Whatever Mother Says... (5 page)

On their arrival at the house, the front door opened and there was a stench of marijuana wafting onto the porch. One of the Knorr children hollered for their mother, but was ordered to slam the door shut, and Sean’s mother never did actually get to talk to Theresa Knorr about their respective sons’ illicit behavior.

Sean frequently heard screaming and pounding on the walls while playing on the sidewalk near the house. But instead of reporting the noises, he just tried to avoid going near the house. Other neighbors commented on the noises, but they also did nothing.

On other occasions, Sean heard streams of profanities coming from Theresa Knorr inside the house. It surprised him that an avid Bible reader should use such foul language.

Sean only ever got to talk to Theresa Knorr during her rare trips out to the local store when she would walk past his front yard. The conversation was always brief and ineffectual. Theresa Knorr—whose weight had soared beyond the 200-pound mark by this time—would waddle up the street with her long dark hair down to her waist and wearing a vast pair of bell-bottom pants. She looked like a huge, fat version of the lady out of the Addams Family, he remembered years later.

Sean also suspected some sort of devil worshiping going on inside the Knorr house. It coincided with the time the children were made to shave their heads by their mother and wear certain types of clothes. But once again, no one did anything to bring the family to the attention of the authorities.

Not surprisingly, the Knorr children never wanted to go home when they were out playing with their friends.

Terry and Billy Bob were constantly around Sean’s home, which had become known locally as the “Kool-Aid house” because it was such a relaxed place. The Knorr children stayed there for meals and told their friends they rarely got a proper meal at home. Other neighbors also felt sorry for them and would feed them regularly.

Older sister Sheila was frequently dispatched by Theresa Knorr to pick up the children from neighbors’ homes. She was always very well-mannered and would turn up at the door and say: “Okay kids, time to come home.”

Sean was in the same class at school as Robert for four years, but during that time the youngster was often absent. Robert also surprised his friend Sean by regularly referring to his mother in a detrimental fashion.

“He said she was off her rocker. That she was a hermit with emotional problems. He just kept saying she was crazy,” recalled Sean.

One time, Theresa Knorr set fire to the backyard of the house on Bellingham for no apparent reason. When Sean rushed over to see if he could help, he had to go through the garage to the back yard, and noticed hundreds of articles of clothing just ripped to shreds, lining the concrete floor. The fire destroyed the back fence, but Sean never forgot the sight of all those clothes. No one ever did find out why the fire occurred.

All the Knorr children—except for Howard Sanders—were very skinny and undernourished-looking at this time. Neighbor Sean also noticed welts on Robert’s back from where his mom had beaten him with a belt.

Sean and Robert regularly did drugs together. Sometimes they would sneak out and smoke pot in the nearby park. Later, they did some more serious stuff together.

Some mornings, big brother Howard would drive the rest of the kids to school in Theresa Knorr’s Ford LTD. Sean would often go along for the ride. The children were always much friendlier in the car, out of reach of their mother.

None of the sisters dated anyone on the street, as they were kept in the house because Theresa Knorr did not want them to get promiscuous. She also refused to give her daughters an allowance.

Sean Martin—whose best friends in the family were Robert and Terry—never tried to date any of the Knorr girls, but his brother Chris was very keen on Sheila for a while, although she did not feel the same way about him. Chris and Sheila even went on a field trip with the school one time, but the relationship never got going.

Sean’s family, taking pity on the Knorr children, used to hold birthday parties for them at their house because Theresa Knorr would not allow their friends inside her home.

Inevitably, all the unhappiness inside the Knorr household resulted in Suesan running away from home on a regular basis. The neighbors always knew when she was on her way because there would be a loud commotion outside the house as Suesan ran down the garden path to a waiting gas guzzler filled with her biker-type friends, who would screech off down the street once she’d climbed in.

One time, a bunch of her friends turned up in a station wagon with a Starsky and Hutch stripe down the side. They grabbed Suesan, pushed her in the car and took off at high speed. At first neighbors thought she had been kidnapped, but it later emerged that Suesan had happily gone with them because she could not stand life inside the Knorr house.

