If You Really Loved Me (13 page)

Patti Bailey was not a particularly effective witness for the State, nor would she be for the defense. Al Forgette elicited a recounting of the night of the shooting from Patti, but she seemed less sure of every detail than she had been in March. The figure she had seen in her doorway—the figure she was so sure was Cinnamon who had fired at her—was now only a "silhouette." She had connected the "silhouette" with the sound of gunfire, but she was no longer nearly as sure that it had been Cinnamon.

Earlier, when she had showed Cinnamon how to fire the gun, she was positive she had not touched it. No, she told Forgette, she had not been concerned enough that Cinnamon was walking around with a gun to tell anyone, or warn anyone. She went to sleep easily, with no worries.

Yes, Cinnamon had been "upset, depressed, like something was bugging her or something." But then, Patti testified, Cinnamon had been getting moodier since maybe January or February.

Pressed for some specific example of Cinnamon's moodiness—even her possible drug use—Patti thought hard.

No—no drugs, ever. "Just depression and upset and like . . . and like the world was going to come to an end. You know, how people look when they're on drugs or something, they look like they don't have a care in the world."

"And that's the way she struck you?" Forgette asked.

Patti shook her head; she was sure Cinnamon had been very, very depressed, and
not
happy—as drug users appeared.

Patti Bailey had a certain flatness of expression, an inability to describe her
own
emotions. Yes, she had been frightened. Yes, she had been apprehensive. Yes, she had been agitated and crying. But the descriptive phrases came from Forgette and Patti only agreed.

Patti's recall now made David's actions on the murder night sound braver. He had been in charge, calling the police, calming her down. She had apparently forgotten his panic, his pleading call to his father.

And now, five months later, Maguire could not shake Patti by letting her read her earlier statements that she was sure the shooter was Cinnamon. "I wasn't sure it was Cinnamon. I didn't know who it was."

"Are you trying to protect Cinnamon now?"

"No."

Jay Newell sat in the back of the small courtroom, observing Patti Bailey as she testified, and the reaction of the spectators in the gallery. It almost seemed as if she were trying to smooth everything over. David Brown emerged sounding nearly courageous, and the shooter was no longer Cinnamon—only a vague, blurry silhouette. The witness Newell had tracked down himself—Kim Hicks—was coming through the door, prepared to testify against Cinnamon. He should feel good. Then why did he have such an emptiness in the gut? Why did he catch himself looking again and again at the small figure huddled at the defense table, her face a mask of pain and disbelief?

"Call Kim Hicks!"

The young, black soon-to-be doctor explained that she remembered well the three
A.M
. call she had received to report to the custodial ward on March 20, 1985.

Kim Hicks had found Cinnamon in bed—
shackled
to the bed—still nauseated, but alert and well oriented. Hicks said she had asked Cinnamon why she had taken the pills. "She explained first of all that she had shot—she had shot someone, okay? And it was said that it was her stepmother and that she shot her twice."

"Did she say what she did—if anything—after she shot her stepmother?" Maguire asked.

"After she did that, she said she went to her father's drawer and took some pills out. . . . She said she took one whole bottleful, and the other bottle. . . . They fell and she took some of those and somehow she had a glass of water and she took those; she took the pills that she had."

Maguire showed Kim Hicks her original records and she scanned them, nodding. "Right . . . okay. That's my writing. She stated she ingested about eighty pills from one bottle and an unknown number of pills from two other bottles."

Cinnamon had told the medical student that she shot her stepmother about three
A.M
. She had shot her once and then heard her crying out, "Help me! It hurts!" At that point, she had returned to Linda's room and shot her once more. This time, there had been no sound from Linda. Cinnamon told Hicks she had waited half an hour and then gone out to the doghouse.

In answer to Maguire, Hicks added, "She went out to the doghouse and she was—she slowly just became sick, you know, and she started vomiting. And she remembers urinating on herself, and just progressively got sicker, heard sirens. No one came and found her or anything like that. She heard the sirens leave and she was still there in the doghouse until later the police came back."

