Owner of Killer Dogs to Go Free

Marjorie Knoller, convicted along with her husband of involuntary manslaughter in the dog-mauling death of a neighbor in San Francisco, will be paroled to a location in Southern California within a few days, officials said Wednesday.

The community where she will serve her parole will not be identified without her permission, said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections.

“We generally don’t talk about specifics, because people like her have both friends and enemies out there,” he said. “But I can say that a specific condition of her parole is that she is not to own a dog.”

Although Knoller, 48, will be paroled to Southern California, her husband, Robert Noel, 62, was paroled in September to Solano County, northeast of San Francisco.

“When there are two defendants in the same crime, we try to separate them on parole, even if they are husband and wife,” Heimerich said.

Both Knoller and Noel served about 16 months of their four-year sentences, which Heimerich said is typical for inmates who avoid trouble in prison and receive credit for time served in jail before sentencing.

The couple, both lawyers, were convicted in March 2002 of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Diane Whipple, 33, who lived in an apartment off the same hall. On Jan. 26, 2001, the couple’s two 100-pound Presa Canario dogs attacked and killed Whipple as she struggled to get inside her home.

In June 2002, San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren threw out an additional second-degree murder conviction against Knoller, citing insufficient evidence that she knew that the dogs would kill.

But Warren upheld the manslaughter convictions. The judge sentenced Noel to the maximum of four years in state prison, but he postponed the sentencing of Knoller for a month to hear further arguments.

In July 2002, after she refused to apologize to Whipple’s family and friends, Warren gave her a similar four-year sentence.

The judge said he handed down the stiffest penalty allowed by law because he believed that she had lied in court and to a grand jury about whether the dogs were vicious. Both animals were destroyed after the attack.

Warren also denied Knoller probation, citing her lack of remorse and his opinion that she “knowingly inserted into society two massive, dangerous, unpredictable dogs with the knowledge that sometime, someplace, someone was going to get hurt.”

Knoller testified at her trial that she had tried to save Whipple by yanking at the leash of one of the dogs and by sprawling on Whipple to protect her from the attack. Warren told Knoller, “I don’t believe you....

“I believe you are the most despised couple in this city,” the judge said to Knoller and Noel. “I don’t believe anybody likes you.”

Testimony indicated that the couple raised the dogs at the request of their adopted son, Paul “Cornfed” Schneider, an inmate at Pelican Bay State Prison.

Knoller served all of her sentence at Valley State Prison for Women in the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla. Noel, because of his experience as a lawyer for both inmates and prison guards in California, served most of his sentence in Oregon. He was transferred to the High Desert State Prison in Susanville, Calif., just before his release.

Both Knoller and Noel are appealing their convictions.