A CHECKLIST FOR MURDER-Anthony Flacco

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seem like a drunk driving accident. What Richard Piernock didn't foresee was his daughter's survival and her willingness for the first time to describe in detail her father's psychosis and his manipulative personality. What's a success once, I say a successful whistleblower? Pearnock denied his involvement in the murder, claiming a conspiracy against him on all levels, confounding the justice system, hiring and firing lawyers representing himself, saying everyone was against him.

After numerous tense trials, Peernock was finally sentenced to life in prison, though those close to him still live in fear. The book that we're featuring this evening is a checklist for Murder with my special guests, journalist and author Anthony Flacco. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Anthony Flacco, Thank you, Dan, it's very nice to be here. Glad you could make it. Finally we

have you on the program. And let's first talk about that this book when it first came out, and then after when you told us when this book first came out, Can you tell us how you came to be the author of this what drew you to this case?

that's Diversion Books who brought out this new version. And I've written a new afterward which sort of catches everybody up with what's been going on since this case was resolved.

whether they're advanced or whether they're crude and homemade. He then went to work using his computer knowledge for the Department of Water Resources in California and did well there on the technical level for a number of years. But as he aged into his thirties, he just began developing these personality traits that caught friction with everybody he was around. It seemed impossible to stay on good terms with the He was perpetually angry or offended or injured and seeking redress.

He became a kind of guy who constantly files complaints on his coworkers and supervisors, and then over the last few years before the crimes broke out, he started doing his own jailhouse lawyer lawsuits against people inside the Department of Water Resources as well as other private companies he would come across in his private life and amassing all this money from nuisance suits where he'd win a few grand here and a few grand there to just go away,

and he started compiling this money. By the time the crimes finally broke out at the end of the eighties, he had over a quarter of a million dollars liquid in the bank, as well as a number of real estate properties, and virtually everything he had accumulated had come through ill will and his tendency to sue everything that moves, and that was before the crime started.

And as he got more and more lawsuits going, and he had dozens of these things, he started in his mind to group all of the people that were against him in these lawsuits against him as if they were a single force, as if they were some kind of army of conspirators, and really it was just a collection of defendants that he had slapped with private lawsuits. But it became in his mind, me against the world, to

kind of mentality. And I've always thought this is Peirnock was the last kind of person whoever should have gotten into using civil law to create social change because of his tendency to personalize things and personalize his anger, which he did, and to create monsters of people who were really just civil defendants. But he did, and he didn't seem to have any ability to back off or moderate the level of his response. Thing was always fought as

though you know, life itself depends on it. Even if he wants somebody to just fix the stairway outside their building because it made him trip and fall, you know, And so the drama, the internal drama kept building up inside of him. Now his wife, who originally was quite a demure and supportive woman, it would have naturally taken her husband's part if he's trying to get some to

right some wrongs using his legal expertise. But as his companion, she also began to see he was farther and farther from reality, developing more and more problems and feuds with more and more people and organizations, and she just became exhausted by it. At the end, she had completely dropped out of all of his civil work, didn't even want to hear about it anymore, and it all went on

just strictly on his own. In the background. He had a big office in the house that he had crammed with files, and that just sort of became the thing that Robert does. Robert goes back to the office anytime at work and pumps his lawsuits. So she just wanted out. Unfortunately, by the time the crimes began, his own illness had proceeded far enough that he now thought she was a part of this great group of people that are against him.

And out to get him, and that somehow they had gotten to his wife Claire and were using her as an agent against him, sort of having her eyes and ears inside his home. And when he decided that was the case for whatever reasons, of course it was false, that's when he began planning his murder attacks, which the planning went on for months.

