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.
While being moved about the unit, he was ordered never to stop, never to talk unless answering a guard’s question, and never, ever to turn around during the escort process, or he would be “immediately taken to the ground.” The word ground, of course, is a misnomer; Peernock was finished with the ground. In truth he would he immediately taken down—hard—to the steel.
Locked inside those cells are over a thousand of the worst offenders society has ever had to face, kept in single-cell housing, confined for 23.5 hours each day to tiny windowless rooms where no direct sunlight ever reaches them. Cells are lined with opaque materials so inmates cannot see other prisoners. They can have reading materials, but anything passed to them is hand-checked and X-rayed for contraband. Inmates can watch TV or listen to the radio, but they must wear headphones to maintain silence.
Prisoners are fed in isolation inside their cells. If an inmate ever refuses to return his tray or his utensils or even the aluminum foil wrapper on his coffee creamer, a team of six to eight officers dressed in full riot gear will storm into his cell and attack the prisoner en masse, carrying riot shields and wearing face visors, armed with Tasers, billy clubs, and guns loaded with gas pellets and rubber bullets. They take the offender to the ground, to the steel. Hard.
Sometimes they hog-tie him. They may leave him lying hog-tied for hours at a time.
Who would do such a thing?
Robert Peernock’s opportunity to begin deepening his study of irony began upon the moment of his arrival.
As his reception was completed, he walked down a concrete pathway that runs all the way around an elevated control station while the guard within it watched his every move. He was ordered to stop before the door of his new cell. The door slid open automatically. More guards followed him as he walked into the cell and the remote-controlled door slid shut behind them. A guard opened the locked cuff port in the cell door, then ordered him to back up and slip his hands through the hole. They always remove the handcuffs only after an inmate is secured inside the cell behind a locked steel door. Peernock was strip-searched, then they left him alone.
Other inmates have counted the holes in the steel mesh of the cell door and found that there are 4,094. Perhaps Robert Peernock saved that project for later. He had a cell to get organized, stowing away his towel, two sheets, and a blanket, plus the tennis shoes that were handed in to him after being X-rayed, as well as his yellow jumpsuit that ties in the front with ten little bows.
The cells are grouped eight to a “pod,” with each pod sharing one high-walled, twenty-six-by-ten-foot exercise yard roofed with steel mesh and Plexiglas.
Peernock could see the guards pacing overhead on the steel mesh screen. He could see the speakers on the walls that can monitor conversations between inmates. Later, when it was his time to go along into the tiny exercise yard, where he was never going to be trusted with workout equipment, he would again be strip-searched before being allowed to step out into the bare concrete box.
The Pelican Bay SHU strip-search procedure is to guard the inmate with assault rifles while the inmate removes the jumpsuit. One officer stands gun-ready while another feels every inch of Peernock’s clothing. Peernock is ordered to open his mouth, wag his tongue back and forth, turn his head to both sides, and show the back of both ears. Then he will run his hands through his hair, spread his fingers apart, and display both his palms and his armpits.
Robert Peernock then lifts his testicles and brushes his hands underneath them to prove conclusively for the State of California that he carries no implements of destruction under the family jewels. He must also wiggle his toes around and show the bottoms of his feet.
For any inmate who feels that he has not been given sufficient attention throughout his life, this is his finest hour: still naked and visible to the other guards and inmates on the pod, he is ordered to turn his back, bend over, grab his buttocks and spread them with both hands, then do a series of three deep knee-bends while coughing hard at the precise moment of the downstroke. Meanwhile a guard shines a flashlight at the inmate’s rectum to confirm that no knives, razors, pipe bombs, track shoes, or pieces of wall-scaling equipment are hidden there.
When it’s time for recess out on the bare concrete floor amid the four high concrete walls, the inmate may pace, run in place, do push-ups, jumping jacks, or sit-ups. He can sit against the wall and briefly feel the sunlight.
He can, if so inclined, think about how he got there.
