If You Really Loved Me Part 28

Wherefore, and based upon the declaration and reports attached, and Incorporated by reference herewith, said complainant prays that a warrant may be issued for the arrest of the defendant(s) herein named, and that said defendant(s) be dealt with according to law.

Subscribed and sworn to before me,

On: September 21, 1988 J. Hobinson/al

MICHAEL R. CAPIZZI, DISTRICT ATTORNEY ORANGE COUNTY, STATE OF CALIFORNIA.

Cleric of the Munic.i.p.al Court County of Orange, Judge State of California

Deputy

Bail Recommendation - S NO BAIL

PART THREE.

The Arrest and the Death List

At 6:39 A.M., on Thursday, September 22, 1988, Jay Newell and Fred McLean met at the 7-Eleven on Ball Road and Sunkist with a male "uniform" and a female "uniform" from the Anaheim Police Department for backup. At seven A.M., Newell and McLean would knock on the door of the big blue house on Chantilly Street, and they wanted every eventuality covered. They had come this far; they wanted no minuscule mistake now.

"I put tape into the recorder in the squad car," Newell recalled. "The female uniform would drive, and we planned to put David and Patti together in the backseat. If they said anything, I wanted to know what it was."

"At seven A.M., the blue house was quiet, but the nearby Orange Freeway was buzzing with commuter traffic. Newell knocked at the door, and he and McLean stepped back a bit and waited.

Nothing.

Newell knocked again.

An intercom near the door startled them as David Brown's voice sounded, "Yeah?"

"Mr. Brown," Newell said. "Can you come down here? There's a problem we need to take care of."

There was another wait, and then the door opened and David Brown stood there, muttering that he had been asleep. He had had to get dressed. He wore white slacks and a white T-shirt. His mood was anything but welcoming, but the moment he stepped back, the two detectives and the male police officer stepped in.

"You are under arrest, Mr. Brown, for the murder of Linda Marie Brown," Newell said quietly.

He searched Brown's face for some trace of emotion and found none. David didn't seem surprised, or shocked. He simply stared back at Newell with his inscrutable blank eyes.

This house was so much more expensive than the little avocado-colored stucco rambler on Ocean Breeze Drive. But it was a mess inside. Cartons of business papers and work to be done were everywhere. The furniture was the samea"at least it looked just like the stuff that Newell and McLean had seen on the day of the murder. But that house had looked as if a woman had taken care of it lovingly. This place looked unlived in, messy.

Newell headed up the staircase to the second floor. He looked into the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. Patti, wearing a nightgown, was in bed there, with Krystal. The four-year-old sat up in bed and stared at him.

"You are under arrest for the murder of Linda Marie Brown," he said to Patti.

She looked at him without expression. There were no tears in her eyes, and she seemed no more surprised than David was.

"This your room?" Newell asked, knowing that it wasn't.

"No, I sleep down the hall with Heather," Patti said, pointing in that direction.

Newell looked in the room and saw Heather in a baby crib. There was a bed, but it was completely covered with neatly folded and ironed clothes. Patti had not slept there. He doubted that she had ever slept there.

David asked to go to the bathroom, and Newell nodded, but advised him he would have to go along. The master bath was in David's bedroom, a huge room obviously recently remodeled. It had a large television set and an expensive stereo system.

The bed was rumpled.

Behind the bed, the carpeted floor rose to another level, and the area appeared to be an office. There was a refrigerator. Newell opened it idly; the shelves were packed with dozens and dozens of bottles of Perrier.

There was no argument about shutting the bathroom door; there was no bathroom doora"the room was still in the last stages of remodeling. It was large and luxurious, with a bay window and a large circular tub with whirlpool jets.

"Can I take a Xanax?" David asked, pointing to a bottle of the heavy-duty tranquilizers.

Newell opened the container, handed one to David, and left the bottle where it was. He wanted to talk to David and he wanted him alert. He handcuffed his prisoner and walked him down the stairs.

Once in the squad car, David Brown began to call piteously, "Help me. Someone help me. I'm going to be sick. I'm claustrophobic."

Patti Bailey dressed quickly in white slacks, a pale-blue hooded sweatshirt, and white sneakers. Neither Patti nor David wore any jewelry. Newell discovered later that David had instructed her to give him her rings, and he had removed his own, secreting close to a hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on top of his medicine chest before he answered the door.

Patti held her hands out silently as she was cuffed.

"Your children, Pattia"" Newell began. This was the difficult part. The babies hadn't done anything to anyone. They were victims too. He fought to keep emotion out of his voice. "Your children can be taken to the Albert Sitton Home in Orange, or if you have someone you can call who could care for them?"

"Grandpa Brown," she murmured. "Call Grandpa Brown."

The Anaheim police officer waited with Heather and Krystal until Manuela and Arthur hurried over to take charge of them.

David recovered quickly from his panic attack. By the time the Anaheim police car headed down Chantilly, he seemed in control. When he saw the driver was headed for the freeway, he pointed out that they had taken the wrong route.

"He said the freeway would take forever that time of day," Newell recalled, "and he was right. But he directed us along this circuitous route that got us right to the Orange County Courthouse in no time. I don't know if it occurred to him that his route just got him to jail quicker."

Patti and David said little. The tape on the recorder in the police car, retrieved later, added almost nothing to the investigation. "Except for one thing," Newell remembered later. "David kept asking Patti about Heather. He kept saying, 'Now, who is Heather's father really?' He was doing it for our benefit. Well, why not? We believed he'd thrown away one daughter already to get what he wanted. Why not throw away Heather? She was only a mistake to him."

