Twenty years later, there was awe in Brenda Kurges Brown Sands's voice as she spoke of having enough of anything she wanted to eat. And clothes . . . and movies . . . And someone to love her and take care of her. David sang along to Neil Diamond songs, and because she loved him, Brenda thought he was romantic, "but really, he couldn't sing that well."
David was funny too. He would tease Brenda when she was trying to discuss something seriously, saying, "Well, let's go ask Maynard."
"Maynard wasn't anybody but a joke David made up."
But even in that paradise of Aunt Sally's Guesthouse, there was a rude awakening. David discovered an odd little switchboard behind the bread box in the kitchen and soon deduced that anyone could listen in to activity in the different rooms and cottages by flipping a toggle switch. The system was designed to check on the welfare of the elderly guests, but David explained to Brenda that they were being spied on. Someone had been listening to them when they thought they were alone. The tone of his voice, the fear he conveyed to her, had a profound effect.
"We were scared," Brenda said, a shiver in her voice. "We began to think that the place was evil, that people had been listening to us and maybe watching us when we were in our room. One night, we were holding hands and walking to the store to buy some Ripple wine, and we could just feel hidden eyes looking at us."
David had always believed in evil forces and ghosts, and the more the two teenagers talked about it, the more they were afraid. "Finally, David just said, 'This place is evil,' and we called his parents and they came and got us and took us back to their house on M Street."
Brenda envied David the yellow house and his parents. "David said his mother beat him with the pipe of her vacuum cleaner, and that he was the 'black sheep' of his family—but I didn't believe it. I got along fine with his parents. They fed me, and they gave me a room to sleep in. Manuela was good to me. But David would tease her and call her stupid and say she didn't know nothing."
Even as a teenager, David was preoccupied with his health. He either believed, or wanted others to believe, that he was dying of cancer. He told Brenda that his colitis was just eating him up. She wasn't sure what colitis was, but it sounded deadly. "He always had the runs, and he was always sweaty and he got overheated so easy."
When David had his tonsils out—paid for by his parents' insurance—Brenda sat beside him, terrified that he would die in his sleep. Suddenly, he started throwing up blood, torrents of it. Brenda believed that he was in his death throes, the bloody fate David had always predicted. Panicked, Brenda ran for the nurses.
David had only coughed and ripped the stitches in his throat open. They took him back into surgery and repaired the damage. But the episode served to convince Brenda even more that David had only a tenuous hold on life.
David's health problems did not affect his sexuality. "He wanted sex three times a day," his first wife recalled. At the same time, David wanted his wife to appear circumspect, almost prim. "He wouldn't let me wear makeup."
David, who had no high school diploma, found his job opportunities limited to "good old fast foods—El Taco, Der Wiener Schnitzel—whatever it took to keep me and her fed." Then in the fall of 1969, Brenda and David traveled to Salt Lake City and stayed with Brenda's grandmother. David worked for one of her relatives who was building a house, and they spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in Utah, enjoying the snow, but also realizing that their economic situation wasn't much better in the Mormon community than it had been in California.
"We came back home on the bus, and we applied for welfare," Brenda said. "It bothered me. My mom lived on welfare, and I never wanted to do that. David hated it too." But they had little choice. Brenda was pregnant, an unplanned event that strained their bare-bones budget. They moved into a tiny apartment in Wilmington. Unwieldy and clumsy as only very small women can be in late pregnancy, Brenda nevertheless helped paint the house next door to earn extra money.
David said he pleaded with his family and hers for their permission to marry Brenda. At length, the families relented and signed their consents. David and Brenda were married in Los Angeles on May 13, 1970, and they moved into apartment E at 1474 Magnolia Avenue in Long Beach. Brenda went into labor on the first of July and spent two days alone with hard contractions at the Harbor General Hospital in Torrance. David had a weak stomach and couldn't bear the sight of blood, or the sounds of pain.
Their baby girl was born on July 3, 1970. She weighed six pounds, fifteen ounces. Her parents were four months short of their eighteenth birthdays.
They named her Cinnamon Darlene.
"It was pretty and it was different, and we wanted her to be special," Brenda recalled "In case she was ever famous, she would have that special name."
14
David was very proud of Cinnamon Dartene, and Brenda took innumerable snapshots of him cradling his baby girl in his arms. A coming-home-from-the-hospital picture of father and daughter, with David holding Cinnamon in front of his parents' house on M Street, as he stared into the sun. David and Cinnamon in front of a Christmas tree. David and Cinnamon at Disneyland. In those early days, his hair was thick and slicked back into a pompadour, and he had long sideburns and the half sneer/half smile so like Elvis's.
Cinnamon was a chubby, beautiful baby with huge brown eyes and thick dark hair who laughed all the time. Her daddy held her in another photo in their apartment on Magnolia. David stood in front of drapes patterned with yellow and avocado daisies.
He quickly became the center of Cinnamon's world. He made a concentrated effort, it would seem, to capture and hold her absolute devotion. He was the fun parent, the one who took her to Disneyland, who zoomed around the block with her on motorcycle rides as she squealed happily, who tickled her and teased her until she giggled.
