A Checklist for Murder (32 page)

Furthermore, as each twisted piece of the Peernock puzzle dropped into place, Craig Richman saw the fate of this tragic family as a particularly hideous example of the weakening of family ties, the loss of social cohesion. The codes of society are no longer strong enough to instill much respect for life or to teach restraint to the enraged. The Peernock file was a small and very personal example of how those large, abstract concepts manifest themselves in the intimate reality of a single family.

And like Steve Fisk, Richman also radiates the strong impression that he sees the killers who come up against him in
court as having brought their business into his own backyard. The experiences haven’t made him optimistic about any dramatic turns for the better in the near future.

“Consider the L.A. riots. If we don’t get a handle on some level of mutual human respect in this city,” he says with a grim sigh, “L.A. hasn’t begun to burn.”

So he attacked the case files hard, cramming research into stolen time, absorbing endless lists of evidence and interviews and two years’ worth of Fisk’s investigative work. Eventually he and Fisk began to spend whatever mutual time they could spare in the hunt for anything they could use to bring in a conviction.

His longstanding habit of heading straight for the gym before going home began to prove invaluable at working off stress, once he realized how difficult it might be to get that conviction.

Before long, despite Richman’s motivation to go home early at night, something—perhaps the photos of the crime scene, or the emergency-room shots of Natasha that look more like coroner’s photos, or the actual coroner’s pictures of Claire—something was enough to push him to the limit in preparing for the case. The contents of the Peernock files began to seem like components of a huge Rubik’s Cube, waiting for just the right twist before all the colors fell into place. He became convinced that somewhere, precisely the right twist for the giant puzzle cube lay waiting. Somewhere.

While the sweltering Los Angeles summer deepened into autumn, Craig Richman started wandering into the office on weekends. As often as not he was on his way back from what was supposed to just be a workout at the gym, dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Still aching from sessions with the free weights, he shuffled through the halls of the deserted office building, sorting through the files, calling Steve Fisk at home, bugging him about details.

Looking for the twist.

CHAPTER

24

T
here is no hard evidence that the final payment of $40,000 which Robert Peernock managed to get from his estate to pay for a private defense attorney ever went to create more murderous mischief outside the jail.

No one wanted to go on record with their suspicions. Still, stories swirled in the background about strange cars following people home late at night, about unusual people pacing sidewalks in front of other people’s homes, of clicking sounds on telephone lines. By this point the case exuded paranoia like scent off a flattened skunk.

Perhaps harmless events were taking on deathly implications and people’s suspicions simply began to run away with them. Or perhaps they don’t want to come forward because they know that they can’t conclusively prove what their senses tell them is true: that Robert Peernock hired private investigators to follow them, and perhaps ultimately to discourage potential testimony.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not any of the frightened people’s stories have a basis in fact; the result was the same. Paranoia permeated lives at all levels of this drawn-out case. The fear was contagious, touching nearly everyone involved.

Even Peernock himself was not immune. As 1990 lurched to a close, he became firm in his conviction that he could not trust his fifth attorney, Filipa Richland, even though he had sought her out and hired her himself, using the money that he wrested from his daughters’ future.

Filipa Richland was, he decided, just one more conspirator who was in on the plot to frame him.

Court records are jammed with transcripts of hearings where he showed up insisting that he be allowed to fire her. He registered one protest after another; she would not allow him to have private records in his cell, she would not take his phone calls often enough, she would not visit him enough, she would not take his orders on how to run the case.

He did not believe her explanation that she didn’t allow murder clients to have private papers in their cells because the snitch situation there invited other inmates to peek at private papers and try to turn in fake evidence in return for shortened sentences. He was sure that she was only using that explanation as an excuse to try to prevent him from assisting with his own defense.

He complained that she refused to send investigators to interview the long lists of people he wanted her to involve in the case. This argument was not new. No matter who his attorney was at any given point, Robert Peernock never accepted his or her explanation that many of the people on his suggested subpoena list were simply witnesses from his old struggle against the Department of Water Resources, and were of little or no value against the murder rap facing him.

As with his other attorneys, he could not make Filipa Richland see that it was
all the same thing
, that his old battery case at the DWR and his fourteen lawsuits against the state government and his current charges of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, arson, and everything else were all a part of the same struggle against corrupt monsters hiding in the darkness of smoke-filled rooms and secret meeting places, plotting against all the taxpayers Robert Peernock wanted so desperately to defend.

To Filipa Richland’s credit, she lasted one year and ten months with Robert Peernock as a client, longer than any
other attorney who tried to defend his long list of felony charges.

But in the end she stood in court and agreed that if he wanted her to substitute out to yet another attorney, and if the court was prepared to allow him still more legal wrangling before pressing the case to trial, she would willingly step aside.

That was all Peernock needed to hear. He jumped at the chance to dump what he claimed was another conspirator clearly out to rig a conviction against him. The state’s persistence in maneuvering him into prison for life was not going to succeed against Robert Peernock.

He demanded nothing less than a full acquittal for himself and complete public exposure of the vast network of tax-paid monsters operating in the dark.

And so it was right after New Year’s Day of 1991 that the Peernock case returned to Nevada for the first time since “James Dobbs” of Sacramento checked into Bally’s and headed downstairs to scope out the feathered fannies at the
JUBILEE
! show. This time the case landed in the office of the man who would wind up actually bringing it to trial.

Attorney Donald Green has his own law practice in Las Vegas, but he keeps his bar dues paid in California as well. Since graduating from Southwestern University Law School near the top of his class, Donald Green has learned that anything can grow under the golden West Coast sun: oranges, avocados, homicidal rages. Every time he picks up the phone, it is yet another opportunity to hear a tale too bizarre to believe.

