The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (6 page)

On the walk home, after chewing him out, she thought to ask why he'd thrown the first punch. This wasn't an act of the boy she knew.

“He called me a nerd,” her son informed her.

“You keep going like this,” she said, “and you've got nothing but disappointment coming to you . . .” She went on, but a part of her heart was pleased. Members of her family had been called a lot of things over the generations, but she was pretty sure “nerd” had never been one.

Rob ultimately expressed the appropriate sentiments to project shame. She sensed that he, like the principal, was humoring her so that she would leave him alone, and then he could wait for his father to call from jail, so he could tell the man how he'd won the fight. The other boy had come away with a black eye. Rob had only a bruise on his shoulder from hitting the steps.

A
fter his arrest
, Skeet was assigned a public defender. Their initial meetings did not involve the events of August 8 at all but rather Skeet's finances. The lawyer filed a plea of not guilty, but that was his only legal motion over the course of the fall; in January 1988, the public defender's office wrote Skeet in prison to say that they were denying him representation, due to his failure to prove indigency. They referred to the house he owned on Pierson Street, which according to “reliable real estate brokers in the area” had a value of between $70,000 and $110,000. The letter also cited a pending civil action, from a car accident Skeet had been in years earlier, in which he still had an expectation of financial recovery (the insurance claim for damages and lost work was $3,174). Skeet began appearing in court without representation, and the judge advised him that if he truly could not afford a lawyer, he could appeal the public defender's decision. This process took almost a year, a year of nearly cosmic miscommunications and misunderstandings between Skeet, the public defender's office, and the appellate court—and a year in which the defendant remained lawyerless, his witnesses uninterviewed. The public defender's office accused Skeet of intentionally mailing the wrong forms and failing to read the case studies they had cited; Skeet accused them of misinformation and outright sabotage. He complained about lack of access to the law library, functioning copy machines, stamps, and envelopes. A recent legislative change, in which indigency came to be decided by the judiciary branch rather than the public defender's office, caused additional confusion as Skeet continued sending appeals to the wrong office without being notified of the change. In nine hearings spread over eleven months, Skeet fought not for his innocence but for his right to someone capable of pleading his innocence.

On November 2, 1988—a year and three months after the murders—his case was once again taken up by the public defender's office. The entire delay boiled down to a single overlooked form and the proper submission of a photo of Skeet's burnt-out property on Pierson Street,
which Jackie took.

Almost five months later, on March 28, 1989, Skeet's newly appointed attorneys filed a motion to set “the dates for the filing and hearing of all pretrial motions”—in other words, a motion to schedule further motions. After more conferences, this date was set for August 7, 1989, exactly two years after the Moore sisters' final evening together. The hearing of pretrial motions commenced September 6 and continued into October. During that span, Irving Gaskins, in whose home Skeet had been apprehended, passed away. Due to the prolonged legal confusion, Gaskins had never given a formal statement to the defense attorneys that could be presented in a trial. According to Skeet, Gaskins had been prepared to testify that the murder weapon and ammunition had not, in fact, been found in his belt—that the police had planted it on him. After all, what killer would fail to get rid of his weapon in the span of a full day following his crime? What sensible human being would carry a loaded gun around a sick, elderly man and his grandchildren?

On February 22, 1990, Skeet's lawyers filed a motion to set the trial date, asserting that in addition to the loss of key witnesses and inability to properly strategize a defense, the long delay between arrest and trial might give the impression to the jury that the defendant's guilt was not really at issue, just the punishment he should receive. On March 9, a trial date was scheduled for September 10. On that day, now three years and one month after the murders, jury selection began for
State of New Jersey
v.
Robert Douglas.

Three years: three years during which Skeet waited in jail along with all the other accused murderers and rapists and pedophiles of Essex County—like a new, warped incarnation of the neighbors he'd once spent his afternoons chatting up along the avenues of East Orange; three years, or more than eleven hundred days, on each of which he was permitted one hour of exercise and fifteen minutes of phone time, calls made collect at extremely high prison rates; three years, or 160 weeks, during each of which Jackie took Rob to see his father; three years during which Skeet, on days when he didn't need to speak with his lawyers,
called his son on the phone to go over homework problems; three years during which Rob grew from a child of seven to a boy of ten; three years during which this boy went about his daily life, knowing full well that Thomas Lechliter and the State of New Jersey were building their case against his father for the death penalty; three years during which Jackie waited in dread to learn whether or not Rob would be called to testify in this regard.

He was called to do so, once in the winter of 1990, at the hearing to confirm that the death penalty would be sought. For ten minutes the nine-year-old—fully aware that his father's very life might be at stake in his words—answered questions from Mr. Lechliter.

“Have you ever been to your father's apartment on Chestnut Street?” Lechliter asked.

