Mad Dogs & Lawyers
A couple of weeks before Knoller and Noel went up to Janet Coumbs’ farm to pick up the dogs, they had hired a local veterinarian named Dr. Donald Martin to examine them. Though he gave the dogs shots and went home, something about Bane troubled the veterinarian. A few days later, he sent Knoller a letter to inform her of his fears about the dog. “I would be professionally amiss if I did not mention the following so you can be prepared,” he wrote. “These animals would be a liability in any household.”
Knoller says she didn’t read the letter until long after receiving it. She and Noel nicknamed the dogs “the Mutleys” and “the kids.” They structured their lives around the animals, never leaving them alone for more than an hour. Bane was “the Banester.” Several mornings a week, Knoller woke up early and cooked bacon, pork and hamburger for the dogs, which she fed to them along with their dog food.
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Keith Whitley, the former guard who used to socialize with Knoller and Noel, noticed the change in them. “I’d get on the phone with Bob to ask him about a case,” he says, “and all he did was talk about how big Bane’s balls were.” Whitley visited their apartment about a week before the fatal attack: “They used to have this charming flat. The dogs turned it into a piss pot. Bob had to bring the dogs out one at a time when he introduced them to me because he couldn’t control them.”
Awful things started happening almost immediately after they brought Bane home. Bane got into a fight with a dog at a beach four days after he arrived in San Francisco and nearly snapped Noel’s finger clean off. Bane and Hera scared the hell out of people in the building and neighborhood. Henry Putek, an unassuming parakeet owner who also lives on the sixth floor, was pinned against a wall one evening when Bane slipped out of Knoller and Noel’s partially open door and charged him. “He stared at me silently,” said Putek. “With drool hanging down, stinking and smelly.”
Neighborhood residents claimed that Bane and Hera attacked at least three local dogs, nearly killing one of them, a German shepherd. People who lived in the area describe their encounters with the dogs in almost supernatural terms. One neighbor recalls that birds started flying crazily when Bane and Hera walked by. Another resident, Alex de Laszlo, remembered encountering the dogs outside a local coffee shop. “I put my hand on Bane’s head,” he said. “It held a sensation very distinct from any dog I had ever petted before. There was incredible tension. There was something strong and dark about this animal.”
From the vantage point of his concrete box at Pelican Bay, Schneider had an entirely different perspective: “Everything was going perfect. I was getting photos of Bane. Bob and Marjorie told me everything he was doing.” Schneider says Bane was growing up right. “I never wanted to see Bane go looking for fights,” he says. “But if he was forced into it, I would want him to represent himself well, and not run away crying.”
At this point, Schneider was on the verge of realizing an impossible dream. One of his associates on the outside had secured space in Dog World to place an ad for Schneider’s Dog o’ War kennels. “Life was so good, I felt like I did when I was on the streets,” says Schneider. “In some ways, I felt better.” He sent a picture of Bane to his sister with the caption “El Supremo Bane. Born to raise hell.”
On January 11th, 2001, Robert Noel wrote Schneider one of his almost daily letters recounting everything that had transpired that day with “the kids.” Nearing the end of the letter, Noel described an encounter between the dogs and a neighbor. “As soon as the [elevator] door opens at six, one of our newer female neighbors, a timorous little mousy blond who weighs less than Hera, is met by the dynamic duo exiting and almost has a coronary.”
The “mousy blond” he referred to was Diane Whipple, the St. Mary’s College lacrosse coach who died exactly fifteen days later in that same hall way. Whipple had had run-ins with the dogs and had made her feelings about her neighbors clear. She claimed to her girlfriend, Sharon Smith, that one of them had snapped at her two weeks earlier. She told her friend Sarah Miller that Noel “was an asshole. He better do something about those dogs.”
On the afternoon of January 26th, Whipple arrived home carrying a bag of groceries with some tacos she planned to make for dinner for Smith and herself. Around twenty minutes earlier, at about 3:40, Knoller says she had been working on legal research alone in her apartment (Noel was out of the city on business) when Bane started to whimper. She put him on a leash, walked him on the roof of the building and came inside to put a bag of Bane’s poop in the garbage chute when she noticed Whipple standing about thirty feet away by her door.
“She was staring at Bane,” says Knoller. Then, for no obvious reason, Knoller says, Bane dragged her toward Whipple. “I battled him the whole way,” Knoller insists. While Knoller struggled with Bane and Hera, who had also come into the hall, for several minutes, she says that Whipple simply stood silently in front of her apartment. Her front door was open, but according to Knoller she didn’t bother to go inside, even after Bane jumped up on the wall and stuck his head in her crotch. All she said, according to Knoller, was, “Your dog jumped on me.”
Knoller says that she finally tried to push Whipple into her apartment for her own good, but Whipple resisted, at which point Bane bit her throat and proceeded to rip her clothes apart. Knoller claims the entire attack lasted a good twenty minutes, during which time, she says, “I put my life on the line. It’s only dumb luck he didn’t kill me.”
Mad Dogs & Lawyers, Page 8 of 9