Don’t Tell ‘Whole Truth,’ Brown Says on Tape : Crime: The murder defendant told his imprisoned daughter their entire family could be jailed in his wife’s death.

In a secretly recorded conversation replayed for a jury Friday, David Arnold Brown sought to convince his imprisoned daughter that his wife was a drug-addicted mobster who wanted to “off” him but that the daughter must not tell “the whole truth” about her stepmother’s killing because the whole family would end up in jail.

“Instead of one person being punished for (the murder),” Brown told his daughter, Cinnamon, “we’d all be punished for it.”

Brown, a millionaire computer entrepreneur from Anaheim Hills who is on trial for murder, conceded in the conversation that he took part in his daughter’s 1985 plot to kill his wife, but insisted repeatedly that he never encouraged it.

“I didn’t want it to happen--you should remember that,” the 38-year-old Brown told Cinnamon sternly during an August, 1988, visit to the California Youth Authority in Camarillo, where Cinnamon was imprisoned for her stepmother’s murder. “I told you guys I didn’t want any part of it.”

With Cinnamon Brown’s cooperation, authorities tape-recorded the conversation in an attempt to show that David Brown had orchestrated the murder of his wife, 24-year-old Linda Brown, and then set up Cinnamon to take the fall for it.

Following her 1985 murder conviction, Cinnamon Brown, now 19, remained silent for more than three years about what happened on the night of the killing, saying she could not remember. But she changed her story and implicated her father after authorities disclosed to her that he had collected $835,000 from the victim’s insurance and then married Patti Bailey, the victim’s sister.

Bailey, now 22, has since pleaded guilty to murder for her role in Linda Brown’s shooting death in the family’s Garden Grove home. Bailey and David Brown now have a daughter. But on the tape, Brown vigorously denies to Cinnamon that the child is his or that he and Bailey were romantically involved.

Some five weeks after the tape recording was made, David Brown was arrested and charged with murder.

Prosecutors said they believe that the tape offers one of their most damaging pieces of evidence against Brown, leaving unchallenged his role in the killing of his wife. The tape, portions of which were published in The Times last year, was played for the first time publicly Friday at Brown’s trial in Superior Court.

Co-defense attorney Richard Schwartzberg, pointing out Brown’s denials that he wanted his wife dead, said: “This does not hurt David. It supports our belief that David was not involved in the killing of Linda Brown.”

Schwartzberg said that Brown’s knowledge of any plot to kill his wife is not a criminal offense. But Brown, in the recorded conversation, clearly thinks differently.

In the tape, Cinnamon Brown tells her father that she is confused and tired of telling “lies” to CYA parole officials, who had been trying to convince her to tell what she knew about the murder.

Her father responds: “You can tell the truth, if you don’t tell the whole truth. If there was knowledge . . . in advance of what was going to happen, then we’ll all go to jail.”

During the conversation, Brown acknowledges that he had talked with Cinnamon and Patti Bailey about killing Linda, who he claimed was a drug addict with ties to the “Mafia” and the “mob.” Linda and her twin brother, Brown tells Cinnamon, planned to “off” him and take over his lucrative computer data-retrieval business.

Prosecutors don’t believe such a plan ever existed and say the claim was Brown’s way of getting his daughter to shoot Linda Brown to death on March 19, 1985.

On the tape recording, Brown urges Cinnamon to continue telling authorities that she doesn’t remember what happened on the night of the murder and avoid casting suspicion on himself, Patti Bailey and his parents, who he said had been present during part of the discussions.

“Do you see any reason for five people’s lives to be ruined . . . for all of us to go to jail because we knew what was going to happen beforehand?” Brown asks. “I can’t survive in jail. . . . I would kill myself before I’d let myself die a slow and painful death in a cell.”