The Best American Crime Writing (17 page)

This happened right at 4:00
P.M.
—just as Mike Garrish was punching the clock at work—because at that moment, R. L. Hansard, who lived across the road, heard chilling screams from the direction of the Garrish house. Not sure what he’d heard, he stepped out onto his porch to listen more closely, but then a motorcycle roared to life somewhere and the screams disappeared.

What could Mike Garrish do but go on?

In Michigan it was cold, too damn cold. He stayed for about a
month and then came home to Georgia. His father still lived in the house on Hancock Road. His friends were still around. He tried to fit in. He asked a few girls out but they turned him down. One, whose father had known Mike as far back as Cub Scouts said, “You ain’t going nowhere with that boy.” As District Attorney Mike Crawford would one day put it: “Can you think of anything worse that could happen to you as a young person than to be accused, wrongfully accused, of killing your own sister?”

Mike’s life would’ve been a hell of a lot easier had Hallman told him he was no longer a suspect—better yet if he’d come out with it publicly, like cops sometimes do. Problem was, Hallman was sure but the sheriff wasn’t. Despite the time card, despite witnesses who put Mike at work at the time of the murder, Sheriff Bill Pitts made it clear to agents that he believed Mike killed his sister to keep her quiet about his drug use. The Garrishes would not learn this for many years—and would have their theories about why the sheriff clung so strongly to his—but bottom line, the contradiction in speculation left Mike “twisting in the wind for twenty-two years,” as he puts it. You might in fact call him a two-time victim. First, he lost his sister. Then he was wrongfully considered her killer. “I was so mad and hurt and angry with Jim Hallman,” Mike says now. “He was archenemy number one.”

Mike believed it would be impossible to return to school or to work in Demorest, so he commuted to Gainesville to work for Pepsi, loading trucks. His friends graduated from high school, but Mike’s formal education ended that Wednesday in November.

He joined the Army, got his high school diploma through Savannah Tech, and began driving trucks. Driving trucks was what he had always wanted to do. Four or five years passed. When he got out of the Army he didn’t want to go back to Demorest, so he took off again, to drive semis for a living. He hauled carpet west, produce east, whatever kept him moving.

Still, he couldn’t escape. Once, at a local fall festival, Mike
heard one woman say to another as he passed:
Don’t you recognize him? He’s the one who killed his sister
. And in Savannah, for St. Patrick’s Day festivities, he turned around in a crowd of 10,000 and found himself face-to-face with none other than Jim Hallman. It was a coincidence, nothing more; but to Mike it felt like the haunting never would end. In his worst nightmare he was being led in handcuffs down a prison hallway and saying, “Why won’t you just stop and listen to me? Why won’t you believe me?”

He felt frustrated but also hurt that anyone could think him capable of violence, much less murder; guilt that he wasn’t there for Lisa at the moment she needed him most; self-loathing that his actions—smoking pot, making that sarcastic and ill-timed crack at Hallman—stole precious time from finding the real killer. He spoke to no one of these feelings, not even his family or friends.

During one visit home he attended a cookout at the home of his old friend Todd Kennedy. Todd’s little sister, Johnna, had been Lisa’s best friend. Now Johnna was a woman. She had never believed any of the things people said about Mike. She accepted a date with him, and then another, and eventually they married. They had two daughters, Micah and Autumn, whom they tried to protect from the darkest family truth, that a long time ago everyone thought Daddy killed his little sister.

The family rarely talked about Lisa. On the first day of each November, they would call each other for comfort. Pat was the obsessive one. She grieved doubly—for her slain daughter and for her suspected son. Both were victims; neither had been vindicated. She hired psychics, kept notes, went over the facts of the case until her head swam. She talked to Lisa at night before bedtime, and sometimes in dreams Lisa talked to her. Pat continually called investigators and the district attorney and said check this and that. She would not—could not—let it go.

Meanwhile, the GBI transferred Jim Hallman to his native Atlanta to work on the investigation of the infamous missing and
murdered children case. He still kept in touch with his old friend, boss, and conscience, Douglas County Sheriff Earl Lee, who above all could not abide crimes against children. “What are you doing about Lisa Garrish,” Lee asked Hallman every time they met. “Are you going to let that child’s death go unpunished?” In 1993, when Hallman made it back to the Gainesville office, one of his first acts as special agent in charge was to rekindle the case.

