A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  On the other hand, there was that “Agreement.” The memory of it haunted her. She had long ago given it to Steve Fisk, but she could see it clearly in her mind’s eye. A simple, plaintive request by a frightened woman, asking that her alienated husband not beat her or attack her elder daughter or verbally abuse anyone in the household.

  There was still Claire’s faith in her to consider, and of course Natasha’s. The young client who’d started out simply as a name on a dissolution form had become a warm human presence in her life. Natasha’s fears for the future, her hopes and concerns, had become familiar to Victoria. So was her pain. And Victoria knew that the grinding process Natasha was to endure under the wheels of the system had only just started. There were still civil trials, probate hearings and Juvenile Court hearings, not to mention the main criminal trial itself. She would be called to the stand many more times.

  If Victoria walked away from this now, she had no idea how she could ever carry the guilt load should something go disastrously wrong with Natasha’s claim on her share of her parents’ assets. There was nothing else for a horribly injured girl barely out of high school to fall back on for rebuilding her life.

  There was always some chance that Natasha might muddle through by herself, even if she wound up with nothing to help her. Others had done it in the past. But Victoria’s years of watching the effects of severe family disasters on children of all ages whose support system failed them convinced her that those who made it through the trauma unscathed were vastly outnumbered by those who went down for the count, who fell into deep depression and succumbed to various forms of slow self-destruction.

  Still, Victoria just didn’t know how much more she could take.

  It was in this frame of mind that she arrived early at the office on the first working day after New Year’s to see what new assaults on her practice had arrived from Dern, Mason and Floum. She found what she was expecting right on top of the early-morning mail, a legal-sized envelope with the DMF logo.

  She sighed heavily and sat at her desk to open the mail, suddenly feeling as if she had put in a full day already, as she tore open the envelope flap and pulled out the contents.

  And there it was.

  A substitution form from the excellent law firm of Dern, Mason and Floum, officially notifying her that they were withdrawing their entire squad of corporate attorneys from the Peernock extravaganza. No longer would the unending avalanche of legalese from the Century City firm’s word-processing department bury her under opposition papers. Whether they were giving up the onslaught or whether their client had fired them, from now on Robert Peernock would be in propria persona. Peernock had chosen to represent himself in court against her.

  She was about to go head to head with the Magic Pencil.

  Yes, Victoria, the little voice sang in the back of her mind, there is a Santa Claus. She laughed out loud for the first time in days.

  Oh, yes, there is indeed.

  Tasha was aware that her new husband shared the love of football with his other Navy pals, so the fact that he was irritated at having to leave the television in the middle of the game to come to the airport and pick her up on Christmas Day didn’t surprise her. She focused on how pleased he was going to be when he got his present. He had always loved to play computer games in arcades and would often stay for hours pumping coins into the machines. Now the latest Nintendo hardware-and-software combination was going to be her gift to him. She had already purchased it out of her dwindling insurance money. As they drove back to the apartment the thought of giving him the chance to play as much as he wanted to, as well as having him around the house more at the same time, made her feel happy.

  It helped her to forget that her father, acting as his own attorney, had served Natasha with a subpoena to testify in Juvenile Court as a witness in a case challenging her sister’s foster parents for custody.

  In two weeks she was going to have to return to Los Angeles and take the stand again. This time Robert Peernock would be representing himself, which meant that the system was going to allow him to put her up on the stand. The man who had nearly killed her was going to grill her in open court.

  CHAPTER

  21

  The California courts were in a unique position with regard to Robert John Peernock. The fact that he was awaiting trial for murder and was charged with twice trying to kill his daughter did not prevent him from access to the same rights as any other citizen, so long as he was not yet convicted. Since anyone has the right of self-representation in court provided that he or she cooperates with rules and required conduct, nobody could stop him from representing himself in his challenge for the custody of the youngest daughter. He was adamant that the little girl be kept with someone who remained under his control.

  Tasha knew her father was going to try to manipulate her into sounding like a liar for speaking out about the crimes. She knew he was going to try to maneuver her into helping him get back out onto the street. She also knew that if she tried to ignore the command to appear in court, she would be held in contempt and left to face fines she could not pay, perhaps even jail time too bitter and ironic to endure.

  On the morning of Wednesday, January 6, 1988, she sat in the gallery of Los Angeles Juvenile Court waiting to begin her testimony. This time, however, things were very different from before. As if by a strange form of magic, the nervousness and dread of her last court appearance had left her. Now in their place was a calm sensation, almost one of contentment. This feeling had puzzled her on the plane ride over. She wondered why she shouldn’t be full of foreboding at having to confront Robert in public.

  It hadn’t been until she was actually on her way into court, once again flanked by bodyguards, that the answer came to her.

  He was going to have to do it out in the open now.

  Since the point in her life years before when she’d begun openly thinking of him as evil, she’d had to endure his abuses in private. There was no winning in any conflict with him; he persisted until he overcame resistance. There was nowhere to run, to hide, to turn for reinforcement. Even when he’d shattered her bones by throwing her against the kitchen wall, Claire had asked her to remain silent, because at that point Claire hadn’t found the strength to face him down.

