Cinnamon Brown Murder: How David Brown Manipulated a Child to Kill

The Cinnamon Brown murder case began on March 19, 1985, when 14-year-old Cinnamon Brown shot and killed her 23-year-old stepmother, Linda Brown, in the family’s Garden Grove, California home. Cinnamon confessed, was convicted in juvenile court, and sent to a youth detention facility. The truth took nearly four years to surface: her father, David Arnold Brown, had spent months grooming his daughter and his teenage sister-in-law into committing the killing so he could collect more than $800,000 in life insurance.¹

The Night Linda Brown Was Killed

Linda Marie Brown, David Brown’s fifth wife, was shot twice in the abdomen with a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver while she slept in the couple’s rented home on Ocean Breeze Drive.² The shooter was Cinnamon. David’s 17-year-old sister-in-law, Patti Bailey, who was Linda’s own younger sister, helped carry out the act.¹

David had staged the scene carefully. He was not home when police arrived, having left to buy comic books and a pie at a convenience store to establish an alibi. When he returned, he played the grief-stricken husband, telling officers he had left the house because of bickering between his wife and daughter.³ Officers found Cinnamon in the backyard doghouse, near-comatose and lying in her own vomit from pain pills her father had given her. In her hand was a suicide note tied with ribbon that read, “Dear God, please forgive me. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”⁴

The plan was for the killing to look like the act of a disturbed teenager who had then tried to take her own life. It nearly worked.

How David Brown Groomed a Child Into Killing

David spent roughly six months preparing Cinnamon and Patti. He told them, again and again, that Linda and her twin brother were plotting to kill him for his money and his business. The murder, he said, was protection.⁵ He assured Cinnamon that because of her age, she would face almost no consequences — maybe a few sessions with a psychiatrist, then home. “If you love me, you’ll do this for me,” he told her, according to her later testimony.⁶

Over those months, Brown discussed various ways to kill Linda, including pushing her from a moving van, electrocution, and blunt force. He settled on shooting. He coached Cinnamon on how to muffle the gun with a pillow, had her practice writing suicide notes that were later flushed or burned, and showed her how to mix pills to fake a suicide attempt.⁶ On the night itself, he woke Cinnamon and told her, “It has to be done tonight.”⁷

Patti Bailey had originally been designated as the one to pull the trigger, but she backed out at the last moment. David turned to Cinnamon. The first attempt failed when the pillow meant to muffle the sound snagged in the gun’s hammer. Cinnamon fired again, and Linda died.³

Brown’s manipulation of Patti ran deeper still. He had been sexually abusing her since she was 11, when she lived with him and Linda.⁸ He promised to marry her once Linda was out of the way, and he did, secretly marrying her in 1986, barely a year after the killing.¹

The Insurance Money

In the months before Linda’s death, David had taken out multiple life insurance policies on her. Authorities later determined he collected $842,793 in proceeds from at least four policies: $100,000 from National Life, $100,000 from New York Life, $350,000 from Capital Life (including a $150,000 accidental death benefit), and a $73,750 settlement from Liberty Life, which had a pending $200,000 application at the time of the murder.¹ Prosecutors would later file a special allegation that the killing was for financial gain, a circumstance that can carry the death penalty under California law.⁹

Within five months of Linda’s death, David paid $350,000 in cash for a large home in Anaheim Hills, where he moved in with Patti.¹⁰ That spending, while his daughter sat in detention taking the fall, would eventually help undo him.

How the Case Unraveled

Cinnamon confessed and was convicted in juvenile court. She received 27 years to life and was sent to the Ventura School, a California Youth Authority facility in Camarillo.² For nearly four years she stayed silent about her father’s role, believing his promises that he was working to get her out and that Patti would eventually confess.¹

Investigators had been suspicious from the beginning. Testing at the time of the murder showed that only David or Patti could have handled the weapon, and the scene never quite fit.² Orange County District Attorney investigator Jay Newell kept the case open, watching David collect insurance money and tracking Cinnamon in detention.¹¹

By 1988 Cinnamon had learned that her father had taken the insurance payout, moved into a mansion, and secretly married Patti. She contacted the district attorney’s office.⁷ In August 1988, Newell wired her for sound during prison visits with her father and captured incriminating conversations on August 13 and August 27. About three weeks later, David Brown and Patti Bailey were arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.²

