A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  Tasha had steadily pushed her sluggish brain through a process of elimination until it worked its way up to the realization that her mother had to be there still, somewhere inside the house.

  But where was she now? Tasha floated away on the question.

  Black velvet hands reached down out of the black velvet sky. She could clearly feel one hand travel under her knees as the other reached across the back of her shoulders, behind her arms.

  “As a groom would carry a bride across a threshold” is the way that both the prosecution and the defense would later refer to it, while attorneys jousted through their intense legal combat inside the courtroom where the search for truth is symbolized by a blindfolded young woman.

  As a bride would be carried by a groom across the threshold, she felt herself lifted off the bed, carried out of the room, down the hallway. She was awake now and recognized the groom’s body. She could tell that it was her father, built solidly, familiar to her in every respect, in his touch, his smell.

  Not a word was spoken. Tasha was past asking questions that she knew would get no answers, or worse, that would get answers she had no more strength to hear.

  They had traveled only a few steps before she felt her father bend over and lay her on the floor. They hadn’t turned any more corners, so she knew that she was being placed in the family room. She recognized the feel of the carpet on the floor where she and her sister had once been boisterous girls playing in the house whether they were supposed to or not.

  After a brief pause she was again picked up by the same strong arms. She felt herself borne a few more paces, turned sideways to slip through a door, carried down a couple of steps. She recognized the sensation of being in the garage. The outside air was relatively cold, the way it gets deep in the night up in the high desert, even in the middle of summer.

  After a few more paces she was placed in a car and left there. The door was closed and everything became silent for a moment. She was almost in a sitting position, slumped to the right against the passenger-side door, her bound feet in front of her. She pushed her feet outward slightly, felt the back of the front seat, and realized she was in the back of her father’s Cadillac. Her cuffed hands could reach down and stroke the smooth leather seats; it was the only car in the family with leather seats.

  The Cadillac was roomy, even in the back. A backseat with room for three full-sized adults to ride America’s roads in luxurious comfort, if they are sitting up. It even had room for two adults to slump sideways, hooded, bound hand and foot, and packed in so well that the tops of their heads wouldn’t be visible to passing police cars. Or to curious pedestrians out for an early morning stroll. Or to the odd possibility of flirtatious single women idling in the next lane at a stoplight somewhere and making eyes at the driver, a soon-to-be-single married man deeply involved in the process of simplifying his life.

  Tasha could hear deep, regular breathing coming from someone lying on the backseat next to her. With her hands still cuffed in front of her, she was just able to reach over and nudge the person. There was no response. But once her fingers brushed the hair, the skin, she recognized the touch of the woman she had spent her life with. And then the sound of the deep, regular breathing registered clearly in her mind. As a little girl growing up, she had listened to her mother breathing during a hundred naps, had roused her mother on countless wake-up-Mommy mornings. The sound of breathing that had serenaded her even before she entered this world needed no explanation.

  The driver’s door opened and someone got in. Tasha never doubted it was her father. She had heard no other voices, sensed no other presence in the house, when her father carried her to the car. But much later, when the Confusers would come, she would be forced to admit that she hadn’t been able to see the driver. She hadn’t heard the driver’s voice. She had never spoken with the driver of her father’s car.

  She didn’t even make an attempt to speak with him, to ask questions. Her senses told her once again that her best chance for survival lay in passivity. Her father hadn’t been in a mood, all night long, to tolerate even the smallest resistance. So Tasha played possum and lay still in the darkness of the backseat, inside the blackness of the hooded face mask.

  Now she felt the car begin to move as the driver she was sure was her father, but could never afterward prove to have been her father, drove the two family women away. They left behind once and for all this attractive house in this comfortable, upscale neighborhood that none of them would ever live in again. He rode alone up front like a chauffeur.

  She guessed that they traveled for fifteen or twenty minutes, but by now she had endured hours of isolation, blinded and bound, terrorized and drugged. Her senses were straggling to make sense of the scrambled information coming to them, so that she couldn’t be certain if the car was stopping from time to time at intersections or if it had moved onto the highway. As they rode she kept listening for the sound of her mother’s breathing, hoping to hear some indication that Claire was waking up. But the breathing remained even and very deep. Even as Tasha fought the sleepy numbness and the sheer fatigue of a night of pain and fear, it was clear that her mother was not going to be able to help either of them.

  Sometime later, just before Tasha was pulled entirely away from awareness by the hum of the tires on the road, she felt the car come to a stop. And still nothing was said from the driver’s seat. She heard the driver’s door open and immediately noticed the nearby sound of big trucks going by, moving very fast. She realized they must be near the highway. For a while she and Claire were left alone in the backseat while the driver whom she would never prove conclusively to be her father tended to other business. She heard and felt the trunk of her father’s car being opened. There was a pause. Soon after, a metallic clanking sound began from the rear area of the car.

  How strange it was, in the cold predawn air, to hear this purposeful, busy activity behind the car and to lie helpless beside her unconscious mother and feel these vibrations coming from the rear area, to hear some odd business taking place down near the gas tank and back near the Cadillac’s rear towing hitch. It was the strong kind of towing hitch, easily capable of pulling a car such as Robert Peernock’s much smaller Datsun F-10.

