A Dangerous Mind: Robert Peernock

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm Jill and I'm Dick.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
In the early morning hours of July twenty second, nineteen
eighty seven, a motorist came across a black Cadillac that
had crashed into a telephone pole on a secluded road
in Santa Clarita, California. So when police were called to
the scene, they found two unresponsive young women inside the car.

(00:54):
The driver, who was later identified as forty five year
old Claire Peirnack, had severe head trauma and was pronounced
dead at the scene. Claire's eighteen year old daughter, Natasha,
who was in the passenger seat, also suffered severe head trauma,
but she miraculously was still alive. Join us for a

(01:14):
Dangerous Mind, Robert Piernock. From the outside looking in, the
Peernock family's life seemed okay, but during their investigation into
what they strongly suspected was a staged crash, detectives learned
the truth about Claire and Robert's marriage. When Clara filed
for a divorce that was still pending, she sought custody

(01:36):
of Natasha and her younger sister. Claire had also asked
the court for an order of protection from Robert, citing
multiple instances of threats and abuse. So Claire had known
that Robert could be a dangerous man, but not even
she could have predicted his twisted plot to eliminate the
people that he was supposed to actually love and protect

(02:00):
family members, right.

Speaker 4 (02:01):
Right, You think they'd be okay, you would.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Think, But no, not with this guy.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
No, this is a piece of work.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
This is a sick dude. Yeah, so throw me a beer.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Let's go, got you a beer. We're gonna drinks a
little blind pig today.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Nice.

Speaker 4 (02:16):
It's an American IPA six and a half percent alcohol
brewed by Russian River Brewing Company, one of my favorite
brewers from California. This beer is gold color, one inch
white head, very pretty lacing aroma of citrus and pine,
a really nice nose, smells great, has a great fruit
and orange taste, a little bit of pine that comes

(02:38):
in later and lingers on your palate. It's crisp and juicy,
these guys.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Can brew beer crisp and juicy.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yep, sounds good, So why don't we open beer, yay
and pors.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
Okay, it just happened to have a few of.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
These nice because I'm thirsty.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
Yeah. Well, it's one hundred degrees outside.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, yeah, all right, come on down here to the
quiet end and let me tell you a little story.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
Tell me a story.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
It was just after five pm on July twenty first,
when Natasha Piernak's best friend Patty pulled her car up
in front of Natasha's house and parked with the engine running,
so her father's car was out front, and Patty offered
to go inside with Natasha. Natasha, who her friends called Tasha,
got out of the car and popped her head back

(03:40):
into the open window. She had chores to do, and
she would just stay out of her father's path, no worries.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
So there's some tension in this house. I mean she
wants to avoid her father.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yep, yep. The girls know.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
It doesn't sound like a particularly nice place to go
home to.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
No, I don't think she liked to go there. He
wasn't even actually living there though he hadn't been around
the house for a while, because although her parents weren't
officially divorced yet, he had a girlfriend and he was
just normally sleeping at her house, and Patty, being close
friends with Natasha, knew that Robert Peerknock was not a

(04:16):
nice man. He yelled at Tasha and had even hit
her before more than once. But Tasha assured her friend
that she'd be fine, and she waved and Patty drove off.
So the front door was locked, and that was unusual.
Tasha took a moment to find her key. The house
was usually unlocked when anyone was home, and now both

(04:37):
of her father's cars were in the driveway. Although Tasha
had been hoping to get her chores done before her
mother came home from work, it was surprising, and it
was disappointing too, that she wasn't going to be alone.
Her father, she knew, was somewhere inside the house, so
she walked inside and shut the door quietly behind her.
It had been a long time since she had come

(04:58):
home to find him there. For years now, if something
required him to be at the house, he always made
sure to be gone before her mother got home, and
that suited Tasha just fine, because she didn't want to
listen to the fighting, so she paused inside the door
and listened. The house was very quiet and it seemed empty.
But then Robert Pierknock opened the sliding glass door from

(05:22):
the back yard to come inside, and their eyes did
meet through the glass. Tasha ignored him and headed down
the hallway to her bedroom. She tried not to hurry,
afraid that if she rushed it might provoke him. A
few seconds later, she was in her room, feeling safer,
hoping for the sound of the front door closing and

(05:43):
for him to drive away in his car. So for
the past month or two, he'd be coming around much more,
almost every day, really picking up personal items, papers, and tools.
Whenever she did come home while he was there, he
would harass her too, about her friends, her schooling, her clothes,
or one of his favorite things was to harass her

(06:04):
about the utilities in the house. She was using too
much electricity.

Speaker 4 (06:09):
Oh, so you should turn the air condition.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
Of the something.

Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yeah, don't cook on the stove.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah. Well, Tasha stayed in her room killing time, just
kind of waiting for him to leave, you know.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
She changed into different shoes to mow the lawn, but still,
there was no sound of him leaving, so when she
ran out of boys to kill time, she decided to
just go out there and face up to it. And
she didn't see him when she walked back down the
hallway and into the kitchen, so decided maybe he was
busy somewhere else and she could just make herself something
quick to eat, because remember she was going to go

(06:45):
out with Patty and a couple of friends that night.

Speaker 4 (06:47):
Yeah, she's going to mow the one first before her
mom got home.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, she was going to do her chores. Now, she
hadn't started eating yet when Robert walked into the kitchen
from the family room. At first everything seemed normal enough.
He stood in the doorway and watched her. Tasha tried
to focus on making her food, trying to send the
message that there wasn't any point in talking to her,
but he just kept standing in the doorway. Then he

(07:12):
asked her about her mother. When was she due home?
Was she working late? Tasha just played dumb, but she
did worry that she was ignoring her father a little
too much and that might make him more angry. So
his voice did turn angry, and he began pacing back
and forth in the doorway, and now he was yelling
at her about the high electric bill. Of course it's

(07:35):
his favorite. So Natasha just couldn't resist talking back to him.
She is a teenager, after all, so she wasn't really
all that surprised when he moved toward her and grabbed
her with both hands around her throat.

Speaker 4 (07:47):
So you're telling me that this is kind of normal.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
Behavior for this family, I think at the beginning, yeah,
but then it just got to a point where it
was more than it had been before.

Speaker 4 (07:57):
Yeah, I mean this is a real physical oh.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, oh yeah, totally very physically abusive man. So she
couldn't breathe, and her hands were grabbing at his wrists
to try and get them off her throat, but he
pushed her backwards with his weight on her neck. She struggled,
but she didn't have the physical strength to defend herself.
Her feet were barely on the ground as she fell backward,
and Robert landed on top of her on the floor

(08:21):
of the family room. So up until then, Tasha hadn't
been that afraid, you know. Unfortunately, she'd dealt with a
lot of his violent outbursts in the past, and she'd
usually gotten through it without having to go to the hospital.
So the poor girl, that's her way of measuring.

Speaker 4 (08:38):
Yeah, and it's been for some time. Yes, it's not
like this started a month before.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
No No. Ever, since she had once gotten between her
parents during a big fight back when she was thirteen,
After ending up with a broken arm and three weeks
of traction, Tasha had learned how to deal with her
father's rage. At least, she thought so, you just had
to keep quiet and wait for your chance to escape.
But this time it did feel different. She held beck

(09:05):
her sobs, keeping still until Robert stopped and let her go.
He stayed on top of her, staring down into her face.
Tasha glared at him as he pulled his hands off
her throat. So Robert looked down at Tasha before he stood,
and he looked like he was making some kind of
a decision, which was scary. He said, I have something
that will make you feel better. Then he walked away,

(09:28):
leaving her sitting confused on the floor while he went
out the front door. So Tasha really had to fight
to keep her self control. She was feeling panicky. The
fear was really growing inside of her.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Now I can imagine this sounded like he was trying
to strangle her.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, well, he pretty much was right hands around the throat.
Yeah yeah, and he's probably gonna come back. So whatever
her father had to make her feel better, she knew
it would be something she didn't want. So she knew
this was a saying of his that meant something bad
was going to happen. So it was clear that she'd
made a mistake in staying in the house with him,

(10:04):
and she didn't want to repeat the mistake by waiting
around to see what he would do next. But she
couldn't go out the front door without running into him.
She could head for the back door, but the backyard
had a steep hill and a wire fence blocking an
open field, so both routes at the side of the
house would only lead from the back to the front,
and she'd end up where he was. So, of course,

(10:25):
if she could break the family taboo she lived with
all of her life about showing their troubles to the neighbors,
then she could have run screaming into the street and
hoped that some neighbor would help her before Robert could
hunt her down and hurt her even worse. Ye, well,
I just think it's sad that she didn't feel comfortable
doing that right. Yeah, After years of living in the area,

(10:48):
the male neighbors mostly avoided Robert Piernack, and the female
neighbors rarely even came to the house, especially if they
saw his car in the driveway. But she heard a
car door slam outside the front entrance, and before she
could hope that he might drive off, she felt his
footsteps vibrate on the floor behind her as he returned
to the family room, so everything happened quickly. Before she

(11:11):
could turn around, she felt him grab her wrists from behind,
and panic gave her some strength against his grip while
she fought, though she did everything she could to fight
off the much bigger man standing over her, pinning her
arms back. Within seconds, Tasha felt some steel bands snap
tightly around her wrists. She was able to twist around

(11:31):
just far enough to see that they were handcuffs, but
then she felt her head forced back and realized the
handcuffs weren't the only things he'd brought in the house.
Blue canvas moved in front of her eyes, and she
felt her father's hands on top of her head. There
was some rough fabric pulled over her face and his
hands were forcing it all the way down to her neck,

(11:53):
so everything went dark. And then she tried to throw
herself onto her side and kind of rub the hood
off her head by rubbing her face on the carpet. Yeah,
but her father pulled her up into a seated position
and she felt something like a noose digging into her throat.
So this is terrifying. It was so tight it was
burning the skin, and resistance was pretty much impossible. But

(12:17):
once she gave up her fight, the tightness around her
neck loosened just a little bit so she could breathe.
So now she's handcuffed, hooded and pinned to the floor.
Can you imagine the terror?

Speaker 4 (12:28):
No, it's a horrible feeling.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
I yeah, because she wasn't really that afraid of him
because she thought he was violent, but that he'd like
hit her or something and then stop. But now he
seems like he's really almost got a plan.