Hallman’s agents began to reinterview people and chase twenty-year-old leads. In 1998, Hallman summoned Mike Garrish and his parents to the GBI office in Gainesville. It was a strange scene. Everyone was twenty years older and had lived with Lisa’s murder in his own way. The last time Mike sat down with Hallman was as a terrified teenager with pot in his bloodstream, and as far as he knew, the electric chair in his future. But Hallman—the law, and Mike’s nearly lifelong archenemy—did not chastise him, accuse him, shout at him, or antagonize him in any way. He did something extraordinary, something long overdue. He apologized.

What Hallman’s agents had just discovered was this: In the hours after Lisa’s killing, bloodhounds from the state prison at nearby Alto tracked a scent from the back door of the Garrish house to the back fence of the Pruitt house next door. The dogs’ handlers did not let them enter the Pruitts’ property. They dismissed the trail—did not even enter it into the investigative file—perhaps because Tony Pruitt’s father was a prison guard and the handlers assumed the dogs had latched onto a familiar scent. To Hallman, though, this was significant, because in the days after the killing he and another agent interviewed the Pruitt family and found reason to suspect the teenage son, Tony.

Tony Pruitt rode the bus with Lisa. He was known among his neighbors and peers to be “weird.” He was absorbed by space stories and comic books and was an only child. His mother once asked Mike to tutor Tony in algebra and Mike did, for one afternoon, but then told his mother he would never go back because Tony giggled
inappropriately and refused to concentrate, was immature beyond words. Neighbors told agents he liked to set bugs and frogs on fire and engaged in the torture of other small animals.

Strange things certainly had happened around the Garrish house. A cow had its eye gouged out, and the pet cat was hanged by a rope from a tree. The Garrishes would come to believe Tony not only watched their comings and goings but also went into their house when they weren’t home. Nobody in Demorest locked doors. An intruder could walk in, get the layout, and even learn that John Garrish kept a couple of handguns and a shotgun in his bedroom closet.

Hallman’s agents also discovered that on the day of the killing, Tony Pruitt had called a friend, Chuck Whitmore, to tell him Lisa had “been shot” to death—even investigators did not know this because until late that night they thought she had been stabbed. Whitmore also told police that Pruitt many years later confessed the murder to him while drunk at a party.

Pruitt had other troubles, too. In 1996, he was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to fifty years in prison. In the process of that investigation, Pruitt’s wife, Mary Sanders, told the GBI that in the mid-1980s Pruitt confessed Lisa Garrish’s murder to her, too, but she had been too afraid to say so until now.

At the GBI office that day, Hallman told Mike they were making a case not against him but against the boy next door.

He didn’t apologize for suspecting Mike back in 1978 but for having had to do his job that way. (“I always kind of felt bad about getting on him so heavy at the time, when we first started,” Hallman says now. “But I was trying to solve a homicide.”) It was merely a tactic, he told Mike, and nothing personal, but he couldn’t reveal this in 1978 or as the years passed, he said, because the case was still open and investigators disagreed about the chief suspect.

Hallman: “We can’t give him that twenty years back, but at least it’s over.”

Mike: “I don’t hold any grudges because I think he was doing the best he could at the time, the best he knew how. But at the same time I don’t think he really knew how hard it was. He has turned out to be one of my biggest heroes because he helped us see it through to the end.”

On November 1, 1998—twenty years to the day of Lisa’s murder—a grand jury indicted Tony Pruitt in her killing. In November 2000, he stood trial. Surely a conviction would clear Mike Garrish in the eyes of the community. Or would it?

All through those days in court the Garrishes swore they heard Mike’s name more than the defendant’s, that Mike was the one on trial. The defense was playing its only hand: If the jury suspects one man, it can’t very well convict another. Yet on the strength of the Whitmore and Sanders testimonies, and on the new fact about the bloodhounds, a jury on November 29, 2000, convicted Pruitt of Lisa Garrish’s murder. He is serving a life sentence in addition to the child molestation sentence.

Does Mike Garrish, now 40, finally feel relief and vindication? Of course. Did the conviction close the door on suspicion? “If it had happened within a year of the murder I think it would have,” he says. “Because this drug on for twenty-two years and twenty-eight days there’s people out there thinking, ‘They pinned that on him just to close the case.’”

It’s like the reverse of trust, which, once lost, is hard to regain: Once doubt is introduced, it can be impossible to dislodge. Before meeting Mike Garrish, for instance, I read the Pruitt trial transcript and background materials on the case and found that Garrish’s guilt seemed, on paper, to be very possible. A few days later, on my way to interview him in Demorest, I was uncomfortable enough to let family know where I would be and with whom. Spending time with Mike Garrish almost immediately erased the doubt, but I
began to understand how others inevitably might have felt in his presence back then, and how those doubts must have affected him for most of his life. “It’s one of those Richard Jewel syndromes,” he says. “He’ll be branded for the rest of his life. No matter what, he is branded. And so am I. Best you can do is not worry about it. Forget about it, pull yourself up, and go on.”