Once, Suesan ran away with a practicing satanist. The rest of the family believe the man introduced Suesan to the occult, and that that contributed to her mother’s hatred toward her. But a lot of this information was supplied by Theresa Knorr to her children, tempered with exaggerations and lies to ensure that the other brothers and sisters stayed on their mother’s side.

There were other recurring problems within the family, like Howard Sanders sexually abusing his half sister Suesan just to get back at his mother. It is not hard to imagine how much influence this had on the dysfunctional situation inside the Knorr household.

Then there was the time all six children were in the backyard of the house on Bellingham, weeding the ground with just a teaspoon each. Howard and his siblings were ordered by Theresa Knorr to completely clear the yard of thistles and weeds and not to go anywhere for four days until they had pulled every one of them out.

The children soaked the ground of the backyard with water before going down on their hands and knees with their spoons. Howard was strong enough to pull the weeds out with his hands, but the others spent hours digging up tiny plots of earth as Theresa Knorr watched from the back window to make sure no one was being lazy.

Not surprisingly, most of the family’s neighbors on Bellingham steered clear of the Knorrs, apart from a woman named Cherise Frederick.

Theresa Knorr seemed to have a real friend in Cherise, who was one of the few people ever to be allowed inside the house and actually made to feel relatively welcome.

But Theresa Knorr’s real motives in befriending Cherise seemed to be centered around her knowledge of the Bible and religion, and they would spend hours talking about their favorite quotations.

The last couple of years at the house on Bellingham mainly featured a running battle between Suesan and her mother. Suesan was having a lot of emotional problems—besides regularly fleeing the house with her oddball friends, she was not helped by the fact that her mother kept ranting on about her daughter’s contract with the devil.

Whenever Suesan acted strangely, Theresa Knorr would tell the other children that Suesan was “up to her usual crap again.” She had little or no sympathy for her seemingly disturbed daughter.

Howard tried to stay away from the house on Bellingham because he could not deal with what was going on. But his mother just would not stop going on about Suesan playing with witchcraft and being a devil worshiper.

Howard kept telling his mother that Suesan simply had mental problems. That she needed a doctor. But Theresa Knorr knew best.

At one point, Suesan, then just fifteen, ran away and was arrested by police. She told them about some of the punishments inflicted by her mother, and they took her to the Child Protective Service offices in Sacramento, where she pleaded to be made a ward of court. The CPS even visited the house on Bellingham in response to allegations of parental abuse made by Suesan about her mother.

A number of meetings at the CPS offices followed. But officials did not believe the teenager’s story, and her mother was allowed to regain custody of her daughter. Theresa Knorr convinced them that Suesan was just an uncontrollable child, and she assured the CPS she could cope with her. Youngest daughter Terry was forced to lie to CPS officials who visited the house, after being threatened with a beating by her mother. Years later, when police tried to find out the names of the social workers who recommended that Suesan be allowed back home, they were told that all the records had been purged under a five-year rule.

Even the other Knorr children were astonished when Suesan was returned home, since they presumed she would never be allowed to move back into the house on Bellingham.

After Suesan was compelled to move back, it became painfully obvious to Terry that Theresa Knorr was going to punish the teenager even more than before her escape. Her two other daughters were also scared. They could not understand why their mother hated all of them so much.

One day, after years of never being seen, Robert Knorr Sr. visited the house in a bid to see his four children. Theresa Knorr sent Howard’s girlfriend Connie—living with Howard at the time—out to talk to Robert Sr. because she knew that he did not know her. Connie had to pretend she was the new owner of the house and that Theresa Knorr and her family had moved on months earlier. Theresa Knorr wanted to prevent Robert Sr. from ever seeing his children again.

During those last few months that the family lived at Bellingham, Howard Sanders was heavily into dealing drugs. Howard contends that Theresa Knorr allegedly knew all about the illicit activities and even helped run the narcotics business in his absence. And when Howard did not have enough cash, he paid his mother the rent in drugs, which she either smoked or made him sell during subsequent drug deals.

