by Otto Penzler
Noel’s first wife, Karen, whom he divorced in 1986 after nearly twenty-three years of marriage, says, “Robert is mentally ill.” She furnishes no proof of her opinion but adds that his three children ceased having contact with him several years ago. Noel’s only biological son, his namesake, Robert Jr., who is 31, said of his father, “He’s a jackass. I don’t like my dad, and I never have.”
Noel grew up in a working-class home in Baltimore. His father was a pipe fitter and his mother a beautician. His only brother works in the electrical trades. Robert, the family overachiever, entered the University of Maryland on a Marine Corps scholarship, similar to ROTC. He married his high school sweetheart, Karen, the day after John F. Kennedy was shot. A year later, he entered law school. In 1969, when he was 27, Noel took a job in the Justice Department. When he was 34, in 1980, he moved west to become an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District Court of San Diego.
Working for the government began to disillusion him. “Being inside the system gave me a unique perspective on its power to crush the individual,” he says. He quit the U.S. attorney’s office after a year and joined a prestigious corporate law firm in San Diego. By 1987, he had divorced, moved to San Francisco, briefly married and then divorced a legal secretary, then met and fell in love with Marjorie Knoller—all in the space of about a year. “I would trust my life in Marjorie’s hands,” he says.
The impression that Marjorie Knoller makes upon entering the visitation room is one of meekness. Her faded, silver-threaded brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and her brown, dark-ringed eyes have a worried softness. On March 27, when the police entered the home of friends in Northern California, where she and her husband were eating dinner, and told Marjorie she was under arrest for second-degree murder, she collapsed and had to be carried out on a stretcher. During subsequent court appearances, her physical and mental states deteriorated. Rolled into the courtroom in a wheelchair, she seemed almost cuckoo, babbling to herself and cursing the prosecutors. By the end of the summer, bruises began to appear on her thighs and lower back. Then, where there had been bruises, hardened nodules of subcutaneous fat, shaped like fingernails, burst through the surface of her skin. Doctors diagnosed it as a nervous-vascular disorder and put her on medication, alleviating her symptoms enough for her to sit comfortably and walk unassisted.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Knoller was a straight arrow who dreamed of becoming an FBI agent. “Marjorie didn’t go with the crowd,” says her mother, Harriet. “She skipped her high school graduation. She told me, ‘Mom, I’m not going. All the kids in my class are on drugs.’”
She met Robert Noel when she was 32, a divorced law-school graduate just starting her career at the firm where Noel was already a big shot. They made a lunch date one day and moved in together a week later. By May 1988, they had both resigned their jobs and hung out their own shingle. They moved away from the commercial contract and tax law that had been Noel’s area of expertise and took on more pro bono work. Then, in 1994, their life was to change drastically when they were referred to what seemed like an interesting case.
The client was a man named John Cox, a guard at Pelican Bay State Prison who had recently broken ranks with fellow corrections officers by testifying on behalf of inmates who’d been brutalized in the prison. Now Cox was being harassed on the job and wanted to sue the California Department of Corrections. Knoller and Noel leapt at the chance to represent him. Within a few months they abandoned what remained of their commercial law practice to concentrate on representing prison guards in grievances against the CDC.
“The good Lord blessed our family by bringing Bob and Marjorie into our lives,” says Monica Bermender, who is represented by Noel and Knoller in an ongoing First Amendment federal court case. “They believed in me and in our family when nobody else would.”
Despite their devotion to their cause, Knoller and Noel racked up an uneven, some say abysmal, record. They lost the harassment case for their first client, Cox, and he subsequently hanged himself. Susan Beck, who analyzed their cases against the CDC in an article in The Recorder, a Bay Area legal newspaper, concluded that Knoller and Noel often made basic procedural mistakes and developed legal strategies based on unsupported conspiracy theories.
“Noel comes across as someone who is competent, but it appears to me there have been serious problems with his conduct on some cases,” says Neal Sanders, an expert in prison law.
