Whatever Mother Says... (6 page)

Sometimes the violence inflicted on Suesan would subside long enough so that Theresa Knorr could sit her bruised and battered daughter down and make her read excerpts from the Bible. Theresa Knorr also talked about calling in priests to perform exorcisms to get the devil out from within her daughter.

Around this time, Theresa Knorr’s drinking increased. She would often keep the children up all night, interrogating them on the different oddities of the Bible.

Theresa Knorr indicated her true feelings about her daughters by always referring to them as “your sisters” during any conversations with the boys. She would spit the words out.

Her possessiveness also knew no boundaries. She tried to encourage her children not to attend school because she wanted to keep an eye on the girls and get the boys out to work from as early an age as possible.

Suesan’s last school was Arcade High School, on Watt Avenue, but she only got as far as seventh grade when her mother pulled her out of school, just as she did with Terry a few years later. Sheila managed ninth grade at Casa Robla before she stopped attending.

About the only one who continued with his studies was Billy Bob. By all accounts he had a good head on his shoulders. He was smart and good at sports. The other children believe he stayed in school so much because he was trying to keep out of his mother’s reach.

Amazingly, despite all the children’s appalling record of absence from school, no one investigated the family’s home life to find out where the problems lay.

Both Robert and Billy Bob had part-time jobs before they turned fifteen, and Billy Bob was extremely bitter about his mother having put all the utilities in his name so that he had to pay for everything out of his modest pay packet. Billy Bob saw it as yet more evidence that his mother was trying to control his life.

It also had a chillingly familiar ring to it. For Theresa Knorr had made every man—including the husband she shot dead—part with his wages the moment he walked through the door.

Four

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina

Theresa Knorr rocked back and forth in her chair, Terry recalls. Back and forth. Back and forth. Not a glint of emotion in her steely blue eyes. Just an empty stare at the person sitting just a few feet away.

In front of her—crumpled at the kitchen table like a rag doll incapable, afraid, to defy any order—was her seventeen-year-old daughter Suesan, whose sin was to be prettier and thinner than her mother and who was rumored to be mixing with the devil. It infuriated Theresa Jimmie Knorr to even look at Suesan. She accelerated the pace of her movements on that red rocking chair. Her eyes locked on Suesan. All the children knew that was a sign.

The chair creaked under the weight of her 250-pound frame.

Theresa Knorr pushed a pot filled with macaroni cheese into her hands.

It was the first of
four
boxes of the stuff that she would make her daughter consume that night.

Suesan shook as she grabbed the saucepan filled to the brim with food. The scorching hot pot sizzled as it touched the skin of her bare legs.

Suesan’s first few mouthfuls brought little response from her mother.

“Don’t get that on the floor.” Theresa Knorr spat the words out with disgusted contempt.

Suddenly the door to the kitchen burst open and stick-figured, blond Terry rushed in. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw that her mother was administering her daily dose of punishment to one of her five brothers and sisters.

“Oh! I, uh … I didn’t mean…”

Twelve years old, Terry Knorr looked from her sister Suesan to her mother, then slowly turned her gaze back to her sister with a look of recognition that verged on apathy. Her pallid face seemed to shrink.

“Oh,” she repeated dully, taking an involuntary step backward.

It was yet another cruel and twisted moment from within the four battered walls of the Knorr household, but it would remain etched in Terry’s memory for the rest of her troubled life.

*   *   *

A few weeks later—in June 1983—Theresa Knorr decided to give her two younger sons—Robert, fourteen, and Billy Bob, fifteen—some lessons in the art of corporal discipline.

Terry recalls that Robert stood behind Suesan at the end of the hall of that comfortable detached home in Orangevale and held her arms back while his brother Billy Bob put on sinister-looking slim black leather bicycle gloves almost like a surgeon preparing for an operation. Theresa Knorr told her son that the gloves were essential for ensuring that no one could detect evidence of the beating Suesan was about to receive.

