If You Really Loved Me (27 page)

Robinson could be a juggernaut. He was fiercely competitive. To almost everyone but defense attorneys, he was immensely likable. Intense and quick-thinking on his feet, he was also possessed of a comedic view of life that endeared him to juries—if not always to judges. One of his trials involved thirty motions for mistrial and so many bench conferences that Robinson quipped, "I could wear out my shoes this way, back and forth, back and forth." The judge frowned, and the defense attorney shouted for yet another mistrial.

At the same trial, the opposing attorney was given to references to his wife, and how he had discussed the case with his wife only the night before, giving the impression of his loving, stable home life. Robinson, a reluctant bachelor, looked at the jury with a mournful glance and said, "If I
had
a wife, I could ask her."

A juror in the back row, carried away with sympathy and the impulse to matchmake, cried out, "I don't have a daughter, but I have a granddaughter you'd love!"

Again, everyone—but the judge and the defense team— thought it was hilarious.

Jeoff Robinson had won fifty of his fifty-one felony cases. (He had one hung jury, but he went back and won that one too, second time around.) In short, he was a maverick. He respected the law, and he respected the truth and aimed for what was morally right. He might, however, seek out moral and legal truth in his own unique fashion.

This was the kind of DDA Newell needed. If he could persuade Jeoff Robinson to reopen the Brown case, they would have a triumvirate who were superb in their jobs, and who were all known to fight like tigers: Fred McLean, Jay Newell, and Jeoff Robinson. As different as three men could be from one another, but each of them obsessed with revealing a long-hidden truth. Newell liked the sound of it and headed from his office to the DA's Homicide Unit.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office was huge, both physically and in terms of personnel. The offices were spread out like rabbit warrens on both the first and second floor of the courthouse. Nobody beyond the district attorney's own staff, and the detectives who came there with cases to review, could find his way out—
if
he managed to get inside. The entrance to the District Attorney's Office was on the second floor, but once through the locked door behind the receptionists' desks, the uninitiated faced a bewildering network of hallways, offices, stairwells, and hidden doors. It was just as well; Orange County DAs had their share of threats. The maze they worked in allowed them to come and go at will, using elevators and exits that appeared to have nothing to do with the District Attorney's Office.

At full strength, there were 175 deputy district attorneys, and 140 district attorney's investigators. That much investigative assistance was a situation unheard of in most areas, but Orange County gave their deputy DAs exceptional support.

Homicide DAs occupied the first floor of the Orange County Courthouse; their offices were eight-by-ten cubbyholes tucked here and there, well off the beaten path. Jeoff Robinson's office was a mess. There was no way to cushion the description; his surroundings plainly did not reflect the precise organization of his thoughts. He was always on the verge of cleaning his office up, but he was also always in trial, preparing for trial, or waiting for a verdict, or—to ease the tension—running or playing basketball. Robinson
liked
to run, and sometimes Newell would run along with him, bored, because that was often the only time they had to discuss the fine points of a case.

Files and books and papers and who knows what covered every surface of Robinson's office. His phone-message spike still had calls from March 1988—which he insisted he had answered. A sign on the wall read "I hate USC!" and tickets to a Jimmy Buffett concert were taped to that. A gym bag stuffed with jogging clothes blocked easy access to his desk. Robinson's passions.

There was a photograph on one wall of Robinson digging for a missing body, caught unaware by some phantom lensman. Underneath, there were three dozen or so suggested captions, most of them obscene, from fellow deputy district attorneys. It was quite possible that there was, indeed, a law degree somewhere in the clutter. It was also possible there was a telephone somewhere on the DDA's desk.

It didn't really matter; Robinson was a man in constant motion who walked on the balls of his feet—like an Indian or like the athlete that he was—moving through the two floors of the Orange County District Attorney's Office. Receptionists usually paged him before they even tried to ring his office. They knew he wouldn't be there. And if he was, he took pride in having the most difficult office to locate in the whole maze of homicide prosecutors' cubicles.

His name was not on the door, but there was a page from a court transcript with a judge's oblique ruling: "Whether or not Mr. Robinson is a buffoon has no bearing on this case."

