Speaker 1: When you make decisions for your company, you always look
Speaker 1: for the no brainers, and if you have a lot
Speaker 1: of MAILI and shipping to do, stamps dot Com is
Speaker 1: the ultimate no brainer. It streamlines your process to make
Speaker 1: your business more efficient, which makes you less busy. Mail checks, invoices,
Speaker 1: legal documents, books, and everything you need to keep your
Speaker 1: business running. With stamps dot com, seamlessly connect with every
Speaker 1: major marketplace and shopping card if you sell online, schedule
Speaker 1: package pickups through the dashboard, and automatically see your cheapest
Speaker 1: and fastest shipping options from different carriers with rates up
Speaker 1: to eighty nine percent off USPS and UPS rates. And
Speaker 1: with the stamps dot Com mobile app, you can take
Speaker 1: care of mailing and shipping wherever you are, even on
Speaker 1: the go. Make the same no brainer decision as over
Speaker 1: one million other business decision makers with stamps dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sign up at stamps dot Com with Code Program for
Speaker 1: a special offer that includes a four week trial plus
Speaker 1: free postage and a free digital scale, no long term
Speaker 1: commitments or contracts. That's Stamps dot Com Code Program.
Speaker 2: Lucky Land Casino asking people what's the weirdest place you've
Speaker 2: gotten Lucky.
Speaker 3: Lucky in Line at the Delhi. I guess ah in
Speaker 3: my dentist's office more than once.
Speaker 1: Actually, do I have to say yes?
Speaker 3: You do in the car before my kid's PTA meeting?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 1: Excuse me? What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
Speaker 3: I never win?
Speaker 5: And tell well, there you have it.
Speaker 2: You could get lucky anywhere playing at Lucky landslots dot com.
Speaker 5: Play for free right now.
Speaker 2: Are you feeling lucky? No, we're not necessary boid Low
Speaker 2: eighteen plus terms and conditions, plus onsa details.
Speaker 3: With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.
Speaker 5: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. Has anyone seen
Speaker 5: the bride and groom?
Speaker 2: Sorry?
Speaker 1: Sorry, we're here. We were getting lucky in the limo
Speaker 1: when we lost track of time.
Speaker 2: No Lucky Land casino with cash prizes that add up
Speaker 2: quicker than a guess registered. But in that case, I
Speaker 2: pronounce you lucky.
Speaker 3: Play for free at Lucky landslots dot com. Daily bonuses
Speaker 3: are waiting. No purchase necessary boid. We're prohibited by Law
Speaker 3: eighteen plus terms and conditions. See website for details. With
Speaker 3: the Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.
Speaker 2: It's your captain speaking, We've got clear runway and the
Speaker 2: weather's fine, but we're just gonna circle up here a
Speaker 2: while and get lucky. Oh no, nothing like that. It's
Speaker 2: just these cash prizes add up quick, so I suggest
Speaker 2: you sit back, keep your trade table upright, and start
Speaker 2: getting lucky y for.
Speaker 3: Free at lucky landslopes dot com. Are you feeling lucky?
Speaker 3: No purchase necessary void. We're prohibited by Law eighteen plus.
Speaker 3: Terms and conditions apply. See website for details.
Speaker 5: Oh Radio, you are now listening to True Murder, the
Speaker 5: most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors
Speaker 5: that have written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, Dck.
Speaker 5: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most talking
Speaker 5: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 5: your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 6: Good Evening the Peernox cast the impression of being a
Speaker 6: very well to do and content family even after the
Speaker 6: separation of Richard and his wife. But madness was contained
Speaker 6: inside this house, and one night Richard Piernoch came to
Speaker 6: kill his wife and daughter, brutally beating them, force feeding
Speaker 6: them alcohol, and placing them together in a car which
Speaker 6: he let drive into a wall so that it would
Speaker 6: seem like a drunk driving accident. What Richard Piernock didn't
Speaker 6: foresee was his daughter's survival and her willingness for the
Speaker 6: first time to describe in detail her father's psychosis and
Speaker 6: his manipulative personality. What's a success once, I say a
Speaker 6: successful whistleblower? Pearnock denied his involvement in the murder, claiming
Speaker 6: a conspiracy against him on all levels, confounding the justice system,
Speaker 6: hiring and firing lawyers representing himself, saying everyone was against him.
Speaker 6: After numerous tense trials, Peernock was finally sentenced to life
Speaker 6: in prison, though those close to him still live in fear.
Speaker 6: The book that we're featuring this evening is a checklist
Speaker 6: for Murder with my special guests, journalist and author Anthony Flacco.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to
Speaker 6: this interview. Anthony Flacco, Thank you, Dan, it's very nice
Speaker 6: to be here. Glad you could make it. Finally we
Speaker 6: have you on the program. And let's first talk about
Speaker 6: that this book when it first came out, and then
Speaker 6: after when you told us when this book first came out,
Speaker 6: Can you tell us how you came to be the
Speaker 6: author of this what drew you to this case?
Speaker 4: And I published this book. Sorry. I published this book
Speaker 4: originally twenty years ago through Dell Books, and it was
Speaker 4: very well received and sold a lot of copies, and
Speaker 4: I sold a screenplay version of it to NBC Films,
Speaker 4: And the book was just sort of cooking along until
Speaker 4: it got to the twenty year anniversary. And I've done
Speaker 4: other books in the time since that had done well.
Speaker 4: So published your contacted me and wanted to buy out
Speaker 4: the rights and reissue it again, which they've done, and
Speaker 4: that's Diversion Books who brought out this new version. And
Speaker 4: I've written a new afterward which sort of catches everybody
Speaker 4: up with what's been going on since this case was resolved.
Speaker 6: Great, now, let's unlike the book where you started at
Speaker 6: a different point. Let's talk about Robert Pirnack before we
Speaker 6: get to the story itself. Very much unlike the book,
Speaker 6: but let's talk about his his background. You talk about
Speaker 6: him being in an engineer and at the Department of
Speaker 6: Water Resources, so this is where a lot of this begins.
Speaker 6: So tell us a little bit Robert his background.
Speaker 4: Well, he was sort of the original nerd early in
Speaker 4: his career, and he did well with computers and technical
Speaker 4: things in engineering type jobs. He had worked for a
Speaker 4: while with a special effects company in Hollywood, rigging things
Speaker 4: to blow up, and this is where he got his
Speaker 4: expertise with explosives, with fuses and the timers of all kinds,
Speaker 4: whether they're advanced or whether they're crude and homemade. He
Speaker 4: then went to work using his computer knowledge for the
Speaker 4: Department of Water Resources in California and did well there
Speaker 4: on the technical level for a number of years. But
Speaker 4: as he aged into his thirties, he just began developing
Speaker 4: these personality traits that caught friction with everybody he was around.
Speaker 4: It seemed impossible to stay on good terms with the
Speaker 4: He was perpetually angry or offended or injured and seeking redress.
Speaker 4: He became a kind of guy who constantly files complaints
Speaker 4: on his coworkers and supervisors, and then over the last
Speaker 4: few years before the crimes broke out, he started doing
Speaker 4: his own jailhouse lawyer lawsuits against people inside the Department
Speaker 4: of Water Resources as well as other private companies he
Speaker 4: would come across in his private life and amassing all
Speaker 4: this money from nuisance suits where he'd win a few
Speaker 4: grand here and a few grand there to just go away,
Speaker 4: and he started compiling this money. By the time the
Speaker 4: crimes finally broke out at the end of the eighties,
Speaker 4: he had over a quarter of a million dollars liquid
Speaker 4: in the bank, as well as a number of real
Speaker 4: estate properties, and virtually everything he had accumulated had come
Speaker 4: through ill will and his tendency to sue everything that moves,
Speaker 4: and that was before the crime started.
Speaker 6: Now you talk about that there was some merit that
Speaker 6: at least his argument before it seems that he becomes
Speaker 6: more deluded, and you talk about illusion and delusion and
Speaker 6: the fine line, and you talk about the lawsuits, but
Speaker 6: talk about his wife, Claire and their relationship and what
Speaker 6: was her role during this whole time. Was she supportive
Speaker 6: in the lawsuits and was she behind her husband initially?
Speaker 6: And talk about their relationship that they were.
Speaker 4: You hit a good point with the illusion and delusion
Speaker 4: phenomenon in Prenock's life because right some of his suits,
Speaker 4: particularly his original lawsuits, I think he did find some
Speaker 4: corruption and bid rigging in terms of the awarding of
Speaker 4: state contracts to various contractors and vendors, and he was
Speaker 4: complaining about that. But once he got the taste of
Speaker 4: making quick and easy money by being righteously offended and
Speaker 4: reporting things, that's when he began to see problems everywhere.
