Man Given Life Sentence for ’85 Killing : No Chance of Parole for Father Who Had Daughter Kill Wife

Likening David Brown to Charles Manson, a judge this morning ordered the man convicted of orchestrating his wife’s 1985 murder to spend the rest of his life behind bars with no chance of release.

In delivering the strongest sentence open to him, Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin also said that if the Orange County district attorney’s office had pursued the death penalty against the 37-year-old computer whiz, he might well have sent him to the gas chamber.

“Mr. Brown, you’re a scary person,” McCartin told the man who was convicted in June of setting up his 14-year-old daughter to murder his wife. Brown sought to profit from the $835,000 in insurance on the victim’s life. He then secretly married his wife’s 17-year-old sister.

McCartin, who also tried the Randy Kraft serial murder case, said Brown--largely through his own tape-recorded words--has proven himself a “master manipulator” who could betray those who depended on him and “not bat an eye.”

And unlike some killers, Brown did it all under the guise of a normal personality, the judge said. “It makes Charles Manson look like a piker.”

Under a previously agreed-upon plea bargain, McCartin gave Brown six years for paying a hit man more than $20,000 to try unsuccessfully to kill the prosecutor in the case, the investigator, and Patti Bailey, the murder victim’s sister and his current wife, while he sat in the Orange County Jail in early 1989 awaiting trial.

But that sentence is to run at the same time as the murder term of life without the possibility of parole. He was also fined $10,000, the maximum allowable.

Brown’s defense attorneys immediately appealed the verdict, but lead lawyer Gary Pohlson conceded later that he sees a “99% chance” that Brown will spend the rest of his life in prison.