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Two Dogs, a Death, and the Trial That Made Kimberly Guilfoyle a Television Star
A dog-mauling trial turned the San Francisco prosecutor into a household name — and paved her way to Fox News and the White House
Perched at the top of a hill in the wealthy San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights, the ornate apartment complex at 2398 Pacific Avenue with views of the Golden Gate Bridge was an unlikely place for a violent death.
It was early 2001, and the country was in the final blush of a decade of worldwide peace and prosperity. In San Francisco, tech startups like Craigslist and Napster were newly ascendant, local media was still thriving and looking for juicy stories, and the tough-on-crime sensibilities of the 1990s still ruled the court system.
Marjorie Knoller, 45, and her husband Robert Noel, 59, lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of the 1920s-style apartment building. They were defense attorneys and self-described “left-wing liberals” who had spent much of their careers representing the homeless and dispossessed, those they saw as “getting screwed by the system.” They had converted a closet into an office where they worked, among other things, to defend prison guards and inmates in lawsuits against the corrections department, and support incarcerated people at Pelican Bay State Prison in nearby Crescent City.
Their win record in court was fairly typical for general practice lawyers, but no case was too small or too strange. Noel once represented an officer claiming he was discriminated against by superiors for refusing to shave his handlebar mustache. The couple would later describe themselves as work-obsessed to the exclusion of much social connection, and they had more or less withdrawn from society.
Noel and Knoller had been keeping two dogs as a favor to a young inmate they had befriended at Pelican Bay, John Paul Schneider, whom they’d gotten to know through their legal work and would later formally adopt, a move they claimed was meant to grant him legal protections. The dogs were Presa Canarios, a mastiff breed from the Canary Islands known colloquially as Presas. Originally bred for guarding livestock, and commonly used for dogfighting, Presas are…