Speaker 4: And as he got more and more lawsuits going, and
Speaker 4: he had dozens of these things, he started in his
Speaker 4: mind to group all of the people that were against
Speaker 4: him in these lawsuits against him as if they were
Speaker 4: a single force, as if they were some kind of
Speaker 4: army of conspirators, and really it was just a collection
Speaker 4: of defendants that he had slapped with private lawsuits. But
Speaker 4: it became in his mind, me against the world, to
Speaker 4: kind of mentality. And I've always thought this is Peirnock
Speaker 4: was the last kind of person whoever should have gotten
Speaker 4: into using civil law to create social change because of
Speaker 4: his tendency to personalize things and personalize his anger, which
Speaker 4: he did, and to create monsters of people who were
Speaker 4: really just civil defendants. But he did, and he didn't
Speaker 4: seem to have any ability to back off or moderate
Speaker 4: the level of his response. Thing was always fought as
Speaker 4: though you know, life itself depends on it. Even if
Speaker 4: he wants somebody to just fix the stairway outside their
Speaker 4: building because it made him trip and fall, you know,
Speaker 4: And so the drama, the internal drama kept building up
Speaker 4: inside of him. Now his wife, who originally was quite
Speaker 4: a demure and supportive woman, it would have naturally taken
Speaker 4: her husband's part if he's trying to get some to
Speaker 4: right some wrongs using his legal expertise. But as his companion,
Speaker 4: she also began to see he was farther and farther
Speaker 4: from reality, developing more and more problems and feuds with
Speaker 4: more and more people and organizations, and she just became
Speaker 4: exhausted by it. At the end, she had completely dropped
Speaker 4: out of all of his civil work, didn't even want
Speaker 4: to hear about it anymore, and it all went on
Speaker 4: just strictly on his own. In the background. He had
Speaker 4: a big office in the house that he had crammed
Speaker 4: with files, and that just sort of became the thing
Speaker 4: that Robert does. Robert goes back to the office anytime
Speaker 4: at work and pumps his lawsuits. So she just wanted out. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: by the time the crimes began, his own illness had
Speaker 4: proceeded far enough that he now thought she was a
Speaker 4: part of this great group of people that are against him.
Speaker 4: And out to get him, and that somehow they had
Speaker 4: gotten to his wife Claire and were using her as
Speaker 4: an agent against him, sort of having her eyes and
Speaker 4: ears inside his home. And when he decided that was
Speaker 4: the case for whatever reasons, of course it was false,
Speaker 4: that's when he began planning his murder attacks, which the
Speaker 4: planning went on for months.
Speaker 6: Now, let's talk about Natasha, his daughter, and you talk
Speaker 6: about the relationship changing as well as the relationship with
Speaker 6: Claire and her husband Robert, but also the relationship with
Speaker 6: Natasha and her father. So tell us about this change
Speaker 6: and what it initially started at and what had sort
Speaker 6: of ended up as a relationship previous to these murders.
Speaker 4: Of Well, this is something we just we want so
Speaker 4: much for kids not to get caught up in and
Speaker 4: just they do again and again and again in the beginning,
Speaker 4: and I have the photos to prove it in the book.
Speaker 4: She was daddy's little girl. She was the sweet little child,
Speaker 4: and he carried her around his shoulders everywhere. I've got
Speaker 4: a picture of her as a ten year old girl
Speaker 4: at her confirmation. They were Catholics. They would just break
Speaker 4: your heart. She's such a little beauty. But what happened
Speaker 4: once she began to develop as a person and to
Speaker 4: develop her own personality and opinions and started saying no
Speaker 4: to Daddy. Then she joined the enemy because he could
Speaker 4: no longer control her. The only way to have peace
Speaker 4: with Robert Peirnack is to accept his control over you.
Speaker 4: And then from the age of I don't know, around
Speaker 4: ten or so, began this process of alienation to the
Speaker 4: time by the time the crimes hit when she was seventeen,
Speaker 4: they were completely estranged. And she told me that by
Speaker 4: the time she was thirteen or fourteen, she already used
Speaker 4: the word evil in thinking of her father. She wasn't
Speaker 4: saying that to call him names or be mad at Daddy.
Speaker 4: She was as a Catholic person expressing in her opinion,
Speaker 4: what's the darkest thing a person can possibly be, which
Speaker 4: is evil where you expect nothing good from you, expect
Speaker 4: only trouble and tragedy from them, and it's terrible. But
Speaker 4: she got that one spot on. I mean, she was
Speaker 4: Sigmund Freud in understanding that her father, no matter how
Speaker 4: good an image he could put up for people, or
Speaker 4: for some reporter or for some camera, she understood all
Speaker 4: that was just crap that what she had was a
Speaker 4: demon in her house, an evil person. By demon, I
Speaker 4: don't mean in a religious term, I just mean somebody
Speaker 4: whose humanity is so twisted in perverse you can no
Speaker 4: longer expect fair human reactions out of them. And so
Speaker 4: she essentially from the time she was sixteen or so,
Speaker 4: barely even went home except when she had to. She
Speaker 4: had a list of friends that she could spend the
Speaker 4: night with girlfriends, and she tended to hang with them
Speaker 4: just for the point of avoiding her father.
Speaker 6: Now there is evil that you talk about as emanates
Speaker 6: in beatings. So Natasha from a young age gets to
Speaker 6: see her father beat her. But you also include a
Speaker 6: very dramatic example of what goes on in this home
Speaker 6: when you talk about the twenty one days in traction
Speaker 6: and what Natasha was forced to do and what she
Speaker 6: did do to cover up this crime or prevent her
Speaker 6: father from having any contact with police over this tell
Speaker 6: us a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: Well, she was still a young girl when she said
Speaker 4: something that pissed off Daddy and a note she got
Speaker 4: between Dad when he was going after mom, and for
Speaker 4: her trouble, she was picked up and thrown against the wall.
Speaker 4: And it dislocated her arm, broke her shoulder, and they
Speaker 4: then had to go to church and everywhere else and
Speaker 4: say that she had fallen so as not to cause,
Speaker 4: of course trouble with police, and not to embarrass the
Speaker 4: family and humiliate everybody, mom and everybody else. And so
Speaker 4: she did and kept up the story for years until
Speaker 4: finally it all broke with the crimes. In fact, during
Speaker 4: the trial, the defense attorney tried to make something out
Speaker 4: of that, but because she had been forced to lie
Speaker 4: about her own broken arm, this meant that maybe she
Speaker 4: was lying in her testimony, and the jurorsis kind of
Speaker 4: laughed that one off, because I think they understood that
Speaker 4: she was a helpless girl. What was she going to
Speaker 4: do if she didn't make dead happy. She already knew
Speaker 4: what he did when he's not happy, and now if
Speaker 4: you want him to be happy, you'd better tell this
Speaker 4: lie that he has. So she told it.
Speaker 6: Now. Robert is living with a woman named Sonya Siegel,
Speaker 6: and she has her own place, and he has a strange,
Speaker 6: real reationship with Claire that he's over at the house occasionally.
Speaker 6: So you can tell us about that, but also tell
Speaker 6: us about the agreement that they have that he talks
Speaker 6: Claire into to delay the divorce, and okay, on the
Speaker 6: premise of tell us explain that, because that's a very
Speaker 6: important thing that we'll say.
Speaker 4: Okay, well that's it's really two questions. Let me get
Speaker 4: to Sonya first, who was really she was just a
Speaker 4: young divorcee still still young, forty two or so, who
Speaker 4: just wanted to have a good man in her life.
Speaker 4: And Pearanock has the ability to project being a good man.
Speaker 4: Sonia thought this was a guy whose wife had thrown
Speaker 4: him out, and she took him in to her condo,
Speaker 4: and she thought they were in love and they were
Speaker 4: going to be married. So she was working that angle
Speaker 4: of the street, having no idea of this second life.
Speaker 4: Pear Knock entertained whereby he would, even though he lived
Speaker 4: at her house, he would drop by the family home
Speaker 4: whenever he wanted and stay as long as he wanted,
Speaker 4: kind of start fights, caused trouble, whip everything up, and
Speaker 4: then leave and go over to Sonya's. Again, this is
Speaker 4: the condition things were in when the crimes finally broke out. Now,
Speaker 4: when you mentioned this agreement, what had happened was Claire,
Speaker 4: oh of almost a year before the crimes, knowing that
Speaker 4: the divorce was just inevitable, had sought out a divorce attorney,
Speaker 4: a female who her name was Victoria doomm It was
Speaker 4: a great name for an attorney who would eventually come
Speaker 4: up against Robert Pirnock too, But at the time all
Speaker 4: she did was consult with her about a divorce and
Speaker 4: Victoria said, okay, I'll get the papers ready. But before
Speaker 4: they got the papers ready to go, Sonia called and said, no,
Speaker 4: hold off on that. Robert has an agreement he wants
Speaker 4: to be to sign, and if I do, he'll agreeed
Speaker 4: to all these other demands that I have for the
Speaker 4: next six months. And so she brought a copy over
Speaker 4: to Victoria to look at, and thank goodness she did,
Speaker 4: because that became a key piece of element of evidence.
