Whatever Mother Says... (23 page)

“Okay. In you go, and don’t forget to unlock the door the moment we knock on it,” explained Fitzgerald.

Theresa Cross squeezed into the toilet with just a tatty plastic bag containing her purse and a few items of makeup.

After four or five minutes, Fitzgerald and Ziegler looked at their watches anxiously and began to wonder why she had still not emerged. Fitzgerald calmly headed back down the aisle and knocked on the little door.

Theresa Cross emerged almost a completely different person from just a few minutes earlier. She was perfectly made-up and had neatly brushed her hair. She looked almost glamorous, a bit like Roseanne Arnold’s mother perhaps.

“There was a twisted vanity about her. Her appearance was always very important to her. She always tried to look good whatever the circumstances,” commented John Fitzgerald.

Theresa Cross had just spent five minutes ensuring that she would look her best when the plane landed and she found herself under the media spotlight. She wanted to be certain she would look as good if not better than everyone else. But it was all a delusion …

Twenty

In ancient times, when might was right, the infant had no rights until the right to live was ritually bestowed. Until then the infant was a nonentity and could be disposed of with as little compunction as for an aborted fetus.

Samuel Radbill, author of
The Battered Child

Placer County Sheriff Donald J. Nunes is the kind of guy who doesn’t do things by halves. He also knows a good press opportunity when he sees it, and the arrival at Sacramento Airport of the by-now notorious Theresa Knorr on a Delta Airlines flight from Salt Lake City on December 18, 1993, promised to be a classic media event.

John Fitzgerald—sitting in his window seat as the plane taxied to its terminal—was hoping, praying, that they could get her down the steps and out of that airport with the minimum of attention. As the plane came to a halt, he saw Sheriff Nunes standing below him on the tarmac with the reassuring sight of four Placer County officers. The sheriff had even brought along his own dark blue Chrysler New Yorker to whisk the threesome away as quickly as possible. Then Fitzgerald saw at least fifty members of the press, angling their cameras directly at the aircraft. There would be no easy escape.

As Fitzgerald, his prisoner, and colleague Laurie Ziegler emerged at the top of the aircraft steps, the whirl of motor drives made Theresa Knorr’s homecoming seem more like a presidential visit than the arrival of a woman alleged to be one of the most evil mothers of all time.

Once on the tarmac, Fitzgerald ignored the barrage of questioning and pushed Theresa Knorr and Ziegler in the backseat of the Chrysler before getting in front with the sheriff. Theresa Knorr looked terrified and said nothing.

But the press circus had only just gotten into gear. As the Chrysler screeched around the main terminal, journalists started chasing the car on foot. Every time the sheriff’s car slowed down on the trafficky airport tarmac, a few healthy reporters caught up and tried to thrust their notebooks and microphones in the window. There was also another problem for the law officers—they could not leave the airport until they picked up Fitzgerald’s Explorer, parked on the lot next to the main runway.

After circling around three more times and successfully wearing out even the fittest journalists, Sheriff Nunes pulled alongside Fitzgerald’s car in the parking lot, and Ziegler, Fitzgerald, and Theresa Knorr swapped vehicles hurriedly and headed off on the forty-minute drive to the Placer County Jailhouse at Auburn.

*   *   *

The area now called Placer County was home to the peaceful Southern Maidu Indians for hundreds of years before the discovery of gold in 1848 brought hordes of miners from the East Coast.

Just three years after that, Placer County was formed from portions of Sutter and Yuba counties. It took its name from the Spanish word for sand or gravel deposits containing gold. Miners washed away the gravel, leaving the heavier gold, in a process known as “placer mining.” The city of Auburn became county seat after being settled by a French gold prospector called Claude Chana, who turned it into a shipping and supply center for hundreds of gold camps.

According to some rather eccentric local folklore, Auburn got its name when, at an outdoor meeting of Indians, one Indian was dancing around an open fire, fell down and burned his hands. When he got up, he exclaimed:
“Ah burn.”
It sounds an unlikely tale. Tourist guides these days describe the city as “a wonderful example of Sierra foothills living at its best.”