One time, Howard was even tipped off by a friend at the Sheriff’s Department about a planned raid on the house by private detectives, and cleaned it out of drugs hours before they arrived.

Much of the time, Howard’s drugs made the house virtually a pharmacy. Howard was known locally as the mushroom man. He had acid. He had connections for coke, crank, and he always had two different types of weed on him. He also had connections with someone who ripped off pharmacies for speed. He often got the drugs in their sealed bottles straight out of the stores.

With the influx of drug trade to the house came the occasional brush with a number of unsavory characters, who accused Howard Sanders of ripping them off during drug deals.

The Knorr family were warned by some Hell’s Angels who lived around the corner that they were going to come over and “rape all the women.”

The Angels were angry that Howard had taken away some of their business. Howard even gave his girlfriend Connie that old .22 of his dad’s to carry for protection whenever she went to the local store.

Theresa Knorr also frequently issued warnings to Connie, but they had nothing to do with the drug trade. She was concerned about Connie’s safety, living under the same roof as her daughter Suesan.

Theresa Knorr told Connie to always lock her bedroom door at night because, she explained coolly, “Suesan is going to try and kill you because she does not like you at all.”

Connie was terrified by the threat of murder, especially since she suspected it was partly caused by Suesan’s jealousy because Howard had committed incest with her.

But there was another reason why Suesan disliked Connie so much. When she and Connie had been at Pershing Junior High together in Orangevale, Connie and her brother had frequently teased Suesan by calling her “fishface” because she wore big, thick glasses and looked like a nerd.

*   *   *

Suesan Knorr greatly contributed to her reputation as the devil’s child within the family by cutting off both her mother’s eyelashes, removing bits of her long, spindly fingernails, and stealing a few strands of her waist-length black hair during a daring midnight raid on her mother’s dingy bedroom. Theresa Knorr claimed afterward that she did not wake up during the incident because Suesan had drugged her coffee with masses of sleeping tablets.

Theresa Knorr was furious when the children refused to tell their mother who was responsible. She systematically burnt each of them with cigarette butts until they told her who had done the evil deed.

Theresa Knorr knew it was probably Suesan because she suspected that the specimens had been removed for some sort of witchcraft ceremony. She also believed Suesan was jealous of her good looks.

Once Theresa Knorr had confirmed that it was Suesan, it marked the start of a series of horrendous attacks. Theresa Knorr utterly detested her daughter’s daring behavior, and she began claiming that Suesan was suffering from sexually transmitted diseases as well.

Shortly afterward, Theresa Knorr told Howard’s girlfriend Connie: “She is a witch, and the only way you can kill a witch is by burning them.”

Theresa Knorr also warned Connie that anytime she cleaned her hairbrush or trimmed her nails, she should flush it all down the toilet because Suesan could get the remnants and use them for her devil worshiping. Theresa Knorr even ominously told Connie that Suesan would be after her blood eventually.

Even Howard Sanders—hardly a saint by anyone’s reckoning—continued to try to get Suesan some discreet medical attention, because he firmly believed she had a mental problem. One day he went over to Connie’s stepdad’s place on Pershing, in Orangevale, and asked him for advice on how to get his sister committed. But Theresa Knorr once again ignored Howard’s pleas when he voiced his concern, and she banned him from ever mentioning the subject again.

The beatings rapidly escalated after the eyelashes incident. Howard Sanders walked in on his mother whipping Suesan with a plastic tube one day. He immediately snatched it curtly from his mother and broke the tube into tiny pieces. But much of the damage had already been done.

Suesan, five feet five inches tall, was approximately the same height as her mother, but Theresa Knorr vastly outweighed her. She had turned into a turtlelike waddler who rocked from side to side as she moved. Her face had become almost square from overeating. Her expressions, even during the most violent exchanges, ran the gamut from stolid to grave.