The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  The following day, using information gleaned from Skeet’s Rolodex, Detective Sergeant Sierchio and three uniformed officers knocked on Irving Gaskins’s third-floor apartment door. Mr. Gaskins, seventy-eight years old and a longtime friend of Skeet’s family, lived on 13th Street in Newark proper, a few blocks from Branch Brook Park, where Rob was currently enrolled in the summer camp. They were admitted entry by a woman. In the apartment, a group of children played on the floor. Mr. Gaskins was hooked to an oxygen tank due to a combination of emphysema, diabetes, and heart disease. The suspect, Robert “Skeet” Douglas, was seated nearby, and after a brief, charged confrontation during which Mr. Gaskins begged the police not to shoot—because a stray bullet might explode his oxygen tank and harm his grandchildren—Skeet was put in handcuffs. According to the police report, the arresting officers found a .38 caliber Taurus Spesco revolver tucked in Skeet’s pants, loaded with six rounds of ammunition, with five more live rounds in his pocket. In the days following, ballistics experts would confirm that striations on the bullets removed from the murdered women’s bodies exactly matched those within the flute of this revolver, and in turn the revolver had unique markings etched on the outer surface of the barrel that matched the holster found in Skeet’s apartment.

  At his desk in the prosecutor’s office, Thomas Lechliter reviewed dozens of transcripts and reports, photographs, and inventory lists, and he constructed a clear narrative of the murders. As he did so, his confidence grew that not only would this evidence lead to a conviction, but also that a conviction would represent justice in the world. In other words, the defendant was guilty. He did not overlook the many loose ends presented within the story: the single witness who had been inebriated, strung out, severely overtired, and hungover at the time of the murders, and who had identified a suspect, by voice only, whom she had encountered once in her life and never spoken to directly; the very odd time lapse between when the murder was said to have taken place—seven thirty—and when Georgianna’s roommate had first called the police two hours later (the warmth of the dead bodies upon police arrival did not help explain that, either); a suspect who, though a known drug dealer, had neither prior convictions nor any history of violence; the less-than-kosher initial police search of apartment 2D, the tuxedo picture illegally taken from the scene, and conflicting police statements as to when the gun holster had actually been found—before the warrant was issued or after (because the holster had been concealed by dirty clothes, finding it before the warrant would have required more than the quick, noninvasive search granted by law); the fact that not one of the interviews conducted so far had alluded to anything resembling a motive.

  All of these questions would be sufficiently answered, Lechliter was sure, before the case went to trial. In the meantime he had the murder weapon, found on the suspect’s person at the time of arrest, and that was really all he needed to win. That, and for Skeet Douglas to obtain legal representation, so that the requisite filings, hearings, appeals, motions, pleas, movements, selections, and—ultimately—the trial of State of New Jersey v. Robert Douglas could commence.

  JACKIE TRIED TO hold her son’s hand on the bus ride to Essex County Jail, but he wouldn’t let her. He gazed out the windows at autumnal Newark flashing past. Most of the other passengers were women in their late teens and early twenties en route to see boyfriends, husbands, brothers. The rest were older, probably parents. Rob was the lone child.

  Jackie hadn’t wanted to bring him so soon, but Skeet had been adamant. He’d used so many of his daily fifteen minutes of phone time—minutes that were supposed to be used to contact lawyers—to call her instead, demanding to see his son, that she’d finally given in. “I’m his father, he loves me, he can see me as I am,” Skeet told her. “I’m not guilty and I’m not ashamed.”

  At the jail, Rob walked the same path she’d walked a few times already, past the same checkpoints and the same gatekeepers, until he was watching his father through the glass. Never before had their likeness struck her so strongly, and it loosened valves within her, the ones that kept her darker feelings contained. Even here, the boy emulated his father, the way he held the handset loosely to his ear, his other elbow propped on the counter, head angled down, words spoken in a low mumble.

  Skeet asked, “How are you doing, little man?”