your heart. She's such a little beauty. But what happened once she began to develop as a person and to develop her own personality and opinions and started saying no to Daddy. Then she joined the enemy because he could no longer control her. The only way to have peace with Robert Peirnack is to accept his control over you. And then from the age of I don't know, around ten or so, began this process of alienation to the time by the time the crimes hit when she was seventeen,

they were completely estranged. And she told me that by the time she was thirteen or fourteen, she already used the word evil in thinking of her father. She wasn't saying that to call him names or be mad at Daddy. She was as a Catholic person expressing in her opinion, what's the darkest thing a person can possibly be, which is evil where you expect nothing good from you, expect only trouble and tragedy from them, and it's terrible. But

she got that one spot on. I mean, she was Sigmund Freud in understanding that her father, no matter how good an image he could put up for people, or for some reporter or for some camera, she understood all that was just crap that what she had was a demon in her house, an evil person. By demon, I don't mean in a religious term, I just mean somebody whose humanity is so twisted in perverse you can no

longer expect fair human reactions out of them. And so she essentially from the time she was sixteen or so, barely even went home except when she had to. She had a list of friends that she could spend the night with girlfriends, and she tended to hang with them just for the point of avoiding her father.

family and humiliate everybody, mom and everybody else. And so she did and kept up the story for years until finally it all broke with the crimes. In fact, during the trial, the defense attorney tried to make something out of that, but because she had been forced to lie about her own broken arm, this meant that maybe she was lying in her testimony, and the jurorsis kind of laughed that one off, because I think they understood that she was a helpless girl. What was she going to

do if she didn't make dead happy. She already knew what he did when he's not happy, and now if you want him to be happy, you'd better tell this lie that he has. So she told it.

going to be married. So she was working that angle of the street, having no idea of this second life. Pear Knock entertained whereby he would, even though he lived at her house, he would drop by the family home whenever he wanted and stay as long as he wanted, kind of start fights, caused trouble, whip everything up, and then leave and go over to Sonya's. Again, this is

the condition things were in when the crimes finally broke out. Now, when you mentioned this agreement, what had happened was Claire, oh of almost a year before the crimes, knowing that the divorce was just inevitable, had sought out a divorce attorney, a female who her name was Victoria doomm It was a great name for an attorney who would eventually come up against Robert Pirnock too, But at the time all she did was consult with her about a divorce and

Victoria said, okay, I'll get the papers ready. But before they got the papers ready to go, Sonia called and said, no, hold off on that. Robert has an agreement he wants to be to sign, and if I do, he'll agreeed to all these other demands that I have for the next six months. And so she brought a copy over to Victoria to look at, and thank goodness she did, because that became a key piece of element of evidence.

What happened was by filing the divorce. By telling the husband she was going to file divorce, it caught him off guard with regard to protecting all these assets he'd put together, and he wasn't about to split that with her. So he came up with an agreement whereby in the agreement's kind of heartbreaking too, he agrees not to hit her, not to beat Natasha I mean, all these just basic human things nobody should ever have to get anybody to

agree to. But they do, and they list it and they sign it for a period of months, and he says, if she'll just hold off on the divorce for those six months, why then he'll go ahead and include her in some of these businesses and things that would be contested in the divorce. That's her motive for doing the agreement. She'll get a better financial settlement and she only has

to wait another six months. But what happens is he immediately begins planning to kill her before that six months is up, because he knows once a divorce action starts, he can't kill her, he'll be the first one arrested. So he tries to use this time barrier that he'd put in this padding of six months to give him

time to plan. Later, it was found he started making checklists on things to do and things to find and places to go regarding this murder almost immediately when they got that agreement signed.

where he's continually doing that. She's accustomed to that, Natasha tries to avoid it. So tell us what happens on the day question with this same kind of situation that she seems to have seen before.

go out dancing for the evening together. So Patty drops her off. She sees Robert Pearlock's car in the driveway, and Patty gets a bad feeling and says, Natasha, you want me to come inside with you? I mean, I know it's not safe in there with your old man in there. Natasha goes, no, no, maybe he'll just turn around and go home late in the day anyhow, So

Patty drops her off and she goes on inside. Now Robert Pearlock's story is he had gone to the house to go out to the backyard to repaint some bookshelves that were there for whatever reason, but what he had

actually done was to set his plot in motion. Once Natasha came into the house, he began berating her for using too much electricity, and as Natasha says, it didn't matter why he would start the argument that the point was always just to give himself a reason to get angry and lose his temper, which he did, And her mistake was she said something wise ass back to him.