Speaker 4 (12:42):
So yeah, so you going to kill me?

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (12:45):
She said, yes, that's going to.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Be terrifying terror in me. Yeah, so she really thought
her life was going to end. The hood's mouth hole
wasn't much bigger than a dime, and then she felt
a plastic tube pressed against her lap as he pushed
it through the hood. Tasha then started to cry, but
as soon as her lips opened, the tube was shoved
down into her mouth, so she really had to concentrate

(13:09):
to fight back her gag reflex. Fearing that if she
vomited then she would espirate, she choked to death.

Speaker 4 (13:16):
Yeah, well put it up. Yeah, got a rope or
something around your throat. This isn't looking good for no.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
I mean, you could actually drown in your own vomit
in the hood. I mean, it's horrible to think of
you could. So she didn't know how it was being
held in place, but she couldn't spit the tube out,
and she wasn't able to form any words. Then she
tasted alcohol burning and pouring from the tube into her mouth.
The taste was harsh. She'd never had heard alcohol before.

(13:46):
She coughed and tried to spit it out and started gagging,
but he was completely remorseless, had no empathy, no sympathy.
Swallow it, Natasha, He said, this is the best way.
Just swallow it. So he pushed her down onto her
back and held the tube in place. The alcohol ran
down the tube and into her mouth, slowly enough for

(14:06):
her to swallow. Then, while he continued to force the
alcohol into her, he decided to go to the next
stage of his plan, and he dragged her to her feet,
forcing her to stagger blindly down the hallway. When he
turned her to the right, Tasha knew that they had
entered her mother's room, so her fingers could feel her
mother's bedspread, and her father then pumped a little more

(14:28):
alcohol down the tube, but this time it didn't last
very long. He leaned over and turned on the radio,
and an FM station was preset to play classical music.
Robert left it tuned to that station. He got up,
but he still didn't leave her. A moment later, Tasha
heard her mother's closet door open. Now this closet wasn't

(14:51):
only her mother's because even though Robert had pretty much
moved out years ago, he still had guns in that closet,
a shotgun and a revolver. She knew he also kept
ammunition in there.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Oh that's swell, yeah, and he didn't keep.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Her guessing about what it was that he had been
trying to find. She heard the clicking of a revolver,
so her father was then holding the barrel of the
gun at her head, and she sat quietly and offered
no resistance, hoping he would just go away, but he
pushed her onto her side, knocking the tube out of
her mouth. He pulled her feet up onto the mattress
and tied her feet together with rope. She couldn't see

(15:28):
the rope, but she could feel the bristles against the
skin on her ankles. A moment later, she felt her
father roll her over onto her stomach and yank her
feet behind her all the way up to her wrists.
Then he tied the rope that was binding her ankles
to the chain between the handcuffs. So I think they
call this hogtide tie.

Speaker 4 (15:48):
Yes, that's not very comfortable.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Well no, and.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
It's scary, Yes it is.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
So. As Tasha lie on the bed, her father gave
her pills now and more alcohol. Then Patty was at
the house, remember her friend who dropped her off, so
she was there to pick her up for their evening out.
And Patty must have gotten tired of waiting for her
to call, so she just decided to come over. And
Tasha heard her father back out of the bedroom and
close the door. So now even if Tasha screamed and

(16:17):
Patty ran for help, how long would that take? And
in the meantime, what would Robert do to her? So
she felt like she couldn't scream. Maybe Patty would just
figure out that something was wrong and she would call
somebody to help her. Tasha tried to remember if Patty

(16:55):
knew where her mother, Claire worked. A warning call to
her mother at work, bring a call to the neighbors,
or maybe even a call to the police. At least
that's what she was hoping, But Patty had called the
house many times and kept getting the answering machine. Then
she went to the house and she knocked on the
door for several minutes and didn't get an answer. Both

(17:17):
of mister Peerknock's cars were still parked there, just as
they had been when Patty dropped off Tasha that afternoon.
So it was getting dark now and she could see
light from the TV screen coming through the curtain on
the front window. Claire's car wasn't there, but Natasha was
pretty reliable, especially when it came to going out and
having fun together. If something had come up, she would

(17:40):
have called Patty went around to Tasha's bedroom window and
knocked on it in case her friend had fallen asleep. Hey, Tash,
are you in there? Patty was calling up at the window,
but Patty heard no answer. She didn't hear anything, and
there was something even stranger. She noticed that the curtains
were closed and the TV was on inside, and nobody

(18:02):
was answering the door, So it really did seem.

Speaker 4 (18:04):
Weird, definitely.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Patty went back to the front and mister Peirnock's Cadillac
was parked there the whole time, but it was usually
covered up and stored when it was there. Now it
was parked there like he'd driven it. His regular car,
the one he drove most of the time, was hardly
ever there at night, and this wasn't even his home anymore, really,
So at that point she noticed that the grass hadn't

(18:26):
been touched, even though Tasha had made it clear that
one of her chores was to cut the lawn before
she went out that night. So Patty did have a
bad feeling, but she was young. She had no idea
what to do, so she just gave.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
Up and left.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Everything went quiet inside the house after that, and it
took another fifteen or twenty minutes for Robert to come
back into the room after Patty left, but Natasha didn't
ask what had happened with the tube again wedged into
her mouth. He held her down on her back and
poured another few swallows of alcohol into her so Tasha
couldn't see, but she heard the dog sparking in the backyard,

(19:04):
and then she heard some loud thumps, So now she
knew that her mom had come home and her father
had attacked her. The next thing she knew, Robert picked
her up and carried her out to the garage and
put her in the cadillact. 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

(19:25):
side door, with her feet bound in front of her,
So she pushed her feet outward, slightly felt the back
of the front seat, and realized that she was in
the back seat of her father's Cadillac. Her cuffed hands
could reach down and feel the leather seat. The cadillac
was roomy, even in the back, and it even had
room for two adults to slump sideways, hooded and bound

(19:47):
hand and foot, and they could be packed in so
that the tops of their heads wouldn't be visible to
any passing police cars, so Tasha could hear breathing coming
from someone lying on the back seat next to her.
With her her hands still cuffed in front of her,
she was just able to reach over and touch the person,
but there was no response once her fingers brushed the hair.

(20:09):
Though she knew that this woman was her mother. I mean,
she'd spend her whole life with her.

Speaker 4 (20:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
So the driver's door opened and someone got in, and
of course Tasha knew this was her father, but much
later she would be forced to admit that she hadn't
been able to see the driver, and she hadn't heard
the driver's voice. Her senses told her that her best
chance for survival was to stay past it, so she
felt the car begin to move as the driver drove
the two women away. She guessed that they traveled for

(20:37):
fifteen or twenty minutes, but by then she'd endured hours
of isolation, plus she was kind of drunk and drugged.
But Tasha would remember hearing trucks passing by. Before the
car stopped and the rear passenger door opened, she felt
her mom being lifted out and heard her being quickly
placed back inside the car, this time in the driver's seat.

(21:00):
Moments later, she felt herself being lifted up and carried
to the front passenger seat. Then some tinkering mechanical sounds
were coming from underneath the car. They'd stopped and then
started again. So a train passed by. Like the nearby traffic,
it sounded close and wherever the Cadillact was parked there
was enough distance that the two people in the trucks

(21:22):
and the two people on the train were likely speeding
by without even knowing that two women were trapped in
the big black car at the side of the road
and that they were in desperate need of help. They
certainly didn't know that. So it's like you're there and
you know that people are nearby that could help you,
but there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yeah, a helpless feeling. But I'm sure that I'm sure
that picked the isolated enough spot.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Oh sure, this was meticulously planned, very planned out.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
Yeah, you're gonna tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
We'll go into that, because the car was really rigged.
So Tasha listened to the metallic sounds under the Cadillac,
and she still had a little physical control left despite
her cuffed hands, her bound ankles, and her blindness inside
that canvas hood, she reached out over her mother's unconscious body. Slowly,
she ran, trembling fingers down the steering column until at

(22:15):
last her fingertips brushed the ignition. When she stretched her
cuffed hands out toward the key, she realized the sounds
under the car had stopped, so she thought that maybe
she'd be able to run him over. That's why she
was reaching for the ignition, But by the time she
got her hands on it, it was too late.

Speaker 4 (22:33):
I imagine that would be rather difficult to run him
over with her hands handcuffed in front of her and
her feet bound.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Well, sure, but she's desperate, and.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
She's in a sack so she can't see. But yeah,
you're right, she's desperate. Try to think of anything that
she can to get her out of this predicament she's in.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
So sometime before at four am on July twenty second,
nineteen eighty seven, a motorist named John Doser pulled over
to the side of a dark road. He tried to
focus on a mass of twisted wreckage off the right
hand shoulder, and it seemed to be a single car rap,
and no one was moving at the scene, so he
looked closer. A wisp of smoke was rising from under

(23:13):
an old cadillact near the side of the road. The
rear of the car was still on the gravel shoulder,
but the front straddled the remains of a wooden telephone pole,
so it looked like the heavy seventy one Cadillac had
rammed the pole with such force that it had splintered
and collapsed the pole. The front of the car had
come to rest on top of the remains of the

(23:34):
pole as it lay on the ground. Dozer knew that
on an isolated strip of road like this one, it
could be hours before anyone else came by, so he
hurried over, opened the driver's door of the Cadillac and
found a petite young woman lying inside. There were no
signs of life, and he tried to pull her free,
but you know, she was jammed under the dashboard beneath

(23:56):
the steering wheel, so he couldn't get her out. Then
on the floor beside her, he noticed there was a
female passenger. He could hear her moaning. So on the
floor beside her, Dozer could hear a female passenger making noises.
The door on the passenger side was jammed in place,
and there was nothing he could do to free the
second victim either, But then he remembered that a thin

(24:19):
wisp of smoke rising from under the car. He realized
an explosion could happen at any second, so Dozer left
to find a phone and call for help. So it
was four twenty five am when paramedic Colyde peep Off
was sleeping during a twenty four hour shift at the
fire station in the North Hollywood area of Los Angeles.

