If You Really Loved Me Part 1

IF YOU.

REALLY.

LOVED ME.

A TRUE STORY OF DESIRE AND MURDER.

by Ann Rule.

This book is dedicated to the memory of J. D. newell and C. R. Stackhouse, the best of fathersa"who gave their love with no strings attached.

If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn.

If a child lives with hostility, he /earns to fight. If a child lives with ridicule, he learns to be sharp. If a child lives with shame, he learns to feel guilty. If a child lives with tolerance, he leams to be patient. If a child lives with encouragement, he learns to be confident. If a child lives with praise, he learns to appreciate.

If a child lives with fairness, he learns Justice. If a child lives with security, he leams to have faith. If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself. If he lives with acceptance and friendship, he leams to find love and warmth.

a"Dorothy Law Nolte.

QUOTED BY JEOFF ROBINSON IN HIS FINAL ARGUMENTS.

IF YOU REALLY LOVED ME.

Prologue.

The phoenix is a mythic bird of surpa.s.sing beauty, large as an eagle, that soars triumphant, reborn, from the ashes of defeat and destruction. It can neither be diminished nor destroyed. With its plumes of brilliant scarlet and glowing gold, it represents new life in numerous cultures. Ancient tombs unearthed in Egypt have images of the phoenix rising from a bed of flames. A phoenixlike creature appears throughout Oriental mythology, and it is found in the coat of arms of King James, Queen Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots.

The rebirth of the phoenix symbolizes the resurrection of man. Down through the ages, it has also come to represent divine power, royalty, and survival against all odds. Over and over and over again, the magnificent bird bests its enemies and takes flight, whole again, from the embers of ruin.

And yet the phoenix is only a dream, a myth, born of the imagination and of wishful thinking. It lives somewhere with the unicorn, the centaur, Pegasus, and all the mythic creatures of the mind. Even so, there are some for whom the image of the phoenix is an invisible cloak of armor, an escape hatch, a sure promise that no matter what sin a man may commit, he will always survive to fly free of his tormentors.

It was so for David Arnold Brown. . . .

PART ONE.

The Crime.

'Long before Walt Disney saw his dream blossom into Disneyland, Orange County, California, was a spot much sought after. Independent, perhaps even a bit feisty, Orange County seceded from Los Angeles County a century ago. The area known as the Santa Ana Valley became a whole new county, eventually the third most populated in California. Orange groves thrived, vineyards proliferated, and the new county beckoned to those who would come west to begin a new life. But a p.r.i.c.kly distrust lingered between Los Angeles and Orange counties. Los Angeles County is bigger, glitzier, smoggier, and its meaner streets are statistically more dangerous. The stargazers and the starlets, the baby moguls and the legends, live there, clawing for fame and fortune, at least according to those south of the "Orange Curtain." Conversely, Orange County residents are deemed priggish, plastic, conservativea"even "nerdy" by some of the more urbane Los Angelenos. Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda in northeast Orange County, and some of the L.A. contingent contend that says it all.

In reality, Orange County is wealthy and high tech, predominantly Republican, with a population so young and upwardly mobile that many who live there cannot possibly envision what it must have been like when citrus groves and vineyards spread out endlessly. The boom hit after 1950. Anaheim, now home to Disneyland, huge convention centers, and the California Angels, had fewer than fifteen thousand residents forty years ago; today, there are a quarter million. In the last twenty years, Orange County's overall population has mushroomed to 2,280,400. There is precious little true "country" left. City lines simply merge. The same streets run through Anaheim and Santa Ana, through Huntington Beach and Irvine. Only the changing colors of street markers indicate city borders.

Orange County is rife with diverse lifestyles existing side by side. The poor live among and between the rich. In a matter of blocks, neighborhoods change. Three-room houses give way to lovely homes with flourishing gardens and then to walled estates. Santa Ana, the county seat, was once sedate and graciously upper-middle cla.s.s. Now, it is a melting pot.

Young Hispanic parents walk along Santa Ana's streets, carrying their proudest possessionsa"beautiful babies and children, oddly bundled against the heat. Cinco de Mayo is a major holiday, albeit a noisy one, in Orange County.

