by Otto Penzler
Animal control officers found Bane in Knoller’s bathroom. The officers inched open the bathroom door and peeked inside. Bane was a massive creature. He weighed 120 pounds and was just under three feet tall, with a brindle coat of black and tan tiger stripes. Most of his weight was centered in his powerful chest, bulging legs, and squat head, his most imposing feature. Bane had defecated all over the bathroom. He was soaked in blood. Even his teeth were red.
The animal control officers carried a tranquilizer gun that shoots darts potent enough to knock out a large dog. They fired three into Bane and waited fifteen minutes, but he remained standing. Two of the officers ended up hooking Bane with “catch” poles and walked him down to their van, where they euthanized him with 25 cc of sodium pentobarbital a short time later.
Five hours later, the victim, Diane Whipple, a popular 33-year-old lacrosse coach at nearby St. Mary’s College, died at San Francisco General Hospital. Her larynx had been crushed and her throat punctured. But the cause of death was cardiac arrest; she had lost nearly all of her blood. Whipple had been an ail-American lacrosse player at Penn State, then an Olympic track-and-field hopeful—an aspiration she was forced to give up in her mid-twenties to battle cancer. Less than a week before the attack, she had run a marathon.
One police officer initially called her death a “tragic accident,” but a morally neutral judgment failed to satisfy the public, whose outrage soon turned on Bane’s owners, Marjorie Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel. Outwardly, they seemed exemplary San Franciscans. They were do-gooder attorneys honored by the Bar Association of San Francisco for their work helping the homeless and mentally disabled. They were opera patrons who hobnobbed with some of the city’s wealthiest citizens. Both on their third marriage, they had wed twelve years earlier and were seen by friends such as their colleague Herman Franck as being “deeply in love, devoted to each other.”
But an investigation into their private lives soon yielded secrets that defied explanation. The couple—she is 46, he’s 60—had recently adopted an inmate at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, a 39-year-old man serving a life term for armored-car robbery and attempted murder. Their “son,” Paul “Cornfed” Schneider, is one of the most feared leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and is currently facing federal trial on an indictment for racketeering and a series of murders he allegedly orchestrated from behind bars.
Schneider, who lived in an 11-by-7½-foot concrete cell, had somehow managed to set up a dog-breeding operation—he called it Dog o’ War kennels—outside the prison walls. Schneider’s associates raised Presa Canarios, an unusual breed of attack dog from Spain introduced to the United States a decade or so earlier. Bane, the dog that killed Whipple, was Schneider’s prize stud dog—Presa puppies sell for as much as $2,200. Prison investigators suspected that the dogs were being raised to protect Aryan Brotherhood criminal enterprises such as meth labs.
The fact that Bane and his mate, Hera, wound up living in Knoller and Noel’s Pacific Heights apartment was odd enough. Even stranger was the relationship between Knoller, Noel, and their adopted son. It included pornographic letters that the couple exchanged with Schneider and, it was rumored, photographs of Marjorie Knoller having sex with the dogs. It did not help Knoller’s cause that days after the city filed a warrant to search for photos that depicted “sexual acts … that involved dogs” in Schneider’s cell, she admitted that her nickname for one of the dogs had been “my certified lick therapist.”
Nothing in the portrait of the couple that was emerging made sense. Nor did the bizarre statements they made in public. They suggested Whipple might have egged on the attack by wearing a pheromone-laced perfume or by menstruating. When Knoller appeared before a grand jury, she wove an almost moving tale of how she risked her life trying to save Whipple’s, then blew whatever sympathy she was gaining by saying that Bane had sniffed Whipple’s crotch “like she was a bitch in heat.”
Since late January 2002, Knoller has been on trial for second-degree murder and her husband for manslaughter. Because the case has received such extensive coverage in their hometown, the trial is being held in Los Angeles. “Bob and Marjorie were so hated in San Francisco,” says Herman Franck. “You half expected to see an angry mob with pitchforks and torches to show up outside the courthouse.”