He was complaining that she left lights on, but then he walked away and left the TV on the rooms, and she called and says, oh, I guess you don't really care about the electricity, do you, And that launched him. He came flying across the room and tackled her and knocked her to the floor, choked her nearly to unconsciousness, then whipped out a hood he'd pulled from somewhere with a rope on the bottom, and tied it around her neck, completely covered her eyes and just had one little hole

for the mouth. And then he tied her hands behind her and her feet, carried her into her mother's bedroom, through on the bed, and left her there. And all this time she's supposedly getting ready. How far do you want me to go with the story?

the premises hears you. But nothing happens. As it happened because she'd spent the night there a number of times with Natasha. She knew that the window next to the door there was a way you could jimmy it and get in, and they used to do that to sneak in if they came in late at night. So she started to jimmy the window and was just about to crawl inside, and she got this really cold feeling and said, whoops, no, I'm not going to do that, puts the window back,

gets in her car and drives away. Now for a long time after that, she's going to be angry at herself for driving away and not doing something. But even if she'd called the police, she didn't have a complaint to make other than the fact that somebody isn't answering

their door, so she let it go. But inside Natasha was lying on the bed, unable to call out to her because her father had pulled out a six gun a revolver, held it up in front so that she could hear him, put one bullet in, spun the chamber, and told her if she made a sound, he'd pull the trigger. So she didn't make a sound, and Patty did drive away, but that didn't stop him. He went on and played the Russian roulette game with her over and over and over again for a long time, and

she was helpless there and couldn't do anything. This supposedly had something to do in his mind with the fact that she and her mother were somehow against him, with all the people that he was fighting with in the state government. Now, that was where his mind left any semblance of logic and went into full blown crazy that he could make such connections and actually not only believe them, but believe them to the point that he would kill behind those connections. And it was all It's a picture

of a madman's mind. But that's all it is.

They never identified the substance, but it was some kind of a downer an opioid, and forced her to swallow and that he was just able to do by putting it in her mouth, putting the gun to her head and telling her to swallow, and giving her alcohol to swallow it with. And this of course eventually wound up knocking her out. When she came to, which was some hours later, and the light had changed it was getting dark. This was in middle of July and so the days

are long. She just in time to hear that her mother had come home from work. She heard the front door open and didn't hear anything else until suddenly their two dogs out in the backyard began barking hysterically the way they never do that they were trained not to do. But those dogs were looking at glass French doors which looked directly into the house, directly into the living room where the front door opened, so the dogs could see

what was happening in there. All Natasha heard was at some point the huge sound of a body hitting the floor, sort of the way she had just been tackled, But she never heard him say anything, and her mother never

got the time to scream or call out. The next contact she had with her mother came hours later, when her father came in long after dark, was one or two in the morning, and carried her out to his big old gunboat Cadillac car and put her in the back seat, still with the hood on her head, still bound and gagged, and lay her next to a body which she knew was her mom. She knew by the

feel and the smell it was her mom. She heard her mother breathing, but her mom made no sounds or didn't speak, and so we all assumed she was still unconscious or whatever he had done to her, and in that position. Then she took the death ride out to the location he'd selected to use for killing them.

He selected a spot underneath the highway overpass on a section of road that ran about one hundred yards or so straight down to a tee intersection, and at that tea was a flat concrete wall. So while he was under the overpass, and of course the noise of traffic drowning out whatever he was doing, he rigged the linkage of the engine so that he could jam the accelerator. Put Ma mclaire in the driver's seat and using a piece of rope, tied her body upright to the wheel.

Then placed Natasha in the passenger seat next to her. Poured alcohol from a booze bottle all over them and threw the bottle in the passenger's foot well, and this is a full quart of bourbon, and then covered both

bodies with gasoline. The bottom of the car he had rigged with a fixed steel bar that he had bent and cut and attached with the point almost touching the gas tank, so that if the car at high speed collided with something, it would drive that point into the gas tank and spew that fuel everywhere around the cutter bar. He had dangled a piece of rope and lit it. In fact, it was still smoldering when cops found it

sometime later. He then, with the linkage rig so that he could jam the accelerator, pointed the car down the road toward that t intersection. At this point, it's around three or four in the morning, nobody's out there. Lets the car go, and it speeds down the road toward the intersection. He even we found tables that he had worked down where he rigged out how much the car would accelerate, how many yards it needed to hit a

