If You Really Loved Me Part 34

This was to be a long, intermittent preliminary hearing. It was obvious that Baruch wanted to start all over with another judge. He made a motion for recusal against JeofF Robinson. (A recusal motion or hearing is designed to remove and replace the prosecuting team.) Baruch complained that Robinson was "overzealous and intimidating to me," making it impossible for him to defend his client.

And so the preliminary hearing was interrupted againa" this time by a recusal hearing. Robinson, represented by attorney Tom Goethals, responded to Baruch's twelve allegations against him. Patiently, Robinson answered. Had he, indeed, called Baruch "the dirtiest, most unethical" lawyer he'd ever seen?

"Yes, I did," he responded calmly.

"Truth was my defense," he said later. "I meant it when I said it the first time."

The recusal was denied and they began again. With time out for Christmas, it was January 6,1989 before Patti Bailey took the witness stand. She had nothing to gain by testifying, and much to lose. There were no "deals"; Patti had been offered neither a chance to "walk" nor "short time." She too was facing murder charges.

There was every chance that she would never get to raise her baby daughter.

What would Patti say? David tried to catch his wife's eye, but she would not glance his way. He was a little anxious, but not overly so. He had expected Cinny to burn him on the stand. That was no big deal. He figured that Robinson and Newell had really gotten to her, and besides, she would do anything to get out of prison.

But Patti. Patti was another story. Patti loved him. She adored him. Sure, she hadn't answered his letters, nor had she opened up to DuPree, but when it came down to it, Patti wouldn't leave him. What would she do without him? Where would she go?

The most noticeable thing about Patti as she moved to the witness stand was her thick b.u.t.terscotch hair, with heavy bangs and ma.s.ses of long curls pulled back from her face with a clip. She was a pretty woman with a strong jaw, wearing a sweater of variegated colors. She trembled continually, as if her nervous system had been pushed beyond a point she could deal with.

David bade her with his mind to look at him, but she would not. He frowned slightly. That was not a good sign. As Patti answered Robinson's questions, David flushed. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had gotten to her, all right. Each answer was worse, more d.a.m.ning than the one before. David stared harder at his wife, willing her to just shut up.

"We were always talking about ways to kill Linda," Patti testified, her voice quivering. "We were both discussing it."

Mary Bailey, Patti and Linda's sister-in-lawa"the woman with whom Linda had lived for yearsa"sat in the gallery, her face a study of grief and horror. Her eyes flooded with tears and she dabbed at them absently.

Patti continued to avert her eyes from her husband as she related how David had instigated the murder plot and enlisted her, and then Cinnamon, to carry it out. "He said it would be best if we killed her firsta"before she killed him. ... He didn't have the stomach to do it himself."

Patti said that she hadn't wanted to kill her sister. She had suggested to David that they might rig an accident so that Linda would be "crushed under a car" but would survive, paralyzed. "That way, she would always have to stay in bed," Patti testified softly. "She wouldn't be able to get up and around, but we'd be able to stay together."

And then, suddenly, Patti began to open up a secret door she had kept locked for half her life. She finally explained why she had become emotionally enmeshed with David Brown. No onea"beyond herself and Davida"had had any idea until this moment of the methods he had used to trap and hold her.

Yes, Patti had loved her brother-in-lawa""like a father" a"until she was eleven, but those feelings soon became more complex. Patti's flat voice held the courtroom mesmerized, her words shocking and tragic. She recalled how David complained that Linda had changed and become "so moody and scary." Patti hadn't noticed anything unusual, but David was convincing. And then he captured the little-girl-Patti who had never been able to count on anything or anyone. He promised Patti that he would marry her someday, and they would always be together, no matter what.

"When was this?" Robinson asked.

"It started when I was eleven, and it continued until the day we were married."

David's manipulation of Patti was far more than promises of marriage one day. Patti shut her eyes as she revealed that David had s.e.xually molested hera"almost from the day she had fled to his home to escape the molestation she had suffered in her mother's house. Nothing had really changed. But David was gentler, and Patti began to think that maybe that was just the way things were. David had a.s.sured her that it was; most grown men helped young girls to grow up by teaching them about love.

