by Ann Rule
Vazquez caught fragments of sentences: ". . . just got the most terrible news . . ."
When David's attorney left, David headed down toward Irv Cully's cell. He was shouting, "Cully! Cully! Goldie fucked up! Goldie fucked up."
David had been nervous as a cat all day, and now he had just learned that the plan hadn't gone down smoothly after all. That damn Richard must have gone and shot the wrong guy!
39
David learned far worse news on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1989. Goldie hadn't shot the wrong man. He hadn't shot anybody. His beloved Goldie had set him up—had even cooperated with his bitterest enemies. Jeoff Robinson and Jay Newell—and Patti Bailey—were all quite alive. David, who considered himself the maestro of exploitation, had fallen completely for Richard Steinhart's gift of gab.
Without Steinhart's help, it was likely that all of David's designated victims would have been dead. But Steinhart had stalled David long enough for Newell and Borris to get solid evidence that a murder plot did, indeed, exist.
When David frantically tried to call his attorney, he found no comfort in that direction. Joel Baruch had left for Florida that morning to celebrate his wedding anniversary.
On February 15, David was charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit murder, three counts of solicitation to commit murder, solicitation to commit perjury, subornation of perjury, and conspiracy to commit arson. Jack Early, one of David's attorneys, described him as "surprised, shocked, and distraught."
An understatement perhaps.
No more shocked than Patti Bailey. When she learned that her husband had thoroughly intended that she would be dead by sundown on Valentine's Day, she told reporters that she figured, "Oh, come on."
But the next day, Jay Newell filled her in on all the details. She began to cry and to shake uncontrollably. "I'm hurt," she finally whispered. "But it's to be expected. Anything is to be expected. I believe it. I guess he likes to repeat history."
There was a new brittleness about Patti. She had seen all of her dreams evaporate. She had read her fifty letters from David and found he could no longer make her believe. They were full of lies, designed only to persuade her to protect him. She had no one. Rather than expecting anything, Patti expected nothing. Her family had cut her off. "But I understand—killing my own sister. I still have to live with that."
Paradoxically, Patti bravely told reporters she was experiencing a kind of freedom. She had been bound to David for so many years. Jail let her be more her own person. Patti, who had been forced to drop out of high school, passed her GED test while she was in the Orange County Jail. "I feel a lot freer. I'm in jail, but I can do what I want."
Not really. Patti tried to hang herself in jail.
Irv Cully was moved to a different jail location and so was David Brown. The man without a home was Richard Steinhart. He needed a secure location. Not only was he waiting to testify in one trial, he would now be a witness in David Brown's trial. He was a target. His enemies branded him a "jailhouse snitch," which was not precisely accurate. He had been snitched off and then had agreed to cooperate with the District Attorney's Office because he deplored David Brown's morals and methods.
Steinhart had gained nothing and lost a good deal. He had no place to go, and he was not safe on the street. David was enraged, and the Hessians were still looking for him.
"I found him a place," Newell recalled with a wry smile. "The one thing you might say about it is that it was secure. Apartments and motels were expensive and vulnerable. So I rented him a bank vault. It wasn't fancy, but it had a window and it only cost six hundred dollars a month— including breakfast."
The vault was in a defunct bank. Steinhart decorated it to suit himself and for the moment, called it home.
With spring burgeoning in the desert, Steinhart headed out one day, seeking a certain monument that said either "29 Palms" or "Joshua Tree." He took a buddy with him, a borrowed pickup truck, and digging tools. David had told him repeatedly that there was a fortune buried up there, much of it in small bills, a fortune hidden from the IRS. It might be as little as $300,000 or it might be $5 million.
They found the left turn and they found the wash, and they followed their compasses due north as David had instructed. And they found a boulder next to a yucca tree.
"We dug, and we dug." Steinhart grimaced, remembering. "It was hot. We got a spot hollowed underneath, and my buddy was holding the boulder up, kind of, with wrecking bars. I was digging under it."