Speaker 4: What happened was by filing the divorce. By telling the
Speaker 4: husband she was going to file divorce, it caught him
Speaker 4: off guard with regard to protecting all these assets he'd
Speaker 4: put together, and he wasn't about to split that with her.
Speaker 4: So he came up with an agreement whereby in the
Speaker 4: agreement's kind of heartbreaking too, he agrees not to hit her,
Speaker 4: not to beat Natasha I mean, all these just basic
Speaker 4: human things nobody should ever have to get anybody to
Speaker 4: agree to. But they do, and they list it and
Speaker 4: they sign it for a period of months, and he says,
Speaker 4: if she'll just hold off on the divorce for those
Speaker 4: six months, why then he'll go ahead and include her
Speaker 4: in some of these businesses and things that would be
Speaker 4: contested in the divorce. That's her motive for doing the agreement.
Speaker 4: She'll get a better financial settlement and she only has
Speaker 4: to wait another six months. But what happens is he
Speaker 4: immediately begins planning to kill her before that six months
Speaker 4: is up, because he knows once a divorce action starts,
Speaker 4: he can't kill her, he'll be the first one arrested.
Speaker 4: So he tries to use this time barrier that he'd
Speaker 4: put in this padding of six months to give him
Speaker 4: time to plan. Later, it was found he started making
Speaker 4: checklists on things to do and things to find and
Speaker 4: places to go regarding this murder almost immediately when they
Speaker 4: got that agreement signed.
Speaker 6: Now, let's talk about Natasha's friend Patricia. Okay, well we
Speaker 6: can get to the day in question here, but okay, well,
Speaker 6: well maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit let's talk
Speaker 6: about Natasha and the day she finds herself again with
Speaker 6: her father and how what she normally would have done
Speaker 6: under these kinds of circumstances Like you had mentioned. He
Speaker 6: comes in ranting and raving and causing trouble and he's
Speaker 6: allowed to do that. They have some kind of situation
Speaker 6: where he's continually doing that. She's accustomed to that, Natasha
Speaker 6: tries to avoid it. So tell us what happens on
Speaker 6: the day question with this same kind of situation that
Speaker 6: she seems to have seen before.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, she had been out with her her best friend,
Speaker 4: Patricia Patty, and they she'd come home. Patty dropped her
Speaker 4: off with her car because Natasha's had a flat or
Speaker 4: something and she wasn't driving it, and Natasha had some chores.
Speaker 4: She was supposed to go home. She was supposed to
Speaker 4: move the lawn and do some laundry, and so she
Speaker 4: was going to do all that and shower and change clothes,
Speaker 4: and then Patty would come back at the end of
Speaker 4: the afternoon pick her up and they were going to
Speaker 4: go out dancing for the evening together. So Patty drops
Speaker 4: her off. She sees Robert Pearlock's car in the driveway,
Speaker 4: and Patty gets a bad feeling and says, Natasha, you
Speaker 4: want me to come inside with you? I mean, I
Speaker 4: know it's not safe in there with your old man
Speaker 4: in there. Natasha goes, no, no, maybe he'll just turn
Speaker 4: around and go home late in the day anyhow, So
Speaker 4: Patty drops her off and she goes on inside. Now
Speaker 4: Robert Pearlock's story is he had gone to the house
Speaker 4: to go out to the backyard to repaint some bookshelves
Speaker 4: that were there for whatever reason, but what he had
Speaker 4: actually done was to set his plot in motion. Once
Speaker 4: Natasha came into the house, he began berating her for
Speaker 4: using too much electricity, and as Natasha says, it didn't
Speaker 4: matter why he would start the argument that the point
Speaker 4: was always just to give himself a reason to get
Speaker 4: angry and lose his temper, which he did, And her
Speaker 4: mistake was she said something wise ass back to him.
Speaker 4: He was complaining that she left lights on, but then
Speaker 4: he walked away and left the TV on the rooms,
Speaker 4: and she called and says, oh, I guess you don't
Speaker 4: really care about the electricity, do you, And that launched him.
Speaker 4: He came flying across the room and tackled her and
Speaker 4: knocked her to the floor, choked her nearly to unconsciousness,
Speaker 4: then whipped out a hood he'd pulled from somewhere with
Speaker 4: a rope on the bottom, and tied it around her neck,
Speaker 4: completely covered her eyes and just had one little hole
Speaker 4: for the mouth. And then he tied her hands behind
Speaker 4: her and her feet, carried her into her mother's bedroom,
Speaker 4: through on the bed, and left her there. And all
Speaker 4: this time she's supposedly getting ready. How far do you
Speaker 4: want me to go with the story?
Speaker 6: Don't go ahead?
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, Patty did come back, and she knocked on
Speaker 4: the door. Nobody answers. And she went around and knocked
Speaker 4: on the window Natasha's window. Nobody answers. And she knows
Speaker 4: this is very strange. Robert Pear Knox's car is still
Speaker 4: in the driveway. Natasha's undrivable car is still sitting there.
Speaker 4: No one else has arrived, but no one's answering the door.
Speaker 4: She knocks hard too. Now the house is not that big.
Speaker 4: You knock hard on the front door, anybody anywhere on
Speaker 4: the premises hears you. But nothing happens. As it happened
Speaker 4: because she'd spent the night there a number of times
Speaker 4: with Natasha. She knew that the window next to the
Speaker 4: door there was a way you could jimmy it and
Speaker 4: get in, and they used to do that to sneak
Speaker 4: in if they came in late at night. So she
Speaker 4: started to jimmy the window and was just about to
Speaker 4: crawl inside, and she got this really cold feeling and said, whoops, no,
Speaker 4: I'm not going to do that, puts the window back,
Speaker 4: gets in her car and drives away. Now for a
Speaker 4: long time after that, she's going to be angry at
Speaker 4: herself for driving away and not doing something. But even
Speaker 4: if she'd called the police, she didn't have a complaint
Speaker 4: to make other than the fact that somebody isn't answering
Speaker 4: their door, so she let it go. But inside Natasha
Speaker 4: was lying on the bed, unable to call out to
Speaker 4: her because her father had pulled out a six gun
Speaker 4: a revolver, held it up in front so that she
Speaker 4: could hear him, put one bullet in, spun the chamber,
Speaker 4: and told her if she made a sound, he'd pull
Speaker 4: the trigger. So she didn't make a sound, and Patty
Speaker 4: did drive away, but that didn't stop him. He went
Speaker 4: on and played the Russian roulette game with her over
Speaker 4: and over and over again for a long time, and
Speaker 4: she was helpless there and couldn't do anything. This supposedly
Speaker 4: had something to do in his mind with the fact
Speaker 4: that she and her mother were somehow against him, with
Speaker 4: all the people that he was fighting with in the
Speaker 4: state government. Now, that was where his mind left any
Speaker 4: semblance of logic and went into full blown crazy that
Speaker 4: he could make such connections and actually not only believe them,
Speaker 4: but believe them to the point that he would kill
Speaker 4: behind those connections. And it was all It's a picture
Speaker 4: of a madman's mind. But that's all it is.
Speaker 6: Now you talk about the we mentioned in the opening
Speaker 6: about the force fed a combination of alcohol. How does
Speaker 6: he do this? He's not just pouring it down her throat?
Speaker 6: So how does he do this? And yeah, so tell
Speaker 6: us what happens there? And also what does Natasha seem
Speaker 6: to hear and her limited ability to hear much or
Speaker 6: obviously with the hood overhead, not to see anything. Well,
Speaker 6: what does she think she hears in the commotion, in
Speaker 6: the events that are going on while she's laying on
Speaker 6: this other room.
Speaker 4: Well, the alcohol and the drugs were introduced by the
Speaker 4: small hole by the mouth, and the hood that was
Speaker 4: tied on her head was put there for the purpose
Speaker 4: of doing this, and he had a plastic tube, surgical
Speaker 4: tube he forced through the hole into her mouth and
Speaker 4: he would pour the alcohol into the tube and she
Speaker 4: either had to swallow it or cough it back up
Speaker 4: into the hood and choke on it. So she swallowed it.
Speaker 4: He gave her some pills. I don't know what they were.
Speaker 4: They never identified the substance, but it was some kind
Speaker 4: of a downer an opioid, and forced her to swallow
Speaker 4: and that he was just able to do by putting
Speaker 4: it in her mouth, putting the gun to her head
Speaker 4: and telling her to swallow, and giving her alcohol to
Speaker 4: swallow it with. And this of course eventually wound up
Speaker 4: knocking her out. When she came to, which was some
Speaker 4: hours later, and the light had changed it was getting dark.
Speaker 4: This was in middle of July and so the days
Speaker 4: are long. She just in time to hear that her
Speaker 4: mother had come home from work. She heard the front
Speaker 4: door open and didn't hear anything else until suddenly their
Speaker 4: two dogs out in the backyard began barking hysterically the
Speaker 4: way they never do that they were trained not to do.