"I didn't put it there," Robinson said. "My door is known as a repository for the inane. I never know what's going to get tacked up there."

In 1981, Jeoff Robinson promised that he would stay with the Orange County DAs Office for at least two years. Seven years later, he was still there, happily entrenched.

His first homicide case was the nightmare that any prosecuting attorney dreads. He had to prosecute an elderly man who had shot his wife because she was dying of a terminal illness and in terrible pain. "How was I going to get that poor old man up there and cross-examine him?" Robinson asked. "I didn't want to,
I
felt sorry for him. And any jury with half a heart would too. Together with defense counsel, we came up with a way out—after many hours of collaboration.
The dead wife was the one who had actually pulled the trigger.
The defendant only helped the victim hold her finger on the gun's trigger. We were able to get the charge lowered to "aiding and abetting a suicide."

A convicted rapist who had served four years for his alleged crime had his conviction reversed when Robinson read the case and saw a number of flaws. "It appeared the man was innocent," Robinson recalled. "1 went to his attorney—who happened to be Al Forgette—and asked if I could talk to the man, with the stipulation that his client's answers could never be used against him.

"It had been a very brutal gang rape of a couple on the beach. This man was the only one caught and convicted, and I believed there were others involved who were still free. It turned out this man had been dead drunk, dressed just like the actual rapists were, and the victims misidentified him. Unfortunately, he took the rap at trial. We were able to find and convict the half dozen
real
rapists—just six months before the statute of limitations ran out."

An innocent man was set free, but woe be unto the guilty defendant who came up against Robinson in court.

Jay Newell had never had occasion to work with Jeoff Robinson. But he wanted to. "The Cinnamon Brown case was so darned intriguing to anyone who started looking into it. I couldn't let go of it, Fred McLean couldn't let go of it, and I was counting on it hitting Jeoff the same way."

Robinson was semiprepared for a visit. Bryan Brown, the chief trial deputy in charge of the DA's Homicide Unit warned him that there might be an old case coming back—"a 1985 conviction." Brown mentioned no names.

"I was wary," Robinson admitted. "I wondered what this 'hummer' was that I was about to be taken in on." When Jay Newell came padding down the hallway with his request, Robinson had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. "He started laying out this Brown case for me, and I could see the work that would be involved, and I'm wondering why reopen something that's dead and buried. I was listening to Jay and thinking, 'This one's no slam dunk. This one could be trouble.' "

Robinson sat behind his desk and listened to Newell for fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. "At about half an hour," he admitted, "I began to get excited. I thought I could smell miscarriage of justice. With that, he had me hooked."

As Gary Pohlson, a much-respected defense attorney and frequent opponent commented wryly, "Robinson will prosecute
anything.
Just toss him any case at all and he'll go for it. And he wins."

That was not quite true. Although he would be loath to admit it, Jeoff Robinson had a wide streak of "crusader" running through him. "I was getting fired up, listening to Newell. I'd rather take on a case that is morally offensive— yet tough—than a sure thing. As far as I'm concerned, I could lose the next ten cases, and I wouldn't care. Not because I like to lose, but because I guess I want to be part of doing the 'romantic' part of what's right. That's the great part of this job! This one cried out for the prosecution to ride in and save the innocent and punish the guilty."

Newell outlined his surveillances of David Brown and Patti Bailey, the phone conversation with Cinnamon. If what Newell believed was true, Robinson was a natural for this case. "I want to prosecute the worst kind of criminal," Robinson explained. "This may sound odd—but I have more respect for a bank robber who goes in and sticks a gun in a teller's face and asks for money, who is, in his own way,
truthful
and up-front about what he does, than I do for a white-collar criminal who pretends to be one thing and is something else. I am
offended
by moral crimes."

If Cinnamon Brown had taken the rap and long incarceration for someone else, this moldering 1985 case that Jay Newell was so obsessed with seemed to Robinson to be the most heinous of moral crimes.
Yes!
Yes, he would take it on. But he warned Newell that they had absolutely nothing at the moment. There was no way that he could reopen the case on Cinnamon's word alone. "I told him I was going to ask for more—and then more—and more and more."

