Cinnamon Brown

Cinnamon Brown, whose sensational 1985 murder of her stepmother at her father's urging was the subject of two books and a television miniseries, is free after serving seven years in a California Youth Authority facility. Brown, 21, was quietly paroled last week after a 2-1 vote in her favor by a Youth Authority review board. Authorities said she is living in Orange County and preparing to take a clerical job.

Cinnamon Brown, whose sensational 1985 murder of her stepmother at her father's urging was the subject of two books and a television miniseries, is free after serving seven years in a California Youth Authority facility. Brown, 21, was quietly paroled last week after a 2-1 vote in her favor by a Youth Authority review board. Authorities said she is living in Orange County and preparing to take a clerical job.

Cinnamon Brown, who at age 14 carried out her father's command to kill her stepmother, was denied early release Tuesday by the state youth parole board despite her cooperation with authorities in her father's trial. In rejecting a prosecutor's request that Brown be freed, the panel gave her no credit for the crucial testimony that sent her father to prison last year as the mastermind of the 1985 murder of his fifth wife, Linda Bailey, in their Garden Grove home.

Cinnamon Brown, whose sensational murder of her stepmother at her father's urging in 1985 was the subject of two books and a made-for-TV miniseries, is free after serving eight years in a California Youth Authority facility. Brown, 21, was quietly paroled last week in a 2-1 vote by the CYA review board. Authorities said she is living in Orange County and preparing to take a clerical job.

It took nearly 5 1/2 years to convict David A. Brown in the death of his wife, Linda Marie Brown. February, 1985: Patti Bailey, at the request of her lover and brother-in-law, David A. Brown, takes a gun into the room of her sister, Linda Marie Brown (David's wife) at the Garden Grove home where they all live, intent on killing her. She gets scared and backs out.

"Girls, it has to be done tonight," the balding computer whiz whispered as he roused the two teen-agers--one his daughter, the other his sister-in-law and secret lover--from a restless sleep. Startled, the girls awoke to the cool, past-midnight quiet of their bedroom and set to work, putting months of helter-skelter, clandestine planning into murderous motion.

When she was an 11-year-old girl with no place to go, Patti Bailey testified Monday, her brother-in-law took her into his home and talked of marrying her someday. Fondling soon followed, she said. At age 15, Bailey said, she and brother-in-law David Brown, then 31, began having sexual intercourse--usually once a week, while her sister was in the shower or out shopping.

Cinnamon Brown, whose sensational murder of her stepmother at her father's urging in 1985 was the subject of two books and a made-for-TV miniseries, is free after serving eight years in a California Youth Authority facility. Brown, 21, was quietly paroled last week in a 2-1 vote by the CYA review board. Authorities said she is living in Orange County and preparing to take a clerical job.

S uperior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin's eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Santa Ana has a peculiar notoriety: Two of the nation's most sensational trials played out there with shocking, oftentimes gruesome, revelations. In 1989, McCartin sentenced Long Beach serial killer Randy Kraft to death for the mutilation murders of 16 young men.

Avoiding her father's sharp gaze, a Garden Grove teen-ager testified Wednesday that she gunned down her sleeping stepmother in their home five years ago because her father told her: "If you love me, you'll do this for me." In a faint, childlike voice, Cinnamon Brown, 19, recounted how her father allegedly reviewed details of the murder plan for months beforehand and then, in the early morning hours of March 19, 1985, woke her up and declared, "It has to be done tonight."

S uperior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin's eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Santa Ana has a peculiar notoriety: Two of the nation's most sensational trials played out there with shocking, oftentimes gruesome, revelations. In 1989, McCartin sentenced Long Beach serial killer Randy Kraft to death for the mutilation murders of 16 young men.

"Bang, bang--right in the back of the head." I murmured the line a second ahead of the actor on the TV screen, amazed even as I mouthed the words at what a weird experience this was. It was almost as if I was watching a rerun of a show I had seen countless times, but something was different: This time the characters had changed. Alice in Wonderland meets murderous Orange County psychopath David Brown.

NBC may have wooed millions of viewers around the country Sunday and Monday nights with its lavish production about Orange County murderer David Arnold Brown and the ultimate dysfunctional family, but some of those most familiar with the tale wanted nothing to do with it. "I couldn't watch it," said Ethel Bailey, the 60-year-old mother of two of the main characters in "Love, Lies and Murder"--the murder victim and the sister who helped kill her.

At first glance, the murder appeared as simple as it was tragic. All the details seemed to fit neatly into place as investigators arrived at the middle-class Garden Grove home at 3:27 a.m. on March 19, 1985. There on the bedroom floor, a few feet from the bloodied body of 23-year-old Linda Brown, was the murder weapon--a .38-caliber revolver, chrome with brown grips. There in a back yard doghouse, lying in her own vomit, was the apparent killer--Cinnamon Brown, 14, the victim's stepdaughter.

Cinnamon Brown, who at age 14 carried out her father's command to kill her stepmother, was denied early release Tuesday by the state youth parole board despite her cooperation with authorities in her father's trial. In rejecting a prosecutor's request that Brown be freed, the panel gave her no credit for the crucial testimony that sent her father to prison last year as the mastermind of the 1985 murder of his fifth wife, Linda Bailey, in their Garden Grove home.

As the morning wears on, clouds thicken over the Karl Holton Camp for juvenile offenders, the sky darkens, the dreary concrete bungalows look even more drab. A chill wind picks up. The television crew pulls jackets tight. Things look bleak--just as they should. Such gloom is ideal for "Love You to Death," the four-hour miniseries being filmed here about the bizarre David Brown murder case in Orange County.

A Garden Grove computer whiz talked his 14-year-old-daughter into shooting and killing his wife because he himself "didn't have the stomach for it," the daughter asserted in court Monday. More than three years after she was convicted of murdering her stepmother and sent to prison, Cinnamon Brown, now 18, broke her silence about the killing that prosecutors now claim was orchestrated by her father, 35-year-old David A. Brown.

A young woman with a soft voice and girlish bangs testified Friday that as a teen-ager she fell in love with her brother-in-law, then helped him and his daughter kill her own sister in the Garden Grove home they all shared. Patricia A. Bailey, now 20, married David A. Brown shortly after Linda Marie Brown, who was his wife, was shot to death March 19, 1985.

Branding him a "master manipulator" more chilling than Charles Manson, a judge Monday ordered David Brown to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole for orchestrating his wife's 1985 murder. "Mr. Brown, you're a scary person," Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin told the 37-year-old computer whiz, who was quickly convicted of murder in June by an Orange County jury for setting up his devoted 14-year-old daughter to murder his fifth wife while she slept.