The fact was that neither Knoller nor Noel had much experience trying criminal cases. Entering the miasma of the prison universe, they were clearly in over their heads. “Prison is like its own ecosystem, with its own rules,” says attorney Russell Clanton. “Life inside the wire is unlike anything most people outside of it can even conceive.”
The low point of their legal career came in 1997, when they defended a Pelican Bay guard accused of colluding with the Aryan Brotherhood to set up child molesters for beating and murder. Their defense failed, and not only was the guard found guilty but one of the inmates they called as a witness was subsequently murdered.
“It was devastating for us,” says Knoller. “I was in shock.”
Schneider was among the witnesses they called in that case and was presumably marked for death like the other inmate. “We sent a letter to the CDC informing them of our concern for Paul’s safety,” says Knoller.
It was about this time that Schneider’s dreams of once again owning dogs began to take root. Ads in the back pages of Dog Fancy and Dog World featuring an unusually fierce breed of dog captured his interest. Called Presa Canarios, they were often touted as “guardian dogs,” as “man stoppers,” tough enough to “take out pit bulls.” Presas are “holding” or “gripping” dogs that were bred by Spanish cattlemen on the Canary Islands in the sixteenth century to pin down bulls for slaughter. They are what breeders call “lip and ear” dogs: They immobilize much larger animals such as bulls by clamping their jaws over their most vulnerable features—their lips or their ears. American-bred Presas look like pit bulls but are about twice as big, sometimes weighing as much as 160 pounds.
Dog behaviorist and breeder Saul Saltars calls many of the Presa lines sold in America “junk dogs”—Presas mixed with pit bulls, Great Danes, English mastiffs. “Some breeders take liberties with what they call Presas,” he says. “You might not know what you’re getting, how stable the dog will be.”
Schneider began dreaming of ways to purchase his own Presas in 1998. He had $23,000 to invest, given to him by a fellow inmate who had won a medical malpractice suit. Schneider’s plan was to use surrogates outside prison to breed Presas. He purchased more than $1,000 worth of dog-breeding manuals. He sent letters to breeders and trainers. Most refused to have anything to do with a prison inmate. Nevertheless, he located a breeder in the Midwest who seemed like a good prospect. According to the CDC investigation, his name was James Harris, and he operated a Presa business, Stygian Kennels. Schneider would arrange to buy Bane from Harris.
According to Tracy Hennings, a Presa breeder familiar with Stygian Kennels (now defunct) and its brood of pups, “Bane was not a pure Presa. He was a questionable mix of at least four different breeds.”
But Schneider, conducting his business from inside his 11-by-7½-foot concrete box, was unable to do the sort of on-the-spot research other buyers might have undertaken. He had a source for dogs. All he needed was a place to raise them.
Initially, he wrote to his sister Tammy asking whether she and her husband, Greg Keefer, would raise dogs for him. Tammy recalls her reaction when she received this letter from her brother. “What the hell is an inmate doing with dogs? No way.”
“One time Paul got us into some deal where he sent us money from one of his legal settlements to buy TV sets for his buddies in prison,” Greg Keefer says. “Next thing, FBI agents came to our door and said we were on someone’s hit list because we didn’t get him a TV.”
“I love Paul,” says Tammy. “But the guy’s in prison for a reason.”
> Rebuffed by his family, Schneider found the assistance he needed from another quarter. His cellmate, Dale Bretches, the murderer, was receiving regular visits from a woman in a Christian outreach program who came from a small agricultural town about 190 miles from Pelican Bay, called Hayfork. Bretches asked her whether she knew any other good Christians in Hayfork who could visit his cellie, Schneider, and help him out with a problem.
Janet Coumbs is a Mormon woman in her late forties who lived on a four-acre sheep farm in Hayfork, California, with her 18-year-old daughter, Daisy. She is a somewhat heavyset woman who scraped by on disability checks and by selling “little baby sheep” to local families for slaughter. A friend of hers stopped by her ramshackle house one day and told her about the mission work she did at Pelican Bay, trying to bring Jesus into the life of a murderer named Dale Bretches. “[She] told me I wasn’t doing my Christian duty by not going with her to the prison to help other inmates,” said Coumbs.
