by Ann Rule
"Girl, 14, Held in Fatal Shooting of Stepmother."
Neighbors along Ocean Breeze Drive were hounded by reporters anxious to unearth details, something more about Cinnamon Brown and the woman she was accused of murdering. The police press release had contained nothing but the stark facts. For the most part, the press came up empty, or in many cases, misinformed. Articles added two years to David Brown's age and mistakenly said Linda Brown had suffered two bullet wounds to the abdomen— not the chest. Cinnamon Brown was reported to be suffering "from an unspecified illness" in a hospital.
The few neighbors who had had any dealings with the Brown family were at a loss to explain what had happened, not because they had known the family well and been shocked at the tragedy, but because they really didn't know the Browns at all. One sixteen-year-old schoolmate of Patti's and Cinnamon's told reporters that Cinnamon was strange, a girl who had "invisible friends and stuff like that." The girl, feeling somehow important because she had even a slight connection to the Browns, said she thought Cinnamon had come to live with her father because she couldn't get along with her mother. She also pointed out that she thought it was "weird" that Cinnamon and Patti had dressed in costumes for Halloween and gone trick-or-treating. "Patti was a witch, and Cinnamon was an old man—I thought that was rather immature for somebody that age."
Pickings were slim indeed for reporters aching for sinister portents.
Another neighbor had found Cinnamon the only member of the family "who would talk to you. My husband and I both went over and talked to her just a couple of days ago after she got a new miniature dachshund. She was friendly."
No one knew Linda. She hadn't made friends with anyone. "The only time I'd see her would be when she was out mowing the lawn," one neighbor said.
Reporters realized they weren't going to get much more than that. The families who lived around the Browns had seen them coming and going, noticed that they had a new baby in the summer of 1984, and that was about it. They didn't mingle; they didn't talk over the fence, and they surely had not shared any family problems.
The avocado-green bungalow stood empty. Yellow police ribbons reading "Police Barrier—Do Not Cross" stretched across every access to the property, and even the photographer who dared to step over one and creep up to the house found nothing in his lens; the windows were all covered with opaque curtains.
The family was not there. With Linda dead and the terrible memories associated with this rented house, David and Patti and Krystal had gone to live temporarily with Arthur and Manuela Brown. His mother could help with the baby; Patti was useless—all she did was sob.
Soon, David would have to think about moving back into the house where Linda had died. His career was essential to so many. His office was there, and his clients depended on him. David would have to take care of business. Some things could not wait. He would also have to contact the insurance companies that had issued policies on Linda.
David Brown barely slept those first few days. He was a bad sleeper anyway. Anybody who knew him well was used to David's insomnia.
Cinnamon, who had regained consciousness, lay in her hospital bed, listless and pale. She watched her police guards come and go and spoke once in a while to the medical personnel who tended to her. Her medical file grew thicker.
Although Cinnamon had been told she was under arrest, and that she had been booked into Juvenile Hall—in absentia—she didn't seem to comprehend what that really meant. She slept a good deal of the time and spoke briefly with her attorney, Al Forgette.
Up in Garden Grove and Anaheim, detectives were working backward through Cinnamon Brown's life, trying to connect the girl herself with the crime she had admitted. In this painstaking, often tedious area of investigation, homicide detectives come to know both their victims and their killers far better than anyone else ever has. Because they cannot know which information will prove to be vital, they collect minor details and the most intimate secrets about people they had not heard of the day before. They will never know the victim—except through others' eyes and recall; they will know the killer better than they know their own wives.
The dead, even long buried, live in the minds of the detectives who work—if not to avenge—to validate their demises. The accused killers are paint-by-numbers to be filled in. Motive, means, opportunity—those were the easiest factors to figure out. Why someone resorts to deliberately effecting the violent death of another human being goes far beyond mere motive.
Now Steve Sanders and Fred McLean began to fill in the portrait of Cinnamon Darlene Brown.
Who was she?