(24:39):
He received a radio dispatch from the main dispatch center
in downtown LA. The operator directed him to proceed to
San Fernando Road in the town of Sun Valley, so
he called for his partner, Paramedic number two, Todd Carb,
as well as a trainee, and within moments the three
were rushing to the scene. So just about four minutes

(25:01):
had passed since their call came in, and Clyde saw
the first body before he and his crew had even
exited the ambulance. So there was a woman laying on
the floor under the steering wheel, with her back against
the driver's seat and her head slumped against the doorframe.
Her knees were jammed up under the dashboard, with her
right arm on the floor and her left arm protruding

(25:22):
from the open driver's side door onto the ground, so
visibility inside the car was a real problem. The dome
light was not on even though the driver's side door
was open, so in addition to evidence of massive blood loss,
the woman had brain matter exposed just above her eyes.
So after his first check of the woman hanging out

(25:43):
the doorway, he noticed the second body on the floor
of the passenger side, and the second passenger, also a female,
wasn't moving either. But Clyde noticed that the smell of
gas from the wreck was unusually strong. Looking around the
interior of the car, he saw puddles of gas on
the floorboard, and concerned that they could be dealing with
an active fuel leak, the paramedics rushed. In that first moment,

(26:07):
he had noticed that blood was also spattered across the
inside of the windshield and around the gear shift, but
there was strangely no damage to the windshield itself or
the steering column. In fact, except for all that blood,
the interior of the car did not appear damaged at all,
and he couldn't tell if the spattered blood was from
one or both of the women. But when Clyde noticed

(26:30):
a thin leather strap several feet long and knotted at
both ends, lying across his patient's face, he immediately began
moving carefully, trying to disturb the scene as little as possible.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
So that sound like a.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
No, I think it was more. I think it was
more of something to set up the car to start
on fire, which I'm going to go into details about
how that was set up. So while Clyde was busy
with his examination of the woman on the driver's side,
other details of the scene looked out of place. There
was a partially empty bottle of whiskey lying on the

(27:06):
driver's side floor, but the odor inside the car was
more like gas than alcohol. The driver's clothing was soaked,
but the odor on the clothing was gasoline, again not alcohol.
The driver's head injuries were so severe, her face so
bloodied that he couldn't even guess at her age. Clyde
couldn't imagine what she might have been hit with inside

(27:28):
the car that would tear her up so badly. It
didn't make sense, but with nothing else to go on,
he noted that the driver was small, and trim and
estimated her age to be around thirty while he went
ahead and checked her for vital signs. But at four
thirty five am, Clyde pronounced his patient dead at the scene,
and this was Claire on the passenger side. The other

(27:49):
paramedics called out to Clyde that the second victim had
signs of life. So as soon as they began to
check her, leaning in the window to determine her condition,
they can confirmed that there was a very strong odor
of gas inside that car. It was pulled on the
floor around the second victim, soaking her clothes too. So
John Doser had returned to the scene and stood in

(28:11):
the background watching, and at that moment he called out
a warning to the driver of a street sweeper from
a nearby gravel company who had pulled his rig over
to protect the scene from traffic. So Dozer directed the
driver to the source of smoke under the car. When
Clyde hurried around to help with removing the survivor, the
street sweeper's driver warned Clyde of the fire danger. Clyde

(28:35):
got on his knees and looked under the car. A
piece of rope that he would later describe as looking
like a wick hung from the undercarriage below the gas
tank area, so the rope had been partially burned and
the end of the rope still smoldered. The smoldering rope
made it urgent that they get the surviving young woman
out and away from the car. The deceased driver would

(28:56):
have to remain in the car for now, so Clyde
put out the call for additional help, then rushed back
to help his teammates remove the survivor. Given the severity
of her injuries, they moved her out as quickly as
they could, but like the woman on the driver's side,
the passenger had suffered massive head and face trauma. It
took extra seconds to handle her with care as they

(29:20):
got her strapped to a backboard, with their arms and
legs fixed in place, and a cervical collar stabilizing her neck.
Such precautions are standard under the circumstances, but you know,
careful handling of the surviving female became more urgent when
they found what appeared to be brain matter on her clothing.

(29:41):
The paramedics didn't know yet if the brain matter was hers,
so they rushed the surviving passenger away on the gurney
to begin first aid behind their ambulance, which had been
parked away from any gasoline from the wrecked car. So,
with an apparently severe skull fracture and the result possibility
of coma, the traumatic shock of moving.

Speaker 4 (30:03):
Her first, they don't get her out of the car
and the gasolin ig nights.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Well, yes, we know that, that's obvious. I don't need
to go to med school for that one.

Speaker 4 (30:12):
But with the head trauma and she's unconsciously, you just
don't have any idea how severe the trauma is. And
she could be fragile enough at moving her if she
had a spinal cord injury or brain injury. Just moving
her without being careful how your positioning her head and neck,
that could kill her.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yeah, and paralyze her I imagine.

Speaker 5 (30:36):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
So, while Clyde directed the treatment and the gentle questions,
he noticed an engine company arriving in response to his call.
So firefighters used a two and a half gallon water
gun to soak down the smoldering rope under the car.
Then they pulled a hip line over to spray off
the accumulated gas under the car, reducing the danger of

(31:20):
an explosion. So amid the flash of emergency light, the
typical noise of an accident scene was beginning to drone
on in the darkness. Idling engines rumbled under the crackles
of dispatch radios. So Todd and Paul, the paramedics, continued
with the surviving passenger, while Clyde asked the firefighters to

(31:41):
leave the deceased woman in place after the fire was
under control. So he knew that police investigators would not
want anything disturbed more than had already been necessary. So
if you have to disturb it to save someone, sure,
but anything beyond that, they don't want to touch it.

Speaker 4 (32:00):
It sounds kind of callous. But the driver already dead, yeah,
so basically isn't any hurry to get her out?

Speaker 3 (32:08):
No?

Speaker 2 (32:08):
No, I mean you have to make these decisions in
an emergency for sure.

Speaker 4 (32:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
So Natasha was a little bit conscious. She could see
forms moving and she could hear sounds, but the messages
coming in were getting lost somewhere and she couldn't communicate
them effectively. Arson investigators responded between five and five thirty
that morning. They saw a fire engine, a patrol car,
and an ambulance already there. Plus now there were a

(32:36):
handful of onlookers. The hood and trunk of the car
were open. The fire captain told them that when he
had arrived on the scene, he'd found both closed, but
that his men had had to open the hood to
check for sparking. The firefighters had also taken the trunk
key from the ignition to open the trunk and make

(32:56):
the same check there.

Speaker 4 (32:58):
Yeah, I certainly had to make or there was nobody
in the trunk. They have two injured people in the
front of the car. True, What if there's another body
in the back in the trunk?

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, injured or dead. You don't know either way. They
certainly have to check.

Speaker 4 (33:13):
They certainly do so.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
In those first moments, they learned that a surviving passenger
had been removed from the car and was being given
treatment in the ambulance, but that she was in no
condition to tell them anything. The heavy car really was
built like a tank now a seventy one Cadillac a Fortress,
so despite a collision severe enough to knock down a
telephone pole, most of the damage to the car was

(33:36):
in the area of the right front fender. Other than
having one front wheel collapse, the car was almost drivable
inside the passenger compartment. There was no observable damage to
the interior other than a small ding in an air
conditioning vent and a thin crack in the lower right
portion of the windshield. They saw the deceased woman on

(33:59):
the driver's floor of the car, and there was a
large amount of blood on the dashboard and on the floor,
So the paramedic and the fire inspector suspected that some
of the residue was brain matter. So, like the paramedics,
the fire investigators believed that the dead woman was in
bad shape for being in such a well preserved automobile.

(34:20):
It just didn't match up.

Speaker 4 (34:21):
No, I mean, the car was relatively intact, and injuries
that the deceased person had were way beyond which should.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
Have happened exactly.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
So when they opened the trunk, they saw a gas can,
some scraps of paper, some rags, and a wooden stick,
and strangely, it appeared they had all been burned recently.
The rags even were still warm to the touch, so
the site under the vehicle was consistent with a crime scene.
The rope wick near the gas tank was wrapped around

(34:53):
some type of metal bar. The bar had a sharpened
edge and was pointed toward the gas tank, with the
tip of the point about half an inch from the fuel.
The other end of the bar was secured to the
cars undercarriage by one single screw, so even though everything
under the car was quite dirty, the single screw holding
the pointed bar was shiny and clean, like a new screw.

(35:17):
The location of the partially burned rope added to suspicions
of attempted arson, but with a dead woman in the
front seat and a severely injured female pulled from the wreckage,
the scene left no doubt that this was arson and
that the purpose of the arsen was murder.

Speaker 4 (35:33):
Yeah, this turns out to be a fairly sophisticated not
a way to get the car to explode.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Yeah, Well, you know that Robert Piernock had a lot
of knowledge about that sort of thing.

Speaker 4 (35:44):
Yeah, he's an engineering.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Type, right, Yeah, yep, and he had worked in pyrotechnics before.
So somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to
turn this car into like a self destructing death trap.
And despite the strong persistent odor, there were no ruptures
in the gas tank, so it was possible to speculate
that if the big Cadillac had not been stopped by

(36:08):
the telephone pole, and if the car's huge V eight
engine had gone on building momentum until the car hit
the retaining wall at the road's dead end, the metal
bar could have rammed and punctured the gas tank. With
the rope, it was like a wick, still burning and
attached to the metal bar that was secured under the

(36:28):
fuel tank. There really could have been an explosion with
an extremely hot fire. So with the amount of gasoline
pulled inside the car's interior, County Corner would have to
identify the deceased just through dental records.

Speaker 4 (36:42):
Yeah, Like I said, it was a fairly sophisticated device
that the perpetrator had then, And certainly even if you
didn't have pure Knox knowledge of pyrotechnics and so on.
And he's already going to be a suspect.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Oh yeah, well he's got the motive right, Yeah, were Natasha.
She wasn't able to tell the first responders that the
other person in the car was her mother, Claire, But
when they checked the car for IDs, they found two
purses and one had a driver's license in the name
of Claire Peirnach, so it was after midnight on July
twenty third, more than twenty hours after the crash was discovered,

(37:20):
when Natasha's consciousness was slowly returning, so she was fighting
to open her swollen eyelids, but the puffy flesh around
her eyes barely let in any light. They had removed
her contact lenses, leaving a haze, so she could really
only see that she was lying in a hospital bed
and couldn't see any further. Later, while she fought back

(37:41):
the remnants of anesthesia, she became aware of a nurse
at her bedside, adjusting ivy drips and monitoring her vital signs.
When the nurse saw Natasha's eyes flutter open, she smiled
down at her. How does your head feel?