Over the next few days, Hicks had had occasion to spend quite a bit of time with Cinnamon.

"Did Cinnamon indicate to you during this 'small talk' any reason for shooting her stepmother?" Maguire asked.

"She did, and even on the night of admission she told us why she did it. . . . She said she didn't know what else to do. Her stepmother had threatened—had told her that she had to leave, that she can't stay there anymore, and they had been arguing that night and specifically that her father was home; he heard the argument. He left, said he couldn't take it anymore. Then he left and they stopped arguing. And that they just basically hadn't been getting along."

Most of the story was familiar. Hicks repeated Cinnamon's alleged fear that Linda wasn't taking care of Krystal, not paying attention to her when she cried. "She was more scared and concerned. Sorta she didn't seem real angry about it—more confused."

But this was, again, a little different version of the night of March 19. David had said he left
after
the girls and Linda were all in bed. But Cinnamon had told Kim Hicks that David had stomped out because he couldn't "take it anymore," all the arguing and bickering. If David Brown knew how explosive emotions were at home, why had he driven off into the night?

Al Forgette questioned Kim Hicks carefully. Why had she spent so much time listening and questioning Cinnamon about the murder?

"That's part of the social history."

Hicks explained that, at first, Cinnamon had seemed very frightened and murmured, "Gosh, what do you think's going to happen to me?" and "I shouldn't have done it," but she grew quieter and more introspective as the days passed. Hicks said she had tried to comfort her patient, saying, "I just told her it would be all right, you know and just—it was more supportive than that, more supportive."

Cinnamon sat at the defense table, her face a bleak study. It was impossible to tell if she remembered Kim Hicks or any of the statements the young medical student attributed to her.

Kim Hicks explained that Cinnamon had been both a person and a patient to her. Yes, she had gone in every morning at eight to take Cinnamon's vital signs, check her heart, blood pressure, and her general condition, but she had also tried to treat her like a human being. She was scared and alone. "Her mom or dad wasn't there."

On cross-examination from Al Forgette, Hicks denied that she was trying to elicit information that would be helpful to the police or the district attorney's office. She asked nothing, she said, after the first day. "The first day we all had to find out. We're admitting the patient. We need to know everything we can possibly know about that patient in order to treat that patient effectively."

This was the witness most dangerous to Cinnamon, and Forgette cross- and recross-examined her. He made it plain that Cinnamon had been in a separate part of the hospital, a part operated by the sheriffs department. Barred. Locked.

"The patient can't walk out of there," the defense attorney said. "But you can walk out of there?"

"Yes."

"There's a deputy sheriff on duty to make sure they don't misbehave and that they're shackled to the bed?"

"They do."

"All of these conversations took place in that area of the hospital? Is that right?"

"They did," Hicks agreed.

Forgette tried to stem the damage Kim Hicks had done to Cinnamon's case. "A motion by the defense at this time. The motion would be to exclude and strike all testimony of the previous witness, Kim Hicks, as it relates to statements made by the minor while she was in custody at the jail ward of UCI. My position is that even though this lady is not an argued police officer, but rather personnel of the hospital— or student—her actions . . . make her an agent of the authorities. The records show that this minor was ... in custody, shackled to her bed.

"My position is that absent an advisement of rights and waiver by the defendant or minor of these rights, that statements elicited from her under those conditions amounted to custodial interrogation."

Forgette, this kindly bear of a man, was fighting for his client. Newell couldn't help but admire him. Cinnamon didn't seem to understand any of it.

Maguire argued that Kim Hicks had merely been taking a social history. Indeed, although it was not argued, Kim Hicks had never gone to the police. It took Jay Newell's careful page-by-page perusal of Cinnamon's medical records to discover this third confession.

For a moment, the courtroom was quiet; Cinnamon Brown's future was suspended on this one, vital motion.