Patti testified that David first encouraged her to perform oral sodomy upon him; he had a.s.sured her that that was the way she would develop into a woman. He also fondled her flat chest, offering to do so to help her to develop b.r.e.a.s.t.s. When Patti's b.r.e.a.s.t.s did bud and blossom, when her menstrual periods started, she testified that was simply more proof that David had been telling the truth.

When Patti was fifteen, she began to have s.e.xual intercourse with her sister's husband. By this time, she was a willing partic.i.p.ant. They grasped at every chance to be alone. "Anytime Linda left, there was usually some kind of physical contact. When she went shopping or took a shower," Patti testified.

Cinnamon had not been mistaken when she related the incident when she stumbled upon her father and Patti in the store, kissing pa.s.sionately. She had seen one of a thousand stolen moments.

"I loved my sister, but I loved David even more."

David Brown stared at his wife, his mouth slightly open, his eyes unblinking, and shook his head slightly. He appeared dumbfounded by Patti's testimony.

On her second day of testimony, Patti discussed the final preparations leading up to Linda's murder. "We decided that Cinnamon should do it because she was young and wouldn't have to serve much time. We both a.s.sumed she'd be sent to a psychiatrist and sent back home . . . [David] said he'd have to go out so that when he came home the car would be warm and he'd have an alibi for not being there."

Patti's testimony corroborated Cinnamon's. Both of the girls had now testified that David could never have been the shooter "because he said he didn't have the stomach for it."

Patti showed no emotion as she testified, even as she spoke of hearing Linda moan in pain after she had been shot. But when Robinson asked Patti about Heather, tears filled her eyes. She looked defiantly at David as she declared that he was Heather's father. She had not been with another man.

Patti described her husband as a man totally domineering, a man who controlled her life to the point that he would not let her visit her family or have friends. "I wore a beeper all the time, so he could page me. I wore it for when David needed me." If she didn't check in with him every fifteen minutes, David would be angry.

In his cross-examination, Joel Baruch suggested to Patti that she was lying about David because she was angry. Had not the DA's men told her that David had pointed at her as the killer? He suggested that Patti had been intimidated into testifying by the police and the prosecutors. Wasn't she saying what they wanted her to say because she wanted to get out of jail and be back with Heather before her baby forgot her?

No, that was not true. Patti stared back at Baruch. She was quite prepared to go to prison for her role in Linda's death. "At least I can go with a clean conscience," she said quietly.

Patti Bailey Brown had been David Brown's little homegrown s.e.x object since she was in the sixth grade. Her partic.i.p.ation in the plot to kill her own sister, the sister who was really a mother figure to her, was reprehensible. And yet, Patti had long since lost free will.

Patti had not seen her own father since she was a year old. As a little girl, she had felt so depressed that she tried to suffocate herself with a pillow. David had convinced Patti that her mother "sold" her to him, for $10,000a"the "business loss" Ethel Bailey would sustain if she could not put Patti out for prost.i.tution. There was no indicationa" other than David Brown's worda"that this was true. Patti believed it.

From the moment David took her into his home, she felt no longer "like a black sheep," but "I felt like I had a family."

In an interview with L A. Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, Patti tried to explain the hold David had over her. "He'd let me sit on his lap and give me attention and tell me I'm a good kid and go out and buy me clothes and make me feel real good about myself."

This was an eleven-year-old child, the very last of eleven children born to poverty. "He's a h.e.l.l of a talker," Patti told Lichtblau. "If he told me the sky was purple, I'd have believed it.... David was everything to me. He was my family. If I thought he was going to be taken away, that'd be like pulling the plug."

With the threat of the loss of David, Patti had indeed partic.i.p.ated in plans to kill Linda. She had yet to reveal the plethora of murder scenarios. Patti recalled later in jail that David had suggested running Linda down with an ATV in the desert; that Patti and Cinnamon ride their bikes to a shopping mall and shoot Linda as she shopped; releasing jacks holding up a car so that it would fall on her; running her over with a car; and creeping up on Linda from behind with a crowbar.

