If You Really Loved Me (40 page)

". . . And then he said he was scared that something was going to happen to him. I don't know how he led up to it, but he once suggested to me. . . when we were out in Calico ... I had the gun on my lap in the backseat of the four-wheel drive—that if it accidentally went off. . . Linda would die and I'd be able to take care of everything."

David had said similar things before, but Patti had always thought he was joking. "I mean like when my mom used to always make jokes like 'I'm going to kill you, you brat!' "

They had been up by Yucca Valley when David made the "joke" about the gun going off. "We were on the freeway coming back from Calico ... he didn't turn around and say it. I think Linda went in ... to get a drink and he . . . just made a joke of it. But... I
did
have the gun on my lap. . . . Umm, that was the gun that, I think, Linda was killed with."

"Did he make the suggestion about accidentally shooting Linda or making it look like an accident more than once, or was it—"

"Yes."

"Okay," Newell said quietly. "Where were you when these other suggestions were made?"

"All over. We'd be in the car . . . the most recent one was before she died, that day she died. We were supposed to pull over, um—shooting, back out at Calico, and he used to make suggestions like if she fell off the cliff. I mean nobody'd ever suspect anything, um, if one of us took a running charge . . . that she'd die that way."

"Took a running charge?"

"No. If you're sitting on a cliff and she's looking out at the cliff, I mean, if one of us came by and ran and she fell."

Patti was talking about Monday, March 18, hours before Linda died, the day they had all planned to go out to Calico, but stayed home instead because it rained.

"Was he talking to you? Or you and Cinnamon?"

"I don't remember if Cinnamon was even around. I mean, there was always times that he'd let her in and then he wouldn't. Because he'd say, 'Well, she's too young . . . she'll go off and say something.' . . . Sometimes he'd talk to me all day about it, and then the next day Cinnamon would be part of it, and he'd make me tell her what he discussed with me so she understood."

As long as Newell had been working on this case—three and a half years now—there were still times that it seemed almost surrealistic to him. What he was hearing wasn't unexpected; he had somehow known it. But the subtle brutality of David Brown's killing plans, spoken out loud, chilled his blood.

Patti brought up the trip home from the hospital months before Linda died. "We went out to see my brother's new baby. He [David] made suggestions that, if we threw her out of the van, it'd look like her door flew open. ... So I don't know if one of us came up with the idea or if he came up with it . . . and neither me or Cinnamon could because we were in the back. . . . After we got home, he said, 'Well, good thing we didn't 'cause the light would of went on and they would of caught on to that—"

"What light went on?"

"You know when you open up your car door, the light goes on. He said the people from behind could have seen what was going on."

". . . And he made it sound like it had to be done that day?" Newell asked.

"He
always
made it sound like it had to be done that day. He was always scared that someone was going to kill him or whatever."

As Newell questioned her for dates and times, Patti recalled that there had been long periods when David dropped the murder planning. He talked a lot about killing Linda when they lived in Yucca Valley, but then went for six or seven months without mentioning it when they lived in Brea. The real campaign to do away with Linda had taken shape in Garden Grove after they'd moved to the house on Ocean Breeze Drive in 1983.

David had once again begun to be afraid Linda would hurt him.

"He would discuss with you that Linda was trying to hurt him?" Newell asked.

"Linda or Alan."

"Okay. What would he say about that?"

"They're getting weird. Linda's not being the same person she used to be.' He was afraid that this family was going to be separated. There was a big tree in the back and ivy. ... I think his dad would be on the lookout to see where Linda was when she came home. We'd be in the backyard talking, and he'd say, 'Well, someone could always shoot her and . . . hide the gun in the ivy.' "

Patti was quite sure that Arthur Brown had overheard David's, plans that day. She estimated this plan was about a week before Linda died. "It wasn't very often that he'd let it go too long. I guess he wanted to keep the idea that the family had to stay together fresh."

