EXCLUSIVE: Mom of four-year-old girl who was thrown off a California cliff to her death by her FATHER finally confronts her monster ex-husband in court - and opens up about her 15-year ordeal
- Cameron Brown was sentenced to life without parole today for first degree murder of his daughter Lauren Key in 2000
- He threw her off a 120ft cliff because, it was argued, he didn’t want to pay her mother $1,000 a month in child support
- Lauren's British mother, Sarah Key-Marer, broke down in tears as she told the court: 'We are all so broken without her'
- In an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Online she reveals how she has coped with the pain of her 15-year nightmare
- ‘I had such a bad feeling,’ says Sarah of the day her daughter had to be pried out of her arms to have a visitation with her father
- It was the last time Sarah would see her little girl
- Brown, a former baggage handler, always denied killing his daughter – but after three trials he was finally found guilty of the callous murder in May
It was an unthinkable crime that sent shockwaves throughout the nation.
Dad Cameron Brown murdered his own four-year-old daughter Lauren Key by throwing her off a steep 120ft California cliff.
Today, after 15 years, Lauren’s heartbroken mother Sarah Key-Marer finally had the chance to confront her ex - as he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder.
And in an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Online she reveals how she has coped with the pain of the past 15 year nightmare which has finally come to an end.
Sarah, 46, broke down in tears this morning as she told a packed courtroom in downtown Los Angeles how Brown had left her completely ‘broken’ when he tossed her beloved daughter off the remote and dangerous cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on November 8, 2000.
The prosecution argued the former baggage handler killed Lauren because he didn’t want to pay her mother $1,000 a month in child support.
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Anguish: Sarah Key-Marer broke down in tears this morning as she told a packed courtroom in downtown Los Angeles how Brown had left her completely ‘broken’ when he tossed her beloved daughter Lauren off the remote and dangerous cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on November 8, 2000
Monster: Cameron Brown always denied killing his daughter – but after three trials he was finally found guilty of the callous murder in May this year.
Brown murdered his own four-year-old daughter Lauren Key by throwing her off a steep 120ft California cliff
Brown always denied killing his daughter – but after three trials he was finally found guilty of the callous murder in May this year.
Surrounded by her husband, friends and family members brave Sarah read a moving impact statement.
Wearing a black dress, tearful Sarah told the court how the suffering Lauren endured still ‘haunts her’.
‘We are all so broken without her,’ she said.
‘The dreams we had for Lauren have been taken
‘I imagine how she would impacted the world with her kind hearted spirit and her strong love of people, which would have inspired her to have remarkable life that would surely have made a difference in this world.
‘I will miss her going to grade school, performances, graduation, betrothal and a family of her own.
Brown was finally sentenced to life in prison without parole today. He has shown no remorse throughout 15 years of legal proceedings, remained unmoved and stony-faced throughout the emotional statements
‘She had thought that she would catch a fairy one day to keep in her pocket, a friend to have, to tell all ll her secrets and things she struggled with.
‘It was a comfort to her in a scary confusing situation.’
Sarah, who is originally from Essex in England, described how the stress of Lauren’s death had contributed to her developing advanced stage cancer, before telling of her belief that she would one day be reunited with Lauren.
She continued, ‘Lauren touched us all uniquely. She was brave and courageous and didn’t show any hate to those who caused her pain.
‘All these years I’ve tried to believe Mr Brown’s accounts of that day were true and that it was an awful accident.
‘I’ve been through it over and over and tried to convince myself of this. It would have been so much easier to accept.
‘But now it’s time for me to come to terms with the truth. Justice has prevailed and now I can come to terms with this verdict.
She added, ‘I’ve learned that the way to heal is to forgive.
‘However it’s my wish that since her death Mr Brown take responsibility for his actions and apologize for her death.
‘I will always hope that one day this would happen. I sincerely wish Mr Brown no harm and now that this decision has been made I can have some peace knowing I am free from years of court proceedings and free to move on with my life.’
Fighting back more tears, stoic Sarah turned to her ex and said: ‘Mr Brown –you will never take her memory from us.’
Several other moving statements from friends and family members were read out to court including one from Lauren’s stepbrother Joshua, who told the court how the night before his sister’s death the little girl became upset and said she thought she would die the next day.
