Daughter Says She Murdered For Her Dad

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Avoiding her father's sharp gaze toward the witness box, a teen-ager testified yesterday that she gunned down her sleeping stepmother in their home five years ago because her father told her: ``If you love me, you'll do this for me.''

Cinnamon Brown, 19, of Garden Grove, Calif., recounted how her father allegedly reviewed details of the murder plan for months beforehand and then, in the early morning hours of March 19, 1985, awoke her and declared: ``It has to be done tonight.''

The young woman's testimony dominated the second day of the murder trial of her father, David Arnold Brown, 38, who is accused of planning his wife's killing.

Painting the father as a ``diabolical manipulator'' who set up his own daughter, prosecutors assert that David Brown wanted his wife dead so he could collect $835,000 in insurance and then secretly marry the victim's 17-year-old sister, Patti Bailey, who lived with the family.

Hours after the 1985 shooting death of Linda Brown, 24, Cinnamon, then 14, was found in the family's backyard doghouse, lying in a near-comatose state in her own vomit and clutching an apparent suicide note. Soon after, she was convicted of murder in juvenile court and sent to the California Youth Authority facility in Camarillo, where she has remained since.

For nearly four years after her stepmother's killing, under constant questioning from authorities, Cinnamon Brown kept silent about

it. But in late 1988, she changed her story and blamed her father.

Cinnamon Brown said her father, a former computer entrepreneur, convinced her that his wife wanted to kill him to get control of his million-dollar business.

Her stepmother had to be stopped before she could hurt her father, Cinnamon Brown said she believed at the time. But her father ``said he didn't have the stomach'' to kill the woman, she testified. She added that he promised that she would not spend any time behind bars for the murder because of her youth.

``I was too young to get in trouble - they would send me to a psychiatrist and send me home,'' she quoted her father as having told her.

David Brown, his daughter testified, went so far as to show her how to muffle the sounds of a .38-caliber gun with a pillow, how to write confession notes and how to fake suicide by taking pills he had given her - a dosage prosecutors say would have been lethal.

``I was willing to do it because I loved him,'' Cinnamon Brown testified. ``I didn't want to lose him.''