The Importance of Seeming Human

At 3 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2001, Marjorie Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel, got out of bed so they’d be on time for their scheduled appearance on “Good Morning America.” They wanted to correct what they considered the “grotesque and negative” image they’d developed in the media since Jan. 26, when their large Presa Canario dogs, Bane and Hera, got away from Knoller in the hallway of their San Francisco apartment building and one of them mauled neighbor Diane Whipple to death.

In this TV interview, the importance of seeming human was never more evident. As Knoller and Noel would learn a year later, their icy performance in front of an estimated 4.7 million viewers would play a pivotal role in their fates.

The interview offered the couple an opportunity to show remorse, to extend heartfelt condolences to Whipple’s loved ones and to explain how emotionally wrecked they were by thoughts that their dog Bane had killed Whipple in the most savage way imaginable. It also offered them the chance to emotionally connect with the millions of American dog owners who might empathize with two people whose pet inexplicably became a killer.

Instead, Knoller and Noel, both attorneys, “got into their fight mode,” says Karen Fleming, a Sacramento jury consultant who would later help the couple select jurors. They smirked, denied, rolled their eyes, evaded and, by implication, accused Whipple of playing a role in her own mauling death. They came off as, at best, arrogant, unapologetic and seemingly unmoved by the tragedy. Perhaps the most damning exchange came when the increasingly incredulous interviewer, Elizabeth Vargas, asked Knoller, “Do you think you bear any responsibility at all for this attack?”

Knoller: “Responsibility? No, not at all.”

Vargas: “Why not?. . . You were unable to control them. Why aren’t you at all responsible?”

Knoller: “I wouldn’t say I was unable to control them.”

Vargas: “You couldn’t stop the dog from attacking Diane Whipple.”

Knoller: “I wouldn’t say that it was an attack, and I did everything humanly possible to avoid the incident. Ms. Whipple had ample opportunity to move into her apartment. . . . She was in her apartment. She could have just slammed the door shut. I would have.”

Knoller depicted Bane’s initial charge at Whipple as “showing interest,” not an aggressive act. When the 120-pound dog pinned the 110-pound Whipple against the wall and Knoller climbed on top of Whipple to protect her, she still insisted Bane was just “showing interest.” Knoller said it only became an attack after Whipple struck her in the eye during the incident, provoking Bane into a protective frenzy.

Noel, his downturned mustache creating an indelible scowl, insisted that Bane and Hera were not dangerous. Asked to explain reports from dozens of people about frightening encounters with the two dogs, Noel reacted with a scoff. Knoller, who seldom made eye contact with the camera, defiantly dismissed the reports as a “total fabrication” by people wanting “their 15 minutes of fame.”

Even when that videotape was played for jurors at their March trial, effectively assuring Knoller’s conviction on the harshest possible charge, it still seemed unclear to Knoller why she might better have stayed in bed on that unforgettable February morning.

The “Good Morning America” interview had created enough public distaste for the couple in the Bay Area that their trial was moved to Los Angeles. Here, prosecutors introduced the ABC videotape as evidence that helped undermine the couple’s credibility and crystallize their images as insincere, selfish and emotionally ignorant.

It worked. The jurors--10 of whom owned or once owned dogs, including one who said he was fond of pit bulls, Dobermans and Rottweilers--considered four weeks of testimony involving five charges against the two defendants. But despite being asked to untangle the case’s confusing and nuanced legal issues, they took only 11 hours to deliberate and convict the couple on all counts. Clearly, the jurors didn’t much like these people.

They convicted Knoller of not one, but two homicide counts: second-degree murder--”implied malice murder”--and involuntary manslaughter. They also convicted her of keeping a dangerous dog. Noel wasn’t even present during the attack, but was found guilty of the two lesser offenses. The couple will be sentenced June 7, and San Francisco County Superior Court Judge James Warren could send Knoller away for 15 years to life. Noel faces as many as four years.

As they take the public stage again, Knoller and Noel are preceded by an image as dour and unrepentant as any comic-book villain. The public regards them with the contempt it normally reserves for the likes of Osama bin Laden or the corporate hucksters at Enron. That passionate reaction seems to affirm the theory that, at least in this case, so-called “emotional intelligence” is no less important than being genetically blessed with a high IQ.