  Tasha heard the rear passenger door open. She felt Claire being lifted out and heard her being quickly placed back inside the car, this time in the driver’s seat. In moments she felt herself lifted up and carried to the front passenger seat. Then the tinkering sounds under the car resumed.

  Tasha’s thoughts raced. Desperation overtook her. Could this be a last chance to try for an escape? But she knew she couldn’t run, couldn’t walk. She had no way of knowing if anyone would hear a scream for help. There would be no time for a second one. If she made any attempt it had to be fast and it had to be final. She struggled to her left and felt the steering wheel. Her fingers traced down the steering shaft. Her fingertips brushed the key, a single key still in the ignition, taunting her with the possibility of freedom like smells of spring wafting through the bars of a prison cell.

  A train passed by. Like the nearby traffic, the train sounded close, but not right next to the car. Wherever the Cadillac was parked, there was enough distance involved that the people in the trucks and the people on the train were most likely speeding by without ever knowing that two women lay trapped in that big black car over there at the side of the road, in desperate need of someone to call the police. If a phone call was made quickly enough there still might be a few minutes, a couple of final moments, if somebody noticed and became concerned and decided to risk getting involved.

  But it is at this point, just as she was about to make her move, that her memory of the crimes ends. The memory gap is as sharp, as final, as the last foot of film rolling off the spool with no more images to display, flapping around on the gears of the projector. Even though the human brain records every sensation relayed to it by every nerve ending in the body, access to memory is sometimes mercifully denied.

 
Teams of experts later offered bits and pieces of crime-scene facts and expert opinion as to the events of the night, the speeding crash, the fire in the trunk, and the burning rope wick.

  Using forensic medicine’s reconstruction of the methods by which invisible killers do their hidden work, investigators can take a physician’s detailed descriptions of wounds and reveal the manner in which those wounds were inflicted. Logic and science shine unrelenting lights, sweeping across endless midnight countryside. And with the power of these illuminations, the force of simple logic can then direct its own beam of light down gloomy valleys, flashing into hillside caves and offering glimpses of the games played by monsters in the dark.

  The attacker seized her and set upon her like a wild animal. The tire iron slammed into her face. That first blow could have easily torn away the canvas face mask, revealing Tasha’s attacker to her as he hovered and raised the steel bar to strike again.

  Natasha knows that she was struck with the tire iron first, because she had no sense of her mother being attacked once they left the house. She knows that she was still wearing the tightly laced hood and the handcuffs when the attack began, because she cannot remember them being removed while she was still conscious. And although her injuries looked essentially like her mother’s when the authorities found them later that morning, there is one crucial fact that explains the thin margin of difference between her injuries and her mother’s fatal wounds. This difference was just enough to grant Tasha the barest shot at survival.

  Her mother’s head injuries were inflicted, the coroner and his investigator said, with the edge of a metal bar wielded by someone standing directly over her as she lay on her back. Someone struck her, standing in a face-to-face position, swinging from the upper right to the lower left, using full arm blows. Claire’s injuries were all concentrated in one small area of her head, because she was already out cold as her attack began. She endured it in an utterly helpless state.

  Natasha was almost, but not quite, as helpless. Her wounds later showed that she was also struck while lying more or less on her back, by a face-to-face attacker swinging the metal bar with full-strength blows. But since Tasha was initially conscious as her attack began, she was able to do one thing that her mother could not. And the slightly different pattern of her injuries offered proof of it.

  She could thrash her head from side to side, in the only defensive motion left to her. This way her injuries were dispersed over a wider area of her head. The puncturing and crushing effect on the bones of the skull was narrowly avoided. Although Natasha cannot remember, may never remember those first blows raining down on her in complete surprise as she lay blind to her attacker, the wide pattern of marks indicates that some part of her was conscious and functioning. Some part of her was able to continue trying to roll and thrash her head away from the blows she could not even see coming.

  Police investigators know that her feet flailed helplessly against the bottom of the dash, pulling against the rope that bound them, because there were no defensive wounds on her legs. She was never able to use them to shield any part of herself from the tire iron. Likewise investigators surmised that her cuffed hands were probably held out of the way by her attacker because her arms also lacked any defensive wounds.

  One of the first impacts tore away the flesh around her left eye, the assailant striking with the downward motion in a typical right-handed fashion. This would shut down her vision on that side, of course, as the bones of the eye cavity and the upper sinus shattered and fragmented. Shock would slow her perception of time into near-frozen motion at that point. Sounds would probably go dead. Yet the reason the investigators know that she could still move is that, incredible as it sounds, Tasha still did not give in. She began the long, slow process of turning her head again, shielding her shattered bones and her torn flesh from having to take another strike over wounds already made. Her feet were still bound and flailing in the passenger footwell, her cuffed hands still held out of the way by her attacker, but the last muscle control left to her was directed full out on the motion of tilting her head far enough, soon enough, to take the next impact on an uninjured part of her. And so as the bar struck at the top of her forehead, it ripped away flesh but it landed on bone that was still sound enough to hold up and to protect the brain from rupture.