Sanders had the names of three girls who had attended school with Cinnamon at Loara High School in Anaheim: Jamie Williams, Lauri Ann Hicks, and Krista Taber.
He arrived at the school at two P.M. on March 19 and spoke with the vice principal. Sanders's questions did not surprise him; the news that Cinnamon Brown had shot her stepmother was all over school. "She just transferred over here from Bolsa Grande on March sixth," the vice principal said, checking his records. "And she's been absent half the time since then—so we hardly knew her. I do know there were no referrals to my office about her."
Sanders asked to see Cinnamon's locker but was told she had none. She hadn't been in school at Loara long enough to be assigned a locker. Sanders needed a sample of Cinnamon's handwriting—to compare with the suicide note she had clutched in her hand when Fred McLean found her in the doghouse. Her home economics teacher came up with a quiz, the only test Cinnamon had taken at Loara High School. It asked questions on the uses of fats in cooking; as in the suicide note, her answers to the quiz were printed— not written—in bold, fat letters.
Later, Fred McLean would obtain a search warrant for the Ocean Breeze Drive residence and the trailer and bring back many examples of Cinnamon's writing, along with a handful of red pens. The printing was all the same. Cinnamon had printed the suicide note.
At Sanders's request, Krista Taber was called to the vice principal's office, and she immediately said, "I know why you're here. The police were at our house at four this morning. I don't know why Cinny's father thought she'd be with me. I haven't seen her since last Monday—the eleventh. She hasn't been to school since."
Krista said that she had been Cinnamon's best friend since they were in kindergarten, and that Cinny had transferred into the freshman class to Loara High so they could be together.
"Have you noticed that Cinnamon's been upset lately?" Sanders asked.
Krista shook her head, baffled. "No, she's been like always. Maybe she was a little uneasy being at this new school, starting in the middle of the year after she was going to Bolsa Grande. But nothing major. She's been on restriction—but that's nothing new."
"For what?"
"For coming home late on Friday—on the eighth of March. We went to see a boy she knows in the tenth grade—Len*. She went steady with him last summer. We get out of school at two thirty-two P.M., and she's supposed to go right home. She rides her bike to school. Well, she called home at three-thirty to ask if she could stay a little longer. She talked to her stepmother, I think. Linda was upset with her and told her to get home right away. Cinnamon left right then."
"How often is Cinnamon on restriction?" Sanders asked.
Krista sighed and rolled her eyes. "Well, right now, she's on restriction for three months—for talking back. Every time she talks back, she gets another restriction. No visits. No phone calls. I don't know if she's lost her TV privileges or not."
"Would you say that Cinnamon is a troublemaker?" Sanders asked.
"Cinnamon?" Krista seemed incredulous, searching her mind for something rebellious her friend might have done. "Maybe a little bit—at school," she finally said. "Cinny pulls pranks, just silly stuff. But she really minds at home. She gets—got—along fine with her stepmother, and with Patti. The only thing that ever gets her in trouble at home is she argues with her dad about little things."
Krista was baffled by the rumors
about her best friend. If anyone knew Cinnamon, she thought it was herself. They had missed each other a lot when Cinnamon started at Bolsa Grande High in September, but they had written letters, and Cinnamon had been allowed to call her on Thursday evenings, and visit—until she got grounded. "I guess I've seen her about six times in the last month. She never mentioned any problems. Just arguments with her dad."
"Do you know where she slept?"
"In Patti's room, I think. Sometimes, when she got mad at her dad, she'd go out to the trailer to sleep. And when she's on restriction on the weekends, her dad would lock her in the backyard where the trailer is. There's a Cyclone fence all around the yard."
"Okay. Has Cinnamon ever talked about using a gun to hurt anyone—or to kill anyone?"
Krista drew back. "No! Never anything at all. Cinnamon would be the last person to ever harm anyone. The only way she would ever have killed anyone would be because she was defending herself or something threatened her. I can't believe Cinnamon did it."
