Bestiality on Trial; Kandahar; Gitlin Alert!

Weird Couple, Killer Dog

West of the Rockies people may pretend an interest in Enron, the treatment of the Al Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo, even the volcano in Congo?but where their attention is truly fixed is on an L.A. courtroom where the dog-maul trial is in its opening throes. Since day one, which was almost exactly a year ago, the case has always been a show-stopper: killer dogs, a lesbian with her throat torn out, impenitent dog owners, UNNATURAL ACTS, plus porn photos mailed to a con nicknamed Cornfed, roosting in California's toughest prison. No wonder people skip past the Enron stories.

The case got moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco because Judge James Warren agreed that the dog owners, lawyers Marjorie Knoller (46) and her husband Robert Noel (60), couldn't get a fair trial in the Bay Area. The San Francisco DA, Terence Hallinan, has charged them both with involuntary manslaughter, with Knoller also facing a second-degree murder rap. Unable to make bail now at $1 million each, they've been in jail since last spring.

As jury selection proceeded last week, there was a torchlight vigil in San Francisco, remembering Diane Whipple, 33, the lacrosse instructor and runner who had her throat ripped out by the late Bane, a presa canario dog weighing 120 pounds, about the same as his victim. In Knoller's carefree estimation Bane and another presa canario, Hera, who's currently on death row awaiting execution, were "no more dangerous than Chihuahuas." It's one of the remarks that has created the widespread public impression that Knoller lacks contrition for Bane's conduct.

And in truth, she could have handled things better. Suppose, for example, when she returned to her apartment in the high-price neighborhood of Pacific Heights and stood there while Bane attacked Whipple, tearing her clothes off, crushing her larynx and spattering the corridor with her blood, she had screamed with horror, fought to pull Bane off, then rushed to call 911. Such conduct might have found favor with the public, or with a jury. As things stand, she allegedly took in the scene, dug around in her purse for her keys, went inside and didn't dial 911. The neighbors made the emergency call.

And take Noel. He hasn't won too many fans either, in part because of letters found in the cell of Paul "Cornfed" Schneider, 39, adopted as a son by Noel and Knoller not long after the fatal mauling, and currently residing in Pelican Bay Prison on a life sentence for aggravated assault and attempted murder. Schneider and another Pelican Bay inmate had organized the training of Bane and Hera as part of a business venture, selling presa canarios as guard dogs, probably to drug gangs. One letter from Noel to Schneider expresses amusement at an attack by Bane on a blind woman. Another ridicules Whipple as "a little mousy blonde" who was terrified of Bane after an earlier confrontation.

And business seems to have had a slightly unusual alliance with pleasure. In one letter, Noel alluded to sexual arrangements of an unspecified nature among the various dramatis personae. "I wanted to thank you," he graciously informed Schneider, "for the thoughts expressed about your feelings about how comfortable you would feel about Marjorie and I inhabiting your body and mind." Hmm.

Similarly unalluring was Noel's speculation, installed in a lengthy letter to DA Hallinan after Whipple's death, suggesting that Whipple had brought about her own demise because her perfume had given off pheromones that whipped Bane into a frenzy. Knoller expanded on this theme in her grand jury testimony, cited by the prosecution, in which she said Bane's initial interest in Whipple appeared to be sexual. "He was sniffing, he was acting agitated," Knoller testified, adding she had never seen Bane respond that way to a human being. "He was sniffing her and acting peculiar..." Also, "He put his head in Miss Whipple's crotch" and responded to her as he would to a "bitch in heat."

Of course the defense is desperate to persuade Judge Warren to shield the jury from insinuations of bestiality among Knoller, Noel, Bane and Hera. California juries have so far refused to convict killer-dog owners of murder. Most defense lawyers quoted in the press agree that even in this case it might be hard to nail Knoller on second-degree murder or even on involuntary manslaughter, or particularly Noel, who wasn't even present. But if they get painted as dog fuckers all bets are off.

The prosecutors are similarly eager to get dog-fucking innuendoes in front of the jury. James Hammer, from the DA's office, argued for admission of sex-related materials into the trial last week, and though he didn't directly level charges of bestiality, he argued that "any evidence, if it exists, regarding any inappropriate sexual conduct by the dogs" would be relevant and should not be excluded. Then he rolled out the magnificently melodramatic assertion that they "blurred the boundaries between dogs and humans, with fatal consequences."

Nedra Ruiz, Knoller's lawyer, furiously battled such slurs and maintained that the only sex-related incident with the dogs Bane and Hera happened when the animals ran into Knoller and Noel's bedroom while they were having sex. It was probably that pheromone thing again. Ruiz dismissed the "boundary-blurring" stuff as "specious filth," albeit adding prudently: "Your honor, there is no sex in this case, in terms of the touchy-feely stuff that that word normally invokes." This careful phraseology might be Ruiz's way of coping with what an AP story describes as letters from the couple to Schneider detailing sexual activity among Noel, Knoller and Bane, along with photos of a naked Knoller. The defense has managed to get these letters and photographs suppressed.