terminal speed, and he had worked that out. The one thing he didn't do was count on the car rolling off the road and not going straight. He had even checked the steering on the car to make sure that it was straight, but he forgot that a rain hill in a road is the center of the road being slightly higher than the right and left side, so that rain naturally runs off the road. Well, that creates a very slight angle, which we don't see when we look

at it, but it's there and it affects trajectory. It affected the car just enough to make it drift to the right and then hit a huge wooden telephone pole that was right off the road. The car was already going fast enough it hit with so much force it snapped that pole off excuse me, just above ground level. But it still wasn't fast enough. It had about another fifty yards to go. It wasn't fast enough to drive that cutter bar into the gas tank. If it had,

of course, that would have exploded. The fireball would have then caught the women who were soaked and gasoline inside the car, and all of the evidence would have gone up in smoke. But because the car hit that pole before it reached its terminal velocity, the explosion he had rigged out didn't take place. I mentioned in the book an alternate theory I have that I can't prove, but I like. And he did this strange thing of tying

her upright to the wheel. I'm not spoke sure what that was supposed to do, because of course, even if they had hit the wall, they'd have been so jostled around and burned up. No one would have known if she was at the wheel or not. Anyway, but he did part of his madness needed to take to put that little twist on his acts. And because of that, if her body slumped to the right side toward her daughter while they're making that death ride down there, that would pull the car off the road and into the

telephone pole. If Claire had any consciousness or awareness left to her then, and the corner felt sure she was alive when the car was started, or on the brink of being alive, then she pulled the car off the road and saved her daughter. Mount she had sustained such massive brain trauma, it's not unreasonable to say she couldn't have been alive or conscious at that point, in which case just the weight of her body did it, and it was physics at work. But in either case, this

is what saved Natasha, the daughter. They had both been beaten badly with a tire iron about the head, but because Claire was unconscious when she received her beating, the blows all fell about the same place on her forehead crashed in her skull. But her daughter, who was not fully conscious but alive when she was being tire ironed, was able to instinctively just thrash her head back and forth side to side. This distributed the force of the blows that she took the head enough so that her

skull didn't cave in and her brain wasn't penetrated. That's why she was beaten and unconscious but still alive when the car took off on its way, and she even survived then the impact the wreck itself, and then her body lay there in the car in that raw gasoline for quite a while before she was eventually found to pull out. There was a lot of damage done to her skin just by the gasoline itself.

and Natasha is taken away by ambulance. They try to get her to respond her name, but you know, she's just delirious and what's coming out of her is not good information. At one point she gave her name as Patty because she was just that, you know, she'd taken blows to the head. Once they're in the hospital, after some hours, she begins coming out of it and they're able to converse with her in the most basic way.

And the first thing she starts trying to say to them is my father, my father, But because she's delirious and can't really elaborate on that, and because their father's nowhere around the wreck, she thought that the doctor rather thought that she was concerned where's my dad, you know, is he hurt and didn't realize she's going, where's my dad? He's not done killing me yet, So they didn't do anything to protect her at first, other than to take

medical care. And in the meantime, Robert Pearnock himself was trying frantically to figure out a way to get into the hospital, pacing around outside in the parking lot, but there was a cop on the door. Soon after, when the homicide investigator, Steve Fisk shows up and asked her just a few questions right away. He knows this whole thing is terrible, and he's got to find Robert Pearanack, her father, because she is now the only thing that

can convict him. She's the only witness, and that means not only the police need to protect her, but Pearanock needs to get rid of her right away. So at that point they put a twenty four.

Their family itself was basically from Quebec up in Canada, but they were not and they weren't people she could turn to. She didn't even speak their language. So she was instantly in one tough situation. But at least she did have a friend, Patty there, who did the best she could stand up for her.

They have to completely discredit him, and so therefore they committed these crimes set him up to look guilty so that if his book does come out, nobody will believe it. And that's his story. And he starts calling the police and saying, I know you want to talk to me. I'll come in and talk to you, but I'm afraid of what you're going to do because I've got all this long history working against the state. So I'm going to have my attorney negotiate the terms of my coming in.

