Whatever Mother Says... (9 page)

Terry watched as the Cougar purred along the narrow track toward the exit from the trailer park complex, and then she returned to the empty house terrified. Fear and paranoia ran rampant through her confused mind.

Two hours later the distinct rumble of the Cougar’s V8 alerted Terry that her family had returned. Theresa Knorr walked in mumbling something about the engine in William’s car knocking. Their plan had been aborted at the last moment. Suesan Knorr’s death sentence had been commuted … for a few hours at least. She was returned to her miserable home on the kitchen floor, too delirious to realize that the family had already agreed to restart their mission the following evening.

*   *   *

Theresa Knorr and Billy Bob announced they were exhausted following their late night excursion, and retired for a nap in the bunk beds in the children’s room. Theresa, far too heavy to manage to clamber up to the top bunk, took the bottom bed.

Billy Bob, as Terry always called him, hardly ever got spanked by his mother. Theresa Knorr’s blatant favoritism toward him was the result of Billy Bob’s remarkable resemblance to how Robert Knorr Sr. looked when he was in the Marines and first swept Theresa off her feet.

Early the next evening, the brothers were ordered to transfer all Suesan’s belongings to Theresa’s car, a maroon 1978 Ford LTD with a white vinyl top. It was a strange-looking vehicle, a two-door sedan in the body of a four-door limo, complete with wire spoke wheels and whitewall tires. Terry never forgot those whitewall tires because her mother made her clean and polish the scruffy car so perfectly.

That night, Terry was once again ordered to play the role of prison guard on Suesan as she lay dying on the kitchen floor.

At one point during the evening, the terrified thirteen-year-old actually thought her sister had died. She got down next to the body on her knees and shook her and talked to her. At first there was no response. She repeated her actions. Suesan started babbling nonsense again. It was like music to Terry’s ears because it meant she was still alive.

Terry continued her round-the-clock guard duty until about midnight, when the family plan was reignited. This time Terry did not plead to join them. Her instincts told her it would be better not to play any part in their dreadful scheme.

Theresa Knorr carefully reversed the car along the side of the house before they carried Suesan out of the back door dressed in the same jumpsuit. They placed her in exactly the same position in the Ford LTD as they had in the Cougar the previous evening.

Terry studied her brothers and sisters for any signs of emotion. Robert seemed really twitchy, while Billy Bob was calm and cool, showing no fear. Theresa Knorr was the same. But Sheila was shaking.

Theresa and her clan drove up Interstate 80, northeast toward Reno. About sixty miles out of Sacramento, just beyond the Donner Pass, Theresa turned south on state Highway 89 and headed for the winter ski resort of Squaw Valley. In the summer months it wasn’t nearly so popular, and it didn’t take long to find a secluded spot near Squaw Creek. There, they unloaded the pile of Suesan’s belongings and fashioned a makeshift bier. They set Suesan on top of it. Then Billy Bob doused her with generous amounts of gasoline. Theresa Knorr waddled back to the car and started the engine. She watched as her son lit a match and dropped it on the bier and ran back to the car.

“If you ever tell anybody about this, you’re going to be next,” Theresa told Billy Bob as he climbed back into the Ford LTD.

The drive back to Auburn Boulevard at dawn that morning was carried out in virtually complete silence. But one incident occurred that terrified Theresa and her children more than the murder of their own flesh and blood.

Suddenly, as they powered along Highway 89, a bird smashed into the windshield of the Ford LTD, almost shattering it. Theresa was so thrown by the incident she swerved the car dangerously and almost lost control. Sheila was screaming. All the occupants of the car that sweltering night were convinced of one thing—that bird had committed suicide on the windshield. Theresa Knorr told her children it was a sign—“an offering or a sacrifice.”

They presumed the bird was the soul of Suesan come to say good-bye forever.

The following morning, July 17, the family returned to the house off Auburn Boulevard minus Suesan. Theresa Knorr and her sons were keen to tell little Terry all the graphic details.

They told her how they left Suesan in a beautiful area that was surrounded by trees, and there was a little clearing, like a meadow, as if to reassure her that her sister’s final resting place was so pretty it was the perfect place to die.