Rumors suggest Knoller was giving Bane a blowjob. As a Southern friend of mine who has to listen to a lot of confessions said to me last year, "Alex, t'aint nothing to hear a man say he's been sucking on his dog's peter." It's all more sedately put in the late J.R. Ackerley's book My Dog Tulip, bible of British pooch lovers and now a big hit over here.

The defense has scheduled as many as 35 character witnesses, including numerous admirers of Bane prepared to testify to his sterling and peace-loving nature, and is also trying to suppress non-sex-related material such as photographs of Bane's teeth. As defense counselBruce Hotchkiss put it in a court filing, "All large dogs have big teeth and are capable of killing a human. Malice cannot be implied by mere possession of a large dog." All California's large dog owners say Aye to that, including Alexander Cockburn, who has espied on a daily basis the shining fangs of the 75-pound Jasper, part Irish wolfhound with genetic reminiscences of border collie, lab and maybe Airedale, chomping eagerly on bones (leftovers, I hasten to say), or chewing with less delight his Hill's Science Diet (lamb and rice mix). Just the other day I got a note from Pacific Gas and Electric giving me the meter-reader's schedule and reminding me that recent changes in California's statutory code make owners liable to felony charges if their dogs injure anyone. Jasper, a stray who was plucked off the streets of Laytonville, narrowly missed the lethal needle and then lucked out, gets stern lectures these days about the need to keep his mouth shut, particularly in the presence of meter-readers.

Further evidence of the bright era now dawning in Afghanistan: life is returning to normality in Kandahar after the grim supervision of the Taliban clerics. On accounts by Tim Reid in the London Times and more recently John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker, joyful sons of sodom are to be seen driving along the boulevards of the ancient city, their catamites demurely installed in the passenger seat. Reid knowledgeably discloses that Kandahar has long been fabled as the San Francisco of South Asia. So delirious are the peculiar enthusiasms of the Pashtun that local wisdom has it that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posteriors. It seems that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilizing the Taliban, in yet another manifestation of that intolerance that has so aroused the indignation of many liberals, prompting them to cheer on the B-52s.

There was a famous fracas in 1994 when two warlords faced off in a dispute over which of them would have the right to rape an attractive young fellow who had fallen into their clutches. There was gunplay in which civilians were killed. Eventually the lad was freed by Mullah Omar's group and the one-eyed zealot was promptly inundated with requests to help in other such disputes.

The inhabitants of Kabul, who had seen their city devastated and thousands killed in the war between warlords (one of whom was a particularly notorious gay muj called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar), similarly yearned for the security, albeit puritanical, offered by the Taliban. Farmers and poor city dwellers who had seen mass rapes of their daughters by the warlords' armed rabble strongly supported the Taliban, reckoning that the compulsory burqas were no bad thing if it betokened the safety of women going out in public.

One of Omar's first decrees when the Taliban took power in 1994 was the suppression of homosexuality. Convicted sodomites endured Trial by Wall Push. Reid offers the example of one such trial in February of 1998 when "three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandahar were taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was pushed over by tank." Two of them died, but in an instructive example of how the Taliban tempered its stern ways with an acknowledgment of the captious workings of Allah, one crawled away to live and love another day.

But now pre-Taliban normality is returning to Kandahar, just as it is to the rest of Afghanistan, where tens of thousands are fleeing to Pakistan to escape banditry and starvation. "One can see the pairs returning," Reid reports. "Usually a heavily bearded man, seated next to, or walking with, a clean-shaven, fresh faced youth." He adds that "it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned" but that they accede out of poverty. "Once the boy falls into the man's clutches?nearly always men with a wife and family?he is marked for life, although the Kandaharis accept these relationships as part of their culture."

"They say birds flew with both wings with the Taliban," Muhammad tells Reid. "But not any more." Is it not stirring to learn of such fruits of that Pax America!

New Gitlin Peril! Millions Menaced

Sources at FEMA are saying that at one point in January they contemplated evacuating San Francisco, fearing that a deadly toxic release of Gitlins menaced the city. Newly installed Gitlin sensors blared the alarm amid distribution of San Francisco-based Mother Jones magazine. An alert CDC worker speedily located the poisonous Gitlin fumes in a tract by the New York-based media critic, containing lines such as: "To the left-wing fundamentalist, the only interesting or important brutality is at least indirectly the United States' doing... In the United States, adherents of this kind of reflexive anti-Americanism are a minority (isolated, usually, on campuses and in coastal cities, in circles where reality checks are scarce)..."

Says the CDC man, Bill Bannion, "I've become something of an expert in Gitlin outbreaks down the years, so I knew right away what I was dealing with." Federal officials are edgy about what one official termed "an upcoming possible national emergency." Gitlin, who teaches on a coastal campus, is scheduled to contribute a volume to Basic Books' new series, "The Art of Mentoring." Already published in the series are tracts by Alan Dershowitz and Christopher Hitchens.