The Moore sisters murders are the central crime in the family history of Rob Peace: the killing of two young women, Charlene Moore and Estella Moore, neighbors of Skeet Douglas in an apartment building on Chestnut Street. Their deaths led to Skeet’s arrest, a capital prosecution, and three years of pretrial imprisonment, while the unresolved question of his guilt became the dominant inheritance passed to his son. For Rob, the murders were never only a legal case. They were the reason his father disappeared from ordinary family life, the subject Rob concealed at school and at Yale, and the cause to which he devoted years of legal research, appeals, and emotional allegiance.

Crime and Immediate Consequences

The murders occurred on August 8, 1987, in the Chestnut Street apartment building where Skeet lived. When Jackie Peace first visited Essex County Jail five days after Skeet’s arrest and three days after his arraignment, Carl told her that Skeet had not been arrested for drugs but for murder—two murders, in fact, involving the two young women who had been his neighbors. Jackie had not yet told Rob. The family knew little beyond the accusation, and she still hoped that the case might prove to be a wrong-place, wrong-time misunderstanding that would be resolved quickly.

The arrest transformed the family’s relationship to ordinary places. Essex County Jail stood between the Passaic River and the New Jersey Turnpike, behind two concentric ten-foot chain-link fences and beside the General Chemical plant. Jackie moved through repeated checkpoints by identifying Skeet as “my son’s father,” then entered a narrow concrete visitation room where Skeet appeared in bright orange, his wrists manacled. The murder case thus reached Rob before he understood its facts: it entered the Chapman Street household through anxiety, absence, and the institutional rituals surrounding his father’s confinement.

Prosecution and Prolonged Imprisonment

The case became State of New Jersey v. Robert Douglas only after an extraordinary delay. Jury selection began on September 10, 1990, three years and one month after the murders. During those three years, Skeet remained in jail with people accused of serious crimes, receiving only one hour of exercise and fifteen minutes of phone time each day. Jackie brought Rob to see him for roughly 160 weeks. Rob grew from seven to ten while the State of New Jersey and Thomas Lechliter built a death-penalty case, and Jackie lived with the fear that her son might be called to testify.

Rob was called once, during the winter of 1990, at a hearing to confirm that the death penalty would be sought. For ten minutes, the nine-year-old answered questions while aware that his words might affect whether his father lived. Later, at Trenton State, visits became more solitary and more burdensome. The prison seemed to Rob and Jackie like a vast, anonymous campus whose nineteen hundred inmates were reduced to institutional meaninglessness. Jackie tried to shield him from the permanence she believed the prison represented, discussing school, friends, and a girl he liked during the drives home rather than the father he had just seen.

The murders also shaped Rob’s secret understanding of himself at St. Benedict’s. During four years of school, while classmates mourned fathers openly, Rob visited Skeet once a month, more often when his sports schedule allowed, and said nothing about his own father. He spent much of his adolescence helping Skeet prepare a long-awaited appeal. The case was therefore not an isolated childhood trauma; it became a concealed, continuing obligation that accompanied Rob through school, athletics, friendships, and college applications.

Rob’s Countercase and the Appeal

As a teenager, Rob took over work that he believed the public defenders had failed to do: proving Skeet innocent. His summer internship at a real-estate firm gave him access to the Office of Public Records and the Essex County Law Library. During lunch breaks he studied capital-murder cases, and at night he read dense legal volumes while his classmates watched television, talked on the phone, or slept. He filled notebooks with precedents and arguments, converting filial loyalty into legal labor.

On December 2, 1997, Rob, Skeet, and pro bono lawyer Carl Herman filed a petition for postconviction relief. They argued that Skeet’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial had been violated. The petition centered on Irving Gaskins, the man in whose home Skeet had been arrested. Gaskins had stated at the time of the arrest that Skeet possessed no weapon, but he died a year before the trial without giving a formal deposition. Herman argued that the public defenders had provided insufficient representation, including during the nearly yearlong period after the arrest when Skeet had no appointed representation, and that they had failed to file a speedy-trial motion once representation began.

A former public defender testified for the State, maintaining that three years was not unusual for a capital case and that the delay had been necessary for trial preparation. He also argued that Gaskins’s statement would not have changed the outcome because Gaskins could testify only about what he had not seen—the murder weapon—rather than identify what he had seen. The lawyer further claimed that the delay may have spared Skeet’s life by giving the defense time to assemble mitigating factors and avoid the death penalty.

The presiding judge nevertheless ruled for Skeet, dismissing the indictment because the constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated. The decision was stayed for fifty days while the State prepared an appeal. After ten years and four months connected to the murders, Skeet came home, but his freedom remained provisional. Rob had imagined reintroducing his father to Newark and explaining the world that had changed during the decade of imprisonment. Instead, Skeet focused almost exclusively on Rob’s school, sports, friends, and relationships, while the looming counterappeal kept the household from feeling secure.

The Murder Theory and Its Afterlife

At Elihu, Rob eventually disclosed the hidden center of his life. He spoke for four hours about his father, the fire on Pierson Street, the Chestnut Street apartment, the trial, prison visits, the successful appeal, and its reversal. He presented the murders through a comprehensive theory of wrongful conviction: Skeet owned a gun because he was “about that life,” but, in Rob’s account, the actual murderer broke into Skeet’s apartment, stole the weapon, used it to kill the Moore sisters in the neighboring apartment, returned it, and then became the basis for a police frame-up.

Rob’s account made the case larger than the question of one gun. He described the murders as evidence of a system willing to sacrifice a black man to close a case, and he understood his father’s conviction as part of the broader conflict between Newark and the white establishment. The intensity of the theory also revealed how deeply the crime had become part of Rob’s identity: because he had not witnessed the murders, he reconstructed them through legal documents, family history, prison conversations, and imaginative certainty, speaking at Elihu as though he had been present with the victims, police, and prosecutors.

Final Legal and Familial Consequences

The postconviction ruling did not end the case. Skeet returned to prison when the State’s appeal prevailed, and Rob continued writing appellate judges. By 2006, however, his legal efforts had shifted from proving innocence to seeking medical treatment outside the prison ward as Skeet’s brain cancer progressed. Rob’s letters emphasized his father’s good behavior, prison employment, and participation in meeting groups, but increasingly became pleas from a son for a dying parent. His scientific training at Yale Medical School gave him a technical understanding of cancer, while the prison system determined how little of that knowledge could alter Skeet’s care.

On August 16, 2006, the final appeal was denied. The court held that the lower court had applied the correct federal standard in rejecting the challenge. Six days later, Skeet became unconscious; that same night his respiratory system failed, and he died quietly in his sleep, less than a month before his sixtieth birthday. The legal dispute over the murders ended not with exoneration or a new trial, but with Skeet’s death in custody.

Rob handled the funeral. Few people attended in East Orange, although Skeet’s old friends continued to tell stories about him. At Rosedale Cemetery, less than two miles from Chapman Street, Rob stood beside Jackie as the coffin was lowered. They each dropped a lily into the grave while the dirt was packed in. The murders therefore remained unresolved in the form most consequential to Rob: not as a case he could finally close, but as a conviction, a father’s imprisonment and death, and a story he continued to carry into adulthood.