New people now live in the old family house on Hancock Road, but the Hansards still live across the street, and the Pruitts are still next door. Except for the new highway nearby and the trailer park in the woods, the place might as well be frozen in time.

When Mike Garrish goes there now, he can’t get over how small the house looks. He does not wish to go inside. “I feel more sad than anything because this was such a great little town to grow up in,” he says. “This was the kind of town you’d want to raise a family in, and I feel like I can never be a part of it anymore.”

His life is in Athens now, with Johnna and their daughters and his sales job at a manufacturing plant. They live in a nice, large home on the edge of town. The air there feels lighter now. Mike can wake up in the morning without a sense of fear and dread. He can finally think of the happy times with Lisa, and the family can speak of her. He no longer hates Jim Hallman. In fact, Mike called him at Christmas to tell him happy holidays.

He got the answering machine.

Nothing has happened with Mike Garrish since the article was published. He has pretty much gone on with his life, obviously with some relief that he’s been publicly vindicated. He still blames himself for his own misery and says if he hadn’t been so stupid all those years ago none of this would have happened, but I think he’s been too hard on himself. He was a kid caught in an unfathomable situation
.

I
t was about four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, January 26, 2001, when Esther Birkmaier, a single retiree in her seventies, heard screams outside her front door. Birkmaier lives on the sixth floor of an art deco apartment building in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco, one of the city’s prime neighborhoods, known for its panoramic views of the Golden Gate Bridge. As Birkmaier pressed her eye against the peephole, a woman in the hallway outside yelled, “Help me!” Birkmaier couldn’t see much from her limited fish-eye perspective, but what she did see shocked her. There was a blond woman on the floor. A huge dog was attacking her.

Birkmaier phoned 911 and reported “dogs running wild” in her hallway. When she hung up, something began pounding on her door. She panicked, phoned 911 again and this time just screamed into the phone. A man heard the screams and also phoned 911 to report what he thought was a rape. Alec Cardenas, a SWAT-team medic and one of the first cops on the scene, arrived about seven minutes later to find the victim lying facedown on the hall carpet in front of her apartment. She was naked, covered in blood, her upper back punctured with dog bites. Blood was splashed on the walls for about twenty feet down the hall. As Cardenas approached, the woman attempted to push herself up and crawl into her home.

About this time, a middle-aged woman who identified herself as Marjorie Knoller stepped out of Apartment 604. She too was covered in blood. But aside from a cut on her hand and a few scratches
on her arms, she was not injured. She told the police she had been walking her dog Bane down the hall when he lunged at the victim, who was entering her apartment carrying a bag of groceries. “I told her to stay still,” Knoller said. “If she had, this would have never happened.” Knoller told police she had managed to lock Bane and his mate, Hera, in her apartment. She was afraid to go back inside.

Animal control officers found Bane in Knoller’s bathroom. The officers inched open the bathroom door and peeked inside. Bane was a massive creature. He weighed 120 pounds and was just under three feet tall, with a brindle coat of black and tan tiger stripes. Most of his weight was centered in his powerful chest, bulging legs, and squat head, his most imposing feature. Bane had defecated all over the bathroom. He was soaked in blood. Even his teeth were red.

The animal control officers carried a tranquilizer gun that shoots darts potent enough to knock out a large dog. They fired three into Bane and waited fifteen minutes, but he remained standing. Two of the officers ended up hooking Bane with “catch” poles and walked him down to their van, where they euthanized him with 25 cc of sodium pentobarbital a short time later.

Five hours later, the victim, Diane Whipple, a popular 33-year-old lacrosse coach at nearby St. Mary’s College, died at San Francisco General Hospital. Her larynx had been crushed and her throat punctured. But the cause of death was cardiac arrest; she had lost nearly all of her blood. Whipple had been an ail-American lacrosse player at Penn State, then an Olympic track-and-field hopeful—an aspiration she was forced to give up in her mid-twenties to battle cancer. Less than a week before the attack, she had run a marathon.

One police officer initially called her death a “tragic accident,” but a morally neutral judgment failed to satisfy the public, whose outrage soon turned on Bane’s owners, Marjorie Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel. Outwardly, they seemed exemplary San Franciscans. They were do-gooder attorneys honored by the Bar Association of San Francisco for their work helping the homeless
and mentally disabled. They were opera patrons who hobnobbed with some of the city’s wealthiest citizens. Both on their third marriage, they had wed twelve years earlier and were seen by friends such as their colleague Herman Franck as being “deeply in love, devoted to each other.”