The other two girls mentioned as Cinnamon's friends were as stunned as Krista was. They had never seen a trace of violence or discontent in Cinnamon. They all denied that Cinnamon ever used drugs or drank alcohol. "She's not that type."
Sanders asked about the older man called Steely Dan whom Patti had mentioned. The girls exchanged looks.
"We know who you mean," Krista admitted. "Cinnamon and I used to stop by and see him once in a while when we had nothing else to do—but we had a pact that one of us would never go there alone."
"Why?"
"We didn't trust him. One time he bought a whole bunch of beer and tried to get us to drink it with him. We wouldn't—we thought he was going to take advantage of us."
"Did Cinnamon feel the same way?"
"Absolutely. We stopped going there after that. That was way last summer anyway."
Len Miller, Cinnamon's former steady boyfriend, agreed that she had gotten into trouble for visiting his house after school. "It wasn't even three-thirty yet, and she called for permission to stay longer—her and Krista and Lauri—but it was her father she talked to. I heard him shout, 'You get your butt home,' and she left right away."
Len described the most innocent of "going steady" arrangements during the summer of 1984. He had met Cinnamon at the pool at school, and they had dated only during the daytime—going to Disneyland or to the Dairy Queen. "We broke up two weeks before school started last fall. I've seen Cinnamon about five times since then."
The picture emerging was of a teenager who lived under suffocatingly strict rules. "We couldn't call her," Jamie said. "She wasn't allowed to give out her phone number, and we didn't know her address. We only saw her on weekends when she visited Krista."
If there were any hidden areas of Cinnamon Brown's life, her friends didn't know about them. They had never seen her get angry, they had never seen her on anything more than an afternoon date, and the only problems she ever seemed to have were with her father.
"She didn't think he liked her," Lauri said.
Fred McLean visited Brenda Sands, Cinnamon's mother, that same afternoon. Understandably, she was very distraught. He was patient as the small woman, who looked so much like Cinnamon, struggled to calm herself so she could answer his questions.
Brenda said she had divorced David Brown a decade earlier because she first suspected—and then verified—that he was engaging in extramarital affairs. Cinnamon was their only child, and over the years, she had sometimes lived with one of them, sometimes the other.
Brenda Sands had dark memories of her first marriage, which was brief and ended in a bitter divorce. Even now, she seemed to vacillate between recrimination and fear. She recounted for McLean an incident where she said David had threatened her with a gun. "It was just after I left him. One day, he came to my apartment to get his rifle that he'd left under the cedar chest, and my rings. He was going to give them to Lori, his new girlfriend."
Brenda told McLean she was afraid to let David have the gun and followed him out to his car where they struggled over it. "He was inside the car, and I was holding on to it. He got hold of the other end and revved the car so that I got knocked up against a telephone pole—and I let go of the gun."
She was still afraid of her former husband. "I think Linda was afraid of him too," Brenda mused softly.
That was news to McLean. Brown seemed such a Milquetoast kind of guy without a trace of violence in him. And he professed such grief over his murdered wife. So far, all the police investigators had heard was that Linda and David Brown were so in love that they had practically been joined at the hip.
"They were just here," Brenda commented, unaware that she had injected a new element into the probe.
"Who was just here?" McLean asked.
"David and Patti. David told me that Cinny had overdosed on some of his prescription drugs. He told me not to tell you detectives that Cinny was always a good, behaved girl."
McLean's antenna went up again on that one, and he was annoyed that David Brown had beaten him to Brenda, but he said only, "I want you to tell me the truth—and not let anyone influence you."
"I will. I'll tell you everything I know."
Brenda told McLean that she was surprised to find David and Patti taking the tragedy so quietly. Her ex-husband could be a very emotional man, but she had found him quite controlled.
That was another revelation for McLean. Even so, he figured Brenda didn't understand what profound shock could do to people. To check her perceptions, he questioned her. "Patti wasn't crying when she was here?" he asked. "David wasn't chain-smoking, hands shaking?"
