Brown Case Prosecutors to Paint Dad as a Svengali

The attraction surely wasn’t physical, Brenda Sands remembers with a laugh.

And yet, there was something compelling about the teen-age David Brown she met in Wilmington all those years ago--something so charming and persuasive in the voice of this occasional poet that Sands quickly fell in love and married him.

“He was a convincer,” Sands, the mother of Brown’s daughter, Cinnamon, said in a recent interview. “He could convince anyone into doing anything. You just believed what he said.”

The 36-year-old Brown, described by his own attorney as “homely,” has married five times since his divorce from Sands a decade and a half ago.

And his successful marketing of an innovative computer data recovery system has enabled him to amass a net worth of nearly $3 million today, said his attorney, Joel Baruch.

But now Brown--ordered this week to stand trial for murder in the bizarre 1985 killing of the woman who then was his wife, 24-year-old Linda Brown--finds himself in the ironic position of having to show that he is not quite as persuasive as friends and relatives make him out to be.

Baruch paints charges against his client as a transparent attempt by Brown’s daughter and his current wife--a co-defendant in the murder case--to help their own causes at the expense of an innocent man.

“You look at my client and you know in a second that he could never intimidate anyone,” Baruch said. “No one can honestly believe that this guy could control people like robots.”

Yet to hear prosecutors tell it, Brown was a modern-day Machiavelli in his mastery of the art of persuasion. And that mastery, they say, almost allowed him to get away with murder.

Prosecutors maintain that Brown was able to instill such blind devotion in Cinnamon Brown, then 14, that she was willing to kill his wife to protect him.

Took the Blame

So devoted was Cinnamon that she then took the blame and sat silent in a youth detention center for more than 3 years while her father lived in comfort with $835,000 from his dead wife’s insurance money, the prosecutors say.

Linda Brown was shot and killed in the family’s Garden Grove home as she slept on the morning of March 19, 1985. Police found Cinnamon Brown huddled in a doghouse in the family’s back yard, apparently passed out from a drug overdose and clutching a suicide note asking for forgiveness.

She was convicted of murder.

But last fall, she recanted and said her father made her shoot and kill her stepmother and take the blame for the crime. Her new story--though riddled with contradictions when contrasted with her previous statements--led to David Brown’s arrest last September.

Arrested with Brown and also charged with murder was Patricia Bailey, 20, the sister of the victim and Brown’s latest wife. Prosecutors say Brown was able to convince Bailey, then 17, to help set up the killing of her own sister. Bailey and Brown were married about 16 months after the killing.

Described as an innovative and largely self-taught computer specialist, Brown set up his own enormously profitable computer firm several years ago. He boasts of pioneering a technique for retrieving lost data from damaged systems--using it to work on such projects as the investigations of the Challenger space shuttle explosion and the MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas.

But Garrick Batt, a vice president at the Randomex computer company in Signal Hill, maintained in an interview that despite Brown’s claims, the retrieval system was in fact developed by a number of people at Randomex. Brown worked as a consultant for the company, collecting more than $650,000 since 1981.

Prosecutors say Brown feared competition from his wife if she were ever to use the lucrative computer secrets he had taught her and set out on her own. But attempts to explore Brown’s business interests as a motive in his wife’s killing have been stifled somewhat by the secrecy of his operation, according to investigators.

Secrecy in Business

“Everything had to be so secretive with the business,” said Alan Bailey, who worked with David Brown and is Linda Brown’s twin brother. “Everything was in his head. The guy didn’t keep anything on paper.”

Patricia Bailey agreed to testify against her husband after a videotaped interview--in which Brown told police he was afraid of Patricia and believed that she had killed his wife--was played for her.

Described as unquestioningly devoted to Brown before hearing that tape, Bailey was stunned by Brown’s denunciation and began to re-evaluate her own loyalties, according to a source close to her defense.

“When she found out (about Brown’s statements to police), she said she felt like a Manson girl. That’s how much he controlled her and dominated her,” the source said, adding that Brown made Patricia Bailey wear a beeper at all times so he knew where she was.

Even with the doubts the defense attorney is expected to raise about the credibility of both Cinnamon Brown and Patricia Bailey, prosecutors say they still have enough evidence to convict Brown of murder. They say they will rely heavily on Brown’s own self-incriminating statements--in a secretly recorded conversation with his daughter at the youth detention center and in a later interview with police.

Could Face Death Sentence

Because of the allegation that Brown had his wife killed to profit financially from her life insurance, he could face the death penalty if found guilty.

“Based on the evidence we have,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey Robinson, “any juror with any common sense will come to only one conclusion--that Brown knew exactly what was going on in that house and that, in his own shrewd way, he orchestrated his wife’s murder.”

The picture of Brown as a ruthless man who was able to manipulate vulnerable people to his own ends and cut them loose at a moment’s notice is one that prosecutors will try to draw with fine detail for a jury in his murder trial.

It is a picture that some of those who know Brown--though stunned by the events of recent months--say fits their understanding of the man.

Alan Bailey said he once considered David Brown a close friend. At one point, the two men lived only a few houses away from each other in Riverside. Though reserved initially, Bailey said, Brown later began to open up to him.

Brown told him repeatedly about his grand aspirations to “fly to the moon,” to own a jet, to have his own office tower, to distinguish himself, Bailey said.

But after the charges of murder were brought against Brown, Bailey said, he felt betrayed.

“He was a coy one, all right,” Bailey, 27, said in a recent interview. “He makes you see what he wants you to see. He prided himself on knowing people so that he could test their sore spots, their weaknesses.”

Brenda Sands, who raised Cinnamon for most her childhood, said her ex-husband could be charming and kind one minute--instilling trust and confidence in those around him--and cutting and cruel the next.

As for the relationship between Cinnamon and her father, Sands said: “Whatever he wanted her to do, she did it.”