San Francisco — The two dogs suspected of attacking Diane Whipple one of which delivered savage, fatal bites to her neck twice had attacked a blind woman and her seeing-eye dog in the months before the mauling, according to a document among an inch-thick stack of papers unsealed Thursday.
The records, which include witness after witness testifying to the ferocity of the two dogs, sharply undercut the claims of owners Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller that they were protective but gentle canines that got along well with strangers and were so nice that one of them even softly carried a kitten in its mouth.
The papers were unsealed Thursday after the Mercury News, the Associated Press and San Francisco Chronicle asked the judge to make public search warrants in the case and the probable cause theories supporting them.
What emerges is a sketch of a couple with a fetish for fighting dogs and a strong sense, at least to the public, that the canines were harmless and under their control. But to some neighbors in their posh Pacific Heights apartment building, the message they got from the couple and their dogs was to beware.
Skip Cooley, a neighbor, told police the couple kept a mat outside their door that read, "Ask not for whom the dog barks. The dog barks for thee." In correspondence with Cooley, after he complained of barking, Noel said he and his wife, both lawyers with many prisoner clients, have been "the subject of attacks." The yelp of his dog, Noel wrote, "is preferable to the sound of a wall-penetrating bullet going through a room."
The charges stem from the Jan. 26 fatality, when the couple's two Presa Canario-mastiff mixes attacked their 33-year-old neighbor in the hallway of the apartment building. Knoller, bloodied and bitten during the attack, has said she tried to shield Whipple with her body and faulted the woman for not trying to escape inside her own apartment when she had a chance.
The documents also built a stronger link between the couple and their recently adopted son, Paul Schneider, 38, and his cellmate, Dale Bretches, 44. The felons started a dog training enterprise while both were serving time in Pelican Bay penitentiary, a state prison that is home to some of California's most dangerous inmates.
Perhaps the most intriguing bits of new information were uncovered in the search of Schneider's and Bretches' cell.
Joe Akin, a prison guard sergeant, said searchers "discovered letters indicating Noel and Knoller's dogs bit a blind woman and her guide dog on two separate occasions sometime between June of 2000 and January 26, 2001." While the seemingly damning admission allegedly came from the couple themselves, no police report can be found showing such a victim ever came forward to complain.
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