A Checklist for Murder (39 page)

“… There is one other event that I really could not figure out how to place on this time line, and the computer wasn’t any help, but it was a statement ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mommy died in a traffic wreck?’ Remember [the neighbor] testified to that. Seemed like it got lost in the shuffle. [The neighbor] testified that she heard the defendant say that to his youngest daughter, six months to a year before Claire was found dead, the apparent victim of a traffic accident. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mommy died in a traffic accident?’

“… Was he planning it to be soon? Yes. The problem was that Claire acted a little bit too fast. The divorce was filed on December fourth. The order to show cause was set on January eighth. The defendant was served on the fifteenth of December. ‘How am I going to kill her that quickly? How am I going to kill her by the eighth? Gee, she filed for divorce. Are they going to think I killed her if all of a sudden she turns up dead?’

“So what are we going to do? We’re going to have to buy more time. Let’s get her to sign a contract where she agrees to delay the proceedings until August 1, 1987. ‘Gee, Claire, I need to delay the proceedings until August 1, 1987, so I can have more time to kill you.’

“No, that won’t work.

“Okay, how about this one. ‘I would like you to delay the divorce proceedings until August 1, 1987, because I’m starting a new business and if you’re gracious enough to agree to delay the proceedings until August 1, 1987, I will in turn promise that your greatest fear will be belied’—I think that’s the right word—‘that I will give you an uncontested, equal distribution of all property.’

“Vicki Doom [and] anybody who testified to that particular
point indicated that Claire Peernock was concerned about the legal battle that she was going to have with the defendant, and all of a sudden she gets that carrot dangled in front of her. ‘If you agree to delay this divorce proceeding until August first in order to give me more time to kill you, I will agree that if you survive that long I won’t contest the divorce. You will get an equal distribution of property.’

“So she agrees. She signs the contract and she sends it to Doom. Ask yourself one thing: how many times do you think that the defendant looked through that house for that contract? He’s got all these pieces of paper that he doesn’t have any right to have in his house. How many times do you think he looked through the house looking for that contract? It reminds me of those old movies, not necessarily old movies, but the movie where the victim, right before they’re being held at gunpoint or something like that, and they go, you know, ‘If anything happens to me I sent a letter to the DA that says if I turn up dead, you did it.’ Kind of reminds me of this. She outsmarted him. She didn’t keep the contract in her house.

“She sent it to Victoria Doom.

“Safekeeping? It turns out that was the letter to the DA, ‘If anything happens to me, the defendant did it.’ She turns up dead ten days before this contract was supposed to expire. Coincidence or circumstantial evidence? You look at all the circumstantial evidence, coincidences are no longer coincidences. They become evidence to indicate that he did it. The order to show cause [in the divorce] was taken off calendar as a result of this contract.

“The next date that we have, or the next thing that indicates some sort of planning, is again a handwritten note by the defendant. It’s dated April 22, 1987. Here’s the date up on top. Now, remember, he’s bought a little time, so he’s got all the way till August now, so it seems that things have
cooled off after a little bit for a while, but again on April twenty-second, we have ‘FIND LOC.’

“… And this ‘location,’ old San Fernando Road and Tux-ford, it’s like the perfect place. It’s got the freeway overpass where you could beat somebody without somebody seeing. You’ve got these abandoned cars there, where if someone drove by and saw a car or two they wouldn’t think anything about it. We’ve got the cement wall at the end of the road. So when the car hits the cement wall it’s going to drive [the cutter bar] right into that gas tank. The fuse, gasoline rope, is going to light the gas on fire. All the evidence is going to be destroyed at the murder.

“‘Find location.’

“Mr. Peernock actually was kind of entertaining. [
He holds up a chart
] I don’t know if you can read that, but that is actually an excerpt from the transcript that we have in this particular trial:

“Question: ‘I ask you, is that your writing?’

“Answer: ‘It looks like it.’

“Question: ‘So you’re not questioning that portion as being authentic, are you?’