Theresa Knorr was apparently unhappy because her daughter had not gained enough weight in the previous weeks. No female in that house was going to look prettier and younger than her. And all the devil talk was ringing in her ears.

Then Theresa crashed her own clenched fist deep into her daughter’s stomach. The teenager flinched, but dared not utter a sound.

Terry Knorr, having seen more in her short life than most people twice her age, stood behind her mother in the entrance to the main bedroom. Her other sister, Sheila, in the doorway of the bathroom, begged Theresa Knorr to stop.

But neither the mother nor her sons took any notice. Then the two girls saw that their mother had something in her right hand, hanging limply down by the side of her enormous girth. It was a silver pistol with a black plastic handle; a small .22 derringer with a capacity of just two bullets. But one would be enough.

Suesan screamed as she caught sight of that weapon, clutched in her mother’s pudgy, pink hands.

Suddenly the whole scene faded to slow motion. Terry watched as her mom lifted her arm and pointed the gun at her sister.

A pop like a champagne cork exploding was the only evidence that she had fired the gun straight at her daughter. The bullet entered underneath her left breast and went right through her rib cage before lodging itself in her back.

Terry watched her sister grab her chest, gasp, then clutch the door frame of the bathroom before stumbling and then falling into the empty bathtub.

An eerie silence enveloped the house for a few seconds as the full impact of what had just occurred sank into the minds of all those present.

Theresa Knorr was the first one to snap out of that trance. She moved swiftly toward her injured daughter.

Clinically, like the nurse she had once been, Theresa Knorr tried to rip the clothes off wounded Suesan. Then she pulled her daughter over the edge of the tub to examine the wound—her only concern was to see precisely where the bullet had entered the body.

That night, Terry and Sheila scrubbed the floor where Suesan had been shot. They scrubbed the door frame where there were bloodstains. They scrubbed every inch of the bathroom apart from the tub where their sister still lay mortally wounded. Theresa Knorr did not have to tell them to do it. They just got on with the task at hand rather than face the wrath of their demonic mother.

Often, the kids would be up until two or three in the morning scrubbing floors and hand-waxing. It was just part of life in that house.

Throughout their entire childhood Theresa Knorr had refused to allow any strangers in the house, because she did not want it dirtied up. In that bathroom, Theresa issued a dire warning to her brood of children: “Just keep your mouths shut. If we have to get rid of the body, we will.”

Theresa Knorr was already referring to her daughter Suesan as though she were dead.

Terry wanted to go to the authorities to report the shooting incident, but she feared for her life, so she kept quiet.

Meanwhile, Suesan remained trapped in the bathtub. The other children would regularly creep into the bathroom and stand and stare at her.

Sheila was the one child who bothered to actually talk to her wounded sibling.

Theresa Knorr overheard one conversation between her two daughters during which Sheila spoke about suicide. Minutes later, Terry claims, Theresa Knorr did something that shocked even the boys.

She handed Sheila the very same gun she had just tried to murder her other daughter with, forced it into her shaking hand and said: “If you’re so depressed, then kill yourself.”

Sheila held tightly onto the gun. Perhaps it was the answer. She walked to her bedroom, lifted the gun to her head and squeezed the trigger. It had no bullets in it …

Back in her bathroom prison, Suesan was still somehow surviving despite a massive loss of blood and only a pillow and a blanket for comfort. Amazingly, as the days turned to weeks, she even gradually began to regain her strength.

But the strangest aspect of this already bizarre scenario was that Theresa Knorr started to attend to her injured daughter as if she was the apple of her eye. Lovingly, she dabbed at the half-inch entrance wound where that bullet she had fired so coldly had pierced Suesan through to her back. She even patched the injury with gauze pads. And she regularly fed her daughter antibiotics to stop the infection from spreading. A liberal dose of Flexeril was provided from her secret store of medicines to stop the pain. The drugs all came from hospitals where Theresa had worked years previously.