Speaker 4: But those dogs were looking at glass French doors which
Speaker 4: looked directly into the house, directly into the living room
Speaker 4: where the front door opened, so the dogs could see
Speaker 4: what was happening in there. All Natasha heard was at
Speaker 4: some point the huge sound of a body hitting the floor,
Speaker 4: sort of the way she had just been tackled, But
Speaker 4: she never heard him say anything, and her mother never
Speaker 4: got the time to scream or call out. The next
Speaker 4: contact she had with her mother came hours later, when
Speaker 4: her father came in long after dark, was one or
Speaker 4: two in the morning, and carried her out to his
Speaker 4: big old gunboat Cadillac car and put her in the
Speaker 4: back seat, still with the hood on her head, still
Speaker 4: bound and gagged, and lay her next to a body
Speaker 4: which she knew was her mom. She knew by the
Speaker 4: feel and the smell it was her mom. She heard
Speaker 4: her mother breathing, but her mom made no sounds or
Speaker 4: didn't speak, and so we all assumed she was still
Speaker 4: unconscious or whatever he had done to her, and in
Speaker 4: that position. Then she took the death ride out to
Speaker 4: the location he'd selected to use for killing them.
Speaker 6: Now was there anything else he did, because we mentioned
Speaker 6: in the opening, but We didn't mention anything about gasoline.
Speaker 6: Was there any mention of an accelerant here?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, Natasha's going in and out of consciousness during
Speaker 4: the ride to the murder scene. It's about fifteen twenty
Speaker 4: minutes from the house out in the San Fernando Valley,
Speaker 4: a little town called San Fernando, and this is an
Speaker 4: industrial area, lots of open space, light industry type factories,
Speaker 4: railroad tracks running through, and highway intersections. That kind of
Speaker 4: a location. You can do a lot of mischief in
Speaker 4: the dark out there most nights, and people won't see you.
Speaker 4: He selected a spot underneath the highway overpass on a
Speaker 4: section of road that ran about one hundred yards or
Speaker 4: so straight down to a tee intersection, and at that
Speaker 4: tea was a flat concrete wall. So while he was
Speaker 4: under the overpass, and of course the noise of traffic
Speaker 4: drowning out whatever he was doing, he rigged the linkage
Speaker 4: of the engine so that he could jam the accelerator.
Speaker 4: Put Ma mclaire in the driver's seat and using a
Speaker 4: piece of rope, tied her body upright to the wheel.
Speaker 4: Then placed Natasha in the passenger seat next to her.
Speaker 4: Poured alcohol from a booze bottle all over them and
Speaker 4: threw the bottle in the passenger's foot well, and this
Speaker 4: is a full quart of bourbon, and then covered both
Speaker 4: bodies with gasoline. The bottom of the car he had
Speaker 4: rigged with a fixed steel bar that he had bent
Speaker 4: and cut and attached with the point almost touching the
Speaker 4: gas tank, so that if the car at high speed
Speaker 4: collided with something, it would drive that point into the
Speaker 4: gas tank and spew that fuel everywhere around the cutter bar.
Speaker 4: He had dangled a piece of rope and lit it.
Speaker 4: In fact, it was still smoldering when cops found it
Speaker 4: sometime later. He then, with the linkage rig so that
Speaker 4: he could jam the accelerator, pointed the car down the
Speaker 4: road toward that t intersection. At this point, it's around
Speaker 4: three or four in the morning, nobody's out there. Lets
Speaker 4: the car go, and it speeds down the road toward
Speaker 4: the intersection. He even we found tables that he had
Speaker 4: worked down where he rigged out how much the car
Speaker 4: would accelerate, how many yards it needed to hit a
Speaker 4: terminal speed, and he had worked that out. The one
Speaker 4: thing he didn't do was count on the car rolling
Speaker 4: off the road and not going straight. He had even
Speaker 4: checked the steering on the car to make sure that
Speaker 4: it was straight, but he forgot that a rain hill
Speaker 4: in a road is the center of the road being
Speaker 4: slightly higher than the right and left side, so that
Speaker 4: rain naturally runs off the road. Well, that creates a
Speaker 4: very slight angle, which we don't see when we look
Speaker 4: at it, but it's there and it affects trajectory. It
Speaker 4: affected the car just enough to make it drift to
Speaker 4: the right and then hit a huge wooden telephone pole
Speaker 4: that was right off the road. The car was already
Speaker 4: going fast enough it hit with so much force it
Speaker 4: snapped that pole off excuse me, just above ground level.
Speaker 4: But it still wasn't fast enough. It had about another
Speaker 4: fifty yards to go. It wasn't fast enough to drive
Speaker 4: that cutter bar into the gas tank. If it had,
Speaker 4: of course, that would have exploded. The fireball would have
Speaker 4: then caught the women who were soaked and gasoline inside
Speaker 4: the car, and all of the evidence would have gone
Speaker 4: up in smoke. But because the car hit that pole
Speaker 4: before it reached its terminal velocity, the explosion he had
Speaker 4: rigged out didn't take place. I mentioned in the book
Speaker 4: an alternate theory I have that I can't prove, but
Speaker 4: I like. And he did this strange thing of tying
Speaker 4: her upright to the wheel. I'm not spoke sure what
Speaker 4: that was supposed to do, because of course, even if
Speaker 4: they had hit the wall, they'd have been so jostled
Speaker 4: around and burned up. No one would have known if
Speaker 4: she was at the wheel or not. Anyway, but he
Speaker 4: did part of his madness needed to take to put
Speaker 4: that little twist on his acts. And because of that,
Speaker 4: if her body slumped to the right side toward her
Speaker 4: daughter while they're making that death ride down there, that
Speaker 4: would pull the car off the road and into the
Speaker 4: telephone pole. If Claire had any consciousness or awareness left
Speaker 4: to her then, and the corner felt sure she was
Speaker 4: alive when the car was started, or on the brink
Speaker 4: of being alive, then she pulled the car off the
Speaker 4: road and saved her daughter. Mount she had sustained such
Speaker 4: massive brain trauma, it's not unreasonable to say she couldn't
Speaker 4: have been alive or conscious at that point, in which
Speaker 4: case just the weight of her body did it, and
Speaker 4: it was physics at work. But in either case, this
Speaker 4: is what saved Natasha, the daughter. They had both been
Speaker 4: beaten badly with a tire iron about the head, but
Speaker 4: because Claire was unconscious when she received her beating, the
Speaker 4: blows all fell about the same place on her forehead
Speaker 4: crashed in her skull. But her daughter, who was not
Speaker 4: fully conscious but alive when she was being tire ironed,
Speaker 4: was able to instinctively just thrash her head back and
Speaker 4: forth side to side. This distributed the force of the
Speaker 4: blows that she took the head enough so that her
Speaker 4: skull didn't cave in and her brain wasn't penetrated. That's
Speaker 4: why she was beaten and unconscious but still alive when
Speaker 4: the car took off on its way, and she even
Speaker 4: survived then the impact the wreck itself, and then her
Speaker 4: body lay there in the car in that raw gasoline
Speaker 4: for quite a while before she was eventually found to
Speaker 4: pull out. There was a lot of damage done to
Speaker 4: her skin just by the gasoline itself.
Speaker 6: Now was how would they found and who brought her
Speaker 6: to the hospital and then tell us about the follow up.
Speaker 6: What happens as soon as she gets the you know,
Speaker 6: soon after getting to the hospital, what condition is she
Speaker 6: in at that time?
Speaker 4: Well, from the time they pick her up she's in
Speaker 4: this kind of delirium, and the EMTs arrived at this
Speaker 4: around four to thirty in the morning. Some guy who
Speaker 4: was passing by, just out late at night saw the
Speaker 4: car and called the police, and ambulances show up and
Speaker 4: the fire department comes. They see the car has been
Speaker 4: rigged to explode, so they spray it down make sure
Speaker 4: it won't go off, and of course call homicide and
Speaker 4: investigators then, who are soon after that right on the scene,
Speaker 4: and Natasha is taken away by ambulance. They try to
Speaker 4: get her to respond her name, but you know, she's
Speaker 4: just delirious and what's coming out of her is not
Speaker 4: good information. At one point she gave her name as
Speaker 4: Patty because she was just that, you know, she'd taken
Speaker 4: blows to the head. Once they're in the hospital, after
Speaker 4: some hours, she begins coming out of it and they're
Speaker 4: able to converse with her in the most basic way.
Speaker 4: And the first thing she starts trying to say to
Speaker 4: them is my father, my father, But because she's delirious
Speaker 4: and can't really elaborate on that, and because their father's
Speaker 4: nowhere around the wreck, she thought that the doctor rather
Speaker 4: thought that she was concerned where's my dad, you know,
Speaker 4: is he hurt and didn't realize she's going, where's my dad?