“Answer: ‘I don’t know if I’ll question it or not, depending on what you’re going to come up with.’

“If that’s not a commentary as to his credibility coming out of his own mouth, I don’t know what is. This—you know I talked about a prosecutor dreaming of cross-examining a defendant on the stand; I don’t even dream of answers this good. You can’t ask for anything better. This shows that Mr. Peernock is totally incredible and will do anything to lie his way out of it. If that doesn’t show a consciousness of guilt on his part, then there is nothing that will.

“… Where do you think Mr. Peernock got the idea for this elaborate scheme on how to cover up his murdering Claire and Natasha for the money? He sat there at Network Electronics and tested those cutter devices for three years and
watched those devices cut into vessels and cause those explosions, and that’s exactly what People’s 27 [the cutter bar] was supposed to do.

“… This isn’t just something that was thought of on the spur of the moment, this was based upon Mr. Peernock’s years of experience and patience in testing at Network Electronics, and months of at least planning on how to kill and cover up the killing of Claire Peernock and Natasha Peernock, planning that began, by evidence that we have, in December of 1986. Who knows when it started before that? That’s all paperwork.

“… She [Natasha] was conscious; she just doesn’t remember. But does that surprise you that she doesn’t remember it? Common sense and what you know out of life. Does it surprise you that she doesn’t remember? And if she’s making this up, if she’s making this whole thing up because the—whoever has gotten their hooks into her, as the defendant has testified to, why doesn’t she just say, ‘The defendant beat me. He took the tire iron and he beat my mom once, twice, three, four times in the head right between the eyes while she was just lying there and I cried, “Daddy, don’t do it, don’t do it,” and then he turned and he did the same thing to me?’

“She’s making this up? Why didn’t she just go that extra step? How much more difficult would it have been? But she didn’t, because she’s telling the truth.”

[And regarding Peernock’s whereabouts through the day after the crimes, before he came home to Soma’s that evening] “Where was he during that entire period of time? Is he hiding? Is he scrambling? Is he cleaning up the house? I don’t know. He knows, but he never let me ask him. Consciousness of guilt on his part. Remember that. He says he tried to get hold of Detective Fisk. [But] Sonia says, ‘It wasn’t Detective Fisk who called me. It was Detective Castro.’ Why did he change [and] what does it matter?—Why
did he lie about when those notes were written, if it
didn’t
matter?

“… The next morning, they wake up, Sonia says, ‘Don’t forget to call Detective Castro.’ He calls and speaks to Detective Ferrand and they make an appointment. Detective Ferrand testifies that he gave him directions on how to get to the Foothill Division, but he doesn’t show up.

“Where does he go? He goes to the bank.

“… Claire’s Grand Am tire. It was flat. Why was the tire flat? There was no reason for the tire to be flat. Was that to create an apparent justification as to why Claire Peernock was driving the Cadillac that evening? Probably. Who flattened the tire? The defendant

“… Mr. Peernock is crazy like a fox. Don’t feel sorry for him because he seemed to be nuts on the stand. He knew exactly what he was doing on the witness stand. He knew exactly when he was getting into a position that he couldn’t get himself out of, so he figured he’d go nuts so he could get out of it. And there he is, somewhere out in never-never land. Don’t feel sorry for him. He killed Claire Peernock. He tried to kill Natasha Peernock … attempted, premeditated, deliberate, and willful murder. It has the same elements of murder, first degree murder, except that it has to be a direct but ineffectual act toward committing the murder …. A direct but ineffectual act is something beyond mere preparation. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, her head was beaten in. How much more direct, but luckily ineffectual, can you get? He tried to kill her. He tried eight times to kill her, at least, but he didn’t succeed.

“… Did he lie to Sonia because he didn’t go to the hospital and he was trying to satisfy Sonia? I don’t know. Or is he lying here because he wants to make it seem like he had reason to be fearful? That there was this Grand Illusion that was referred to in the opening statement. Or is it a Grand
Delusion on the part of the defense—on the part of the defendant? Illusion, delusion, it’s a fine line. But ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Peernock sat up here and he showed you. If I hadn’t called any witnesses, you could look at Mr. Peernock and say, ‘This is an evil man who will do anything he wants to kill anybody and get what he wants.’ He showed it to you.