In denying Heather, the child who had come to mean more than life itself to Patti Bailey Brown, David may well have made the biggest mistake of his life. Patti would have done anything for David until Heather was born. When he failed to love their child, the tiniest seed of rebellion took root in Patti.

Was it possible that David was not her savior, her ultimate lover, the most wonderful man who had ever lived?

Interview room A-224 in the Orange County District Attorney's Office wasn't a very large room. Perhaps deliberately so. The subjects interrogated in that room and their questioners were close enough so that their eyes were forced to meet, so that sudden intakes of breath echoed loudly.

A-224's decor smacked of the sixties. There was a rectangular table, made of melamine in a dark wood pattern, scratched and marred, six faded orange-and-yellow-zigzag-upholstered chairs, and yellow walls with framed prints. A frenetic Jackson Pollock. An Henri Rousseau. Saint Francis. A Museum of Modern Art poster dated "April 5-June 4, 1967," which definitely established the era the room was last decorated. A mirrored clock ticked away on one wall.

The chairs were slightly sprung from years of suspects shifting, turning, some of them squirming, as questions grew invasive and close to the bone. Many of the interrogations were both audiotaped and videotaped.

Now, just before eight-thirty on the morning of September 22, 1988, David Arnold Brown sat heavily in one of those orange and yellow chairs, Jay Newell sat obliquely across from him, and Fred McLean took a chair at the near end of the table. David had requested Perrier, and he sipped from a plastic cup, then lit the first of many, many cigarettes.

He seemed quite calm, even confidenta"but faintly annoyed.

Newell's interviewing techniques were so low-key that the most tautly strung suspect tended to relax. Newell could say, "Now, you're under arrest for PC-187a"ahhh, that's murder," so casually that it somehow didn't sound so bad, after all.

It may have been the remnants of a barely detectable Oklahoma drawl. More likely, Newell's approach to interrogation was the result of years of refining, practicing, utilizing. He was good. When he said, "You'll have to repeat that for me. I'm not that quick; could you run it by me again?" he was ultimately believable. Indeed he insisted that he really wasn't that speedy in grasping facts. But neither his peers nor the suspects he helped to convict believed that. Newell missed nothing; he only pretended that he had.

David Brown, however, was so concerned with impressing Newell and McLean with his importance and with the precarious state of his health that he misjudged Jay Newell.

Possibly a fatal miscalculation.

One day, a jury might watch this interrogation. The way they perceived it could be the linchpin of a trial. But for now, David listened to his Miranda rights, and he nodded agreeably. Of course he would talk to the two detectives. "I have nothing to hide."

He was shocked, of course, to be sitting where he was. He was ill, he explained, and suffered from a "bleeding problem" that would probably necessitate frequent trips to the rest room, and he apologized in advance.

"No problem," Newell murmured.

David explained that he suffered from a kind of "immunological disorder" that was "not AIDSa"but a variation of it." It affected his heart, kidneys, liver. There was a chemical imbalance in his body that caused him to regurgitate, and he explained that he had almost suffocated from it several times.

If Newell believed his shopping list of miseries, it seemed a miracle that David Brown could get out of bed in the morning. He wondered if the man had an organ left that functioned. Well, at least one, Newell thought grimly; the existence of Heather proved that.

Asked about the night Linda died, David strained to remember the date and then commented that he remembered hardly anything. "I know that a lot of my health problems now are a result of my loss of her . .. because I never had and never will love a woman like the way I loved that woman."

Four weeks earlier, Newell had listened while David castigated Linda to Cinnamon, calling her a drug addict greedy enough to kill him to have his business, a woman who had poisoned him, a woman who had allowed her own brother to be tied up and tortured for two weeks. But Newell betrayed nothing of what he knew. He listened with his most concerned, interesteda"even sympathetica"manner while David rambled on.

"Tell me in your own words what you remember of that night, if you would," Newell asked.

David did not remember the day of the murder. "I was probably fielding calls anywhere from the Pentagon down to the local computer companies. That's what I usually did."

At the end of every responsive answer, David veered off into a discussion of his own emotional pain. "I've been to three psychiatrists because I just can't seem to deal with her death. I want to die. I'm suicide p.r.o.nea""

"Do you remember that night though?" Newell cut him off with the same question each time David wandered.

Despite his protestations that he had no independent memory of "that night," Newell urged David to search the "computer banks" of his mind.

"We made love," David said.

"You had s.e.x?"

"We made love, yes."

". . . When you say you made love, you mean you had s.e.xual intercourse?"

"I don't remember specifically that night. Lindaa"that's one of the things I loved about hera"she had quirks, you know, things she loved to do. One of her things was, whenever possible, was to drive me crazy, get me crawling and screaming is what I'm talking about. Ah, it's kind of hard to be specific."

"Well, we're all adults," Newell said dryly.

"Yeah, well... she loved to kiss me and touch me you knowa"foreplaya"whatever you call it. Sometimes, she didn't mind having intercourse when she was having her period. I didn't particularly get excited about it."

"Do you remember that night?" Newell pressed again.

"... I don't remember. I know she drove me crazy. I know we did something. One of the things she liked to do was .. . she used her hands to at least satisfy me."

"Did you get a climax that night?"

"Oh . . . every night. We'd known each other and been in love for too long. She knew what I liked and how to take care of me, and I took care of her ... we tried very often not to do the same thing every night. We liked to keep the fire and excitement going."

"Was everyone still there playing cards?"

"I don't honestly know. It didn't matter to her, and she had this way of getting me going so it didn't matter to me. I don't know if anyone was still there or not."

How odd. How extremely odd that a man would begin an interview about the murder of his beloved wife by describing the most intimate details of their s.e.x life. But if Newell and McLean even blinked, it was internally.