Robert “Skeet” Douglas

Robert “Skeet” Douglas is the absent and overpowering father at the center of Rob Peace’s story: a man remembered as charming, intelligent, protective, and devoted to his son, but also as a cocaine hustler whose confidence in his own control collapses after he is arrested for the murders of Charlene Moore and Estella Moore. His life gives Rob both a model of masculine care and a permanent wound. Skeet’s imprisonment removes him from ordinary fatherhood while making him an inescapable presence in Rob’s identity, education, anger, legal campaigns, and eventual return to the drug economy.

Identity and Early Relationship

Skeet met Jackie Peace in 1979 through Carl, who had worked with him on a factory demolition crew. Carl was quiet and reserved; Skeet was a witty leader of men. The two had also formed a loose partnership “making movements” through cocaine, though Carl regarded their operation as neither major nor particularly dangerous. At Passion Sports Bar & Café, Skeet noticed Jackie and used his practiced charm, while she initially ignored him and treated him as another dealer whose confidence exceeded his substance. He lived only two blocks from Jackie’s family home on Pierson Street, and during the ride there he impressed her with his knowledge of biographies, even as he revealed little about his own past.

Skeet’s relationship with Jackie became intimate but never settled into marriage. He repeatedly criticized her for indulging their baby, saying that she never put Rob down, gave him whatever he wanted, and let him sleep in her bed. His objection was not simply disciplinary. Skeet believed that a child needed to struggle in order to become capable, whereas Jackie defended the security she was giving her son. Their disagreement established a lasting tension in Rob’s upbringing: maternal protection on one side, paternal insistence on toughness and self-reliance on the other.

Skeet wanted Jackie to stop working and move into his house so that he could support her, even if she would not marry him. Jackie refused to leave her parents’ home on Chapman Street. When Rob approached school age, Skeet rented an apartment on Chestnut Street, hoping to separate his drug business from the family house and make the home safer. Jackie understood the danger more clearly than Skeet did. In the drug economy, she believed, the real center of commerce was the person rather than the property; if Skeet were arrested, she did not want to be tied to an apartment in his name.

Hustling and the Illusion of Control

Skeet presented his criminal work as contained, conservative, and manageable. He held irregular day jobs, coached a youth basketball team, drove a troubled boxy Volvo, and did not flaunt his money. He claimed to avoid the younger generation of hustlers whose codes were becoming more brutal, assuring Jackie that he had too much respect for human life to compete with them. His self-image depended on being different from reckless dealers: intelligent rather than desperate, disciplined rather than violent, and connected to ordinary working men rather than to the most dangerous figures in Newark.

That distinction also helped him maintain a family role. Skeet wanted to be a provider, and his offer to support Jackie gave the drug trade a domestic justification. He did not describe himself as pursuing luxury; the money seemed to him to balance the gap between what work paid and what life cost. Yet the apartment on Chestnut Street, intended as a buffer between business and family, became the site of the Moore sisters’ murders and the place where the distinction between controlled hustling and lethal violence disappeared.

The police and prosecutor assembled a case in which Skeet was accused of killing Charlene and Estella Moore after a night involving liquor and cocaine at their apartment. Georgianna Broadway, who had been present, identified Skeet by his voice, though she later admitted that she had not actually seen the shooter. She had encountered Skeet only once before, when he repaired the sisters’ faulty door. Skeet was arrested at Irving Gaskins’s apartment near Branch Brook Park. The arresting officers reported finding a loaded Taurus Spesco .38-caliber revolver tucked into his pants, with six rounds in the weapon and five additional live rounds in his pocket. Ballistics later linked the revolver to bullets removed from the women’s bodies, while markings on the gun were matched to a holster found in Skeet’s apartment.

The case nevertheless contained significant weaknesses. The principal witness had been intoxicated, using cocaine, severely tired, and hungover. The timing of the murders and the delayed call to police remained difficult to reconcile. Skeet had no prior convictions or known history of violence, and investigators had identified no clear motive. Questions also surrounded the initial search of apartment 2D, the removal of a tuxedo photograph, and conflicting accounts about when the holster had been discovered. These loose ends became central to Skeet’s own insistence that the truth had been displaced by a convenient official narrative.

Arrest, Trial, and Imprisonment

When Carl told Jackie that Skeet had been arrested, she first asked how long he might receive for dealing. Carl paused before explaining that the charge was murder—two murders, involving young women who had lived near Skeet in the Chestnut Street apartment building. The revelation overturned the version of Skeet that Jackie had been willing to tolerate: the cautious hustler who kept violence at a distance and protected his family from the consequences of his work.

Jackie’s first visit to Essex County Jail took place five days after Skeet’s arrest and three days after his arraignment. In a cramped room divided by Plexiglas, she saw him in bright orange clothing, his wrists shackled. He was given fifteen minutes and immediately asked her to find a lawyer who could reduce his $500,000 bail and help him get out, plan his defense, speak with people, and see Rob. Even then, his instinct was to meet an overwhelming danger with confidence, negotiation, and movement. Jackie understood that the charge was a capital case and that neither charm nor improvisation could make the danger disappear.