Sarah Key-Marer, left reacts alongwith her best friend Annette Watling, right, after Brown was found guilty on murder charges in the death of his daughter Lauren. The first-degree murder conviction in May came about a dozen years after Brown was arrested and followed two previous trials when jurors decided the death was a crime, but they couldn't agree whether it was murder or manslaughter
Said mom Sarah today, ‘The dreams we had for Lauren have been taken. I imagine how she would impacted the world with her kind-hearted spirit and her strong love of people, which would have inspired her to have remarkable life that would surely have made a difference in this world
‘I will miss her going to grade school, performances, graduation, betrothal and a family of her own'
The then 10-year-old Joshua tucked her into bed and told her she would be alright – not knowing that the next day would indeed be her last.
Heartless Brown, 53, who has shown no remorse throughout 15 years of legal proceedings, remained unmoved and stony-faced throughout the emotional statements.
Wearing an orange prison suit with long grey-brown hair and beard, the killer declined to make any representation regarding his sentence.
Residing over proceedings at Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Los Angeles, Judge George G. Lomeli told an emotionless Brown that he would ‘receive a life sentence without a possibility of parole’.
Outside court Sarah said she would say ‘sorry’ to her little girl if she had the chance to speak to her one more time.
Sarah is still haunted by the memory of the last time she saw her daughter on the morning of November 8, 2000.
The little girl was distraught at the thought of spending time with her father that afternoon after school, as part of a court approved visit.
So distraught, teachers had to almost pry Lauren out of her mother’s arms when she was dropped off that morning.
‘By the time we arrived she was crying. It took me a while to get her out of the car seat,’ Sarah said in an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Online.
‘She’s clinging to me. Her nails are digging in my neck. Her legs are wrapped around me.
‘[She’s saying] “Don’t let me go. Don’t let me go!”
‘We got inside the school and I couldn’t physically separate her from me.’
Sarah with Cameron Brown. Taken during a skiing trip in 1995 when they were still dating. They never married
Sarah still chokes up when she recalls the last moment she saw Lauren as she turned to go to work.
The mom says: ‘I remember looking back and seeing her. She’s just looking at me with desperation and her eyes said it all: “Mommy don’t leave”.
‘I said, “I love you”. She could barely speak.’
Sarah admits she had no idea of the danger her child was in – just that she was anxious about spending time with Brown.
When she called the school to check on her daughter a few hours later, the teachers said Lauren was so petrified she tried to run away a couple of times and had even asked other parents to take her home with them.
‘I had such a bad feeling,’ says Sarah, who was so upset she decided to defy the court-ordered visitation and get Lauren before Brown arrived.
She spoke to her daughter, briefly, on the phone, before leaving the office. Sarah says the child was ‘whimpering.’
It was the last time she ever spoke to her daughter. Tragically she had no chance of making it to the school on time.
Brown had arrived while the mum was still on the phone with Lauren’s teachers, who had to hand the little girl over to her father.
The Lauren Key memorial, which is on Inspiration Point, the cliff where she died
Hours later a homicide detective would tell her the four-year-old was dead, after having fallen from a 120ft cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Shockingly Sarah says Brown didn’t even call to tell her himself that their child had died.
Instead, she was waiting at home for him to drop Lauren off at 7pm, as planned. Forty-five minutes after Brown still hadn’t arrived, the worried mom and her husband, Greg Marer decided to drive to the airport baggage handler’s home.
It was while they were en route – frantically calling the police – that an officer told them to get off the highway and wait at the nearest station, where she was told the horrifying news.
‘I was in complete disbelief,’ Sarah says. ‘I thought she [the homicide detective] was crazy.
‘I thought she had the wrong mother, the wrong child. Anything but what I heard was an actuality – Lauren had died at the cliff.
‘I just remember being hysterical and screaming and the first thing that came out of my mouth, unbeknownst to me, was, “He did it”.’
At that moment – and for months and years after – all Sarah knew was that her child had died from a fall from the cliff, a beauty spot called Inspiration Point, while she was with her father.
Brown refused to answer her calls or her questions about what happened that afternoon, creating a wall of silence that, 15 years later, still remains.
It’s indicative of the frosty, hostile relationship that developed between Sarah and Brown when she told him she was pregnant with his baby two decades ago.
The former flight attendant, who is originally from Essex in the UK, met him in a restaurant in Newport Beach, California, in 1995. They soon started dating.