  Rob told him about street football, summer camp, and first grade starting at Oakdale. Skeet promised that he would call him every day, that he would be here whenever Rob was able to visit, that he would be home very soon.

  “Hey,” Skeet said, just before their time was up, “you know I didn’t do anything wrong, right? You know I’m innocent?”

  “Yeah,” Rob replied, his confidence unwavering. In that moment, Jackie almost believed Skeet, too.

  SCHOOL BEGAN, and Jackie tried to treat the changing days and seasons normally, for her son’s sake. She walked him to school, bused herself to work, and met him back at home. She was worried about his learning progress, both because his teachers were less than inspired and because of the emotional trauma he was enduring. With Skeet’s help and his own motivation, Rob had always been able to bridge the gap between his own drive and the lack thereof at Oakdale Elementary. Jackie tried to fill Skeet’s role doing homework, but she wore out easily. After long days taking orders in the kitchen, she didn’t generally have the strength to give orders at home. Over the following months, Rob began gaining weight—“husky,” she started calling him—and acting lazy. Coming home and seeing her seven-year-old splayed on the sofa, half asleep with his books unopened and watching junk on TV, reminded her of every man around the neighborhood whom she wanted nothing to do with. And yet she hadn’t built up the heart to push Rob forward from this event the way Jackie was pushing herself forward. Usually, she simply dropped on the sofa next to him and watched whatever he was watching. Whenever she felt sorry for herself, she tried to think of Skeet, seven miles away, alone in a cell. Whenever she felt really sorry for herself, she thought of the Moore sisters.

  Then she was in the school principal’s office, with Rob sitting hunched beside her, his blood still hot, muttering breathy little resignations to himself, “I don’t care if they kick me out, that boy’s a fool.”

  In the winter of first grade, Rob had had his first fistfight, on the front steps outside Oakdale Elementary. Fights weren’t uncommon, and the faculty didn’t treat them very seriously. But they’d still called Jackie at work. To her chagrin, no one at the school asked for a disciplinary meeting. So Jackie demanded one herself, left work, and walked to Lincoln Avenue. Throughout the curt discussion that followed (she felt the administrators were humoring her so they could go home), she visualized the scene: two seven-year-old bodies in winter coats tumbling down the concrete steps into dirtied snowbanks, arms flailing and profanity in play, while fellow students and young male passersby from the surrounding neighborhood chanted encouragement (“C’mon, li’l man, kick his ass!”). They were two little boys pretending to be men.

  On the walk home, after chewing him out, she thought to ask why he’d thrown the first punch. This wasn’t an act of the boy she knew.

  “He called me a nerd,” her son informed her.

  “You keep going like this,” she said, “and you’ve got nothing but disappointment coming to you . . .” She went on, but a part of her heart was pleased. Members of her family had been called a lot of things over the generations, but she was pretty sure “nerd” had never been one.

  Rob ultimately expressed the appropriate sentiments to project shame. She sensed that he, like the principal, was humoring her so that she would leave him alone, and then he could wait for his father to call from jail, so he could tell the man how he’d won the fight. The other boy had come away with a black eye. Rob had only a bruise on his shoulder from hitting the steps.

  After his arrest, Skeet was assigned a public defender. Their initial meetings did not involve the events of August 8 a
t all but rather Skeet’s finances. The lawyer filed a plea of not guilty, but that was his only legal motion over the course of the fall; in January 1988, the public defender’s office wrote Skeet in prison to say that they were denying him representation, due to his failure to prove indigency. They referred to the house he owned on Pierson Street, which according to “reliable real estate brokers in the area” had a value of between $70,000 and $110,000. The letter also cited a pending civil action, from a car accident Skeet had been in years earlier, in which he still had an expectation of financial recovery (the insurance claim for damages and lost work was $3,174). Skeet began appearing in court without representation, and the judge advised him that if he truly could not afford a lawyer, he could appeal the public defender’s decision. This process took almost a year, a year of nearly cosmic miscommunications and misunderstandings between Skeet, the public defender’s office, and the appellate court—and a year in which the defendant remained lawyerless, his witnesses uninterviewed. The public defender’s office accused Skeet of intentionally mailing the wrong forms and failing to read the case studies they had cited; Skeet accused them of misinformation and outright sabotage. He complained about lack of access to the law library, functioning copy machines, stamps, and envelopes. A recent legislative change, in which indigency came to be decided by the judiciary branch rather than the public defender’s office, caused additional confusion as Skeet continued sending appeals to the wrong office without being notified of the change. In nine hearings spread over eleven months, Skeet fought not for his innocence but for his right to someone capable of pleading his innocence.

