If You Really Loved Me (61 page)

I asked him if his childhood had been happy, and he quickly reversed the question. "Was
yours?
. . . What's happy?"

David Brown clearly did not like direct questions. I asked him, just to change the direction of the conversation—and because I had found it to be a good interviewing technique to relax subjects—"If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you choose?"

He froze. "Why would you want to know that?"

"No reason. I'm trying to get to know you."

Then I realized that he suspected I was seeking information about some eventual escape destination. I had no doubt at all that, even as we talked in this totally secure jail, the man on the other side of the glass
was
devising schemes once again.

When I asked him what was wrong with his heart, David looked wary again. "It's a physical problem," he said shortly.

"I imagined it was, What are your symptoms?"

His eyes slid to the right, and there was a long silence.

"Do you have an irregular heartbeat?" I pushed.

"No."

"Do you have tightness in your chest?"

"No."

"Do you feel pain?"

"No."

"Do you have shortness of breath?"

Finally he nodded. "And I have numbness. I can't feel my arms sometimes."

It was obvious even to a layman that David Brown's heart was fine; he suffered from the classic symptoms of panic attacks. But for once, he didn't want to talk about his many ailments; he wanted to talk about how he was seduced and threatened into the murder-for-hire plot by Irv Cully and Richard Steinhart.

"I was being strong-armed by those guys; they had pictures of the Chantilly Street house. They would have killed my mom and dad and children—one by one. They told Newell and Robinson that they could lock me in a cell and
get
me. The DA said, 'If you can,
do it. "

Brown studied my face to see if I was buying this, and I stared back at him.

He tried harder. "Listen, there were tons of message slips [between Cully and Steinhart and the Orange County DA's Office] that disappeared. Irv gets pizza, juice, burritos.
We
don't get that stuff in here."

David had apparently perused items taken in discovery from the prosecution by his attorney Gary Pohlson. One was a scrawled note from Irv Cully: "During the discussion with Newell, Myself and 'Goldie' Steinhart would APPRECIATE two styrofoam cups and a BIG can of pineapple juice, as a token of good faith."

Food was obviously very important in David Brown's life. He mentioned it often. Being denied his favorite foods was apparently symbolic of his loss of power in jail. He seized on Cully's modest request to show me the DA's office was crooked. There was nothing in evidence to indicate that Cully ever
got
his pineapple juice.

And Steinhart, of course, never got any pizza; he only put on such a good act from his phone in the Huntington Beach Jail that David still
thought
he had. If the stakes in David's games had less potential for tragedy, his petulance about food would have been laughable.

David suggested that I read the September 22 interview again and again. "Act out the parts," he urged. He still believed that he deported himself very well the morning of his arrest in that devastating interview with Jay Newell.

I
had
read the transcript ten times; I had viewed the videotape a dozen times, alone and with others, and perceived a man who revealed his sociopathy completely. It was significant that David saw himself—and Newell—in reversed roles.

From David's point of view, it was Jay Newell who lied. "As naive as I might sound," he said, deliberately ingenuous, "I didn't think an officer of the law could
lie.
I've never been arrested in my life. He caught me with a right hook, and I believed him. He flat-out lied to me. He made it sound like I admitted I was guilty! I was scared to death, Ann. He caught me with my shorts down! It
shocked
me to see the pictures [taken by the surveillance camera in Ventura]. I didn't know it was Cinnamon. Would I deny it—if I knew I'd done it? Wouldn't that just make her mad?"

David Brown confided to me that he feared prison. "The cons will go after me because they think I'm rich, or they'll blackmail me."

"Couldn't you use your money inside to buy an easier life?" I asked.

"No way."

I asked David if he was, indeed, still wealthy. He contemplated me and then said earnestly, "Honest to God, I'm flat broke."

There it was again, "honest to God" as a preamble to a flat-out lie.

I asked another blunt question. "Is Heather your child?"

"No! . . . Patti's a slut. Patti was going out since junior high school. She was dating a contractor. A DNA test would show I'm not Heather's father. I've asked for a blood test."

"Why did you marry Patti then?"

"That's a hard one to explain." David's eyes moved again to the right as he formulated an explanation. The marriage was only a dummy marriage, never meant to be real, he assured me. "Hell, I won't deny that during some real lonely and emotional times, I did have some 'encounters' with Patti—she wasn't unattractive—but trust me, she couldn't have gotten pregnant. How shall I say it—she couldn't have gotten pregnant with the
kind
of encounter we had. I had emotional problems and physical problems that precluded —ah, sexual intercourse."

