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…
