Skeet Douglas's arrest

Skeet Douglas's arrest on August 9, 1987, was the decisive rupture between the Peace family’s ordinary domestic life and the criminal prosecution that would shape Rob Peace’s identity, loyalties, and future. The arrest followed the murders of Charlene Moore and Estella Moore in their Chestnut Street apartment building, and it supplied the state with a suspect, a weapon, and a narrative of guilt. Yet the same episode also contained evidentiary irregularities and unanswered questions that allowed Rob to regard his father not simply as a convicted murderer but as a man denied a fair defense.

The Call and the Charge

Jackie Peace had long expected that news about Skeet would arrive in the middle of the night, but the call came while she was working on a Sunday, just before the lunch rush. Frances Peace told her anxiously that the police were looking for Skeet without explaining why. Jackie initially denied knowing where he lived or anything about him. That evening she took over Skeet’s role in helping seven-year-old Rob with his summer-camp exercises, attempting to manage addition, subtraction, and subject-predicate structure while keeping the crisis from entering her son’s awareness.

Only after Rob fell asleep did Jackie begin calling relatives, starting with Carl. Carl’s silence first suggested that the situation was serious, and then he gave her the essential fact: Skeet had already been found at Irving Gaskins’s house. Jackie asked whether the matter concerned dealing, but Carl corrected her. Skeet had not been arrested for drugs; he had been arrested for two murders, those of two young women who lived near him in the Chestnut Street apartment building.

The Arrest at Irving Gaskins’s Apartment

The investigation moved from the victims’ apartment to Skeet’s Rolodex. After Georgianna Broadway, critically injured at University Hospital, identified a photograph of Skeet as the person responsible for the shootings, Detective Sergeant Alan Sierchio used the exchange to obtain a search warrant for apartment 2D and access the Rolodex. The information led Sierchio and three uniformed officers to the third-floor apartment of Irving Gaskins on 13th Street in Newark, a few blocks from Branch Brook Park, where Rob was attending summer camp.

Gaskins was seventy-eight, a longtime friend of Skeet’s family, and dependent on an oxygen tank because of emphysema, diabetes, and heart disease. Children were playing on the apartment floor when the officers entered. Skeet was seated nearby. During the tense confrontation, Gaskins begged the police not to shoot, fearing that a stray bullet might ignite the oxygen tank and injure his grandchildren. The officers handcuffed Skeet there.

The arrest produced a physical basis for the prosecution. Police reported finding a loaded .38-caliber Taurus Spesco revolver tucked into Skeet’s pants, with six rounds in the weapon and five additional live rounds in his pocket. Ballistics experts later concluded that the striations on bullets removed from the murdered women matched the barrel of that revolver. The gun also bore distinctive markings on its outer barrel that matched the holster recovered from Skeet’s apartment, creating a chain of physical associations between Skeet, his residence, and the killings.

Evidence and Unresolved Questions

The prosecution’s case appeared powerful to Thomas Lechliter, who reviewed transcripts, reports, photographs, and inventory lists and came to believe that a conviction would represent justice. But the investigative record contained substantial complications. Georgianna’s identification initially came through a photograph shown while she was intubated and unable to speak; she nodded that she knew the person responsible and nodded again when asked whether the pictured Skeet was the shooter. She later acknowledged that she had not actually seen the trigger puller. Her identification rested instead on recognizing Skeet’s voice speaking to Estella in the kitchen, although she had met him only once, about a week earlier, when he came to repair the sisters’ faulty door.

Other details troubled the case. The witness had been intoxicated, using drugs, severely sleep-deprived, and hungover when the murders occurred. There was an unexplained gap between the reported murder time of approximately 7:30 p.m. and the first call to police two hours later, while the warmth of the victims’ bodies when officers arrived did not resolve the discrepancy. Skeet was known as a drug dealer, but he had no prior convictions and no history of violence. Investigators had also conducted an initial, warrantless search of apartment 2D, during which they removed the conspicuous photograph of Skeet in a bright green tuxedo, top hat, and jeweled cane before formal authorization was obtained.

The holster created another procedural problem. Police accounts conflicted about whether it had been found before or after the warrant. If officers discovered it before the warrant, its concealment beneath dirty clothes would suggest that the supposedly quick, noninvasive search had gone beyond its lawful limits. Most conspicuously, none of the interviews then conducted supplied a clear motive. The arrest therefore achieved legal and narrative closure before it achieved an explanation of why the murders had occurred.

The Arrest’s Long Afterlife

For Jackie, the arrest began a cycle of jail visits, legal uncertainty, and family endurance. For Rob, it became the hidden center of his understanding of race, authority, and manhood. Years later, he spoke for four hours at the Elihu society about the father whose arrest had defined his childhood: the Chestnut Street apartment, the police investigation, the trial, prison visits, a successful appeal and its reversal, and the monthly letters he continued sending to appellate judges. He argued that the real murderer had stolen Skeet’s weapon from apartment 2E, used it to kill the Moore sisters in apartment 2D, and returned it before police illegally removed it and planted it on Skeet. That account directly contradicted the prosecution’s interpretation of the revolver and converted the arrest into what Rob understood as an institutional injustice.

The case remained present even as Rob moved through institutions meant to offer escape and legitimacy. At Saint Benedict’s Preparatory School, he entered a disciplined brotherhood of students from forty towns and sixty middle schools, under the motto “WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME.” At Yale University, however, the unresolved arrest continued to shape his responses to perceived humiliation. When wealthy crew-team students left dirty trays behind while he worked in the dining hall, their disregard triggered an anger far exceeding the immediate slight. He imagined violent retaliation, struck a wall, and later connected the incident to a larger struggle over class, race, and respect. The emotional force of the arrest had become part of a recurring pattern in which contempt demanded an answer.

The arrest also shadowed Rob’s later encounters with real danger. In August 2003, a bulk supplier pulled a revolver on him after Rob threatened to abandon a failed negotiation. The weapon reduced his education, scientific knowledge, and achievements to a single visceral point of attention: the muzzle. He paid the additional money demanded and then began teaching at Saint Benedict’s, temporarily leaving drug dealing. The episode demonstrated how the violence associated with Skeet’s arrest had not remained in the past; it had become part of the world Rob inhabited and the risks he repeatedly approached.

Skeet’s final appeal was denied on August 16, 2006. Six days later, while dying of brain cancer in prison, he lost consciousness and died after respiratory failure. Rob handled the funeral arrangements, and he and Jackie stood together at Rosedale Cemetery as Skeet’s coffin was lowered. The arrest had begun with Jackie trying to protect a sleeping child from frightening news. It ended, decades later, as the event around which Rob’s defense of his father, his distrust of institutions, and his own unresolved relationship to violence were organized.