A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  In the early years of their marriage, Claire admired his ability to identify a problem at home or at work and focus on it relentlessly until a solution was found. Claire was proud and secure; she knew there would always be room in the job market for a skilled troubleshooter.

  Robert Peernock could shoot trouble like nobody’s business.

  THE BIRTH OF A WHISTLEBLOWER

  Robert John Peernock turned fifty a couple of months before the night of his wife’s murder and his daughter’s brutal near-death beating. Up to that point, he had, in a number of ways, led an enviable life. During the rise of his career he had continually displayed qualities that society expects from its captains of industry. He amassed undisputed professional skill with complex and powerful computer control systems. He later supervised the testing of sophisticated electronic detonators for pyrotechnic devices. Strongly self-guided, he took additional courses of study throughout his career, developing an exemplary level of technical expertise. His determination to achieve excellence in his work and his powers of concentration gave him abilities with circuitry that reached levels shared only by a select group of electronic engineers around the country.

  Whatever fears Peernock nurtured of professional or personal defeat were kept hidden. He consistently showed a relish for conflict once he decided that there was a reason to target someone or something for battle.

  The dark path that eventually led him to a seat at the criminal defense table facing charges of murder, attempted murder, solicitation of murder, kidnapping, and arson is a long one. The journey had begun many years before.

  Part of that journey is now a matter of record, filed in the early 1980s when Robert Peernock came before the United States District Court to sue the State of California and a host of his superiors at California’s Department of Water Resources. The complaint reads like a textbook primer on standard conflict situations between whistleblowers and the corruption they seek to expose.

  The main plot of the Peernock struggle begins with his employment as an inspector for the DWR at about age thirty-five. Peernock swears that shortly after being hired he was told by a superior that instead of actually doing his appointed job of serving as a watchdog against malfeasance by contractors and suppliers to DWR, Peernock’s true responsibility was to sign off on inferior work done by DWR contractors whether the work met with specifications or not. Further, he was ordered to then dream up excuses for the contractors to reap further rewards by helping them submit change-orders for the repair of work that had been improperly done to begin with, thereby creating a double-dipping situation for the contractors, using taxpayer funds.

  He tells of being warned that if he didn’t play along, not only would he be forced out of his job at DWR, but that the DWR had Mafia ties and he would be endangering himself severely by attempting to oppose the cover-up scheme.

  After repeated threats were lodged against him he finally went to the man who had hired him at DWR and complained that if he did as he was told, equipment would not meet minimum safety requirements and it would take years to correct all the problems, at the cost to California of millions of dollars. Worst of all, the inherent safety problems could create fatal hazards for DWR workers.

  He says his superior admitted that all of this was common practice and a known problem, but that if Peernock was strong enough to try to force contractors to meet specifications, his boss would see to it that Peernock received full backing of the DWR via the division chief. When Peernock acted upon that advice, the supplier answering to Peernock’s inspections eventually furnished a huge computer control system to DWR called the WINDGAP 68–35, “by far the best control system” received by DWR up to that time. It required no additional fix-it costs.

  But instead of drawing praise, Peernock was informed by various employees that he was going to be harassed out of his job for daring to see to it that the taxpayers got a good deal.

  He had bucked the system. And he had made enemies.

  He was stripped of his inspector’s authority and the contractors were told that they were free to ignore him, with the result that more inferior control systems were supplied to DWR in the subsequent months and years. Since these systems failed to meet specifications, there were further billings for huge amounts by the same contractors to bring them up to specifications that they should have met in the first place. Now the double dipping was continuing right under Peernock’s nose and he had absolutely no ability to stop it.

  Peernock started making more noise. And more enemies. The following story taken from Peernock’s Second Amended Complaint CV-023124 LEW (Tx) in U.S. District Court describes his version of what was going on with the Department of Water and Power and some of its officers. Peernock claimed DWR supervisors began flying down from headquarters in Sacramento to warn that he was creating too many waves and he would be well advised to give it up.

  When he spurned the warnings, bribe offers replaced them. If he cooperated and kept quiet, Peernock could join in the system and participate in the rip-off.

  If he didn’t play along, he was advised that even though his reputation for competence was too strong to make a case for firing him, the company would build a set of false charges against him by alleging personality problems. Management people at DWR would encourage their contractors to write letters of complaint so that they could harass him out of the company one way or the other.

  Peernock claimed that he was told all state-department management people “dance together” in Sacramento. By refusing, Peernock was in ever-increasing danger of having to take the consequences. He told of receiving threatening calls at home and claimed that he was assured by higher-ups that he would never be promoted because of his actions in writing internal memos to inform on contractor rip-offs. His automobile was subject to constant sabotage, the brake lines cut repeatedly.