The Jailhouse Murder-for-Hire Plot

Brown’s response to being arrested was to try to kill the people building the case against him. While awaiting trial in the Orange County jail in early 1989, he recruited a fellow inmate, Richard Steinhart, offering at least $30,000 — $10,000 per target — to murder Deputy District Attorney Jeoffrey Robinson, investigator Jay Newell, and Patti Bailey. Brown told Steinhart he had $500,000 buried in the desert to fund the operation. He also wanted Steinhart to burn his Anaheim home and help him escape.¹²

Another inmate, Joseph Drake, overheard the discussions and tipped off authorities. Steinhart agreed to cooperate and participated in dozens of recorded phone calls with Brown. In one, Steinhart said the targets had been killed: “Bang, bang — right in the back of the head.” Brown replied, “Wonderful! You’re a good man.” Brown had his brother Tom deliver $11,700 in cash to Steinhart, with another $10,000 on the day of the supposed hits. Much of the money came from a trust fund overseen by Brown’s defense attorney.¹³

Brown pleaded guilty to the solicitation charges in July 1990 and received a six-year sentence to run concurrently with whatever he received in the murder case.¹⁴ The recordings also came in at his murder trial, admitted as evidence of character and consciousness of guilt.

The Trial and Conviction

David Brown’s murder trial took place in 1990 in Santa Ana before Orange County Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin. Deputy District Attorney Jeoffrey Robinson prosecuted the case, the same man Brown had tried to have killed.¹¹

The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of Cinnamon and Patti, the secretly recorded conversations from both the 1988 prison visits and the 1989 murder-for-hire plot, and the insurance records. Cinnamon’s testimony was the centerpiece. By then 19, she spoke in a faint, childlike voice barely audible from the stand and avoided her father’s gaze for nearly four hours. She described how David had told her Linda was trying to kill him, assured her she was too young to face real punishment, and walked her through months of planning. “I was willing to do it because I loved him,” she told the court. “I didn’t want to lose him.”⁷

Defense attorney Gary Pohlson argued that Cinnamon was testifying in hopes of early release, which she denied, and that the prosecution’s case depended on witnesses who had received deals in exchange for cooperation.⁶

In June 1990, the jury convicted Brown of first-degree murder and made a specific finding that he had killed Linda for financial gain. At sentencing on September 17, 1990, Judge McCartin imposed life in prison without the possibility of parole. He refused to strike the financial gain finding, pointing to the $835,000 Brown had collected from Linda’s insurance, and said that if prosecutors had sought the death penalty, he “might well have sent him to the gas chamber.”¹⁵ On April 23, 1992, the California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, affirmed the conviction in full.¹

What Happened to Cinnamon, Patti, and David

Patti Bailey pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in juvenile court in May 1989 in exchange for her cooperation and testimony. She was sentenced to less than four years in a California Youth Authority facility, with her record to be sealed and cleared upon release at or before age 25.¹⁶ While incarcerated, she filed for divorce from David Brown.¹⁷

Cinnamon was denied early release by the state youth parole board in early 1991, became eligible for parole in March 1992, and would have qualified for mandatory release on her 25th birthday in July 1995.¹⁸ She was paroled in late February 1992, having served seven years, and was preparing for a clerical job in Orange County at the time of her release.¹⁹

David Brown spent the rest of his life in prison. He died of natural causes on March 20, 2014, in the prison hospital at California State Prison, Corcoran, at age 61, housed in a protective unit.¹⁰

1
Findlaw. People v. Brown
2
Los Angeles Times. Man, Woman Are Charged in 1985 Garden Grove Slaying
3
Los Angeles Times. The Brown Case
4
Los Angeles Times. The Brown Case
5
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Los Angeles Times. Daughter Tells of Dad’s Role in Murder Plot
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Los Angeles Times. Brown’s Daughter Testifies Against Father
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Los Angeles Times. The Brown Case
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CBS News. Man Who Plotted Wife’s 1985 Murder Dies at 61
11
Los Angeles Times. Investigator Cracked the Brown Murder Case
12
Los Angeles Times. Brown Charged With Soliciting Murders
13
Los Angeles Times. Taped Jailhouse Calls Detail Brown Murder Plot
14
Los Angeles Times. Brown Pleads Guilty in Murder-for-Hire Plot
15
Los Angeles Times. Brown Sentenced to Life Without Parole
16
Los Angeles Times. Bailey Pleads Guilty to Murder in Juvenile Court
17
Chicago Tribune. Parental Trust Takes Heavy Hit
18
Los Angeles Times. Cinnamon Brown Denied Early Release
19
Los Angeles Times. Cinnamon Brown Paroled