Lead prosecutor Jim Hammer also had a flair for the dramatic. He was known as “The Hammer” for his unsparing style of questioning, and he kept Whipple’s ring in his pocket throughout the trial, at one point displaying it to reporters.
The case made Hammer, who identifies as gay, a cause célèbre in San Francisco’s gay community, and with good reason: The jury’s verdict in the criminal case bolstered arguments coming out of the landmark legal ruling in the civil case, which found Smith had the right to bring a wrongful death suit as a gay domestic partner. But the media still flocked to Guilfoyle.
“She controlled quite a bit of publicity because she was seeing Gavin Newsom and married him within a year of the trial,” said Dennis Riordan, a lawyer for the defense. “But it was Hammer’s show… ” Experts observing at the time said getting a murder conviction was “going to be difficult.” Kenneth Phillips, an attorney specializing in dog-mauling cases, said it “almost never happens in a case like this” and that the dog-mauling case, “just isn’t a murder case — it never was.”
But the prosecution ultimately threaded the needle, and many cited Hammer’s passionate closing as the reason, including those who did so grudgingly, like Riordan who called it “grossly prejudicial” but effective. In an hour-long rebuttal, Hammer recreated the moment of Whipple’s death. “She was alone, unable to even talk, and a dog was still running lose with her, and she tried to breathe again, her voice closed in again on her, the two holes in her larynx, and she crawled and she tried to push herself up, and she crawled some more to try to get home, and no one was there, no one,” Hammer told the jury. “That’s what these people’s recklessness did, caused that kind of death.”
A 2001 profile of Noel and Knoller in the San Francisco Chronicle portrays the couple not as evil but insufferably myopic, having styled themselves as “champions for the powerless and the unpopular, convinced they were decent people doing good deeds.” But sealed court documents that were improperly leaked by “law enforcement officials” presented a one-sided picture of the case. The documents included salacious and unverified descriptions of the defendants, depicting them as not merely eccentric hermits but a villainous pair engaged in heinous behaviors, from bestiality and illicit affairs to an “incestuous love triangle” with John Paul Schneider, the Pelican Bay convict. Prison authorities claimed Schneider wanted the dogs trained to protect drug labs in Mexico, although the FBI found no wrongdoing and no charges were filed.
Guilfoyle skillfully engaged the national media to advance the prosecution’s arguments, including the notion that the defendants had ignored warning signs the dogs were vicious. And when in November 2001 a questionably sourced prison intelligence report arose that Guilfoyle was apparently the subject of death threats from Schneider — whose ties to the Aryan Brotherhood and curious relationship with the couple were highlighted prominently by the prosecution — she leaned into it.
“The information is a bit thin — we frankly don’t know how credible it is, but precautions are being taken just in case,” a Sacramento source told the San Francisco Chronicle of the death threat at the time. Nonetheless, the alleged murder contract quickly became cemented in Guilfoyle’s narrative.
Guilfoyle spoke about it on Fox News in 2017, telling Tucker Carlson of the alleged incident: “I had a contract out on my life to have me killed because they didn’t like the Puerto Rican lawyer that was prosecuting these people. They’re lawyers right? So they said, ‘Oh no, we don’t want her,’” she explained, a verbal pivot that seemed to suggest the reported murder contract came directly from Knoller and Noel and not Schneider.
In December 2001, ahead of the dog-mauling trial in Los Angeles, Guilfoyle played into this storyline again. She wore a bulletproof vest to a rehearsal dinner ahead of her wedding to Newsom — a detail that didn’t go unnoticed by media outlets at the time and one that even made it into a Washington Post profile in 2018, along with the revelation that “police inspected the church before her wedding.” (Knoller and Noel received hundreds of threatening phone calls and 20 death threats, according to their lawyer at the time, and their car had its windshield smashed and tires slashed in the secure parking lot below their apartment, but the news never stirred headlines or police protection.)
It didn’t help matters that Noel and Knoller were their own worst representatives legally and in the media. Journalists had a field day with the defendants, and Judge Warren would soon refer to them as “the most despised couple in this city.” Shortly after Whipple’s attack, the couple held a press conference outside of Pelican Bay, highlighting their ties to the controversial convict and flying in the face of one of the most common pieces of advice people in their profession give defendants under criminal investigation: Don’t talk to the press.
Soon after, Noel and Knoller attracted more negative attention with an early appearance on Good Morning America in which they appeared to blame the victim for not escaping while she still could. “I wouldn’t say that it was an attack, and I did everything humanly possible to avoid the incident. Ms. Whipple had ample opportunity to move into her apartment,” Knoller said on Good Morning America. “She was in her apartment. She could have just slammed the door shut. I would have.”
Even after they were indicted for second-degree murder and sent to jail, the couple continued to self-sabotage, calling Smith’s wrongful death suit a “fraud and sham” and trying to have it thrown out on the grounds that as a gay partner she wasn’t a legal heir. The argument was in line with discriminatory practices of the day, and some experts assumed it would prevail. But Noel and Knoller lost that battle, and it likely didn’t help that rather than seeking legal counsel, the lawyers had represented themselves, typing up their court papers from jail.
Later, Knoller showed a more emotional side to the courtroom in Los Angeles. Sobbing, she described how she’d fought and failed to control her dog, explaining that she had only gone on television to counter media “misinformation” and let people know “this was a totally unexpected, horrible event.” But it was too late. Jury members couldn’t reconcile that Knoller with the robotic lawyer they’d seen on Good Morning America, whose callous answers they could go back and replay, as prosecutors had to great effect during the trial. “We didn’t go into this deciding we would hate these people,” a juror explained, following the vote to convict for murder.
The ruling troubled criminal law experts like Phil Pennypacker, a then-defense attorney who would go on to serve as a judge for the Superior Court of Santa Clara County in California, who told the Los Angeles Times in 2002 that the case quite clearly did not rise to the level of murder. “[Knoller] lost control of a dog who weighed many, many pounds and was very, very muscular,” he said. “It’s like punishing somebody for not thinking through the consequences of what could have happened.”
Franklin Zimring, faculty director of criminal justice studies at UC Berkeley’s law school, has disagreed with the murder verdict since it was first made almost 20 years ago. “The problem with the circumstance being so unusual is jumping to the conclusion that the dog’s controllers knew and intended to take a life-threatening risk,” he said. “I think it was unjustified.”
But for many lay observers, the notion it was all a tragic accident didn’t square with the lawyerly, almost robotic response from Knoller and Noel, who seemed incapable of registering the appropriate degree of compassion and pity for Whipple and her loved ones.
Local reporter Ed Walsh, who has interviewed Knoller a number of times over the years, said “she did express a lot of remorse about what happened” and that he had a very different opinion of her after talking to her in person. “I think they made a mistake by talking to the press, coming across so badly, and then shutting up because it was the only impression the public had of them. The media went with this narrative early on that they were this cold, calculating couple and it just kind of stuck,” he said.
But life in prison for murder? Warren always thought “their conduct from the time that they got the dogs to the weeks after Diane Whipple’s death was despicable,” as he said in his ruling. But that didn’t make them murderers.