Whatever Mother Says... (4 page)

But in another corner of that large house in Orangevale, a much more disturbing incident was occurring.

Terry, just six years old, was being molested by her brother Howard, who was thirteen at the time. It was an awful introduction to an even more awful life within those four brutal walls.

Terry explained to investigators more than fifteen years later: “I didn’t know what he was doing; well, I knew what he was doing wasn’t right, but I wasn’t, you know, I was afraid to tell anybody, and … I went to my mom because it hurt.”

Theresa Knorr was outraged when she heard that Howard had molested his half sister. She broke a chair over the boy’s back and seriously beat him to make sure he never did it again.

Howard Sanders later confessed to having illicit sex with his sister in dramatic tones to two stunned Placer County investigators during a tape-recorded interview conducted at his home in Sacramento on November 16, 1993.

POLICE OFFICER
: I’m going to make this very short and sweet. There’s been allegations of molestation and that you molested Theresa, your sister. Are those allegations true?

SANDERS
: Yes.

POLICE OFFICER
: And that was sodomy, anal sex.

SANDERS
: Yes.

Terry will never know if that attack by her brother sparked the eventual terrors that filled the Knorr household, but shortly after being molested by Howard, bad things started to happen.

The first incident occurred when the mother of one of Terry’s best friends, Jennifer—who lived on Sutton, just around the corner from the house in Orangevale—called at Theresa Knorr’s front door to offer her some of her daughter’s clothes as a gift.

Theresa Knorr was furious. She thought Terry was going around telling people that the family didn’t have any money, that they were so poor they couldn’t afford to buy the children clothes.

Once Jennifer’s mother had gone, as later recounted by Terry, Theresa Knorr grabbed her youngest daughter and made her strip naked before dragging her through the house.

Then she grabbed a piece of rope, wrapped it around Terry’s neck and threw it over a door. Theresa Knorr’s two sons, Billy Bob and Robert, then held the rope, forcing Terry to stay in one position while her mother beat her with a weeping willow limb until she almost passed out. Terry remained jammed against the door throughout.

Theresa Knorr’s violent outbursts seemed to escalate when she was introduced to witchcraft by Chester Harris after he became her husband.

Theresa immediately began claiming that her daughter Suesan was involved in devil worshiping. And she began making veiled references to Suesan plotting to kill her mother before she reached the age of eighteen.

“To fulfill her contract with the devil…”

According to Terry, something happened between Chester Harris and Suesan. It was something that may have driven a wedge between her and her mother. It also had the effect of breaking up Theresa Knorr’s marriage to Harris.

After the split with Harris, Theresa Knorr began frequently disappearing from the house on Bellingham, in Orangevale, for days at a time, leaving Howard—just fourteen—to look after the rest of the clan.

On one occasion she took off for at least four days after running out of the door of the house in front of the children. She came back with the police, claiming that Howard had threatened her.

Howard—sitting in the living room with a friend—cried because he felt so betrayed by his mother’s abandonment and her false accusations against him.

Years later Howard wondered whether Theresa Knorr had been suffering from a nervous breakdown at the time. What other reason could there be for a mother to run out the front door and leave her children in the care of a fourteen-year-old?

Theresa Knorr gave her son a bizarre explanation when he asked where she had been during those four days she disappeared.

“She told me she had found some pennies and she threw these pennies away and that, you know, these pennies showed back up in the motel where she was staying, and no matter what she did, these pennies kept showing back up, you know,” said Howard.

“I mean, I didn’t understand it at the time. But looking back on it, I mean, obviously they were paranoid delusions. And that goes along with somebody that’s having a nervous breakdown.”

Sometime after this, Theresa Knorr stopped getting out of bed and getting dressed. She never took a shower, and refused to go outside for weeks at a time. But she still managed to wield the hand of discipline if required.

