Who was David Arnold Brown?

He had told investigators only the most cursory details about his life and seemed disinclined to tell them anything more. They knew he was wealthy, that he owned Data Recovery and claimed to be a computer genius, that his health was fragile, and that he seemed to a.s.sociate almost exclusively with his family.

There was nothing to link David Brown to the murder of Linda Brown. It had seemed a bit odd to McLean and Newell that a man so upset by an argument with his wife should have remembered his whereabouts so precisely. A skeptica"or a detectivea"might even deduce that Brown had intentionally established an alibi. But that was only a feeling, not solid evidence. Police investigations had checked out Brown's story; he was, indeed, where he said he was at the time Linda died. In the official eyes of the law, Brown was a law-abiding citizen. He had no criminal recorda"not with the California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Information, nor with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Crime Information Center. McLean had checked, and Newell had checked.

David Brown was clean.

McLean had to let it go, at least for the moment; he had other duties. Newell could not let it go, even though he wasn't even sure what he was looking for. Newell was a man born to ferret out things hidden, a low-key bulldog who refused to accept easy solutions. He worried a case, turning it over and over, kept coming back to it until he was satisfied that he had discerned every facet of the truth.

Jay Newell didn't grow up in a cop's family; his dad was a school custodian in La Habra, and Jay and his two sisters had come with their folks from Oklahoma to Norwalk, California. There, young Jay's hero was a Los Angeles County deputy who lived across the street and took the time to talk to neighborhood kids and listen to their problems.

When Newell got out of the army in 1971, he signed up with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office. The first a.s.signment for rookies just out of the Academy was working in the jails, not the favorite duty for most cops. "If you want to get through the jail a.s.signment quick," Newell explained, "you pick the toughest jail you can. That's what I did. I volunteered for the old HOJJa"the Hall of Justice Jail in downtown Los Angeles."

The HOJJ was full of difficult prisoners, including Charles Manson and his followers, who were housed there during their marathon trials. Newell was startled to see what a diminutive man Manson was, and how, even locked up, he had a mesmerizing effect on young prisoners. The man who should have been reviled was, instead, idolized. Studying Manson taught Newell a great deal about charismatic manipulators. "He had a whole block of cells to himselfa"to keep him isolateda"but some of the other prisoners would pa.s.s by him when they were transferred in or out. They polished his shoes for him; they would take his jail clothes and put creases just right in thema"anything to please him," Newell recalled, shaking his head. "He had a creepy kind of power."

In many ways, working the Hall of Justice Jail was far more dangerous for rookie deputies than being on the streets. Simply locking down the jail for the night could be risky. "All the cell doors slammed shut at once," Newell remembered. "We'd yell, 'Comin' closed!' to warn the prisoners to step away from the doors. But some of them would toss blankets in the doorway, and that made the handle the deputy was pulling fly back and smack into him hard. Luckily, I was in and out quickly, but I learned a lot in the process."

Next, Newell went to patrol. He was out on the road only three days when he was involved in a shoot-out. Two suspects were wounded, but Newell and his partner emerged unscathed.

He liked police work, the variety of details a street cop deals with, and yet it was the continuing investigation of crimes that truly fascinated him. As a patrolman, he only got to see the beginning of a case, and then he had to hand it reluctantly over to the detectives for follow-up. It left him wanting more. He saw only the surface, when everything in him wanted to dig deeper. In the hierarchy of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, it can take a long time to move up into the detective unit, and Newell chafed at the wait. After eight years with the Sheriff's Office, he resigned and signed on with the Orange County District Attorney's Office as an investigator.

Newell's first a.s.signments were hardly the stuff of mystery thrillers. He worked in the Family Support Division, then investigated welfare fraud for a year. By 1981, he had moved into the Juvenile Division where he worked juvenile-related homicide cases and tried to stem the damage from a growing problem: gangs. Orange County saw the unwelcome emergence of some of the first of the gangs that would soon plague the West Coast, and Newell had his baptism of fire. He investigated forty-seven gang-related homicides. He had wanted into the thick of criminal investigation, and he got his wish. Crips. Bloods. Skinheads. Newell played a key role in producing training films that taught cops how to deal with the skinheads and the ethnic gangs that were proliferating. He got along with the gangsa"as much as any cop could.