  But Tasha had already faced him down once before, back on July 21, the day his crime spree began. She had done it without protection, even though it had nearly cost her life.

  So she told herself she could surely face him down again, surrounded by policemen in open court. Whatever he did to her, whatever lies he told, whatever accusations, insults, or scorn he heaped upon her, he was going to have to do it with witnesses this time. A court reporter would take down every word and file it in a safe place so that nobody could ever come back at some future point and try to make her feel stupid or crazy by insisting that something she’d clearly heard with her own ears had in fact never been said.

  And so her father had unwittingly given her a chance to speak up for all of the Peernock family women and for years of his abuse. And this time he could yell and scream all he wanted to, but he couldn’t hurt anybody.

  She could see her father’s back as he sat at the attorneys’ table conferring with his co-counsel, ready to begin whatever it was that he had called her here to do. But just as her testimony was beginning, Natasha was astounded to hear the judge observe, out loud, that the trial needed to proceed in a timely fashion—because Natasha Peernock had just been flown in from Hawaii.

  She couldn’t believe her ears. This wasn’t criminal court, but was it possible that this judge actually hadn’t been told that she was under witness protection? And that her father, sitting right there, was the reason for it?

  Robert was sitting as close to the judge as she was. She had clearly heard the judge give away her secret location, in full voice, in open court. Surely her father heard it too.

  She nearly screamed in frustration.

  Her mind raced. What to do? Should she speak up, ask
them to stop, or was the damage done? Did anybody realize what had just happened? No one seemed to have reacted. The lawyers were having a discussion with the judge about some technical point; it had apparently just slipped out. Her father didn’t react openly, but she knew he was too clever to do that anyway. No, she would just have to hope that it was a slip of the tongue and that the judge realized what he had done. She could only pray that Robert’s attention was occupied with his notes and that he hadn’t heard.

  And then the judge said it again.

  Not thirty seconds later. Something to the effect of “Let’s wrap up her testimony so that she can go back to Hawaii.” She couldn’t believe her ears. Her fear that her father might find a way to outsmart the legal system jumped up about a hundred notches.

  And that was how her testimony began.

  Today her memory of the details is blurred under the weight of the relentless probing she endured there. But she is crystal clear on one point; the psychological ordeal lasted for four days as she sat pinned in the witness chair under her father’s machine-gun questioning, forced to go over every tiny detail of the night of the crimes, piece by jagged piece, while he labored to portray her as a liar.

  • • •

  Juvenile Court records are sealed under the law and cannot be quoted as matters of public record in the way that other types of civil or criminal action may be. There is good purpose to this law. It protects the minor children, both psychologically and physically, who are the subjects of the trials; some of the most impassioned and potentially abusive behavior people will display shows up in custody battles.

  Without revealing the confidentiality of the trial or the names of the foster parents, Natasha can clearly recall her growing amazement that the court allowed her father to continue berating her, despite being continually warned that his questions were improper and that he was not sticking to the juvenile-custody issue, and despite the judge’s expressed awareness that Robert was trying to address his criminal trial issues here in Juvenile Court. She remembers her father at one point openly taunting her, asking, “Did your mommy die in a car wreck?” The court scolded him but still he was allowed to continue.

  Throughout the four-day ordeal she clung to the consolation that at least someone was hearing him, at least his coldness, his contempt, his flagrant disrespect, were being displayed for everyone to see.

  But every day she climbed down from the stand feeling a little more drained. She tried to get to sleep at night but her sense of outrage hammered away inside her. It seemed incredible that nobody was stopping him.

  By the end of the fourth day her grip on that consolation was at the breaking point. Fatigue had drained her strength. Her throat had gone raw, her chest was congested. It had become hard to swallow and her ears throbbed.

  As if invisible tentacles of hatred had reached out from her father’s maliciousness, she could feel, like a vampire’s victim, the health being sucked out of her.

  It began to seem that he was still working his evil, but that now he could do it invisibly.

  At last, at the end of the afternoon on January 13, the judge decided that Robert Peernock had been given every courtesy by the system and had had ample opportunity to cross-examine Natasha. The four-day beating was finished.

  She climbed down from the stand and walked out of the room without looking back.

  Tasha had hoped to brighten up this trip to Los Angeles by seeing some friends, maybe going out to some of the old haunts. Instead, she went straight back to her in-laws’ home, fell into bed, and stayed there for two weeks before she was well enough to get back on a plane and fly home.

  But when she arrived back in Hawaii she found that a barrier had begun to form inside her marriage, and outsiders were not going to be able to help her deal with it. The consequences of marrying a young man she had barely known began to be felt as their opposite styles of coping with stress slowly drove a wedge between them.