“Just outside the front, sir,” the boy replied.

And, later on: “Have you ever seen your father using drugs?”

“No, sir.”

To the extent that he could, Rob used his responses to declare over and over that his father was a nice man who cared about homework and would never hurt anybody. Lechliter managed to sway the judge toward the death penalty regardless.

A
T
O
AKDALE
E
LEMENTARY
, Rob led the math league and spelling bee teams to area competitions where they were typically routed by more affluent schools in South Orange and Montclair. He took these defeats to heart, scowling and stomping around the house for days afterward. Already, he and his more motivated classmates were learning that no matter how badly they wanted to succeed, they seemed to lack some element that would put them on equal footing with peers growing up just a few miles away. Of course, they figured that the element was money.

In addition to such socioeconomic awakenings, her son now officially hailed from a single-parent home. He was far from alone in this regard; of the roughly sixty thousand people living in East Orange in the
late 1980s, 25 percent were under eighteen years old, and 67 percent of those children lived in single-parent homes. More than ten thousand children in the three square miles Rob Peace inhabited shared his new situation, whether through abandonment, death, or imprisonment. But for the most part, families in the area tended to break up very early, before long-term memory imprinted and the children had fully formed their attachments. These children had never had involved fathers and so they didn't know, as Rob knew, what it felt like to love and be loved by one—and then have him ripped away.

The only positive effect Jackie observed was that in a high-crime area such as East Orange, where murders were relatively common, no one crime stood out to the extent that it generated much gossip or judgment. People close to the Peaces knew what had happened, of course, but the event wasn't otherworldly enough to send shock waves of “Oh my God, can you believe . . . ?” coursing through the surrounding blocks. Jackie had worried about Rob in this regard at first—his association by blood to an alleged killer of women—but found that there was no need. He didn't seem to experience any exclusion, name-calling, or dirty looks. No one cared, not really. What did worry her was when Rob would come home smirking with an ugly sort of pride. He'd tell her how someone—an older kid at school whose dad knew Skeet, or a random set of guys trolling the neighborhood in the evening, or Carl—had lauded his father as some kind of noble rebel-warrior and considered him above all a victim of the white establishment. “Shame how they did him like that,” they would say to the boy. And worse: “You have to carry his name on proud, little man.”

To avert this name carrying, Jackie had to make a change.

During the year after Skeet's arrest, she began attending night school to become qualified as a kitchen supervisor. Consequently, for six months she saw her son for less than an hour in the mornings. This huge sacrifice proved worthwhile when, upon completion, she landed an administrative job at University Hospital and a raise of $2,000 a year. Instead of cooking the food, she was now responsible for order
ing, tracking, keeping inventory, and delegating work to others. She skimped on clothes, food, and all luxuries, both for her and Rob. She took a second job sweeping hair off a salon floor. And after two years of this—of Rob enduring ridicule for wearing clothes he'd outgrown while eating yellow rice with black beans most nights, often by himself or with his grandparents—Jackie had saved enough to send her son to private school on her own. This time, no one questioned her desire to do so. She was forty-one years old.

In September 1990, just as his father's murder trial began in the courthouse downtown, Rob entered the fourth grade in a private Catholic school. During the months to come, the remainder of Skeet's life would be decided upon by a jury of his peers. In a certain way, Rob's life would be, too.

Chapter 3

M
T.
C
ARMEL
E
LEMENTARY
S
CHOOL
stood on East Freeway Drive overlooking the I-280. As the mostly poor, mostly black and Hispanic students filed in and out, they could look down the steep embankment at the cars whooshing past, carrying suburban commuters from their bucolic homes to their downtown jobs and back again. The modest brick building was sandwiched between a church and a nursing home. On a grass lawn directly behind it, nurses took turns jumping rope while the octogenarians in their care looked on eagerly, clapping out revolutions—and also creating a kind of neighborhood watch that kept loiterers and dealers away (the interstate off-ramps provided convenient locations for white-collar commuters to buy drugs quickly, without venturing into the hood). Mt. Carmel, kindergarten to eighth grade, cost $200 a month. Most of the teachers were elderly white nuns, of whom Skeet would disapprove. But unlike before, or possibly ever again, he had no say in the matter. Jackie was paying about a third of her monthly salary—now around $600—in tuition, plus additional expenses for clothes, books, and supplies. She was also taking a big risk by hoping this sacrifice would mean something. If Rob turned out like any other rough boy in the neighborhood—if her son wasn't special like she believed he was—she feared the disappointment that would follow too much striving on her part. At the very least, she was confident that
he was now among people who saw beyond who and where they were. Uppity or not, Jackie saw beyond.