But an investigation into their private lives soon yielded secrets that defied explanation. The couple—she is 46, he’s 60—had recently adopted an inmate at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, a 39-year-old man serving a life term for armored-car robbery and attempted murder. Their “son,” Paul “Cornfed” Schneider, is one of the most feared leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and is currently facing federal trial on an indictment for racketeering and a series of murders he allegedly orchestrated from behind bars.

Schneider, who lived in an 11-by-7½-foot concrete cell, had somehow managed to set up a dog-breeding operation—he called it Dog o’ War kennels—outside the prison walls. Schneider’s associates raised Presa Canarios, an unusual breed of attack dog from Spain introduced to the United States a decade or so earlier. Bane, the dog that killed Whipple, was Schneider’s prize stud dog—Presa puppies sell for as much as $2,200. Prison investigators suspected that the dogs were being raised to protect Aryan Brotherhood criminal enterprises such as meth labs.

The fact that Bane and his mate, Hera, wound up living in Knoller and Noel’s Pacific Heights apartment was odd enough. Even stranger was the relationship between Knoller, Noel, and their adopted son. It included pornographic letters that the couple exchanged with Schneider and, it was rumored, photographs of Marjorie Knoller having sex with the dogs. It did not help Knoller’s cause that days after the city filed a warrant to search for photos that depicted “sexual acts … that involved dogs” in Schneider’s cell, she admitted that her nickname for one of the dogs had been “my certified lick therapist.”

Nothing in the portrait of the couple that was emerging made sense. Nor did the bizarre statements they made in public. They suggested Whipple might have egged on the attack by wearing a pheromone-laced perfume or by menstruating. When Knoller appeared before a grand jury, she wove an almost moving tale of how she risked her life trying to save Whipple’s, then blew whatever sympathy she was gaining by saying that Bane had sniffed Whipple’s crotch “like she was a bitch in heat.”

Since late January 2002, Knoller has been on trial for second-degree murder and her husband for manslaughter. Because the case has received such extensive coverage in their hometown, the trial is being held in Los Angeles. “Bob and Marjorie were so hated in San Francisco,” says Herman Franck. “You half expected to see an angry mob with pitchforks and torches to show up outside the courthouse.”

If Knoller and Noel were simply on trial for acting like jerks, this would be an open-and-shut case. But proving that this strange couple had a murderous intent will be difficult for prosecutors. Nor will the trial answer all questions about this case, the story of how the once-prominent San Francisco attorneys wound up adopting an Aryan Brotherhood gang leader and his killer dog reveals as much about individual human folly as it does about the peculiar, corrupting hell of the American penal system. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that their journey into this hell was paved with good intentions.

Originally locked up in 1985 for an armored-car robbery, Paul Schneider has been incarcerated since the early 1990s in the Security Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State Prison, where he is locked in his cell twenty-two and a half hours per day, never allowed outdoors, and permitted contact with the outside world only through letters and strictly monitored visits. Keith Whitley, a former guard
who first encountered Schneider in 1987, calls him “the most dangerous man in California.” Schneider is deemed such a security risk that when he was moved last fall out of Pelican Bay in preparation for his federal trial, U.S. marshals and the California Highway Patrol blocked traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge in order to transport him across it in a heavily defended motorcade.

When I first meet Schneider, he appears across the reinforced-glass visitation window at his temporary home in the Sacramento County jail looking amazingly fit despite his chalky complexion. Throughout the interview, a steady clanking sound emanates from deep within the jail—chains sliding, locks tumbling, doors slamming, which together sound like the rumbling of the empty stomach of a mechanical beast. Schneider has thick blond hair combed straight back, a direct, blue-eyed gaze, stands about six feet two and weighs 220 pounds. Muscles, traced with blue veins, bulge beneath his pale skin. His right hand is tattooed with an A and a B, spare advertisements for his affiliation with the notorious Aryan Brotherhood gang.

Schneider, born in 1962, grew up in Cerritos, California, with two younger sisters, his mother, and his stepfather, a retired Air Force officer who ran an industrial cleaning service. He portrays his childhood as a happy one. “My stepdad used to take me flying in Cessnas,” he says. “I worked on pit crews for drag-racing boats.”

He says that he always loved, dogs. When he was about 16, Schneider found a summer job with a Los Angeles company called Continental K-9, which specialized in lending junkyard-protection dogs to small businesses in the city’s crime-ridden industrial zone. He would drop off the dogs at night and pick them up early in the morning. Most of the animals were semi-wild, vicious mutts. “Thieves would cut tendons in the dogs’ legs,” he says. “That was when I learned how loyal dogs are. They would still try to do their job even when their legs were sliced.”