But apparently did not preclude oral copulation, as Brown subtlely suggested, as he watched my face to see my reaction. I said nothing.

"And then," he continued "my folks were there, and Krystal, and Alan lived there. I was having a relationship with Betsy Stubbs right up to the arrest."

Betsy Stubbs, the daughter of David's insurance agent, more recently the baby-sitter. Betsy Stubbs, who at nineteen, still believed she could miscarry by "throwing up a baby." Jay Newell had interviewed Betsy and learned of her affair with David—even while he was married to Patti. "I didn't have boyfriends," she had said to Newell, sobbing. "He was the first guy who made me feel attractive and a little bit important."

Betsy clearly mattered little to David; he mentioned her only to bolster his indictment of Patti. He expanded on Patti's black desire for him. "Patti killed Linda to get to me. I was scared to death of Patti. I thought she
was
the one who killed Linda. That's why my parents lived there. We were
that close
to having her move out when we were arrested. Patti was looking into buying property in Oregon. ... I hated Patti. I wouldn't have minded if something happened to her."

There was a loathsome kind of fascination here. David Brown blamed
everything
on someone else. In the three hours we had talked, he blamed Patti, Brenda, Cinnamon, the Baileys, Gary Pohlson, Jeoff Robinson, Jay Newell, Richard Steinhart, Irv Cully,
and
the justice system for his misfortunes.

He added Joel Baruch, his ex-attorney. "I was forced into PC [the protective custody wing] and they planted Irv Cully and Richard Steinhart in there to entrap me. Baruch said, 'Pay them. They're just criminals. They won't really kill Robinson.' I told Baruch to warn Robinson. I
believed
Baruch and he was gone to Florida." This was typical David Brown rhetoric; whatever served him best at the moment was that day's truth.

I had a creeping sense of déjà vu. How many times had I listened to convicted killers deflect blame before it ever touched them? In a sense, I think they all came to a place where they
believed
what they were saying. David Brown looked sincere, and he sounded genuinely aggrieved; I believed that, for that space in time, he believed. He actually saw himself as a victim.

He was impatient with those who kept harping on the old truths. "Robinson says I brainwashed Cinny and Patti," he said with a laugh. "How could that be?"

"Do you understand the steps in brainwashing?" I asked.

He shook his head, but David was curious.

"I wrote a book about it once," I said. "In order to brainwash someone, four criteria must be met. First of all, the victim has to suffer a profound psychic shock—"

"They never had that."

"They thought their home was being broken up," I said. "They depended on you completely. They didn't think they could get along without you."

"Naw—that doesn't fit. What else?"

"The victim must be removed from everything and everyone that makes her feel safe," I offered. "The girls weren't in school—all they had was home. They thought Linda was going to kill you, that the 'family' would be gone, and there would be no home."

Already, David Brown was shaking his head. ". . . Doesn't fit."

"The third thing is that the subject is 'programmed'— told what the brainwasher wants her to believe, over and over and over again."

This time, David said nothing.

"Fourth," I said, "the victim is promised a reward. Usually her very life. Patti said you were her 'life support.' " '

"No way. It doesn't fit. I didn't brainwash those girls. They did it all on their own."

David enjoyed the mental jousting. I could tell he rather liked the idea of being a successful Svengali, but he would not, of course, admit that to me.

He changed the subject. I had come too close to reality for him. He wanted me to know how very, very much he had loved Linda. He had treated her like a queen, never letting the romance go out of their perfect marriage. "I had an account with a special florist—for Linda," he recalled, his eyes actually misting. "I ordered only expensive, unusual arrangements, and I insisted on crystal vases. I had that florist scouring Nordstrom's and I. Magnin's looking for just the right crystal vases."

David described his meticulous attention to the details of Linda's inurnment, repeating to me, as he had to anyone who would listen, how important it was to him that her ashes had a pleasant resting place. He told me how lovingly he composed the inscription for the plaque to mark her place in the "twenty-four-hour-a-day fountain."

"What did you write?" I asked, pen poised.

David only repeated that he had grappled to find the right words to write on the plaque that covered Linda's niche in the fountain. And yet, urged to remember, he could not.

"The words—the words that you wrote?" I asked again.

He looked blank and shook his head. "I don't remember. Go look at the plaque—you'll see how much I loved her."