The wrecking bars gave way in the sand and the boulder came crashing down, catching one of Steinhart's middle fingers beneath it. "It squashed that finger like an empty banana peel," he said, holding it up to show scars. "And then it plain took it off. My buddy was all gung ho to keep digging, and I was trying to hold my finger on by a shred of flesh. I told him I didn't think we should pursue the project—at least not then."
Emergency room surgeons were able to reattach Steinhart's flattened finger, but his enthusiasm for treasure hunting was vastly diminished.
Richard Steinhart had never really beaten his addiction to cocaine. On May 14, 1989, Officer R. Reinhart of the Huntington Beach Police Department was staked out on Commodore Circle, a notorious area for drug dealing. He had made at least fifty drug arrests there. He spotted a slow-moving pickup truck driven by a young woman. As the officer observed the two occupants wheel around on Commodore Circle, he saw a young Hispanic man walk up to the truck and show the male passenger two plastic bags with white powder in them. The bearded passenger gave the man some money and accepted the Baggies. The officer didn't know Richard Steinhart, but he recognized a drug deal when he saw one going down.
Steinhart was busted again.
He went back to the Orange County Jail, but this time his life changed completely. "I was in total sep [separation]." He had his reputation as a physically powerful man, but that was all he had. He saw that "Charles Manson and mass murderers are heroes in prison." But he didn't want that.
Steinhart found what he wanted at chapel call on the evening of June 22, 1989. There are scores of men behind bars who "find God" because it is expedient. No one who talked to Richard Steinhart believed that he was among them; he became a man totally committed to his religion. "I'd been going three times a week to chapel call when some of it began to sink in," he said. In chapel that night, he experienced a jolting spiritual awakening. It never left him.
Indeed, he wasn't even in chapel for religious reasons. "I was only going to find out what was happening in the mods—'cause I was in total sep, or maybe to bully the kids out of their candy bars, their commissary packs, their peanuts and stuff, bully them to put money on my books and stuff. But the Holy Spirit came upon me. The Reverend Win Barr asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus Christ. My hand just shot up, and I didn't realize it was up. Everybody's going, 'Steinhart's tryin' something—look!' They figured I had an escape plan, 'cause they knew me, and they asked me afterward how I was going to do it, 'cause they wanted to ride on my coattails. . . .
"I went back to my cell—three concrete walls with a glass front, and a twenty-four-hour guard—and I tried to find the smallest corner of my cell so the bull in the bubble couldn't see me, and I got on my hands and knees and I started crying and I begged God for mercy . . . and forgiveness. I got off my knees a new creature."
At breakfast the next day, Steinhart suggested that his fellow prisoners say grace. Bewildered, they did. And then he led them around the table, singing "Amazing Grace." Most of them thought he was crazy, and some believed this was all part of a master escape plan.
There was no escape plan. Steinhart was, for ever after, a changed man.
He still worried, however, about his power to control his addiction when he was on the street again. He called Jay Newell for help. Newell found Set Free, a drug rehabilitation program that would waive its long waiting list—only if the patient came directly from jail. The day Steinhart was released, Newell picked him up and took him to the program. A
fter that, he went to a church-sponsored rehabilitation program at Lake Elsinore, California.
Steinhart no longer cared about David Brown's elusive treasure. It was quite possible that the half million dollars, even 5 million—if it did indeed exist—still waited under some boulder, near some yucca tree on the way to Barstow, California.
Patti Bailey believed that David had a hidden cache of money in the desert. Although she never went with him, she saw him leave the house with bags of money many times. He told her he was going to bury it so that the tax men wouldn't find it.
There was no trial for David Brown in March 1989. The new charges virtually demanded a postponement. His case was becoming more and more complicated. It seemed likely that it would be autumn before a trial could get under way.
During the second week of May, Patti Bailey was allowed to plead guilty to her sister's murder in an Orange County juvenile courtroom. On June 2, she sobbed as Superior Court judge C. Robert Jameson sentenced her to the California Youth Authority until her twenty-fifth birthday.