Theresa Knorr stopped punishing her son Howard when he was a strapping fourteen-year-old—six feet and 190 pounds—and highly likely to retaliate against his overweight, overbearing mom. The last time he was beaten by her, she wielded her favorite weapon—a two-by-four with the words “Board of Education” written across it.
1
He cannot remember the reasons for the punishment, but the words exchanged between mother and son provide a cold insight into their relationship.

After his mother’s final painful smack on his backside with the two-by-four, Howard turned around to her and said:

“You done now?”

“Yes. I guess you’re too big to whip anymore.”

Howard’s worst legacy from those beatings was his vicious temper. Life at that house really screwed him up.

“I had a real problem with my anger, you know, real problem with my anger. That’s what led me into a bad marriage, and I ended up going to jail for it and that wasn’t the first time I ever got in trouble about violence. So yeah, it screwed me up pretty good. I had a lot of demons to work out,” he told investigators years later.

But while Theresa Knorr might have decided not to beat her eldest son anymore, there was no such reprieve for her daughters.

She was convinced they were going to go out and be promiscuous. She wanted to keep control of the girls so they would never be involved with boys. That meant clamping down on them—not even letting them go out and socialize with other teenagers.

Theresa also passed on the mantle of responsibility to her boys, especially Howard at that time, because he was the eldest. It put the teenager under immense pressure. He was already working part-time as a cook at a local restaurant called Joe and Dotty’s, on Auburn Boulevard, to help the family survive. He had learned how to cook by preparing meals for his brothers and sisters. But now he was going to have to be the father as well.

The other children accepted Howard as a father figure for the period he remained at home. He was respected, even feared. Basically, he took the place of a husband. That also meant frequently being the disciplinarian of the family.

There were numerous occasions when Theresa Knorr would let Howard do her spanking for her with that familiar piece of two-by-four. She was proud of having trained him in the art of inflicting punishment.

Sometimes Howard would make the children hold their ankles as he smashed the board on their bottoms or lay them on the floor before spanking them.

These spankings were such vicious beatings that none of the children ever forgot them.

Bruises were commonplace, especially when Howard used that two-by-four piece of wood—the Board of Education.

Theresa Knorr still got involved in the really serious punishments. On many occasions the children being punished would end up with bruises all over their bodies.

Theresa Knorr even introduced a switch-style riding crop just to inflict extra pain on her flock of children.

When she used the switch, the injuries were so serious that the other children would dab peroxide on the cuts all over the back of whoever had been punished.

As the oldest and the biggest, no one dared argue with Howard. He even devised rules and regulations that the other children had to obey, or face dire consequences.

Howard’s career as main male enforcer in the Knorr household continued until he retired, at sixteen, after starting to work full-time as a chef. Howard was the sort of guy who, if the front door was slammed, went around to the back door; and if the back door was locked, he tried the windows; and if the windows were barred, he would haul out a sledgehammer.

But working outside the home began to give him a new perspective on life.

“I was seeing more of life and started to realize that these weren’t right, you know, that beating kids wasn’t right,” he says.

As well as questioning his mother’s orders, Howard actually began standing up against Theresa Knorr on behalf of his other brothers and sisters. The punisher was transforming into the protector.

She was no longer physically strong enough to stand up against Howard, but she had no intention of stopping the punishments being inflicted. She just tried to make sure he wasn’t around when she handed out her own special brand of discipline.

Howard never actually hit his mother, but he did come close to it frequently. One time he grabbed her and threw her against a wall. Then he smashed the wall right next to her head with his fist and put a hole in it. The children used to snigger every time they walked past the dent in the plaster.

But it was sisters Suesan and Sheila who got the brunt of their mother’s vicious temper. Howard and Terry both remember one day when Theresa Knorr pulled Sheila’s canine tooth out with her bare hands because it was not growing straight.

At school Sheila’s big ears earned her the nickname Dumbo. Life was extra tough on her. Physical abuse at home and verbal taunting at school. Was there no escape?