Theresa could hardly be described as uncommunicative with her children either. She matter-of-factly informed them of the reasons why their sister had to remain in that hellhole of a bathtub. They had no choice, she told her clan. Theresa knew that if there was blood left on anything, then it could easily be traced.

She also did not want to move her daughter, because she didn’t know if the bullet would be dislodged. Terry wondered if this was a sign of compassion on the part of her mother (or simply an effort to avoid any further spillages of blood.)

But Terry did not doubt that, having cruelly shot her own daughter, Theresa Knorr turned into a caring nurse, regularly washing her injured daughter and tending to her wounds.

However, at the same time, she forbade the other children from sharing toilet facilities with Suesan by claiming they could catch a disease from her. The real Theresa Knorr was never far away.

As Theresa’s clinical attitude continued to be tempered by the occasional sign of warmth, she even told Suesan that she was sorry and asked for forgiveness.

“I forgive you,” whispered Suesan.

That was one of many mistakes Suesan made. The beatings would never end.

As the weeks turned into a month, Suesan emerged from the bathroom having survived a bullet without receiving any professional medical attention. Theresa Knorr was doggedly determined to make sure the authorities never discovered anything about the shooting, even if it had almost cost her daughter her life.

Suesan became a virtual heroine in the eyes of her brothers and sisters. Whenever their mother was out of the room, she faced a stream of questions about the wound. Did the bullet hurt? Did you think you’d die? Terry was even allowed to touch the spot where the bullet had come to a halt after its almost fatal journey through Suesan’s body. She could feel it still lodged in her right side.

Theresa Knorr feared that Suesan might try to kill her in revenge for the shooting. She was also worried that her oldest son, Howard, would find out about the incident and decide to punish her. After years under his mother’s control, Howard had made a new life for himself outside the vicious web of physical and sexual abuse that had haunted Theresa Knorr and all her children for so many years.

She called Howard up within days of the shooting with a carefully concocted tale deliberately designed to throw him off the scent.

Theresa Knorr told twenty-year-old Howard that Suesan had stabbed her sister Sheila with a steak knife. Sheila—under fear of punishment from her mother—backed up the story dutifully.

Theresa claimed to Howard that a few days later Sheila got hold of the derringer and shot Suesan. The mother reassured her son it had only been a surface wound and she had removed the bullet safely just a short time after the shooting.

*   *   *

Once Suesan had made a recovery—even though she still had the bullet lodged next to her ribs—she tried to keep out of the house on Bellingham Way as much as possible. Frequently she would stay at friends’ homes or remain out until late at night.

Howard and his common-law wife Connie moved back into the house when it was up for sale after the shooting. They noticed the scar on Suesan, but the entire family insisted the wound had been inflicted by Sheila, not her mother. Only those in the house on that fateful day knew the truth.

Even Suesan herself backed up this lie by insisting it had been her sister who shot her.

Connie was terrified by Theresa Knorr. One night when she and Howard were living by candlelight in the by-now deserted house in Orangevale, she heard a noise, opened the door to the hallway, and there was Theresa Knorr emptying out a closet. Theresa turned to her and said: “I know what you are. I know what you’re doing. You will be punished. Your time will come.”

Connie’s only two sins in the eyes of Theresa Knorr were to be younger and prettier than her
and
responsible for luring her oldest son away to a new life.

A few weeks later an even more chilling event convinced Connie to try and avoid setting foot inside the Knorr household whenever possible. She was pregnant with her first child by Howard when Theresa Knorr dropped in at Connie’s mother’s home, which she had moved back to, and informed Connie that Suesan had told her the baby was a boy, would be born on February 1, and he would have a birth defect. All three prophesies came true.

Then Theresa repeated her earlier claims that Suesan had gained special powers after selling her soul to the devil. But, Theresa Knorr insisted, Suesan told her that she was going to kill Connie and the baby because there were not supposed to be any more descendants to carry on the family name. Connie was petrified. She had found herself involved in a very dangerous family.

Five

What did you do that made all of us turn out so well?