Whatever Mother Says... (19 page)

The two detectives wanted to go over some of the other details surrounding Knorr’s sisters’ deaths, like the type of duct tape used to wrap around Suesan’s body and across her mouth. Knorr insisted that he could not remember any shooting incident involving Suesan or any other wounds inflicted by his mother or Suesan.

He did talk about the dreadful, last beating inflicted on Sheila by her mother, and he referred to the locations where the bodies were dumped after being shown a number of crime scene photos by Fitzgerald.

That same day, the Placer County Sheriff’s Department issued a two-page press release to inform the world of the extraordinary double murder inquiry. Written in heavy, bold-type capital letters, it began:

SHERIFF DONALD J. NUNES RELEASES THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION
:

SHERIFF NUNES ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT A
1984
HOMICIDE, ONE OF THE MOST ALARMING AND BIZARRE IN THE HISTORY OF PLACER COUNTY, HAS BEEN RESOLVED
 …

The release went on to notify the media of all the case’s basic details and then signed off with a piece of guessology that was pretty close to the mark:

THERESA KNORR MAY BE EMPLOYED, OR SEEKING EMPLOYMENT, AT A CONVALESCENT HOSPITAL
.

That same day, Fitzgerald—still very concerned that he had no concrete clues as to where Theresa Knorr was living—contacted police in Washoe County, Nevada, to see if they could locate her in the Reno area. He had been told by prison officials in Ely that Robert Knorr had tried to contact his mother at an address in Reno. Detective Dick Williamson, of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department, assured Fitzgerald he would do everything possible to help try and track down Theresa Knorr, and promised to get back to him as quickly as possible.

Fitzgerald also contacted Terry once again to discuss the progress he was making. He asked her to make a list of all the incidents of abuse suffered by her and her sisters at the hands of their mother and two brothers, William and Robert.

Then Fitzgerald told Terry he would be in touch with her “in a few weeks.” The investigator’s words summed up Terry’s worst fears. When he said “a few weeks,” she began to wonder if the police were really that interested. The lack of urgency in Fitzgerald’s response worried her. She had come this far. She wanted action to be taken immediately. But they still had not even located her mother. She was very, very worried.

Seventeen

“You know all she did was screw her own life. For Christ’s sake, do you think, I mean, if I had, I mean I’m going right now through surgeries to try to have children because of the abuse. My insides were mangled from this woman. Yet, my mother also did some wonderful things.”

Terry Knorr

“I’ll get you. I know where you are.”

The male voice on the other end of the telephone was calm, dry, and very menacing. Terry was extremely nervous. She slammed the handset down without uttering a word. It had only been a few hours since Sergeant Fitzgerald had informed her he would be in touch with her in a few weeks.

In a few weeks I could be dead, thought Terry.

A couple of minutes later—at just about 9:00
P.M.
on November 5, 1993—the telephone rang again. This time Terry hesitated to pick it up. But it kept on ringing relentlessly. She succumbed.

“I’ll get you. I know where you are.”

She slammed it down again. This time Terry was petrified. She picked up the phone and called the local police department at Sandy and got through to desk duty officer Jeff Duval.

Within a few hours he had placed a flag on the house, just in case any strangers were lurking nearby.

The following morning, thirty-four-year-old Sandy Police Department detective David Lundberg was enjoying a lazy Saturday at home when his sergeant, Eddie Kantor, called to ask him if he would be prepared to talk to a lady about some threatening phone calls that she claimed were linked to the murder of her two sisters.

“We need to look into this to see if there is anything in it,” Kantor told Lundberg.

The young detective was intrigued. He called Terry at the number she had left with Officer Duval the previous evening. Lundberg listened patiently for more than an hour as she poured out her life story once again.

After getting off the phone with Terry, Lundberg immediately contacted John Fitzgerald in Placer County, who confirmed the existence of the task force. Both cops assumed that Terry’s plea to her local police was an attempt to guarantee that this time something really was going to be done.

