‘True Crime’ Writer Hot on Trial of a Family Plot : Homicide: Best-selling author Ann Rule witnesses Santa Ana proceedings for a book on a sensational father-daughter murder case.

It was an item of just a few hundred words that ran in a hometown Seattle paper that autumn day in 1988. But to best-selling crime writer Ann Rule, the tale--and the accompanying photo of a pretty teen-ager named Cinnamon with long, wavy hair--were the stuff of great drama.

“Watch this!” Rule scribbled on the wire service story out of Orange County, clipping it from the newspaper and tossing it in an old cardboard box that had the word “possibles” scrawled in crayon on the side.

An ex-police officer turned detective writer, Rule was a virtual unknown in the publishing world in 1974 when she began researching a string of murders that turned out to have been committed by a close friend: Ted Bundy. The result was the best seller, “Stranger Beside Me,” about Bundy, the former law student turned itinerant killer of women.

By 1988, fresh off the success of “Small Sacrifices,” about an Oregon mother who shot her children, Rule was atop the red-hot and increasingly crowded genre of the “true crime” book.

She had her pick of any crime in the country.

But it was the relatively low-profile story of Garden Grove teen-ager Cinnamon Brown--imprisoned for the shooting murder of her stepmother, only to break a three-year silence by blaming the whole scheme on her father--that captivated Rule.

And it has now brought the 54-year-old Rule to a Santa Ana courtroom, armed with a new two-book contract worth a reported $3.4 million.

It’s a far cry from the detective stories that the creative writing major churned out for years for the “pulp” crime magazines at $200 a crack to try to support four children. She often used the pseudonym Andy Stack, because her editors said readers would not believe a woman crime writer.

But she sees her task as unchanged: to show generally law-abiding, gentle readers how people who may be their friends or neighbors can commit acts of “unremitting horror.”

For the last month, she has been holed up most days on the eighth floor of Orange County Superior Court to hear testimony about just such acts in the murder trial of David Arnold Brown. Each morning, she takes her customary front-row seat, a tape recorder and note pad in hand and an occasional friend or relative at her side.

After court, she returns to a rented Santa Ana apartment to take down notes and impressions on a portable computer. Sometimes, she manages a trip to Disneyland or other tourist spots. But mostly she worries about finding elusive answers in the complex case in time to meet a November deadline. “I always forget how exhausted trials make you,” she says.

The Brown case is “a sleeper,” she concedes. But for a woman who long ago learned the grist of detective thrillers--”sin, suffer, repent and a happy ending”--it seemed to hold all the elements: family betrayal, bloodshed, greed, charismatic figures, unlikely and still-unresolved twists.

“It was just a gut feeling that this might be it--just instinct,” Rule says, recalling the brief 1988 news story that was to shape her next two years of work. “It’s a great story, partly because family murder is more interesting than stranger-to-stranger murder.”

The Brown newspaper clipping sat in her cardboard box among about 20 other “possibles”--stories so compelling that one might produce another “Stranger Beside Me” or “Small Sacrifices”--recently made into a TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett as child-killer Diane Downs.

The clipping did not sit in the box long. Within four months, she had signed a contract with her new publisher to make the Brown story her next book, and she even had a working title:

If You Really Loved Me.

Unlike her other books, Rule insists she has a great story whether or not David Arnold Brown is found guilty of orchestrating his wife’s killing in 1985 in their Garden Grove home.

A millionaire computer entrepreneur, Brown collected $835,000 in insurance and married the victim’s sister soon after his wife’s death. Meanwhile, his daughter Cinnamon--found hours after the murder in the back-yard doghouse, near-comatose with an apparent suicide note in her hand--sat in a California Youth Authority cell for her stepmother’s murder. But in mid-1988, she broke her silence and alleged that her father had masterminded the whole scheme.

The defense is scheduled to begin its case this week, and the jury could be deliberating Brown’s fate within days. Rule then plans to stay in town for another several weeks to interview key characters--including, she hopes, Brown himself.

But whatever the verdict in the case, “This book is about people who did unspeakable things to win either love or money or both; the puzzle is who did what to whom and for what reason.” She hopes to have it published by the spring of 1991.

The case has exceeded expectations, she says, unveiling dramatic twists along the way. These range from the sensational--revelations that Brown had conspired to assassinate three members of his prosecution from his jailhouse cell--to the subtle--the tearful disclosure in court last week by a burly jailhouse informant that he is suffering from AIDS.

Rule speaks calmly about such things as murder and rape, betraying her mere year and a half as a police officer in Washington before bad eyes forced her retirement.

Early in her writing career, Rule says, she was bothered by the idea that “I’m making a living off of other people’s tragedies.” The guilt was so nagging that she once went to a psychiatrist to discuss it.

Now, however, she realizes that “what matters is how you treat your subjects, whether you’re doing it to be sensational or with some sensitivity. . . . It’s the gentlest people who are fascinated by the cruelest people, ‘cause we don’t understand why--how could they do that?”

Still, the proliferation of “true crime” stories in recent years has spurred a public relations backlash against the genre, prompting charges of callous exploitation and sloppy reporting over the publishing industry’s rush to satiate the public’s appetite for horror.

Rule has gotten mixed reviews.

In a 1987 New York Times review of “Small Sacrifices,” for instance, author Ann Jones criticized what she said was an oversimplified idea of good versus evil and called the book “a page-turner, despite some shopworn characters and weary prose borrowed from cop fiction.”

Rule is nonchalant about such broadsides.

“For writers,” she said, “financial success is critical acceptance.”

By that standard, she is a success. She has earned more than $2 million for “Stranger Beside Me” and “Small Sacrifices,” along with sales on five other books that were impressive enough to prompt publishing giant Simon and Schuster to woo her away from her former publisher with a fat contract.

“Judging by the marketplace and what her books are worth to her publisher, she’s absolutely at the top of the heap” for crime books, said Starling Lawrence, executive editor at W. W. Norton publishing house in New York and the editor of two of Rule’s early works.

“She has this great understanding on a gut level of the subjects that she’s writing about and how ordinary people respond to situations of terror or violence,” he said. “And those were things that she taught herself before Ted Bundy ever came along.”