Cinnamon Brown was no gang member. She was a convicted juvenile homicide offender. Why couldn't Newell just let go of her case? It was a question with no answer, only a gnawing gut instinct. Newell's curiosity about her father was an itch that demanded scratching.

After the murder of Linda Brown, David Arnold Brown told anyone who would listen that he was a man torn, caught between his grief over the loss of his wife, pity for his motherless baby, and concern for his firstborn child. Cinnamon was criminally responsible for making Krystal a half-orphan, he said forlornly, and that fact would fill him with wrenching ambivalence for the rest of his life. Seeing Cinnamon reminded Brown of the tragedy and of her partic.i.p.ation. But he couldn't just walk away from his daughter. She needed him now more than she ever had. He vowed to visit her as often as his health permitted.

Brown had always called Cinnamon "Cinny" and stressed to police that there was an extremely strong bond between them, even during those times she was living with her mother. He bemoaned the fact that she had stubbornly resisted when he tried to get her into counseling. He blamed himself, he said, for not trying harder to get help for Cinnamon. But he accepted the fact that his fourteen-year-old daughter had murdered his beloved, perfect wife.

When he could take the time from other investigations, Jay Newell began to dig beneath the surface of David Brown's life, locating any number of people who were quite willing to fill in a c.h.i.n.k here and a missing s.p.a.ce in time there. He discovered that David Brown was something of a ladies' man. Linda had been his fifth wife. Newell also located a dozen or more women Brown had been involved with between marriages. He was neither tall nor handsome, but it hadn't seemed to hurt him with women. As one of Linda and Patti's relatives said graphically, "He always got the beauties. None of David's women were dog meat."

Newell found that David's existence had been marked by soaring peaks and desolate valleys. Still, all things considered, he had been quite successfula"until Linda's murder. He bragged that he had a talent for survival, along with an innate intelligence and acquired skill. The numerous statues and sketches of birds in the Ocean Breeze Drive house were David's. Family members told Newell that David identified with the phoenix, the mythic bird rising from the ashes of disaster to soar again. He even wore a symbolic pendant. His personal jeweler had created the image of a phoenix just as Brown ordered it, with its wings downa"not spreada"as it rose with ease from "flames" formed of yellow and orange topaz. The custom piece cost $ 1,500.

David Brown liked to say that in the end, like the phoenix, he always won.

No one could argue that David was not a high achiever, a middle child who had struggled to break out of the pack of many children in a family with limited income. Perhaps that was why prestige and wealth mattered so much to him. And why he detested authority figures. Perhaps it was his mother's control over him when he was a child that made David so resistant to anyone's telling him what to do.

Well, he had weathered the latest storm. Cinny was safely behind bars where she could hurt no one. He would visit her, of course, but Brown had his business, his clients and his employees, along with the total care of Krystal. His parents were upset, naturally, and Linda's family was devastated. They looked to him for decisions.

Apparently everyone in both families had come to depend on David Brown for jobs, and in a pinch, for money. He had succeeded in the business world far beyond what any of them had accomplished. David liked to think of himself as the kind of guy who could walk in and do what needed to be done. It was true he could be self-important, and as one of Linda and Patti's brothers said, "a pain in the b.u.t.t" about it. He was not averse to strutting a little bit, letting his wife's family know that he was in charge.

But success had cost David Arnold Brown. He was the first to admit that the stresses in his life had exacted a toll. At thirty-two, he was invariably taken for much older. In his computer data retrieval business that wasn't necessarily a bad thing; the corporations and government agencies he dealt with seemed more secure believing they were dealing with an older man.

Despite his accomplishments in the corporate world and with women, David's health was not good. He had been treated for high blood pressure, heart trouble, headaches, asthma, allergies, insomnia, stomach problems, ulcerative colitis, liver problems, kidney problems, depression, and "nerves." His roster of prescription medicines equaled that of most senior citizens. He worried aloud, voicing his belief he would die young, and his family worried with him.

Beyond his illnesses, David had been in a number of automobile accidents: seventeen, in fact. He was either an abysmal driver, or unlucky. Nevertheless, insurance claims had enabled him to replacea"even upgradea"his damaged vehicles.