The old Orange County Courthouse, its red-rock exterior burnished by sunlight, exists only as a museum, dwarfed and outdated by the near-skysc.r.a.pers in the Civic Center Plaza. Lovely old homes along Broadway house attorneys' offices, and onea"a bank. The grounds of the Orange County Civic Center Plaza draw the movers and the shakers, the attorneys and politicians, but the plaza is also a dwelling place for the homeless, young druggies, middle-aged dropouts, and the elderly poor, all attracted to Orange County by the moderate climate or simply for their own ethereal reasons. Their shopping carts, overflowing with possessions, are parked in militarylike lines in the shade of the courthousea"Building 30.

Drive-by shootings occur almost daily in Santa Ana, and exquisite small parks reverberate with curses and fights far into the night. Police wryly call convenience stores "stop and robs". But other Santa Ana parks are safe and serene, and state-of-the-art shopping malls rival any in America.

Life can be good in Orange County, the median household income is close to $50,000 a year. The median-priced home sells for close to $250,000. Even the most rudimentary house with two bedrooms and one bathroom will bring $150,000.

Orange County smells of eucalyptus and dusty olive trees, of orange blossoms, jasmine, wild plum, Mexican food, the Pacific Ocean (when the wind is right), suntan lotion, the sweat of runners, and freeway exhaust. Geraniums and impatiens bloom year-round, along with the fuzzy red pokers of bottlebrush trees. The violet billows of the jaca-randa tree last for months. The median strips of every freeway bloom with scarlet, pink, and white oleander bushes, ten feet high. Yellow daylilies crowd the sidewalk near the Orange County Jail, and the entrance to the Coroner's Office is like a garden with feathery ferns, salvia, lobelia, and the majestic stalks of light-blue allium.

In 1985, 13,031 deaths were recorded by the Orange County Coroner's Office. That office investigated 6,047 of those deaths and determined that 112 were homicides.

One of those homicides occurred on Ocean Breeze Drive on March 19 in the city of Garden Grove.

Ocean Breeze Drive is a one-block street, minutes from police headquarters, a charmingly misnamed street where any wafting of sea wind would be highly unlikely short of a major storm; the Pacific Ocean is a dozen miles away. Ocean Breeze is a pretty street, sandwiched between Pleasant Place and Jane Street. There are six houses on either side, all constructed in the sixties on large lots. All have shake roofs and stucco-and-brick exteriors, and some are identical save for color, trim, and landscaping. Each would sell today for a quarter million dollars.

The yard on the southwest end of the block has pink cabbage-rose bushes behind a curving, white picket fence. Another front lawn features a circular fountain edged with pansies, and colored lights play over it at night. Lawns are always mowed, but trees and bushes have grown tall in the last twenty-five years, and the houses on Ocean Breeze are shaded from the sun and rea.s.suringly private. The residents are mostly professional people, middle-aged. Family people.

A weeknight in March in such a neighborhood was usually a quiet time for police, especially as the hours crept toward morning. Garden Grove patrol officer Darrow Halligan was nearing the end of his "evening's" watch at 3:26 A.M. on March 19, 1985. After a heavy daytime rain, the weather was cold and clear, somewhere near forty to forty-five degrees, and Halligan kept his heater going. Winding down from his eight-hour shift, he was driving near Brookhurst and Lampson Avenue when he heard the radio call directing him to a "possible 187" (homicide) at 12551 Ocean Breeze Drive.

He knew the street well. The north end ab.u.t.ted Lampson; he was only a few blocks away.

The street had no streetlights, and it was very dark as he inched along, shining his spotlight on the houses to find "12551." Bushes grew so high around many of the homes that Halligan couldn't even see the numbers. The house numbers had been painted on the coved curbing, but not recently and the ciphers were pretty well worn off. Finally, he made out the "12551" on a green stuceo and brick bungalow on the west side of the street.

It was so quiet, so unlike the usual homicide call. No shouting or screaming, and n.o.body out in the street to wave him in. Odd. Quiet enough to make the muscles tighten in the back of Halligan's neck. Maybe it was only a prank call, but "possible 187" was not a call any California cop wants to hear, especially at three-thirty in the morning with no backup in sight. Halligan had arrived so rapidly that he knew that the suspect, if any, might very well still be nearby.

His radio crackled with the information that the victim was inside the house with a gunshot wound, but that the dispatcher had no further information, and no description at all of a suspect.