David said he still felt close to Linda, that they had shared an interest in communication between the real world and the other world beyond, in ghosts and psychic phenomena. "Linda and I believed in that kind of stuff," he said. "We went to psychics. We only went to the best. They told me I would be very, very successful in business, and that I would live to an old age. But Linda—well, two of them just turned white when she asked about her future. They didn't want to talk about it. The third finally came right out and told her she would die very young. I'm afraid she believed them. It troubled her, and I guess it scared her more when Krystal was born—because they'd all told her she would give birth to a daughter, and that part had come true."

After three hours, I was beginning to hear David Brown's explanations for the second time. Obviously, he believed that he had won me over with his arguments. He urged me to begin work at once as an investigator for
him
and suggested that I start with his parents. "They will tell you what kind of person I am. . . . I've never hurt anybody, I'm not violent. . . .
I
divorce women. I don't kill them. "

I had already spent twenty months investigating the death of Linda Brown, and the crimes for which David Brown was convicted. Nothing he said had convinced me of his innocence.

But I had wanted to give him a chance to speak. And so once again, I had looked into the chillingly blank eyes of a sociopath—the antisocial personality. Empty eyes, reflecting nothing, even as the brain that controlled them skittered frantically around for new excuses, new plans, new plots. I had hoped that David Brown might offer me some definitive key to unlock the reasons behind his conscienceless life. I was disappointed. Perhaps he didn't know himself why he was the way he was.

David Brown had thought he could manipulate me, as he had always tried to manipulate others. But I had been to school. And suddenly, I could not get away fast enough— out of the airless cubicle, down the blank hall and into the waiting room whose Barbie chairs were now filled with a whole different platoon of visitors.

Afterword

T
he hardest concept for most laymen to understand is that criminals such as David Brown are quite sane. When we encounter or read about individuals who commit heinous and ugly crimes, it is easier to write them off as "crazy." Deliberate cruelty is hard to accept so we tend to say, "You'd have to be crazy to do that."

No.

Sociopathy may be the most intriguing of all mental aberrations. To greater and lesser degrees, the vast majority of human beings empathize with each other. Even two-year-olds understand that other creatures feel pain and cry. "If it hurts me, then it must hurt you too." The sociopath (or antisocial personality or psychopath; the terms are interchangeable)
understands
the concept of empathy only intellectually. Indeed, he uses it to further his own aims. But he does not, apparently
cannot,
understand it emotionally. He cannot put himself in another human's shoes; the concept is utterly foreign to him. As Jeoff Robinson said in his closing arguments, David Brown
"wants, wants, wants."

David Brown wanted sex and money and respect and
things.
He betrayed women, his brother, his parents, his children, all of his wives, to get what he wanted. After midnight on March 19, 1985, he drove away in the night, knowing that his sleeping wife would be dead when he returned. He let his daughter take the rap for it. He married Patti Bailey, impregnated her, and blithely offered her up as the next sacrifice. I have no doubt that, as Robinson suggested, David Brown would renounce Krystal to stay free.

He will offer up
anyone
to benefit himself. And as he does so, he will feel completely within his rights.

"I'm worth it."

Whether he truly believes he is "worth it," or whether he is only trying to pad an almost nonexistent sense of self-esteem, is an absorbing question.

In talking to psychiatrists and psychologists, David had given, I suspect, a "safe" version of his early life. He claimed sexual molestation by "an old man in the park." I have no doubt he was molested; the molester is far more likely to have been someone quite familiar to him. Child molestation is a cyclical crime, running through families like an incurable virus.

Still a child, David Brown viewed suicide attempts of a close relative. Still a child, he worked all alone through the night in a gas station. He speaks proudly of his accomplishment, but how lonely it must have been at four
A.M
. on a dark desert morning for an eleven-year-old.

David Brown had an aggressive mother and a meek father. He had no money for clothes or school supplies. A school picture of the young David—perhaps eight years old—looks like Beaver Cleaver. He needs braces, the buttons on his shirt don't match, his pocket is torn— but his eyes seem clear and trusting. It is well nigh impossible to connect this child of 1960 to the overweight manipulator of 1990.

And yet the seeds would have been there.

Even then.

David Brown, the poor teenager, the welfare recipient, sought sex and wealth to cover up his inadequacies, and he
used
sex and wealth to control others. He hit puberty obsessed with sex. Throughout his life, he vacillated between periods of inhibited sexual desire and intense sexual activity. He freely voices his preferred sexual activity—fellatio—to fellow prisoners, detectives, and the young women he attempts to seduce.