The effect on his already debilitated health was harder to a.s.sess. His calendar was blocked out with appointments with his physician and his chiropractor. Just to keep going, he explained, he had to have frequent spinal adjustments. His lifestyle didn't help; David smoked three or more packs of cigarettes a day, ate junk food almost exclusively, and his only exercise was the walk from his house to his cara"unless his self-avowed rigorous s.e.x life counted as exercise. Close-mouthed about many areas of his life, he spoke freely of his s.e.xual prowess.

Digging even deeper, bit by bit Jay Newell began to piece together an intriguing biography of his inscrutable subject a"without knowing where it would lead or what it might prove.

David Brown was born in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 16, 1952, near the end of the Korean War. He was the sixth of eight children. His father, Kansas-born Arthur Quentin Brown, thirty-two when David was bora, was an auto mechanic who usually worked two jobs to support his family.

His mother, Manuela Estrada Brown, was born in El Paso, Texas, and married young. The babies came along soon, and with regularity. Manuela was only twenty-seven when she bore her sixth childa"David. Arthur junior was first, then Bob, Shirley, Linda Sue, Susan, and David. After David, came Tom and the baby, Steven. Linda Sue died as an infant, and the Browns lost their firstborn, Arthur junior, in an automobile accident when he was eighteen.

At eight, David Arnold Brown was a winsome-looking child who resembled Beaver Cleavera"his hair, home crew-cut, his shirt wrinkled and missing a b.u.t.ton. His eyes were large and clear, his front teeth too big for his mouth and slightly protruding. He was a little boy who looked as if he needed a hug.

David resembled his mother physically and grew to look even more like her as he matured. They were both brunettes (although Manuela hennaed her hair to a maroon shade.) Manuela's heritage was Hispanic, but as he matured, David played down his Hispanic roots, distancing himself from that culture. He often voiced prejudice against Hispanics, as well as most other minorities.

Bitter in-laws later described Manuela as so overweight that four chairs collapsed beneath her. She was not that heavy; she was only a compact, stocky woman. Both mother and son had the same amorphous body structure, short in stature, with chubby arms and small star-shaped hands.

As much as he looked like his mother, he pulled away from her early in his life. He seemed to feel far more affinity for his father, whom he found positive and caring. A slight man, tentative about his role in life, Arthur Brown always tried to do the right thing. But he had little power, and he had spent his life trying to appease those around him. How strange that David had chosen to call his father before he called the police the night Linda was murdered. His father seemed the last person to turn to for quick, decisive answers in a moment of crisis.

On the other hand, his mother was a vocal woman with definite opinions. He denied that he ever loved her and described her as selfish, controlling, greedy, and violent. When he was older, he teased and tormented her with s.a.d.i.s.tic jokes until she got angry or broke into tears. (His daughter Cinnamon, while fond of her grandpa, unwittingly spoke of Manuela in a deprecating manner, as if she were not quite brighta"echoing her father.) Yet, Manuela visited often and sometimes lived in David's many adult homes. And David had taken Manuela's side in an argument with Linda only hours before his young wife died.

In truth, David Brown probably felt ambivalent about his mother. Even though he didn't like her, perhaps he always needed her to take up the slack in his often untidy personal life. In times of trouble, Manuela Brown was the decisive voice, while Arthur fluttered ineffectively, uncertain of what to do.

The Brown family remained in Phoenix until about 1960, then, when David was eight, moved to Needles, California. Needles, just at the eastern boundary of California, is often listed on weather charts as having the highest temperature in America, a town surrounded by desert. After that the family moved around, following jobs for Arthur, and lived over the next thirteen years in Bakersfield and various towns in Los Angeles County. Arthur eventually went to work for Arco. Manuela never worked outside the family home.

David told contradictory stories of his childhood. When talking to a counselor, he recalled that he enjoyed a "wonderful relationship" with each of his family members. But the childhood that he described to others was horrific. Bizarre, violent episodes burst forth unbidden from his memory. Beyond his alleged early hatred for his mother, David told of a number of traumatic a.s.saults. He recalled being beaten up by a gang of Indian youths. He spoke of being s.e.xually molested by an old man in a park. He witnessed a close relative's suicide attempt when he was only ten and was rendered immobile with terror as he watched the knife stabbing repeatedly into wrist arteries, and the cascade of blood that followed. Although the attempt was not successful, the moment stayed frozen in his mind.