And he starts down that game while he goes off to Las Vegas, gets a facelift, and starts spending money like its water because he's liquidating his assets. Sonya at this point still thinks, my poor Robert. He's on the run from these murderous police and government forces that want to kill him, and she's covering for him, alling for him, helping him with his car and with bills and whatever health,

whatever else he needs. But Steve then Fisk, the detective, once he realizes what Pearnox game is, goes back to her and he lowers what I call his velvet hammer on her. He takes the fact that she genuinely does love this guy and doesn't know who it is she's protecting, really and he uses that against her. He says, Sonya, here's the thing. I know you know where Robert is.

the spot. So you want to say, Robert, you need to give him up and get him into protective custody right now, because his chances of dying are worse every day he spends out on the street, and that he just put her in a trap in that way, because if she does love him, which she did, and cares about what happens to him, which she still did, then she's got to get him on the streets. And Fisk convinces her, look, you're not really protecting him. You're setting him up to get killed by some cop or or

somebody else he tries to hijack. You're guaranteeing a bad end unless you protect him. And he put it in that way so that by turning on her fiance, she was actually doing him a favor. And she gave him the address of a hotel over in the valley where he was holed up, and Fisk went over there, knocked on the door and said, hey, Robert, it's Steve Sonya want me to tell you that she can't make it

by tonight. And the minute Robert said okay, and they knew he was in there, they crashed through the door, took him down, and were able to arrest him. The weird thing, now, here's the thing. Sonia loved him so much that it was so hard for her to finally come around to giving the cops the information. And you know, she had to be manipulated, so oh, protect him, Sonya,

protect him, Sonya, because you know her loyal Robert. Well, her loyal Robert was sitting on the bed, but twenty seven thousand dollars in cash of his passport and a travel book for New Zealand. He hadn't said a word to her about going anywhere. So that's the guy she was protecting. Later in the trial, when it came time for her to testify, they show her some papers and things.

They're getting square on how Peernox's been manipulating his income, and they said, this date here is that Robert Pearnox's birthdate, And she goes yes, and then she stops, says, no, no, wait, that's not his birthdate, that's my birthday. It's a form that he had filled out on himself, and she just stops and kind of goes. He remembered the one time that he had acknowledged her birthday is when he was

using it to scam somebody else. But as with all sociopaths, no matter how skilled, if you are around them in their intimate space, before too long the mask comes down. It simply takes too much energy for them to keep up that crap. Twenty four to seven. So it's the people closest who always take the most damage because they're the ones who see the demon first.

there is to it. But when she read in the newspaper about this case and realized, oh my god, that's Claire Peirnock, the woman who came in to see me, And then she thought, wait a minute, I have a copy of this agreement, and the date she was killed is only nine days before that agreement expires. This was a woman with only nine days left when she was safe to kill, because once that divorce started, Pearannock wasn't safe. She says, Holy crap, I have to get involved. Now

what about his daughter? Because she already knew Peiranock is a guy who squirrels away all kinds of money, and he has all these different scams for covering his money, she thought, because he's murdered of their mother, A large share of this is now Natasha's who is now an orphan. But this guy is on the run, liquidating his cash and spending it as fast as he can, Meaning not only is this girl an orphan, but she's about to lose everything she might ever have and be left penniless.

So she got involved, starting in with all the civil work necessary to isolate Pearnock's bank accounts. But the problem is Pearnock, having all this money, hired a big law firm named Dern, Mason and Flum, big huge law firm, and paid them a huge retainer to make her life hell and challenge every single move she make, and then appeal that, and then appeal that. So they quickly buried her under so much work that her little one woman

law office couldn't keep up with her other cases. She had let all her other cases go, which she did her paying cases to work on this one for which she was being paid nothing, and kept working to isolate his bank accounts. One at a time. She'd have partial success, but others were shielded behind various paper deals he would use to protect his money. And so she knew time was running out. He's spending it fast, and if she doesn't stop it soon, these girls get bupkis to try

to build their lives on. It was Natasha and a girl whose story I don't tell because she was just a small child, Yle who was eleven at the time, her youngest sister. But she's not any part of the crime,