Speaker 3 (37:55):
Do you think you?

Speaker 2 (37:56):
Could answer a few questions while Natasha was still confused,
but she was able to say that her mother had
been in the car with her, and Tasha would later
describe her state of mind in the hospital. As she
came to there were distant images, sounds, and voices. Memories
of a revolver's chamber spinning next to her ear over

(38:17):
and over and over, crashing sounds of a violent struggle
coming from the other side of a bedroom wall, the
cold feel of steel handcuffs, the panic as straps tightened
around her throat and ropes being pulled tight around her ankles. Also,
along with all this, there was her father's voice assuring

(38:40):
her that she was going to be killed. So, how
awful is that?

Speaker 4 (38:45):
I don't you like to wake up to that?

Speaker 2 (38:47):
It's bad? So she began to fear where her father
was at that moment. If he was nearby, was he
trying to get into the hospital? Would she even know
him if he appeared in the room. Without her contact lenses,
she couldn't see as far as the doorframe, so she
wouldn't even know if the person coming in was wearing
a hospital uniform. Natasha had no idea how much longer

(39:10):
she might survive, but enough of her memory had returned
so that she knew there was somebody out there who
had a strong motivation to kill her before she could
remember all of the details, So she was really struggling
to remember as much as she could.

Speaker 4 (39:26):
So Natasha's going to remember what her father did to
her and how he had tried to kill her and
succeeded in killing her mother.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, but before we get to that, let's get a
little background on Claire and Robert. We really haven't given
a background on their lives before this, No, and I'd
very much like to know, yeah, particularly his Yeah. Well.
Claire married Robert in April of nineteen sixty seven, and
she was a French Canadian who had moved to the

(39:54):
US from Quebec as a twenty four year old new
bride living in Hollywood, California. Clare described her life to
friends as being full and she saw a bright future
filled with happiness. A former family friend who was a
guest at the pool party where Claire and Robert first met,
described Claire as having been swept off her feet by Robert,

(40:17):
so nobody was surprised when Claire and Robert became husband
and wife. Claire confided to friends that Robert gave her
a more intense level of attention than anything she had
ever known, so she was captivated by his treatment of
her and the pleasure he seemed to take in just
being with her. So it sounds a little bit like
love bombing, Yes it does. So. They had their first

(40:40):
child about two years after the wedding in June of
sixty nine, and they agreed to name her Natasha. Both
parents doted on her, but Robert really made her his
little princess. Claire filled photo albums with pictures of Robert
holding Natasha and playing games. She was unquestionably a day
daddy's little girl. So for the first ten years of

(41:02):
the marriage, Robert moved up the corporate ladder as a
technician with expertise in computers and with the talent for
fixing complex problems in circuitry. He also worked as a
pyrotechnics engineer, so he eventually rose to the rank of
vice president at Network Electronics Corporation, where his specialty was

(41:23):
in testing explosive devices. Robert's technical skills were exceptional, and
he did have a strong ability to guide currents through
countless connections, so he.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
Certainly the knowledge and the ability to make a device
like there was in the car.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Absolutely, yeah, it's really right up his alley.

Speaker 3 (41:43):
Don't you think this sounds like so?

Speaker 2 (41:46):
In the early years of their marriage, Claire admired his
ability to identify a problem at home or at work
and to focus on it relentlessly until a solution was found.
So that made her feel assured.

Speaker 4 (41:58):
Yeah, well, she's fairly newly married, has his wonderful husband
who's so smart and a skill set that would enable
him to be always employed.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, he had the skill set, and she knew he'd
always be able to have a good job onince be
a provider. But in the beginning, But the beginning of
Robert as a whistleblower began a while back, well before
the night of his wife's murder and his daughter's near
death beating, because up to that point he had led
a really enviable life. During the rise of his career,

(42:30):
he had shown qualities that society expected from successful men.
He was strongly self motivated. He took additional courses of
study throughout his career, and he developed a special level
of technical expertise. So whatever fierce Peernock had of professional
or personal defeat he kept hidden. He did show a

(42:51):
love for conflict once he decided that there was a
reason to target someone or something, so he kind of
enjoyed that. But the dark path that eventually led him
to committing crimes would be a long one. It began
many years before, in the nineteen eighties. That's when Robert
came before the US District Court to sue the State

(43:13):
of California and a bunch of his superiors at California's
Department of Water Resources, so the complaint read like a
textbook on standard conflict situations between whistleblowers and the corruption
they expose. The main plot of his struggle began with
his employment as an inspector for the DWR, and that

(43:36):
was when he was about thirty five, and he would
swear that shortly after being hired, he was told by
a superior that instead of doing his job as a
watchdog against malfeasance by contractors and suppliers, his true responsibility
was to sign off on inferior work done by the contractors,

(43:56):
whether the work met with specifications or not. So he
told of being warned that if he didn't play along,
not only would he be forced out of his job
at the DWR, but that the DWR had mafia tized
and he would be endangering himself if he opposed any
cover ups. So, after repeated threats were lodged against him,

(44:18):
he finally went to the man who had hired him
at DWR and complained that if he did as he
was told, equipment would not meet minimum safety requirements and
it would take years to correct all of the problems,
and this would cost California millions of dollars worse, he
said the safety problems could create fatal hazards for DWR workers. Sure,

(44:42):
and I think this was legitimate. I think he really
was trying to help at.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
That point at the beginning.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, he said his superior admitted that all of this
was common practice and a known problem, but that if
he was strong enough to try and force contractors to
meet specifications, his boss would see to it that he
received the full backing of the DWR. But that didn't happen.
Instead of that, peer Knock was told by other employees

(45:10):
that he was going to be harassed out of his
job because he'd made enemies.

Speaker 4 (45:15):
Yeah, that's not a good thing.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
No, So if that's true, he wasn't a bad spot.
He was stripped of his inspector's authority and the contractors
were told that they were free to ignore him. So
this must have really made him mad.

Speaker 4 (45:30):
And this is an ongoing problem for Robert at work.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yeah, it went on for years. So from the late
seventies all the way through to the morning of his
wife's murder in nineteen eighty seven, Robert was always involved
in a series of lawsuits in state and federal courts
in his ongoing attempt to get the corrupt officials off
of the state payroll. So he presented bits and pieces

(45:54):
of evidence to support his claims, but he never had
enough to set off the federal investigationation that he wanted.
But it is the arrest report for the only crime
Peernock was ever convicted of prior to the destruction of
his family that really lays out what happened. It all
took place after he turned forty two, so that was

(46:15):
about seven years after his whistleblower struggles had begun. The
arrest report tells how he was at the job site
discussing a company calisthenics program with one of the men
whom he supervised, when Peernach lost his temper and attacked
this man. So apparently he grabbed the man around the
neck and when the man tried to run away, Peernock

(46:38):
hit him with a fist to the side of his
head and face, and this attack resulted in his conviction,
But he was only convicted on a misdemeanor count of battery.
And of course he had a different story for this
sure where it was in his fault.

Speaker 4 (46:53):
Well that it may he's there the one who tried
to choke the guy and hit him.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
Well, yes, but he was saying he didn't start it.

Speaker 3 (47:01):
I guess no.

Speaker 4 (47:02):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
So, by the time Claire and Robert's second daughter was
born in nineteen seventy seven, he was spending less time
with his family, so the marriage was not going so well.
The distance between he and Claire were growing, and his
fixation on his causes grew Because in some rare instances
a few were starting to get some results. Robert began

(47:47):
to feel like he was finally proving his point in
a way the state and eventually the Feds would not
be able to ignore, so he really stepped up his efforts. Then,
Natasha remembers that it was at this time in the
late seventies and early eighties when her role as daddy's
little girl was lost because she was growing up she

(48:07):
was developing a will of her own. Natasha found herself
replaced in his affections by her new little sister, who
was still a young toddler to be completely controlled by
Robert whenever he'd spent time with her. Claire was spending
most of her time at home alone or in violent
arguments with Robert when he was at home. Natasha says.

(48:29):
By then, because of Robert's repeated outbursts against Claire, and
because of the violence Natasha witnessed him repeatedly inflicting on
her mother, she had decided that her father was an
evil man. Claire worried that no settlement would ever be
enough as Robert's campaign against the state dragged on and on,
and she even confided to friends that she was afraid

(48:51):
he had found his true love, and it certainly wasn't
her or the children. But this battle at the same
time did wear on his health. He had tried trying
to sleep. He became very irritable. Robert started coming home angrier,
constantly indignant that no one appreciated his efforts, not even
his wife, whom he wanted at his side in his struggle.

(49:14):
So his nerves seemed frazzled after a long day battling
corrupt officials, and Claire showed some family friends her bruises
to show just how dangerous it was to be around
him when his tensions were getting high.

Speaker 4 (49:29):
This abuse has been going on for a long.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Time years, but it was in the recent years that
the problems between Claire and Robert grew Claire had no
more patience for Robert's campaign against the state, and Robert
felt betrayed by her refusal to support his efforts. So
hostility infected their communication and their relationship, all the way

(49:52):
down to conversations about the most mundane things in their
daily lives, and by nineteen eighty three, the anger inside
the marriage was really getting bad. Claire intervened as often
as she could to keep Robert from taking his rage
out on Natasha, and in May nineteen eighty three, Claire
and Robert were having one of their arguments in the

(50:12):
kitchen when the confrontation turned violent. Natasha would tell how
she saw Robert grab Claire and begin to push her around.
Natasha jumped in front of her mother and demanded that
Robert leave her alone, and the next thing she knew
this is when Robert threw her against the kitchen wall.
He drove her to the er, and on the way

(50:33):
there he made sure that Natasha understood that she was
to tell the doctors she had slipped and fallen while
playing in the house.

Speaker 4 (50:41):
Yes, let's get our stories straight right, and she.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Spent the next twenty one days in traction for shattered collarbone.
Claire did come to visit her and told her daughter
that she agreed with Robert Natasha should lie to the
hospital staff. So that's not really the best thing, but
she was just so afraid. She was afraid of what
Robert might do once he was alone with them again,

(51:05):
if they admitted the truth.