  Nevertheless he sent several letters to upper-level politicians, keeping his identity secret to avoid still more violent reprisal. He alleges that his bosses realized he was the complainant and responded by paying the contractor $50,000 to write numerous letters saying that Peernock had all kinds of personality problems which were the true root of his complaints.

  Finally, when a major overflow of water occurred at one of the state’s biggest pumping plants, costing the taxpayers millions of dollars in damages, rumors floated around that Peernock had shut down the system himself by way of protest. But he replied that the event occurred because a company involved failed to comply with required safety features. The disaster, he said, actually proved his claims.

  One thing was clear. Somebody wasn’t dealing in the whole truth.

  Phone threats escalated at Peernock’s home. Employees began to confront him at work, trying to start arguments. Although he stands six feet and then weighed about 185 pounds, they repeatedly tried to tempt him into fights.

  The odds continued to stack against him.

  Peernock felt partially vindicated when an audit report was issued by the auditor general’s office confirming that state contract procedures were not up to par, but the report never went any farther. Soon his fears about the extent of the corruption grew larger. Peernock claimed the Auditor General was forced out over what Peernock says were false charges leveled in retaliation for confirming Peernock’s accusations. The new Auditor in that office offered Peernock no satisfaction in the pursuit of what Peernock described as a huge network of bribe takers and crooked office holders.

  The stakes rose again. Now Peernock was confronted by a field engineer and warned that one of their former engineers, who had also threatened to disclose conflict of interest in the awarding of state contracts, had been found with his head blown off by a shotgun. A “suicide.” Peernock was assured that the same thing could happen to him.

  By this point the hostility against him at work was open and widespread. More sabotage dogged him. Lug nuts were loosened on his car wheels. Sometimes the lug nuts were removed altogether. The brakes and warning-light lines were again cut. P
eernock was told that he was like Serpico and that his campaign against this endless system of crooks and thieves was merely an attempt to “hold back the incoming tide.”

  His mentor at DWR was removed and replaced with a hand-picked enemy who immediately subjected Peernock to all sorts of administrative harassment at work, attempting to force his voluntary resignation. One company officer even claimed to know, but refused to reveal, who was doing the sabotage.

  The California Department of Water and Power had closed ranks against Robert John Peernock.

  Peernock changed tactics. He formed a union and got himself elected shop steward, using his position there in an attempt to bring further leverage against the DWR and the crooked contractors. But other employees were not so eager to unite “against the tide,” especially after Peernock was injured when a large car mysteriously ran into his at a stop sign. The driver fled on foot and was never caught. Peernock was not only knocked out by the impact, he suffered the further indignity of being robbed at the scene before he regained consciousness.

  Coincidentally, there was an open whiskey bottle in the other car.

  And now for the first time the DWR conflict moved outside the state contract system. He insists that reports of the accident were falsified by the police, who now seemed to have been pulled into the fray against him. He protests that their behavior in covering up this attempt upon his life makes it clear that the cops themselves are under the control of a crooked administration. Further, he continues to this day to assure all who will listen that the state administration can and will use the police as a taxpayer-paid private army of reprisal, attacking and destroying anyone who dares to buck the system.

  Thus, from the late 1970s through to the very morning of his wife’s murder on July 22, 1987, Robert was constantly involved in a long series of lawsuits in state and federal courts in his ongoing attempt to sweep all of the corrupt officials off the state payroll. He presented bits and pieces of evidence to support his claims, but never enough to trigger the federal investigation that he desired. His history throughout those ten years is a bogglingly complex tissue of accusations and allegations against individuals and businesses, against co-workers, bosses, private contractors, and state agencies. Although the lawsuits occupy thousands upon thousands of pages of transcripts in courthouses all over California, Robert never presented any of the courts with a smoking gun sufficient to generate the kind of sweeping reform action he desired.

  But it is the arrest report for the only crime Robert Peernock was ever convicted of prior to the destruction of his family that clearly lays out the series of events that finally stuck in his gut. It all took place after he turned forty-two, seven years after his whistleblower struggles began. The arrest report tells how Peernock was at the job site discussing a company calisthenics program with one of the men whom he supervised when Peernock lost his temper and attacked the man.

  He grabbed the man around the neck.

  When the man tried to retreat, the police report notes that Peernock struck him with a fist to the side of the head and face, on the side of the head opposite to that where Claire Peernock’s fist-sized bruise would be found years later.

  This attack resulted in his eventual conviction on a misdemeanor count of battery. But that’s not what stung him so badly, eating at him inside like a slow acid drip until the obsession began to bleed throughout his thoughts. This is:

  The charge landed on the desk of Deputy District Attorney Myron Jenkins in the Newhall branch of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. In fact, the charge was already there when Jenkins inherited his job early in the new year, but Jenkins signed off on it as he routinely did with the dozens of others that came across his desk. This allowed the case to go to trial. But first, as a matter of common practice, Jenkins notified Peernock’s attorney to offer a plea bargain deal that included a simple hundred-dollar fine and probation for disturbing the peace.

