If You Really Loved Me

by Ann Rule

  Six feet was big in the forties; in the seventies, it was the Goliaths who were the draft choices.

  But it wasn't really that. It was the law itself calling to him. Jeoff Robinson had been weaned, reared, steeped, and tutored in the law from the time he was old enough to comprehend. Not criminal law. Civil law. It was assumed that Jeoff would come into the family practice. For a long time, he assumed he would too.

  His father, Mark Robinson, Sr., was renowned for his landmark success in product liability suits. Jeoff's older brother, Mark junior, in partnership with their father, won a stunning victory over the Ford Motor Company in the incendiary-Pinto suits of the seventies, and they had since won many more multimillion-dollar judgments—both actual and punitive—for their clients.

  "As a kid, I wasn't questioned," Jeoff Robinson remembered. "From the time I was five, I was cross-examined. I loved it. I loved watching my dad in court. I respect my dad more than any man I've ever known. He has an internal toughness that I've never seen in anyone else. My mother— well, my mother's a saint."

  Mark Robinson, Sr., an Army Air Force pilot, was shot down over Yugoslavia in World War Two and was missing in action for several months before he was discovered to be a prisoner of war. His bride, Rita, nineteen, was pregnant when Mark vanished. His first son was born while he was missing in action and was named after him.

  After the war, the family settled in Los Angeles's Hancock Park, on Irving Boulevard, and grew to eight children. "It was paradise for kids. I think we had seventy-five kids on our one block alone," Jeoff remembered. "Big older houses —when neighborhoods in Los Angeles were much different—a sort of Catholic ghetto."

  Later, as his practice grew, Mark Robinson moved his family to Fremont Place where he had made a once-in-a-lifetime buy on a large house with a tennis court—and an elevator. But Jeoff was not raised a rich kid. His father's tremendous success peaked after most of his children were grown. The Irving Boulevard days had the most impact on the eight Robinson kids, rough-and-tumble, and in and out of neighbors' houses in a Los Angeles that no longer exists.

  Like his siblings, Robinson was brought up to be unfailingly polite, devout, and to work like hell for what he believed in. There was a Kennedyesque energy among the Robinsons, and Jeoff inherited twice his share. Mark junior practiced law with his father, and brother Greg coached football for UCLA for nine years and would later join the coaching staff of the New York Jets.

  Jeoff graduated from law school at Southwestern University in Los Angeles, and he would have been welcomed into the family firm. But he wanted to strike out on his own, to prove he could make it on his own merit, without being "one of the Robinsons." Once he had done that, he would probably join his father and brother—but not until then.

  "I wanted to try cases too," he recalled. "About the only way a young lawyer got to try cases immediately was to go to work-for the public defender's office or the district attorney. I preferred to prosecute crimes."

  And prosecute crimes he did. Jeoff Robinson revved himself up for trial as if he were still playing football, stopping short of actually charging his office wall like a lineman attacking an opposing team. He worked through the night on arguments, acted out all roles, and prepared for any eventuality. He was also known for his willingness to get in there and dig for evidence—both figuratively and literally—with the investigators, and a forty-hour week meant nothing at all to him. He often worked sixty hours.

  In trial, Robinson was utterly consumed by the case at hand. He was brilliant in voir dire and closing arguments. His direct- and cross-examination techniques were imaginative and maddening to the defense. He was emotional in the courtroom, but it was a sincere reaction, in no way contrived. He wore his feelings on the outside. When he was angry, the gallery knew it. When he was amused he had trouble hiding it.

  Robinson could be a juggernaut. He was fiercely competitive. To almost everyone but defense attorneys, he was immensely likable. Intense and quick-thinking on his feet, he was also possessed of a comedic view of life that endeared him to juries—if not always to judges. One of his trials involved thirty motions for mistrial and so many bench conferences that Robinson quipped, "I could wear out my shoes this way, back and forth, back and forth." The judge frowned, and the defense attorney shouted for yet another mistrial.

