Jury Expected to Get Murder Case Today : Trial: A prosecutor portrays the husband of a slain woman as a ‘despicable’ manipulator who designed his wife’s death--then took off to the beach.

More than five years after Linda Brown was shot to death in her sleep in her quiet Garden Grove neighborhood, a prosecutor on Tuesday portrayed her husband as a “despicable” manipulator who masterminded the scheme and nearly got away with “the perfect murder.”

But as the murder trial of David Arnold Brown neared an end, Brown’s attorney countered in his own closing argument that the millionaire computer entrepreneur from Anaheim Hills is a convenient dupe for his teen-age daughter and current wife, both now imprisoned.

The Superior Court jury will probably begin sorting out the case today after a final rebuttal by Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey Robinson and instructions from Judge Donald A. McCartin.

The jury’s pending verdict is being watched closely by potential book and screenwriters who see a drama of family betrayal and violence. Many of them were in the jammed courtroom for the attorneys’ finale Tuesday, along with relatives of both the victim and the defendant.

Brown, 38, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if he is found guilty of having orchestrated his 24-year-old wife’s killing, in part to gain $835,000 from her insurance policies, including several that he took out on her life just before her murder.

Summing up testimony that began at the end of April, Robinson told jurors that Brown plotted his wife’s killing for months beforehand with his daughter, Cinnamon--who was then 14 and Linda Brown’s stepdaughter--and with the victim’s then-17-year-old sister, Patti Bailey, his secret lover. Brown and Bailey married after Linda Brown’s death and have a child.

Cinnamon Brown and Bailey agreed to help in the plot because Brown had convinced them that Linda Brown had Mafia connections and was plotting to kill him if they did not strike first, prosecutors said. Robinson added that Brown, playing off his daughter’s naive devotion, tricked her into believing that her youth would protect her from serving time.

In the early morning hours of March 19, 1985, Cinnamon Brown walked into her stepmother’s bedroom and shot her twice. The daughter was found hours later in the back-yard doghouse, nearly comatose from a drug overdose and clutching an apparent suicide note.

At the time, Brown was out for a 2 a.m. trip to the beach and to a convenience store to get a soda and some comic books--a trip that prosecutor Robinson said was a patently transparent attempt to create an alibi for himself while the killing that he masterminded was carried out.

After the shooting, Cinnamon Brown took a large dose of tranquilizers at her father’s directions to feign suicide, Robinson asserted.

What the teen-ager did not know, he continued, was that the dosage was enough to kill her.

And had she not vomited much of the contents and lived to testify against her father, “you would have had the perfect murder,” the prosecutor said.

Cinnamon Brown was convicted of murder and sent to a California Youth Authority facility. In mid-1988, she changed her previous versions of the killing and asserted that her father had masterminded the whole scheme, leading to the arrest of him and Bailey.

Bailey, who by then had secretly married her former brother-in-law, later agreed to testify against Brown and pleaded guilty to murder as a juvenile.

Robinson described Brown as a “pathological liar,” “a poor excuse for a human being” and “a real creep.” He added: “This man doesn’t have a conscience--none.”

For proof of Brown’s guilt, Robinson said, jurors have to look no further than a tape-recorded jailhouse plot by the defendant to kill Robinson, a district attorney’s investigator and Patti Bailey. According to the tapes, Brown paid a hit man $21,700 to carry out the job, but the plot was thwarted through a tip from a jailhouse informant.

But defense attorney Gary Michael Pohlson sought to weaken the prosecution’s case by depicting both Cinnamon Brown and Bailey as admitted liars who are trying to help themselves by blaming Brown.

Pohlson asserted that Bailey--who testified that she and Brown first had sexual relations when she was 11--was the real seductress in their relationship.

But a mocking Robinson compared the idea that Brown is a manipulated victim to “Edgar Bergen saying Charlie McCarthy’s running him around. ‘Look at these puppets! Look at what they’re doing to me.’ . . . The truth is, they were all three involved, but there was a ringleader, and it’s not hard to figure out who it is.”