Dog’s Owner Says Victim Failed to Save Self

Standing in a soft, cold rain with the low-slung walls of Pelican Bay State Prison behind him, attorney Robert Noel seemed prepared for what he now considers the inevitable.

He and his wife, he said, fully expect to be arrested for the mauling death of their neighbor, a San Francisco lacrosse coach who was killed by the couple’s “lovable mutt.”

Noel, 59, had come to the front gates of the remote prison--home to the dog’s original owner, a violent white supremacist whom Noel and his wife adopted just last week--to mount a defense for his family and his pets.

“All she had to do was close her door,” Noel said, insisting that 33-year-old Diane Whipple played a part in her own death Jan. 26 in the hallway of the apartment building they shared in San Francisco.

Noel had come back to this prison town Friday the same way he had left it a few years ago, swirling in controversy and putting forth an explanation of events that most everybody found bewildering.

It was here in 1997 that his career took a strange turn that endeared him to members of the Aryan Brotherhood and ultimately led to the mauling death. That turn began during a lengthy criminal trial when Noel wove an extravagant conspiracy theory to defend guards and their white supremacist cohorts accused of brutality. In one court filing after another, Noel unsuccessfully argued that the local district attorney, FBI agents and state corrections investigators framed the guards and directed inmate murders.

His contentions seemed quite a departure for the former tax attorney and federal prosecutor who once won a U.S. Justice Department award for his vigilant pursuit of lawbreakers. “I suggest to you the possibility that the [district attorney] and his team of associates from the Department of Corrections have complicity in the deaths,” Noel wrote to a federal prosecutor in one of several letters alleging a widespread conspiracy.

It was also here, inside one of the nation’s most restrictive prisons, that Noel and his 45-year-old wife, Marjorie Knoller, met one of California’s most notorious and deadly inmates, an Aryan Brotherhood enforcer who would become their adopted son and alter the course of their lives.

As a favor to inmate Paul “Cornfed” Schneider, Noel and Knoller agreed to take in his fierce, powerfully built dogs, including the Presa Canario-English mastiff mix named Bane that attacked and killed Whipple at the doorstep of her Pacific Heights apartment.

Now Noel and Knoller face possible manslaughter charges, if it can be shown that they knew of and ignored Bane’s impulse to violence.

On Friday, Noel said his recent troubles can be traced to San Francisco Dist. Atty. Terence Hallinan, whom he accused of being out to get him. He not only blasted Hallinan, but the prosecutor’s father and brother as well.

The broadside, which Hallinan described as ludicrous, surprised no one here. It all has a familiar ring, said Del Norte County prosecutor Jim Fallman, part of the dissonant world view of Noel and Knoller.

“They’ve put together some pretty wacky conspiracy theories, and I’ve been at the center of a few of them,” Fallman said. “Their approach to defending their clients is basically throw everything out there, anything in the world, and just hope that something sticks.”

Chet Miller, a former corrections investigator at Pelican Bay who was sued by Noel and Knoller in a 1998 racketeering case that was dismissed, agreed. “They’re fascinated by conspiracy theories, and they see them everywhere,” he said.

How did two everyday, if not always quiet, financial attorneys fall into a hard-to-fathom world where they took up the banner of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., rogue guards and members of the Aryan Brotherhood? How did the lines become so blurred between attorney and client that they felt compelled to adopt the 38-year-old Schneider, a lifer with a bright mind and an artist’s pen who once stabbed a guard and an attorney?

Whipple’s death is the kind of urban nightmare that taps into many people’s fears. But as details of the attack and Noel and Knoller’s lives have trickled out over the last week, the case has become stranger still.

Perhaps the biggest mystery is how two attorneys twice honored by the San Francisco Bar Assn. for their advocacy for the homeless, could end up adopting Schneider and caring for two animals that investigators say were part of the inmate’s plan to breed “dogs of war.”

An expert in weapons manufacture and concealment, Schneider stands 6 foot 2, with a muscular body marked by bold tattoos, including the letters “AB” on his left hand and “White Supremacist” scrawled in German around his navel, according to James Aiello, his court-appointed private investigator.

A decade ago, Schneider stabbed Sacramento attorney Philip Cozens--whom he had lured to his courthouse jail cell with a polite note--because he didn’t like the way Cozens was defending a fellow gang member.

Schneider had manufactured his own knife from a prison soup tureen and gotten it past the X-ray machines and metal detectors of the courthouse by encasing it in putty and plastic and secreting it in his rectal cavity. He stabbed Cozens four times.

During his later trial, in the name of public safety, the state built a special courtroom at Folsom State Prison and stuck a huge bolt in the ground to chain him to, Aiello said. But the trial never took place because Schneider, in exchange for pizza and several six-packs of Coke, pleaded guilty.