Coumbs made her first visit to Schneider in January 1998. Within a couple of months, Schneider had persuaded Coumbs to lend her farm to his Dog o’ War kennels. Every two weeks, she was supposed to send Schneider pictures of the dogs and letters describing their life on the farm. One photo showed Bane cuddling with a cat. This enraged Schneider. “You’re making a wuss out of Bane,” he wrote. “These are royal dogs, and they need to look majestic.”
Several months later, Schneider and Coumbs had a falling-out. According to Schneider, the root of their conflict was romantic. He says, “She kept dropping hints about how she wanted me to convert to Mormonism and marry her.” After Schneider says he spurned Coumbs’s romantic overtures, she stopped sending letters and visiting him altogether. Coumbs has also told investigators that Schneider threatened her. “Things can happen to you and your home,” he allegedly told her. (Reportedly, Coumbs is now in the witness protection program.)
In late 1999, Schneider turned to Knoller and Noel to help him retrieve his dogs from Coumbs. Perhaps because of their dismal performance as attorneys, Schneider had resorted to Knoller and Noel only after another Bay Area attorney had turned him down.
True to form, the lawyers threw themselves into this new ill-fated cause. They threatened to sue Coumbs if she didn’t turn the dogs over, and then they spent their own money to hire an animal-transport service and showed up in person at Coumbs’s farm on March 31, 2000. There were now eight Presas on the farm, four of them pups sired by Bane.
For the previous year, Bane had been chained to an iron stake. Noel beams when he recalls seeing the dog for the first time. “Bane was confident, proud, handsome,” he says, adding, “Bane had an eye for ladies. He sees Marjorie, rolls over on his back, and bam, that big red arrow popped out. He had a hard-on that big.” Noel gestures with his hands, indicating Bane’s penis length, then grins. “Boy, was that dog hung.”
Noel and Knoller transported seven of the dogs to homes in Southern California belonging to relatives of Schneider’s prison buddies. They kept Hera, a female that developed a heart condition, and, after spending $3,000 on her veterinary bills, moved her into their Pacific Heights apartment. In early September, they brought Bane to live there as well. Greg Keefer says that before Knoller and Noel rescued Bane, the dog had been neglected. “Flies had chewed Bane’s ears down to their nubs,” Keefer says.
By now, they were writing letters and sending dog pictures to Schneider several times a week. Their odd relationship with him was reaching full bloom. Knoller says she first floated the idea of adopting Schneider, explaining this unusual arrangement in practical legal terms. “By adopting Paul,” says Knoller, “we now have a say in his medical treatment. If something bad happens to him in the prison, we can sue. We adopted him to give him protection.”
Her analysis is legally true—and adult adoption has long been a method employed by gay couples to form family units with legal standing—but it fails to explain the couple’s interest in a violent inmate. Knoller suggests that she and Schneider had a lot in common, such as a mutual interest in The Hobbit and in runes. “Paul has an inner life he shares with us,” Knoller says. “He’s special. He’s our kid, and we love him.”
She seems almost convincing, like a doting mom, but if that’s true, what about the rumors of bestial photos and kinky fantasies traded with Schneider? Knoller allows that “threesomes are a pretty standard erotic fantasy.” She says, “It’s a tradition to write erotic letters to inmates. It helps them.” Then she tries a different tack. “Paul was writing a novel, an erotic medieval fantasy. We wrote chapters back and forth. We were all characters in it.”
Knoller says that, along the way, “I flashed my breasts in some pictures. Bob might have sent one of these to Paul. There was nothing with dogs.”
Noel describes their unusual family unit in noble terms: “We were a part of keeping something in Paul alive. Bane punched a hole through that cement box Paul lives in and gave him a window on the world. We wanted to help keep that window open.”