As hard as Arthur worked, his combined salaries covered only the basic living expenses of his large family. David spoke with pride about his own resourcefulness. "If we wanted anything for schoola"binders, rulers, school suppliesa"we had to earn it. I pulled weeds, trimmed trees, mowed lawns, from the time I was eleven. I was washing dishes in a cafe after school too when I was eleven," David recalled. "When I was still only eleven or twelve, I ran a gas station all by myselfa"up to sixteen hours a day. I loved it. It was way out in Mettler, a little crossroads about twenty-five miles south of Bakersfield. I was pretty tired when school came around, but it was the only way I could have real nice clothes."

Arthur and David's older brothers worked in the cafiS too, but David was the only one deemed competent enough to be in charge of the gas station.

The family moved ona"to a yellow stucco house on M Street in Wilmington near Long Beach. And it was well nigh impossible to track accurately David's various recollections of his early teens. His memory was spotty, like a radio signal in stormy weather. His most consistent story was that he was physically punished at home to the point of abusea"and that his only recourse was to run away from home at the age of fourteen.

His formal schooling ended in Los Angeles's Banning High School where he completed the eighth grade. He was, according to his summing up of his life, on the road and on his own when most kids were still in junior high school. Given David's inventive, innovative mind and his talent for survival, it was not surprising that he maintained himself quite well, despite his age.

At fifteen, David had a steady girlfriend. He met Brenda Kurges through his sister Susan. "Brenda taught me about s.e.x," he insisted. Brenda was also fifteen, a small attractive girl with chiseled features, olive skin, compelling brown eyes, and long, straight, almost black hair.

She was fathered by her mother's first husband, who left when she was small. She would look for him for most of her life before she located the stranger who was her father. No man could have lived up to her idealized picture, and of course, her real father did not. Brenda's life was bleak. Her half-siblings came along with regularity, and she was a little ashamed that most of them had different fathers. She had virtually no clothes and far too much responsibility for a fifteen-year-old.

She was desperately unhappy at home. "I was the oldest of eleven kids, and I was the 'mother.' I ran away twice. The first time I ran was with David's sister Susan, and we went to Lawndale and got caught. We got caught the next time too."

David was well aware of Brenda's home situation, and of her desperation to be free of it. He was attracted to the pet.i.te brunette, partially, he believed, because she too was living in an "abusive" home. "She was very lonely... . Her mother was worse than mine."

Ideally for his needs, David had found someone dependent, suggestible, and trapped in the cage of her life, her prettiness dulled by poverty. He recalled that Brenda dressed in "rags." He saw himself in the role of her rescuer.

Indeed, he was.

Brenda had a boyfriend, Andy, who was also a friend of David's. "Andy was just a nice boy. He wasn't mean or demanding. No s.e.x or nothing like that," she remembered. "Andy took me to the first movie I ever saw. It was The Yellow Submarine." David asked Andy if he could take Brenda outa"just once. "Andy said okay, and we went out," Brenda said. "That was just kind of it. From then on, I was with David. He said, 'You're going to stay with me.' So I did."

It was not so much David's physical appearance that appealed to Brenda, but rather the fact that he was the first person in her whole life who seemed to want to protect her. She had learned to expect nothing, and suddenly there was someone who cared for her. She was vulnerable, innocent, and artless. "He was kind of 'puffy' then tooa"not like latera"but a little overweight," Brenda recalled, sounding puzzled that she was once married to David Brown. "He had acnea"but it wasn't too bad, and then he started to pick at it, and it bled."

David lost weight when he started seeing Brendaa"to the point that his jaw was lean and hard, and in some pictures taken during that time in the midsixties, he had a Presleyesque look. Many girls might have been drawn to that David. In fact, there was a profound s.e.xual attraction between pretty little Brenda and the boy whose voice and words were so persuasive, although she could nota"and cannota"explain it. He sent her original poems written just for her. His poetry was amateurish and cloying, but his thoughts and feelings seemed so loving.