Patti had never allowed herself to think about what Linda's death would mean; she had blocked it off in a faraway place in her mind. But she had been so depressed. David had not allowed her to see a counselor unless he was in the room. Even after she tried to commit suicide by taking three boxes of No Doz pills and tranquilizers, when she slit her wrists, David would not allow her to be hospitalized. He was always afraid she would tell. And so, she could never confide her grief and terror to anyone.

Patti Bailey had belonged to David Brown, body and mind and soul, for a decade. He was the only male she had ever really known. He was practically the only person she had contact with. Was it surprising that she would have done almost anything to keep David safe? To please David?

On January 19,1989, Judge Schenk ordered David Brown held over for trial for murder and conspiracy. Judge Schenk also decided that there was enough evidence to support a special allegation that Brown had plotted his wife's death for financial gain. This special finding meant that David Brown might face the death penalty.

On February 2, Superior Court judge Myron S. Brown set David Arnold Brown's trial date for March 29, 1989. Patti Bailey would face charges in juvenile court first, because she was only seventeen when Linda Brown was murdered. Jeoff Robinson said he would ask, however, that she be tried as an adult. Her age at the time of the murder ruled out the death penalty for the victim's sister.

By the time David Brown had a trial date, he had already begun to construct other plans. As he was fond of saying, "I always know what I'm doing." David, in this new milieu, had new friends. Like a chameleon, he adapted quickly to any environment. The past did not haunt him.

Christmas in jail is, at best, a bleak holiday. Richard Steinhart, "Yahtahey" on the street, thirty-five, had found himself in any number of unusual spots on Christmases pasta"many of them plush and pricey, a good number of them dangerous. He hadn't spent a Christmas Eve "at home" in years. On December 24, 1988, Steinhart was arrested for probation violation and lodged in the Orange County Jail. In truth, he was picked up because he was a most important material witness in an upcoming murder trial (unconnected to the David Brown trial). The trial involved bikers and counterfeiting, and the accused were powerful men.

Orange County deputy DA Rick King needed Steinhart. He was a percipient witness; he had voluntarily told investigators of events in 1982 that strengthened the State's current case. The defendants had every reason to want Steinhart out of the way, and Steinhart had every reason to want to be swallowed up on the streets of some large city in southern California, to become anonymous. But Steinhart was in the Orange County Jail, Rick King would be able to find him when he needed him, and Steinhart would have to testify against some heavy hitters.

Actually, Richard Steinhart was a heavy hitter himself.

He had been in jail before, and he knew the protocol better than a d.u.c.h.ess going to tea with the queen. It was not his favorite place to be, but for the moment, it was probably safer than the streets of Orange County.

Steinhart was a long way from home, or where home had been once. Born on December 13,1953, in Somerville, New Jersey, Steinhart never knew who his birth father was. His mother was an organist in the St. Luke's Methodist Church in Somerville. She played the ma.s.sive pipe organ, dressed Richard in a "little Lord Fauntleroy suit," and did her best to raise her young son in the church, but he was such a wild one that sometimes she despaired. "My mom really did care about us when we were young," Steinhart recalled. "She worked two jobsa"and it was really hard on her."

They moved from New Jersey, and Richard grew up with his mother and stepfather in Buena Park, California. He was a smart kid who did "very well in school" without really trying. He was a rebel, a hyperactive teenager who gravitated toward trouble.

Steinhart became a superb athlete. He was six feet tall, but he gave the appearance of being six three; his shoulders were ma.s.sive and his chest was deep. He had black hair, long and combed straight back, a "cookie-duster" mustache, and a goatee. He was heavily tattooed and usually wore a black leather vest and Harley-Davidson T-shirt. When he was silent, he was unapproachable. When he talked, he talked ninety miles a minute. There was an electric quality about Steinhart, pure energy unfettered by restraints. He was always charismatic; he was often witty, and on occasion his intensity could intimidate.

