A Checklist for Murder (41 page)

“I do this,” Schwab explained, “because of the especially callous manner in which this crime was committed, almost a torturous, satanic manner, in which his daughter was tied up, hog-tied, had the mask put on her face, was force-fed with alcohol and drugs, in which he attempted to murder his own daughter, his own flesh and blood, an unspeakable act even in this day and age of unspeakable acts.

“… I want the following placed in a minute order to go with Mr. Peernock’s file. It is my most steadfast recommendation that Mr. Peernock never be allowed back into society, and I want this stated in the minute order that I recommend that no future governor ever parole Mr. Peernock. That if any future governor should parole Mr. Peernock, Natasha Peernock’s life is in danger. Other persons’ lives are in danger. And the blood of any person Mr. Peernock kills will be on that governor’s hands.

“… I further recommend, and I want this placed in the minute order, that he be placed, that Mr. Peernock be placed in a position of high security, the most high security prison possible, Pelican Bay if possible … that he be allowed to have as little contact with other persons as possible because of his danger to other human beings. So I want this also placed in the minute order that he is to be put in a high security module as much as possible, Pelican Bay if possible, and that he be watched carefully and never allowed to again wreak his evil vengeance for greed or any other untoward purpose.”

And then Robert Peernock was taken away.

Deputy DA Pam Springer’s light blond hair made her stand out in the crowd as she sat alone in a back row of the courtroom
to watch Robert Peernock’s sentencing. Even though she had been transferred away from the Peernock case two years before and carried her own heavy caseload, she had asked Craig Richman to tell her when the sentencing was to take place so that she could come and see for herself. She sat wordlessly through the bizarre drama of Peernock’s explosions and through all of the heartrending comments that family friends delivered before the sentence was read. She listened to each judgment being read against Peernock, in which the word
evil
was used again and again.

Like Craig Richman, she describes how her work always consists of rushing from one hot spot to another, usually on an emergency basis. She says that the same is true for everyone on the front lines of the firestorm of crime that is blackening lives in every part of the largest city in the most populous state in the most powerful country history has ever known. And she shares in the frustration of a besieged population that cries out for better protection, safer streets, longer sentences for felons, more prisons to hold them—and lower taxes.

But Springer paused in her rush from one fire to another on the day of Peernock’s sentencing because she felt the need to see for herself the moment of consequence for this man who had made a mockery of the very idea of family and who then had openly jeered at the system while it labored to bring him to justice.

When it was all over she paused long enough to congratulate Craig Richman for having pursued the conviction so avidly, as she had been certain that he would. Then she turned and hurried back to her own office, back to the latest fire. There had been no time to spare for her to attend the hearing to begin with, but as with so many other people involved with this case, her professional detachment had been penetrated by it. The specter of a father laying waste
to his own daughter’s face with a bar of cold steel was an image she couldn’t shrug off.

Pam Springer had recently given birth to her first child, a baby girl.

Detective Steve Fisk offered a quick congratulation to Craig Richman too. But that was it. The day was still early enough for him to get back to the office and check on new developments in his latest landslide of homicide cases. As he began his twenty-fifth year as an L.A. cop, he knew all too well there is never time to rest on laurels. While the city’s population tears away at its own flesh like some crazed animal caught in a trap, Fisk hangs on to his serenity as a born-again Christian. Others don’t have his source of solace; old friends on the force are constantly dropping out on stress leave or taking early retirement.

Steve Fisk had only been able to build this case by putting in outrageous seventeen- and eighteen-hour days, sometimes working straight through the weekend. It’s a pace no one can sustain indefinitely, but he’d been trying not only to give back some kind of justice to what remained of the Peernock family but to give back a little justice to the city he’d been born and raised in, where he has built his own family.

It was just one way to work at giving his kids some sense of hope for the future, a sense that if enough people can pull together hard enough, determinedly enough, things might not fall completely apart after all.

But he knew there would be a stack of messages waiting on his desk.

There always is.

“I don’t do high-fives when I win a case, and I didn’t do any then,” Craig Richman said afterward. “This thing was a tragedy any way you look at it. Here was a man who had it all, and he threw it away. A mother is dead with young
daughters she will never see growing up. Natasha was left to try to find some way to trust people again.

“It was definitely not ‘Miller time.’ But you take what satisfaction you can. At least Vicki and Tasha both have a better chance to live out natural lifespans without some hired psycho coming after them.

“Your reward just has to be the satisfaction of creating a little justice. That”—he grins—“and of course the fabulous paycheck of a public servant.

“I did get the rest of the day off, though. So that’s something. There was just enough time to hit the gym on the way home.”

Now that this case was wrapped up there would, of course, be another stack of files sitting on his desk the next morning.

There always is.

Donald Green left the courtroom that day feeling sure that he could have provided his client with the magical reasonable doubt if only the man had kept his mouth shut and cooperated. Green had earned the admiration of everyone involved with the case, but he headed for the airport having only the Ancient Litigator’s Riddle for comfort: “Attorneys work so hard to win their cases. Why do clients work so hard to lose them?” He had taken the case determined to help prevent a man from being “framed for murder,” as his client had presented the story to him. But Robert Peernock, as Judge Schwab eventually concluded, had come to court determined to make it his personal Golgotha.

So Green left Los Angeles still facing a malpractice suit by the client he had tried to save. It would be many months to come before the suit would be dismissed. Later, he would also be taken to court by the investigators who had worked on the case for him, despite the fact that he’d entirely used what little money the courts provided him in order to pay his investigators’ fees. Even though the investigators initially
agreed that they would get paid only when Green himself did, and Green got nothing for all his troubles, they took him to court anyway.