  Even as the last of her consciousness left her, Tasha still refused to give in. Perhaps she even found command of her voice for one flickering instant, forcing a short scream of protest through her throat. Why else would a blow land squarely across her lips? It shattered those perfect teeth that had flashed through so many smiling pictures over her eighteen years.

  A pretty girl’s face is no match for steel. The last blows were directed against a head that could no longer try to swing out of the way. The last blows took possession of her in the darkness and they chewed her without mercy.

  Later, both women must have seemed dead to their attacker while the car was readied for its solo drive toward the dead-end wall. But Tasha retained the thinnest little lifeline to the world as their bodies and the interior of the car were doused with gasoline, as the gasoline-soaked wick was lit under the car near the bottom of the gas tank, as the small fire was started in the trunk, as the accelerator linkage was pulled tightly toward the Cadillac’s front fire wall so that the gas pedal stuck flat to the floor while the car was dropped into gear.

  When the mother and daughter began their brief, highspeed journey, all indications are that Claire was already gone, even as the Cadillac’s wheels began to roll for the last time.

  The prosecution would eventually offer two possible theories of the way the car left the road and avoided the dead-end wall. One is that the crown of the road, designed to promote rain runoff, was angled just enough to slowly tilt the car to the right as it traveled, gaining speed. The slope slowly ran the car off the side of the road and into the telephone pole before it could reach the dead-end wall at the much faster impact speed that was intended.

  The second theory is that the long leather strip found later across Claire’s face had been used to tie her upright to the steering wheel, mimicking a driving position. And so even in death, Claire made one final move to protect her daughter. As the car gathered speed, she slumped to the right, which turned the wheel and sent the car off the road. This second theory explains why Claire never hit the steering wheel or the windshield. It explains why she was found on the floor, jammed up under the dashboard. Since she had already slumped over onto the seat when the car hit, she flew under the steering wheel entirely.

  If this second theory is true, then it was Claire who took the car off the road in time to avoid the explosion that would have resulted at higher speed as the tank-puncturing sharp steel bar, with its point only half an inch from the thin metal of the gas tank, punctured it upon impact and spewed gasoline to be ignited by the rope wick. Even in death Claire offered this fragile safety net to her brutalized young daughter. If this theory is accurate, and there is no evidence to show that it is not, then it was truly Claire Peernock who saved her daughter’s life.

  But Natasha had a few challenges left to overcome before she could hope to leave behind her ordeal of captivity and brutality.

  It would not be nearly enough simply to survive the highspeed crash designed to explode the gas tank and turn the Cadillac into a roaring inferno, simultaneously a murder weapon and funeral pyre.

  Hardest of all, she would have to fight to have her story believed, while she herself struggled to regain her emotional and psychological balance after suffering the ultimate betrayals at her father’s hands.

  This is why her battle did not end out on a lonely road that night.

  That’s only where it began.

  The rabbit comes out of the hole,

  runs around the tree …

  and jumps back into the hole.

  —Boy Scout method for remembering

  how to tie a knot that only grows

  tighter under stress

&
nbsp; CHAPTER

  6

  Claire Laurence married Robert Peernock on April 16, 1967, when she was a newly arrived French-Canadian from Quebec. Soon after, as a twenty-four-year-old bride living in Hollywood, California, Claire Peernock described her life to friends as being full, with a promise of future happiness.

  A former family friend who was a guest at the pool party where Claire and Robert first met describes Claire as having been immediately swept off her feet by Robert. The sparks between them were apparent to onlookers. Nobody expressed any surprise when Claire and Robert soon became constant companions and later husband and wife.

  Claire confided to friends that Robert fawned over her with a level of attention far more intense than anything she had ever known. She was completely captivated by the relentless sweetness in his treatment of her, by the pleasure he took in being with her. She would do anything he wanted. This pleased him more.

  Their first child was born a little more than two years later, in June of 1969. They agreed to name the girl Natasha. Both parents doted on their baby girl, but Robert immediately made her his princess, fawning over her at every opportunity. With video cameras not yet on the market, Claire filled photo albums with snapshots of Robert cuddling Natasha, playing all kinds of games with her. Whenever Robert had the chance, he applied his hobby of making home tape recordings to the pursuit of capturing every sound his daughter made.

  Natasha’s early childhood photos show a beautiful flaxen-haired child with a glowing, confident smile and bright, intelligent eyes. She was unquestionably Daddy’s little girl.

  For the first ten years of the marriage, Robert moved up the corporate ladder as a technician with expertise in computers and a gift for complex problems in circuitry. He eventually rose to the rank of vice-president at Network Electronics Corporation, where his specialty was in testing explosive devices for their subsidiary, the Ordnance Technology Group. Robert’s technical skills were above reproach. He had a firm grasp of the complex problems in explosive circuitry and his ability to guide currents through countless connections was a gift, cited in numerous job reports.