They are all young women—girls, really. Brenda Kurges Brown Sands is unarguably the personification of David's ideal female. Or at least she was once. When she was fourteen or fifteen, poor, dependent, trusting, and adoring, he rescued her. When she became even slightly independent, the relationship began to erode.

Lori, his second wife, was sweet, kind, and trusting. But she was nineteen when David married her. Too old.

Linda, who was both his third and fifth wife, was perfect. So like Brenda when the teenage David chose
her.
But Linda too grew up. Like Brenda, she bore David's child, and he was no longer her only love.

Patti shared Linda's abysmal background. Like Brenda and Linda, she was running from an unhappy home when David "saved" her. From eleven to twenty-one, Patti remained David's perfect sex slave. But she too grew up and became a mother, and in doing so, she lost the only man she ever loved.

With Patti, his wife, down the hall, Betsy Stubbs shared David's bed the week he was arrested. Betsy was a plain girl who used too much makeup and wore her skirts too short. She was a "little slow" and had no self-confidence at all. She engaged in oral sex with David, she told Jay Newell, because she thought no one else would want her.

All of them were David's kind of women. They allowed him to maintain absolute control. David was in charge. Cindy, his fourth wife, was the only aberration. She had two children when he married her, and she was older. That marriage, of course, lasted only six months.

Had David Brown not been arrested and convicted, this man who was married
six
times by the time he was thirty-three would surely have continued his search for "Brenda." The young Brenda. He might have grown old, but his women would have continued to be teenagers. In truth, I suspect David Brown detests women. He teased his mother sadistically, and he characterizes women by their body parts—never by their minds or souls.

Jeoff Robinson gave two primary motives for Linda Bailey Brown's murder: lust and greed. Those are the concepts, the goals, that shaped David Brown's life.

He is the complete sociopath.

He is also narcissistic and a hypochondriac. The person who suffers from the narcissistic personality disorder feels a sense of entitlement; he believes that he deserves everything he wants—because he is
special
The hypochondriac revels in the attention he gets for all his imaginary illnesses. David has convinced others he is dying of colon cancer for twenty years !

Even the most brilliant forensic psychiatrists do not know what factors cause sociopathy. Every sadistic sociopathic killer I have ever written about suffered abuse in early childhood—under the age of five. Abandonment, physical abuse, sexual abuse, humiliation, rejection. The developing conscience, which should have blossomed around two or three, was smothered aborning. These children fought to survive; they had neither time nor energy to grow a conscience. They learned, instead, to look out for number one, for if they did not, who would? Therapists cannot go back a dozen or more years later and
insert
a conscience; it is far too late.

But every child who is abused, abandoned, rejected, humiliated, under the age of five does not grow up to be antisocial. What makes the difference? After two decades of examining the sociopathic killer, I have come to believe that there are genetic, predisposing factors that come into play. The very intelligent, very sensitive child—abused—seems most likely to adjust, to
survive
at all costs. And the cost is the complete loss of ability to empathize and to feel regret and guilt.

A growing school among psychiatrists espouses the "bad seed" theory. Some experts believe that a certain percentage of infants are born
evil,
and that no amount of nurturing can overcome a bad seed's natural tendencies.

Others cite
physiological
causes. We share with animals the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system tells us what we
want.
Animals take what they want and have no control system. Human beings have the prefrontal lobe that gives us feelings and reasoning power. That, in essence, gives us brakes. One school of thought suggests that some infants
are
born with a breakdown in the pathways between the prefrontal lobe and the limbic system and lack the ability to control their desires. Like animals, they simply take what they want—congenitally crippled villains.

I reject the bad seed and the limbic breakdown theories—possibly because I don't want to believe that any child is born with his fate already sealed. Rather, I think genetic predisposition
combines
with the way a child is raised to shape what he will become. The search for a definitive answer to the cause of sociopathy continues.

Something over three percent of all males in America fall within the parameters of the antisocial personality. One percent of females fit that mold. They are, fortunately, not all murderers. These are the people all of us interact with at some point in our lives, usually to our regret. These are the people who cheat in business, who steal from us, who break our hearts and move on without looking back—and without remorse.

These are the politicians who ignore the rules, get caught, and appear on television to explain why the rules the rest of us live by were not meant for
them.
And if we do not believe them, they are genuinely shocked.

These are the "preachers" who solicit money in the name of God and spend it on themselves. Who break the commandments, while telling us not to. Caught, they cry real tears and beg for forgiveness. Forgiven, they do not change.