If one thing only might be said of Richard Steinhart, it was that for most of his life, he had never been exactly what he appeared to be.

Steinhart attended Fullerton Community College where he played guard and tackle for a team that never lost a game all season. His interest in college dwindled as he began to make more and more money in other pursuits.

It was in martial arts where Steinhart soared. His stepfather had many master's belts, and Richard became the youngest certified grand master of the martial arts in the United States, a two-time national karate champion, and world champion of the UKKA, the Universal Kenpo Kung Fu a.s.sociation. He had black belts in third degreea"or highera"in six martial arts. He once had his own studio where he instructed his students in the techniques of laying a man out with quick blows from the hands and feet, graceful killing movements too fast for the eye to follow.

Not surprisingly, Steinhart was working as a nightclub bouncer by the time he was seventeen. He would become, in his own words, "a modern-day ninja. I worked for serious people in the 'professional' area; I was sought after as a bodyguard. I was an arm-breaker and a leg-breakera"if I had to be. ... I had no feelings about what I dida"not for the target; I was a professional." Steinhart would also become, at various stages of his life, "internal affairs officer" for the Hessian motorcycle gang, a bodyguard for comedian Jerry Lewis, a gunrunner, a drug runner, a drug addict, and a contracted hit man.

Steinhart worked, he recalled, for whoever had the money to pay hima"the government, celebrities, the mob, the drug lords. Many of his contacts had the clout to keep him out of jail, and he often walked away when he knew he should have been booked. All it took was a nod and a word from the right agency or organization. But in the end, even Steinhart's high-placed government "friends" were telling him to clean up his act; they couldn't help him any longer, no matter how valuable his services were.

"I sold drugs for two years before I tried them," he recalled somewhat ruefully. "I wouldn't touch the stuff. Some of the clientele I worked for ran a half ton to a ton of cocaine. Everybody was trying to get me to sample ita"but I held out. And then I tried it. Since 1978, I've put a half million dollars of cocaine in my own nose."

He also bought his mother a new upper plate and a house in Huntington Beach. "Those dentures made her the happiest I've ever seen her."

Steinhart's name was familiar to southern-California cops, and not because they admired him. Arresting Steinhart was a dicey proposition. He was almost impossible to subdue if he didn't care to go quietly. "I remember I got arrested once," he said. "They had me on my hands and knees, and this one cop came up and said, 'Mr. Steinhart, we know who you area"and if you move, I'm going to put a bullet in your head.' And I said, 'That's what I would do if I were you, 'cause I know me!'"

Steinhart could take on six or more opponents and "destroy" them. He had the respect of the Hessians; he taught them how to use martial arts, and he rode along with them on his big hog of a bike, his long hair streaming behind him. He always had a woman, or two or three.

But things started turning sour on Steinhart toward the end of 1987. "I was getting arrested for stupid drug beefs. I had no wife, no kida"I'd lost them. I had no place to live. I was burned-out. I always had girls who were willing to pay my way, but..."

Steinhart wanted to do "one big thing to pay for my kid," but he had somehow lost his timing, or maybe only his taste for the game.

On Christmas Eve, 1988, the newly arrested Richard Steinhart recalled that he just wanted to "mind my own business. I got my stuff and I went right to my cell that first night in there. I came out in the morning. See, there's a pecking system in the IRC. So I sat at the lowest table, kept my head down; I didn't want to mess with n.o.body." Steinhart had been booked into David Brown's module. By this time, David had been in the Orange County Jail for three months and had long since bribed and bragged his way to the head table.

Jail and prison culture sp.a.w.ns nicknames. Steinhart answered to "Goldie" when he was in jail. Other inmates were called Mouse and c.o.c.kroach and Shadow. It guaranteed a kind of anonymity. Outside this raucous boys club they lived in another world with other names.

The IRC prisoners called Brown "Dave" to his face; behind his back, they called him Hunchy for the awkward, hunchbacked stance he took when playing handball, his omnipresent cigarette clenched between his lips, or "Thurston Howell III" for the rich castawaya"played by Jim Backusa"in the television series "Gilligan's Island." David hated being called Thurston. But he had been quick to let his jail mates know that he was a tremendously wealthy man. They deferred to him, even as they scorned him.