and she wasn't there when it happened. Nevertheless, it was also a concern about what's going to happen to that girl now after all of this, if he is able to spend out this money and he was in Vegas just going through it like water and hiring all these investigators to follow every witness in the case, paying this fortune to this civil attorney to block and doing all this while shuttling back and forth between Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Sonia's house underneath the police's nose, while

constantly having his criminal attorney call them and say, oh, yeah, he's coming in, he's coming in. It was just a circus, and the cops, of course, were spitting nails over this or being jerked around this way. That's what finally drove Fisk to pin Sonya to the wall. The way he

did it just had to be no more. Mister nice guy Peirnock was making a joke of the legal system, which is already beleaguered enough, but his refusal to cooperate anyway, and to constantly level accusations that people had managed to stall the investigation and had managed to keep him free for a few weeks. But of course it eventually closed in once Sonya was flipped and then he was arrested. This barely even slowed pear knock down the instant he's arrested.

Of course, now he's complaining about everything that happens. He's being beaten, he's being mistreated, and filing complaints about that this guy is like the terminator. In fact, that's the way Natasha described him recently. He's like the terminator, and it's a great description because he's just not deterred. You show up one of his lies as a bald faced lie, he doesn't even take a breath before he's making another accusation that you have to then go deal with that.

It doesn't even slow him down. And Natasha still twenty years later, still lives in hiding to this day because she knows for a guy like him, the offense that he's angry for always just happened. Just happened just now. It doesn't matter if it was twenty thirty years ago. It just happened now. And he's just as angry and just as determined now as he would have been his own daughter. And see such an enemy that her face needs a tire iron, and he's the one who has

to do it. That's where his madness took him.

So let's but I wanted to talk about the one profound story that you talk about to illustrate how dangerous a person Robert Peirnock was to Natasha, and again you describe to how she's still in hiding to this very day. Talk about the real estate agent, the Latino real estate agent.

up says, I'm a real estate agent. I'd like to like to list your house for you, and she goes, oh great, I could use the help. Come on and I'll show you around. She takes him inside and notices he barely glances at anything in the house, walks straight to the back bedroom, which is just an ordinary little it was a girl's bedroom at the time. But what was unique is this bedroom window happened to look directly into the backyard of the Natasha's safe house next door.

The woman said it was strange. He just stood there staring out that glass, showing no interest in the contents of her home. And then after a minute, when she finally said hey buddy, he goes, oh, yeah, I don't

need to see anymore, walks out and disappeared. He didn't think anything of it other than this is some crazy real tour until later when the course detectives started coming around and they showed her photographs in a six pack, and she picked out Peirnock's face from among the other guys and said, this is the agent who was here. He had tracked her down to a supposed safe house

while she's in witness protection. He had come in and he had a business card printed up that shouldn't be a realtor, by the way, and then gotten that close to see exactly where Natasha was, where her bedroom window was, and everything else. And then disappeared again. This is why Natasha's afraid of her father.

and he had for four years. He delayed this prosecution of As you said, Dan, what should have been a slam dunk on this guy. I mean straight to the execution chamber. No, no, no, no. He was just getting started and working as his own attorney, writing these motions. They would appoint him a new attorney if the attorney wouldn't do whatever he said. Well, they became a conspirator who was trying to work against him, and he fired them.

He very nearly got away with this whole thing. He had planned it so carefully, and he was so good at pressing the system's buttons. The title of this book, you know, almost wound up being a perfect murder, although I guess I couldn't have written it then because we wouldn't know he'd have gotten away with it, you know.

he puts everybody in a position. So if you could explain that what Stephen Fiks finds and what its importance is to this.

box and sent them on in with everything else. Well, the box he put them in turns out was a Xerox paper box, and because of that, somehow that box got separated from the case evidence and put over in the Xerox room with all the other cases of paper that was used by people making copies in the office and sat there for four years while they tried to

get this case going and while Pereanock delayed actions. Finally, once Peernaut gets his last defense attorney, Donald Greene, whom he hires with his own money, Vegas attorney who's also licensed to practice in Los Angeles, we're going forward to the trial and the new DA Craig Richmond, has been assigned this case, and he's scared out of his mind

because it looks like a loser. They don't have the smoking gun they need, and this Pereanot guy just keeps managing to win on technicalities, one hearing after another after another. So on the eve of trial, he goes into the copy room because they have a big table in there to spread out his files. And he's sitting there working and he looks over just looking around the room, and there's the piles, the stacks of the boxes of paper.

