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WHO’S WHO IN THE BROWN TRIAL

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<i> Researched by Dallas M. Jackson and Janice L. Jones/Los Angeles Times </i>

David Arnold Brown:

Masterminded a twisted plot to have his 14-year-old daughter, Cinnamon, kill his wife, Linda Marie, collect $835,000 in life insurance on his wife and then marry the dead woman’s 17-year-old sister, Patti. When the plot was unraveled and Brown arrested, he hired a fellow inmate to kill the three people he felt responsible for his predicament.Linda Marie Brown:

As David Brown’s fourth wife, the 24-year-old was the target of the 1985 murder/insurance fraud scheme plotted by him, her sister, and stepdaughter Cinnamon Brown. Cinnamon Brown:

Since her father “didn’t have the stomach for it,” Cinnamon carried out the murder of Linda Marie. Hours after fatally shooting her stepmother twice in the abdomen, Cinnamon, then 14, was found nearly comatose, lying in her own vomit in a back-yard doghouse, clutching a suicide note that read, “Dear God, please forgive me. I didn’t mean to hurt her.” She confessed to the murder and was sentenced to 27 years to life but remained silently loyal to her father for three years until she was persuaded in 1988 to reveal the whole story.

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Patti Bailey:

The younger sister of Linda Marie, she lived with the couple, and she and Brown had sex from the time she was 11. Originally designated to kill her sister, she backed out at the last minute. A little more than a year after the murder, she secretly married her dead sister’s husband. She and Brown have a 2-year-old daughter who is living with a Bailey family member.

Jay Newell: District attorney investigator responsible for persuading Cinnamon to reveal her father’s murder plot. Because of his persistence, Newell himself became a target in Brown’s murder-for-hire scheme. The others were his wife Patti and prosecuting attorney Jeoffrey L. S. Robinson.

Richard Steinhart: Picked up on a parole violation from an earlier cocaine conviction, he met Brown while in Orange County jail. The two quickly hit it off, and Steinhart agreed to murder Jay Newell, Patti Bailey and Jeoffrey Robinson for at least $21,700.

Jeoffrey L.S. Robinson:

The prosecuting attorney who sought to bring Brown to justice and one of the targets of Brown’s murder-for-hire scheme.

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