Placer County’s 1431 square miles encompass a variety of terrains including everything from flat grasslands through rolling foothills to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The population in 1985 was 135,300, including a significantly low racial mix; 1.5 percent Asians, 7 percent Hispanic, less than one percent black, and one percent Native American.

But it was the construction of Theresa Knorr’s favorite Interstate 80 more than a quarter of a century ago that opened up Placer County and led to more than a third of its employed residents traveling to and from the California state capital of Sacramento.

The people of Auburn still remember another notorious case, that one involving children alleged to have murdered, which occurred just before the tragic death of Suesan Knorr.

On June 14, 1983, Anna Brackett, age eighty-five, was waiting for her son’s visit when two girls knocked at her door and asked for a drink of water. Usually wary of strangers hanging around her quiet condominium complex in Auburn, Anna felt no fear when she agreed to let Shirley Katherine Wolf, fourteen, and Cindy Lee Collier, fifteen, into her home. After all, they were only kids …

One hour later Anna was found dead, lying in a pool of blood, stabbed twenty-eight times with a knife from her own kitchen. Police questioned neighbors and local youth authorities, and early the next day found the two runaways hiding in Cindy’s house. Confessing to their grisly crime, Wolf and Collier were arrested and one month later tried by a Superior Court judge without a jury. They were sentenced to the maximum penalty under the law: to be kept in a California Youth Authority correctional facility until they reached the age of twenty-seven. It later emerged that both girls had suffered from family neglect and hideous sexual abuse that had robbed them of their childhoods and drove them to kill.

*   *   *

The brief Auburn winter, for which no one was ever quite prepared, arrived early the morning after Theresa Knorr’s dramatic return to California. A bitter breeze flowed west from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and in the great American tradition of public buildings in winter, it was so hot in the Placer County Courthouse, you felt trapped inside your clothes and there was nothing to breathe except thick steam heat.

First to be led into the immaculate, beige-colored courtroom was Theresa Knorr, handcuffed and wearing ill-fitting regulation Placer County inmates’ tunic and pants in her favorite bright red.

The six television cameras, two still photographers, a radio reporter, and two newspaper photographers allowed in the court recorded every move.

Theresa Knorr sat down opposite Judge J. Richard Couzens, the huge seal of the state of California between them. The stars and stripes were to the judge’s right, the bear of the California state flag to his left.

No sooner had Theresa Knorr sat down on the brand-new maroon-colored seat than her son William was brought in by two uniformed guards. They guided him alongside his mother. Neither looked each other in the eye. She kept her eyes set on the beige carpet. His eyes snapped around the room nervously.

William was terrified about sitting next to his mother. He had turned over a new leaf once he left his mother’s home. Suddenly, that previous life had reemerged and threatened his future. He looked pale and scared.

Then ex-husband Robert Knorr Sr. got up and screamed at Theresa Knorr.

“I hope you burn in hell for what you did to my kids, woman!”

The whole court stopped. Knorr Sr. glared. Reporters watched excitedly.

Theresa Knorr glanced in the direction of her ex-husband and gave him a cool stare. It was a look that seemed to say: “I am still in charge.”

Later Knorr Sr. claimed, as if to defend his actions, that he had reconciled with his son William and had been regularly visiting him in jail since his arrest. He said that his son was innocent and very depressed about the charges.

But his father’s outburst in court that morning simply had the effect of making William Knorr look even more terrified. He leaned over and whispered a few words in the ear of his attorney. Seconds later William Knorr was moved away from his mother to a row behind her.

In the public gallery, the assembled media watched in fascination because they knew that this was the first time mother and son had seen each other since those alleged crimes were committed inside that house just off Auburn Boulevard all those years earlier. Cameras continued to click. This was a photo opportunity none of them wanted to miss.

Theresa Knorr tried desperately to use her attorney to shield herself from the family members and the press in the public gallery just ten feet away. She could feel the hatred emanating from her ex-husband, Robert Knorr Sr., DeLois Knorr, the daughter-in-law she had never met before, and a handful of friends who had come to court.

The press pack scribbled furiously. None of them was going to leave the steaming courtroom until every last detail of this first appearance of mother and son had been squeezed out.