In 1979, after graduating from high school early, Schneider
joined the Air Force and was assigned to a special Strategic Air Command unit in eastern Washington. He worked as a crewman aboard KC-130 aerial refueling tankers, large planes that accompanied heavy bombers to the edge of Soviet airspace. He lived a week at a time in an underground bunker called a “mole hole,” and he participated in round-the-clock drills in which crews were told nuclear attack was imminent and were given five minutes to scramble their jets. They were never told whether these drills were actual or make-believe Armageddon until their missions were over. The isolation and intense psychological pressure of his military duty would later prove excellent preparation for Schneider’s ability to withstand tortuous conditions within the corrections system.

Schneider’s sister Tammy offers a much darker view of her brother’s childhood than the idyllic picture he paints. Tammy, 38 and married to a firefighter, lives in a rural community about an hour from where she and Paul grew up. She is an attractive woman with an almost doll-like presence, an impression created by her limited ability to move her hands or arms as a result of brain cancer she has battled for twelve years. According to Tammy, the house where she and her brother grew up was run on a regimen that blended military discipline and sadism. “Our house was a prison, and our stepdad was the warden,” she says. He would wake the children up in the middle of the night to make them scrub pots or scour the bathroom floor with toothbrushes. Tammy’s first beating occurred when she was eight. A couple of years later, her stepfather began to sexually abuse her. “Paul was very protective of me,” she remembers. “He stood up to our stepdad. That man used to beat the shit out of Paul.”

Schneider did not last long in the authoritarian world of the military. According to Tammy, he and his wife split up two years after he enlisted, and he was kicked out of the Air Force for writing bad checks. He moved back to Cerritos and became the manager of a local pizza parlor. On one of his nights off, he put on a mask, armed
himself with a handgun, and robbed the restaurant. A short while later, he began to notice the big sacks of money carried by armored-car drivers at the Alpha Beta supermarket where Tammy worked as a checkout girl. He developed an irrational personal hatred of the guards. “I couldn’t believe how arrogant the guards were,” Schneider says. “They’d come into the store, with their little revolvers pointing to the ground, and they’d bump into people without even apologizing. I wanted to show them that they weren’t so tough.”

Schneider robbed the guards and got away with nearly $100,000. Several weeks later, according to his sister, he showed up at his stepfather’s house flaunting a new motorcycle. His stepfather, suspecting that Schneider was behind the robbery, tipped off the cops, who began to build a case against Schneider. In 1985, at the age of 23, he was arrested and eventually sent to New Folsom State Prison, in California. By July 1987, he had earned his way into the Aryan Brotherhood by stabbing a guard in the neck.

Schneider thrived in the brutal prison environment, pitting his will against the authorities’ every chance he had. In 1990, when he was brought into a courthouse under heavy guard to testify in a case involving another inmate, Schneider pulled a knife he had fashioned from a prison soup ladle and stabbed a defense attorney several times. Like a magician guarding the secret behind a trick, Schneider has never revealed how he smuggled the weapon into the courtroom, though his victim’s wounds contained unmistakable clues: They were infected with fecal matter.

After the incident, Schneider penned a declaration explaining why he’d attacked the attorney. The assault stemmed from his desire to humiliate a warden at New Folsom State Prison. “I took [associate warden] Campbell’s boasting of his new vaunted security procedures as a challenge,” he wrote. As for why he chose his victim, he wrote, “I didn’t like his attitude, his smart-aleck remarks, nor his demeanor. So I stabbed him. In retrospect, it was a bad idea.”

Schneider picked up a life sentence. Displaying an uncanny ability to harass the system even in defeat, he successfully sued the prison administration for excessively X-raying him every time he was transported before and after the soup ladle-knife smuggling episode and collected $11,666.66.

In the meantime, Schneider was transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison shortly after it opened in 1989. The prison was intended to be the crown jewel of the California Department of Corrections, which operates one of the largest penal systems in the world, a gulag with ninety-eight facilities, more than 300,000 inmates under its jurisdiction, and nearly 50,000 employees.

Pelican Bay rises unexpectedly out of redwood forest a few miles off Highway 101, on the desolate Northern California coast, 360 miles north of San Francisco. Its antiseptic corridors resemble passageways in a large, slumbering spaceship. “When you first go inside Pelican Bay,” says Russell Clanton, an attorney who represents several inmates there, “it feels like being inside an enormous sensory deprivation tank.” The 3,200 inmates are stored like factory-raised poultry in small concrete cells.