Brenda saw David's deep depressions early on. One day, she went to the yellow house on M Street after school and found him on the patio. "He was just staring at his feet, and he was so down. He said, 'n.o.body loves me. I have no friends. No one cares,' and I told him, 'I care about you.'"

David was jealously possessive of Brenda from the start. He even made her wait outside men's rest rooms while he was inside. "Like he thought someone was going to come along and pick me up!" Brenda said. "One time, the police picked us up in Redondo 'cause I was waiting by the men's bathroom and they didn't believe I was waiting for David."

Brenda was jealous of David, too. During the early years of their relationship, she loved him completely. "He told me he knew I was going to run away again, and that I couldn't take care of myselfa"so he was going to go with me and take care of me."

And so he did.

When he was barely sixteen, they ran away togethera"first to Brenda's grandfather, who lived in a hotel in Wilmington. "He tried to talk me out of it and told me I should go back to school, but I'd made up my mind to stay with David." They got a job at her grandfather's hotela"painting the stairways a"to pay for their room, then moved on when that work ran out. They lived by their wits, finding work for a few days or a week.

David was adept at taking care of them. "We worked at odd jobsa"waiting tables, doing yard work, or in service stations, fast-food places. We paid our own way," he remembered. And then they were hired by a place called Aunt Sally's Guesthouse* in Lawndale. Elderly people lived there in a cl.u.s.ter of cottages. Brenda cooked and served breakfast and ironed. David did maintenance work.

At first, their situation was idyllic. They had their own room, warm and private and hidden from the world. The work wasn't nearly as hard as Brenda's duties at home. She was wonderfully in love with David, and so grateful to him that he had rescued her. s.e.xually, then, they were perfectly matched, and their escape from home had brought them to floating, dreamy days, a honeymoon where only the two of them existed.

"The guy who ran Aunt Sally's was really generous," Brenda recalled. "He only had one hand, and he needed helpa"so he didn't even check our ages or anything. We didn't have to pay rent, and we had plenty to eat. I didn't get to eat like that at home! We could have ice cream or whatever we wanted! We had clothes and we had movie money. We were teenagers just having a good time."

Twenty years later, there was awe in Brenda Kurges Brown Sands's voice as she spoke of having enough of anything she wanted to eat. And clothes . . . and movies . . . And someone to love her and take care of her. David sang along to Neil Diamond songs, and because she loved him, Brenda thought he was romantic, "but really, he couldn't sing that well."

David was funny too. He would tease Brenda when she was trying to discuss something seriously, saying, "Well, let's go ask Maynard."

"Maynard wasn't anybody but a joke David made up."

But even in that paradise of Aunt Sally's Guesthouse, there was a rude awakening. David discovered an odd little switchboard behind the bread box in the kitchen and soon deduced that anyone could listen in to activity in the different rooms and cottages by flipping a toggle switch. The system was designed to check on the welfare of the elderly guests, but David explained to Brenda that they were being spied on. Someone had been listening to them when they thought they were alone. The tone of his voice, the fear he conveyed to her, had a profound effect.

"We were scared," Brenda said, a shiver in her voice. "We began to think that the place was evil, that people had been listening to us and maybe watching us when we were in our room. One night, we were holding hands and walking to the store to buy some Ripple wine, and we could just feel hidden eyes looking at us."

David had always believed in evil forces and ghosts, and the more the two teenagers talked about it, the more they were afraid. "Finally, David just said, 'This place is evil,* and we called his parents and they came and got us and took us back to their house on M Street."

Brenda envied David the yellow house and his parents. "David said his mother beat him with the pipe of her vacuum cleaner, and that he was the 'black sheep' of his familya"but I didn't believe it. I got along fine with his parents. They fed me, and they gave me a room to sleep in. Manuela was good to me. But David would tease her and call her stupid and say she didn't know nothing."

Even as a teenager, David was preoccupied with his health. He either believed, or wanted others to believe, that he was dying of cancer. He told Brenda that his colitis was just eating him up. She wasn't sure what colitis was, but it sounded deadly. "He always had the runs, and he was always sweaty and he got overheated so easy."