Jay Newell knew he couldn't do all the legwork and all the investigating by himself. Fred McLean was no longer assigned to the Garden Grove detective unit, and Newell had to figure a way to get him back on the team. He went to McLean's old sergeant, who went to his new lieutenant. Would they cut McLean loose from his new detail for a while? Fortunately, they agreed. Nobody knew the 1985 case the way McLean and Newell did. In order to reconstruct it, it would take both of them.

Impatiently, the two of them—and Jeoff Robinson—had to wait for a go-ahead from the upper echelons of the Orange County District Attorney's Office. They could do no more until they had that. Newell could not even go up to the Ventura School and talk to Cinnamon.

It was the longest three weeks of Jay Newell's life. He got his permission to pursue the case. But even with all he and McLean had learned in the more than three years since Linda Brown's murder, neither they nor Robinson knew how complex the case would become.

25

J
ust after sunrise on August 10, 1988, Jay Newell and Fred McLean were on their way to the Ventura School to talk to Cinnamon. Her phone call had provided them with enough information to get
this
far, on the road headed north. They had no idea what she was going to say, but they would be able to watch her face as she spoke, to evaluate her body language.

It was quite possible she only wanted to get out of prison—but neither McLean nor Newell truly believed that was Cinnamon's reason for calling. More likely, the secrets she had held on to so tightly had begun to burn. And she was probably angry. That was good; justifiable rage almost always brought forth the truth.

It was early when they drove through the gates at Ventura School, the August morning cool before the heat of the day to come. Cinnamon was still asleep when they arrived. Her work schedule on the TWA flight reservations line kept her up very late at night. They waited, and when she finally appeared, both Newell and McLean were stunned by the vast change in her appearance, her bearing. Cinnamon had dressed carefully, as if she were applying for a job and not meeting with detectives to discuss a long-ago murder. She had been short and a little chubby; now she was very slender. The pudgy cheeks were gone; the planes of her face were sculpted and enhanced with subtle, skillfully applied makeup.

McLean, especially, had difficulty equating this young woman with the scared, sick child he had pulled from the filthy doghouse three and a half years earlier.
That
Cinnamon had given him a confession he had never really believed, and then she had faded on him. All these years, he had been poised, waiting for the rest of the story; he had not realized how much so until this moment.

It was 11:37 on that Wednesday morning when Newell began the first tape. He had explained to Cinnamon that she needed no attorney. She had already been convicted of the homicide they would be discussing. She could not now be placed in double jeopardy. In other words, she could not be convicted
twice
for the same murder.

Again, Newell stressed that neither he nor McLean could promise her anything for the information she chose to give to them. No deals. No expectations of an earlier release from prison.

Cinnamon nodded. She understood that she would be flying without a net. It didn't matter.

Newell wanted to take Cinnamon back, figuratively through a tunnel of time, to elicit total recall of the events of early 1985, if that was possible. "First of all," he began softly, "put your mind back a couple of years ago when all this happened, to a point where you can even remember what the weather was like ... it may be so insignificant that you don't think we even need to know . . . What were you wearing, whether or not the grass was mowed, how the air smelled . . . how old were you?"

"Fourteen . . ."

Cinnamon had seen only the most rudimentary reports on her case, and that had been two years ago—the files kept on her at CYA. She had seen no newspaper accounts. She had not seen her attorney since her trial, and even then, she said, "Mr. Forgette didn't let me read anything pertaining to my case."

"You haven't refreshed your memory in any way then— other than by just thinking about it?"

She shook her head. "Just thinking about it. Trying to go back, because I've pitched it out of the way so far. Like I was told to—and I pitched it out so far that it got out of touch with me. I almost started believing it myself."

Newell laid down five proof sheets of photos of the exterior of the house and yard at Ocean Breeze Drive. Cinnamon identified the small frames easily, tapping them with one long, perfectly manicured fingernail. She pointed to the aqua and white travel trailer. "That's where I was told to stay."