"The suspect is not in the residence," the Garden Grove Communications Center updated. "I have the informant on the phone with me now."

"Well, have the informant meet me at the front of the house, would you?" Halligan responded, with some relief.

The porch light was out, but he could see lights on in the front window. A man, short and heavyset, opened the door.

He stood, silhouetted, in the backlighting from the living room.

Halligan stepped ina"alonea"to a situation about which he had precious little information. The man was clearly tense and distraught, his face streaked with tears. Nearby, a young blond woman held a crying baby in her arms and sobbed hysterically.

"I think my wife's been shot," the man said, stuttering with emotion. "She's in the bedroom. I'm afraid to go look, Officer. Would you?"

He hadn't looked? Maybe that did mean a false alarm. Halligan asked where the bedroom was and the stocky man pointed toward the southwest corner of the house.

The young woman sobbed even louder, and the man seemed frightened. His voice trembled when he asked Halligan to check on his wife. Halligan had no time to ask him why he believed she'd been shot when he hadn't seen her. But whatever his reasons, the guy was getting more and more agitated.

"Sit there on that couch, both of you," Halligan instructed. "I'll check the bedroom."

He moved in the direction the man was pointing and found himself in a den or office. He switched on his flashlight as he moved deeper into the house. The hall beyond the den was very dark. He moved the beam of his flashlight along the corridor until he spotted a half-closed door to the left of the den.

As he nudged the door open with his shoulder, he heard some sound, a gaspa"no, a gurgle. He knew better than to touch a light switch and contaminate any fingerprint left there. He could make out a bed opposite the door. His flashlight swept over a figure lying there, feet toward the door.

Halligan moved swiftly toward the person on the bed, the cone of light fixing on a female with longish light hair. He could see a ma.s.sive amount of still-wet blood on her chest. She lay on her back with her right arm trailing off the side of -the bed and her left hand raised to her ear.

She could not be dead. He rejected that because he could still hear the choking gurgle in her throat as she struggled to draw in air. Halligan put his fingertips to the carotid artery where it ran up the side of her neck. He felt nothing. No rea.s.suring pulse where there should have been a steady beat.

He leaned toward the young woman, who lay on flowered sheets, placing his left ear next to her nose. He felt no breath. He looked to see if her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rose and fell with any intake of air.

They did not.

Blood stained the woman's lips and chin, blood that had almost certainly come up from her lungs. Halligan saw that the blue blanket covering her from the waist down was smooth and flat; there could have been no struggle. It was quite possible that she had not even wakened to see a gun pointed inches away from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Almost simultaneously other Garden Grove police ofli-cers and paramedics began to arrive at the green bungalow. If there was a chance that the victim still lived, they had to act. Conversation with the couple who huddled on the couch in the living room would have to wait. Who they were or their relationship to the victim would come later. The man had said that the injured woman was his wife. He looked much older than she, but then he was under tremendous stress. Grief and fear change people.

Officer Scott Davis, Patrol Sgt. Dale Farley, who would take over control of the crime scene, and Halligan stood near the bed, helpless. Patrol Officers Alan Day and trainee Andy Jauch joined them as they watched the victim for some sign of life. The woman was so desperately injured , that no one short of paramedics could treat her.

The police had to have a picture of the woman on the bed; it might be the only tangible proof they had later of how she had been found. It might appear uncaring, but it was not. Day had brought a Polaroid camera in with him, and although the memory of that moment haunts Sergeant Farley today, he handed it to Halligan and said, "The light's not good, but get as many exposures as you can before she's moved."

She seemed young, and so vulnerable.

Halligan had time to take only two. Two Polaroid shots of a pretty young woman with her eyes half open, her face bloodied but eerily serene. Her left hand was still flung up next to her ear as it must have been while she slept. The officers estimated her age as late teens to early twenties.

Paramedics Chris Esser and Ruben Ruvalcaba from the Garden Grove Fire Department Engine 4-1 rushed into the southwest bedroom. They thought they heard the woman gasp for air. It was hard to tell. A death rattle sounds almost the same. They lifted the comatose victim from the bed and carried her to the closest hard surface where they could administer cardiopulmonary resuscitationa"the den/office floor. She wore a knit shortie nightgowna"black and white and red with laughing penguins in top hats parading across the front until they disappeared into the solid red of blood. They placed her on the tan carpet and quickly cut away the silly little nightie, leaving her nude except for a pair of fuzzy blue nightsocks.