"I remember the first time I talked to Dave," Steinhart recalled. "I'd been sitting there keeping quiet, but these guys were talking, pretending they knew karate and martial arts and everything. I was trying to keep my mouth shut, but it got my professional goat. Finally, I stood up and said, 'This is how you do it,' and went ka-ba-boom! The guy went, 'Arrghh,' and went down, of course, and Brown looks up and whistles and says, 'Hey, this is my kind of guy'a"and invites me over to the head table."

Christmas Day dinner in the Orange County Jail.

Steinhart's "victim" got up from the floor holding his neck and muttering. The guards politely asked Steinhart not to demonstrate martial arts. "You move so fast, Richard; we don't know if you're just fooling around or . .."

He nodded. They had a point, and he wasn't about to make the guards nervous.

Steinhart peeled his tangerine and observed the squat, pale man who had been so impressed with his physical prowess. This guy was no athlete. Steinhart saw at once that Brown was naive in the ways of the con, how he longed to be one of the boys.

"I watched him and studied him and saw that David Brown did not have a real friend in the worlda"probably never had. He was the abused little rag dolla"the one with one eyea"that the little girl gets mad at and socks a little bit, and then she goes and hugs the pretty dolls. David appeared to be that kind of person. Very vulnerable as far as being streetwisea"but a ruthless, ruthless, person. Serious obsession. There was a very ruthless person inside."

Steinhart, operating then as the con man's con, knew.

Steinhart was looking for a chicken ripe for plucking, and the word in the module was that Brown was loaded. He was putting money on the books of many of the prisonersa"for favors. Some bought him extra candy bars and cigarettes. (David went through his ration in no time.) Some hinted they might be able to help him win his case. For whatever reason, men with no money on their books suddenly had $10 to $50 deposited to their accounts by Arthur Brown (who used a number of transparent aliases). David convinced his family that his life was in danger, and that it was necessary to buy "protection" from other prisoners. Not until the advent of Richard Steinhart, however, had David found a man in whom he placed his full trust.

"David really opened up to me," Steinhart recalled. "And me just being mea"from a professional side. See, you have to rise or lower yourself to the occasion and be what you have to be to any man to get what you can get out of ita"whatever role-playing it calls for. It keeps you alive."

Another prisoner, Irv Cully*, who wore the "jacket" of a snitch, hovered obsequiously by David Brown's side. Cully had sat with David at the head table on Christmas Day because he had "seniority"; he had been there longer than anyone. When Steinhart joined their exclusive little group, he sensed he was in the presence of jailhouse power. "They had some little plan goinga"I didn't pay too much attention," Steinhart remembered. "Something with Cully and his girl, Doreena*."

Steinhart "worked" David Brown, listened with pretended fascination to his stories about his business successes, his great wealth, his women. He responded in just the way he knew would please Brown. He perceived that David longed to be a real man, macho, respected in jail. David, in turn, admired Steinhart, who came complete with his own set of war stories.

By the time Patti Bailey testified in January, virtually blowing David out of the water with her bleak confidences, David was ready to employ desperate measures. For the first time, perhaps, he realized that he might not be acquitted. His own attorney had warned him how good Jeoff Robinson was, filling him in on Robinson's track record.

It was unthinkable that David should go to prison. He had always told Cinnamon and Patti, "Keep me out of this." He had meant to be only the puppeteer, not a partic.i.p.ant. He hadn't the stomach for up-close violence, and his health was far too fragile for him actually to serve time.

David didn't want to go to trial and have Jeoff Robinson cross-examine him. Nor did he want Jay Newell sniffing around anymore. Newell had found out things about his very private life that David thought he had covered over years ago.

