Teen-Ager Says She Killed Stepmother at Urging of Father

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.”

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 and declared: “It has to be done tonight.”

The young woman’s nearly four hours of often tearful testimony in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana dominated the second day of the murder trial of her father, David Arnold Brown, 38, a former computer entrepreneur from Anaheim Hills who is accused of masterminding his wife’s killing. The prosecution alleges he was driven by greed and passion.

Painting the father as a “diabolical manipulator” who set up his own daughter, prosecutors assert that David Brown wanted his wife dead so he could collect $835,000 in insurance and then secretly marry the victim’s 17-year-old sister, Patti Bailey, who lived with the family.

Hours after the 1985 death of 24-year-old Linda Brown, Cinnamon, then 14, was found in the family’s back-yard doghouse, lying in a near-comatose state in her own vomit and clutching an apparent suicide note. Soon after, she was convicted of murder in juvenile court and sent to the California Youth Authority in Camarillo, where she has remained since.

For nearly four years after her stepmother’s killing, under constant questioning from authorities, Cinnamon Brown kept silent about it, saying she could not remember. But in late 1988, she changed her story and pinned blame on her father. Now she is a star witness against him.

David Brown also faces charges that, while in jail in early 1989, he paid a hit man $21,700 in a plan to assassinate two members of the Orange County district attorney’s office and Patti Bailey--his new wife. Bailey has already pleaded guilty to murder in juvenile court for her role in the Linda Brown killing and is also a key witness against David Brown.

At the outset of cross-examination late Wednesday, defense attorney Gary Pohlson sought to show that Cinnamon Brown’s testimony was motivated by the hope that her cooperation would prompt an early release from the juvenile system. She is scheduled to be released at age 25, in 1995.

But Cinnamon Brown denied the assertion and clung to her testimony.

She testified that her father convinced her that his wife wanted to kill him to get control of his million-dollar business.

Her stepmother had to be stopped before she could hurt her father, Cinnamon Brown said she believed at the time. But her father “said he didn’t have the stomach” to kill the woman, she testified. She added that he promised that she would not spend any time behind bars because of her youth.

“I was too young to get in trouble--they would send me to a psychiatrist and send me home,” she quoted her father as telling her.

David Brown, his daughter testified, went so far as to show her how to muffle the sounds of a .38-caliber gun with a pillow, how to write confession notes and how to feign suicide by taking some pills he had given her--a dosage prosecutors say was lethal.

“I was willing to do it because I loved him,” Cinnamon Brown testified. “I didn’t want to lose him.”

It was not until 1988, when CYA authorities told her of the insurance money her father had collected and of his marriage to Patti, that Cinnamon Brown said she began to question her loyalty to her father.

Until then, she said, she believed her father was trying to find ways to get her out of the CYA facility. “I trusted my father,” she said. “Why would he tell me to do something that wasn’t all right?”