As the paramedics worked, inserting an airway, and then an intravenous line with a solution of D5W, they compressed the young woman's chest rhythmically, urging her heart to start beating effectively.

The walls of this room were covered with family pictures. A huge studio portrait of a man and a woman, smiling and obviously in love, hung over the red-brick fireplace. They seemed to gaze down at the activity on the floor. It was difficult to tell if the woman in the picture and the woman on the floor were the same person. There was a definite similarity, but then the sobbing woman in the living room also resembled the portrait. And a shooting victim, in extremis, would look nothing at all like herself. Her skin was pallid, her eyes unfocused. The paramedics' LifePak heart monitor showed erratic response to their CPR, but no normal sinus rhythm. She would need surgery to have any chance of survival, but they dared not move her until she was stabilized.

So many people were now coming and going that Farley placed Jauch at the front door to maintain scene control. A log marked the arrival and departure times of all personnel. Davis and Day were instructed to separate the man and girl in the living rooma"and to begin preliminary interviewing.

Halligan finally had time to glance around the bedroom where the injured woman had been found. A revolver with a two-inch barrel lay on the carpet between the door to the hall and the bed, but no one knew yet if that was the murder weapon. He left it there, waiting for the primary investigators to arrive. Only now did he notice a small bathroom just off the bedroom, the door closed. Cautiously, he pushed the door open, half-expecting to see someone hiding there.

There was no one.

For any policeman, anywhere, there is a clearly defined list of priorities, and the first item on that list is that life must be preserved. On down the roster are things such as keeping the peace and arresting the guilty. Time hung frozen in the den as the paramedics tried to help the victim live. Finally, she was carried out to a Southland ambulance and rushed with sirens screaming toward the Fountain Valley Community Hospital trauma unit. The ambulance was packed with medical personnel; there was no room for Halligan, so Farley instructed him to follow behind in his squad car and stay with the victim as she was treated in the emergency room.

Dr. Michael Safavian was working the early-morning shift in the emergency room. When the ambulance pulled up, he needed just a glance to see that only heroic measures might bring the victim back.

It was five minutes after four in the morning when Safavian and the ER crew began to work on the young woman. No air could reach her right lung; clotted blood blocked the way. Safavian inserted a trocar into that lung to release blood, hoping the organ would reinflate. At the same time, he ordered three units of blood to be transfused into the patient.

No response.

Halligan watched as the emergency room surgeon tried one final, heroic measure. Without anesthetica"she needed nonea"Safavian cut into the young woman's left chest and reached in so that he could ma.s.sage her heart, but it lay leaden and still in his hands.

At twenty-six minutes past four, she was p.r.o.nounced dead. Cause of death, or rather manner of death, was apparent. There were two bullet wounds of entry in her chest.

Joe Luckey, an Orange County deputy coroner, arrived at Fountain Valley Community Hospital at five A.M. Luckey found a perfectly formed body still warm to the touch; there was no rigor, no lividity.

Luckey began to list the hospital appliances: the IV points, a right chest tube, a sutured left chest incision, an airway, and EKG monitor pads. He collected the bloodied nightie and the pair of blue bootie socks, a wedding-engagement ring set, and a gold bracelet, placing them in paper bags. He bagged the victim's hands in case there was some trace evidence caught there.

And then the dead woman, tentatively identified as Linda Marie Brown, twenty-three, was taken to the sally port entry behind the Orange County coroner's office in Santa Ana. The guraey-scale in the floor just inside the door showed her weight to be 127 pounds.

Less than two hours after the first call for help came in to 911, Linda Brown rested on a shelf in the cold room, awaiting postmortem examination.

It had beguna"as it does with all homicide investigations. A human being who had been alive only hours before was now dead, deliberately dead by someone else's hand. It was more difficult to deal with somehow when the victim had died in her own home where she had every reason to feel safe. At that point, Garden Grove police investigators had just a peephole into the wall that surrounded the private lives of the people who lived at 12551 Ocean Breeze Drive. There were questions to be answered, and with luck, the truth would emerge. In this case, however, the truth would be a long time coming.

A long, long time.