  At the same trial, the opposing attorney was given to references to his wife, and how he had discussed the case with his wife only the night before, giving the impression of his loving, stable home life. Robinson, a reluctant bachelor, looked at the jury with a mournful glance and said, "If I had a wife, I could ask her."

  A juror in the back row, carried away with sympathy and the impulse to matchmake, cried out, "I don't have a daughter, but I have a granddaughter you'd love!"

  Again, everyone—but the judge and the defense team— thought it was hilarious.

  Jeoff Robinson had won fifty of his fifty-one felony cases. (He had one hung jury, but he went back and won that one too, second time around.) In short, he was a maverick. He respected the law, and he respected the truth and aimed for what was morally right. He might, however, seek out moral and legal truth in his own unique fashion.

  This was the kind of DDA Newell needed. If he could persuade Jeoff Robinson to reopen the Brown case, they would have a triumvirate who were superb in their jobs, and who were all known to fight like tigers: Fred McLean, Jay Newell, and Jeoff Robinson. As different as three men could be from one another, but each of them obsessed with revealing a long-hidden truth. Newell liked the sound of it and headed from his office to the DA's Homicide Unit.

  The Orange County District Attorney's Office was huge, both physically and in terms of personnel. The offices were spread out like rabbit warrens on both the first and second floor of the courthouse. Nobody beyond the district attorney's own staff, and the detectives who came there with cases to review, could find his way out—if he managed to get inside. The entrance to the District Attorney's Office was on the second floor, but once through the locked door behind the receptionists' desks, the uninitiated faced a bewildering network of hallways, offices, stairwells, and hidden doors. It was just as well; Orange County DAs had their share of threats. The maze they worked in allowed them to come and go at will, using elevators and exits that appeared to have nothing to do with the District Attorney's Office.

  At full strength, there were 175 deputy district attorneys, and 140 district attorney's investigators. That much investigative assistance was a situation unheard of in most areas, but Orange County gave their deputy DAs exceptional support.

  Homicide DAs occupied the first floor of the Orange County Courthouse; their offices were eight-by-ten cubbyholes tucked here and there, well off the beaten path. Jeoff Robinson's office was a mess. There was no way to cushion the description; his surroundings plainly did not reflect the precise organization of his thoughts. He was always on the verge of cleaning his office up, but he was also always in trial, preparing for trial, or waiting for a verdict, or—to ease the tension—running or playing basketball. Robinson liked to run, and sometimes Newell would run along with him, bored, because that was often the only time they had to discuss the fine points of a case.

  Files and books and papers and who knows what covered every surface of Robinson's office. His phone-message spike still had calls from March 1988—which he insisted he had answered. A sign on the wall read "I hate USC!" and tickets to a Jimmy Buffett concert were taped to that. A gym bag stuffed with jogging clothes blocked easy access to his desk. Robinson's passions.

  There was a photograph on one wall of Robinson digging for a missing body, caught unaware by some phantom lensman. Underneath, there were three dozen or so suggested captions, most of them obscene, from fellow deputy district attorneys. It was quite possible that there was, indeed, a law degree somewhere in the clutter. It was also possible there was a telephone somewhere on the DDA's desk.

  It didn't really matter; Robinson was a man in constant motion who walk
ed on the balls of his feet—like an Indian or like the athlete that he was—moving through the two floors of the Orange County District Attorney's Office. Receptionists usually paged him before they even tried to ring his office. They knew he wouldn't be there. And if he was, he took pride in having the most difficult office to locate in the whole maze of homicide prosecutors' cubicles.

  His name was not on the door, but there was a page from a court transcript with a judge's oblique ruling: "Whether or not Mr. Robinson is a buffoon has no bearing on this case."

  "I didn't put it there," Robinson said. "My door is known as a repository for the inane. I never know what's going to get tacked up there."

  In 1981, Jeoff Robinson promised that he would stay with the Orange County DAs Office for at least two years. Seven years later, he was still there, happily entrenched.

