THE LIES AND THE MURDER

At first glance, the murder appeared as simple as it was tragic. All the details seemed to fit neatly into place as investigators arrived at the middle-class Garden Grove home at 3:27 a.m. on March 19, 1985.

There on the bedroom floor, a few feet from the bloodied body of 23-year-old Linda Brown, was the murder weapon--a .38-caliber revolver, chrome with brown grips.

There in a back yard doghouse, lying in her own vomit, was the apparent killer--Cinnamon Brown, 14, the victim’s stepdaughter. And there, clutched in ribbon in the near-comatose teen-ager’s hand, was a suicide note that seemed to say it all:

“Dear God, please forgive me,” the note read. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

Cinnamon Brown--a girl who apparently couldn’t take her stepmother’s nagging any more--was convicted of murder. But even as she was sent away to the California Youth Authority at Camarillo until age 25, some authorities wondered: Could it be this simple?

More than five years later, the answer came back with a resounding “no.” Cinnamon’s father, David Brown, a 37-year-old millionaire computer businessman, was convicted of murder in June, 1990, as the mastermind behind his fifth wife’s elaborate murder. A jury took just seven hours in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana to return the guilty verdict.

It was Brown, the jury decided, who talked his daughter into killing his wife, gave her the murder weapon and the drugs to feign--or perhaps carry out--her suicide, and then fled the house just before his daughter shot a sleeping Linda Brown twice.

As Cinnamon sat silently in prison for nearly four years, Brown collected $835,000 in the victim’s insurance and lived in a new, half-million dollar Anaheim Hills home with his secret wife--Patti Bailey, the victim’s sister.

Bailey was 17 when they wed but said later that she and Brown first began having sexual relations when she was 11, behind her sister’s back. She, too, was involved in the plotting of her sister’s death for months beforehand and between Cinnamon and David’s trials pleaded guilty as a juvenile to murder. Then she agreed to testify against David.

For most of her time in prison, Cinnamon Brown maintained she could not remember what happened on the night of the murder. It was only after repeated attempts by a suspicious investigator, Jay Newell of the Orange County District Attorney’s office, that she changed that story in the summer of 1988 and said her dad orchestrated the whole thing.

Cinnamon said her father convinced her that Linda Brown was planning to kill him and steal his lucrative, self-made computer business; that Brown himself “didn’t have the stomach” to kill his wife; and that Cinnamon, because of her age, would spend little or no time in jail.

Quoting her father’s pleas in the weeks before the killing, Cinnamon’s words set a chilling tone for David Brown’s trial: “If you loved me, you would do this for me.”

Cinnamon Brown did it, and she still remains in prison, denied parole most recently on Jan. 15. She is in the same youth prison as Patti Bailey. Brown, for his part, is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence in state prison without chance for parole.

In jailhouse interviews with The Times, Brown has maintained his innocence, claiming he was set up. But along with the testimony of Cinnamon Brown and Patti Bailey against him, Brown’s own words proved as damaging to him as any other evidence, jurors asserted.

In secretly recorded conversations with Cinnamon at her prison, Brown told his daughter not to tell investigators the “whole truth” about the killing or the whole family would go to jail. After his arrest, he acknowledged discussing his wife’s murder with Cinnamon beforehand and showing her how to kill herself but said he thought it was all “a joke.”

And in a remarkable series of jailhouse conversations taped secretly in early 1990 after his arrest, Brown arranged to pay another inmate at least $22,700--with promises of far more--to kill the prosecutor on the case and the two star witnesses--Cinnamon and Patti Bailey.

As he sent Brown away to prison last September, Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin, who has handled dozens of murder cases, could only liken the man before him to Charles Manson.

“Mr. Brown,” the judge said with a tone of understatement, “you’re a scary person.”

Eric Lichtblau has covered the Brown case for The Times since September 1988.