Speaker 4: He's not done killing me yet, So they didn't do
Speaker 4: anything to protect her at first, other than to take
Speaker 4: medical care. And in the meantime, Robert Pearnock himself was
Speaker 4: trying frantically to figure out a way to get into
Speaker 4: the hospital, pacing around outside in the parking lot, but
Speaker 4: there was a cop on the door. Soon after, when
Speaker 4: the homicide investigator, Steve Fisk shows up and asked her
Speaker 4: just a few questions right away. He knows this whole
Speaker 4: thing is terrible, and he's got to find Robert Pearanack,
Speaker 4: her father, because she is now the only thing that
Speaker 4: can convict him. She's the only witness, and that means
Speaker 4: not only the police need to protect her, but Pearanock
Speaker 4: needs to get rid of her right away. So at
Speaker 4: that point they put a twenty four.
Speaker 5: Okay brown two name something that's not boring, laundry, a
Speaker 5: book club, computer solitaire.
Speaker 2: Huh oh, sorry, we were looking for Chumba casino to chum.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 2: Chumbacasino dot com as over one hundred casino style games
Speaker 2: joined today and playing for free for your chance to
Speaker 2: redeem some serious prizes chum chumbacasino dot com.
Speaker 4: Plus the webtails for our armed guard on her and
Speaker 4: then to assure her safety and Patty, her friend, came
Speaker 4: and brought her pajamas and stayed with her and refused
Speaker 4: to leave the room. She was sleep on the floor
Speaker 4: by the bed to try to give her some sense
Speaker 4: of having a backup, because of course she was an
Speaker 4: instant orphan by all of this. Her mother was murdered
Speaker 4: and her father was a maniac, and it was just her.
Speaker 4: Their family itself was basically from Quebec up in Canada,
Speaker 4: but they were not and they weren't people she could
Speaker 4: turn to. She didn't even speak their language. So she
Speaker 4: was instantly in one tough situation. But at least she
Speaker 4: did have a friend, Patty there, who did the best
Speaker 4: she could stand up for her.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about what happens with Steve Fisk detective and
Speaker 6: with Sonya Siegel once they get word at where he
Speaker 6: lives and they get so what do they do? How
Speaker 6: do they proceed with Robert's girlfriend Sonya Siegel.
Speaker 4: Well, at this point, shortly after the crime, Sonya is
Speaker 4: still bought into Robert Pearnock's explanation of being up against
Speaker 4: a cabal of conspirators who work for the state government
Speaker 4: who want to get rid of him. He claims that
Speaker 4: he's about to publish a book that's naming names of
Speaker 4: all these corrupt people that would destroy so many careers
Speaker 4: that they it isn't even enough for them to kill him.
Speaker 4: They have to completely discredit him, and so therefore they
Speaker 4: committed these crimes set him up to look guilty so
Speaker 4: that if his book does come out, nobody will believe it.
Speaker 4: And that's his story. And he starts calling the police
Speaker 4: and saying, I know you want to talk to me.
Speaker 4: I'll come in and talk to you, but I'm afraid
Speaker 4: of what you're going to do because I've got all
Speaker 4: this long history working against the state. So I'm going
Speaker 4: to have my attorney negotiate the terms of my coming in.
Speaker 4: And he starts down that game while he goes off
Speaker 4: to Las Vegas, gets a facelift, and starts spending money
Speaker 4: like its water because he's liquidating his assets. Sonya at
Speaker 4: this point still thinks, my poor Robert. He's on the
Speaker 4: run from these murderous police and government forces that want
Speaker 4: to kill him, and she's covering for him, alling for him,
Speaker 4: helping him with his car and with bills and whatever health,
Speaker 4: whatever else he needs. But Steve then Fisk, the detective,
Speaker 4: once he realizes what Pearnox game is, goes back to
Speaker 4: her and he lowers what I call his velvet hammer
Speaker 4: on her. He takes the fact that she genuinely does
Speaker 4: love this guy and doesn't know who it is she's protecting,
Speaker 4: really and he uses that against her. He says, Sonya,
Speaker 4: here's the thing. I know you know where Robert is.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: You can keep lying to me and keep us away
Speaker 4: from him. But here's the thing. The whole department is
Speaker 4: on this case now. We're never going to let him
Speaker 4: just walk away. This is capital murder. We're not going
Speaker 4: to back off. That means if we don't bring him in,
Speaker 4: at some point, some rookie out there is going to
Speaker 4: come across him in a traffic stop or whatever, and
Speaker 4: that rookie might just panic and kill him right on
Speaker 4: the spot. So you want to say, Robert, you need
Speaker 4: to give him up and get him into protective custody
Speaker 4: right now, because his chances of dying are worse every
Speaker 4: day he spends out on the street, and that he
Speaker 4: just put her in a trap in that way, because
Speaker 4: if she does love him, which she did, and cares
Speaker 4: about what happens to him, which she still did, then
Speaker 4: she's got to get him on the streets. And Fisk
Speaker 4: convinces her, look, you're not really protecting him. You're setting
Speaker 4: him up to get killed by some cop or or
Speaker 4: somebody else he tries to hijack. You're guaranteeing a bad
Speaker 4: end unless you protect him. And he put it in
Speaker 4: that way so that by turning on her fiance, she
Speaker 4: was actually doing him a favor. And she gave him
Speaker 4: the address of a hotel over in the valley where
Speaker 4: he was holed up, and Fisk went over there, knocked
Speaker 4: on the door and said, hey, Robert, it's Steve Sonya
Speaker 4: want me to tell you that she can't make it
Speaker 4: by tonight. And the minute Robert said okay, and they
Speaker 4: knew he was in there, they crashed through the door,
Speaker 4: took him down, and were able to arrest him. The
Speaker 4: weird thing, now, here's the thing. Sonia loved him so
Speaker 4: much that it was so hard for her to finally
Speaker 4: come around to giving the cops the information. And you know,
Speaker 4: she had to be manipulated, so oh, protect him, Sonya,
Speaker 4: protect him, Sonya, because you know her loyal Robert. Well,
Speaker 4: her loyal Robert was sitting on the bed, but twenty
Speaker 4: seven thousand dollars in cash of his passport and a
Speaker 4: travel book for New Zealand. He hadn't said a word
Speaker 4: to her about going anywhere. So that's the guy she
Speaker 4: was protecting. Later in the trial, when it came time
Speaker 4: for her to testify, they show her some papers and things.
Speaker 4: They're getting square on how Peernox's been manipulating his income,
Speaker 4: and they said, this date here is that Robert Pearnox's birthdate,
Speaker 4: And she goes yes, and then she stops, says, no, no, wait,
Speaker 4: that's not his birthdate, that's my birthday. It's a form
Speaker 4: that he had filled out on himself, and she just
Speaker 4: stops and kind of goes. He remembered the one time
Speaker 4: that he had acknowledged her birthday is when he was
Speaker 4: using it to scam somebody else. But as with all sociopaths,
Speaker 4: no matter how skilled, if you are around them in
Speaker 4: their intimate space, before too long the mask comes down.
Speaker 4: It simply takes too much energy for them to keep
Speaker 4: up that crap. Twenty four to seven. So it's the
Speaker 4: people closest who always take the most damage because they're
Speaker 4: the ones who see the demon first.
Speaker 6: Now, tell us about this other major character in this story,
Speaker 6: because she gets inextricably involved after meeting Claire, and Claire
Speaker 6: really and her identifying with each other. Tell us about
Speaker 6: Victoria Doom and what she's doing at the same time,
Speaker 6: trying to curtail Robert Pernock and the siphoning of the
Speaker 6: money that she knows that he's going to use one
Speaker 6: way or another. Tell us what Victoria Doom does and
Speaker 6: how involved she gets in this case.
Speaker 4: This is a wonderful woman, this Victoria Doom. She's just great.
Speaker 4: I can't say enough good things for her. She is
Speaker 4: the living antidote for every dirty lawyer joke you've ever
Speaker 4: heard in your life, this one. You started out just
Speaker 4: as a divorce attorney. She took in a client and
Speaker 4: Claire Peiranack, who was going to get a divorce and
Speaker 4: then decided not to. And she thought, Okay, that's all
Speaker 4: there is to it. But when she read in the
Speaker 4: newspaper about this case and realized, oh my god, that's
Speaker 4: Claire Peirnock, the woman who came in to see me,
Speaker 4: And then she thought, wait a minute, I have a
Speaker 4: copy of this agreement, and the date she was killed
Speaker 4: is only nine days before that agreement expires. This was
Speaker 4: a woman with only nine days left when she was
Speaker 4: safe to kill, because once that divorce started, Pearannock wasn't safe.
Speaker 4: She says, Holy crap, I have to get involved. Now
Speaker 4: what about his daughter? Because she already knew Peiranock is
Speaker 4: a guy who squirrels away all kinds of money, and
Speaker 4: he has all these different scams for covering his money,
Speaker 4: she thought, because he's murdered of their mother, A large
Speaker 4: share of this is now Natasha's who is now an orphan.
Speaker 4: But this guy is on the run, liquidating his cash
Speaker 4: and spending it as fast as he can, Meaning not
Speaker 4: only is this girl an orphan, but she's about to
Speaker 4: lose everything she might ever have and be left penniless.