She identified each picture, all correctly. The green house was caught in her memory, as much as she had tried to forget it.

"Why don't you just start anywhere," Newell suggested. "Tell us what you remember about the incident—leading up to it, that day, and from then on."

Cinnamon took a deep breath. "Well ... I was in the living room one day with my father and Patricia. Patti had left to go to the kitchen—we had a dining room before you would reach the kitchen—and she stopped there by the door. . . . She goes,
'Shhh!'
so I was quiet."

Patti had stood frozen for minutes. When she came back to the living room, she looked perplexed. "I just heard the strangest thing," she said. She told Cinnamon and David that she had overheard a phone conversation between Linda and her twin brother, Alan. She said it sounded as if they were planning to kill David.

Cinnamon had laughed, but Patti was adamant. "She goes, 'No, I'm
serious. . . .
Linda was talking to Alan about
killing
David!' My dad goes, 'What have you been smoking in the kitchen?' but she goes, 'I'm serious.'"

Cinnamon said David sighed and asked Patti what she had heard, but she had seemed very upset and said she couldn't discuss it in the house because Linda might overhear. "And I was saying, 'She's pulling your leg—she wants attention,' and after a while Linda came out and everything was okay. She told me to go get ready for dinner."

"Do you have a time frame?" Newell asked. "How long was this before Linda was killed?"

". . . At least seven months before."

The subject was dropped for the evening, but David had brought it up again the next day when he, Patti, and Cinnamon were going to the chiropractor. (They all had been in an earlier accident.)

"Patti said that Linda was going to kill my father to get him out of the way." Cinnamon said she could not believe it. She had looked at Linda later and thought, "Linda wouldn't say something like that. I was thinking, like, because she was so pretty. . . . No, Patti's hallucinating."

Cinnamon had tried to write it off as a practical joke. "Our family's a big bunch of practical jokers."

But the terror had begun. David said he
knew
Linda was going to try to kill him. "My father kept saying, 'Just believe me. I'm your father. I know she is trying to kill me.' "

From that point on, David had been in "almost a paranoid state," and he had come to Cinnamon often and said, "Linda's going to try to kill me."

Cinnamon didn't know how to respond. She was afraid to discuss her father's fears with her mother because she didn't want it to get back to David. She was frightened of David. He could get so angry.

It was during this period that Cinnamon had seen her father kissing Patti in the store. That made her even more confused. Linda was being so nice to her, so worried about Cinnamon's sadness. But Cinnamon certainly couldn't tell Linda about her father and Patti kissing.

She couldn't tell anyone.

"The next thing I remember happening that concerns the case is me being out in the van with my father and Patti. My father just got back from Randomex, and we were going to cash his check. ... I heard Patti talking to my father about
'we have to get rid of her.
'... My father was all—'I don't know how we're going to do it.' I sort of oozed into the next seat behind them, and my father looked back at me and he goes, 'What did you hear?' . . . and he said, 'You probably heard it already, so just sit there.' "

Newell darted a glance at McLean. The story was bizarre, but it had the ring of truth to it. Neither man had to say more than a word or two to keep it flowing. Cinnamon had held it in so long.

Patti reminded Cinnamon of the phone call she had overheard. "Well," Patti said, "I heard them again . . . and they said they were going to kill your father . . . this time, they're serious."

Cinnamon was hard to convince. She argued that Patti couldn't have heard what was on the other end of the line—not with the speakerphones turned off—but Patti said, "I just know, and we have to get rid of her before she kills your father. . . . You don't
know
Linda. I know Linda. She's my sister."

And then David himself kept telling his fourteen-year-old daughter that he believed Linda was plotting to kill him. "Either we could get rid of Linda—or I could leave."

Cinnamon was appalled. "Why would you leave us? What are you talking about? Why don't you just get a divorce?"

Cinnamon had had precious little stability in her young life, and her father seemed to her then very strong, very loving, the one constant she could cling to. He had groomed her to be that way. The thought that he might leave her seemed more real, more threatening, than Patti's story of murder plots. He had already been divorced four times, she argued. One more wouldn't matter.