At first Sarah was charmed by the athletic, tanned surfer. Two months later, however, their romance soured when she found out she was pregnant.
‘I was in shock,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t something I was planning on.’
Neither was Brown, who suggested that Sarah have an abortion, which she promptly refused to do.
‘That’s really where the whole relationship changed,’ she says.
Sarah says Brown became irritable and hostile. They eventually split because he allegedly left threatening messages on her answer phone.
‘I was extremely petrified, because I didn’t know what he was capable of,’ says Sarah, who admits that although Brown was aggressive, he was never physically abusive.
When they broke up she focused on life as a single mother.
She was overjoyed by the birth of her daughter in August 1996. But six months later she thought it was in the best interests of her baby to file for child support.
She insists that money was not her motive.
‘For Lauren’s sake I didn’t want her to look back when she was older and say I had shut her dad out because of some issues we had,’ Sarah says.
By the time she received a letter saying Brown wanted a paternity test in 1998, child support was not at the forefront of her mind.
Brown was confronted by Lauren's mother today, who said, 'I miss the warmth of her skin, her crystal blue eyes, her gentleness and her loving nature'
Once it was proven that he was the father a court ordered him to pay Sarah $1,000 a month in child support.
‘That figure was way more than I had imagined,’ she says, ‘I knew it would create a lot more animosity.’
Instead, she was shocked when, in December 1999, Brown demanded visitation rights. It’s a decision Sarah believes was financially motivated.
‘It’s common knowledge that if you’re having visitation your child support drops,’ she says.
By then Lauren was three-years-old. To her, ‘dad’ was Greg Marer – the man her mum met in church and married when she was still a baby.
Now she was being told she had two dads – ‘Daddy Greg’ and ‘Papa Cameron.’
It was confusing but Sarah says the initial supervised visits between father and daughter were fine and they were making an effort to get to know each other.
Things deteriorated, however, when she noted to the court that Brown was making negative remarks about his mother and using bad language in front of Lauren.
In a court document, Sarah stated that his ‘parental skills were not the best.’
‘I was just being honest,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t out to make him look bad.
‘I could see something brewing. I didn’t know quite what it was at that time.’
Sarah says that at the next court hearing, upon reading what she had written, Brown approached her outside and allegedly said, ‘What goes around, comes around.’ The comments terrified her.
In the meantime she noticed her happy little girl becoming more anxious about spending time with Brown.
Lauren was having tantrums and outbursts and telling her mum that she didn’t want to see her father anymore.
But by the fall Brown was having unsupervised visits, including overnight stays.
‘I saw the life in her being drained and sucked out,’ Sarah says. ‘She just had this anxiety.
‘She would say, “Can I run and hide under the bed if he comes?”’
Sarah says she asked her daughter what she did with Brown during their visits but the little girl would just ‘shut down.’
‘Lauren wouldn’t give me any information at all,’ Sarah says. ‘So I didn’t know if he was physically hurting her. I didn’t see any signs. I didn’t know if it was just emotional.’
At her wits end the mum desperately sought help from multiple sources, trying to get to the bottom of what was going on and to see if she could halt the visitations.
Sarah tells Daily Mail Online that Brown refused to answer her calls or her questions about what happened that tragic day, creating a wall of silence that, 15 years later, still remains. It’s indicative of the frosty, hostile relationship that developed between Sarah and Brown when she told him she was pregnant with his baby two decades ago
‘I knew there was some form of foul play somewhere,’ she says. ‘I reached out to Child Protective Services, contacted countless counsellors and the police, who would say it was a domestic.
‘I did everything physically possible that I could do to try and just put the brakes on, because it was snowballing so fast.’
Ultimately it was a family holiday in England in October 2000 – during which Lauren completely relaxed – that convinced Sarah that the visits with Brown had to stop immediately.
‘From the moment Lauren stepped foot on the plane, it was as though you had a taken a weight off her shoulders,’ the mum says.
‘She suddenly returned to herself. I could see such a night and day difference in her that I knew when I got back I had to do something.’
The family returned to California on October 30. By that time Brown was demanding full custody and a hearing was due to take place exactly a month later.
It was under those tense circumstances that Sarah went to see her lawyer on Friday November 3 and begged him to do something to end Lauren’s misery.
‘I got on my knees and I begged him to please stop these visits,’ she says. ‘And he said, “No, hold on. You’ve got until the 30th. Do the right thing. Be the good parent. It will all be OK”.’
