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If You Really Loved Me
Ann Rule

Pocket, 1992 - 608 pages

average customer review:based on 40 reviews
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   highly recommended  highly recommended





One of Rule's best

This is an older true crime story from the mistress of the genre, Ann Rule. I read it at the time it came out, and found it fascinating and tragic. Recently, my mother was cleaning out her collection of books and setting overflow aside for donation, and I rescued this from the donation pile because I wanted to read it again.

One night in 1985, police were called to the California home of a self-made millionaire named David Brown, who shared the house with his wife Linda, their baby Krystal, Linda's younger sister Patti, and David's daughter from a previous marriage, Cinnamon. In the master bedroom, police found Linda Brown shot to death, and 14-year old Cinnamon curled up shivering and vomiting up mountains of pills in a doghouse out back. The story that emerged was that an allegedly contentious relationship between Cinnamon, David's daughter, and Linda, David's wife, had finally escalated into a tragic confrontation. Cinnamon immediately confessed to shooting Linda Brown, and after a quick trial was sent to a juvenile prison facility.

Another murder in another dysfunctional family - nothing unusual, right? For some reason, however, the whole incident bothered the chief investigator, Jay Newell, and he couldn't get it out of his mind. Something wasn't right about it. Cinnamon was a sweet, confused girl who had no record of any serious rebellion, and the investigator couldn't shake the feeling that she was holding something back. David Brown also left a bad taste in Newell's mouth, and the presence of Linda's younger sister in the home seemed strange. What was really going on in this odd household? Long after the case was dead and buried, Newell kept watching and listening and asking questions.

Almost four years later, Cinnamon broke her long silence and the true story of what happened in the Brown house that night was finally revealed, piece by appalling piece. It's a shocking insight into just how much power a parent has over a child, and how smoothly a cunning adult can manipulate so many others to do his or her bidding. It's Ann Rule at her best, pulling every detail together to present a full picture of a terrible crime and more importantly, all its underlying elements - not an easy task given the complexity of familial emotion and the ultimately deadly addition of a sociopathic mind.

I have the old hardcover, but it's still in print as a mass market paperback, available on Amazon or any other bookseller site. I recommend it if you're interested in true crime and all the psychological factors that play into a crime like this.




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I remember this book like it was yesterday...

I read this book about 7 or 8 years ago and i recently made an account on Amazon and i can tell you this book was one of the best books i have ever read about. I remember this entire book like i read it yesterday! What Cinnamon Brown went through as a pre-teen...the manipulation, the pressure she had on her and then to have to go to jail for this man, David Brown was just absoultly sick. I couldn't believe with the pressure she was put under by Brown that she would have to do any time at all and was repulsed when i read on and found out what they gave her. She is free now but still. It must have been hell on a kid that was practicaly forced to do something like that to someone she had to secretely love, and we know as a child she secretely loved her step mother.

Shocking, sad and unfortunatly...so true...


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Sick, Sick, Sick

I can't believe that David Brown really did this to his daughter, his own flesh and blood!! He manipulated his 14 year old daughter into killing his wife so he could collect the insurance money!! There are no words to describe how demented this "man" really is. Then he tried to have his daughter killed from prison! Unbelievable! This "man" deserves to rot in hell for all eternity~






Sinking to the depths of what real monsters can do

Every now and then I pick up one of Ann Rule's true crime accounts. I like figuring out puzzles, and mystery novels are especially tempting as they let me try to figure things out on my own end of things. But true crime books have an additional factor to them -- I enjoy seeing the monsters that inhabit the world around us get justice, and sometimes it helps to know that I am not alone in my own little pocket of misery.

If You Really Loved Me dips into the psychology of a family, and the man who was the head of it. To all appearances, David Brown was an ordinary looking fellow, overweight, acne-scarred, but very successful. He had developed a means of rescuing lost data from computer disks right at the start of the big computer boom of the eighties, and had made quite a bundle of money. His home was in an prosperous part of Orange County, California, and his marriage to Linda Bailey was a happy one on the surface. They had a newborn daughter named Krystal, and he had invited not just his daughter from a previous marriage, Cinnamon, but also Linda's sister, Patti, to live with him. The home was tidy and well-furnished, and the two teenage girls were average, high-spirited girls, especially Cinnamon.

But on a March night in 1985, Linda died from two gunblasts in her chest. David Brown had gone out for a drive, and had come home to Patti crying and holding the baby, and Cinnamon was nowhere to be found. EMTs and the police came, and Linda's life could not be saved. And a search revealed Cinnamon huddled in a doghouse in the backyard, covered in vomit, and clutching a note scrawled on a piece of cardboard.

