Free A Checklist for Murder by Anthony Flacco Page B

to protect her daughter. As the car gathered speed, she slumped to the right, which turned the wheel and sent the car off the road. This second theory explains why Claire never hit the steering wheel or the windshield. It explains why she was found on the floor, jammed up under the dashboard. Since she had already slumped over onto the seat when the car hit, she flew under the steering wheel entirely.
    If this second theory is true, then it was Claire who took the car off the road in time to avoid the explosion that would have resulted at higher speed as the tank-puncturing sharp steel bar, with its point only half an inch from the thin metal of the gas tank, punctured it upon impact and spewed gasoline to be ignited by the rope wick. Even in death Claire offered this fragile safety net to her brutalized young daughter. If this theory is accurate, and there is no evidence toshow that it is not, then it was truly Claire Peernock who saved her daughter’s life.
    But Natasha had a few challenges left to overcome before she could hope to leave behind her ordeal of captivity and brutality.
    It would not be nearly enough simply to survive the highspeed crash designed to explode the gas tank and turn the Cadillac into a roaring inferno, simultaneously a murder weapon and funeral pyre.
    Hardest of all, she would have to fight to have her story believed, while she herself struggled to regain her emotional and psychological balance after suffering the ultimate betrayals at her father’s hands.
    This is why her battle did not end out on a lonely road that night.
    That’s only where it began.

The rabbit comes out of the hole,
runs around the tree …
and jumps back into the hole.
— Boy Scout method for remembering
how to tie a knot that only grows
tighter under stress

CHAPTER
    6
         
    C laire Laurence married Robert Peernock on April 16, 1967, when she was a newly arrived French-Canadian from Quebec. Soon after, as a twenty-four-year-old bride living in Hollywood, California, Claire Peernock described her life to friends as being full, with a promise of future happiness.
    A former family friend who was a guest at the pool party where Claire and Robert first met describes Claire as having been immediately swept off her feet by Robert. The sparks between them were apparent to onlookers. Nobody expressed any surprise when Claire and Robert soon became constant companions and later husband and wife.
    Claire confided to friends that Robert fawned over her with a level of attention far more intense than anything she had ever known. She was completely captivated by the relentless sweetness in his treatment of her, by the pleasure he took in being with her. She would do anything he wanted. This pleased him more.
    Their first child was born a little more than two years later, in June of 1969. They agreed to name the girl Natasha. Both parents doted on their baby girl, but Robert immediately made her his princess, fawning over her at every opportunity. With video cameras not yet on the market, Claire filled photo albums with snapshots of Robert cuddling Natasha, playing all kinds of games with her. Whenever Robert had the chance, he applied his hobby of making home tape recordings to the pursuit of capturing every sound his daughter made.
    Natasha’s early childhood photos show a beautiful flaxen-haired child with a glowing, confident smile and bright, intelligent eyes. She was unquestionably Daddy’s little girl.
    For the first ten years of the marriage, Robert moved up the corporate ladder as a technician with expertise in computers and a gift for complex problems in circuitry. He eventually rose to the rank of vice-president at Network Electronics Corporation, where his specialty was in testing explosive devices for their subsidiary, the Ordnance Technology Group. Robert’s technical skills were above reproach. He had a firm grasp of the complex problems in explosive circuitry and his ability to guide currents through