RED ZONE

Crime writer Jones (The Embrace, 1999, etc.) details every creepy circumstance that led to last year’s notorious San Francisco dog mauling.

On a winter day in 2001, Diane Whipple was torn to pieces at her apartment doorstep by her neighbors’ dogs. Presa Canarios have been bred for centuries to be tough, but the dogs in this case are hardly worse than the unsavory trio whose relationship is the primary focus of Jones’s reporting: lawyers Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel, who were caring for the animals, and Paul Schnieder, the man who owned them. A jailed Aryan Brotherhood honcho (“good at making bad things happen, [he] lived to create death, ruin, and destruction”), Schnieder may having been arranging to breed his pets for the dog-fight circuit. As Jones describes it, the convict does pretty much what he chooses from his maximum-security cell at Pelican Bay State Prison, including possibly ordering hits on enemies. Knoller and Noel began by representing Schnieder, then exchanged erotic letters and photographs, and ultimately adopted him. Stranger still was the lawyers’ refusal to intervene when the animals in their charge got out of hand during neighborhood walks and attacked other dogs. It’s all very nasty—the fungoid lawyers, the odious Schnieder in the shadows, the wicked dogs—and Jones keeps the sinister beat thrumming along with prose that has a dark vitality. She makes a few strange comments, saying of erroneous reports concerning a prosecutor’s past, “in reality . . . readers and viewers didn’t care about the truth.” But in general she lines up her facts carefully and strives for objectivity, even though the word “innocence” simply doesn't apply to Knoller or Noel (and forget about Schnieder). Here’s more good news: Schnieder still operates out of his office at Pelican Bay. Rarely has the phrase “safely behind bars” meant so little.

Terrifying, and told just so. (b&w photo insert, not seen)