Theresa explained to Terry how Billy Bob pulled Suesan out of the car, laid her down, then, with Robert, pulled all her belongings out and spread them all around her. Robert then got back in the car, where Sheila sat terrified.

“When they poured gas over her and they got to about her chest area, her lower face area, it was like her—her entire body just collapsed, just like her soul was leaving her body,” Terry later recalled them telling her.

Theresa even reassured Terry that her sister had already died before the blaze was started.

“That’s when her soul escaped the corpse,” she chillingly added.

*   *   *

Howard Sanders—the only member of Theresa Knorr’s family to have actually escaped the nest before the death of Suesan—read an article in the
Bee
about a body found burning near Tahoe City just a few days later. It instantly reminded his wife Connie of those chilling conversations with her mother-in-law some weeks earlier when she had talked about having Suesan exorcised.

Howard carefully studied every word of the article, which reported that authorities had found the body off Highway 89 and presumed it was a woman who had a child because of the diapers scattered near the body. Howard suspected it must have been his half sister.

Howard confronted his mother on the phone, but she just said, simply, that Suesan had gone. Howard, understandably stunned, tried to question his mother further, but she repeated that she had gone. When he pressed her once again, she admitted Suesan was dead, but refused to elaborate. Instead she promised her oldest son she would tell him about it some other time.

When Howard did next see his mother, she insisted that Suesan had died of natural causes. But she refused to go into much detail. Howard did not believe his mother, and later confronted his two brothers, Robert and Billy Bob, about the article in the
Bee.
Robert admitted the body referred to was Suesan but added cryptically: “She was literally rotting away alive anyhow.”

When Howard was living with his in-laws on Pershing Avenue, Orangevale, Theresa Knorr dropped by unexpectedly one afternoon and insisted her son go in the Ford LTD with her.

Howard was terrified of his mother because of what he suspected had happened to Suesan. He was afraid that she might kill him if he asked too many questions about Suesan.

Howard was particularly spooked by the menacing-looking pair of tight red leather driving gloves his mother was wearing when she picked him up that day. Red was her favorite color. He was convinced she was using them to avoid getting her fingerprints on anything.

Paranoia was running rampant through Theresa Knorr’s family—much of it inspired by her allegedly brutal regime.

Shortly after Suesan’s death, Terry, just thirteen, made the first of many attempts to run away from the dreadful place she called home. She took off to live with a gang of youths in their late teens in a run-down apartment block a short distance from Auburn Boulevard. Theresa Knorr was furious when she heard, and immediately ordered eldest son Howard to go and get her back with the aid of his younger brother, Billy Bob.

The two brothers went over to the building on Marconi where they had heard Terry was staying, to find a party in full swing. Howard banged on the door and heard Terry say: “Oh shit, it’s my brother.” She then ran out the back door, and a bunch of heavyset bikers rushed out the front and tried to pick a fight with Howard and Billy Bob.

Howard cooled the potentially dangerous situation by talking to the men, but he never actually persuaded Terry to come home. However, a few weeks later she arrived back at the house off Auburn Boulevard and all was forgiven … for the time being.

Eight

“There’s a light above me. I think it’s a hole. I’m gonna climb toward it.”

Sheila Sanders, three days before she died

February 17, 1985, was a bleak and chilly night on Fulton Avenue, in the Del Paso Heights area of Sacramento. Tatty mid-seventies gas guzzlers cruised close to the sidewalk with their full beams turned up to highlight the prostitutes advertising their bodies in exchange for the cost of a set of retreads. Their lights illuminated black leather skirts, assorted stilettos, and white knee-high boots on a three-inch heel. But whatever the packaging, the end result was the same.

Theresa Knorr’s twenty-year-old daughter Sheila had allegedly only recently started working Fulton Avenue after some heavy pressure from her mother. Theresa demanded that each of her surviving children give her most of their earnings from whatever jobs—legal or illegal—they might have.