He eventually won the suit, but it would take him years to clear up the legal fallout from the Peernock debacle.

Remarkably, at the time of this writing Green has changed nothing about his way of carrying out his practice. He still will not turn away a referral client in need of defense on a major felony charge, regardless of his or her ability to pay. He kept his practice going despite huge monetary losses on the case. He still hates the idea of innocent people facing prison because they can’t afford good representation. So cases continue to come through his door because the word is out that he fights hard and loves to win.

When his clients give him the chance.

Although Robert Peernock seemed to have been pulled from the courtroom a thoroughly beaten and traumatized man, the case record shows that he went back to his cell and hand-wrote a “Designation of Record on Appeal.” It was many pages long and signed that same day. Before the sun was down on the day of his sentencing, the unrelenting jailhouse lawyer had already begun the process of setting his appeal in motion.

Tasha lay down that afternoon and went to sleep, something she rarely did in the daytime. But the day’s strangeness had vacuumed all of the energy out of her. She was limp with fatigue. She hadn’t spoken at the sentencing hearing, even though Craig had invited her to. Where would she find words to express her feelings as her father was locked away forever? The reporters outside the courtroom had hounded her for quotes, but she’d brushed past them and said nothing. She’d felt no need to see her name in the papers again and had no desire to make a soundbite for the evening news.
Writers had pressed business cards into her hands. She’d dropped them to the floor and kept moving toward the exit, hungry for nothing else than to be gone from that unhappy place for the last time.

She lay down to rest without thinking whether she wanted to or not. Her body had just run out of gas. Sleep carried her away.

She woke up hours later. It had gotten dark. In the first fuzzy moment after opening her eyes it seemed that everything, all of it, had been an endless, awful dream.

Then as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes, her fingers brushed over the indented bones above her cheek, the ones that ached and throbbed every time the weather turned cold. She was instantly reminded that all of it had been real.

The reminders would be there for the rest of her sleep-shortened days and throughout all of her long, wakeful nights. Clear and present monster tracks, they would keep the memories forever close at hand.

CHAPTER

31

R
obert was shipped off to Pelican Bay, a super security high-tech prison whose renowned Secure Housing Unit, called simply the SHU, is a thing of dread among California prisoners. Some of the SHU’s most hardened inmates are said to have gone quite literally insane in the enforced silence of its utter isolation.

Even the very toughest child-murdering, gang-banging jailhouse thugs are known to have begged to be released back to a life of hard labor at an ordinary maximum security prison after less than a year in the SHU. A few have been dragged away to mental units after resorting to extreme and irrational behavior within their cells, going so far as to smear urine and feces all over themselves as if in some bizarre form of performance art reflecting the devolution of their lives. But at the Pelican Bay SHU such behavior is rarely effective in earning a transfer to a padded cell; more often they simply end up chained to their one-piece toilet.

California opened Pelican Bay State Prison in 1989 high up in northern California, isolated in the woods sixteen miles south of the Oregon border. It was built in response to a spiraling pattern of inmate violence inside all of the state prisons. At one institution, California’s Corcoran prison, the violence had climbed to more than twenty-one assaults annually for every hundred inmates.

So the state had an immediate need for a place to send its most violent offenders: prison gang members, inmates who try to kill guards, major prison drug traffickers, even prisoners
who, like Robert Peernock, attempt to hire the paid murders of innocent people on the outside.

The SHU was designed specifically as a place to isolate and to completely control inmates who are so violent and unpredictable that not even the slightest moment of trust, freedom, or individual choice can be permitted them, a place where these highly toxic individuals can be warehoused in the strongest sense of the word.

Robert Peernock began the year 1992 with his arrival at Pelican Bay, where he got his first glimpse of the stark white Secure Housing Unit and its dark blue gun towers. The tinted windows give the place the appearance of a movie set from some particularly foreboding piece of science fiction. Pelican Bay has been called the Alcatraz of the 1990s. Inmates call it “the dog pound.” But inside, the place looks more like a windowless space station than any earthly scene that might come to mind.

By the time Peernock’s prison bus rolled past the large electronic security gates and stopped at the back door of the SHU, much had changed in the California penal system. The inmate assault rate had dropped in the prior year to less than five per hundred at Corcoran prison. It was even less at other state prisons.

At Pelican Bay SHU it was down to less than one percent. Peernock could instantly see why. He stepped down to face a reception line of prison guards standing at attention in their jumpsuits and combat boots. Their billy clubs were drawn and ready, while the head guard kept his Taser drawn and poised to fire.

In a standard welcoming ceremony at the SHU, a new inmate is advised to look one last time at the outside world because it will be a very long time, if ever, before he sees it again.

As the reception ceremony continues, two prison guards step in front of him and two in back. They sternly advise
him that from now on, any bullshit he might contemplate starting will in fact be finished by the staff.

By whatever means necessary.

Robert Peernock’s waist chains were removed and his hands were cuffed behind his back, as Natasha’s had been. He was ordered to bend over while a portable metal detector was run over his buttocks to be certain that he wasn’t carrying any grappling hooks or hand grenades in his rectum; then it was run over the rest of his body to be certain he didn’t have any skeleton keys or prison knives in his mouth, his ears, his hair, his nostrils.

During his final moments outside it was pointed out to him that the SHU is surrounded by a wide gravel “moat” covering a special weight-sensing grid that will set off alarms if touched by anyone weighing more than forty-five pounds. Potential escapees have serious dieting to do.

Then he was ushered inside through the heavy steel doors. Security cameras followed his every move. As he was escorted down the metal hallway, two guards holding 9mm assault rifles trailed his movements from the industrial screen floor of the overhead gangway, their eyes fixed on him every step of the way.