Speaker 4: So she got involved, starting in with all the civil
Speaker 4: work necessary to isolate Pearnock's bank accounts. But the problem
Speaker 4: is Pearnock, having all this money, hired a big law
Speaker 4: firm named Dern, Mason and Flum, big huge law firm,
Speaker 4: and paid them a huge retainer to make her life
Speaker 4: hell and challenge every single move she make, and then
Speaker 4: appeal that, and then appeal that. So they quickly buried
Speaker 4: her under so much work that her little one woman
Speaker 4: law office couldn't keep up with her other cases. She
Speaker 4: had let all her other cases go, which she did
Speaker 4: her paying cases to work on this one for which
Speaker 4: she was being paid nothing, and kept working to isolate
Speaker 4: his bank accounts. One at a time. She'd have partial success,
Speaker 4: but others were shielded behind various paper deals he would
Speaker 4: use to protect his money. And so she knew time
Speaker 4: was running out. He's spending it fast, and if she
Speaker 4: doesn't stop it soon, these girls get bupkis to try
Speaker 4: to build their lives on. It was Natasha and a
Speaker 4: girl whose story I don't tell because she was just
Speaker 4: a small child, Yle who was eleven at the time,
Speaker 4: her youngest sister. But she's not any part of the crime,
Speaker 4: and she wasn't there when it happened. Nevertheless, it was
Speaker 4: also a concern about what's going to happen to that
Speaker 4: girl now after all of this, if he is able
Speaker 4: to spend out this money and he was in Vegas
Speaker 4: just going through it like water and hiring all these
Speaker 4: investigators to follow every witness in the case, paying this
Speaker 4: fortune to this civil attorney to block and doing all
Speaker 4: this while shuttling back and forth between Las Vegas and
Speaker 4: Los Angeles and Sonia's house underneath the police's nose, while
Speaker 4: constantly having his criminal attorney call them and say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: he's coming in, he's coming in. It was just a circus,
Speaker 4: and the cops, of course, were spitting nails over this
Speaker 4: or being jerked around this way. That's what finally drove
Speaker 4: Fisk to pin Sonya to the wall. The way he
Speaker 4: did it just had to be no more. Mister nice
Speaker 4: guy Peirnock was making a joke of the legal system,
Speaker 4: which is already beleaguered enough, but his refusal to cooperate anyway,
Speaker 4: and to constantly level accusations that people had managed to
Speaker 4: stall the investigation and had managed to keep him free
Speaker 4: for a few weeks. But of course it eventually closed
Speaker 4: in once Sonya was flipped and then he was arrested.
Speaker 4: This barely even slowed pear knock down the instant he's arrested.
Speaker 4: Of course, now he's complaining about everything that happens. He's
Speaker 4: being beaten, he's being mistreated, and filing complaints about that
Speaker 4: this guy is like the terminator. In fact, that's the
Speaker 4: way Natasha described him recently. He's like the terminator, and
Speaker 4: it's a great description because he's just not deterred. You
Speaker 4: show up one of his lies as a bald faced lie,
Speaker 4: he doesn't even take a breath before he's making another
Speaker 4: accusation that you have to then go deal with that.
Speaker 4: It doesn't even slow him down. And Natasha still twenty
Speaker 4: years later, still lives in hiding to this day because
Speaker 4: she knows for a guy like him, the offense that
Speaker 4: he's angry for always just happened. Just happened just now.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter if it was twenty thirty years ago.
Speaker 4: It just happened now. And he's just as angry and
Speaker 4: just as determined now as he would have been his
Speaker 4: own daughter. And see such an enemy that her face
Speaker 4: needs a tire iron, and he's the one who has
Speaker 4: to do it. That's where his madness took him.
Speaker 6: Now. The thing is is we won't have enough time
Speaker 6: to go through this incredible story because as soon as
Speaker 6: we get to what it looks like a slam dunk,
Speaker 6: you talk about his abilities and his energy and his
Speaker 6: psychopathic nature in quick order, he gets rid of a
Speaker 6: bunch of lawyers, and again he's still within the conspiracy
Speaker 6: thing that everybody is involved in this conspiracy against him.
Speaker 6: So let's but I wanted to talk about the one
Speaker 6: profound story that you talk about to illustrate how dangerous
Speaker 6: a person Robert Peirnock was to Natasha, and again you
Speaker 6: describe to how she's still in hiding to this very day.
Speaker 6: Talk about the real estate agent, the Latino real estate agent.
Speaker 4: If you could, Oh yeah, yeah, I skipped over that.
Speaker 4: My apologies. That's a great one. So this is Whyle
Speaker 4: Peiranock is still on the lamb, traveling back and forth
Speaker 4: between Vegas and Los Angeles. He's got all these high
Speaker 4: priced investigators who have a eventually tracked down Natasha's safe house,
Speaker 4: which you're not supposed to know anything about. And next
Speaker 4: door to the safe house, a woman who owned her
Speaker 4: place there had put it on the market and she's
Speaker 4: cleaning in the garage one day and this guy shows
Speaker 4: up says, I'm a real estate agent. I'd like to
Speaker 4: like to list your house for you, and she goes,
Speaker 4: oh great, I could use the help. Come on and
Speaker 4: I'll show you around. She takes him inside and notices
Speaker 4: he barely glances at anything in the house, walks straight
Speaker 4: to the back bedroom, which is just an ordinary little
Speaker 4: it was a girl's bedroom at the time. But what
Speaker 4: was unique is this bedroom window happened to look directly
Speaker 4: into the backyard of the Natasha's safe house next door.
Speaker 4: The woman said it was strange. He just stood there
Speaker 4: staring out that glass, showing no interest in the contents
Speaker 4: of her home. And then after a minute, when she
Speaker 4: finally said hey buddy, he goes, oh, yeah, I don't
Speaker 4: need to see anymore, walks out and disappeared. He didn't
Speaker 4: think anything of it other than this is some crazy
Speaker 4: real tour until later when the course detectives started coming
Speaker 4: around and they showed her photographs in a six pack,
Speaker 4: and she picked out Peirnock's face from among the other
Speaker 4: guys and said, this is the agent who was here.
Speaker 4: He had tracked her down to a supposed safe house
Speaker 4: while she's in witness protection. He had come in and
Speaker 4: he had a business card printed up that shouldn't be
Speaker 4: a realtor, by the way, and then gotten that close
Speaker 4: to see exactly where Natasha was, where her bedroom window was,
Speaker 4: and everything else. And then disappeared again. This is why
Speaker 4: Natasha's afraid of her father.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: While once he's arrested, he starts, as you said, firing
Speaker 4: his own attorneys. Oh, they're all conspiring against me too,
Speaker 4: And then several judges got on. The judges are conspiring
Speaker 4: against me, and up to the point, a clever defend
Speaker 4: that can make those claims work. The system, in fact
Speaker 4: bends over backward to see to it that you are
Speaker 4: not railroaded. And for that reason, when you start these
Speaker 4: complaints about people's integrity, you can get some traction, which
Speaker 4: he did. He knew how to press all the buttons,
Speaker 4: and he had for four years. He delayed this prosecution
Speaker 4: of As you said, Dan, what should have been a
Speaker 4: slam dunk on this guy. I mean straight to the
Speaker 4: execution chamber. No, no, no, no. He was just getting
Speaker 4: started and working as his own attorney, writing these motions.
Speaker 4: They would appoint him a new attorney if the attorney
Speaker 4: wouldn't do whatever he said. Well, they became a conspirator
Speaker 4: who was trying to work against him, and he fired them.
Speaker 4: He very nearly got away with this whole thing. He
Speaker 4: had planned it so carefully, and he was so good
Speaker 4: at pressing the system's buttons. The title of this book,
Speaker 4: you know, almost wound up being a perfect murder, although
Speaker 4: I guess I couldn't have written it then because we
Speaker 4: wouldn't know he'd have gotten away with it, you know.
Speaker 6: Sure, well, let's talk about the a checklist for murder,
Speaker 6: because Stephen Fisk is again it's almost it is so
Speaker 6: movieesque some of the scenes in this book, and he's
Speaker 6: looking and looking for some bit of physical evidence because unbelievably,
Speaker 6: like you mentioned, Robert Peirnock, even with attorneys that end
Speaker 6: up he sues them and believes they're all part of
Speaker 6: a conspiracy. He takes advantage of that system, and so
Speaker 6: he puts everybody in a position. So if you could
Speaker 6: explain that what Stephen Fiks finds and what its importance
Speaker 6: is to this.