  The arrangement would have allowed Peernock to save the taxpayers the expense of a trial. It also offered minimal impact to Peernock’s record.

  But he rejected the hundred-dollar plea bargain offer and insisted on the trial. So one of Myron Jenkins’s staff attorneys was assigned to prosecute the case for the DA’s office.

  Peernock was convicted.

  Unbowed, he appealed the conviction. He insisted that both the charge and his conviction had been engineered by Deputy District Attorney Myron Jenkins as retaliation against Peernock for his efforts against the corrupt state system. This theory entails the proposition that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, the largest law office in the world with over a thousand prosecutors in its service, operates at the behest of the state government to frame and convict anyone who dares to come forward and speak out against organized corruption in state government. Robert Peernock has no trouble visualizing and describing the countless connections on this giant circuit board of corruption.

  In his appeal, he claimed that the victim’s story had been, in Peernock’s words, “impeached by his own testimony.” But the court noted that Peernock himself had only two witnesses, and that their testimony broke down completely. It was filled with inconsistencies and recountings of events they could not possibly have been in a position to witness.

  By contrast, the victim’s story was borne out by the hard physical evidence as well as the witnesses for the victim. So the Court of Appeal refused Peernock’s assertion of self-defense, given that Peernock’s victim was eight years older, four inches shorter, nearly seventy pounds lighter, and was in poor physical condition.

  Peernock also argued in his appeal that he had not been permitted to outline his long list of grievances against the DWR at the trial. But the court ruled that even if that story was true, it would do nothing to explain his innocence with respect to the battery charge.

  He was left to try to frame an appeal by presenting accusations of bias on the part of the trial court as being part of a plot against him by “the state, his supervisory employees, the sheriff’s office, the office of the district attorney, the prosecutor, and the trial judge.”

  In the end the three appellate judges found that these claims were also unsupported and that his trial had been a fair one. His request for a new trial was denied.

  If Robert had accepted the small defeat of the hundred-dollar fine, he could have walked away. But the obsession had nailed him. The sting burned deeply. He could not, was not, going to let it go. He could see how it was all connected. As it happened, one of the connections turned out to be true, in a turn of coincidence that Peernock would never see as being anything other than a further example of conspiracy among the lawyers trying to hound him into prison. At the time of Peernock’s battery trial Myron Jenkins was slightly acquainted with a law clerk over in the public defender’s office in the suburb of Newhall.

  The law clerk’s name was Victoria Doom. She hoped one day to become a sole practitioner, but for now, she and Myron Jenkins were on opposite sides of the fence in a relatively small judicial district. Their business sometimes brought them into contact, but Victoria Doom had no way of knowing how much she and Jenkins would one day have in common via the strange legal history of Robert John Peernock.

  Claire tried to ride out the situation for the first few years after Robert’s whistleblowing campaign began. In an age where elaborate rip-off schemes on the part of government contractors are constantly coming to light on major news programs like 60 Minutes, his campaign, to her, initially seemed to have the ring of truth.

  She hoped that Robert’s plan might actually succeed, that he could sue the state agencies and the managers involved until the kickback scheme was brought to light. Her husband talked long and often about the need to save taxpayers’ money, how deeply and bitterly he resented the waste of good tax revenues on the complex scheme of bribes involving a staggering number of state officials.

  But their problems at home only grew, aggravated by his devotion to his work. By the time Claire and Robert�
��s second daughter was born in 1977, he was spending less and less time with his family. The distance between him and Claire was growing relentlessly.

  His fixation on his cause célèbre grew because in rare instances a few of Robert’s countless letters, complaints, and lawsuits were actually starting to get results. He claimed that these victories proved that his overall premise of massive corruption was the truth, but his opponents grumbled that he was simply learning how to overwhelm the legal system by bombarding it with self-filed lawsuits. Nevertheless, concessions were sometimes made at work, with bosses agreeing to alter procedures to Robert’s specifications.

  Ground had been given. Robert began to feel that he was finally proving his point in a way that the state and eventually the feds would not be able to ignore. He stepped up his efforts, filing more complaints accusing fellow inspectors of taking bribes and filing more grievances against his bosses for allegedly condoning such behavior.

  Natasha recalls that it was at this time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that her position as Daddy’s little girl was lost. She was developing a will of her own, no longer the malleable child she once had been. And so the rift between Robert and most everyone else now included his former princess child.

  Natasha found herself replaced in his affections by her new little sister, who was still a toddler young enough to be completely controlled by Robert whenever he had time to spend with her.

  Claire Peernock was spending most of her time at home alone, or in violent arguments with Robert when he was at the house.

  Natasha says that by then, because of Robert’s repeated outbursts against Claire and because of the violence Natasha witnessed him repeatedly inflict on her mother, she had already concluded that her father was evil.