And then Judge Fitzgerald said briskly, "Motion to strike by the defense the testimony of Kim Hicks is denied. Next witness."

11

T
hroughout her trial, Cinnamon occasionally glanced quickly over the gallery. She did not understand that proposed witnesses were excluded and she wondered where her father was. She could not believe that he wasn't there supporting her, as he had always promised he would. She hoped maybe he was out in the hall. Her gaze swept over the tall man at the back of the courtroom. She had no idea who Jay Newell was, and neither had any idea how entwined their lives would become.

The witnesses moved through the double doors of the courtroom, approached the witness chair, testified, and were gone. Some of them were from Cinnamon's short life
before,
and some she had met after. She listened to her oldest friend in the world, Krista Taber—who seemed so nervous and sad—as she told how Cinnamon had been summoned home from Ted Hurath's house, how often she was on restriction.

Fred McLean testified. He identified pictures of the rooms of the house on Ocean Breeze Drive, pictures of the doghouse. He talked about arresting Cinnamon. McLean recalled how and where he had found Cinnamon.

She didn't remember him at all.

McLean identified the suicide note written on pink cardboard, and the purple ribbon wound around it to curl it into a scroll. In his deep Kansas voice, he read aloud, "Dear God, please forgive me. I didn't mean to hurt her."

It seemed a hundred years ago to her now.

Cinnamon could not follow the trial nor understand all the clipped, official police lingo and the medical testimony by forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Fukomoto. A homicide trial, the intricate details of forensic science, the sometimes gory explicitness of a pathologist, who has long since grown used to such matters, can be incomprehensible to the layman—a foreign language to a fifteen-year-old girl.

Hours and hours of testimony from experts on ballistics, on fingerprinting, on gunshot residue, on blood-typing. Blood. Cinnamon had never seen the blood; the house was so dark, and it was easy to think of the sound of the gun and the smell of gunpowder as only part of a nightmare. They were saying that Linda had had type B. That was on the pillowcases. Cinnamon had type O.

What difference did it make? Cinnamon closed her eyes and hunched her shoulders closer together, her mouth set.

All of it was really backup testimony. Cinnamon's future had shifted and twisted like a high bridge in an earthquake the moment Kim Hicks's testimony was allowed to remain on the record.

Court recessed Friday afternoon, August 9. Cinnamon could not understand where her father was. Patti had testified. Where was her dad?

David Brown's name was heard in the courtroom, but he was not there. He sent word to the district attorney's office that he was too ill to attend his daughter's trial. His testimony was offered by stipulation.

Mike Maguire explained that
if
Brown were called as a witness, he would testify to the events of March 18-19. Whether Cinnamon understood that her father, if he came to court, would have been
against
her—not
for
her—was unclear.

Maguire droned out the stipulations. "If David Arnold Brown were called as a witness, he would testify that he had kicked Cinnamon Brown out of the house three weeks prior to March 19, 1985, and that it was then agreed upon that Cinnamon Brown would live in the trailer in the backyard . . . David Brown would also testify that Cinnamon Brown and Linda Brown were not getting along in the weeks prior to March 19, 1985.... David Brown would also testify that Cinnamon Brown was told that either she lived in the trailer or she went back to live with her mother, Brenda Sands."

"Entered."

What did "stipulate" mean? Cinnamon
still didn't understand what they were saying, that both sides had just stipulated that her father believed she was guilty.

On Monday morning, August 12, at nine-thirty, they began again. Only two witnesses before Judge Fitzgerald ruled on whether Mike Maguire had proved his case against Cinnamon beyond a reasonable doubt. Bill Morrissey and John Woods testified on their administration of GSR tests.

Cinnamon did not testify. Forgette had decided it would be better for her if she didn't. If she didn't remember anything—and she assured him she did not—what good would it do for her to go on the stand?

