Kraft Prosecutor Seeks Convictions, Not Limelight

As the first day of testimony ended last September in the Randy Steven Kraft serial murder trial, a spectator shook his head at the performance of the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown.

The defense had been on the attack; Brown had been low key, unruffled by the jabs.

“That defense lawyer is eating Brown alive,” the man said.

A longtime court watcher who had observed many of Brown’s trials gently tapped her elbow into the skeptic’s ribs. “It ain’t over yet,” she said.

It wasn’t.

Kraft, 44, eventually was convicted of murdering 16 men in Orange County--all the murder charges he had faced. Kraft’s lawyers are still grinding their teeth over all the mistakes they believe that the judge allowed Brown to make during that trial. But Brown’s colleagues are piling on the plaudits.

“It’s tough enough to convict somebody of one murder, but to convince a jury that Kraft killed 16 people. . . . Brown is just one hell of a prosecutor,” said one of Brown’s bosses, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright.

For nine months of testimony, it was Brown’s task to show jurors how 16 grisly sex-related murders of young men, spread over more than a decade, were all connected to the same killer. Today, Brown will return to the same courtroom, Department 30 of the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana, to try to convince jurors at a two-month hearing that Kraft deserves the death penalty.

Brown, 47, is the supervisor of the district attorney’s 11-person homicide group. Still, he insists on carrying a full courtroom load. When the Kraft trial ends, he will prosecute another highly publicized case, that of Cynthia Lynn Coffman and James Gregory Marlow, who are accused of murdering a young Orange County woman. The couple are now on trial in San Bernardino for the murder of another woman there.

Prosecutors and investigators who work for Brown love him and call him “Dad.” Cops and crime lab workers rave about him too. His co-workers admire him because he never acts like the boss, said Daniel P. DiSanto, who has been Brown’s chief investigator for six years.

“Bryan doesn’t dictate to anyone. He says: ‘Maybe this is what we should do. What do you think?’ ” said DiSanto.

Brown’s critics are primarily defense attorneys, who characterize his courtroom demeanor as folksy, with a sometimes aw-shucks way of talking to jurors. C. Thomas McDonald, one of Kraft’s attorneys, calls it Brown’s “cowboy” style. But others who admire his courtroom skills say that view is unfair.

“The quality those people are talking about is simply his honesty,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. James P. Cloninger, who has worked closely with Brown. “His courtroom style is not contrived. He’s the same in front of a jury as he is anywhere else.”

Few of Brown’s critics deny his courtroom effectiveness.

“You think he’s sitting there asleep, and before you realize it he’s got the jury eating out of his hand,” said one defense investigator.

One defense lawyer, who did not want his name used in case he opposes Brown again, claims that Brown uses unfair tactics. But the lawyer acknowledged that Brown is tough to beat in the courtroom.

“Brown has a human quality that appeals to jurors,” he said. “It can be devastating for a defendant.”

Kraft’s lawyers declined to discuss Brown’s performance. But McDonald on numerous occasions during the trial has been angry with Brown, usually when Brown objected to some piece of evidence the defense wanted the jurors to see.

One controversy between the lawyers came at the end of Brown’s closing arguments, when he placed before the jury 16 large pieces of white cardboard, showing the victims’ bodies at the scene, with other pictures showing how the evidence connected the victims to Kraft.

Brown claimed that it was a legitimate way of showing how the killings were all committed by the same person. McDonald accused Brown of deliberately trying to inflame the jury. One member of the defense staff called it “Brown’s Great Wall of Death.”

But Brown’s supporters insist that he went out of his way during the trial not to sensationalize the deaths.

“Bryan did what he had to do, but he has always been sensitive to our feelings,” said Rodger James DeVaul, father of one of the victims. “We were fortunate to have him for our prosecutor.”

A prosecutor is all that Brown has ever been.

Focus on Homicide Cases

Brown is a native of Long Beach who went to Long Beach City College. He later attended the University of Washington and then graduated from the prestigious Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He joined the Orange County district attorney’s office immediately after passing the bar in 1968.

