Hella Nation - Evan Wright [88]
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 Mormon and marry her.” After he spurned Coumbs’s romantic overtures, Schneider says, she stopped sending letters and visiting him altogether. Coumbs has told investigators that Schneider threatened her. “Things can happen to you and your home,” he allegedly told her. (Reportedly, Coumbs is now in the federal 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 mutual interests 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