Hella Nation - Evan Wright [81]
Five hours later, the victim, Diane Whipple, a popular thirty-three-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 all-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 forty-six, he’s sixty—had recently adopted an inmate at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, a thirty-nine-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 eleven-by-seven-and-a-half-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 among 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, 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