  When she tried to talk about what the trial had been like, her husband still refused to refer to the night of the crimes as murder, calling it “the accident” instead. She didn’t like talking about it, but sometimes the subject just came up and she needed a mention, a comment, a comforting word or two from him to bring the thoughts hammering at her out into the light of day.

  His responses were sullen, frustrating bouts of silence.

  She cursed herself for having bought the computer game, as her husband began to lose himself in the brightly colored game world.

  Not long afterward she awoke one night to hear him mumbling in his sleep. For a moment she feared he might be dreaming about a girlfriend, some pretty thing with no scars and no legal problems and no trauma. But it wasn’t that. In his sleep, he was deep in the conflict of his newest software fantasy, the hero of a legendary battle game. Resentment flooded through her, but she didn’t wake him up. What was the point of starting a fight? It would just make everything feel worse. Tasha told herself that maybe they just needed to get past the hump of this damned murder trial. And besides, what if he snapped and issued an ultimatum to her—where else was she going to go?

  She still felt too scarred, too marked by the crimes, to attempt to face the world on her own. Her mother’s fears that Natasha might end up dependant on a man had become reality, albeit by means no one could have predicted.

  On January 26, 1988, Victoria Doom actually saw Robert Peernock for the first time at a probate hearing before Judge Fred Rimmerman. It was Peernock’s first probate hearing since he had fired Dern, Mason and Floum and decided to represent himself.

  Given typical self-represented status, he was allowed to come into the courtroom without wearing shackles or leg restraints, even though in his case this was being done despite the numerous Class A felony charges pending against him. The only law enforcement in the courtroom was a single bailiff.

  Victoria watched in fascination as Robert stormed angrily into court with a bundle of legal papers under his arm, marched up to the attorney table, slammed the papers down, and glared at her with what she could only interpret as pure hatred. Moments after Judge Rimmerman opened the proceedings Robert began to interrupt loudly, haranguing the judge for several minutes with a list of accusations against the DA’s office and Deputy DA Myron Jenkins, plus all of the judges appointed by former Governor Jerry Brown including Rimmerman himself, plus Judge Michael Luros, who had presided at the preliminary hearing in the murder case.

  Judge Rimmerman sat quietly at first, allowing Robert to outline the vast conspiracy against him and the tidal wave of corruption that he claimed had him in its grip. However, Rimmerman began warning Robert that he was going too far when he began to make accusations against Victoria and Natasha for stealing his money and preventing him from using it to hire an attorney to replace Bradley Brunon, whose fee had only covered Robert as far as the preliminary hearing. Robert demanded the right to use that money to hire someone who could get him out of the morass swallowing him. He didn’t want to hear anything about probate laws, which demanded the estate be shared by the survivors. He especially didn’t want to hear anything about Natasha’s right to protect the estate from being used entirely for Robert’s defense, leaving nothing for the daughters.

  Finally Rimmerman had had enough and ordered Robert to leave the courtroom until he could get himself under sufficient control to be able to function as his own attorney. But when the bailiff tried to escort him from the courtroom, Robert started struggling with him, refusing to leave, continuing to scream at the judge.

  A violent struggle broke out, with the bailiff trying to call for backup while he restrained Robert, who continued struggling and shouting his conspiracy accusations.

  The judge leaned under his desk and pushed the hidden call button to summon more officers to the courtroom. People in the gallery jumped up and began to crowd for the doors in panic as the situation quickly careened out of control.

  It took two minutes, which felt more like two hours on adrenaline time, before
another six deputies showed up with guns and subdued Robert completely, dragging him out of the courtroom.

  The power of Robert’s emotions stunned Victoria.

  Within minutes of walking in, Peernock had worked himself into a self-stimulated Vesuvian eruption unlike anything she had ever seen in court. She sat marveling at what she had just learned about her adversary. While the power of his passion was undeniable, he seemed to have no clue whatsoever about the wisdom of projecting a reasonable image in court, whether that image is true or false.

  After a few minutes to restore order, Judge Rimmerman called for the defendant to be returned. This time there were two armed guards kept in position at the main entrance.

  Five more were positioned in a semicircle around Robert Peernock.

  CHAPTER

  22

  During the time Tasha spent between trips back to L.A. to testify, Hawaii began to feel more like a trap than a paradise. Her appearance kept her from wanting to socialize and her artistic nature couldn’t find much in common with the military wives of her husband’s friends. She didn’t feel able to attempt working yet, and a new sailor’s salary doesn’t leave much money for a young couple’s entertainment.

  Shortly after she’d returned home from her testimony in the juvenile case she began seriously to fear for her marriage. Even though it had been more an act of need than true love, it still felt wrong just to let the marriage go without a fight.

  This was when Tasha realized she might have an opportunity to let her father be of some actual positive value after all the trouble he had caused. Perhaps the very real threat that he posed to her safety, plus the judge’s slip of the tongue in court when he’d mentioned her home state twice in a row, might offer her a way to use her witness-protection situation to maneuver a transfer out of Hawaii for her husband. A change of scene might be just the thing.