of years of refining, practicing, utilizing. He was
good.
When he said, "You'll have to repeat that for me. I'm not that quick; could you run it by me again?" he was ultimately believable. Indeed he insisted that he really
wasn 't
that speedy in grasping facts. But neither his peers nor the suspects he helped to convict believed that. Newell missed nothing; he only pretended that he had.

David Brown, however, was so concerned with impressing Newell and McLean with his importance and with the precarious state of his health that he misjudged Jay Newell.

Possibly a fatal miscalculation.

One day, a jury might watch this interrogation. The way
they
perceived it could be the linchpin of a trial. But for now, David listened to his Miranda rights, and he nodded agreeably. Of course he would talk to the two detectives. "I have nothing to hide."

He was shocked, of course, to be sitting where he was. He was ill, he explained, and suffered from a "bleeding problem" that would probably necessitate frequent trips to the rest room, and he apologized in advance.

"No problem," Newell murmured.

David explained that he suffered from a kind of "immunological disorder" that was "not AIDS—but a variation of it." It affected his heart, kidneys, liver. There was a chemical imbalance in his body that caused him to regurgitate, and he explained that he had almost suffocated from it several times.

If Newell believed his shopping list of miseries, it seemed a miracle that David Brown could get out of bed in the morning. He wondered if the man had an organ left that functioned. Well, at least one, Newell thought grimly; the existence of Heather proved that.

Asked about the night Linda died, David strained to remember the date and then commented that he remembered hardly anything. "I know that a lot of my health problems now are a result of my loss
of
her . . . because I never had and never will love a woman like the way I loved that woman."

Four weeks earlier, Newell had listened while David castigated Linda to Cinnamon, calling her a drug addict greedy enough to kill him to have his business, a woman who had poisoned him, a woman who had allowed her own brother to be tied up and tortured for two weeks. But Newell betrayed nothing of what he knew. He listened with his most concerned, interested—even sympathetic—manner while David rambled on.

"Tell me in your own words what you remember of that night, if you would," Newell asked.

David did not remember the day of the murder. "I was probably fielding calls anywhere from the Pentagon down to the local computer companies. That's what I usually did."

At the end of every responsive answer, David veered off into a discussion of his own emotional pain. "I've been to three psychiatrists because I just can't seem to deal with her death. I want to die. I'm suicide prone—"

"Do you remember that night though?" Newell cut him off with the same question each time David wandered.

Despite his protestations that he had no independent memory of "that night," Newell urged David to search the "computer banks" of his mind.

"We made love," David said.

"You had sex?"

"We made love, yes."

". . . When you say you made love, you mean you had sexual intercourse?"

"I don't remember
specifically
that night. Linda—that's one of the things I loved about her—she had quirks, you know, things she loved to do. One of her things was, whenever possible, was to drive me crazy, get me crawling and screaming is what I'm talking about. Ah, it's kind of hard to be specific."

"Well, we're all adults," Newell said dryly.

"Yeah, well . . . she loved to kiss me and touch me you know—foreplay—whatever you call it. Sometimes, she didn't mind having intercourse when she was having her period. I didn't particularly get excited about it."

"Do you remember that night?" Newell pressed again.

"... I don't remember. I know she drove me crazy. I know we did something. One of the things she liked to do was . . . she used her hands to at least satisfy me."

"Did you get a climax that night?"

"Oh . . .
every night.
We'd known each other and been in love for too long. She knew what I liked and how to take care of me, and I took care of her ... we tried very often not to do the same thing every night. We liked to keep the fire and excitement going."

"Was everyone still there playing cards?"

"I don't honestly know. It didn't matter to her, and she had this way of getting me going so it didn't matter to me. I don't know if anyone was still there or not."

How odd. How
extremely
odd that a man would begin an interview about the murder of his beloved wife by describing the most intimate details of their sex life. But if Newell and McLean even blinked, it was internally.

David talked and he talked and he talked. He smoked until the air in the little yellow room was blue. And still he talked. That was how he had always won. Just keep talking and people will come around. Throughout his interrogation, the damn cops had hardly gotten a word in edgewise, and David felt he had been in control of the conversation.

When Robinson and Newell watched the three-hour tape, they were gleeful. They had him. "Up to then," Robinson admits, "we had a skeleton case. We were going to go with it, no matter what. But in this long tape, David Brown
talked.
At first, it wasn't so much what came out, it was the fact that the man actually opened his mouth and
talked.
... Jay and I couldn't predict how a jury might view that tape."