  On November 2, 1988—a year and three months after the murders—his case was once again taken up by the public defender’s office. The entire delay boiled down to a single overlooked form and the proper submission of a photo of Skeet’s burnt-out property on Pierson Street, which Jackie took.

  Almost five months later, on March 28, 1989, Skeet’s newly appointed attorneys filed a motion to set “the dates for the filing and hearing of all pretrial motions”—in other words, a motion to schedule further motions. After more conferences, this date was set for August 7, 1989, exactly two years after the Moore sisters’ final evening together. The hearing of pretrial motions commenced September 6 and continued into October. During that span, Irving Gaskins, in whose home Skeet had been apprehended, passed away. Due to the prolonged legal confusion, Gaskins had never given a formal statement to the defense attorneys that could be presented in a trial. According to Skeet, Gaskins had been prepared to testify that the murder weapon and ammunition had not, in fact, been found in his belt—that the police had planted it on him. After all, what killer would fail to get rid of his weapon in the span of a full day following his crime? What sensible human being would carry a loaded gun around a sick, elderly man and his grandchildren?

  On February 22, 1990, Skeet’s lawyers filed a motion to set the trial date, asserting that in addition to the loss of key witnesses and inability to properly strategize a defense, the long delay between arrest and trial might give the impression to the jury that the defendant’s guilt was not really at issue, just the punishment he should receive. On March 9, a trial date was scheduled for September 10. On that day, now three years and one month after the murders, jury selection began for State of New Jersey v. Robert Douglas.

  Three years: three years during which Skeet waited in jail along with all the other accused murderers and rapists and pedophiles of Essex County—like a new, warped incarnation of the neighbors he’d once spent his afternoons chatting up along the avenues of East Orange; three years, or more than eleven hundred days, on each of which he was permitted one hour of exercise and fifteen minutes of phone time, calls made collect at extremely high prison rates; three years, or 160 weeks, during each of which Jackie took Rob to see his father; three years during which Skeet, on days when he didn’t need to speak with his lawyers, called his son on the phone to go over homework problems; three years during which Rob grew from a child of seven to a boy of ten; three years during which this boy went about his daily life, knowing full well that Thomas Lechliter and the State of New Jersey were building their case against his father for the death penalty; three years during which Jackie waited in dread to learn whether or not Rob would be called to testify in this regard.

  He was called to do so, once in the winter of 1990, at the hearing to confirm that the death penalty would be sought. For ten minutes the nine-year-old—fully aware that his father’s very life might be at stake in his words—answered questions from Mr. Lechliter.

  “Have you ever been to your father’s apartment on Chestnut Street?” Lechliter asked.

  “Just outside the front, sir,” the boy replied.

  And, later on: “Have you ever seen your father using drugs?”

  “No, sir.”

  To the extent that he could, Rob used his responses to declare over and over that his father was a nice man who cared about homework and would never hurt anybody. Lechliter managed to sway the judge toward the death penalty regardless.

  AT OAKDALE ELEMENTARY, Rob led the math league and spelling bee teams to area competitions where they were typically routed by more affluent schools in South Orange and Montclair. He took these defeats to heart, scowling and stomping around the house for days afterward. Already, he and his more motivated classmates were learning that no matter how badly they wanted to succeed, they seemed to lack some element that would put them on equal footing with peers growing up just a few miles away. Of course, they figured that the element was money.