He says, one has little peerore written on the side, which people not working on the case wouldn't even notice. But of course he goes Piirnock. He goes Ori and pulls out that box and opens it up. It's not a box of paper. It's all these slips of lists and slips of paper from Pear Knox trunk that have just been sitting there. He goes, holy crap. He starts going through them, and most of them are just grocery lists stuffed from the hardware store. Ordinary thing. Go get

your haircut, go get your shoes fixed. But he starts noticing mixed in with a lot of those things are some strange things, like by handcuffs. The term get location or no find location is there again and again, dozens of time. Find location, find location, find location. And then after a certain day, just a few weeks before the crimes, that one stops. He doesn't have any more notations to

find location. You know, he's found the underpass, He's found the wall, the concrete wall, face mask, wife in the front, plus the child plus cover is one of his notes on how to stack them or bodies into the car before launching it off. And gradually he puts these notes together and realizes he's just found a checklist for murder. And this is the thing that Peiranock ultimately can't answer for, can't explain away, and winds up convicting him and putting

him in prison. What would otherwise have been a perfect crime turns out to be absolutely nothing because he was so anal retentive, he was so in love with his own paranoid thought process that he couldn't bear to just throw away the damn lists, toss him in the fire, your home free, Noo. He had to say his souvenirs and his souvenirs, his own souvenirs are what put him away. Students firing love the way that came down.

on trial for murder. And he's a jailhouse lawyer. And guess what. Steve Fisk calls Natasha in and says, I'm sorry to tell you, he's demanding his right to defend himself and be his own at herney. The court has to let him do it, and that means he's the poenaing you to testify. You're going to have to be grilled by your father in open court. This is the man. The last time she saw him, he was bashing her face in with a tire iron. Now she has to put on a nice little dress and sit in a

witness box while he grills her. And he did, and it went on for days, and he was a master at mocking and sneering and basically verbally just torturing her, but always staying just within the lines of what the court had to allow him to say, being that he was his attorney. Just put her through hell. But she was able to stand up and look him in the eye and speak the truth and answer his questions. And

she never wavered, never wavered, not one time. And I have tremendous admiration for her and what it took to go through that. But his attempt to get her on the stand and discredit her in some way was his last ditch, and thankfully it didn't work. He was what they call too clever by half. He was so busy figuring everything out and manipulating everybody that he just went too many steps in the wrong direction. He couldn't recover.

The bit that seemed so clever about defending himself was actually the thing that wound up not putting him away, but putting in a position to be put away, because the jury saw who he was. They saw his condescending cruelty to this girl who had barely survived at his hand. And I think he showed them the killer. I think he said, you have to find me guilty. You're looking at the personality that was able to do these things.

Fascinating thing about sociopaths that I've seen every true crime case I've ever worked on is the line that the writer William Peter Bladdie used in the book The Exorcist. They also picked up that line in the movie version, where one priest is saying the other, well, we're gonna have to figure out which demon we're dealing with here, and the older, wiser priest snaps at him and says,

it's always the same demon. Now, I don't think in religious terms, and I'm not offering you a religious icon here, but I think it's very clarifying when you want to understand these personalities, when you're dealing with the true sociopath, it's always the same demon. Their individualities, their uniqueness as people, that stuff is boiled away by the illness. They just become these terminator machines, function machines. You do and you say anything at all that you need to do and

say to get done what you want. And that is the same for one person to the next to the next. And he just became that. Thank goodness, he showed it to the jury and they deliberated six hours and found

him guilty. Even the judge. Let me just tell your listeners, this in the sentencing went on, and this long colloquy and the sentencing appealing to any future governor who might ever have PEARNOX'X case come before him for clemency for parole, that no matter what strange circumstances could ever cause that to happen, that governor had to know that Peernock could not be released, that the streets could never be safe with this guy out there, and that he needed to