Noel described his newest relative Friday as an orphan locked up for more than a decade in a concrete box. “Mr. Schneider’s mother died several years ago. His birth father has not been seen in 30 years. His only significant family is a sister who is terminally ill.

“Given the fact that Ms. Knoller and I had no children and that we thought that he was a worthwhile person, we adopted him.”

Before he and his wife began defending inmates and guards, Knoller handled complex financial and regulatory work and Noel cut his teeth as a tax and bank failure attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. During his decade of government work, the department presented him with the Director’s Award.

In the mid-1990s, he and Knoller got on the list of attorneys representing members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. It was a time of much turmoil at Pelican Bay, which sits at the edge of an old logging and fishing town along the California-Oregon border. A federal judge in San Francisco had declared the high-tech prison an instrument of wholesale brutality.

Testimony in a 1995 class action lawsuit showed that guards were not only brutalizing inmates in the Security Housing Unit but also that the violence had spilled into the general prison population.

Guards had shot and killed prisoners engaged in routine fistfights. Inmates who defied prison rules were thrown naked into outdoor cages and left in the freezing rain. The judge found that the brutality was sanctioned by higher-ups in the Corrections Department and that the prison’s internal investigative staff was helping cover up the incidents.

As part of the prison’s reform, a new team of internal investigators was brought in to stop the abuse of inmates and root out problem guards. It was this team that ran into the legal buzz saw of Noel and Knoller.

In the summer of 1995, the team began investigating a large number of fights and stabbings in the main yard, which was under the command of a clique of officers that included David Lewis and Jose Garcia.

According to corrections investigative reports and court exhibits, Lewis and Garcia were sneaking into confidential prison files and retrieving paperwork that identified inmates as child molesters. They passed the secret files to white supremacist gang members, demanding that the molesters be attacked.

Garcia and Lewis allegedly rewarded their inmate cohorts with extra time outside their cells, fast-food burritos, Jack Daniels whiskey and silk underwear for their conjugal visits. Garcia and Lewis, who were defended at various times by Noel and Knoller, were eventually found guilty and sentenced to prison. A third officer was also indicted and faces a federal trial later this year.

Noel and Knoller argued that their clients were innocent victims of a plot to frame them by various local, state and federal authorities.

Garcia had been friendly with Schneider and other leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood, and Noel and Knoller began taking up the cause of gang members. In 1998, an internal war had splintered the ranks of the Aryan Brotherhood, and Noel accused local and state officials of ordering hits on the gang members who had testified on behalf of Garcia.

“I was sued, Fallman was sued, everyone was sued by them,” said county investigator Richard Barton. “They accused me of personally pointing the finger and ordering the murder of an Aryan Brother named Boyd.

“That’s the thing about Noel. He can be so pleasant and engaging in person, and the next minute I was getting one of his long faxes accusing me of staging a hit.”

Fallman said Noel misread the jury in the Garcia case. It was made up of blue-collar workers, loggers and fisherman who didn’t know what to make of Noel. He and Knoller dressed to the nines, drank Perrier, carried fancy briefcases and wore scarves, Fallman recalled.

“They looked like they drove to court in their Bentley, and I started carrying my case papers in cardboard boxes to counter their image to the jury,” he said. “If you’re trying to ingratiate yourself to a jury in Del Norte County, you don’t sip Perrier.”

Asked Friday if he had ever won a case on behalf of guards or inmates, Noel sidestepped the question.

As for the mauling of Whipple, he said the dogs involved were not bred to fight, and he denied reports that Schneider was running an illegal dog operation from behind prison walls.

He insisted that Bane, whose care he took over as a favor to Schneider, never hurt a soul before Jan. 26. His wife, who was walking the dogs, was as much a victim in the attack as Whipple, he said, adding that his heart went out to the woman’s family for this “incredible tragedy.”

“Bane had never shown any signs of people aggression,” he said.

Noel and San Francisco police differ dramatically about what happened on the sixth floor of the apartment building. Authorities say Whipple was coming home from work when Bane and Hera bounded toward her, dragging Knoller in tow. Bane, police say, lunged at Whipple and tore open her throat. Hera bit at Whipple’s clothing. Knoller tried to intercede to no avail.

Noel insists that Whipple was standing in front of her open apartment door, watching Knoller struggle with the dogs. Instead of retreating inside, he said, Whipple came back out.

“I do not think that a reasonable person, under those circumstances, would crawl back into the hall to face the dog,” he said.

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Times staff writers Kurt Streeter, John M. Glionna and Jennifer Dorroh and researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story.