Lundberg went into the Sandy Police Department that Saturday morning and did some computer checks on Terry’s home address. He soon discovered that police had been called to the house on at least a dozen occasions, and only two weeks earlier, Terry had even spent a night in jail after an altercation with a patrolman who tried to break up a domestic disturbance at the house.

*   *   *

David Lundberg’s devotion was typical of a man with a very clear sense of right and wrong. The last of nine kids brought up in Salt Lake City, the dapper detective wanted to be a cop “because I got into a lot of trouble as a kid and decided it might be kinda fun to join the other side.” His problems included involvement in drugs, hanging out and drinking beer. Then he did two years at college studying law enforcement, and joined the Sandy Police Department. Married life beckoned once … for just three months. “Thank God it was a quick one.” Now he shares his neat house on the edge of Sandy with a couple of cats and a dog.

Lundberg’s biggest case was the Alta View Hospital siege in Sandy in 1990. “They made a TV movie out of that one,” he says proudly. Then a young patrolman, Lundberg arrived on the scene not realizing that a siege was in progress, and immediately found himself confronting an armed man who was holding two nurses hostage. The gunman, furious at Lundberg for daring to challenge him, then killed one of the nurses to prove he meant business. “It was very traumatic.” After eight hours, the siege ended and gunman Richard Worthington was arrested. “He hung himself in jail recently,” said Lundberg, with just a touch of satisfaction in his voice.

*   *   *

When Lundberg arrived at Terry’s place in his tan-colored Corsica the following Monday morning, he immediately recognized the property as the same place he had visited as a patrolman during yet another of Terry’s regular domestic disturbances a year or so earlier.

Terry was relieved to have another policeman take an interest in her case. The combination of the threatening phone calls and John Fitzgerald’s comment about getting back to her in a few weeks had made her feel as if no one really cared.

The young, ambitious detective was even more intrigued when Terry told him she had reported the killings to a sheriff over at Woods Cross three years earlier and that nothing was done. Terry also revealed that she had told one of his colleagues at the Sandy Police Department, who had called at the house following yet another domestic disturbance at least a year earlier.

Lundberg bonded very well with the frightened twenty-three-year-old. He was especially interested in her claims because he had worked a number of child abuse cases over the years.

“The more detail she went into, the more convinced I became,” said Lundberg. “I was fascinated.”

In the background, Terry’s in-laws drifted in and out of the room, hardly uttering a word. Lundberg says he felt they were very suspicious of his motives in coming to the house. The detective’s only aim was in fact to ensure that this time Terry’s claims were properly acted upon. He was also determined to expose the officers from Woods Cross and Sandy who had apparently ignored Terry’s plight.

Terry was very impressed by David Lundberg. By the end of their meeting, she felt that the young detective really did care about what she was saying.

Lundberg even gave Terry his home phone number and insisted that she feel free to call him anytime.

“I had a gut feeling about Terry. If I was dealing with a dangerous suspect, then it would be different, but this was a case where she really needed someone to talk to.”

As Lundberg left Terry’s house, he promised her he would get something done. As they stood on the doorstep, he stopped momentarily and hugged Terry reassuringly.

“If you need anything, call me.”

The moment Lundberg got back to his neat, pristine desk at the ultramodern, open-plan detectives’ bureau at the Sandy Police Department’s brand-new headquarters on Centennial Parkway, alongside Interstate 15, he put a request in to find out who interviewed Terry all those years earlier.

The department CAD computer system was supposed to log all police-involved incidents. It records addresses, times, dates, and people’s names, to provide data to be cross-referenced with police departments across the nation.

Lundberg punched in a request for everything on Terry’s home address at Pepperwood Drive. Within minutes he was poring over the many details of the domestic disputes at the house, but there was no mention of an interview into the deaths of her sisters. Lundberg wondered if Terry had perhaps mentioned it to an officer who wrote it off during one of those many visits by saying she was intoxicated and talking nonsense.

A few days later, after conducting his own unofficial internal inquiries, Lundberg tracked down the Sandy policeman concerned and confronted him.

“He looked me in the face and said he did not recall her saying anything about her sisters,” says Lundberg bitterly. He believes that cop was “covering his ass like a true professional.”