In final arguments, Maguire deemed Cinnamon's alleged crime as premeditated. "cold-Wooded murder," committed by a depressed and angry girl. Cinnamon slumped lower in her chair, and all the curves and angles of her face seemed to pull downward as she listened to Mike Maguire. It sounded so ugly the way he said it. The way he described how Linda had been asleep in her bed when she— Cinnamon—crept beside her in the dark and shot her at close range. He was talking about "cold-blooded murder," and it seemed as if he were talking about someone else, as if his voice were coming from a long way away.
Cold-blooded murder.

Forgette talked next, and he seemed to be far away from her too, even though she knew he was on her side. He said she had been insane, legally insane. Otherwise, she would never have shot Linda.

"Why in the world would a young Lady who had a great deal of affection for her stepmother have a rational motive to kill her? Most troubling is the complete absence of a motive for this child to murder her stepmother."

Insane, legally insane.
Was that the reason Cinnamon had shot Linda?

Why indeed? It was a question that beggared an answer, but there was none.

Monday, August 12, 1985, was to be a long day utilizing all its minutes in court. If possible, Fitzgerald hoped to hear final arguments, give his verdict, and then, depending on that verdict, possibly move on to testimony in the second phase—the insanity phase—of Cinnamon's trial.

It seemed to Cinnamon that they were propelling her faster and faster toward . . . what?

After Crime Scene Investigator Bill Morrissey's and Sergeant Woods's testimony, Judge Fitzgerald called for a fifteen-minute recess. When he returned, he announced that he had reached a verdict.

"The Court finds as follows: I find beyond a reasonable doubt that the minor known as Cinnamon Brown, in fact, did kill the victim Linda Brown. She did so with premeditation and deliberation, with malice aforethought.

"Court further finds that this was in fact an intentional killing by this minor, specifically the minor intended to kill the victim, Linda Brown.

"The Court then does find the minor Cinnamon Brown to be guilty of murder of the first degree. . . . Her age at the time of the killing was apparently fourteen."

It had happened so swiftly. Al Forgette tried to explain to Cinnamon what it all meant. She had just been found guilty of first-degree murder. She shook her head ever so slightly and looked down at her lap.

Now Forgette had to prove to the judge that Cinnamon Brown had been totally unable to understand the nature and quality of her act of murder. He would call witnesses who would testify to the fragility of her sanity. It was the only way he could keep her from going to prison. The murder made no sense to Forgette, and he could not see how anyone else might view it otherwise.

He first called Brenda Sands, Cinnamon's mother, to bolster his contention that Cinnamon had been out of her mind that March night.

Brenda was a bit confused about
what
she should say. David had been so anxious for her to tell police that Cinny was weird, and she didn't trust David as far as she could throw him. But David could talk so well and make things seem the way he wanted her to believe. He had told her the police were just trying to railroad Cinny. Mr. Forgette too had said it was okay to reveal any emotional scenes. It would help Cinnamon. Brenda knew that Cinny was basically a good kid, and emotionally sound.

But she would do anything to save her child from prison, so she brought up all the blowups they had had. Mother-daughter arguments and yes, Brenda had sent Cinny to live with her father and stepmother. Cinny had been so snippy that Brenda had slapped her and Cinny had tried to hit her back.

"We got into a little mother-and-daughter, you know, argument, you know, fighting, you know, because she stayed out late, and it had something to do with her, you know, about obeying rules. . . . Just slapping. I struck her first and then she hit me, but I put my arm up to block her from hitting me."

"And it was thereafter that you sent her back to her father?" Forgette asked.

"Yes." Brenda hastened to explain that she and Cinnamon talked on the phone often and spent many weekends together.

And yes, she remembered that Cinny had called her about a week before Linda died. "She was feeling ill. She told me that her stomach hurt. She wasn't feeling too good. She said she felt like she was going crazy because everybody kept fighting there in the house.

"I just said, well, you know—you know, I didn't understand what was going on. And I told her I don't know what to tell you. I can't solve your dad's problems."