die in prison. This extraordinary thing for a judge to put in a minute order in his sentencing hearing, and especially a guy like Judge Schwab. This is a very scholarly, calm, measured sort of a guy. This is not any sort of a hothead jurist at all, and yet he was just almost pleading with anyone who would ever read this trial record. You can't believe this guy. If you're feeling the least bit convinced by this guy, it's the demon

breathing at you. That's all that's happening. There's a website that he's taken out where he goes and explains, you know, of course, all the people that are against him, and he talks about my book that I was supposedly hired by the state to write a book. That's all. Nobody hired me to do anything. But you know, if you don't look too close, it looks almost real. And if you have a proclivity to believe paranoid stories, maybe you've

been burned by the state yourself. At some point, he knows which buttons to press, and he'll hook you, and you'll think, oh my gosh, we've got to free this poor man, this unjustly convicted man. But you're talking about a monster. It's always the same demon.

time I didn't talk about. Also the point that we didn't talk about, the point he reaches out to inflict fear not only still on his daughter, but also these lawyers and potentially the prosecutor. Tell us a little bit about that.

with her mom, the car exploded into fire. Peer Knock had had his minions go and put one of his firebombs under it. Imagine that for being the first time you meet your fiance's mother, you get her car blown up out in the driveway and possibly cause a few concerns about what her daughter is getting into.

had to drag him out and gag him. And so the picture was that he'd had duct tape halfway up his face, surrounding his head, just to be able to have this guy back in court for the judge to say, you're gonna have to witness, You're gonna witness this decision here, and we're gonna have you back in this court, but we're not gonna listen to you. We've listened to you, so we're gonna gag and bound you. So, I mean, again, very very unusual. I've never had of anybody. I mean,

it's very very rare. Let's put that way.

did to me. They bound me with tape, And if you just want to get all emotional, you can go, oh, yeah, isn't that awful, But when you see the circumstances of it, you real this poor judge had taken this thing for months, allowing this guy to just burn away the taxpayers millions of dollars on this trial, millions of dollars with his stalling tactics and if he allowed it to work, the message would be, Hey, if you're ever in trouble in court,

just yell and scream and accuse everything that moves. You can bind everything to a halt. He had to stop Peirknock, and yet the sentencing needed to go forward too, and Parannock wasn't going to shut up, so he did have him bound and gagged. What you can't see, he's got cotex stuffed into his mouth underneath that duct tape that's wrapped around his head. But he put that tape around his own head just as sure as if he took out the role himself and start of winding it around

his neck. But now he tries to use it to make himself look pitiful. It's the mob.

ongoing victim. My hope is simply not that her life is greater, there's a happy ending, but just that she's able to live a life that is tolerable and find some kind of peace. That's my hope for her. That we can't offer listeners though, some kind of happy panacea, though there isn't one. This was a monster at loose, for sure, but the people in the system, and today

it's become so hip to put down the system. Every cop on this case, every lawyer, every judge on this case twisted themselves in knots to provide justice to this man, to this monster. They went above and beyond, and it had nothing with race or politics or anything else. It had to do with fundamental decency. That's all. People just sick and tired of living in a society where it seems like decency has become a joke. And everybody here agreed, this is no joke. We're going to take this dead serious.

And Parre not got to go to Pelican Bay, into total isolation where it drives the toughest of men so crazy that they wind up rolling their own feces into little balls and stacking it in the corner. And it's precisely where he belonged. It's only through the goodness and the decency of the people of California that he wasn't executed. So he was given that benefit. It's the only one he's earned, though, you know, just drawing his next breath, he's used up all his luxuries once he does that.

to have that realization. He's still underway righting and trying to appeal to as many people like you say as a website, So he's still thinks he's the victim here. But a very very incredible and fascinating story. Before I let you go, can you tell us it looks like I saw something about Investigation Discovery. I posted it on my website on Facebook about this story being involved Investigation Discovery. Is it?

She remains. We didn't give away her real name or location, but she's there and she talks, and that's where she says to this day that he's the terminator and that's not hyperbole. I believe her he is the terminator with her if he can find out today where she is she'll be gone tomorrow.