Plot to Murder 3 Ends in Brown’s Pleading Guilty : Crime: Action is entrepreneur’s first admission of wrongdoing since being jailed nearly 2 years ago in wife’s death.

Anaheim Hills computer entrepreneur David Arnold Brown, already facing life in prison for orchestrating the elaborate 1985 murder of his wife, pleaded guilty Monday to charges that he also tried last year to kill three key figures in his prosecution from his jail cell.

The plea marked the first time that Brown, 37, has admitted any wrongdoing since being incarcerated nearly two years ago in connection with allegations that he set up his teen-age daughter to kill his wife. The plea also resolves one of the last lingering legal issues in a tale that has attracted Hollywood filmmakers and big-name mystery writers to the Orange County Courthouse.

Jailhouse conversations secretly recorded by authorities in early 1989 showed that while he was in custody awaiting his murder trial, Brown paid a would-be hit man $21,700--and promised him hundreds of thousands more--to kill the prosecutor in Brown’s murder case and also the chief investigator and Patti Bailey, the latest of Brown’s five wives.

Bailey, now 22, secretly married Brown after helping him plot and carry out the murder of her sister, 24-year-old Linda, then Brown’s wife. Bailey and Brown had been having sexual relations since she was 11. After her arrest at Brown’s side in connection with the murder, however, Bailey became a star witness against him.

Brown’s teen-age daughter, Cinnamon, and Bailey testified that Brown convinced them that Linda had to be killed before she could harm him, take away his successful computer business and break up the family. So, Cinnamon, then 14, shot her stepmother to death in their Garden Grove home in March, 1985, and then went quietly to prison. Cinnamon Brown, now 19, maintained her silence about the episode for more than three years.

While his daughter was behind bars in the custody of the California Youth Authority at Camarillo, Brown collected $835,000 from Linda’s insurance and lived comfortably with Patti in a new home he had bought in Anaheim Hills. That all ended in September, 1988, however, after Cinnamon Brown came forth with a new version of the murder.

This time, she asserted that her father had masterminded the whole thing, telling her: “If you really loved me, you would do this for me.”

A Superior Court jury last month deliberated just seven hours before finding Brown guilty of murder in what the prosecutor described as a near-perfect crime.

Brown’s plea Monday puts on record his guilt in the jailhouse murder scheme that followed, but it will probably have little bearing on the time he serves in prison, attorneys said.

Brown, who made millions from a system he devised for retrieving lost data from damaged computer systems, already faces a prison term of at least 25 years and the possibility of life in prison without parole in Linda Brown’s murder. He is to be sentenced Aug. 22 before Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin. Attorneys agree that he should receive a six-year term for the jailhouse death plot, but that is to be served concurrently with the murder sentence.

The guilty plea could, however, help to keep Brown incarcerated longer should he ever come up for parole, said Assistant Dist. Atty. Edgar A. Freeman, who handled the prosecution of the jailhouse plot. “We’re very satisfied,” Freeman added.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey L.S. Robinson--who prosecuted the Linda Brown murder case and was one of the people Brown attempted to have killed--said after Brown made his guilty plea: “More than anything else, I’m just glad this has all come to an end. It’s been so long and so frustrating for everyone involved, with so many twists and so many emotions the whole way. Just when you thought everything was behind you in this case, something else would come up.”

In February, 1989, that “something else” was the startling disclosure that Brown had for weeks been plotting to kill Bailey, Robinson and district attorney’s investigator Jay Newell, whose persistence helped break the case against Brown.

Authorities were tipped to the jailhouse plot by a third inmate who said he had heard Brown discuss the killings with the intended hit man, a black-belt biker named Richard Steinhart. Authorities quickly moved in on Steinhart, persuaded him to cooperate, and tape-recorded hours of conversations between the two in January and February of last year, while Steinhart was in jail on a parole violation and after he was released.

On the tapes, Brown and Steinhart can be heard discussing the killings in intricate detail, then making plans to pay a female inmate to come forth once Patti Bailey was dead to testify that Bailey had admitted making up her story against Brown. They also discussed having Brown escape from jail and making it appear as though he, too, was the target of an attack by some unknown assailant.

The conversations reached a climax on Feb. 13, 1989, when Steinhart told Brown by telephone that he had supposedly just shot Robinson and Newell “Bang, bang--right in the back of the head.”

Brown’s response was quick: “Wonderful! You’re a good man . . . . You did great.”

Brown’s attorneys fought to keep the tapes out of Brown’s most recent trial, arguing that the conversations were merely the desperate actions of an innocent man. But McCartin ruled that the tapes could be played anyway, and jurors and attorneys alike pointed to Brown’s own words on the tapes as particularly compelling evidence.

Defense attorneys Gary M. Pohlson and Richard L. Schwartzberg conceded after Brown made his plea Monday that the tapes leave no room for dispute over Brown’s guilt in the triple-murder plot and that it would be pointless to proceed to trial.

In a brief jailhouse interview with The Times after his conviction in the Linda Brown murder case last month, Brown indicated that he would get a new attorney and challenge the jury’s verdict on the grounds that he was not adequately represented. He complained that Pohlson and prosecutor Robinson have been friends for years and that he was therefore robbed of the chance for a fair trial.

But Pohlson said Monday that Brown showed no resistance to the idea of entering the plea in the jailhouse scheme. “He saw he was guilty, and (prosecutors) had a lot of evidence against him,” Pohlson said.

Brown, wearing a white shirt, listened attentively from the court cell in Santa Ana as Municipal Judge Gary P. Ryan asked whether he understood that he was admitting having conspired to murder Robinson, Newell and Bailey and that five lesser counts would be dismissed as part of the plea arrangement.

“As long as the end result is six” years for the sentence, Brown told the judge. “Yes, I do.”

Then asked how he pleaded, Brown answered “guilty” three times in flat succession after each of the three counts was read. He shook his head slowly after the final plea and then, as recounted later by Pohlson, said through the cell bars: “This is the most difficult part.”