A few minutes later the attorney agreed to a continuance and the case was adjourned. Theresa and William Knorr were solemnly led away back to their cells.

William Knorr’s attorney Michael Brady said afterward that he hoped all future court appearances could be arranged so that mother and son were not in sight of each other. “My client is distraught about being in court with her.”

Ironically, Brady also told newsmen after the court appearance that although William Knorr wanted no part of being around his mother, he still felt it was best to keep the two defendants linked in court.

“If it is true that she was an overbearing mother, I want them tried together because she is responsible for the alleged homicide, not my client,” said Brady.

*   *   *

At the Placer County Jailhouse attached to the courtroom, Theresa Knorr and her son William each occupied eight-by-ten cells in the part of the prison given over to solitary confinement for punitive or protective reasons. This was a high profile case, and the protagonists of such dramas are often considered vulnerable to starstruck inmates happy to grab some glory by attacking notorious defendants.

Neither Theresa Knorr nor her son were particularly comfortable about their enforced incarceration, and—although men and women inmates have been openly mixed inside Placer County’s modern, air-conditioned facility since it opened in 1988—they avoided each other like the plague. Weak, yellow-orange lights burned in both their cells most of the night, which was fine if you were an insomniac with plenty of books to read, but very distracting if you were not. The cells had a bed, a toilet, a sink, even a tiny desk balanced on lockers. In Theresa’s, she had a three-inch window looking out onto a pond in a picturesque field at the back of the jail. Sometimes she watched pheasants hopping and skipping across the pastures as a few geese swam lazily back and forth in the pond. On another occasion, an orange-and-white-striped cat stalked a dove in the same field while a bluebird whistled in a small pine tree close by. On January 22, Theresa Knorr was allowed a rare treat—a walk in the grounds. She also became a prolific letter writer and, from the day she arrived in Auburn, scribbled away furiously to all her friends back in Salt Lake City.

In his cell on the other side of the facility, William Knorr was allowed to work out in the weight room and then shower. The rest of the time he did pushups and situps. Both Knorrs were allowed to make collect telephone calls. But neither saw any newspapers or watched television. Jail rapidly started to become a way of life for them.

*   *   *

In Salt Lake City, many of those close friends of Theresa Cross, as she called herself in that city, were still reeling from the shock of her arrest and extradition to California.

Pat Thatcher, the daughter of Alice Sullivan, and her brother Bud Sullivan, had the unenviable task of boxing up all Theresa Cross’s belongings and storing them away just in case she ever got back to collect them.

They carefully stacked her jewelry, makeup, and books in cardboard boxes and then took all her clothes out of the closet in that porch area where Bud had built a rail to take all Theresa’s extra clothing. They also dismantled a treadmill she had gone to great lengths to have delivered to the house, although it was rarely used by overweight Theresa.

Just as Pat was removing the last of Theresa Cross’s dozens of pairs of one-inch-heeled pumps, she noticed a number of carefully wrapped gifts stacked neatly in the corner of the closet. The mother who allegedly had inflicted so much pain and suffering on her children had been looking forward to another friendly family Christmas in the Sullivan household and had already bought at least half a dozen gifts to give her new family.

“It was so sad. I took them down to the basement close to tears. I still cannot believe that a good person like Theresa could be responsible for the crimes she is accused of,” Pat said recently.

And Bud Sullivan still stoutly defends Theresa Cross, despite the fact she tried to trick him into lending her yet more money the night before her extradition to California.

“Maybe Theresa is protecting her kids and does not want to implicate the others and that’s why she’s saying nothing. Maybe she was not involved in what they say. Who knows?” Bud said.

Twenty-one

From victims in the home, they go on to become victims and victimizers on the street.

Paul Mones, Author

Every day, investigators gathered at the task force headquarters at Inspector Johnnie Smith’s office in the Placer County Sheriff’s Office in Auburn. On the walls were maps of the region, as well as photos of Suesan and Sheila, their mother and two brothers. Bagged-up evidence—jewelry, clothing, makeup—still lay strewn on Smith’s desk.