And then there are the David Browns. The antisocial personalities who easily cross over the boundary lines that separate cheaters, con artists, and predators of the lonely hearts from murderers.

The antisocial personality has no conscience. This is a concept as foreign to most of us—and as difficult to understand—as truly visualizing infinity. Our minds shut down. We cannot imagine what it must be like to distance ourselves totally from another creature's pain.

Those without the baggage of conscience can step into new rooms in their lives and close the door of the past tightly behind them so that no wisp of odor or sound penetrates. No guilt. No bad dreams. No looking back at all. For them, yesterday never really happened. For most of us, the future is the only unknown; we remember the past, and it often haunts us. The sociopath lets the past die behind a series of locked mental doors.

The
sadistic
sociopaths, the killers, seem to have, however, a curious sense of ritual for the dead. It does not matter that a sociopath has caused the death in question; he—or she—will go to great lengths to tie up loose ends neatly.

A lovely funeral service. A red rose in a coffin. A poem of remembrance. An engraved statue or headstone or plaque. The symbolic gesture seems to make it easier to close the doors.

Yes, I killed you
—
it was necessary
—
but I gave you a great funeral.

Yes, I killed you
—
but I engraved your name so no one will forget you.

Yes, I killed you
—
but I always carry your picture in my wallet.

After David's conviction, Jay Newell went to the cemetery where Linda Brown's ashes were interred, curious about what her niche plaque actually said. Linda
was
in a fountain, as David described. David had given her two niche plaques. The upper plaque read simply, "Linda Marie Brown," and beneath that, "1961-1985," the dates separated by a dove. The lower plaque bore the words David had forgotten:

"Your love, kindness, caring, and beauty will shine forever. Love, Krystal and David."

Because antisocial personalities are missing something as vital as true feelings of concern, they often substitute symbolism. They need touchstones to help bridge the gap between themselves and humans who can feel. They may identify with astrology or mysticism or unicorns or—as in David Brown's case—the phoenix.

The day after Linda was shot, David asked Officer Alan Day to bring him his cross, but I suspect it was his phoenix pendant that he clung to. The dove dies but the phoenix lives forever.

David Brown is the ultimate survivor, indeed a phoenix, always gathering shape and energy in the ashes of his failures. He accepts no blame and therefore cannot change. He truly can see no
reason
to change. All guilt detaches and slips away from him like ice in a warm rain. He has no bad dreams. He plans only for the future. Even now, if his captors are not vigilant, he will fly free, victorious once again.

On November 28, 1990, David was moved from the prison facility at Chino, California—where he was undergoing tests and evaluation—to New Folsom Prison in Sacramento. Now, and for the rest of his life, he will be known as prisoner E-70756. New Folsom has the most modern security devices in the California penal system. He has been segregated for his own protection.

Data Recovery is still in business. A Chicago office answers phone calls, and apparently David Brown still receives profits.

Patti Bailey remains a prisoner at the Ventura facility in Camarillo. She will probably be there until she is twenty-five years old. The daughter she bore David lives with Mary and Rick Bailey.

David has begun to write to Patti again, clever, beguiling letters—designed to draw her back to him. No one can predict what Patti 's future holds. Her only model has been David; her ethics, her education, her sexual orientation, her morality. He caught her in a box with invisible walls for more than a decade. Whether she can ever truly escape him is questionable.

Richard Steinhart and his wife, Pat, have placed their faith in God. Richard now goes by the name Liberty. He has undergone a near-miraculous remission from AIDS and works on a crisis line at Melody Lane Center in Anaheim fielding calls from those whose lives have been blighted by drugs. He also speaks frequently to high school and youth groups in his campaign to save them from the mistakes he once made. He gives them Bibles, which he pays for himself or with donations. Liberty is a dynamic speaker, full of bluster and humor—and love.

Eighteen months after "Goldie" Steinhart plotted with David Brown to get rid of Jeoff Robinson and Jay Newell, Newell's wife—Betty Jo—went with me to meet Liberty. When we asked for Richard Steinhart at Melody Lane, we got blank looks, The knew only "Liberty."

After talking with Liberty for an hour or so. Betty Jo felt comfortable enough to ask, "You weren't
really
going to shoot my husband, were you?"

"The way I was then?" he answered. "Yes . . . right in the back of the head."

It was a searing moment. In the telephone room of a drug clinic, Jay Newell's wife and I joined hands with Liberty and said a prayer of thanks for a tragedy that didn't happen.