Patti was now one of the key witnesses against David. She had barely turned twenty-one. If she had been tried as an adult, she would have faced twenty-seven years to life in prison. As a juvenile, she would probably be released when she was twenty-five. Patti didn't really understand that. Even as she pleaded guilty, and when she was sentenced, she believed that she would go to the California Youth Authority prison for four years, then be transferred to an adult facility where she would stay for the rest of her life.
"I pleaded guilty," she said, "because I know that what I did was wrong—real wrong. . . . I'm just sorry it ever happened. I just wish I could make it all go away. You never realize how much you miss someone until she's gone, and I'd give anything in the world to have her back now. I have to live with this the rest of my life. I don't think I'm getting off easy."
"There were no deals for Patti Bailey," Jeoff Robinson told the press. He explained that the case was heard in Juvenile Court because Patti was only seventeen at the time of the murder, because she did not pull the trigger, and probably most significantly, because she had been sexually abused and brainwashed during all the years she had lived with David Brown.
Joel Baruch sniped at Robinson. "That's the way the DA operates. They just bought themselves a witness." Baruch contended that he would prove at David's murder trial that he never wanted Linda dead, and that he was presently the unwitting target of lies told by his sixth wife, Patti, and his daughter, Cinnamon.
Ironically, Patti would now be locked up in Ventura, the prison school where Cinnamon had already spent four years. They would be housed in separate "cottages" far apart—but they would come in contact occasionally.
Arthur and Manuela, David's parents, would raise Krystal. Patti's little girl, Heather Nicole Bailey, was in the care of Mary Bailey, Rick's wife. Even if Patti should be released from prison in four years, she would miss her baby's vital, growing-up years.
When Patti was transferred to the Ventura School in Camarillo, David continued to write to her. His trial lay ahead. He needed Patti's support. He asked her if she was "woman enough" to drop her story and warned her to "watch her back" because she was "trusting the wrong people."
That wasn't true. Patti didn't trust anyone. Her heart beat too fast, she perspired, her chin shook, and sometimes she felt as if she could get no air at all.
No, Patti Ann Bailey Brown did not get "a deal."
Cinnamon and Patti were in prison, and David Brown was in jail, awaiting what should have been a speedy trial. But justice rumbled along as sluggishly as an overloaded mule. There was no closure. No one connected with the case could make plans.
On June 19, 1989, Joel Baruch filed a second recusal motion on behalf of his client. He sought to have the Orange County District Attorney's Office removed from the case. Since David Brown now stood accused of conspiring and soliciting the murder of two Orange County staff members —Jeoff Robinson and Jay Newell—Baruch suggested there would be a "conflict of interest."
Should Baruch be successful in removing the DA's office —or only Robinson and Newell—he would accomplish what David had clumsily tried to achieve with his murder plots. A new prosecuting team would be brought in. It was unlikely that any team from the California State Attorney General's Office could learn as much about David Brown as Newell and Robinson knew. His life was so intricate, his plans so devious. What had been written down was voluminous; the sheer experience that Newell and Robinson shared was vital to the prosecution's case.
Deputy District Attorney Tom Borris countered the recusal motion. "We are looking at Baruch very closely." After the DA's office realized that the money for the planned "hits" had been released in two checks from Baruch's office to Tom Brown, Baruch's possible involvement in the assassination plot became a question too. However, Borris said his office could find no evidence that the defense lawyer had known that the money was allegedly to be used as a murder payoff. One $ 10,000 check had a notation that it was to buy "rare coins."
"What difference does it make where the money comes from?" Baruch snapped. His statement in the recusal motion summed up his argument: "The maneuvering by the District Attorney's Office to keep Deputy District Attorney Robinson on the case poignantly demonstrates how that office has lost all objectivity and impartiality in making critical decisions."