A couple of weeks before Knoller and Noel went up to Janet Coumbs’s farm to pick up the dogs, they had hired a local veterinarian named Dr. Donald Martin to examine them. Though he gave the dogs shots and went home, something about Bane troubled the veterinarian. A few days later, he sent Knoller a letter to inform her of his fears about the dog. “I would be professionally amiss if I did not mention the following so you can be prepared,” he wrote. “These animals would be a liability in any household.”
Knoller says she didn’t read the letter until long after receiving it. She and Noel nicknamed the dogs “the Mutleys” and “the kids.” They structured their lives around the animals, never leaving them alone for more than an hour. Bane was “the Banester.” Several mornings a week, Knoller woke up early and cooked bacon, pork, and hamburger for the dogs, which she fed to them along with their dog food.
Keith Whitley, the former guard who used to socialize with Knoller and Noel, noticed the change in them. “I’d get on the phone with Bob to ask him about a case,” he says, “and all he did was talk about how big Bane’s balls were.” Whitley visited their apartment about a week before the fatal attack: “They used to have this charming flat. The dogs turned it into a piss pot. Bob had to bring the dogs out one at a time when he introduced them to me because he couldn’t control them.”
Awful things started happening almost immediately after they brought Bane home. Bane got into a fight with a dog at a beach four days after he arrived in San Francisco and nearly snapped Noel’s finger clean off. Bane and Hera scared the hell out of people in the building and neighborhood. Henry Putek, an unassuming parakeet owner who also lives on the sixth floor, was pinned against a wall one evening when Bane slipped out of Knoller and Noel’s partially open door and charged him. “He stared at me silently,” said Putek. “With drool hanging down, stinking and smelly.”
Neighborhood residents claimed that Bane and Hera attacked at least three local dogs, nearly killing one of them, a German shepherd. People who lived in the area describe their encounters with the dogs in almost supernatural terms. One neighbor recalls that birds started flying crazily when Bane and Hera walked by. Another resident, Alex de Laszlo, remembered encountering the dogs outside a local coffee shop. “I put my hand on Bane’s head,” he said. “It held a sensation very different from any dog I had ever petted before. There was incredible tension. There was something strong and dark about this animal.”
From the vantage point of his concrete box at Pelican Bay, Schneider had an entirely different perspective. “Everything was going perfect. I was getting photos of Bane. Bob and Marjorie told me everything he was doing.” Schneider says Bane was growing up right. “I never wanted to see Bane go looking for fights,” he says. “But if he was forced into it, I would want him to represent himself well, and not run away crying.”
At this point, Schneider was on the verge of realizing an impossible dream. One of his associates on the outside had secured space in Dog World to place an ad for Schneider’
s Dog o’ War kennels. “Life was so good, I felt like I did when I was on the streets,” says Schneider. “In some ways, I felt better.” He sent a picture of Bane to his sister with the caption “El Supremo Bane. Born to raise hell.”
On January 11, 2001, Robert Noel wrote Schneider one of his almost daily letters recounting everything that had transpired that day with “the kids.” Nearing the end of the letter, Noel described an encounter between the dogs and a neighbor. “As soon as the [elevator] door opens at six, one of our newer female neighbors, a timorous little mousy blond who weighs less than Hera, is met by the dynamic duo exiting and almost has a coronary.”
The “mousy blond” he referred to was Diane Whipple, the St. Mary’s College lacrosse coach who died exactly fifteen days later in that same hallway. Whipple had had run-ins with the dogs and had made her feeling about her neighbors clear. She claimed to her girlfriend, Sharon Smith, that one of them had snapped at her two weeks earlier. She told her friend Sarah Miller that Noel “was an asshole. He better do something about those dogs.”
On the afternoon of January 26, Whipple arrived home carrying a bag of groceries with some tacos she planned to make for dinner for Smith and herself. Around twenty minutes earlier, at about 3:40, Knoller says she had been working on legal research alone in her apartment (Noel was out of the city on business) when Bane started to whimper. She put him on a leash, walked him on the roof of the building, and came inside to put a bag of Bane’s poop in the garbage chute when she noticed Whipple standing about thirty feet away by her door.