Five days later Lauren was dead.
Sarah admits she didn’t think the bitter custody battle would end in such a tragic way, but that didn’t stop her from feeling guilty for filing for child support in the first place.
‘It was my right to ask for child support,’ she says, ‘but if I hadn’t done that I believe Lauren would still be here.
‘I live with that every day. But I know the guilt would kill me inside if I focused on that.’
After a three-year police investigation Brown was arrested in November 2003. He insisted that Lauren’s death was not his fault.
‘His statements were that it was an accident,’ Sarah says. ‘It was her fault.
‘She was running too close to the edge and he looked away.
‘She’d slipped and fallen. He heard her say, “Ah”.
Brown had left Sarah completely ‘broken’ when he tossed her beloved daughter off the remote and dangerous cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on November 8, 2000
‘But why would you even take her to such a treacherous, crumbling place in the middle of nowhere?”
Sarah hoped a trial would answer her questions. Tragically, a week before it began in 2006 she was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer.
She had to testify in court, in between her treatments, which included chemotherapy and surgery.
Painfully thin, nauseous and losing her hair, she wore a wig to hide her condition from the jury so they wouldn’t feel sorry for her and rule out of sympathy.
Facing her daughter’s killer in court, for what would be the first of three trials, she admits was hard.
‘I was anxious about seeing him,’ she says. ‘He just looked at me with a cold, hard stare. I could feel his eyes upon me. No emotion.’
The defence team’s line of questioning also left her distressed. In 2006 Brown’s attorney was celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos, whose showbiz clients have included Chris Brown and Michael Jackson.
He grilled her about the intimate nature of her relationship with Cameron Brown, even suggesting that she deliberately got pregnant.
‘I’d seen him in action on the TV and I knew what I was working with,’ she says. ‘He got very personal and tried to paint a picture of me as someone who had intentionally got pregnant to stay in the country.’
When that trial ended in a hung jury in 2006, Sarah was devastated and didn’t know if she could face going through it all again.
‘I felt like it had been whole waste of time, because I didn’t have any answers and there wasn’t a verdict,’ she says.
‘I was told they would retry the case and to think I would have to go through this again was horrific.
‘The emotion and stress on my body was something I absolutely dreaded.’
When the 2009 trial also ended in a hung jury she was in ‘disbelief,’ although she does believe the jury did the best they could with the evidence they had.
Sarah and her husband Greg. When Lauren was three-years-old, ‘dad’ was Greg Marer – the man her mum met in church and married when she was still a baby. ‘I’m relieved that we can all finally put this to rest and not keep reliving the tragic circumstances of her death,’ she says
It was during the third trial, however, that in a Perry Mason-type moment, a new witness – one of Brown’s former work colleagues – delivered shocking testimony that left no doubt the airport baggage handler killed his daughter so he could stop paying child support.
It was a jaw-dropping moment befitting a Hollywood courtroom drama.
Sarah says: ‘They were having a conversation about child support and he said something about, “I wish we could just get rid of the child”.
‘You could hear a pin drop in the whole courtroom. It was very devastating to hear. I wasn’t prepared for that. I was floored by what I heard.’
The information was enough to convince the jury who, on May 13, found Brown guilty of first-degree murder.
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‘I was in shock when I heard them all say, yes, it was first degree,’ says Sarah who cried at the moment that marked the end of her 15-year battle for justice.
It also eliminated any doubt in her mind that Lauren’s death was an accident, a hope she had clung to from the very beginning.
‘Of course it would be easier to hear that it was an accident,’ she says. ‘Nobody wants to hear it’s a murder.
‘I didn’t want to think that he was capable of doing that to his own flesh and blood.’
Now with the ordeal of the trials behind her, Sarah wants to focus on cherishing her daughter’s memory.
‘I’m relieved that we can all finally put this to rest and not keep reliving the tragic circumstances of her death,’ she says, ‘and we can just remember the good times with Lauren.
‘Now I can just think about her and keep her memory alive.’
Sarah says she is also working towards forgiving Brown while using her story to offer hope to others that they too can get through tragic circumstances, if they have faith and hold on.
‘Healing comes from offering forgiveness,’ Sarah says, ‘and I continually pray that one day tell him that I forgive him, because I know that holding on to bitterness will only poison me.’
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