Brenda shrugged. "David always chain-smokes," she answered. "But he wasn't shaking. He was pretty calm. I asked him where the gun had come from, but he said he didn't know. Then he said it must have been Linda's gun. Patti was positive it was Linda's gun."
McLean asked Brenda to evaluate her daughter's state of mind in recent months. She seemed mystified at Cinnamon's actions, including the attempted suicide.
"We're close," she said. "She shares her feelings with me, and secrets—things that worry her. I know Cinnamon believed that Linda was afraid of David."
"Has Cinnamon ever spoken to you about suicidal thoughts?"
Brenda looked up at McLean through disbelieving eyes and shook her head. "Oh, you know—how teenagers can be dramatic. If she was mad, or if her feelings were hurt, she might say, 'I wish I was dead!' She wasn't serious. I know she wasn't."
"When was the last time you saw Cinnamon?" McLean asked.
"Yesterday. Just yesterday. My grandmother, Ruby, and my aunt were here visiting from Salt Lake City. We went over to David's house so they could visit with Cinnamon. David even came out—after Cinnamon begged him to— and he acted glad to see my relatives. I know him, and I knew he was faking it, but they didn't. They thought he was just charming."
"And how was Cinnamon?" McLean interrupted.
"She was fine, but she wanted to come home with us and visit. I couldn't take her then because my car was just jam-packed with their suitcases. I told her I'd come over after I'd unpacked the car. But when I called later to tell her I'd be over, David answered the phone. He said everyone had settled down for the night, and he didn't want to wake her."
Brenda looked at her hands, shredding a piece of Kleenex. "That's what bothers me so much. If I'd just made room in the car, or if I'd gone over last night to get her, it wouldn't have happened. I keep going over that in my mind."
No matter how many times he approached the question of Cinnamon Brown's emotional stability, McLean got essentially the same answer. She was, her mother said, a completely normal teenager. The only time she was down was when she had a cold or suffered from menstrual cramps.
Why then would David Brown insist that Cinnamon was flaky, suicidal, out of control? He had said it. Patti Bailey had said it, and David had even asked Brenda to describe Cinnamon that way. Maybe he was trying to protect his daughter by building an image that would sugge
st a "not guilty by reason of insanity" motive. If a normal, rational girl committed murder, she might get a stiffer sentence than one who was clearly insane. That could explain David's scurrying ahead of the police to be sure that image was created.
Brenda struggled to recall what frame of mind Cinny had been in over the few days preceding the shooting. Cinnamon had suffered from menstrual cramps a few days before. Her mother was not aware that Cinny had ever before taken an overdose of drugs or medication.
"Would Cinnamon lie?" McLean asked.
"I suppose she was capable of stretching the truth, but I can always get the facts out of her."
"How about drugs—any problem with that?"
"Never. She always puts down drug users."
"How about school? How was she doing?"
"Well, she got poor grades last spring, so she was going to summer school—"
"Summer of 1984?"
Brenda nodded. "She got a B in U.S. Government and History, but she still only got a D in Math 8 in summer school. I know she cut some classes to go to the beach."
When McLean asked how Brenda felt about Cinnamon's living at her father's house, she repeated what David had explained to her. She really had no choice but to let Cinny live with her dad. "He said Cinny said she would run away if she was forced to come back and live with me."
Brenda told McLean that she and Cinnamon had had a doozy of a blowup, and she had been more than glad to have her daughter go live with her father for a while. But they weren't still angry. They talked all the time.
"Cinnamon wanted to go to school here in Anaheim— back at Loara. She didn't feel safe at Bolsa Grande, not after that man exposed himself to her and then there was a drive-by shooting near the school. She missed her friends at Loara too.
"Cinny never told me she thought of running away. Oh, she complained. Sometimes, she said she felt like a slave at David's house. She said she had to do so much housework, and Patti didn't do her share."
"That's kind of par for the course," McLean offered.