  His first homicide case was the nightmare that any prosecuting attorney dreads. He had to prosecute an elderly man who had shot his wife because she was dying of a terminal illness and in terrible pain. "How was I going to get that poor old man up there and cross-examine him?" Robinson asked. "I didn't want to, I felt sorry for him. And any jury with half a heart would too. Together with defense counsel, we came up with a way out—after many hours of collaboration. The dead wife was the one who had actually pulled the trigger. The defendant only helped the victim hold her finger on the gun's trigger. We were able to get the charge lowered to "aiding and abetting a suicide."

  A convicted rapist who had served four years for his alleged crime had his conviction reversed when Robinson read the case and saw a number of flaws. "It appeared the man was innocent," Robinson recalled. "1 went to his attorney—who happened to be Al Forgette—and asked if I could talk to the man, with the stipulation that his client's answers could never be used against him.

  "It had been a very brutal gang rape of a couple on the beach. This man was the only one caught and convicted, and I believed there were others involved who were still free. It turned out this man had been dead drunk, dressed just like the actual rapists were, and the victims misidentified him. Unfortunately, he took the rap at trial. We were able to find and convict the half dozen real rapists—just six months before the statute of limitations ran out."

  An innocent man was set free, but woe be unto the guilty defendant who came up against Robinson in court.

  Jay Newell had never had occasion to work with Jeoff Robinson. But he wanted to. "The Cinnamon Brown case was so darned intriguing to anyone who started looking into it. I couldn't let go of it, Fred McLean couldn't let go of it, and I was counting on it hitting Jeoff the same way."

  Robinson was semiprepared for a visit. Bryan Brown, the chief trial deputy in charge of the DA's Homicide Unit warned him that there might be an old case coming back—"a 1985 conviction." Brown mentioned no names.

  "I was wary," Robinson admitted. "I wondered what this 'hummer' was that I was about to be taken in on." When Jay Newell came padding down the hallway with his request, Robinson had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. "He started laying out this Brown case for me, and I could see the work that would be involved, and I'm wondering why reopen something that's dead and buried. I was listening to Jay and thinking, 'This one's no slam dunk. This one could be trouble.' "

  Robinson sat behind his desk and listened to Newell for fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. "At about half an hour," he admitted, "I began to get excited. I thought I could smell miscarriage of justice. With that, he had me hooked."

  As Gary Pohlson, a much-respected defense attorney and frequent opponent commented wryly, "Robinson will prosecute anything. Just toss him any case at all and he'll go for it. And he wins."

  That was not quite true. Although he would be loath to admit it, Jeoff Robinson had a wide streak of "crusader" running through him. "I was getting fired up, listening to Newell. I'd rather take on a case that is morally offensive— yet tough—than a sure thing. As far as I'm concerned, I could lose the next ten cases, and I wouldn't care. Not because I like to lose, but because I guess I want to be part of doing the 'romantic' part of what's right. That's the great part of this job! This one cried out for the prosecution to ride in and save the innocent and punish the guilty."

  Newell outlined his surveillances of David Brown and Patti Bailey, the phone conversation with Cinnamon. If what Newell believed was true, Robinson was a natural for this case. "I want to prosecute the worst kind of criminal," Robinson explained. "This may sound odd—but I have more respect for a bank robber who goes in and sticks a gun in a teller's face and asks for money, who is, in his own way, truthful and up-front about what he does, than I do for a white-collar criminal who pretends to be one thing and is something else. I am offended by moral crimes."

  If Cinnamon Brown had taken the rap and long incarceration for someone else, this moldering 1985 case that Jay Newell was so obsessed with seemed to Robinson to be the most heinous of moral crimes. Yes! Yes, he would take it on. But he warned Newell that they had absolutely nothing at the moment. There was no way that he could reopen the case on Cinnamon's word alone. "I told him I was going to ask for more—and then more—and more and more."