For more than 10 years, he has concentrated on homicide cases. His career has been aided in part by good timing. For example, the case of William G. Bonin, known as the Freeway Killer, fell to Brown after two previous Bonin prosecutors left the office. Bonin, already sentenced to death for 10 murders in Los Angeles County, faced charges of four more murders in Orange County.

Brown won those convictions, which had capped 23 straight successful prosecutions in major cases. Soon after that, in 1984, he was named Prosecutor of the Year by the state prosecutors’ association.

Brown has lost just two serious felony cases. In the first, he failed to persuade a jury to convict a Huntington Beach couple of first-degree murder for the death of their baby. The jury returned a verdict of involuntary manslaughter against the husband only.

Brown’s second loss might also have been one of his finest moments as a prosecutor.

He was trying to convict three brothers of murder in the death of the wife of one of them. She had been shot by a sheriff’s deputy during a melee after one brother had resisted arrest. The three were bound over for trial at a preliminary hearing.

But Brown, in another case, happened to hear a police officer say he had inadvertently failed to turn over to lawyers some of his handwritten notes.

Brown, as a precaution, then asked investigators in the melee case to double-check that all the notes from every police officer had been turned over to the defense lawyers. To his surprise, he learned that one officer had misplaced important notes from a witness.

Brown immediately called it to the court’s attention, and the brothers were granted a new preliminary hearing, where the charges were dismissed.

“He could never have mentioned those notes and no one would have ever known,” said Marshal Schulman, an attorney for one of the brothers.

Helped Get Search Warrants

Within hours after Kraft’s May 14, 1983, arrest, it was Brown whom a Sheriff’s Department investigator, James A. Sidebotham, called on a Saturday morning to help him get search warrants for Kraft’s house and car. Brown has been Kraft’s chief prosecutor ever since.

Kraft has not hidden his own feelings about Brown. After Brown filed 16 murder charges against him in 1983, Kraft said in a Times interview that Brown “is only trying to put another notch on his gun belt.”

But even Brown’s critics don’t accuse him of seeking personal glory.

When Bonin was convicted, television news crews waited and waited for Brown to appear on camera to bask in his victory. But Brown slipped out a back door to avoid them.

After the Kraft verdict, Brown refused to appear on camera or talk with reporters. He also refused to be interviewed for this story. Some of his colleagues say Brown is embarrassed for his profession when he sees Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner in the spotlight so often, holding news conferences on controversial cases.

Brown also has tried to ensure that his home life is protected from the public eye. He has two sons, one in college and one in high school, and is married for a second time. He will admit to loving water sports and traveling, but not to much else.

What he really loves, he has said in previous interviews, is his job.

“I love working with cops,” he once said. When asked what excited him about the job, he told about a Friday afternoon, when he had to finish his rebuttal by Monday, and he mentioned that it was too bad there was no time to find a witness whose name had just come up.

Brown said he walked in Monday morning to find the witness sitting in his office. Two of his investigators who had heard him had spent their entire weekend tracking down the man.

While Brown rarely loses his temper in public outside the courtroom, at least two incidents have triggered an uncharacteristic public display of his feelings.

Once was when a member of the County Board of Supervisors questioned the quality of the work by the three forensic pathologist partners who handled all the homicide deaths in the county. Brown and the lawyers under him signed a public petition describing the three as outstanding doctors who had all been of tremendous help to prosecutors.

Furious Over Column

Another was three years ago when a neighborhood newspaper columnist questioned Brown’s decision to prosecute Kraft on 16 murders instead of just three or four. The columnist suggested that it was causing needless delay and unnecessary expense. Brown was furious. In a published letter, he challenged the columnist’s claim that he had talked to families of victims who wanted the numbers reduced so the trial could get moving. Brown said not a single parent agreed that they wanted “their” case dropped.

It was important to prosecute Kraft on all 16, Brown wrote, because a conviction of three or four murders does not always result in a death sentence. Brown wrote that government not only has a moral obligation to protect the public, “but also to make available the judicial system to redress wrongs inflicted on victims.”

His final salvo was for the columnist’s question: “Who cares about the parents of the victims?”

Brown’s response: “I do, and the Orange County district attorney’s office does.”