Man Found Guilty of Murdering Wife in Staged Car Crash

A Tarzana man was convicted Friday of murdering his wife and attempting to murder his teen-age daughter by staging an elaborate car crash in Sun Valley.

Robert Peernock, 54, faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison because jurors, after deliberating little more than one day, also found that he committed the crimes for financial gain.

Peernock and his wife, Claire, 45, were within weeks of divorcing when she was discovered in a crashed car on July 22, 1987, according to testimony in the eight-week San Fernando Superior Court trial.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Craig R. Richman argued that Peernock staged a “night of terror” against his wife and daughter to gain control of community property and life insurance benefits totaling $1.5 million. Peernock would have realized less than $300,000 in the divorce, the prosecutor said.

Key to the prosecution’s case was the testimony of Peernock’s daughter, 22-year-old Natasha Peernock Sims, who said that about 12 hours before she and her mother were discovered in the crashed car, her father choked her, handcuffed and hogtied her and force-fed her alcohol.

Sims said that the last thing she remembered was being placed in the car alongside another person who was breathing slightly but whom she could not identify.

An autopsy determined that Claire Peernock died of head wounds that investigators said were inconsistent with crash injuries.

The car, a white Cadillac, was found by a passerby about 4:30 a.m., crashed into a telephone pole in a desolate industrial area. Police said the car was doused with gasoline and rigged to explode.

Peernock, who underwent several years of psychiatric evaluation after his arrest, repeatedly interrupted the court proceedings to proclaim his innocence.

He asserted that he was the victim of a conspiracy involving his daughter, his deceased wife’s attorney, prosecutor Richman and police investigators.

Peernock also accused his attorney, Donald J. Green, of “being in on the plot to rig this conviction so they can get my wife’s and my money.”

Judge Howard J. Schwab rejected Peernock’s repeated requests to fire Green and to represent himself, noting that Peernock already had fired or driven away seven lawyers.

Because of Peernock’s outbursts, the judge ordered him removed from the courtroom for most of the last four weeks of the trial.

However, he was allowed to testify in his own defense. Peernock seized the opportunity to accuse a long list of parties of conspiring to hire an ex-felon to murder his wife and daughter and make it look like Peernock did it.

In his final argument, Richman called Peernock “crazy like a fox,” suggesting that he was feigning paranoia so that he could deny the “overwhelming evidence against him.”

Green, who indicated in an opening statement in July that he would attack Sims’ credibility, never got the chance.

At a hearing outside the presence of jurors, police investigators said that from her hospital bed while recovering from the crash, Sims said that a friend, not her father, was with her in the crashed car. She also gave several other details about the crime scene that were inconsistent with her trial testimony.

But Schwab agreed with Richman that at the time, Sims was under the influence of drugs administered to aid her recovery from head wounds suffered in the crash.

He ordered Green not to mention in the presence of the jury any statement Sims made while hospitalized.

In his final argument, Green, who has refused to discuss the case with reporters, urged jurors to acquit Peernock because there were “too many holes” in the prosecution case. Green said that “even if you believe Natasha Sims, that doesn’t mean he tried to kill her” and murdered his wife.

That brought a sarcastic rebuttal from Richman, who asked whether “space aliens” could have completed the murder after Peernock beat both women unconscious.