Newell explained that Cinnamon had talked about suggestions that
she
had made about how to kill Linda. Had Patti ever come up with ideas?

She was quiet for a few moments thinking. Not one of the three men listening could easily place this sad young woman in the role of a conniving murderess—any more than Newell and Robinson could envision Cinnamon in that sense. They were pawns. But why? Cinnamon loved her daddy.

Patti? Patti was still something of a mystery.
Why
should she have been so slavishly devoted to the man the other jail inmates had nicknamed Hunchy?

"Ummm. Suggestions?" Patti mused, remembering. ". . . You know how they had that cyanide thing? When the Tylenol thing was going on?"

"Oh," Newell said, nodding. "I see, yeah."

"The accidents—or the people that did that in the pills . . ." She trailed off for a moment.

"The cyanide . . . who brought the suggestion up?" Newell asked.

"I think it was on the news and I think we both—or all of us—just looked at each other and thought, 'Why not?' ... I mean, he got a lot of ideas from watching the news."

"And what about you? Do you remember any specific ideas you had yourself?" Newell asked. His deep voice was still easy, conversational. .

"Umm, there was the time that David asked me. Well, I was
told,
however you want to put this, that if she was suffocated, that'd be an easy, painless death.

"But no. He usually woke me up at night talking to me. One night, I was told that if I just went in the bedroom, stuck a pillow right there while her back was turned . . . and just shot her, then nobody'd hear anything, and it'd be done and over with. ... I couldn't do it—so I left."

So
Patti
had been David's original choice to kill Linda.

Jeoff Robinson had a few questions, but he and Newell assured Patti they weren't ganging up on her. "Patti, for a period of time, when David was suggesting these things, you say that you weren't taking him seriously?"

"No ... I wasn't taking him seriously."

"All right," Robinson continued, "but there definitely was a time—up to the murder—when that changed, when you
did
take him seriously?"

She looked into Robinson's eyes and answered slowly, "When I
did
take him seriously? When he [really] did have me go in the bedroom with the gun. I mean, I had the gun in my hand and everything—and I just couldn't do it. . .
that's
when I started taking him seriously."

"Right. And what did he have you do—physically?"

"Physically?"
Patti suddenly looked alarmed, and then she understood what Newell was asking and relaxed.

"He just said okay, you can go in there. You can hold the pillow, hold the gun with the other hand, and you can shoot her and not very many people will hear it. And then you can just claim somebody came in and robbed us."

Robinson wondered just how it was that Patti had apparently agreed to participate in the killing.

"I never agreed. It's just the fact that he hands you the gun and I did take him serious then, but I never actually agreed. ... I felt
obligated. "

"Patti," Robinson said, "let me ask you a question. Yes or no. Okay?"

She nodded.

"Whether you did it out of obligation—you told us that one of the things he has done continually is lay this business on you about keeping the family together, the guilt, he would be gone and so forth?"

She nodded again.

"Is that true?"

"Yes."

"All right. After he laid all that guilt on you about keeping the family together,
did you
—along with Cinnamon and David—agree and participate in the planning to kill Linda?"

She stared back at him. This was the question of questions. This was no-going-back time.

Robinson and Newell stopped breathing.

"Yes."

Once that single word was out, Patti Bailey Brown wanted it back. For minutes, she crept back to the safety of maybe believing that David Brown had only been joking.

But they all knew.

And gradually, with her own attorney listening, offering her a glass of water from time to time, Patti verified Cinnamon's confession. There were very slight variations; some details were agonizing for Patti to discuss. When she was asked what happened to the brown pillow David had given Cinnamon to use as a silencer, she looked blank for a moment. And then she said, "Oh—that was from David's recliner. He used it to support his bad neck. He just put it back on the chair, until it wore out."

Patti understood, as she answered Newell's and Robinson's questions, that one day she would have to tell this awful accumulation of truths in a courtroom.