No one knows what Sheila really thought about working as a prostitute. It just wasn’t a topic of conversation inside the Knorr household. When Theresa Knorr demanded that she pay her keep, Sheila at first started streetwalking on Auburn Boulevard, just two minutes from their house. But the clients who drifted along that red-light district rarely paid more than ten dollars a trick. The good money was over at Fulton. Word on the street was that car salesmen and the businessmen who owned the dozens of trailer parks in the area would happily pay as much as two hundred bucks for a few hours in a nearby motel room with a girl.

Youngest daughter Terry could not understand why her half sister did not run away once she had earned some cash from turning tricks on Fulton. Terry certainly would have left home if given half the chance. In her mind, getting up to $200 for each trick was the sort of big money that would provide a route out of that terrible household.

Life inside Theresa Knorr’s home was also difficult for Sheila for other reasons. She did not want to be a prostitute forever, and she was dating one local guy seriously, even considering marriage. But she could not ask her boyfriend back to the house—let alone mention the word marriage in front of her mother—without risking a terrible beating.

Sheila regularly ended up with two black eyes in one session following a thrashing by Theresa and her boys. But Sheila did not once attempt to run away—however unpleasant life became, she seemed to stay out of some misplaced loyalty toward the family.

Meanwhile, Theresa Knorr had banned the very mention of deceased daughter Suesan after becoming occasionally and uncharacteristically haunted by her memory. Theresa admitted sometimes feeling a cold draft up her back when she walked by Suesan’s closet. She believed that her daughter’s soul had come back to haunt her.

However, police would later charge that none of this stopped Theresa Knorr from turning her brutal attentions toward Sheila. One day she beat her up after accusing her of getting pregnant by one of the many men who paid her for sex over at Fulton.

Over the next few weeks, Theresa Knorr became increasingly obsessed about Sheila’s “pregnancy,” even though there was no actual evidence she was expecting a child.

Things reached a head late one night when Theresa made Sheila cycle to the store more than half a mile away on Auburn Boulevard, to pick up some cigarettes.

Bicycling furiously past the leery eyes of the transvestites and rent boys plying for trade on the strip of Auburn known as the meatrack, Sheila must have wondered where her life was leading. There was no escape from Sacramento’s thriving cash-for-sex scene, even while out on an errand for her mother.

But as she pedaled past the imposing entrance to the Lombard Mortuary, a motorist rammed into her bike, knocking her to the ground. The driver did not even stop to see if she was okay. But then that was typical of life on the rougher side of town.

Sheila was taken by paramedics to the nearby Mercy Hospital, in Sacramento. For once the bruises and cuts had not been inflicted at home, but any hope that Theresa Knorr might actually offer some sympathy soon disappeared.

Her mother was concerned about the accident. But her worries had nothing to do with Sheila’s injuries. She believed that the incident was a sign from above. A sign that indicated her daughter had been taken over by the devil.

Theresa was convinced that when Sheila got hit in front of that mortuary, she had died and a demon took over her body, or so she told the rest of the family.

However, there was worse to come.

Theresa still believed that Sheila was pregnant. That combination of twisted opinions sparked a tirade of abuse that was even more horrendous than anything Suesan had suffered the previous year before her death.

Within minutes of struggling back into the house from the hospital, Sheila was being held by her brothers Billy Bob and Robert while her mother gave her a serious beating.

Theresa Knorr, once of the delicate chin and wispy brown hair, was certainly no longer slender and easy on the eyes. She weighed 250 pounds and had her hair pulled back like a sumo wrestler. Her features were bloated. Her arms were the size of Popeye’s, and her once-pretty waistline was now as thick and elastic as a truck tire. And she packed enormous power in each of those punches.

Sheila’s body soon turned black and blue from where Theresa had beaten and strangled her. The nightmare was back on course, and that evening’s proceedings had only just begun.

According to Terry, after smashing Sheila around for a while, Theresa Knorr started force-feeding Sheila with macaroni cheese, just as she had done to Suesan. Some old habits never die, they come back to haunt you forever.

On that same horrendous night, Theresa also managed to break Sheila’s front tooth off while trying to force-feed her the macaroni. As the food was shoveled down her throat, she even started vomiting.