Theresa Knorr’s drinking also got so excessive at this time that she frequently would pack all six children in the family station wagon and leave them in the car outside bars she liked to frequent in Orangevale. Visits to drive-in movies were just as distressful for the youngsters.

“She’d end up getting bombed. She’d pass out and we’d have to wait for her to wake up to go home,” recalled Howard.

For many of their childhood years the kids veered from malnourishment to being force-fed vast quantities of fatty food. Sometimes teachers would take pity on some of the Knorr children and provide them with sandwiches and the occasional hot meal. But it is tragically clear the diet inside that household had serious effects. By the time he was twelve, Howard’s diet included a daily consumption of alcohol and drugs, packs of cigarettes, and the occasional slice of bread smothered in peanut butter, jelly, or cheese. These years of inconsistent, damaging diet, especially during childhood, may well have resulted in stunted development of some of the Knorr children. It also created levels of stress and fear that no ordinary family should ever have to suffer. But there was much worse to come …

Three

If my mother loved you, she loved you greatly. But if you were on the outs with my mother, she would make you feel like you were all alone in the universe, that nobody cared about you and you weren’t worth anything. So you always wanted to be on the good side of my mother.

Howard Sanders

That’s odd, neighbor Sean Martin remembered thinking as he walked out into the backyard of his house opposite the Knorr family home in Orangevale, the dog is not moving.

Bijou just lay there deathly still as twelve-year-old Sean tried desperately to wake him up. He pulled and tugged at the animal, but there were no signs of life in his tiny body.

A few minutes later Sean Martin and his big brother Chris started flashing a light down the dog’s throat. They just could not accept that their pet—part cocker spaniel, part poodle—was dead. When it dawned on them what had actually happened, both boys began to cry.

Life on Bellingham Way had been littered with odd incidents ever since the Knorrs moved in nine years earlier. Those who visited the house likened it to an out of control runaway train ride consisting of drug taking, excessive alcohol, and repeated violence toward one or another of the Knorr children. The family got a reputation in the area, which meant they were blamed for just about every strange occurrence on the street.

To make matters worse, Howard Sanders had reached his mid-teens and was hanging out with all the wrong types.

Neighbor Sean Martin grew up with the entire Knorr family from the mid-seventies up until when Theresa Knorr sold the house in 1982. He witnessed dozens of odd incidents, but the death of his dog Bijou is a typical example of how rumors could quickly spread about the “weird” Knorr family.

It all began when Bijou nipped youngest daughter Terry on her leg one time when she was teasing him in the front yard of Sean’s home. Terry—eleven at the time—was not that bothered about the injury, but Theresa Knorr was convinced the dog had rabies, and she reported Sean and his family to the SPCA and got the dog quarantined for a month.

Bijou was actually released from quarantine after only four days because he was given a complete clean bill of health. The next day Sean walked into the backyard and found the animal dead.

No one knows who killed the dog, but Sean believes it was poisoned. The incident went down in Bellingham folklore as gossip flew around that Theresa Knorr had killed the dog. But no one ever proved if the story was true.

The Knorr house in Orangevale had a strangely designed interior. The orange and white drapes were thumbtacked to the wall, and there were just bare lightbulbs—no lamp shades.

The furnishing inside the house consisted of a very basic leaf table with six chairs around it. One tatty couch. But there were no knickknacks or posters or pictures on the walls, and the TV was on constantly. The carpet was a dreadful, sickly, pea-green color. It seemed as if personal touches were nonexistent inside the Knorr family home.

Sean Martin—now twenty-four, and working as a doorman at one of Sacramento’s biggest sports bars by night while going to school during the day—got into trouble with Robert one time when they were just twelve years old. The two boys stole hundreds of dimes out of a neighbor’s house.

After being caught, both boys accused each other of committing the evil deed. Sean’s mother marched him down to her neighbor’s house to apologize for stealing. Then she took him to the Knorrs.