“How close was he to violence up on that witness stand? How close was he to hitting me? You can use that to decide whether Mr. Peernock is credible, whether he is exhibiting consciousness of guilt. Look at all the facts and you cannot possibly come up with any conclusion but that Mr. Peernock is guilty of all these crimes.

“… And in the whole scheme of things, when all the circumstances are added up, you might as well have had somebody at the scene of this crime saying, ‘Mr. Peernock did it,’ because Mr. Peernock did it.

“There is not doubt.”

The defense goes last. But as Victoria Doom had noted back in Judge Rimmerman’s chambers two years earlier, you can’t fight a case on air. Not only had Donald Green taken no money for himself in the defense of Robert Peernock, he had watched the defense dissolve in front of his eyes the moment his client was pulled off the stand.

Green made his closing remarks with passion, even though it was like trying to tap-dance on thin ice wearing heavy boots.

Still, he carefully and methodically went through each piece of evidence and offered explanations as to why they might deserve to be doubted. He emphasized the slightly confused or conflicting testimonies of various people who were testifying to what they had seen in the dark at 4:30
A.M.
months or years before their testimony was given.

He wondered out loud if the police still thought Sonia was somehow involved, saying, “You have to ask yourselves why Sonia testified in court under a grant of immunity.” But in the long run he was stuck with the task of creating reasonable doubt against the prosecution’s scenario by trying to imply that some variation on one of these other explanations must be true:

1. One of the passersby who was at the scene for a short time after the car crashed and before the police arrived must have decided to take two women who were already unconscious and to smack them repeatedly in the head with a heavy metal bar, then pour gasoline over them, then rig up a wick under their car and light it,
but not bother to rob them
, and Natasha simply decided to take advantage of the situation following all of this by lying about everything that had happened in order to “get” her father; or

2. This had really all been set up by Fisk, Doom, and the police. Claire and Natasha were followed out there and the wreck was caused somehow by the cops and then rigged to look like Robert Peernock’s doing, but Natasha somehow isn’t aware of all that, even though she remembers everything that happened up until the moment her beating began; or

3. Natasha has been intimidated into lying and is only doing so because the crooked police have her too terrified to tell the truth.

Today Natasha laughs out loud at the very suggestion of number three. There is not a trace of humor in her laughter.

Thus the jury was left to wonder whether one of those
bizarre scenarios could offer any sort of doubt that was, in fact, reasonable.

It took them less than six hours to review the many pages of detailed jury instructions, consider the hundreds of pieces of evidence, and convict Robert John Peernock on every single count.

By the time the convictions came in, Tasha was supporting herself by working in Hollywood. She had gotten a job passing out fliers for underground nightclubs with roving locations. It didn’t pay much, but the people she ran around with were all pretty low key. Best of all, none of them were tuned into the big murder trial going on across town.

The word about Robert’s conviction didn’t reach her right away; she had learned to make herself difficult to find. It made her feel safer just in case Daddy had any more surprises for her.

When someone finally tracked her down with the news, she felt relieved but not really surprised. She had thought of him as evil since before her early teens. Once she knew that he had revealed himself to the rest of the world, it just didn’t seem that they could really let him go. After all, they would have to walk the streets with him too.

She went out dancing that night, but not because of the conviction. Tasha had already had four years to work at putting it all behind her. She went out dancing because she’d already had plans to go. “I was busy at the time,” she says. “I had a lot of other things to think about.”

Better things.

Out in New Mexico, Victoria’s rural telephone line had been down for most of the day. She paced the floor, fretting over the Peernock case, knowing it had gone to the jury but unable to find out whether or not there was any news.

Finally her fax line fired up and began rolling out paper. A letter was coming in on district attorney stationery.

It was from Craig Richman.

Hey, your phone isn’t working. Hope you get this.