He sometimes finds himself hired to make a jury believe one anyway.

“I operate on a need-to-know basis. One of the first things I instruct a client is not to tell me that they’re innocent and for God’s sake not to tell me they’re guilty. Proof is the
problem of the prosecution. As the defense, I’m in to provide a reasonable doubt. Nothing else. If you try to play father confessor to all the people you defend”—he pauses at this point, sighs, shakes his head—“you will
absolutely
lose your mind.”

Green was in the eighth year of his legal career in January of 1991 when his phone rang with a call that would change his life for years to come.

“I got a call from a client of mine who had been charged with being a contract killer in the so-called Ninja Assassin murders back in 1985 and was in L.A. County Jail for a long time, where he became friends with another inmate who spent a couple of years in jail defending himself because he did not trust attorneys.

“And it turns out that this other guy was in the cell next to Robert Peernock. They got to talking about lawyers. The guy tells Peernock about this so-called Ninja Assassin who I defended. So Peernock contacted me through this guy, relaying the message that his primary concern was that he locate an attorney who cannot be bribed by the system, who isn’t afraid to operate outside the system and against system pressure, especially on a PC-187: first-degree murder.”

And so Green arranged a special visit at the L.A. County Jail over the coming weekend. Then he flew to Los Angeles to meet Robert Peernock for the first time.

He walked in the back door from the parking lot and entered the sour stink of the jail, handed the guard his California bar card and driver’s license, did the usual b.s. about why are you a California attorney with a Nevada address. He removed his steel-toed cowboy boots before stepping through the metal detector.

The heavy door slid open and Green was led down to the jail’s hospital ward to meet Robert Peernock for the first time.

“Peernock came in, no handcuffs, no shackles, even
though he was being held in the Highpower section, which means he’s in there with your biker maniacs, your hillside stranglers, your contract killers, that sort of thing. He comes in with two big expandable folders tucked under his arms. Stuffed with papers.

“I hadn’t heard of the Peernock case yet and had no preconception about who Robert Peernock was. And when we met that first time my immediate reaction was that he was a man on a
mission
”—Green hits the word hard—“to prove that he did not kill his wife or do any of the crimes he was accused of.”

After their initial two-hour interview he agreed to take Peernock’s file back to Las Vegas with him, read it on the plane, and call back with his opinion on whether or not he could be of any help. Green knew that Peernock had no immediate cash to pay him, but that there were funds held in various family accounts. He could make application for them if he and Robert agreed to attempt the case together.

Hence he might get paid, he might not. “But my policy is that I never turn down a referral case on a major felony, regardless of the ability to pay. Money was never a consideration in taking this case either. Later that week I told him his case could be defensible and that I would represent him.”

So Donald Green substituted in for Filipa Richland and became Robert Peernock’s defense attorney number six.

The story took another ironic twist as Green got set to face off against Craig Richman; both men have strong military backgrounds. Green is a decorated Army veteran and frequently uses his special military license to defend court-martial cases in the U.S. Court of Military Appeals.

Craig Richman raised hell. He petitioned the judge to refuse to allow Peernock to push the trial back once again so that yet
another
attorney could take the time to get up to speed, only to be deemed a co-conspirator as soon as the attorney
failed to obey Peernock’s instructions. Therefore Donald Green was forced to commit, in court and on the record, to remaining on the case for the long haul and not to bail out if things got tough. He swore to see the case through to completion, no matter what.

As of January 10, 1991, Donald Green officially became Robert Peernock’s trial lawyer, in for the duration.

He recalls Robert Peernock as being completely cooperative.

At first.

January was just as busy for Victoria. She made the final move out of California and over to New Mexico, joining Richard on the land they had purchased there the year before. He had already moved their collection of animals and was setting up the grounds with the necessary enclosures.

The decision to move had come after Pam Springer called Victoria into her office to give her the news that Robert Peernock was soliciting a hit man to kill her and Natasha. That news finally did what all the other stress factors of the city had not yet been able to do; it convinced her to give up life as a big-city lawyer. If the pollution doesn’t kill you and the traffic doesn’t kill you and the stress of the job doesn’t kill you, Victoria thought, why, then there are always the paid operatives of a jailhouse murderer to worry about.

By the time she threw in the towel on life in L.A., she was packing a pistol to get herself to and from her car and keeping a shotgun under her desk, losing sleep over bumps in the night, and fretting over every detail of her part of the Peernock case.

So finally she and Richard sat down and asked themselves if this was really what their married life was supposed to be about. He had recently taken early retirement from a successful career and wanted her to have a little more leisure in her own life too. Richard thought it might seem especially
nice if his wife could avoid getting plugged in the parking lot by some monosyllabic junkie on a lunatic mission.

L.A. just wasn’t worth it anymore.

So she stayed on in her Saugus office while Richard began getting their new home ready on a large patch of raw land several miles outside the little town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which looks nothing at ail like its more famous namesake. It had taken over a year to wind down her L.A. practice. She would continue to represent Natasha via phone and fax, flying back for hearings.

So the year opened with Victoria walking out the door of her Saugus office for the last time, moving to someplace where the zoning inspectors wouldn’t get on her back over her fondness for strange animals and any new hit men in her life would have to work a little harder to get to her.

During that same January, Tasha’s phone conversations with Victoria were keeping hope alive that at some point in the future this endless mess of her father’s trial would at last be over and that the money her mother had set aside for her would be released. Then she could finish her schooling, take a breather from her endless rounds of survival jobs, and make a few choices about her future based on something other than the immediate need to cover the rent and scramble for groceries.