Rob was a quiet boy who, with his broad chest and wide shoulders and constant glower, strutted around the school as if someone had just stolen something that he wanted back. With only eighteen students per grade, he stood out. He wore boots with untied laces, and the belt of his pants hung halfway down his backside (he still took care to make sure his shirt was tucked in, in accordance with the dress code). He received A's in every subject.

The heavy burden Rob carried was clear to all around him. But whatever plagued him specifically, he didn't speak of it, and his self-­contained bearing inhibited his classmates from asking (they were, after all, ten years old, though many were growing up much faster than they deserved). And as Rob gradually made friends and ingratiated himself with his teachers—through work ethic and graciousness, if not his demeanor and appearance—he never mentioned the trial unfolding downtown throughout the fall of 1990. Rob's first months of private school were his father's last months of being presumed innocent.

A
FTER MORE THAN
three years of waiting, the weeks-long jury selection began. Though the jury ended up being composed of eight blacks and four whites, the defense attorneys still complained of racial bias since the composition did not adequately represent the area in which the crime had occurred. In turn, the prosecution chose its jurors based on the strength of their belief in the death penalty.

The actual trial spanned a single week in November 1990. Mr. Lechliter's opening statement painted an intimate, detailed rendering of the morning of August 8, 1987, with multiple references to the infant in the apartment. Then he called a parade of policemen who'd been at the scene of the crime. One after another, these officers described the arrangement of the bodies of the two women, the disarray of Skeet's apartment and the drug paraphernalia found there, the
photo corroborated by the single witness, and the moment when Skeet had been apprehended, armed with the loaded murder weapon, sitting among children. Lechliter's strategy seemed to be to imprint his narrative on the jury through force of repetition, as nine different policemen answered more or less the same two dozen questions over the course of three afternoons. During cross-examination of the State's witnesses, Skeet's public defenders focused almost exclusively on details of positioning, needling each officer to recount, practically down to the square inch, where he had stood during every moment of the crime scene investigation. Even the judge seemed to grow prickly during these lengthy, sometimes redundant exchanges during which few conclusions or refutations were made. Aside from a few roundabout assertions that a certain officer couldn't have seen a certain piece of evidence at a certain time because of a door or obstruction of some kind, the lawyer's strategy was unclear and ineffective.

A ballistics expert for the prosecution then explained why the spent rounds found at the crime scene could have been fired only by the gun found on Skeet at the time of arrest.

And then Georgianna Broadway, who had recovered from her wounds, took the witness stand. Though her foggy memory and misunderstanding of hearsay laws muddled what the prosecution intended to be a highly dramatic moment, her testimony still concluded with her pointing to Skeet Douglas and identifying him as the murderer. “Him right there. He killed Stella and Charlene.”

After six days, Mr. Lechliter rested his case. He had not pressed any of his witnesses to present a motive to the crime (nor had the defense pointed out the lack of one). He had based his case on the same set of facts he'd learned of in the days following Skeet's arrest: a witness placing the defendant at the crime scene, a less reliable witness pointing to him as the shooter, and a murder weapon owned by and found on him.

The witnesses for the defense numbered three: an old friend of Skeet's from junior high basketball, the mother of another childhood friend, and a neighbor from Pierson Street. All served strictly as char
acter witnesses, asserting Skeet's basic kindness and aversion to trouble. After each witness spoke, Mr. Lechliter approached for the prosecution's cross-examination and asked a single question: “Were you in Apartment 2D of 7 Chestnut Street on the morning of August 8th, 1987?” to which each witness replied no. The defense's case lasted less than an hour.

And yet the jury reported they couldn't reach a consensus despite deliberating for a longer time than the trial proper had actually taken. Maybe Georgianna's choppy testimony had interrupted the prosecution's story (the jury had requested a reading of Georgianna's transcript multiple times during deliberation). Maybe the stark visual contrast between nine white policemen testifying against one black man proved hard to overlook. Maybe one of them believed the defense attorney when, in his closing statement, he asked the jury to
consider
the possibility that, in an area long known for police corruption, one or all of the arresting officers might have conspired to plant the weapon in Skeet's belt.

The judge directed them to deliberate for at least another day, noting that one of the jurors had reported sick during one day of deliberation. He sternly insisted that a verdict should be reached.

When the twelve citizens finally emerged, they did so with a verdict: guilty on each of two counts of first-degree murder, as well as one count of aggravated assault on Georgianna Broadway and possession of an unregistered handgun.

On December 13, 1990, after more than four dozen appearances at the courthouse over the previous three years, Skeet came back for the sentencing. The state sought the death penalty, but Skeet received a life sentence in Trenton State Prison. He would not be eligible for parole until 2020, thirty years hence. Near the end of the hearing, Skeet was given a chance to make a statement. He stood up before the court and cleared his throat.