Cinnamon had not asked to move back with her mother. Whatever was troubling her remained bottled up inside.

Krista Taber testified that Cinnamon had not seemed as happy as she had before. But she struggled with specifics. The best Krista could do was to answer Al Forgette's question "Well, if you saw her five times, how many times was she unhappy in the five times?"

"Once." And that was the time Cinny had been ordered to leave the gathering of friends at Len Miller's house and come right home.

Krista had a vague recollection that Cinnamon had once told her she had taken fourteen aspirin. She didn't know why or when; Cinny had not even gotten sick. It wasn't a big deal.

Patti Bailey testified again, emphasizing how strange Cinnamon had acted the night of the shooting. Patti once more relived her terror as she tried to protect herself and Krystal from a berserk Cinnamon.

Patti stressed how moody and depressed Cinnamon had been, how much time she spent carrying on conversations with imaginary friends. "She'd be talking to them and say, 'What do you think, Maynard?' "

And then, of course, there were the sinister Oscar and Aunt Bertha, all invisible, all imaginary, but according to Patti, very real to Cinny.

Manuela Brown took the stand to testify as to her granddaughter's bizarre behavior. She had taken care of Cinny weekdays when her granddaughter was about four.

"Describe her demeanor when she was with you," Forgette urged, "if you will."

"Very quiet. She very seldom smiled, you know, not as happy as she was when the marriage was happy and everybody was—"

Forgette cut her off before she launched into a rehash of Brenda and David's divorce a decade earlier.

Asked about Cinnamon's state of mind when she lived on Ocean Breeze Drive, Manuela shook her head and sighed. "Sometimes she'd be happy and sometimes kind of moody, like she was depressed a lot of times."

Manuela too brought up the ubiquitous Maynard, the invisible friend. Members of the gallery stifled giggles as the stout lady explained how Cinnamon teased her.

"She asked me to come upstairs—she wanted me to meet her friend. And I thought maybe it was a hamster or something—kids usually have hamsters or guinea pigs or something. When I went upstairs, I was going to sit on the bed and she said,
"Don't!
Be sure you don't sit on Maynard."

Manuela saw no humor in that at all. "We were going to the Target Store in the van once, all of us, and she says, 'Grandma, be sure you don't sit on Maynard.'"

Cinnamon Brown had not slit her wrists nor run naked down Main Street nor babbled gibberish. She had done nothing that any normal teenager—with a well-developed sense of humor—might not do. Teenagers
are
moody and often depressed. As hard as Al Forgette fought to prove Cinnamon psychotic, he had so little to work with.

"Call Dr. Howell!"

Cinnamon Brown's relatives and friends had scoured their memories for remembrances of some significant aberration on her part. And had come up with virtually nothing. Dr. Thomas Patrick Howell, a clinical psychologist employed by the Orange County Department of Mental Health, would be the first professional to testify for the defense.

For almost three years, Dr. Howell had been assigned to do court-authorized psychological evaluations to diagnose disturbed adolescents and help in crisis intervention. In the month after Linda's murder, Howell had examined Cinnamon, and he had also talked to David Brown and to Juvenile Hall staff members. He had worked with only a brief summary of the case and had not accessed police records for more specific details.

"The interview with her biological father, Mr. David Brown, was for what purpose?" Forgette asked.

"... To get some type of developmental history, family history, and understanding of what was occurring in the family, psychosocial stressors, any problems in the family configuration that the—"

"So you relied on Mr. Brown essentially for family history as much as you could?" Forgette cut in.

"Yes, I did."

What Dr. Howell had gotten from Cinnamon's father was akin to a miner striking a vein of pure gold—a profusion of mental pathology. Brown had arrived an hour late for his appointment, seemed frazzled, disheveled—but clean. He had explained his many ailments—hypertension, ulcerated colon, allergies, bronchitis, and he was obviously anxious.