Dear God, please forgive me, I didn't mean to hurt her.

To everyone involved, the solution appeared very clear -- Cinnamon was tried for the murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life, and only fourteen years old, was sent to prison. Life returned to normal for the Browns, and Patti stayed with David Brown, raising Krystal, and eventually giving birth to a child of her own, Heather.

But to the police and prosecutors involved in the case, there was something a little too smooth about the murder. And there was something about Brown that bothered everyone -- but the only way to reopen the case would be if Cinnamon spoke, and for nearly four long years she remained silent. Then one of the original investigators, Jay Newell, recieved a phone call, and the truth began to be slowly uncovered...

It's a chilling tale of mental and emotional abuse, murder for hire, manipulation and the man who was at the center of it all. Using interviews, photographs, and transcripts of the case, Rule gives a glimpse into a family that was deceptive, and with David Brown as the man who ran it all. He was charming, and would marry no less than six times, usually to very young women, and each marriage would fail in some respect. What was most disturbing was just how close David Brown came to getting away with everything -- investigators discovered that he would run insurance scams, make grandiose claims, and always seemed to find someone else to blame for everything that was questionable in his life.

For me, the hardest thing to read what Brown did to his own daughter, and the abuse he put Patti through. Out of all of his women, it was these two teenagers that went through the most trauma. Brown viewed women as things, put on the earth to gratify him sexually, and it didn't matter if they were preteens or not -- it was these sections of the book that made me physically ill, and helped me to recognize that predators lack the moral integrity that stop most of us from acts of terrible horror.

While Rule does get a bit repetitive in her account, the story is compelling enough to continue reading through to the end. She delves into the psychology of a sociopath, the hell that survivors of abuse go through, and the lives of the lawmen who worked to bring justice, finally to Linda Bailey and Cinnamon Brown.

This is not a book for children of any age to read, and that would go to most adults that I know. The violence in this is particularly disturbing, made all the more so in that it actually happened. For me, the hardest part was to read about the words and actions that Brown used to control the women in his life -- my own mother and grandfather would use very close to the same phrases to twist my own thinking into believing that what they were doing was my fault, not theirs, and there were times when I had to set the book down and walk away for a while to get my own equilibrium back. Despite this, it helped me to understand more of what I had gone through personally, and so, that made the book worth reading.

Rule is able to stay detached from her subject in this, and lets the reader decide guilt or innocence on their own. One thing that I appreciated was that she included several afterwords to update the readers on what happened to the Bailey-Brown families and the others in the story after the trials were over. There is also an insert of black and white photos of the people and places in the story as well.

If you have a strong enough stomach to deal with the crimes that Rule brings to life here, go on ahead and read. But I would not let this book be read by a child, or anyone who is emotionally sensitive to this sort of thing. Handle with care, and it still gets five stars from me for the writing and the skill that Rule uses to bring this story of evil to life.

Recommended.


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Truly Exceptional Book

This is a tremendous book by Ann Rule-- a complete true story. I am from Garden Grove, and my father's parents were the first owners of that home on Ocean Breeze where Linda Brown was shot. My family had owned it from the mid-50s and had moved out in the early 70s-- but many of the same neighbors remained through 1985. Some of which are mentioned in the book.

This is a must-read. There was a "made for television" move about these events, called "Love, Lies & Murder," but it is NOT based upon Ann's book.

If there's ever "just one" of Ann's book I would recommend, it would be this one, "If You Really Loved Me."


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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8



There was only one way to please her father: Murder his wife....

David Brown was the consummate entrepreneur: a computer wizard and millionaire by age thirty-two. When his beautiful young wife was shot to death as she slept, Brown's fourteen-year-old daughter, Cinnamon, confessed to killing her stepmother. The California courts sentenced her harshly: twenty-four years to life. But in the wake of Cinnamon's murder conviction, thanks in part to two determined lawmen, the twisted private world of David Brown himself unfolded with astonishing clarity -- revealing a trail of perverse love, twisted secrets, and evil mind games. A complex and often dangerous investigation suggested a horrifying scenario: Was the seemingly bland David Brown really a stone-cold killer who convinced his own daughter to prove her love by killing for him? A man who turned young women into his own personal slaves, who collected nearly $1 million in insurance money, and married his dead wife's teenage sister, David Brown was a sociopath who would stop at nothing...a deadly charmer who almost got away with everything.




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