She never could have let the opposition whip her into just walking away.
One of the papers she came across was a copy of a reference request that Tasha’s fashion-design school had sent to her high school counselor. The counselor, who had known Tasha for nearly four years, had written his reply weeks before the night of the crimes, when he had no idea that anyone outside the design school would ever see it. And as Victoria began reading remarks that Natasha herself had never seen, she felt as if she were listening in on some secret conversation.
Appearance: Excellent. Maturity: Excellent. Integrity: Excellent. Creativity: Excellent. “Natasha is a motivated, intelligent, and mature individual who constantly strives to accomplish her personal and educational goals. Loyal, determined, and fun loving, her pleasant personality, sincerity, and compassion for others has been a shining delight to her peers and teachers. This outstanding and determined young lady will strive diligently to pursue her career goal of working in the fashion industry.”
Victoria might have found the recommendation touching under other circumstances, but now it just made her angry. She got madder by the second as she thought about the characterizations leveled at Natasha in the court documents filed by Dern, Mason and Floum. They had essentially accused her of having made everything up to frame her poor innocent father, of inventing a horrible lie in the form of this story about her father being a killer. They not only implied that she was doing it in order to get her hands on her dead mother’s insurance money, they had included Victoria in these valentines. They called her professional behavior deceptive, dishonest, done in service of some awful hoax.
The firm had asserted this position to the courts even though they were talking about a young woman who had lain trapped in the car’s wreckage next to her mother’s dead body while the pool of gasoline that the murderer had poured over them slowly ate away at her flesh.
Victoria clutched Natasha’s character reference in her hands, gazing through it with a grim stare. How satisfying it would have been, she thought, if the excellent law firm of Dern, Mason and Floum had not yet left the case. She would have loved to take this character reference over to their offices high up inside the shining white towers of Century City.
And jam it down their throats.
Tasha’s facial scars had healed enough that she was finally able to make herself get a job as a waitress at the base NCO club. Her flesh was still too raw to tolerate sunlight, but she wanted to try working indoors. The job helped to bring in a little money. It gave her a chance to go somewhere on her own, to have something to do even if it was just a service job. Most importantly, it helped to take her mind off the fact that her marriage was beginning to feel as if it had hit the same wall her father’s Cadillac had been headed toward on the night of the crimes.
Piles of coins began accumulating on her dresser at home. They helped give her the feeling that she was finally able to accomplish something on her own. Still, every time she tried to imagine leaving, she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Leave and go where?
At least things were looking up in one sense; either people didn’t stare at her so much anymore, or she had begun to develop a resistance to it. It made working easier. She mulled over the marriage while she hefted the heavy trays, glad finally to have something to do that got her out of the house on a regular basis.
She realized that when they had started out, her husband had barely been more than a kid himself. He had suddenly found himself saddled with a badly injured young wife and a witness protection program and stories of brutality that went far beyond the impersonal naval battles he was trained to fight.
She could see his side of the problem, all right. It just didn’t give her any way of reconnecting their broken communication lines.
Back in Los Angeles as the second year of the case dragged toward a close, Pam Springer discovered she was being transferred to another division. The Peernock case, which the D.A.’s office had originally estimated would take only a year to complete, now found itself in need of a new prosecutor.
Springer admits that she left with definitely mixed emotions. She was hardly sorry to be free of the entanglements, but was still frustrated that she wouldn’t be able to see it to completion.
Because by that point Robert Peernock was on his fifth defense attorney and his fourth pretrial judge, chewing them up like gum balls. He found every loophole in the system to drag out the proceedings month after month, despite blaming the delays on the system itself. He turned nearly every court appearance into yet another opportunity to plead his detailed conspiracy accusations.
Even today when she gives her thoughts about the personal experience of handling the case, her eyes harden. She lapses into prosecutorial mode, ticking off names and facts with the skill of an experienced senior prosecutor. Clearly, that part of her hated to walk away.
Only when the topic switches to her marriage and motherhood does Springer’s smile fully open up. Her eyes suddenly glow, her face softens; the woman that her husband fell in love with is revealed. Her smile remains for as long as the topics focus on pleasant things.
It is still there as she begins to discuss Craig Richman, the-up-and-coming young prosecutor who replaced her. Springer knew that whatever the outcome of the trial, Craig Richman would be aggressive as hell in pursuing the conviction.
And by this point Pam Springer knew very well that whatever the outcome of the case, this new guy Richman was in for a treat.
“I came back from lunch one day and walked into my office to find several big boxes of case files on my desk,” Richman said later. “There was a note from Billy Webb, my boss, telling me that the Peernock case was now my baby. I didn’t have to ask who Robert Peernock was; by this point everybody knew. But I also knew that the guy had been having a lot of success at jerking the system around in circles. A couple other prosecutors who were senior to me had been offered the case and refused. One had been involved with Peernock before on his old battery case and didn’t want to set grounds for conflict of interest. But nobody asked if I wanted it or not.”
Craig Richman trained at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and still describes himself as a soldier. Now he serves with the thousand-prosecutor army of the largest law office in the world. The battlefront is a courtroom, and here the bad guys have Craig’s team heavily outgunned and severely outnumbered.
Asked whether it made him nervous to inherit an infamous and complex murder case, Richman replies that it did not. But then he smiles and shakes his head. “I didn’t know any better.”
Richman was a radio announcer at the Air Force Academy’s campus station. The background shows in his voice. He liked radio so well that after military service he spent several years working at stations in California and Arizona before settling into law school in Sacramento. He left his radio career behind when he joined the DA’s office in 1985, but he describes trial work as being like radio drama. “The two are similar in a lot of ways. The jury is an audience; you have to draw them in and keep their interest. Just because they can’t change the channel doesn’t mean they can’t tune you out.”
On the day he inherited the Peernock case, Richman had just begun married life with a wife whose beauty matches his chiseled features so well that co-workers still refer to them dryly as “Ken and Barbie.” He resolved to keep the case away from his off-duty time; he didn’t want to blow the new homelife. But it didn’t take long before the case began to bite deeper. Like Steve Fisk, Richman was born in Los Angeles and grew up watching his hometown become increasingly dangerous as the streets turned into shooting galleries and the neighborhoods into breeding grounds for bizarre psychotic outbursts.
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 restrain
t 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
There 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 cann
ot 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.”
A Checklist for Murder Page 23