Speaker 4 (51:06):
Yeah, well, I get the impression that the violence was
kind of accelerating.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Yeah, I think it really was.

Speaker 4 (51:14):
So I can see where she might want to try
to minimize the repercussions from.

Speaker 3 (51:19):
Telling the truth exactly.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Well, Natasha really didn't have the strength to speak out
against her father alone, after all, she was a child.
But she gave a different story to everyone who asked
at the hospital, and that was her way of maybe
trying to get someone to notice. Yeah, you know, she hoped,
maybe if I tell a different story to each person,
they'll notice that my stories don't add up and they'll

(51:44):
put something together.

Speaker 4 (51:45):
That's a good thought, probably when it wouldn't be successful.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
No, it wasn't. I mean, either nobody put it together
or no one came forward with their suspicion. So the
violence in the Peer Not Home was a secret, and
it would stay that way for another four years. So
the Peirnock. Marriage would never recover from this, and by
the next year, Robert hit a girlfriend and he was
sleeping at her place most nights, even though he did

(52:10):
continue to keep most of his belongings at the family house,
and that was fine for Claire and Natasha. Claire was
glad to have the place to herself, and Natasha finally
felt safe at home for the first time in years.
Claire found a secretarial job and began thinking about a
real life on her own. The traditional marriage had ended

(52:30):
and the checks were coming in every month on his
real estate holdings, even though Robert by this time was
no longer working a job, but settlements on some of
his many lawsuits had left him quite a bit of money.
He had enough money to save over a quarter of
a million dollars in various bank accounts, and this is
in the eighties, so that's a fortune.

Speaker 4 (52:51):
That's a good amount of money, really.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
So in early November of eighty six, despite her patience
and her years of not being able to break away
from Robert, Claire's time as an enabler of her husband's
violence was coming to an end. Claire began looking for
a divorce lawyer, and she chose the small law office
that was located nearby in a single story mall. So

(53:15):
it may have been a referral from a friend, or
maybe she just wanted to discuss her issues with another woman,
and this was the first female lawyer she saw. So
she was about to confront a very forceful man, divide
their property and claim her half of the money that
he had amassed. So it certainly wasn't going to be easy.

Speaker 4 (53:36):
No, it would not be no.

Speaker 2 (53:39):
So November thirteenth, a few days after the initial consultation,
Claire returned some financial papers to Attorney Victoria Doom's office
for use in determining property settlements. How do you like
that name, Victoria Doom? I love it?

Speaker 4 (53:54):
Hu's I kind of smiled to myself when I saw
her name, thinking this very apropos.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Yeah, it sounds really strong, doesn't it. Yes, So Victoria
was going to figure this out, and Claire paid her
a retainer, so the divorce was finally going to happen.
Two days later, on November fifteenth, Claire took out a
state farm life insurance policy on herself for ten thousand
dollars that was payable to her daughter Natasha and nobody

(54:23):
really knows why she did that. She did call her
longtime friend Louise, who had been at the pool party
where Claire and Robert had met twenty years before, and
told her she was finally getting a divorce. She confessed
to her that she was afraid that Robert might try
to kill her, but she said that she was resolved
to make the change. Still, despite Claire's best intentions, her

(54:47):
actions put her on a real collision course toward her
own death. Really kind of helped to set things in action.

Speaker 4 (54:54):
Yeah, galvanized Robert. It did he needed to do something.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
No fault of her own, but yes, definitely, and this
also changed things for Victoria Doom. Accident investigator Mark Warshaw
had tried to speak to Natasha before they loaded her
gurney into the ambulance, but remember, she'd been too badly
injured to be of much help. All she'd been able
to do was mumble a few words in response to

(55:20):
his question about the identity of the other passenger. He
hadn't told Natasha that the other passenger had died. She
wouldn't learn about that until days later in the hospital.
But Warshaw had been an accident investigator for over eight years,
and he knew he would have to hope that the
paramedics could stabilize her and give the doctors a chance

(55:42):
to save her. Then hours later, just before noon, he
stopped by the hospital to check on her, and he
learned that she was still in the ICU, but that
she was more responsive. He got permission to talk to
her for a few minutes. She was fading in and out,
giving erratic statements. The doctors were still assessing her head

(56:04):
wounds and working to stabilize her condition before putting her
under anesthesia to operate. Warshaw moved in close to her
bedside and quietly introduced himself, but she seemed barely aware
of his presence. So this was, he realized, the only
person in the world who might ever be able to

(56:24):
tell him the truth about what had happened so very
important witness.

Speaker 4 (56:30):
The only other person who could tell it had happened
is the person who did it.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
And he's not going to do that, So he began
asking her questions. He worked slowly and gently, but Tasha
faded in and out of consciousness. Gradually, she did manage
to say one or two meaningful words through her broken teeth,
until a rough story did come out in bits and pieces.
She gave the last name of who she thought was

(56:55):
her companion, That was her friend Patty, and she remembered
that they left Patty's house on the day the crimes
began around seven thirty or eight pm, and they'd gone
to Natasha's house. She said that they then had left
Natasha's about ten thirty and went to meet some guys.
So she murmured that this was the last thing she

(57:16):
could remember before waking up at the hospital, and she
seemed to be giving her best memory of the night before,
but she clearly wasn't much help, and she wasn't really accurate.
She just remembered being with her friend and really hadn't
remembered anything about her father or.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
Mother at that point.

Speaker 4 (57:34):
So clearly she wasn't able to give a good story
her coherent story.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
No, not yet, but she will be.

Speaker 4 (57:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
So Mark Wassaw didn't know who Patty was, but he
knew that the Los Angeles Coroner's office had already identified
the dead woman as Natasha's mother, Claire. And at that
point the x rays came back from the lab and
they showed multiple skull fractures. Natasha was going to have
to have face surgery right away too. So about five

(58:03):
hours into the investigation, the police received a call from
Robert Peirnock, so he called them up. He said that
he had heard from a neighbor that Claire and Natasha
had been involved in a traffic accident. So he's really
acting like, oh my gosh, I just heard this.

Speaker 4 (58:18):
Yeahhough he didn't see that upset or shocked.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
No, no, none at all. He told them that he
didn't live at Claire's house anymore, but that he did
come around frequently. He said that he was at the
house painting some shelves and Claire and Natasha were they're drinking.
He said they kept drinking until they were sloppy drunk,
but he stayed out of it because he didn't want
to get involved. At some point though, the house was

(58:44):
quiet and he saw that they had taken his Cadillac
and were racing around in his car, weaving a bottle
of whiskey out the window. So can you just picture
a mother daughter these are just a normal mother daughter.

Speaker 4 (58:58):
It's really hard to believe, ye, but his story can
fit what the actual occurrence was.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Yeah, it supported a drunk driving accident. But when you
look at the evidence, it really wasn't a drunk driving.

Speaker 4 (59:11):
Once we get to look at the Cadillac, yeah, that
story is going to vanish.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
Yes, yeah, But Robert agreed to come to the police
station for further questioning, so that made the police satisfied
for a time. But in the meantime, the Cadillac had
been taken to the police slot where it was processed
and examined by arson and accident investigators. So they checked
every part of the car, and based on burn patterns,

(59:37):
they were able to establish that there had been two
separate fires intentionally set just before the car crashed. Beneath
the car, they could see gasoline burns going down under
the gas tank, and the burn pattern led the investigators
to find more unusual rigging under the car. They found
the rope tied to the trailer hitch that ran under

(59:58):
the car to the rear axel, and that rope was
saturated in gas and had also been set on fire.
So it's not a subtle thing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:07):
Here, who no, No, a pretty ingenious thing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
Kind of you. If it wasn't so evil, you might
think so, right right, Then they found that metal bar
under the car that had been tied to the axle
by the cotton rope. So this odd looking metal bar
had been screwed next to the gas tank and sharpened
to a point about half an inch from the gas tank.
It looked like the metal bar had been set up
to puncture the tank upon impact in the car crash,

(01:00:34):
but the Cadillac had not hit the telephone pole hard
enough to do that. If it had penetrated the tank,
the car likely would have had quite an explosion.

Speaker 4 (01:00:43):
Well that it would have. Yeah, because of Robert's training,
he would be able to figure out how to rig it,
so it would definitely explode.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Yeah, and he put time and thought into this. This
wasn't a spur of the moment thing at all.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
Oh No, So the police know that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Claire had been murdered, no question, and her murder had
been planned. So within twelve hours of the wreck being discovered,
investigators were putting together a list of suspects. Of course,
Robert Pierknock was the number one suspect, and the police
were awaiting his arrival at the police station. But you
know what, You're going to be shocked, but he never

(01:01:18):
showed up.

Speaker 4 (01:01:20):
Nope, amazing, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
So the morning after the crash, Detectives still had not
heard from him, and they tried again to talk to
Natasha in the hospital, but she still wasn't making a
lot of sense. Her head injuries were so severe that
her memories were mixed up. Detectives were looking for Robert,
who was not at the Peerknock house, but they were
able to track down his girlfriend, Sonya Siegel. Still he

(01:01:45):
wasn't at Sonya's house. When the police talked to her,
she couldn't believe that he could have been involved.

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
In the crash.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
She denied having any information about where he was, and
she repeated the same story he had given about him
painting at the house and how Claire and Natasha had
taken off drunk in his Cadillac. The police told her
they had to speak to Robert. They didn't give her
all of the details, but they did tell her that
Robert needed to call the police as soon as possible,

(01:02:16):
and then they continued looking for him. They were trying
to bring him in calmly and interview him, but it
was becoming obvious that he was not wanting to cooperate.
So after days of not hearing from him and not
being able to find him, the police received a strange letter.
So this is the letter that was written by Robert
Piernack and delivered through his attorney very good. And in

(01:02:40):
this letter he claimed not to be involved, and he
explained that the reason he couldn't come in was that
he was a whistleblower against the state of California and
he was afraid for his life. So he basically said
he thought the police may have been involved in a
conspiracy to silence him. He assured them that he had
damaged corrupt people in the government and if he was

(01:03:03):
to come into the station, he was afraid he'd never
get out again. So he claimed the car crash must
have been part of a deadly conspiracy against him. So
they'd done this to the wife and daughter to make
it look like he did it to get him in
prison and then get him out of the way. So
it's pretty elaborate, this whole story.