One of the theory’s leading proponents, Dr. Daniel Goleman, the Harvard-educated author of a 1995 bestseller on the subject, contends that being emotionally savvy is critical in human relationships. To acquire this “flair for living,” Goleman says individuals must first figure out what makes them tick, and then sharpen their feel for how their words, mannerisms and emotions will affect others. They have to tune in to how people respond to them, and, if necessary, adjust. People without these emotional and social skills--or people who are oblivious to their importance--come off as insensitive, arrogant and obnoxious.

Jurors, of course, are only human. Dog-mauling murder cases are rare; murder convictions even more rare. They are reserved for the worst of the worst.

By calling Knoller a second-degree murderer, the jury, in effect, ranked her with the Ohio man who was convicted of murder because he knocked his wife unconscious and sicced a pit bull on her.

The “Good Morning America” interview was not the first time Knoller and Noel seemed callous. They had been similarly defensive and accusatory toward Whipple five days earlier in a press conference. Two weeks after the ABC interview, they took their story to a grand jury with disastrous results. Although prosecutors had asked the panel only for involuntary manslaughter and mischievous dog indictments, the panel added the murder count against Knoller.

Even a hearing officer who had to decide whether Hera should be destroyed found the defendants’ testimony not credible and ordered the dog killed--even though Hera did not initiate the attack and the dog’s participation was not definitively proven. Several months later, a poll found 71% of Bay Area residents believed Knoller and Noel guilty. Letters to the editor in the local papers were merciless. One correspondent called them “rock-bottom pond scum.”

Many of the couple’s most provocative statements eventually found their way into the Los Angeles courtroom. The most damaging, jurors said after trial, was the ABC interview. They replayed the tape several times in the jury room.

“There was no kind of sympathy, no kind of apologies,” one juror observed. “It helped us a lot.” He added: “We didn’t go into this deciding we would hate these people.” Still, the videotape was the backdrop when Knoller testified. By then, she seemed to understand what people needed to hear. She told how Bane, her “gentle and loving” pet, turned into an unrecognizable monster when he spied Whipple. Bane charged, pulling Knoller off her feet and dragging her flat on her stomach as she clung to his leash. He leaped up in front of Whipple, putting his paws on either side of her against the wall. When the dog got down, Knoller pushed Whipple into her apartment, and Bane either jumped on or pushed the two women to the floor.

Knoller said she pulled the leash with all her strength. She repeatedly commanded the dog to stop, but Bane ignored her and began ripping away Whipple’s clothing and tearing into her body from the neck down to her feet. She said Whipple was mostly silent as Knoller screamed at Bane and pounded on him. She threw her body over Whipple, drenching herself from head to toe in the dying woman’s blood. Knoller said she fought to exhaustion, but nothing worked.

Sobbing hysterically and at one point screaming out her testimony, Knoller said: “Every time I think it would be over and I could get him away from her and get him the hell out of there, it would get worse and it would start all over, and it just got worse and worse and worse and worse. . . . Anything I was trying to do, he just wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t listen. He just wouldn’t respond. He just wouldn’t stop what he was doing.”

Knoller’s courtroom story, now carefully guided by her lawyer, was shorn of defiance and implications that Whipple’s actions had somehow aggravated the attack. She offered tearful condolences to the family and told how sorry she was about the horrible way Whipple died. But her words came too late. For the jury, there was no way to reconcile this emotional, remorseful woman with the cold, defiant and defensive woman they saw on the tape. Which was the real Marjorie Knoller?

On verdict day, Knoller sat at the defense table wearing what appeared to be the same light-blue coat she wore on ABC. She closed her eyes, furrowed her brow and clinched her mouth as the clerk read the verdict: “We the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Marjorie Knoller, guilty of the crime of second-degree murder.” Knoller opened her eyes as if in utter disbelief. She gasped for breath and began to cry. Her mouth became a grimace. Moments later, Knoller scanned the audience to find her parents. She mouthed a single word.

“Help.”