When David had his tonsils outa"paid for by his parents' insurancea"Brenda sat beside him, terrified that he would die in his sleep. Suddenly, he started throwing up blood, torrents of it. Brenda believed that he was in his death throes, the b.l.o.o.d.y fate David had always predicted. Panicked, Brenda ran for the nurses.

David had only coughed and ripped the st.i.tches in his throat open. They took him back into surgery and repaired the damage. But the episode served to convince Brenda even more that David had only a tenuous hold on life.

David's health problems did not affect his s.e.xuality. "He wanted s.e.x three times a day," his first wife recalled. At the same time, David wanted his wife to appear circ.u.mspect, almost prim. "He wouldn't let me wear makeup."

David, who had no high school diploma, found his job opportunities limited to "good old fast foodsa"El Taco, Der Wiener Schnitzela"whatever it took to keep me and her fed." Then in the fall of 1969, Brenda and David traveled to Salt Lake City and stayed with Brenda's grandmother. David worked for one of her relatives who was building a house, and they spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in Utah, enjoying the snow, but also realizing that their economic situation wasn't much better in the Mormon community than it had been in California.

"We came back home on the bus, and we applied for welfare," Brenda said. "It bothered me. My mom lived on welfare, and I never wanted to do that. David hated it too." But they had little choice. Brenda was pregnant, an unplanned event that strained their bare-hones budget. They moved into a tiny apartment in Wilmington. Unwieldy and clumsy as only very small women can be in late pregnancy, Brenda nevertheless helped paint the house next door to earn extra money.

David said he pleaded with his family and hers for their permission to marry Brenda. At length, the families relented and signed their consents. David and Brenda were married in Los Angeles on May 13, 1970, and they moved into apartment E at 1474 Magnolia Avenue in Long Beach. Brenda went into labor on the first of July and spent two days alone with hard contractions at the Harbor General Hospital in Torrance. David had a weak stomach and couldn't bear the sight of blood, or the sounds of pain.

Their baby girl was born on July 3, 1970. She weighed six pounds, fifteen ounces. Her parents were four months short of their eighteenth birthdays.

They named her Cinnamon Darlene.

"It was pretty and it was different, and we wanted her to be special," Brenda recalled. "In case she was ever famous, she would have that special name."

David was very proud of Cinnamon Darlene, and Brenda took innumerable snapshots of him cradling his baby girl in his arms. A coming-home-from-the-hospital picture of father and daughter, with David holding Cinnamon in front of his parents' house on M Street, as he stared into the sun. David and Cinnamon in front of a Christmas tree. David and Cinnamon at Disneyland. In those early days, his hair was thick and slicked back into a pompadour, and he had long sideburns and the half sneer/half smile so like Elvis's.

Cinnamon was a chubby, beautiful baby with huge brown eyes and thick dark hair who laughed all the time. Her daddy held her in another photo in their apartment on Magnolia. David stood in front of drapes patterned with yellow and avocado daisies.

He quickly became the center of Cinnamon's world. He made a concentrated effort, it would seem, to capture and hold her absolute devotion. He was the fun parent, the one who took her to Disneyland, who zoomed around the block with her on motorcycle rides as she squealed happily, who tickled her and teased her until she giggled.

Brenda did the "scut" work, the boring, tiresome part of parenting. She handled the discipline and she walked the floor with her sick baby. David was the parent with the fey sense of humor, the wit that Cinnamon would inherit. From the very beginning of her life, David programmed Cinnamon to believe that her daddy was the most wonderful, funniest, most powerful man in the world.

She adored him.

David Arnold Brown's ambition accelerated. He and Brenda were still on food stamps and received a partial grant of $235 a month from Aid to Dependent Children, Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.

He wanted more. So much more.

David enrolled in the WIN, Work Incentive Program, through the welfare department, a government program designed to traina"or retraina"welfare recipients for the job market. He rapidly achieved his high school degree by taking the GED (general equivalency diploma) tests. In April of 1971, he received his scores: Score U.S. Percentile Correctness of Effectiveness of Expression: Interpretation of Reading Materials, Social Studies: Interpretation of Reading Materials, Natural Sciences: Interpretation of Literary Materials: General Mathematical Ability: 69 79.

62.

82 62.

55.

58.