Half an hour after Peernock’s very first recess out in the yard began, he was back inside his cell. The door was locked once more. The silence a
gain enveloped him. Thereafter he would keep company only with his legal papers and a few writing materials. He would read with glasses made of unbreakable plastic, not glass. He would be allowed one book and one magazine whose metal staples are always removed before they are passed on to an inmate. Every item is constantly scrutinized for security purposes.
In this way Robert John Peernock quietly, very quietly, began serving his sentence of life without possibility of parole as California’s guest in January 1992, joining Pelican Bay State Prison’s population of about 3,500. They are housed at a cost to Robert’s taxpayers of $80 million per year because every one of these individuals has proven himself utterly untrustworthy of even the smallest degree of personal freedom.
The high-tech penal technology into which he threw the remainder of his life is unquestionably a mark of how far our society has come. Many see it as a dreadful indication of where we are headed. Robert Peernock, however, could only view this place as home. There he began the first of many long nights to come, shadowed in isolation and silence within his earthbound space station, flying away from his hard-earned captivity only in sleep, when he dreams such lucky dreams.
Craig Richman and Victoria Doom both agree that everyone who hears about this case asks the same thing: “She wasn’t really his biological daughter, was she?” In an age stuffed with acts of insanity, nobody wants to see this last fragile taboo broken, no one wants to imagine that we have come to the point where a man who seems so ordinary on the outside can render his beautiful girl helpless in the flower of her youth and spend months plotting to tear at her face with cold steel.
While there is no way of knowing for certain how many monsters were in the dark out on that lonely road where Claire and Natasha were forced into a savage dance with the devil, there was surely more than one.
And Robert Peernock has long begged for someone, for anyone, to hear him when he cries out that the prosecution was wrong in saying that the crimes were committed by a single attacker, or that he alone destroyed his family that night.
While he never used the phrase monsters in the dark to explain the crime scene, he has said the same thing in essence. And in that sense he is right; the darkness out there was full of monsters. But the evidence left the jury and anyone else who looked at it seriously with one inescapable conclusion: that Robert Peernock is the one who issued the gruesome invitations.
No one in the court system ever disputed that perhaps years ago, Peernock really did discover corruption in the awarding of state contracts. But after the debilitating effect of his years of struggle against the system, after years of visualizing what steps the enemy might take to retaliate against him and then visualizing what steps he in turn might take to resist, after all his years of confronting opponents at the job site and then replaying the conflicts in his mind, somewhere along the way, as his behavior on the witness stand showed, he had lost the ability to tell friend from foe. Eventually he could no longer separate opponent from conspirator, conspirator from monster, estranged wife from monster, angry daughter from monster, monster from monster from monster.
From the moment he wrote the first reminder “Find Loc.,” followed by all the other horrible reminders, surely he no longer had his real family in mind. This may be the only answer to the listener’s dismay upon hearing of a successful man’s plot to commit savage violence against his beautiful wife and his own daughter.
If Peernock was not simply a demon in human form that night, if he was not Evil incarnate as the trial court deemed him to be, then the most charitable explanation is that he was planning to strike out against monsters who had left the confines of his inner world and who could now step in and out of his imagination at will.
When he finally lifted that steel bar and slammed it downward with full arm blows, he was no longer facing his helplessly bound wife and terrorized daughter. He was striking out at monsters bent on destroying him. He could look right at his wife and bludgeon her again and again and never once see the woman he had promised to love and cherish for all the days of his life.
He could look right at his daughter, touch her lovely features, even say her name, and then give her over to the very demonic forces from which most fathers would offer up their lives in protection of their children. All the while he might never truly realize, down inside whatever could be left of his heart, that this was the same little girl he’d run along beside as he taught her to ride her first bicycle.
There were indeed monsters in the dark out on that road that night. Robert Peernock went after them with a vengeance. But he was trying to kill the movie by slashing at the screen.
All of his best-laid plans in response to the taunting of those hidden monsters simply led him to the darkness of his maximum security prison cell. There he found himself alone, with a lifetime to spend in battling them through every waking hour.