Garden Grove homicide investigator Fred McLean was sound asleep shortly before 4:30 A.M. on the morning of March 19,1985. But after eighteen and a half years with the department, a phone shrilling in the night was far from unusual. As always, McLean woke instantly alert. It was second nature. His career demanded that he deal with the aftermath of the human emotions, aberrations, and bad judgment that often lead to violent death. An uninterrupted night's sleep was a luxury.

Lt. Larry Hodges, the Garden Grove watch commander, was on the phone. He instructed McLean to respond to 12551 Ocean Breeze Drive to take over as the primary investigator into the gunshot murder of a young woman who had just been p.r.o.nounced dead at the Fountain Valley trauma facility. Patrol officers had been called to the house within the past hour, had done preliminary interviews of the occupants, and cordoned off the crime scene.

McLean stopped at Garden Grove Police Headquarters on Acacia Parkway to pick up Det. Steve Sanders and a homicide kit. He saw that Sgt. John Woods and Det. Bill "Bugs" Morrissey had been rousted out of bed too and were preparing to go to the homicide scene. It was still dark as they pulled up in front of the green stucco and brick bungalow on Ocean Breeze Drive. The street was alive with police cars now. Andy Jauch listed their names and arrival time as Sanders and McLean pa.s.sed into the brightly lit living room.

The room was jam-packed with furniture, and it all looked new. In fact, it looked as if someone had gone to a mall and overdosed at Levitz, K Mart, Toys-R-Us, and Video-Land. There were two Early American-style couches upholstered with beige and brown bursts of flowers, two matching brown velour recliners, two rocking chairsa"one a child'sa"two maple end tables, a playpen full of toys, a baby's walker, a gun case with six rifles neatly in place, a coffee table, a number of lamps with their shades still wrapped in plastic, a large console television set, a VCR, and remote controls within arm's reach in every corner of the room. The furnishings were all good, solid, unimaginative stuff, expensive but uninspired, and far too much for this smallish living room.

Beyond that, every flat surface was covered with knick-knacks. Some were tastefula"a bra.s.s clock, a small cut-crystal vasea"but some of it looked like carnival prizes. The lamp-clock in a hard plastic case with vibrating metal fronds and constantly changing colors, and the bouquets of feathers and artificial ferns, could have been won in a three-pitch-for-a-dollar booth on the midway.

The walls and tabletops were covered with family pictures and otherworldly paintings featuring unicorns. Knickknack shelves held dozens of ceramic unicorns. The living room was crowded, but it was neat, the thick brown carpet vacuumed, the furniture dusted, and the walls freshly painted. Whoever had decorated this room had worked carefully to keep a brown, beige, white, and yellow color scheme.

It was a homey-looking room. Whatever had happened to summon police here in the middle of the night had not touched this area of the home. McLean glanced around and saw a pair of man's scuff slippers in front of one of the recliners, a woman's blue Reeboks in the middle of the floor, a zigzagged afghan over the larger rocking chair. A baby's bottle, two-thirds empty, still rested on a lampstand.

The television was on, but muted. McLean noted idly that it was tuned to MTV; as he glanced over, The Cars were singing "Why Can't I Have You?" Then he looked at the stereotypical print of a clipper ship coursing through rough waves in its frame over the cold fireplace and subconsciously summed up the room. The people who lived here either had enough money to buy whatever they liked, or the credit to charge it. At the same time McLean wondered why everything was brand-new. It was as if this were a home without a history, as if it had just sprung up overnight. How many families can afford to replace every piece of furniture, every gewgaw and lamp, at the same time?

The rest of the house was the same. A cursory look showed McLean that the family living here denied themselves nothing material. Every single room of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house was crowded with new furniture. Where one dresser would have served, there were twoa"or three. Furniture and toys and things were everywhere. It was as if teenagers had been given permission to buy whatever they wanted.

McLean strolled through the kitchen into the little back hall that doubled as a laundry room. On the dryer, he saw an empty gla.s.s and three empty prescription pill bottles. The pill vials lay on their sides, their caps off. He read the labels as he carefully slipped the bottles into evidence bags and initialed them. The first one had held Darvocet-N, 100 mg, #60, issued 11-28-84; the second one Dyazide #100, issued 6-29-82; and the third containera"Darvocet-N too, also #100, number 2S, issued 11-24-83.