Speaker 4: In the process of gathering evidence at the crime scene,
Speaker 4: he had opened Pearnock's trunk of his car, and notice
Speaker 4: that all these slips of paper in there. Peirnock is
Speaker 4: a chronic list maker. Everything he does, he makes a
Speaker 4: list first, so he didn't know what to make, but
Speaker 4: he has gathered him all up, put him in a
Speaker 4: box and sent them on in with everything else. Well,
Speaker 4: the box he put them in turns out was a
Speaker 4: Xerox paper box, and because of that, somehow that box
Speaker 4: got separated from the case evidence and put over in
Speaker 4: the Xerox room with all the other cases of paper
Speaker 4: that was used by people making copies in the office
Speaker 4: and sat there for four years while they tried to
Speaker 4: get this case going and while Pereanock delayed actions. Finally,
Speaker 4: once Peernaut gets his last defense attorney, Donald Greene, whom
Speaker 4: he hires with his own money, Vegas attorney who's also
Speaker 4: licensed to practice in Los Angeles, we're going forward to
Speaker 4: the trial and the new DA Craig Richmond, has been
Speaker 4: assigned this case, and he's scared out of his mind
Speaker 4: because it looks like a loser. They don't have the
Speaker 4: smoking gun they need, and this Pereanot guy just keeps
Speaker 4: managing to win on technicalities, one hearing after another after another.
Speaker 4: So on the eve of trial, he goes into the
Speaker 4: copy room because they have a big table in there
Speaker 4: to spread out his files. And he's sitting there working
Speaker 4: and he looks over just looking around the room, and
Speaker 4: there's the piles, the stacks of the boxes of paper.
Speaker 4: He says, one has little peerore written on the side,
Speaker 4: which people not working on the case wouldn't even notice.
Speaker 4: But of course he goes Piirnock. He goes Ori and
Speaker 4: pulls out that box and opens it up. It's not
Speaker 4: a box of paper. It's all these slips of lists
Speaker 4: and slips of paper from Pear Knox trunk that have
Speaker 4: just been sitting there. He goes, holy crap. He starts
Speaker 4: going through them, and most of them are just grocery
Speaker 4: lists stuffed from the hardware store. Ordinary thing. Go get
Speaker 4: your haircut, go get your shoes fixed. But he starts
Speaker 4: noticing mixed in with a lot of those things are
Speaker 4: some strange things, like by handcuffs. The term get location
Speaker 4: or no find location is there again and again, dozens
Speaker 4: of time. Find location, find location, find location. And then
Speaker 4: after a certain day, just a few weeks before the crimes,
Speaker 4: that one stops. He doesn't have any more notations to
Speaker 4: find location. You know, he's found the underpass, He's found
Speaker 4: the wall, the concrete wall, face mask, wife in the front,
Speaker 4: plus the child plus cover is one of his notes
Speaker 4: on how to stack them or bodies into the car
Speaker 4: before launching it off. And gradually he puts these notes
Speaker 4: together and realizes he's just found a checklist for murder.
Speaker 4: And this is the thing that Peiranock ultimately can't answer for,
Speaker 4: can't explain away, and winds up convicting him and putting
Speaker 4: him in prison. What would otherwise have been a perfect
Speaker 4: crime turns out to be absolutely nothing because he was
Speaker 4: so anal retentive, he was so in love with his
Speaker 4: own paranoid thought process that he couldn't bear to just
Speaker 4: throw away the damn lists, toss him in the fire,
Speaker 4: your home free, Noo. He had to say his souvenirs
Speaker 4: and his souvenirs, his own souvenirs are what put him away.
Speaker 4: Students firing love the way that came down.
Speaker 6: You had two very very important interviews for this book,
Speaker 6: and of course the most important is Natasha Peirnock and
Speaker 6: her tell us about the importance for her personally and
Speaker 6: for this case professionally in the testimony that she had
Speaker 6: at court, and tell us the circumstances under which she
Speaker 6: did testify, given that he had the right to defend
Speaker 6: himself in court.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, this poor kid. Sometimes when you do
Speaker 4: these crime stories, it's astounding how much grief and tragedy
Speaker 4: will get rained down upon the innocent, and not just
Speaker 4: for a little while, but a lot of it for
Speaker 4: a long time. And that's what happened with Natasha. Now
Speaker 4: this is four years later, her surgeries and things have
Speaker 4: recovered where she looks almost normal. She's got scars on
Speaker 4: her face and she can function. But this is an
Speaker 4: orphan whose skull was crashed in by her father who's
Speaker 4: on trial for murder. And he's a jailhouse lawyer. And
Speaker 4: guess what. Steve Fisk calls Natasha in and says, I'm
Speaker 4: sorry to tell you, he's demanding his right to defend
Speaker 4: himself and be his own at herney. The court has
Speaker 4: to let him do it, and that means he's the
Speaker 4: poenaing you to testify. You're going to have to be
Speaker 4: grilled by your father in open court. This is the man.
Speaker 4: The last time she saw him, he was bashing her
Speaker 4: face in with a tire iron. Now she has to
Speaker 4: put on a nice little dress and sit in a
Speaker 4: witness box while he grills her. And he did, and
Speaker 4: it went on for days, and he was a master
Speaker 4: at mocking and sneering and basically verbally just torturing her,
Speaker 4: but always staying just within the lines of what the
Speaker 4: court had to allow him to say, being that he
Speaker 4: was his attorney. Just put her through hell. But she
Speaker 4: was able to stand up and look him in the
Speaker 4: eye and speak the truth and answer his questions. And
Speaker 4: she never wavered, never wavered, not one time. And I
Speaker 4: have tremendous admiration for her and what it took to
Speaker 4: go through that. But his attempt to get her on
Speaker 4: the stand and discredit her in some way was his
Speaker 4: last ditch, and thankfully it didn't work. He was what
Speaker 4: they call too clever by half. He was so busy
Speaker 4: figuring everything out and manipulating everybody that he just went
Speaker 4: too many steps in the wrong direction. He couldn't recover.
Speaker 4: The bit that seemed so clever about defending himself was
Speaker 4: actually the thing that wound up not putting him away,
Speaker 4: but putting in a position to be put away, because
Speaker 4: the jury saw who he was. They saw his condescending
Speaker 4: cruelty to this girl who had barely survived at his hand.
Speaker 4: And I think he showed them the killer. I think
Speaker 4: he said, you have to find me guilty. You're looking
Speaker 4: at the personality that was able to do these things.
Speaker 4: Fascinating thing about sociopaths that I've seen every true crime
Speaker 4: case I've ever worked on is the line that the
Speaker 4: writer William Peter Bladdie used in the book The Exorcist.
Speaker 4: They also picked up that line in the movie version,
Speaker 4: where one priest is saying the other, well, we're gonna
Speaker 4: have to figure out which demon we're dealing with here,
Speaker 4: and the older, wiser priest snaps at him and says,
Speaker 4: it's always the same demon. Now, I don't think in
Speaker 4: religious terms, and I'm not offering you a religious icon here,
Speaker 4: but I think it's very clarifying when you want to
Speaker 4: understand these personalities, when you're dealing with the true sociopath,
Speaker 4: it's always the same demon. Their individualities, their uniqueness as people,
Speaker 4: that stuff is boiled away by the illness. They just
Speaker 4: become these terminator machines, function machines. You do and you
Speaker 4: say anything at all that you need to do and
Speaker 4: say to get done what you want. And that is
Speaker 4: the same for one person to the next to the next.
Speaker 4: And he just became that. Thank goodness, he showed it
Speaker 4: to the jury and they deliberated six hours and found
Speaker 4: him guilty. Even the judge. Let me just tell your listeners,
Speaker 4: this in the sentencing went on, and this long colloquy
Speaker 4: and the sentencing appealing to any future governor who might
Speaker 4: ever have PEARNOX'X case come before him for clemency for parole,
Speaker 4: that no matter what strange circumstances could ever cause that
Speaker 4: to happen, that governor had to know that Peernock could
Speaker 4: not be released, that the streets could never be safe
Speaker 4: with this guy out there, and that he needed to
Speaker 4: die in prison. This extraordinary thing for a judge to
Speaker 4: put in a minute order in his sentencing hearing, and
Speaker 4: especially a guy like Judge Schwab. This is a very scholarly, calm,
Speaker 4: measured sort of a guy. This is not any sort
Speaker 4: of a hothead jurist at all, and yet he was
Speaker 4: just almost pleading with anyone who would ever read this
Speaker 4: trial record. You can't believe this guy. If you're feeling
Speaker 4: the least bit convinced by this guy, it's the demon
Speaker 4: breathing at you. That's all that's happening. There's a website
Speaker 4: that he's taken out where he goes and explains, you know,
Speaker 4: of course, all the people that are against him, and
Speaker 4: he talks about my book that I was supposedly hired
Speaker 4: by the state to write a book. That's all. Nobody
Speaker 4: hired me to do anything. But you know, if you
Speaker 4: don't look too close, it looks almost real. And if
Speaker 4: you have a proclivity to believe paranoid stories, maybe you've
Speaker 4: been burned by the state yourself. At some point, he
Speaker 4: knows which buttons to press, and he'll hook you, and
Speaker 4: you'll think, oh my gosh, we've got to free this
Speaker 4: poor man, this unjustly convicted man. But you're talking about
Speaker 4: a monster. It's always the same demon.