The trial lasted less time than the jury’s deliberations, which extended long enough for the jurors to report that they could not initially reach consensus. They repeatedly requested Georgianna Broadway’s testimony. The defense emphasized the witness’s impaired condition, the visual contrast between nine white police officers and one Black defendant, and the possibility that officers in a city known for police corruption had planted the weapon. The jury eventually found Skeet guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, aggravated assault on Georgianna Broadway, and possession of an unregistered handgun.

On December 13, 1990, after more than four dozen court appearances over three years, Skeet was sentenced to life in Trenton State Prison. The state had sought the death penalty, but he would become eligible for parole only in 2020. In his statement to the court, he maintained that he had not committed the murders and argued that the trial had never established what really happened. He challenged the police reports, the alleged weapon recovery, the trajectory of the bullets, and the absence of testimony that could place him at the scene. He also said that Irving Gaskins, who had died, was the one person who could have testified truthfully about the arrest.

Skeet’s final words in court turned from the legal case to Rob. He said that Jackie had been gracious, that their son had visited the jail every week for three and a half years, and that Rob was brilliant, a straight-A student who sang in the church choir. He expressed sympathy for the Moore family while insisting that he had a family of his own. Rob and Jackie were not present at the trial or sentencing because Skeet did not want them to see him in his most vulnerable condition. The decision preserved his dignity in front of them, but it also made his imprisonment more difficult to witness and interpret.

Fatherhood as Inheritance

Skeet’s imprisonment did not end his influence over Rob; it transformed that influence into an absence that Rob repeatedly tried to fill with explanation. At Yale, Rob told members of the Elihu society that he had spent four hours discussing the father previously hidden from them. He described Jackie’s upbringing strategy, the fire on Pierson Street, the Chestnut Street apartment, Skeet’s network of men, the trial, the prison visits, and the successful appeal that was later reversed. He presented Skeet as a great man wronged by a system designed against ordinary Black men, and he offered a detailed theory that someone had stolen Skeet’s gun, used it in the Moore sisters’ apartment, returned it to Skeet’s apartment, and persuaded police to plant it on him.

Rob’s defense of Skeet was intellectual in form but emotional in origin. Arthur Turpin, who had sensed Rob’s anger beneath his humor and marijuana use, recognized that Rob could reason through almost every argument except the question of where Skeet had been on the morning of the murders. Until Rob could place his father in that moment, Arthur believed, Rob would struggle to place himself in the present. Skeet therefore functioned not only as a parent or a legal subject but as the unresolved riddle around which Rob’s own identity had formed.

The father’s absence also sharpened Rob’s response to humiliation. When white, affluent Yale students left dirty trays behind while Rob worked in the dining hall, the insult became vastly larger than a breach of etiquette. Rob imagined retaliating physically and described “curbing” in graphic detail before punching a hole in the dish-room wall. The encounter connected campus class contempt to the history Rob associated with Newark, policing, and Skeet’s conviction. The anger was not evidence that Skeet had taught him violence in any simple way; it showed how the father’s case had become part of Rob’s moral vocabulary for interpreting disrespect, institutional power, and the need to prove that no one was invulnerable.

Illness, Death, and Afterlife

Skeet’s later life was marked by imprisonment and brain cancer. The disease caused dramatic weight loss, headaches, nausea, swelling, and profound fatigue; his mental faculties flickered between charismatic intensity and distant, inaudible speech. Rob sat silently beside him during visits when Skeet could no longer sustain conversation. The illness’s attack on Skeet’s brain carried particular symbolic force because intelligence had always been central to his self-presentation and to Rob’s memory of him.

On August 16, 2006, Rob learned that Skeet’s final appeal had been denied. Six days later, Skeet became unconscious, and his respiratory system failed that night. He died quietly in his sleep, a month short of his sixtieth birthday. His death ended the possibility of a new legal reversal or a definitive explanation from him, but it did not end Rob’s investment in the case. The denied appeal closed the formal route while leaving the private argument alive.

Rob handled the funeral arrangements. Few people attended the service 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 with Jackie as the coffin descended. His bowed body became a support for his mother, and both dropped lilies into the grave while the dirt was being packed in. Skeet’s physical life ended there, but his imprisonment, alleged innocence, fatherly tenderness, and failure to protect the family continued to organize Rob’s understanding of himself.

Skeet’s significance ultimately lies in his contradiction. He was a provider who entered an economy he believed he could control, a charismatic father whose devotion to Rob coexisted with the risks that removed him from daily life, and a convicted murderer whose case contained enough irregularities to sustain his son’s lifelong resistance to the verdict. His story helps explain why Rob could move between academic brilliance, righteous anger, teaching, drug dealing, and plans for legitimate enterprise without experiencing those worlds as wholly separate. Skeet left Rob not a settled inheritance but a demand: to decide whether love required belief, whether intelligence could defeat circumstance, and whether a father’s absence could ever be made legible.