For the moment, David Brown's biggest problem was that he would have accommodations far less plush than he had become used to. He was worried about what would happen if he needed medical help in a hurry. Jailers assured him that he would be taken care of; they would have someone review his medications. He was strip-searched and given a large pair of orange coveralls. David Arnold Brown, computer genius, millionaire, was now Orange County prisoner #1058076.

Lodged in the IRC—the Intake and Release Center—in the Orange County Jail, David thought about his sudden change of fortune, and he looked for ways to survive until his father bailed him out. He wasn't sure what they thought they had on him. That Newell was a closemouthed S.O.B.

He touched his neck, fumbling automatically for his phoenix pendant—but it wasn't there. It was safe with his other jewelry, back in the house where his dad could find it. It had to be that way. Damn cops would steal anything they got their hands on. He knew he could count on his father to take care of things.

Still, his throat felt naked without the phoenix. It was his security, his good-luck talisman, the symbol of who he was.

At 12:44
P.M.
, Patti sat in the same chair in the interview room that David had, and while David had barely changed position, Patti twisted and turned, tucked one leg beneath her and then turned and tucked the other foot beneath a slender flank.

Patti Bailey didn't talk. Not really. She
spoke
with Jay Newell in her husky, flat voice, but she
said
so little.

She remembered nothing. She had "blanked it out." A psychiatrist had helped her block it out. She couldn't remember how long ago it had been since Linda died. "She [the psychiatrist] got me to deal with it realistically. See, I always thought that Linda had just gone on vacation, and she got me to see that she wasn't just on vacation, and she wasn't coming back. But I don't remember the details. Everything's just a total fog. ... I guess I don't want it to come back."

Patti said she was still having terrible memory problems. She could barely remember what happened last week. She never discussed it with Cinnamon. She had seen her a month ago, and not for a year and a half before that. "I remember the drive up [to Ventura School], but I don't remember a whole lot of what was said."

"What made you go after so long?" Newell asked.

"She's my sister—well, not really, but like a sister. ... I had to see if she was still there—if she was okay."

"What did you talk about?"

"About Krystal."

"Did you talk about Linda's death ... ?"

"No."

"What if I told you Cinnamon remembers discussing it with you?"

"I don't remember."

"What is the relationship between you and David."

". . . He's not my blood father—but he is my dad."

"What is your
feeling
for David?"

"Just the same as I would feel for a father."

"Do you love him?"

"No ... as the aspect of 'Dad,' yes—but not as the aspect of any other way."

"There's nothing sexual between the two of you?"

"No."

"Has there ever been anything sexual?"

"No."

Newell asked about the long-ago kiss between David and Patti in the store. Patti said she couldn't remember.

Patti could barely remember what happened yesterday. She was dry-eyed, emotionless, and would not be swayed from her position of almost total forgetfulness. "Sometimes I feel I'm in a daze. I don't want to remember, or whatever "

Newell asked her about the time she had overheard a plot between Linda and Alan about killing David. She merely looked blank. Patti apologized for being so dense. She could not help her loss of memory.

"Do you ever dream about Linda's death?" Newell asked.

"I dream about picking her up at airports and stuff, but that's all."

Newell told Patti that he was going to have to dig deep into the mystery of Linda's murder, that he had a tape to play for her, and Patti suddenly began to choke up.

She begged Jay Newell to "go slow—'cause it really hurts. I just now woke up and realized she's really gone; she's not going to come back. 'Cause I'd find myself driving down the street trying to find her. So go slow. Go slow and deep if you have to, but it's going to hurt."

Newell left the room to find Patti some Kleenex, and she bent her head and sobbed. She did not know she was on camera; the tears were real, whether for herself, for her baby, or for her dead sister, whom she described as "more a mother to me than a sister."

Patti expected to hear a tape from the night of the murder, and she was afraid to hear it. No, Newell explained, he was going to play her a tape of David discussing her involvement—a
recent
tape.

Patti stared at Newell, uncomprehending. She insisted she and David never discussed anything about Linda's murder. They discussed only details of the house, buying clothes for Krystal. "He knows I don't understand what happened in the past."

Patti said she and David didn't get along.

"Why are you living there?"

"Because I take care of Krystal the best I can. That's the only key I have left to Linda. I don't want to lose it. Until I feel more stable about myself, or until there's someone to take care of Krystal, I'll stay. ... I wouldn't leave unless he told me to get the hell out of his house."

Patti denied the slightest connection to David Brown in any way beyond father-daughter.

She did not—or would not—recall any conversation with Cinnamon at Ventura, nothing beyond talking about Krystal. Even when Newell played snatches of David's voice on the tape, implicating Patti in the murder, she balked. She did not remember. She would not connect David ... or Cinnamon ... or herself to Linda's death.

"Everybody's pointing at you?" Newell asked. "Why?"