Robinson leaned toward Patti and said quietly, "Patti . . . why did you want Linda dead at that time? What were your reasons? Was there something ... for your own . . . reason, or was it because David had—"

"David had us believe that the family was the most important thing, and she was going to disrupt the family and we'd never be able to be a family once again. . . . And then he said, 'Well, see,
your
family was never'—
my
family was never a family. And this was our true chance of being a family and having everything that a family was supposed to have. And she was going to interrupt that if he had to leave, or they were going to get a divorce. Then we'd never be a family again. ... I guess I needed the fact that there
was
a family. ... He said Cinnamon wouldn't serve that much time. We'd all be happy, the four of us, forever, from that day forward. No matter what."

It was almost like a cult. A little family cult.

Where there was no room for Linda any longer.

Patti knew little about insurance or finances. She was aware of one insurance policy on Linda's life.

"Did you ever go into a joint [bank] account with David?" Newell asked.

"Yes. Not by choice—but yes."

"You know how much money was ever in that account?"

"It varied. When I turned eighteen, I had a trust account from the Bank of America that had twelve thousand dollars in it. David said his name had to be put on it because I couldn't handle money. ... It was my way of paying him back, so I had to pay bills. After that money was gone, my account was closed."

But there had been other accounts. David put money down on a car for her, but she had to make the payments. "I had to make the payments by doing housework. . . . There was another time when I had seventeen thousand dollars from a car accident—that opened up another joint account. To pay bills, to buy furniture, to buy the stove, the refrigerator. There was a time I received social security for my dad, five thousand dollars, and that had to go into David's checking account."

David had held all the money strings in the family. Always. No one but David knew how much money he really had.

". . . Patti," Donald Rubright spoke up, "do you realize now that—ah, you feel like you were duped?"

"Hell, yes ... I knew someone was going to die, but I didn't realize that it was going to hit so close to home."

"You didn't realize what it was going to feel like afterwards?"

"Yeah. I didn't realize what it was going to be like. ... I honestly believed that the four of us would maintain a decent family and nothing was ever going to tear us apart."

". . .
After Linda was killed?"
Newell asked incredulously.

"Yeah, like a little fairy tale."

"And, in summing up," Rubright said, "I mean—just so we can clarify—what you did—you
realize
was wrong."

"Yes."

"All right," Rubright continued. "In retrospect, you feel that you did it for reasons that you thought at the time were right, but now you know you were wrong."

"Yes."

"Do you feel remorse or sorrow for taking part or participating in the killing of your sister?" Rubright persisted.

"Yes. After she died, I felt so bad, so upset. . . . And I did try to kill myself because I couldn't live with the fact— knowing that—I had something to do with it. . . . And I couldn't live with it. I mean, I lived with it, obviously, but there are several occasions that I did try to kill myself."

Unconsciously, Patti rubbed the white scars circling her wrists as she spoke.

Had she told the truth? Yes. Most of it. There had been no opportunities for at least eighteen months for Cinnamon and Patti to speak together alone. Each had now talked to Jay Newell, Fred McLean, and Jeoff Robinson from their own independent recall. And each remembered that ugly night and the pathological schemes leading up to it in almost exactly the same detail.

Neither had anything to gain by talking. Cinnamon had already lost, and Patti had much more still to lose.

And still, when Robinson and Newell listened to one replay—and then a second and a third of the interview with Patti Bailey Brown—they detected pauses in odd spots in the conversation, and a certain sense of holding back and holding in.

Patti had not told it all. Why?

David Brown had no idea how much Jeoff Robinson and Jay Newell now knew about him. He recognized them as enemies, certainly. And he hated them for what they had done to his life. With every setback, the bitterness he felt toward the deputy DA and the DA's investigator grew and festered.

Patti was the key to his freedom. He knew that, and he still believed that Patti could never be turned against him. Patti would protect him to her dying breath. He wasn't sure why she wasn't answering his letters and cards, but he knew she would come around.