  Jay Newell knew he couldn't do all the legwork and all the investigating by himself. Fred McLean was no longer assigned to the Garden Grove detective unit, and Newell had to figure a way to get him back on the team. He went to McLean's old sergeant, who went to his new lieutenant. Would they cut McLean loose from his new detail for a while? Fortunately, they agreed. Nobody knew the 1985 case the way McLean and Newell did. In order to reconstruct it, it would take both of them.

  Impatiently, the two of them—and Jeoff Robinson—had to wait for a go-ahead from the upper echelons of the Orange County District Attorney's Office. They could do no more until they had that. Newell could not even go up to the Ventura School and talk to Cinnamon.

  It was the longest three weeks of Jay Newell's life. He got his permission to pursue the case. But even with all he and McLean had learned in the more than three years since Linda Brown's murder, neither they nor Robinson knew how complex the case would become.

  25

  Just after sunrise on August 10, 1988, Jay Newell and Fred McLean were on their way to the Ventura School to talk to Cinnamon. Her phone call had provided them with enough information to get this far, on the road headed north. They had no idea what she was going to say, but they would be able to watch her face as she spoke, to evaluate her body language.

  It was quite possible she only wanted to get out of prison—but neither McLean nor Newell truly believed that was Cinnamon's reason for calling. More likely, the secrets she had held on to so tightly had begun to burn. And she was probably angry. That was good; justifiable rage almost always brought forth the truth.

  It was early when they drove through the gates at Ventura School, the August morning cool before the heat of the day to come. Cinnamon was still asleep when they arrived. Her work schedule on the TWA flight reservations line kept her up very late at night. They waited, and when she finally appeared, both Newell and McLean were stunned by the vast change in her appearance, her bearing. Cinnamon had dressed carefully, as if she were applying for a job and not meeting with detectives to discuss a long-ago murder. She had been short and a little chubby; now she was very slender. The pudgy cheeks were gone; the planes of her face were sculpted and enhanced with subtle, skillfully applied makeup.

  McLean, especially, had difficulty equating this young woman with the scared, sick child he had pulled from the filthy doghouse three and a half years earlier. That Cinnamon had given him a confession he had never really believed, and then she had faded on him. All these years, he had been poised, waiting for the rest of the story; he had not realized how much so until this moment.

  It was 11:37 on that Wednesday morning when Newell began the first tape. He had explained to Cinnamon that she needed no attorney. She had already been convicted of the homicide they would be discussing. She could not now be placed in double jeopardy. In other
words, she could not be convicted twice for the same murder.

  Again, Newell stressed that neither he nor McLean could promise her anything for the information she chose to give to them. No deals. No expectations of an earlier release from prison.

  Cinnamon nodded. She understood that she would be flying without a net. It didn't matter.

  Newell wanted to take Cinnamon back, figuratively through a tunnel of time, to elicit total recall of the events of early 1985, if that was possible. "First of all," he began softly, "put your mind back a couple of years ago when all this happened, to a point where you can even remember what the weather was like ... it may be so insignificant that you don't think we even need to know . . . What were you wearing, whether or not the grass was mowed, how the air smelled . . . how old were you?"

  "Fourteen . . ."

  Cinnamon had seen only the most rudimentary reports on her case, and that had been two years ago—the files kept on her at CYA. She had seen no newspaper accounts. She had not seen her attorney since her trial, and even then, she said, "Mr. Forgette didn't let me read anything pertaining to my case."

  "You haven't refreshed your memory in any way then— other than by just thinking about it?"

  She shook her head. "Just thinking about it. Trying to go back, because I've pitched it out of the way so far. Like I was told to—and I pitched it out so far that it got out of touch with me. I almost started believing it myself."

  Newell laid down five proof sheets of photos of the exterior of the house and yard at Ocean Breeze Drive. Cinnamon identified the small frames easily, tapping them with one long, perfectly manicured fingernail. She pointed to the aqua and white travel trailer. "That's where I was told to stay."