Speaker 4 (01:03:24):
It sounds like he's even contradicting himself though. So he
originally told him that his wife and daughter were in
the car drunk, yes's true, and took off, and now
he's saying, well, it was caused a part of a
conspiracy against him.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
Yeah, how would the people that were setting him up
know that his wife and daughter would be in the
car or that it would crash, so really far fetched.
Detectives still had to look into his claims, but they
weren't very hopeful about the validity of that. They did
look into public records and could verify that he had
exposed some corruption, but there was no evidence of any conspiracy.

(01:04:02):
Then a detective went back to talk to Natasha in
the hospital because she was waking up and she was
more lucid now. She told police how her father had
attacked her and forced alcohol and drugs down her throat
after her dad had been forcing the alcohol into her
with a plastic tube. She remembered her mom coming home.

(01:04:24):
She heard her father rustling her to the ground and
attacking her. Hours went by and Natasha could hear her
mother in the room with her still alive, unconscious but breathing.
Then she remembered being carried out to the car. She
had no memory of being hit on the head and
no memory of the car crashing. The next thing she

(01:04:45):
would remember was waking up in the hospital, so she
was asking for her mother when she woke up, but
the nurses put her off and tried to keep her
calm and from their behavior. She was convinced that her
mom had died. Natasha was terrified that her father would
come back for in the hospital too. She was the
only living witness, which put her in a lot of danger.

(01:05:08):
Police were put outside her hospital room around the clock
to keep her safe.

Speaker 4 (01:05:12):
Well that's a good idea, you know, why the only witness?
Do you have an accident?

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
No? No, And the police were able to get a
search warrant for the pir Knock house after they heard
Natasha's full story. So once they were in the house,
they found traces of blood, They found blood spatter on
the walls, They found a whiskey bottle, and they found
a tube with a mask, which is what he had
used to force the alcohol down her throat. The metal

(01:05:39):
from which the metal bar under the car had been
cut was at the house too, and they also found
some cotton rope like that that had been under the vehicle. So,
although he seems really clever, why would he leave all
that behind?

Speaker 4 (01:05:53):
I know he had to think that people would be
in his house.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
At some point, Well you would think, but maybe not.
Maybe he just thought he was so smart. They were
going to think it was an accident and that would
be the end of it, which is possible if the
car had just hit the wall and exploded, there may
not have been any more follow up.

Speaker 4 (01:06:12):
They might not have been, but it's still to me
kind of stupid of him to leave all that stuff behind. Yeah,
or it could easily be found.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Well, you're right, sure. So what was interesting is that
in their search the police were surprised to find a
huge amount of paperwork in notes left behind in Robert's handwriting,

(01:06:53):
so they boxed up all the papers and took them
as possible evidence, and later they would find a lot
of evidence of his plan, like to do lists, checklists, clicklists,
so that investigators were surprised when the medical examiner did
Claire's autopsy and concluded that she died in a traffic accident.

(01:07:14):
The police tried to explain that Claire had been beaten
to death and that her killer had tried to make
it look like an accident, but theme would not change
his finding. He said her injuries were consistent with a
traffic accident. So this is a huge problem because the
police were working toward a murder charge against Robert Peernock,
and if the cause of death was from a traffic accident.

(01:07:36):
That's the end of their case.

Speaker 4 (01:07:37):
It was their case, that's right now. I'm not sure
from what I've read, doesn't anywhere seem like her injuries
were due to a traffic accident.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
No, I mean, especially if you looked at the car.

Speaker 4 (01:07:48):
Yeah, how the me decided that it was all accident trauma?

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
Yeah, I don't know. I think maybe just looked at
the blunt force trauma and maybe if you didn't see
the vehicle and see the verity there, you might think
that came from a car accident. I don't know. It's
just really kind of strange. And the police were a
little bit shocked that he said that.

Speaker 4 (01:08:08):
Yeah, I don't know that the and he did a
good enough autopsy.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
No, and the police didn't believe. So one of the
detectives went to the head coroner and explained what was
going on. If he had agreed that Claire had died
in a traffic accident, the police investigation would be derailed.
So the head corner came down and looked at Claire's
body at the evidence added debt photos from the scene,

(01:08:33):
and he determined it was a homicide and that Claire
had died of blunt force trauma, not from a car accident.
So now they have Natasha's statement, the autopsy report, and
the evidence, so prosecutors were ready to pursue a murder
charge against Robert. The police went back to his girlfriend, Sonya,
but she wasn't cooperating. She really was in love with

(01:08:56):
Robert and trying to protect him. But investigator were able
to get his bank statements and track him down making
large cash withdrawals from banks. They found out he had
taken out over fifty thousand dollars just from one bank alone,
so it definitely looked like he was getting ready to
flee the country.

Speaker 4 (01:09:17):
I wonder if he's going to take Sonya with him.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Well, she didn't seem to know. Police really believed that
she was not involved, that she was just trying to
protect him. But if she believed all the conspiracy stuff
and he said we need to leave the country, I
bet she would have. Yeah, she was one hundred percent
in with him. So detectives went back to the Preknock
house again to do more thorough processing of the scene.

(01:09:42):
They used luminol on the floor and in the living room.
There was a large body sized reaction indicating that there
had been a body lying there bleeding. When the Los
Angeles Times ran an article on the story, it caught
the attention of Claire's divorce attorney, Victoria Doom. When she
learned Claire had been killed, she called up detectives and

(01:10:03):
told them that she thought she knew what the motive was.
So apparently Claire had sent a letter to Victoria Doom
saying if anything happened to her, then Robert was responsible.
So we hear this time and time again. It's like
your favorite thing when a victim says, if I end
up dead, so and.

Speaker 4 (01:10:21):
So did it, I'd like to know the percentage of correct.
Guess as that would be right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
Yeah. Well, I'm sure people say it when it doesn't happen,
but seems to happen an awful lot to people who
are killed.

Speaker 4 (01:10:33):
Yeah, and they've said, if this happens, look at this person.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
But to me, that's kind of crazy, because if I
really felt I was going to be murdered, the last
thing on my mind is what they do after I'm murdered.
I'm going to prevent my murder at any cost.

Speaker 4 (01:10:48):
Yeah, you take steps to make sure it wasn't going
to be you, right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:53):
But it seems like Claire got that ten thousand dollars
policy for her daughter as well, which I imagine would
be shared between the two daughters. But anyway, she'd made
an agreement with Robert to postpone the divorce for six months,
and this was done under the pretense that he wanted
to receive financing for a new business and that it
would look better if they were still married. Sure, so

(01:11:16):
they did have three income properties and over two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars in the bank in nineteen eighty seven.
This was a very substantial amount. Over seven hundred thousand
dollars in today's money. Yeah, two point fifty in that
money over seven hundred in today's money. Either way, it's
a shit ton of money.

Speaker 4 (01:11:36):
That's a good amount.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
Yeah, So in a divorce, Claire would get half, and
he was not okay with that, of course. So now
within just a few days of the divorce going forward,
Claire was dead because he knew he had to kill
her before August first, because that's when things would go through.
So after Natasha was discharged from the hospital, detectives wanted

(01:11:59):
to put her in a safe house, but she didn't
really want to do that. She wanted to stay with
a friend in Santa Clarita, so she went and stayed
there for a few days, and with Robert still evading
the police, the police and Natasha both were quite worried
that he would come back and try and kill her.
A next door neighbor soon contacted the police to tell

(01:12:21):
them she was worried that a man was scoping out
the house next door, so they went to talk to
the neighbor. She said that she had a for sale
sign in front of her house, and one day she
was cleaning the house and a man walked right in.
He walked right past her to the upstairs and looked
out the window at the house next door. So she

(01:12:43):
was quite worried. I think I would have been even
more so. But she asked him what he was doing
in her house, and he told her that he was
a real tor. But then he left, so it was
very sketchy. So she called the police. They came out,
and when they showed her a photo of Robert p
or Not, she identified him as that man that had
been in her house. So pretty creepy, huh, that's definitely creepy.

(01:13:07):
I don't like it.

Speaker 4 (01:13:09):
Or do we know or do we assume that the
police had some people watching Natasha when she's staying at
a friend's house.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
You would think, right, But the neighbor had to call them,
so I'm not sure. But maybe they didn't see him
go in that house. Good question. But the police still
couldn't find peer Knock, so they kept going back to
his girlfriend, Sonya. She was the only connection they had,
so they put twenty four hour surveillance on her and

(01:13:38):
they saw her making phone calls from different phone booths,
so undercover officers would get as close as they could
to her and listen to her conversations. They believed that
she was talking to Peernock, that she believed his version
of events, and that she just loved him, so they
knew that she would do or say anything to help him,
and she really didn't seem to believe that he was involved,

(01:14:01):
so she was completely in with him, yep, very loyal.
So about a month went by with investigators monitoring Sonia's calls,
and finally they got a break to confirm she was
talking to him. They heard her say I love you,
Bob before she hung up the phone. So they arrested
her and brought her back to the police station. They

(01:14:22):
told her the details of what he had done, and
she really had a tough time accepting that that was true.
To her, Bob Pearnock was an innocent man who was
being persecuted by a corrupt government, so she'd really bought
into his whole story. The police decided that she probably
was a decent person and she'd just been charmed and

(01:14:43):
manipulated by him, but they weren't going to let it
go at that. They charged her as an accessory after
the fact for helping him get money and other things.
And as they continued speaking with her, the DA was
putting together the huge paper trail that had left behind.
They explained how he had set up the car crash

(01:15:04):
to murder his daughter. So before the crash he killed
Claire by crushing her skull with some kind of metal object.
He then beat Natasha on the head. He poured gas
over both of them in the trunk and throw out
the car's interior. He stuck Claire's foot on the gas
with a leather shoelace, and he tied a lace around

(01:15:27):
the gear shift. Then he stood outside the vehicle and
using the lace, he was able to pull it and
cause the car to go forward. So this is elaborate, sure,
But earlier when you were asking me if it was
a garage, this is what it actually was.

Speaker 4 (01:15:44):
It was to the gearshift. Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:15:46):
So the plan was to send the car down the
road until it hit a concrete wall and exploded, killing
both his wife and his daughter. So nice guy, huh, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15:57):
I guess. So he couldn't run alongside the car and steer,
he had to aim it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:04):
Well, yes, it.