Perhaps by now he even fights the monsters in his dreams. Robert John Peernock is nothing if not a determined man.
The Final Chapter
Robert Peernock and I corresponded for months as I attempted to arrange an interview. At first he readily agreed, but also insisted that I sign what he called an “ironclad agreement” promising that I would say nothing to even imply that he may be guilty.
I declined the “ironclad agreement,” but told him that since he had spent years claiming that the legal system would not let him speak, I would guarantee him in writing that he could tell his story without censorship—provided that he first answered certain questions. First of all, my chief concern was his response to the question of what he was doing on the night of the crimes when Patricia came to the house and couldn’t get anyone to answer the door. Secondly, what were his detailed actions throughout that night, if indeed he had nothing to do with the crimes?
He ignored the questions and instead sent me hundreds of pages taken from his old lawsuits against the Department of Water Resources, plus passages from his grilling of Natasha while he was acting as his own attorney in the Juvenile Court case. He also sent pages of complex formulae concerning the rate at which dead bodies cool, purporting to prove that his wife died long before the “crooked cops” say that she did. He failed to mention that he had based his figures upon a body-cooling rate of one degree per hour, when in fact the rate of cooling can be two degrees or more, depending on body weight and air temperature. He failed to explain how his countless civil court actions prove he is innocent of the crimes. He spoke passionately about the continuing waste of taxpayers’ money, but still did nothing to answer my simple questions about his activities on the night of the crimes.
Toward the end of our correspondence, I offered him an entire chapter’s worth of unedited written statement if he would stick to the topic of his specific activities on that night and answer the original questions I had sent to him. He agreed, saying, “I will definitely take you up on the offer,” but still failed to answer the questions.
Finally, with time running out, I wrote to tell him that I would fly to his prison and interview him on tape, but that he would still have to answer my original questions about his whereabouts that night. I had no desire to hear more tirades against the state while questions about his own activities went unanswered. Instead he sent me more copies of legal documents of all kinds from his prior lawsuits against the state, none of which said a word in answer to the questions I had repeatedly posed to him.
But the harder I pressed him to stick to the issues, the more hostile he became. It was a chilling reminder of his performance on the witness stand when Craig Richman pressed him to explain the checklist for murder. When I told him he would not take over my publishing contract for his own devices any more than he’d been able to take over his attorney’s license to practice law, he wrote back with his revelation that I, too, am a hired shill for the government forces who are out to silence him.
He still never said why he hadn’t answered the door for Patricia. He didn’t detail his actions of that night. He never continued his expl
anations for those items on the “checklist for murder” that he’d been prevented from explaining on the witness stand because he’d gotten himself pulled out of the courtroom.
Instead, he finished up his correspondence with two more thick packets filled with detailed computations of time and temperature scales offered in complex proof of his innocence while still ignoring the simple questions. He packed his last letters with threats and accusations against me, Victoria Doom, Steve Fisk, Craig Richman, and Donald Green.
He doesn’t accuse Natasha anymore, though. He says he just wants her to keep repeating the story she has been “programmed” to repeat so that the cops won’t “hurt her any more.” I called Natasha and read that part to her. There was a pause, then she made a sound that was something like a laugh, but it was heavy and sad.
“Gee,” she replied, “I’m so glad to have his permission now.”
I asked her if she wanted to make any statement to him for the book, or maybe write him an open letter. When I asked her what she might want to say, her voice became very soft.
“I would just ask him if he has any idea what he has done, ask him why …” Then she stopped. It took her a few moments to continue.
“On second thought I don’t really want to say anything to him. And I don’t want to ask him any questions. What could he say? What difference would it make? He probably doesn’t even know what the truth is, anymore. I really wouldn’t even want to hear it.”
So I informed Peernock that I was tired of his threats and accusations and that he had squandered his chance to speak. The PO box used for communicating with him was then disconnected.
A Checklist for Murder Page 31