The next day, Lundberg returned to Terry’s home to try and get some more details about her allegations. She was more relaxed because the threatening phone calls had stopped. Terry even admitted her own innermost fears about becoming a child abuser herself. It really worried Terry that she might end up like her mom, and she told him how she had gotten that friend to take the child away who almost burned down the house when she was babysitting.

Lundberg gave Terry a poster that says
LOVE DOESN’T HAVE TO HURT
, which featured a photo of a hand holding a rose with just a prick of blood on the forefinger. Below it read:
Domestic Violence
Can
Stop 1–800–897–LINK.
He knew that if a similar sort of service had existed a few years earlier, the Knorr tragedy might have been prevented.

Having observed the poverty inside that house on Pepperwood, Lundberg also insisted Terry and her in-laws have his Thanksgiving turkey voucher, awarded to all serving police officers at Sandy as a gesture of thanks from City Hall.

Lundberg believes that Terry was feeling isolated because John Fitzgerald and the Placer County task force were a long distance away.

Terry frequently would call him in the middle of the night with a nugget of information she had forgotten to tell him before.

“She was always very apologetic, saying, ‘I hope I did not disturb you or wake you up.’”

Lundberg spent hours one morning making calls to all the hospitals in the Salt Lake City area to find Terry a friendly, sympathetic psychiatrist willing to treat her for no charge. He recognized that she was someone in dire need of professional counseling.

*   *   *

The Nevada State Prison, at Ely, is the sort of place where inmates sometimes bolt across the day-room floor and, at full stride, smash their fists into the side of a prison guard’s head, knocking him to the floor.

But the obvious problems of life inside a tough jail had shrunk into insignificance for twenty-four-year-old Robert Wallace Knorr. As he paced up and down the nine-by-nine cell he shared with another inmate, he could not stop thinking about what was happening back in Auburn.

The police had already been in touch with him and asked for his full cooperation. He turned them down flat, and one investigator predicted that authorities were going to have to get a court order to force him to appear in any eventual trial. They already knew that the whole question of whether or not he should be treated as an adult or a child was going to be a crucial part of any court hearing, as he was fifteen and sixteen at the times of his sisters’ killings.

*   *   *

A few days after Terry received those threatening phone calls, her mother, Theresa Knorr, noticed the first newspaper and television reports concerning Terry’s allegations against her. Sheriff Don Nunes’s press release on the investigation into Sheila and Suesan’s deaths had alerted the world to her alleged crimes.

But it was the local news report on Utah’s KUTV Channel 2 that must have shaken even Theresa Knorr to the very core. There, on the television screen, was her only surviving daughter, Terry, telling the world about the awful abuse and murder allegedly inflicted on her family.

Terry, close to tears throughout the interview, told interviewer Peter Rosen: “What kind of mother would do that? What kind of person am I going to be for the rest of my life because of this?

“All my life I’ve tried to put out of my mind what happened. I couldn’t believe that it actually happened. I just want my sisters to know I had nothing to do with this and I loved them. I don’t have them now and I want them back.

“I told all these people, but none of them wanted to believe I was actually telling the truth. They all thought I had loony tunes and that I had problems, well, what the heck do they expect!

“I have asked myself a hundred times why didn’t I just tell them to run. I didn’t know what to do. All my life I have tried to block it out of my mind.”

The KUTV Channel 2 news show also reported that police were still trying to find Theresa Jimmie Knorr. Fitzgerald had even provided the media with a copy of that almost glamorous photograph of her that she used on her Utah driver’s license. Sheriff Nunes admitted: “We don’t know where she is. She’s in the wind somewhere.”

On the morning of November 5, Theresa Knorr got a loan in the form of a check from Bud Sullivan for $4600 to be paid back to him against her salary. He had turned down her initial request a week earlier. But then she came back to him and said she really needed the money. Bud—a relaxed good old boy in his early sixties—asked her why. She told him she had another heavy tax bill to pay, and since she had reliably repaid an earlier loan out of her wages, he reluctantly agreed.