Not to worry. David had a new best buddy who was going to take care of his problems. Richard Steinhart. Steinhart had convinced him that he could do anythinga"for a pricea"and what he couldn't do, he had the connections to have done. David and Steinhart planned how to raise money, escape, wreak revenge, and find a new life far away on another continent. "There was no emotion involved," Steinhart explained. "I wasn't his 'friend.' You might say I was an acquaintance. But he was talking big, big, serious money. Was I going to do what he wanted me to? h.e.l.l, yes. For three hundred thousand dollars, I was going to do it."

With Cully eavesdropping like some misplaced d.i.c.kensian toady, David approached Steinhart with plans. Steinhart hinted that he might be released at any moment, and David needed a good man on the outside. "David started talking about arsona"to begin with," Steinhart recalled. "He wanted me to torch his motor home and the house. I was going to do that first."

Seeing Steinhart's apparent a.s.sent, David pushed a bit further. "Then he started with, 'What about an escape plan for getting out?' I just threw some stuff at hima"just to keep him shut up," Steinhart said. "But then he started talking about escaping while he was at his dentist's office. Now, I'm serious, 'cause that can be done. I told him fifty thousand dollars, 'cause my buddies have enough loyalty to mea"I'd planned on thata"that they'd do it for me for free."

Each time Steinhart agreed to one of David's devious scenarios, the plans escalated. Soon, David had a four-phase program: he wanted his motor home and the Chantilly Street property burned for the insurance moneya"so that he could pay Steinhart; he wanted an escape plan in place when he visited his dentist; and he wanted three, perhaps five, people dead execution style. Any law enforcement officers who got in the way, would be, of course, expendable.

Once all this was accomplished, David would dispatch Steinhart to the desert where he said he had $3 million buried, and the two of them would head for Australia. David said he owned twenty-five acres of land there; they would ride into the outback, two on a motorcycle, free at last. They would eat all the pizza they wanted and drink all the beer they could hold.

The escape plan was doable. But if it should somehow fall through, and David did have to go to trial, the next phase would become operative. The two men and one woman David Brown hated and feared most in the world would be dead. Jeoff Robinson and Jay Newell would be first to die in David's plan. Then he wanted Patti, his treacherous wife, dead. He had no use for her; she was an anchor dragging him down.

David held fourth and fifth and even sixth possible victims in abeyance. One of the two hits on hold was Brenda Brown Sands and her second husband. David had warned Brenda he would never forgive her for having a baby with another man. It didn't matter that he had had five wives since Brenda, two babies, and countless s.e.xual contacts. Victim five (and possibly six) was to be at least one of the Bailey brothersa"Larry and/or Alana"whom David had come to detest.

"I was going to do it," Steinhart recalled. "It was no job for amateurs. I used to hate amateurs. . . . See, a professional will do it any way you want it to look. You can make a hit look like a gang did ita"you do a drive-by. You can make it look black or Aryan Brotherhood or like some weirdo flake did it."

Richard Steinhart was prepared to do what he had to doa"including arson, murder, and aiding and abetting escapea"to get his hands first on the $300,000 David promised for the job, and then to go with David into the desert and find the boulder hiding $3 million. With his share of that, he could travel far, leaving behind the life that was rapidly closing in on him.

But Richard Steinhart had a stubborn, annoying streak of decency running through him, no matter how hard he tried to eradicate it. It surprised him, but he found it difficult to remain detached from David Brown. The guy was slime.

"I picked up a newspaper one daya"I read about what David had done, the s.e.xual molestation and stuff, and it just struck me in the hearta"that piece of kaka. It really disturbed my spirit." Steinhart grimaced. "I had the full intention of when we got him out for the escapea"getting him over in Australia, have the plane set, the monies transferred for cash reserves and alla"of taking him to the outback, and he'd have been 'out back' with Crocodile Dundee somewhere being gator bait, 'cause I'd have took that three million dollars and buried him there and came back to the United States. With enough money, you don't need pa.s.sports or IDs or anything, and I wasn't really that concerned about coming back."

The more Steinhart read and heard about David Brown, the more revulsion he felt. He was admittedly no angel, but hea"like all consa"had his own ethical limits.