Speaker 6: One of the most vivid moments in the book is
Speaker 6: the character of Robert Peernock, is that with Richmond having
Speaker 6: him on the stand, he originally thought, jeez, I won't
Speaker 6: let him get into this vast conspiracy, but then he realized,
Speaker 6: you know what, maybe I will. So that vasque conspiracy
Speaker 6: included his own lawyers, the judges, all the judges, all
Speaker 6: the lawyers, everybody involved in this, and oh, in this
Speaker 6: time I didn't talk about. Also the point that we
Speaker 6: didn't talk about, the point he reaches out to inflict
Speaker 6: fear not only still on his daughter, but also these
Speaker 6: lawyers and potentially the prosecutor. Tell us a little bit
Speaker 6: about that.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, he hired investigators to find where his own
Speaker 4: attorney was staying in Los Angeles while they were on
Speaker 4: trial and tried to have him killed the prosecutor, Craig
Speaker 4: Richmond shortly during the trial excuse me, during the trout
Speaker 4: was newly engaged, and he went for the first time.
Speaker 4: He and his fiance went to her mom's house for
Speaker 4: him to meet her, and parked her car out in
Speaker 4: the driveway. While they were in the house having coffee
Speaker 4: with her mom, the car exploded into fire. Peer Knock
Speaker 4: had had his minions go and put one of his
Speaker 4: firebombs under it. Imagine that for being the first time
Speaker 4: you meet your fiance's mother, you get her car blown
Speaker 4: up out in the driveway and possibly cause a few
Speaker 4: concerns about what her daughter is getting into.
Speaker 6: Incredible. Another vivid moment was the he makes such a
Speaker 6: disturbance in court that the liberal Doug Schwab, the judge says,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna gag you, bind and gag you, bound and
Speaker 6: gag you if you don't shut up, And they finally
Speaker 6: had to drag him out and gag him. And so
Speaker 6: the picture was that he'd had duct tape halfway up
Speaker 6: his face, surrounding his head, just to be able to
Speaker 6: have this guy back in court for the judge to say,
Speaker 6: you're gonna have to witness, You're gonna witness this decision here,
Speaker 6: and we're gonna have you back in this court, but
Speaker 6: we're not gonna listen to you. We've listened to you,
Speaker 6: so we're gonna gag and bound you. So, I mean, again,
Speaker 6: very very unusual. I've never had of anybody. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's very very rare. Let's put that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've never certainly never come across another case where
Speaker 4: it was done. Although when you read this trial record,
Speaker 4: you see absolutely that the judge had no choice but
Speaker 4: to do it. Perlock even uses that picture on his
Speaker 4: website as if to show, look at what the state
Speaker 4: did to me. They bound me with tape, And if
Speaker 4: you just want to get all emotional, you can go, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: isn't that awful, But when you see the circumstances of it,
Speaker 4: you real this poor judge had taken this thing for months,
Speaker 4: allowing this guy to just burn away the taxpayers millions
Speaker 4: of dollars on this trial, millions of dollars with his
Speaker 4: stalling tactics and if he allowed it to work, the
Speaker 4: message would be, Hey, if you're ever in trouble in court,
Speaker 4: just yell and scream and accuse everything that moves. You
Speaker 4: can bind everything to a halt. He had to stop Peirknock,
Speaker 4: and yet the sentencing needed to go forward too, and
Speaker 4: Parannock wasn't going to shut up, so he did have
Speaker 4: him bound and gagged. What you can't see, he's got
Speaker 4: cotex stuffed into his mouth underneath that duct tape that's
Speaker 4: wrapped around his head. But he put that tape around
Speaker 4: his own head just as sure as if he took
Speaker 4: out the role himself and start of winding it around
Speaker 4: his neck. But now he tries to use it to
Speaker 4: make himself look pitiful. It's the mob.
Speaker 6: I'll let you go. Let's wrap up with the story
Speaker 6: of a little bit of hope. And also for those
Speaker 6: people that think that you know, are just bed set
Speaker 6: on having a death penalty, you talk, and I like
Speaker 6: the sarcasm that you do. Add in this part of
Speaker 6: the book where he's in Pelican Bay. So first tell
Speaker 6: us about the survivor, Natasha Pearnock. How is she doing,
Speaker 6: how is she fared? Before we talk about what Robert
Speaker 6: Piernock's fate seems to be well.
Speaker 4: Listen, I wish I had some rosy thing I could
Speaker 4: offer you. Natasha is alive, she has her health, so
Speaker 4: I get there's that. You know, she did beat back
Speaker 4: the attempt on her life. But this is a woman
Speaker 4: alone in the world who knows her father will kill
Speaker 4: her if you can find her, because he's insane. So naturally,
Speaker 4: she's had no success with a relationship. She's not a
Speaker 4: married person now, she doesn't have children, and she's an
Speaker 4: ongoing victim. My hope is simply not that her life
Speaker 4: is greater, there's a happy ending, but just that she's
Speaker 4: able to live a life that is tolerable and find
Speaker 4: some kind of peace. That's my hope for her. That
Speaker 4: we can't offer listeners though, some kind of happy panacea,
Speaker 4: though there isn't one. This was a monster at loose,
Speaker 4: for sure, but the people in the system, and today
Speaker 4: it's become so hip to put down the system. Every
Speaker 4: cop on this case, every lawyer, every judge on this
Speaker 4: case twisted themselves in knots to provide justice to this man,
Speaker 4: to this monster. They went above and beyond, and it
Speaker 4: had nothing with race or politics or anything else. It
Speaker 4: had to do with fundamental decency. That's all. People just
Speaker 4: sick and tired of living in a society where it
Speaker 4: seems like decency has become a joke. And everybody here agreed,
Speaker 4: this is no joke. We're going to take this dead serious.
Speaker 4: And Parre not got to go to Pelican Bay, into
Speaker 4: total isolation where it drives the toughest of men so
Speaker 4: crazy that they wind up rolling their own feces into
Speaker 4: little balls and stacking it in the corner. And it's
Speaker 4: precisely where he belonged. It's only through the goodness and
Speaker 4: the decency of the people of California that he wasn't executed.
Speaker 4: So he was given that benefit. It's the only one
Speaker 4: he's earned, though, you know, just drawing his next breath,
Speaker 4: he's used up all his luxuries once he does that.
Speaker 6: Yes, absolutely, it's just an amazing and fitting end for him.
Speaker 6: You talk about the humiliation that he will have to
Speaker 6: undergo for the rest of his life in this prison,
Speaker 6: the fear that he must face, and again for all
Speaker 6: those death penalty advocates, you draw a great picture of
Speaker 6: what it would be like for the rest of this
Speaker 6: man's life sitting in this prison. Whether he realizes what
Speaker 6: he did is wrong or not. Psychopath is not going
Speaker 6: to have that realization. He's still underway righting and trying
Speaker 6: to appeal to as many people like you say as
Speaker 6: a website, So he's still thinks he's the victim here.
Speaker 6: But a very very incredible and fascinating story. Before I
Speaker 6: let you go, can you tell us it looks like
Speaker 6: I saw something about Investigation Discovery. I posted it on
Speaker 6: my website on Facebook about this story being involved Investigation Discovery.
Speaker 6: Is it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Well, thanks for asking, Dan. It's already shown several times
Speaker 4: on the Discovery ID channel and I understand it's done
Speaker 4: really well with the audiences. We got Natasha to come,
Speaker 4: even though her face is shadowed for the camera, and
Speaker 4: for the first time to actually make a public comment
Speaker 4: about this case that she's ever made since it began
Speaker 4: all those years ago, and she didn't come out of hiding.
Speaker 4: She remains. We didn't give away her real name or location,
Speaker 4: but she's there and she talks, and that's where she
Speaker 4: says to this day that he's the terminator and that's
Speaker 4: not hyperbole. I believe her he is the terminator with
Speaker 4: her if he can find out today where she is
Speaker 4: she'll be gone tomorrow.
Speaker 6: Yeah incredible, Yeah, amazing. For those that might want to
Speaker 6: find out more about your other work or do you
Speaker 6: have a website? Do you do Facebook? Tell us how
Speaker 6: people might find out more.
Speaker 4: Sure, please just feel free to google my name Anthony
Speaker 4: Flacco Flacco, That'll take you right to my website. Of
Speaker 4: course I'm on Facebook too and happy to talk to
Speaker 4: people who write my website. Has you know the email address?
Speaker 4: And I always answer emails as long as they're civil,
Speaker 4: and I'm happy to engage with people who like to
Speaker 4: write in.
Speaker 6: Well. I want to thank you very much, Anthony for
Speaker 6: finally making it to True Murder and talking about this
Speaker 6: classic now a true Trime classic, a checklist for murder.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. I want
Speaker 6: to thank you very much and hope to talk to
Speaker 6: you again in the future. Thank you, Dan, You have
Speaker 6: a great evening.
Speaker 4: All right, you too.
Speaker 6: Good night,