Brenda did the "scut" work, the boring, tiresome part of parenting. She handled the discipline and she walked the floor with her sick baby. David was the parent with the fey sense of humor, the wit that Cinnamon would inherit. From the very beginning of her life, David programmed Cinnamon to believe that her daddy was the most wonderful, funniest, most powerful man in the world.
She adored him.
* * *
David Arnold Brown's ambition accelerated. He and Brenda were still on food stamps and received a partial grant of $235 a month from Aid to Dependent Children, Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.
He wanted more. So much more.
David enrolled in the WIN, Work Incentive Program, through the welfare department, a government program designed to train—or retrain—welfare recipients for the job market. He rapidly achieved his high school degree by taking the GED (general equivalency diploma) tests. In April of 1971, he received his scores:
Score
U.S. Percentile
Correctness of Effectiveness
of Expression:
55
69
Interpretation of
Reading Materials,
Social Studies:
58
79
Interpretation of
Reading Materials,
Natural Sciences:
53
62
Interpretation of
Literary Materials:
59
82
General Mathematical Ability:
53
62
David Brown, with only an eighth-grade education, scored well above seniors in a sample of 38,773 high schools in America. He was not a runaway genius, according to the GED tests, but he was smart. David wanted to be a computer technician and the WIN program agreed to send him to the Control Data Institute in Los Angeles. He had to wait almost a year before he actually began training at Control Data, and in the meantime, he applied for a number of jobs in the computer field. The rejection letters were all the same: "We do not have an opening commensurate with your background."
Despite insistence that he was in failing health, David was classified 1-A by
the Selective Service, Local Board 127, in Long Beach in July 1971. He requested a hearing in August, and whatever he told them worked. He never served in the military.
Brenda, David, and Cinnamon moved from the little upstairs Magnolia Avenue apartment in Long Beach to a larger one at 2162 Canton Street. David worked part-time pumping gas in a Mohawk station and commuted to work on a motorcycle. Later, he bought an older yellow Ford Galaxy from Arthur for $75. On a WIN form, he listed his last three jobs as a "materials handler" for a foam company, a carpenter/mason for a Lawndale builder, and a nonpaid data processor for a computer company.
"We went to Gold Key and bought furniture for the apartment on Canton Street," Brenda remembered. "I was the one who ended up paying it off. I liked that apartment. Later, David's mother borrowed the bedroom set, and I haven't seen it since, except for one chest I needed later."
The marriage was relatively happy, although David seemed determined to keep Brenda dependent upon him. They were much happier when she trusted only in him. He didn't even want her to have a driver's license. "He thought I was a dummy," Brenda said. "I asked a neighbor to teach me how to drive, and David was mad when I surprised him and showed him my license."
David wasn't physically violent with Brenda—not for a long time, and then only once. While they were living on Canton Street in Long Beach, he did beat her. She called her father-in-law. "I told Art and Art came over and told David, 'You lay a hand on her again, and I'll beat you up!' "
Arthur Brown's wrath had a significant effect on David.
They moved yet again, this time to a two-bedroom apartment on Juno Avenue in Anaheim. Their marriage was destined to be short, however—an estimation of its actual length depended on whether Brenda or David related the story. She said they were married about three years and David recalled it was five, although he admitted to an abysmal memory for dates, times, anniversaries. Since David was married to someone else by 1974, Brenda's recall appeared more accurate.
Brenda characterized David as totally, constantly consumed with women—all women. "He was oversexed. That's the only way I can say it. He was always leaning out of the car or turning around to look at women. He knew it made me mad, but he was obsessed. It didn't matter if they were young or old, or whatever. ... I just couldn't stand it." David, in turn, accused Brenda of infidelity and said she was violent and psychologically abused him.
Even though she and David had sex three times a day, she said he wasn't satisfied. "He still wanted more. He came to me and told me that he thought he'd gotten married too young and hadn't had enough sexual experience. He asked my permission to go out with a woman he'd met at work at Cal Comp in Anaheim. She was older and had two kids. I really tried to understand him, and his argument kind of made sense, so I said okay."
After that, there were trips overnight. David told his wife that he was going "deer hunting" with a male friend. She wasn't duped. "I knew it was a woman."
At the same time, David was still jealously possessive of Brenda. He forbade her to go to lunch with her coworkers and when she defied him, accused her of infidelity. Brenda recalled her shock one day in 1974 as she stood frozen at the entry to a local café. Her husband was sitting in a booth, his hands caressing another woman. It was the first time she had actually seen him with someone else, and it hurt her badly.
Her name was Lori. "She was a plain girl—slender," Brenda said. "I asked him about it and he said he was working." She knew he was lying.
Soon after, when Brenda was working a Saturday shift in her office job and David was taking care of Cinnamon, he brought the child in and plopped her down, saying, "You take her—I'm busy." Brenda asked Cinnamon what they had been doing. "She told me she'd been riding on a motorcycle with 'Daddy and a girl.' I thought she meant one of her little friends, but she said, 'No a big girl—for Daddy.' It was Lori."