Speaker 4 (01:16:05):
Looks like the car left the road earlier than he
had intended.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Yeah, so it didn't quite work out. So even after
he put all that effort and he didn't quite do
it right. So still kind of a fuck up overall.

Speaker 4 (01:16:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
So a detective was finally able to get through to
Sonya by telling her that she could save his life.
So this was clever. The detective told her that if
police spotted Robert, he would definitely be shot and killed,
so if she turned him in, she could save his life,
and she did eventually accept the logic of this. At

(01:16:41):
least he'd be arrested and alive, and if he is innocent,
he would have his chance to prove it in court.
So by cooperating, Sonya was able to have her charges
dropped as well. So she revealed his location to the detective.
He was at the Vagabond Motel in Woodland Hills. The
LAPD made their move to capture him, and one officer

(01:17:03):
went to the door to kick it in while one
called the room's phone to distract him. So when Peirknock
was out and put on the ground and handcuffed, his
ear was bleeding really badly and partially kind of torn.
So yeah, it turned out he'd gone to Las Vegas
and had a facelift and some of the stitches were
torn out.

Speaker 4 (01:17:24):
Now I've seen pictures of him. I guess he did
a good facelift, but he didn't look any.

Speaker 3 (01:17:29):
Different, No, not at all.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
And if that was his idea, no, that did not work.
So the surgery didn't change his appearance. He still looked
like himself, but maybe with fewer wrinkles, and he did
have a chin implant as well. But in his room
police found travel brochures to Australia and he had over
twenty thousand dollars in cash. Natasha was in Hawaii in

(01:17:54):
hiding when she learned that he had been apprehended, so
of course she was very relieved.

Speaker 4 (01:18:00):
I imagine she was.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
Yeah, I think a lot of people were relieved to
have him finally caught. So he was charged with first
degree murder and then he was transferred to a high
security jail as he prepared for his trial. Though he stalled,
The case went to trial in nineteen ninety one after
Peernock underwent psychiatric exams to determine whether he was competent

(01:18:22):
to stand trial. So he really did go through a
few different lawyers though, right, he wasn't an easy client.

Speaker 4 (01:18:29):
No, I imagine with his personality that he probably went
through more than one.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Yeah, oh, yeah, he was horrible at the trial. He
did finally hire attorney Don Green, and this was someone
who was willing to defend him based on his whistleblower
story and in follow up TV shows and articles about
this case, Don Green still supported that Peernock was innocent,

(01:18:55):
but still in the middle of the trial, Peernock did
attempt to fire Green, stating that he was working to
rig a conviction. So, according to Peernoch, no one was
on his side.

Speaker 4 (01:19:06):
He alone. I guess all these opponents.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
Yeah, and very bravely. Natasha was the prosecution's most important witness.
As the trial went on, Peernock argued, yelled, and tried
to go into all of his conspiracy theories, and at
one point he even threw a cassette tape at the jury,
telling them to listen to it and then they would
understand everything and see that he was truly a victim.

(01:19:32):
He refused to stop causing problems in the courtroom until
he would finally be gagged, handcuffed, and forced to sit
in a chair while the trial proceeded. And there are
photos of him with them looks like duct tape around
his face. It's amazing that doesn't happen very often. So
after he was convicted in the murder of his wife

(01:19:54):
and the attempted murder of his daughter, Natasha, Peernock was
also found guilty of trying to hire a fellow inmate
to kill both Natasha and her attorney, Victoria Doom. So
this really did change Victoria's life because can you imagine
having someone trying to hire someone in prison.

Speaker 3 (01:20:14):
To kill you.

Speaker 4 (01:20:15):
Yeah, that's kind of a bummer, isn't It.

Speaker 2 (01:20:17):
Really is scary. It seems like these criminals who are
in prison or jail, and then they think they can
hire someone to go out and kill witnesses or lawyers
or prosecutors, events or lead detectives. It's craziness.

Speaker 4 (01:20:33):
Yeah, but you know a lot of these stories are
just inmates trying to get a reduction in a reduction
sentence there.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
Well, yes, when the other inmate is just telling the story.

Speaker 4 (01:20:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:48):
Yeah, but these were actually confirmed, and it's not surprising
because he'd already been looking for Natasha to kill.

Speaker 4 (01:20:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
So the judge sentenced him to two life terms plus
twenty two years in four months. And the significance of
that was that Natasha, his daughter, was twenty two years
old and four months at the time of the sentencing,
So it was kind of in her honor because imagine
that's her own father. It's just really horrible not to

(01:21:19):
mention her mom being killed right there with her. So
she went through a hell of a lot and really
had a tough time throughout her whole life. So Robert
died in prison after getting COVID nineteen and he was
eighty five years old, so he lived a pretty long
life in prison.

Speaker 4 (01:21:37):
Yes, he did, around forty years or so.

Speaker 2 (01:21:40):
Yeah, and I bet he wasn't the greatest prisoner, but
you know, he was kind of smart and had some talents,
so he probably got along fine. If you have to
have something to offer in prison or you're pretty much screwed, I.

Speaker 4 (01:21:52):
Think, yeah, there's got to be something you can do.

Speaker 2 (01:21:55):
Yeah, you've got to be able to help with their
lawyering or mixing things a certain way, or having money.
You have to have something. So I guess he got
along okay in there. But his daughter was very relieved
when she heard he died.

Speaker 4 (01:22:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
Yeah, so quite a case.

Speaker 4 (01:22:13):
Huh. Yeah, it's amazing. A lot of these cases we
do sound like you're just telling a story.

Speaker 2 (01:22:19):
Yes, well yeah, because they're so far fetched, but true.

Speaker 3 (01:22:22):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 4 (01:22:23):
Continue to amaze me what people can do to other people.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
Absolutely, So we're going to move on to feedback, but
before we do, i'd just like to say, if you're
a fan of True Crime Brewery and you just can't
get enough of our storytelling and our thoughtful analysis, subscribing
at Ty Grabber dot com slash subscribe is the perfect
next step. As a subscriber, you'll enjoy every episode completely

(01:22:51):
add free, so you'll stay immersed in the chilling details
without any interruptions. Plus you'll get access to exclusive bonus
et theisdisodes that dive into the most fascinating and disturbing cases,
and this is content you won't hear anywhere else. Your
support not only helps keep the beer and the stories
flowing here, but it also allows us to continue delivering

(01:23:14):
the content that you love. So, whether you're in it
for the psychology, the mystery, or even the craft beer pairings,
subscribing is a wonderful way to show your appreciation and
to get even more of what makes True Crime Brewery
so addictive. So if this sounds good to you, just
head on over to tigreber dot com slash subscribe and

(01:23:36):
join the Tigreber community today. We certainly would appreciate it.

Speaker 4 (01:23:41):
Jill, you ready to do some feedback?

Speaker 2 (01:23:43):
I am. I would love to do some feedback. And
I'm going to start us out with a voicemail from
friend of the show Nate, because he has two or
three things that I thought were interesting. So let's hear it.

Speaker 4 (01:23:56):
Hi, Dick and Joel's Nate. I hope you guys are
doing well. Actually have a.

Speaker 6 (01:24:01):
Couple of cases related to car accidents. Well, it's kind
of like fatal summer driving while intoxicated. The first up
is Rebecca Grossman who trial was adjudicated last year. She
was drinking and driving and she had value of in
her system when she ran down two boys in San
Diego while racing with her boyfriend who is a former

(01:24:24):
Major League Baseball player. The other one is Bradford Castler,
who kill two people at Sweet Tomatoes and Newton, Massachusetts.
Happens to be one of my favorite restaurants growing up
in Brookline, mass But he had I guess multiple sclerosis,
and he was kind of told that he shouldn't be driving.
But the doctor didn't say you're not supposed to be driving.

(01:24:45):
It was kind of like, you know, and he made
that decision on his own. But I guess he got
a five or six year sentence in prison. I think
he was just released from prison actually not too long ago.
But it's like, at what point do you say to yourself,
if you have major disability that affects your ability to drive,
is it up to you to decide that or should

(01:25:06):
it be up to the state to decide that? And
the last case is Darien Has who killed two cyclists
while driving impaired in New Hampshire men. She I think
got a fifteen to twenty years sentence.

Speaker 4 (01:25:21):
Plus.

Speaker 6 (01:25:22):
There was a case of a mother and daughter down
in Atlanta where the mother covered up for the daughter
when the daughter a blanking on the name. But the
daughter caused a crash where six people died, and then
the mom tried to cover it up by having the
car fixed in private, and so the daughter got I
think a life sentence for the car accident, and then

(01:25:43):
the mom got like a ten year sentence for covering
it up. It was a pretty crazy case. No one's
ever covered that one, but I mean it's crazy to
think that if your child is guilty of something like
that that you would try to cover it up for
them rather than having them take responsibility for their action. Anyway,
I hope you as are doing well and stay cool
this summer. You know, the Southwest is very hot. Anyway,

(01:26:05):
take care Hi Well, thank you, Nate.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
So, yeah, first of all, parental cover up, what do
you think about that?

Speaker 4 (01:26:12):
Well, you know, parents are supposed to provide examples to
their children of how to live a good life. And
kid gets into trouble, you try to look out for
them and help them in any way. You can, but
this is not the way to do it.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:26):
I think the problem might be that the kids that
do this kind of thing are often kids who weren't
raised right and have parents who would try and help
them get away with it. If you think about Paul
Murdoch that case with the boat crash, you'd had several
car crashes beforehand that had been covered up by his family,
and they certainly were anxious to try and cover up

(01:26:47):
the boat crash too. And there are many other examples
of that sort of thing.

Speaker 4 (01:26:52):
Yeah. So your theory or your idea is that kids
who do some horrible thing and they don't get punished
for it, and because the parents take steps to keep
it hidden. Uh huh, there's something wrong in the sense
with the parents, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:27:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:08):
I think so they didn't get.

Speaker 4 (01:27:09):
Their values, they lost them somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Yeah. I'm not saying that any misbehaving child has shitty parents,
that's not true. But I am saying that someone who
does this kind of thing is more likely to have
parents who are immoral, or don't care so much about
following the law, or in many instances, feel entitled. So
what about disability? Who decides when you're disabled? If you

(01:27:36):
shouldn't be driving, that's a difficult question. Can doctors make
that decision or does it need to be through the
state or are we just going to rely on the individual.

