The dogs involved were two Presa Canarios belonging to Paul Schneider, a high-ranking member of the Aryan Brotherhood serving three life sentences in state prison.

[3] The dogs were looked after by Schneider's attorneys, Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller, a husband and wife who lived in the same apartment building as Whipple.

Knoller's murder conviction, an unusual result for an unintended dog attack, was rejected by the trial judge but ultimately upheld.

Whipple later moved to San Francisco, and came within seconds of qualifying for the U.S. 1996 Olympics team in track and field, for the 800 meters.

[citation needed] At the time of her death, Whipple lived in San Francisco's Pacific Heights with her domestic partner of six years, Sharon Smith.

[9] Starting in the mid-1990s, they ran their law office out of a converted closet in their Pacific Heights apartment in San Francisco.

[10] On January 26, 2001, while returning home with bags of groceries, Whipple was attacked by the two dogs in the hallway of her apartment building.

[8][9] Schneider and his cellmate Dale Bretches were attempting to start an illegal Presa Canario dog-fighting business from prison.

They initially asked acquaintances Janet Coumbs and Hard Times Kennel owner/breeder James Kolber of Akron, Ohio, to raise the dogs during their incarceration.

[11] Whipple died hours later at San Francisco General Hospital from "loss of blood from multiple traumatic injuries (dog bite wounds)".

Although the judge granted a new trial for the second degree murder charge, he sentenced Knoller to four years in prison for the lesser-included involuntary manslaughter on July 15, 2002.

[citation needed] In May 2005, the state appellate court reversed the judge's grant of new second-degree murder trial for Knoller.

The appellate court ruled that implied malice murder did not require knowledge of a high probability of death but rather just a conscious disregard of serious bodily injury.

On August 23, 2010, the First District Court of Appeal unanimously upheld Knoller's conviction, finding that she acted with a conscious disregard for human life when her Presa Canario escaped and killed Whipple.

[30] In November 2015, Knoller petitioned the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn her second-degree murder conviction.

[33] Noel died of heart failure in a La Jolla nursing home on June 22, 2018, the day of his 77th birthday.