If Knoller and Noel were simply on trial for acting like jerks, this would be an open-and-shut case. But proving that this strange couple had a murderous intent will be difficult for prosecutors. Nor will the trial answer all questions about this case, the story of how the once-prominent San Francisco attorneys wound up adopting an Aryan Brotherhood gang leader and his killer dog reveals as much about individual human folly as it does about the peculiar, corrupting hell of the American penal system. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that their journey into this hell was paved with good intentions.
Originally locked up in 1985 for an armored-car robbery, Paul Schneider has been incarcerated since the early 1990s in the Security Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State Prison, where he is locked in his cell twenty-two and a half hours per day, never allowed outdoors, and permitted contact with the outside world only through letters and strictly monitored visits. Keith Whitley, a former guard who first encountered Schneider in 1987, calls him “the most dangerous man in California.” Schneider is deemed such a security risk that when he was moved last fall out of Pelican Bay in preparation for his federal trial, U.S. marshals and the California Highway Patrol blocked traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge in order to transport him across it in a heavily defended motorcade.
When I first meet Schneider, he appears across the reinforced-glass visitation window at his temporary home in the Sacramento County jail looking amazingly fit despite his chalky complexion. Throughout the interview, a steady clanking sound emanates from deep within the jail—chains sliding, locks tumbling, doors slamming, which together sound like the rumbling of the empty stomach of a mechanical beast. Schneider has thick blond hair combed straight back, a direct, blue-eyed gaze, stands about six feet two and weighs 220 pounds. Muscles, traced with blue veins, bulge beneath his pale skin. His right hand is tattooed with an A and a B, spare advertisements for his affiliation with the notorious Aryan Brotherhood gang.
Schneider, born in 1962, grew up in Cerritos, California, with two younger sisters, his mother, and his stepfather, a retired Air Force officer who ran an industrial cleaning service. He portrays his childhood as a happy one. “My stepdad used to take me flying in Cessnas,” he says. “I worked on pit crews for drag-racing boats.”
He says that he always loved, dogs. When he was about 16, Schneider found a summer job with a Los Angeles company called Continental K-9, which specialized in lending junkyard-protection dogs to small businesses in the city’s crime-ridden industrial zone. He would drop off the dogs at night and pick them up early in the morning. Most of the animals were semi-wild, vicious mutts. “Thieves would cut tendons in the dogs’ legs,” he says. “That was when I learned how loyal dogs are. They would still try to do their job even when their legs were sliced.”
In 1979, after graduating from high school early, Schneider joined the Air Force and was assigned to a special Strategic Air Command unit in eastern Washington. He worked as a crewman aboard KC-130 aerial refueling tankers, large planes that accompanied heavy bombers to the edge of Soviet airspace. He lived a week at a time in an underground bunker called a “mole hole,” and he participated in round-the-clock drills in which crews were told nuclear attack was imminent and were given five minutes to scramble their jets. They were never told whether these drills were actual or make-believe Armageddon until their missions were over. The isolation and intense psychological pressure of his military duty would later prove excellent preparation for Schneider’s ability to withstand tortuous conditions within the corrections system.
Schneider’s sister Tammy offers a much darker view of her brother’s childhood than the idyllic picture he paints. Tammy, 38 and married to a firefigh
ter, lives in a rural community about an hour from where she and Paul grew up. She is an attractive woman with an almost doll-like presence, an impression created by her limited ability to move her hands or arms as a result of brain cancer she has battled for twelve years. According to Tammy, the house where she and her brother grew up was run on a regimen that blended military discipline and sadism. “Our house was a prison, and our stepdad was the warden,” she says. He would wake the children up in the middle of the night to make them scrub pots or scour the bathroom floor with toothbrushes. Tammy’s first beating occurred when she was eight. A couple of years later, her stepfather began to sexually abuse her. “Paul was very protective of me,” she remembers. “He stood up to our stepdad. That man used to beat the shit out of Paul.”
