Customer Reviews

If You Really Loved Me

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After seeing several "true crime" shows on the Brown Case I ordered Ann's book. I had been a fan of hers for several years but hadn't read this story yet. She brings the people involved in this case to life.

What David Brown did to his family is unthinkable. He molested his wife's sister, he manipulated his 14 year old daughter into killing his wife and then sat back and enjoyed his freedom and the insurance money from the death of his wife.

While he lounged in a nearly 1/2 a million dollar home, now married to his late wife's sister, his daughter sat in the Ventura School (a youth prison). If not for three men, who went above and beyond the call of duty, David Brown would never have been convicted. Kudos to Jay Newell, Jeoff Robinson and Fred McLean. And to Cinnamon Brown for breaking the silence.

Ann Rule weaves a story so incredible and so vivid you will not be able to put the book down till you're done!

Bravo, Ann, on another truly exceptional book.

Ann Rule,you are the best true crime writer around!This book has got to be my alltime favourite (english spelling,sorry it's where I was born).I have read this book so many times and I am always really into it.It has been read by a lot of my friends too and they love it.Lots of twists and plots,tons to keep the reader interested!If you only read one book in your life,make sure it's this one.There is also a great movie on this story too,although the book is much better.

I have just finished this book; the first I've read by Ann Rule, and have been engrossed from the first page. As soon as I finished it, I scanned the Internet to find out what had happened to the main characters; especially Cinnamon Brown, the poor young 14 year old girl that was locked up for the crime that her father brainwashed her to do. I was so pleased to discover that she has been released from prison and is happily married with a kid. I hope and pray she can put what her father did to her behind her, and get on with having a happy normal life. If you like a book with real people, real situations, and real emotions, get this book. You won't regret it.

Cinnamon D. Brown was a good kid and she deserved a break. Born to teenage parents, Cinnamon early on became a "daddy's girl." Her parents divorced when she was small and so her time spent with her father, David Brown was limited.

David Brown was a ruthless, cruel, cold and calculating sociopath. He was married a total of six times (twice to the same woman) and appeared to be unable to sustain adult relationships. His wives were put to pasture before they hit 25 and it is his wife Linda who suffers most of all.

David used psychological pressure on Cinnamon to kill Linda. Cinnamon, then 14, does so. She is arrested and serves time in a California Youth Authority center. Meanwhile, David is living the good life by marrying Linda's younger sister and making a good living in the computer industry.

Fortunately, David's crimes are brought to light. Witnesses come forward and it is the "biker witness" who wins everybody's heart. Suffering from AIDS and wanting to do the right thing, this witness comes through like the cavalry. He is a good lesson that friends come in all forms.

I was glad that Cinnamon was finally released from the CYA. She was a good kid who really needed a break. At last count, I read that she had recently married and had a child. I also read that she completed her degree. Cinnamon is truly a success story and I prayed for her release and for her happy life for years.

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.

Ann Rule writes another gripping true crime book exposing corruption in a vile family. A father who gives his 14-year-old daughter handfuls of drugs before manipulating her into killing her stepmother "If she really loved him." Worse yet, the man marries the dead wife's sister, only two years older than his daughter. Is that enough for him? No, then he plots for THIS wife's death. Or does he? Is it all a crazy, messed up teen-ager who then tries to commit suicide? A father couldn't be so horrible that he'd try to kill his own daughter with drugs to cover up the murder of his wife? Readers will have to dig into this book to know.

Very detailed, written like a novel, a great read! Also a Lifetime movie, but the book's way better!

I read an updated version with an afterword from 2002 from Ms. Rule. Nice to know what these people are doing now! And praise goes to the investigator and DA who wouldn't let a "simple" murder go without digging further!

This book was the first of Ann Rule's that I ever read. Now I own all of them!! It tells the great tale of a young girl who was brainwashed, and convinced by her father to murder her step-mother. Ann Rule dos a great job of telling all aspects of this story without describing too many of the gory detail. There are great pictures that help you keep the characters straight and help you realize that this amazing story is actually true. The story doesn't end with the discovery of the guilty pary, all the court proceedings and aftermath are almost as interesting as the main story itself. This is definatelty a book I could read in one sitting

A short review to any A.R. novel is preferred, the better not to divulge the plot on the Net!"If You Really Loved Me" is good writing, with an "inverted story". A murder is committed in the early pages and "whodunit" quickly identified. But there is so much more here! Ms. Rule takes close to 600 pages to lay bare the full, bizarre tale of a mean, selfish, compulsive and manipulative father named David Brown. If there is a fault to the book, it lies in the almost total dearth of likable or even sympathetic characters. What a crew! A hint: Skip over the centerfold of pictures in this and other A.R. works. The photos may (or may not!) give away the outcomes. A final hint: Don't spend too much time reading reviews. If you like the genre, "If You Really Loved Me" is a safe choice!

Although it is hard to believe, I feel that David Brown is just a sadistic a sociopath as Ted Bundy was, although, unlike Bundy, he did not commit murder with his own two hands. He violated the trust of a daughter in her father and with the sly wiliness of a cunning fox, manipulated her into committing the one deed that can never be undone - the act of murder. With lies and false promises, he turned his teenage sister-in-law into his lover,until she was so blinded by adoration for him that she reached the point where she conspired to kill her own sister and then concealed the true reason for the murder's commission afterward. The author takes us into the mind of a man whose selfishness, inhumanity and plots of murder did not stop with the slaying of his young wife, but merely started with it. With this book, Ms Rule does a fantastic job delving into the ocean of immorality. It's a deep ocean, so I would advise readers to bring some SCUBA gear.

Excellently written, gripping and horrifying. Truly a must read