Man Convicted Of Persuading His Daughter To Kill His Wife

SANTA ANA, Calif. - A millionaire computer entrepreneur who prosecutors say persuaded his 14-year-old daughter to kill his wife and then take sole responsibility for the crime has been found guilty of first-degree murder for financial gain.

Cinnamon Brown served nearly four years at the California Youth Authority before telling authorities that her father, David Brown, 37, owner of Anaheim-based Data Recovery, had persuaded her to kill her stepmother, 24-year-old Linda Marie Brown, because as a juvenile she would probably get off without going to jail.

Since then the Brown case has taken other incredible turns.

David Brown married the victim's sister, Patty Bailey, who has since admitted involvement in the murder plot. And while David Brown was in the Orange County Jail awaiting trial, law enforcement authorities secretly recorded a plot in which he tried to arrange to murder three other people: Patty Bailey, who was by then a star witness against him, and the chief investigator and the lead prosecutor on his case.

The jurors deliberated just seven hours, an unusually short time in a murder trial. But during five weeks of testimony, they had listened for several days to secretly taped conversations of Brown. In one of them, while he was visiting Cinnamon Brown in prison, he told his daughter that, if she ever told the truth, ``then we'd all go to jail.''

``The key evidence against David Brown was not his daughter, or

his (current) wife, but his own words,'' said Deputy District Attorney Jeoffrey Robinson, who was one of Brown's targets.

The jurors' finding Friday that Brown arranged his wife's death to gain $835,000 in life insurance automatically elevates his possible sentence from one of 25 years to life, the standard for first-degree murder, to life in prison without parole.

Superior Judge Donald McCartin set sentencing for Aug. 22.

Brown showed no reaction to the verdict.

His attorney, Gary Pohlson, said he and co-counsel Richard Schwartzberg had told Brown he probably would be found guilty.

``We were faced with three days of tapes we had no defense to,'' Pohlson said.

Brown's daughter, Cinnamon, is still serving a sentence at the California Youth Authority for the March 19, 1985, shooting death of Linda Marie Brown, the defendant's wife at the time. Patty Bailey is also in prison after pleading guilty to involvement in the murder. She was 17 at the time of the shooting and is also at the Youth Authority.