Schneider did not last long in the authoritarian world of the military. According to Tammy, he and his wife split up two years after he enlisted, and he was kicked out of the Air Force for writing bad checks. He moved back to Cerritos and became the manager of a local pizza parlor. On one of his nights off, he put on a mask, armed himself with a handgun, and robbed the restaurant. A short while later, he began to notice the big sacks of money carried by armored-car drivers at the Alpha Beta supermarket where Tammy worked as a checkout girl. He developed an irrational personal hatred of the guards. “I couldn’t believe how arrogant the guards were,” Schneider says. “They’d come into the store, with their little revolvers pointing to the ground, and they’d bump into people without even apologizing. I wanted to show them that they weren’t so tough.”
Schneider robbed the guards and got away with nearly $100,000. Several weeks later, according to his sister, he showed up at his stepfather’s house flaunting a new motorcycle. His stepfather, suspecting that Schneider was behind the robbery, tipped off the cops, who began to build a case against Schneider. In 1985, at the age of 23, he was arrested and eventually sent to New Folsom State Prison, in California. By July 1987, he had earned his way into the Aryan Brotherhood by stabbing a guard in the neck.
Schneider thrived in the brutal prison environment, pitting his will against the authorities’ every chance he had. In 1990, when he was brought into a courthouse under heavy guard to testify in a case involving another inmate, Schneider pulled a knife he had fashioned from a prison soup ladle and stabbed a defense attorney several times. Like a magician guarding the secret behind a trick, Schneider has never revealed how he smuggled the weapon into the courtroom, though his victim’s wounds contained unmistakable clues: They were infected with fecal matter.
After the incident, Schneider penned a declaration explaining why he’d attacked the attorney. The assault stemmed from his desire to humiliate a warden at New Folsom State Prison. “I took [associate warden] Campbell’s boasting of his new vaunted security procedures as a challenge,” he wrote. As for why he chose his victim, he wrote, “I didn’t like his attitude, his smart-aleck remarks, nor his demeanor. So I stabbed him. In retrospect, it was a bad idea.”
Schneider picked up a life sentence. Displaying an uncanny ability to harass the system even in defeat, he successfully sued the prison administration for excessively X-raying him every time he was transported before and after the soup ladle-knife smuggling episode and collected $11,666.66.
In the meantime, Schneider was transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison shortly after it opened in 1989. The prison was intended to be the crown jewel of the California Department of Corrections, which operates one of the largest penal systems in the world, a gulag with ninety-eight facilities, more than 300,000 inmates under its jurisdiction, and nearly 50,000 employees.
Pelican Bay rises unexpectedly out of redwood forest a few miles off Highway 101, on the desolate Northern California coast, 360 miles north of San Francisco. Its antiseptic corridors resemble passageways in a large, slumbering spaceship. “When you first go inside Pelican Bay,” says Russell Clanton, an attorney who represents several inmates there, “it feels like being inside an enormous sensory deprivation tank.” The 3,200 inmates are stored like factory-raised poultry in small concrete cells.
Within a few years of the prison’s opening, reports began to leak out suggesting that Pelican Bay’s neat façade served mainly to conceal its interior horrors from the outside world. In two early incidents, guards were caught using medical facilities to torture inmates—strapping one man to a gurney and beating him, submerging another in scalding water and flaying him with wire brushes. Eventually, several brutality cases filed on behalf of inmates were rolled into a class action suit. After a two-year trial that ended in 1995, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson ruled that prisoners at Pelican Bay had been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. His lengthy opinion detailed “assaults, beatings, and naked cagings in inclement weather” and concluded that “the misuse of force at Pelican Bay is not merely aberrational but inevitable.” (Since the ruling, prison authorities say conditions have improved.)
In 1997, Schneider was taking a shower in Pelican Bay when, he claims, a guard popped open an electronic door and allowed a sworn enemy from a rival African American gang called the Black Guerrilla Army to enter the shower area and ambush him. Schneider overpowered his assailant. The guard intervened with a weapon misleadingly named a gas gun. The firearm actually uses a gunpowder charge similar to a twelve-gauge shotgun to fire plastic projectiles the size of Ping-Pong balls. Schneider took multiple shots to the head and was taken to the infirmary with a concussion and lacerations. Afterward, Schneider, a jailhouse lawyer of some renown, sued the prison over the incident. His case, however, was thrown out of court.