Speaker 4 (01:27:47):
Well, you can't just rely on the individual because they
want it most of the time. They want to keep driving.

Speaker 2 (01:27:53):
Right, So it's hard for them to be objective, even
if they think they are being which is similar to
elderly people when they can't drive anymore. It brings to
mind your mother who drove into her nineties and seemed
fine driving to the grocery store and back. But as
she got older she could start to cause a danger
on the highway, like one time turning the wrong way

(01:28:16):
onto the highway.

Speaker 4 (01:28:17):
Yeah, she did that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:18):
And this was a woman who was very sharp. But
even if you are mentally sharp, your reflexes things like that,
they do slow down.

Speaker 4 (01:28:27):
Well, they definitely do. Yeah, in my mother's case, and
she ended up just driving from her home to the
grocery store, which was about two miles away, right, And
she could do that pretty well. Although if you looked
at her garage door, it had all sorts of wounds
to it, right right, pulling back.

Speaker 2 (01:28:48):
In, Yeah, but that wasn't hurting anyone else that was
just banging up her car in her garage.

Speaker 4 (01:28:54):
Yeah. I was just wondering how many cars she dinged
up in the Hannaford parking lot.

Speaker 2 (01:29:00):
Yeah, not sure. I think she was probably more careful
in the parking lot. I think she actually didn't try
to park real close to other cars.

Speaker 4 (01:29:08):
Now, but getting back to mister Castler, we don't know
that he considered not driving.

Speaker 2 (01:29:14):
Yeah, well we don't really know the background of it.
But when did it happen. It happened in twenty sixteen.
So Castler drove his car into a pizza shop, killing
two and injuring seven, and his attorneys blamed the accident
on his multiple sclerosis. So the attorneys even blamed it
on that. So that's not great in his favor. Really.

(01:29:36):
He was convicted on two charges of motor vehicle homicide
and one charge of driving to in danger and he
received a sentence of just four years, So pretty light
light sentence considering he killed two people and injured seven others.

Speaker 4 (01:29:53):
Yeah, because the other two examples Nate gave us, those
people got much different sentences.

Speaker 2 (01:30:01):
Well, those people were impaired by alcohol or drugs. Rebecca
Grossman a philanthropist and socialized socialite in Los Angeles who
struck and killed two young boys while they were crossing
the street in a crosswalk. She and her then boyfriend,
Scott Erickson, had been drinking before the accident, and although

(01:30:23):
she was under the legal limit for driving, she still
got convicted. Now, she said that her boyfriend in the
other car hit the boys first, but apparently that was
not believed. The accident happened in twenty twenty, and she
just hit her trial last year and she was found
guilty of two counts each of second degree murder vehicular

(01:30:46):
homicide in one count of hit and run driving, and
she was sentenced to fifteen years to life. So she
currently resides at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

Speaker 4 (01:30:59):
Yeah, well, I think she got convicted because she was
probably racing, right. Yeah, I'm not one hundred percent sure,
but they had been drinking before they left, and they
were each driving their own car, and there was some
question about maybe they were racing a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:31:17):
Well, so, if nothing else, it was reckless driving and
the kids.

Speaker 4 (01:31:21):
Were crossing where they should have in a crosswalk.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
Right, and it was a hit and run that.

Speaker 4 (01:31:26):
Was a hit and run. That's a big one.

Speaker 2 (01:31:28):
That's a really big one if you don't stop. So
the third one Darien Hass. She drove into a group
of cyclists in September twenty thirteen and killed two of them.
She was unlicensed and under the influence of painkillers when
she struck the cyclists, so she was found to have fentanyl, klonopin,
and percocet in her system, and eight hours before the

(01:31:51):
accident she had received a ticket for speeding. I don't
know how significant that is because we don't know if
she was on the drugs at that time. But she
pleaded guilty to two counts each of manslaughter and second
degree assault, and she was sentenced to fifteen to forty
years in prison, so a significantly longer sentence.

Speaker 4 (01:32:12):
Yeah. Well, this woman was impaired. I guess that's one
reason to go a little more forcefully with her sentence.

Speaker 2 (01:32:19):
Yeah, I suppose so. Well, it's interesting because the disabled
man was impaired, but he wasn't really at fault for
being impaired because he didn't take a drug. But if
you look at drug abuse and alcoholism as a disease,
then you could say it was a disability that she had. Yes,

(01:32:40):
So of course you have to give her more of
a punishment, I believe, because otherwise it would be repeated.
Because people who drink and drive or do drugs in
drive are known to be repeat offenders, and the only
way you stop them is sometimes taking their license away,
but sometimes not, like she'd already lost her license but

(01:33:01):
was still driving, so sometimes they do need to be
locked up.

Speaker 3 (01:33:05):
Really she is, Yeah, she is, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:33:09):
Okay. I had a couple of updates I wanted to
talk about, and the first one is Crystal Rogers. So
Crystal Rogers went missing back in July of twenty fifteen
from the home she shared with her boyfriend and their
two year old son. So Cristel and her boyfriend, Brooks
Houck had a really difficult relationship, kind of off and

(01:33:29):
on and volatile, and according to Brooks, Cristel would sometimes
leave for a day or two just to decompress. Crystal's
family was convinced that Brooks was responsible for her disappearance,
and most people who heard about it were convinced. After
several years of investigation, Brooks was charged in Crystal's murder

(01:33:49):
in twenty twenty three, Joseph Lawson and his father, Steve
Lawson were charged as accomplices. So in the trial, Brooks
was found guilty of murder and tampering with evidence. Joseph
Lawson was found guilty of tampering with evidence. Steve Lawson
had already been found guilty of evidence tampering in an

(01:34:10):
earlier trial, and Crystal's body has never been found, so
the jury recommended a sentence of life for Brooks and
twenty years for conspiracy. Formal sentencing is scheduled for August
twenty first. So I think one of the most interesting
things about this trial for me was brooks story of

(01:34:31):
what happened the night Crystal went missing. So Cristel had
told her friends and family that she was having a
romantic night out with Brooks that night. She was excited
about it. Cristel had five children, including her two and
a half year old, that she had with Brooks, and
she had babysitting arranged for all of them. But then
Brooks would say their night out was them walking around

(01:34:55):
the farm with the two and a half year old
that whole evening in the rain and until like midnight
or one o'clock in the morning, so that didn't seem believable.
Then he also said that she was on her phone
playing games until really late in the night while the
little kid was running around and she was playing these
games on her cell phone. But the hole in that

(01:35:17):
story is that her phone had been turned off and
never turned on again hours earlier. He'd also gotten some
dark tinting on his car windows, and the prosecution believed
he did that to prevent people from seeing whether she
was in the car.

Speaker 3 (01:35:33):
With him or not.

Speaker 2 (01:35:35):
And another case to update would be Corey Richins. So
she's a real estate agent and ended up being a
children's book author, author of one book, and she's accused
of murdering her husband, Eric Richins, by poisoning him with
a fentanyl laced moscow mule in March of twenty twenty two.
After his death, she published a grief book titled Are

(01:35:58):
You with Me? And this was aimed at helping children
cope with loss. So she even ended up going on
morning talk shows to talk about this book and had
a little bit of fame from it. Prosecutors alleged the
murder was financially motivated and was tied to some fraudulent
financial activities, so the couple was married in twenty thirteen,

(01:36:21):
and in twenty twenty one, It's believed that Corey began
stealing from Eric's accounts and forging documents. In February of
twenty twenty two, Eric became ill after eating a sandwich
from Corey, and he suspected that she poisoned him. So
that's a bad sign that he would think that.

Speaker 4 (01:36:40):
Yeah, but why did he drink the moscow mule if
he suspects his wife of trying to poison him? Yeah,
why would he even touch anything well prepared by her?

Speaker 2 (01:36:50):
I don't know. It was like a month later when
he consumed the moscow mule and died, and she published
the book about a year after that. Then about two
three months after the book was published, she was arrested
and charged with murder and drug possession. So investigations would
reveal financial fraud and misuse of power of attorney. Then

(01:37:13):
just this June June twenty twenty five, twenty six new
charges were filed, including mortgage fraud, money laundering, forgery, and
more so. Currently, Corey has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
She remains in custody awaiting trial, and the case has
expanded to include a complex web of financial crime. So

(01:37:34):
a court hearing is expected to address the subpoena dispute
and set a trial date. And we don't know yet
if this trial will be televised, but it would be
a good one to watch if it is. One thing
I remember about this case which we saw, was it
on a dateline? I think it was dateline? Was how
he was laying in the house dying for hours. She

(01:37:55):
never called nine to one to one. She called some friends.
She took a picture of him lying in the kitchen
on the kitchen floor. I think. Also when they checked
her Google searches, she had searched things about fentanyl and
even things about prison. And one interesting thing she searched
for was how to get someone to write a book
for you. So we don't even know if she really

(01:38:17):
wrote that book herself.

Speaker 4 (01:38:18):
Might not.

Speaker 2 (01:38:20):
So just a complete fraud. They had a business where
they were doing contracts for I believe it was for weapons,
for guns, and she said they had all these contracts.
They got friends and family to invest and apparently Eric
thought that it was going well. But she was doing
pretty much a Ponzi scheme, right.

Speaker 4 (01:38:41):
She was cooking the books.

Speaker 2 (01:38:42):
We know yeah, yeah, but taking money from people to
invest and paying them off a little with new investors' money,
which is a Ponzi scheme, and it never lasts for
that long. It has to end at some point that
it does, so that'll be a fascinating one to see.

Speaker 4 (01:38:58):
Yeah, let's watch that trial.

Speaker 2 (01:39:00):
Yes absolutely, all right, Well, thanks for listening everybody, and
we'll see you next time.

Speaker 4 (01:39:06):
At the quiet end, plenty of seats come one down

Speaker 3 (01:39:09):
Bye bye bye, guys.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Herd with Colin Cowherd

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}A Dangerous Mind: Robert Peernock

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Herd with Colin Cowherd

All Episodes

A Dangerous Mind: Robert Peernock

Stuff You Should Know