Jim Enright, chief deputy district attorney, said that evidence of the murder-for-hire plan would be introduced to support a death sentence verdict if the death penalty was sought. Since Robinson was one of the intended victims, he would be replaced in the trial at that point by Tom Borris.
Baruch contended that Robinson would already have won the jury's sympathy by then; it would be too late for them not to think of him as the victim-to-be. "No juror should be permitted to make a life-or-death judgment in a case where he knows and likes the victim."
What a complicated legal situation it had become. Enright suggested that, by the time the jurors reached a penalty phase—if they should find David Brown guilty in the first phase of the trial—an entire new jury could be selected. Enright announced flatly that there was no question of removing Robinson. Robinson had established rapport with the key witnesses, and he knew the case inside and out.
Baruch was scathing. "We have to go through all this just to keep Robinson on the case? I mean—is Jeoff Robinson the only talented prosecutor they have?"
Underlying all the argument, there was the fact that death penalty cases are excruciatingly difficult to prove. Most jurors-to-be are uneasy with the concept of finding a defendant guilty if it means he—or she—will die. The Brown case was especially difficult to prove; Newell and Robinson now believed that David Brown had not actually pulled the trigger the night his wife died. Although he was just as culpable—if not more culpable—as the actual shooter, under the law, would jurors grasp that?
Robinson had prosecuted a number of exacting homicide cases; he suspected this one was destined to be the most memorable, no matter what the verdict. His three chief witnesses were convicts—or exconvicts. Two convicted murderesses, and a born-again strong-arm drug dealer. The prosecutor had not exactly been tossed into a field of daisies.
The defendant,on the other hand, had, as yet, no criminal record and would be presented by the defense as a conscientious businessman who had saved lives with his computer skill. The newspapers always referred to David as an "executive."
Nothing was black-and-white, and an intelligent jury would know that. But this case was no sure thing. Robinson would never give up the prosecution of David Brown to a new team, nor would any of the brass at the Orange County DA's office.
Both Robinson and Newell had, quite literally, risked their lives on this one.
The defense and the prosecution wrangled sporadically as full summer came to Orange County. The actual trial seemed no closer than it ever had. The official date was August 2, 1989, but no one involved seemed to feel it would begin then. It seemed sometimes as if Da
vid Arnold Brown would forever be suspended in limbo in the county jail.
Then on July 29, 1989, Joel Baruch abruptly resigned as David Brown's attorney, citing a "conflict of interest" that he refused to discuss. Now, David had no lawyer of record. Any further proceedings were delayed until August 11. The motion to remove Jeoffrey Robinson as prosecutor was taken off the court calendar.
Verbal fisticuffs between attorneys continued when David Brown hired a new lawyer: Richard Schwartzberg. Baruch had one final go-round associated with the Brown case. He brought a civil lawsuit against Schwartzberg, claiming that David Brown's new attorney had slandered him in court. Baruch charged that Schwartzberg had told other attorneys in court that Baruch had taken part in the plot to have members of the Orange County prosecution team killed.
Schwartzberg, who had been joking, agreed to make a $500 donation to a charity benefiting cystic fibrosis to settle the suit. "It isn't worth the time and money to fight this," he explained. ". . . It was a way for both sides to save face. Schwartzberg also agreed to apologize to Baruch.
Schwartzberg, a brilliant legal mind, would soon be joined by Gary M. Pohlson, one of the three or four top defense attorneys in Orange County. Schwartzberg was a walking law library, and Pohlson had a warm, friendly style that jurors responded to. David Brown had now hired himself a dynamite defense team—which did not come cheap.
Indeed, it was necessary for Jay Newell to photocopy all the payoff money from the murder plot so that the actual money could be removed from evidence and given to Brown's new lawyers. The buried money apparently was not tapped, but David did have a safe in a storage shed in Orange. He gave the combination to a defense investigator. The lock would not click open. When a locksmith easily flicked the dial and the heavy door swung open, there was nothing inside.