I respect my lawyers and I have a lot of respect for them and I think they're fine gentlemen, but as far as in a professional capac
ity sometimes, well, from my understanding a crime is committed, the police reports are taken and all investigations go at that point and from that point and if those police reports are erroneous then people are going to have erroneous investigations and they're going to try to defend based on that. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Lechliter, I know he's just doing his job, but he wasn't there and if they say this is the designated defendant then it's his job to win the case, you know, but the truth never came out. It's win or lose and unfortunately my lawyers lost, but justice wasn't done and the truth never came out during that trial and I think a better effort could have been put forth . . . From the beginning, as I said, I did not commit this crime. I know the jury has determined that I'm guilty of the crime. I really don't know anything about what happened in that room. I was not there. I did not commit the crime. I was arrested and unfortunately the only gentleman that could really tell the truth, since I did not take the stand, under the advice of my attorneys, was Mr. Irving Gaskins and he died. I did not have the weapon on me, that's completely fabricated . . . [Gaskins is] the only one that could tell what happened at the time of my arrest, that I did not have a weapon on me . . . I don't know why I'm accused of this and I never saw the photographs of the actual crime scene until court. I don't understand how a person could come in a doorway and shoot someone whose right side is facing the doorway and she is shot on the opposite side and there was no testimony elicited from the medical examiner as far as the person that's supposed to have fired the shots. Someone evidently fired the shots, but where they could have been standing for this lady to be shot from someone coming from one direction and the entrance wound, contact entrance wounds are coming from the opposite direction. I just don't understand that and it was never brought out in the trial . . . I mean it seemed like Miss Broadway was laying on that side and that's the side where the shots came from. I mean, something is not right here and I've been convicted of this—

At this point, the judge stopped him and said, “I know that you have sustained throughout the trial and today your innocence and as you can see I'm struggling. I really don't know. I'm sitting here with the verdict and I don't know . . .”

Skeet finished by saying:

I have a ten year old son. His mother has been very gracious. He's been coming to the jail every week for three and a half years. This whole thing is unbelievable. I know I've been convicted. As I said from the beginning, as God is witness, I'm innocent of this crime. My heart goes out to the family of Charlene and Estella Moore . . . but I have a family and my son's a beautiful child and when I was out there I spoiled him. I was with him everyday. I thank God that he's a very brilliant child. He's a straight-A student and he sings in the choir at church and . . .

Finally, Skeet trailed off, shook his head, and sat. Rob and Jackie were not in the audience, and hadn't been at all throughout the trial. This, like the prison visits, had been Skeet's decision. He hadn't wanted either of them to see him in this most vulnerable position. After gearing his entire existence and child-rearing philosophy around friends, Skeet's fate ultimately lay at the mercy and judgment of strangers.

J
ACKIE CONSIDERED THAT
maybe it was a good thing Skeet would be gone for a while, considering that the Mt. Carmel uniform would have given him an aneurysm: pink shirt, brown slacks, with a purple-and-pink plaid tie.

Two evident types of children walked through the neighborhood each afternoon. The kids who went to school walked in cheery clusters, many wearing simple bicolored uniforms and carrying backpacks. They walked slowly to and from the bus stop, savoring one another's company, none eager to part ways and return home to whatever awaited them there.

The other kids walked in much smaller groups, usually two but never more than three. During the summer they wore wife-beater undershirts, and during the winter they wore baggy coats that they shouldn't have been able to afford. Whether these children actually sold drugs or simply wanted to project an association with people who did, Jackie felt sorry for them—sorry for the fact that ten and twenty years down the road, assuming they were not incarcerated or dead, they would be doing exactly the same thing they were doing now. These kids, mostly boys, mostly fatherless she presumed, would pass by the schoolkids, leering. The schoolkids, whose safety came from numbers, would quiet for a moment and walk on. Jackie saw this dynamic almost every day on the corners on either end of Chapman Street, but only as she edged farther into her forties did she begin to see the power in it: half the generation already lost, the other half just trying to get home each day.

Just after Skeet's conviction, Jackie splurged on a gift for her son: the
A
volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She bought it from a door-to-door salesman, with a spontaneity rare for her, and she began saving extra so that every few months she could furnish another volume.

Her faith in her son's promise began with his intense interest in books, a passion that could not be taught, not where they lived and not with Jackie's work schedule. These books were gateways, not just in abstractions of the mind but to real-world opportunity. They led him to as many school academic squads as he could fit into his schedule and subsequent competitions in the tristate region. Unlike Oakdale, the Mt. Carmel teams were actually capable of winning. Rob began bringing home ribbons, certificates, and small plastic trophies. He placed them all in a cardboard box beneath his bed. He joined a traveling church choir at St. Mary's. Rob never said much about these extracurriculars, aside from asking for rides to and from places and small amounts of money for travel fees. “Industrious,” the nuns at Mt. Carmel called him. “Focused . . . advanced . . .”