  In addition to such socioeconomic awakenings, her son now officially hailed from a single-parent home. He was far from alone in this regard; of the roughly sixty thousand people living in East Orange in the late 1980s, 25 percent were under eighteen years old, and 67 percent of those children lived in single-parent homes. More than ten thousand children in the three square miles Rob Peace inhabited shared his new situation, whether through abandonment, death, or imprisonment. But for the most part, families in the area tended to break up very early, before long-term memory imprinted and the children had fully formed their attachments. These children had never had involved fathers and so they didn’t know, as Rob knew, what it felt like to love and be loved by one—and then have him ripped away.

  The only positive effect Jackie observed was that in a high-crime area such as East Orange, where murders were relatively common, no one crime stood out to the extent that it generated much gossip or judgment. People close to the Peaces knew what had happened, of course, but the event wasn’t otherworldly enough to send shock waves of “Oh my God, can you believe . . . ?” coursing through the surrounding blocks. Jackie had worried about Rob in this regard at first—his association by blood to an alleged killer of women—but found that there was no need. He didn’t seem to experience any exclusion, name-calling, or dirty looks. No one cared, not really. What did worry her was when Rob would come home smirking with an ugly sort of pride. He’d tell her how someone—an older kid at school whose dad knew Skeet, or a random set of guys trolling the neighborhood in the evening, or Carl—had lauded his father as some kind of noble rebel-warrior and considered him above all a victim of the white establishment. “Shame how they did him like that,” they would say to the boy. And worse: “You have to carry his name on proud, little man.”

  To avert this name carrying, Jackie had to make a change.

  During the year after Skeet’s arrest, she began attending night school to become qualified as a kitchen supervisor. Consequently, for six months she saw her son for less than an hour in the mornings. This huge sacrifice proved worthwhile when, upon completion, she landed an administrative job at University Hospital and a raise of $2,000 a year. Instead of cooking the food, she was now responsible for ordering, tracking, keeping inventory, and delegating work to others. She skimped on clothes, food, and all luxuries, both for her and Rob. She took a second job sweeping hair off
a salon floor. And after two years of this—of Rob enduring ridicule for wearing clothes he’d outgrown while eating yellow rice with black beans most nights, often by himself or with his grandparents—Jackie had saved enough to send her son to private school on her own. This time, no one questioned her desire to do so. She was forty-one years old.

  In September 1990, just as his father’s murder trial began in the courthouse downtown, Rob entered the fourth grade in a private Catholic school. During the months to come, the remainder of Skeet’s life would be decided upon by a jury of his peers. In a certain way, Rob’s life would be, too.

  Chapter 3

  MT. CARMEL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL stood on East Freeway Drive overlooking the I-280. As the mostly poor, mostly black and Hispanic students filed in and out, they could look down the steep embankment at the cars whooshing past, carrying suburban commuters from their bucolic homes to their downtown jobs and back again. The modest brick building was sandwiched between a church and a nursing home. On a grass lawn directly behind it, nurses took turns jumping rope while the octogenarians in their care looked on eagerly, clapping out revolutions—and also creating a kind of neighborhood watch that kept loiterers and dealers away (the interstate off-ramps provided convenient locations for white-collar commuters to buy drugs quickly, without venturing into the hood). Mt. Carmel, kindergarten to eighth grade, cost $200 a month. Most of the teachers were elderly white nuns, of whom Skeet would disapprove. But unlike before, or possibly ever again, he had no say in the matter. Jackie was paying about a third of her monthly salary—now around $600—in tuition, plus additional expenses for clothes, books, and supplies. She was also taking a big risk by hoping this sacrifice would mean something. If Rob turned out like any other rough boy in the neighborhood—if her son wasn’t special like she believed he was—she feared the disappointment that would follow too much striving on her part. At the very least, she was confident that he was now among people who saw beyond who and where they were. Uppity or not, Jackie saw beyond.