Shortly after that, David brought Lori home to the apartment he shared with Brenda. He had divorce papers in his hand. He gave them to Brenda and announced he wanted custody of Cinnamon. "He introduced Lori to me by saying, This is the woman I'm going to marry.' " Brenda refused to divorce David, thinking that he would tire of Lori.
David, of course, remembered a different scenario. He insisted that he met Lori Carpenter at work at Century Data. She was an assembler on the line, "just a friend" who comforted him when Brenda was unfaithful to him. "My sister caught her cheating on me. I just packed my clothes and took the car and left everything to her. That divorce really tore me up."
Whichever version was true, the brief marriage was clearly in its death throes, and at some point as their relationship unraveled, Brenda became eerily afraid of David. "I don't know why, but Í had this terrible fear that he was going to smother me to death with a pillow while I was asleep. He never tried it as far as I remember, but I used to wake up unable to breathe, dreaming, maybe, that he had covered my face with a pillow." She lay awake, long after David seemed to be asleep, watching shadows slide down the wall, afraid to close her eyes.
Brenda finally got up the nerve to leave David, enlisting her boss's help to move her furniture out. When David came home that evening, he walked into a completely empty apartment. The landlady was there, checking it over. David told her that he must be in the wrong apartment. She assured him that he was in the correct apartment, but that his wife and child were gone. "They took everything when they left."
David was enraged.
"David came to where I worked and held a gun up against my head and said that if he couldn't have me, nobody could," Brenda remembered. "I just didn't care. I told him to go ahead and shoot me, because he'd never get away. The police would lock him up forever. I was just so tired of fighting him. He finally dropped the gun and walked away."
Brenda had moved to a smaller apartment, also on Juno Avenue. There was a brief—one week—reconciliation when she let David move in with her. She came home after work to find him calling Lori on her phone. "That was it. I heard him telling Lori he loved her. I chased him out."
A day or so later, he came back to get his rifle. Brenda was afraid to let him have it. That was when they struggled over the rifle and David hit Brenda with his car.
Brenda didn't dislike Lori and felt more relieved than anything when David left her. "No more colon cancer talk all the time. No more other women." But Brenda was terrified that David would win custody of Cinnamon, because Lori's father was an attorney. "I didn't have any idea how to get a lawyer, and I didn't have any money. I looked up some lawyer's name in the phone book, and I went to the California Building on Euclid and rode up on the elevator and walked right into his office. I told him, ‘I need help and don't have any money.' He said we could work that out in time payments. I didn't want any alimony. I just wanted child support."
David was astounded. The fourteen-year-old girl he had protected was now twenty-one and able to take care of herself.
Brenda—the young Brenda—was the prototype, David's sexual ideal, and she always would be. His image of the ideal sex object did not mature as he aged. He would continue to fixate on teenage girls. After his first divorce, he was still in his early twenties and there was only a slight discrepancy in age between himself and pubescent girls. As he grew older, that discrepancy grew larger.
Girls in their teens gave David more respect and listened raptly to his stories of his accomplishments. They appreciated the gifts he gave them. Their skin was smooth and soft, their breasts and bellies unmarred by stretch marks, their legs long and coltish. They seldom drew back in shock when David told them his sexual preferences; they were still malleable and suggestible—unlike grown women.
Brenda and David's parting was most assuredly not a friendly divorce, but the bitter feelings eased after the decree was handed down, Brenda was given custody of Cinnamon and raised her with the help of sitters. David had weekend custody. Cinnamon was her daddy's girl, according to David. "She was the perfect child. Well mannered . . . polite. After the divorce, she flipped from that to a
withdrawn child who didn't like to be held and was nervous, fidgety, and constantly drifting off."
David didn't do well after the divorce either. Young as he was when he began with Brenda, he had fallen easily into the pattern that would define all his relationships with women. He had to be in charge. Brenda had belonged to him, and she had looked up to him. Her defection took the spine out of his self-confidence. He remembered the first gun incident and described how he placed the rifle to Brenda's head with the firm intention of killing her and then himself. But she had proved stronger and gutsier than he. She had shown disdain—not fear—even with the immediate threat of the gun against her flesh.
After his divorce from Brenda, David's episodes of overwhelming depression exacerbated. His sexual appetites waxed and waned—either causing (or caused by) his depressions. At times, he felt tremendous sexual drive. Conversely, he periodically suffered from a complete loss of interest in anything sexual. Since his libido approached satyriasis, this diminution of desire left him a hollow man. Sexual performance and fulfillment were central to his existence; he was a man consumed by sex. It was during this ten-year period when his sexual performance and outlet were sporadically blunted that David was hospitalized three times for depression and suicidal thoughts.
But then, like the phoenix itself, he always pulled himself together and rebounded. He now had his technical degree from the Control Data Institute. However much he tended to embroider and pad his résumé, to boast of his accomplishments, one thing was immutable. David Brown proved remarkably adept in the burgeoning computer industry.
After working for Century Data in Anaheim, he moved steadily upward over the next five or six years, employed by a half dozen other computer companies. "I doubled my salary. In this business, they'll bid for you if you're good— and I am good."