"No," David said. "She'll still kill me if I divorce her. . . . I'll just leave you guys with everything and take off and start over again."

"I said, 'I don't want you to leave me, Daddy. I don't want you to leave me . . . and he goes, 'I have to. Either that or we have to get rid of Linda.' "

"So I said, 'How can I help? Can I talk to her for you?' But he said, 'No, don't ever talk to her about what we talked to you about.'

"I said okay. And that's when I started listening to my father, and he started telling me things. And I was thinking that it was right—because I believed in my father."

The grotesque conversation continued as the van hurtled toward Garden Grove. David suggested that maybe they could just send Linda away, perhaps give her a lot of money and send her away.

"Patti said, 'No—that won't work. . . . We'd have to get rid of her. . . . We'd have to kill her,'" Cinnamon told Newell and McLean. "At that time, to me, that didn't seem like reality. It just seemed like Patti was talking. I said, 'How do you plan on killing her?' She goes, 'I've been thinking about that—maybe hitting her over the head.' And I go, 'With
what?'
She goes, 'With something hard,' and I said, 'Would that kill her?' She goes, 'I think so,' and my father butted in. He goes, 'Well, if she hits her hard enough in the right place, it would kill her.' "

Cinnamon still couldn't believe that they were talking about Linda, that Linda could possibly be a threat to anyone. It all seemed like a long-running sick joke. Her father was like that sometimes, thinking up weird practical jokes. She stared out the window.

"Patti goes, 'Do you have any suggestions?' "

"To kill somebody?" Cinnamon had asked, still thinking it was a game more than anything. "In the movies, I saw—in the bathtub, you throw an electrical appliance in there, but I'm not sure how good that works."

Patti had laughed and said, "No, no, no. We'd have a hard time getting Linda in the tub . . . she's always
showering. "

Cinnamon relaxed. It
was
a joke, after all. She moved back in the van and turned on her radio, ignoring her father and Patti. .

Newell asked her if they had talked about the subject of killing Linda in the house. Cinnamon said no; they were afraid of being overheard. She wasn't even sure how long it was before David brought it up again. She remembered they were in the car, going to the chiropractor.

"Who was there then?" Newell asked.

"It was me, Patti, and my father.

"My father said, 'Cinny, it has to happen immediately.' He just popped out of the blue with 'it has to happen immediately.' [He said,] 'We have to get rid of Linda as soon as possible. I just know she's going to kill me soon. We can't delay it anymore. It has to happen, like, right away.'

"Patti said, 'Yeah, it has to happen.'

"I was all, 'Well, how do you guys plan on doing it?' and he goes, 'We need your help.' "

Cinnamon closed her eyes, reliving the drive with Patti and David, repeating what he had said to her.

"He goes, 'Do you love me, Cinnamon?'

" 'I love you. Don't be stupid!' I said, and I hit him on the back of the head.

" 'Do you love me?' and I said, 'Of course I love you.'

" 'How
much
do you love me?'

"I said, 'I love you a lot. I love you more than anything.'

"And he goes, 'Would you do anything for me?'

"I said, 'Yeah, I'd do anything for you. I
love
you.'

" 'I want to make sure that you love me enough that you'll do anything for me.'

" 'Of course. Don't be ridiculous.' "

"I'm being serious with you," David had said.

"And I said, 'I'm being serious with you too.' Then I started getting emotional. I was figuring, oh, no, he's going to leave me. I know he's going to leave me! He goes, 'Ummm, I'm thinking about leaving.'

"'No, please don't leave,' and immediately, he goes, 'Well, then, how are you going to help me?' "

For an instant, Cinnamon remembered, she had felt as though she had just stepped through a door that had slammed shut behind her. And then she reassured herself that her father had always known what he was doing—that he was always in charge.

They rode along in silence for a long time, and she began to relax. It was the same sick joke again, some kind of test of her loyalty. Suddenly, her father spoke again. "I need you to help me. I need you to help me get rid of her."

"Do you want
me
to kill her?" Cinnamon had half-whispered.

"I want you to help, yes. And if you feel you have the stomach for it, I want you to do it."