Upon his release from the infirmary, he was sent into Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit. Schneider speaks of living in the extreme confinement of the SHU with a sort of twisted pride. “They put us in the SHU to keep us away from the rape-os and chesters,” he says, referring to rapists and child molesters. “I’m proud of that. I don’t want to be associated with them.”
The role of the Aryan Brotherhood, like other race-based gangs, is a complex one within the hostile prison universe. On the one hand, these gangs enforce segregation. But the gangs are also likely to do business with each other: smuggling drugs, manufacturing weapons, running numbers, and brewing alcohol. The gangs also share (along with many guards) a more or less openly homicidal contempt for sex offenders. Under Schneider’s leadership, the Aryan Brotherhood is alleged to have recruited at least three guards in its efforts to identify and attack sex offender inmates. In its case against Schneider, the federal government charges him with masterminding the murder or attempted murder of twenty-four people, including the killing of a cop.
In person, Schneider maintains an unnervingly pleasant, almost bland smile, whether he’s discussing killing rapists or reading one of his favorite authors, J. R. R. Tolkien. He says his entire mental and physical effort in the SHU “is structured around not going insane.” The last stop for those who lose this battle in the SHU is the prison psychiatric unit. Here, the most critical mental cases can be put on heavy doses of psychotropic drugs, then given “group therapy.” In these sessions, individual prisoners are locked in telephone-booth-size boxes with plexiglass-and-barred fronts that prisoners call “man cages,” and these are propped upright, arrayed in groups of four or six around a therapist.
“You definitely don’t want to lose your marbles in the SHU,” Schneider says. “But you can find things that cheer you up—getting a cup of instant coffee, news, or a box of saltines. It’s important to keep your day full.” He stays in shape by wrapping the law books he keeps in his cell and using them as weights. Sometimes he lays his cellmate, a murderer named Dale Bretches, across his arms and bench-presses him like a barbell.
Several years ago, Schneider and Bretches began producing artwork. Since they were forbidden art supplies by prison authorities, they collected scrap paper and soaked it in toilet water until the ink came off. They made pigments by scraping the colors off ads in magazines. “If you want a lot of red,” Schneider
says, “you look for a Marlboro ad.”
His intricate creations look like a cross between tattoo art and the air-brushed murals that adorned vans in the 1970s. The paintings are frequently chock-full of runes—cryptic symbols found in the works of Tolkien. Schneider often depicts himself in his paintings as a bare-chested Norse god riding on the prows of ships surrounded by noble animals.
Devan Hawkes, a special intelligence officer for the CDC, has spent years investigating Schneider. He believes the runes found in Schneider’s work contain “secret codes” that convey instructions to Aryan Brotherhood associates outside prison.
Looking for subjects to draw, Schneider began to pester his sister for pictures of the “white Siegfried and Roy tigers” and for copies of Field & Stream, which he claims was banned by the prison because it contained photos of guns. Then Schneider came across a magazine that would change his life: Dog Fancy. “Looking at dogs made me forget I was in prison,” says Schneider. Soon, they inspired him to become a dog owner once more.
After they were arrested last March for the dog-mauling case, Knoller and Noel were so broke they were unable to make bail. They have spent nearly a year living separate but parallel lives in different wings of the San Francisco city jail. When he enters the jail visitation room in his orange jumpsuit, Robert Noel slides into a chair and smiles warmly. Noel is an imposing six feet four. His golden-boy features have aged comfortably beneath his shaggy blond hair and walrus mustache. Though he faces up to three years in prison, he projects confidence and freewheeling good cheer.
After chatting amiably about his once high-powered social life, Noel produces a copy of a painting that Schneider made. It depicts Noel, Knoller, and Schneider at a medieval feast presided over by their “royal dog,” Bane. Noel traces his finger across the paper and says dreamily, “There’s our family,” then points to the big dog in the foreground and says affectionately, “That’s the Banester.”