Whatever Mother Says... (10 page)

Theresa then decided that measures needed to be taken to prevent anyone from seeing some of her daughter’s dreadful injuries. She forced Sheila to sit in the bathtub while she filled it with cold water and ice cubes. Then she made her stay in it for upward of an hour in an effort to bring out the bruising she had just inflicted on her daughter.

From then on Theresa Knorr also began handcuffing Sheila to the underneath of the kitchen table at night so she could not escape. They were the same cuffs that had been used to such chilling effect on her sister less than a year earlier.

As an afterthought, Theresa called up lawyer Wes Seegmiller to help push for a claim off the insurance company following Sheila’s accident. Theresa Knorr never liked to miss out on an opportunity to make some extra cash.

But another matter was particularly aggravating Theresa at that time. Her beloved teenage son Billy Bob had dared to announce he was leaving home to move into an apartment on run-down Fulton Boulevard with a pretty teenage girl called Emily Lewis, who worked with him at the movie theater on Ethan Way.

Theresa was infuriated that her favorite son was striking out on his own. Billy Bob told dark-haired Emily that he had been kicked out of home by his mom—nothing could have been further from the truth. But whatever his excuse, Billy Bob managed to persuade Emily to set up home with him, and he even took on another part-time job at Arco Arena and worked a third job at a book company in West Sacramento, to ensure he could afford the rent on the apartment.

Emily never went into the Knorr family home just off Auburn throughout the nine months she lived with Billy Bob. He told her that one of his sisters had run away and he openly admitted he did not care much for either Sheila or Suesan. Emily never questioned why Billy Bob was so obsessed with not allowing her inside the family house.

She did feel there was something unusual about the family, and it worried her, but she could not actually fathom what the problem was.

*   *   *

With Theresa Knorr’s obsession about Sheila’s pregnancy growing every day, her eldest daughter was unshackled and allowed to go—under the escort of her two brothers, naturally—to a local doctor to establish once and for all if she was actually expecting a child.

When it was confirmed that she wasn’t pregnant, Theresa still continued to insist Sheila had venereal disease. So she made her go to another doctor to be checked for chlamydia and pelvic inflammatory disease.

Theresa Knorr even took her own penicillin to fight off the diseases she was convinced she had caught from her daughter. She then started claiming to the other children that Sheila had secretly obtained a cure for her venereal disease and was deliberately not telling her.

One day, Theresa became so angry about this that she hog-tied Sheila in a closet across from the back bedroom of the apartment as punishment for her deception.

Sheila had, in the eyes of her mother, given her venereal disease and then would not admit she had been cured of it. Theresa began to ration Sheila’s food and refused to let her out of the closet.

At the end of May 1985, Theresa completely banned Sheila from being fed anything. She just remained crammed in that tiny closet next to the bathroom, which measured about two feet by two and a half feet—not big enough to keep a small dog in. Her feet were tied together with Ace bandages, her hands tied behind her back with white canvas wrist restraints bought at a medical supply store on Madison Avenue in Orangevale, near where they used to live. Theresa Knorr also removed the knob from the bathroom door and used it on the outside of the closet every time she wanted to open it to inspect her daughter. There was no handle inside the closet, so Sheila could not get out. Theresa Knorr told her daughter she would not feed her anything, even water, until she admitted what she had done.

“She wanted Sheila to confess,” Terry has said. “That was mother’s way. Beat them until they confess.”

Weak from lack of food, stinking from perspiration in that steaming hot prison, Sheila knew there was only one way to survive. She confessed to her mother that, yes, she did have VD, and yes, she did get a cure. None of it was true, but Sheila only cared about one thing—getting out of that awful closet.

It was agony for Sheila as she crawled out of the tiny space that had been her home for more than a week. Her first taste of freedom was probably as sweet for her as that of any escape from a POW camp.

Theresa Knorr once again switched to her caring, loving mother mode and gently helped her daughter drink some water. Sheila seemed to have made it against all the odds. Even the other children were surprised she had actually got out of the closet alive.

But Theresa Knorr was feeding her starving daughter water for an ulterior motive. She asked her what kind of drugs the doctor had given her when he administered the shot that cured her VD.

Sheila stumbled over her reply. That was enough for Theresa. She knew her daughter was lying. Within seconds Sheila was being dragged back to that closet from hell. Her freedom had been so brief. The black hole beckoned …

*   *   *

“PLEASE! PLEASE LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

The screams and moans coming from that closet soon became like audible wallpaper in the Knorr household. No one seemed to notice the sounds, but then Theresa Knorr had insisted on stuffing towels underneath the door to the closet so that it muffled her daughter’s cries for help. No one seemed concerned about Sheila, except Terry, by now fourteen years of age.

She strained her ears to listen to any telltale signs of her sister’s condition inside that small closet. A few days after she was locked in there for the second time, Terry heard Sheila rustling around, desperately peeling off her clothes because of the sweltering eighty-five degree heat that drifted through the day and much of the night.

The third day after Sheila’s reincarceration, Terry waited until her mom went out on a rare trip to the local store before sneaking alongside the cupboard with some refreshment for her stifling, feverish sister. All she could find was two cans of beer.

She held a can to her sister’s parched lips because her wrists were still bound behind her back. Sheila was sweating so profusely that her hair was wet through. She asked Terry for water, but at that moment Terry heard the sound of the Ford LTD returning. It was beer or nothing.

Sheila desperately swallowed it, much of the beer dribbled down the side of her mouth as she tried to drink the entire contents of one can in a single gulp. The alcohol might have helped deaden the pain just a little bit …

*   *   *

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

Those were the last words Terry ever heard her sister Sheila utter. A few moments later she heard a thump, then another, then another … then silence.

Those muffled noises occurred as her sister tried to climb up the hard pine shelves inside the closet. Theresa Knorr had removed the lowest one so she could cram her daughter in there.

Sheila had been using the little ledges that the shelves sat on to hold them up, to climb up in the closet toward what she thought was the light of freedom. Those final sounds were the shelves crashing down on that emancipated girl.

For three more days Theresa Knorr and the rest of her clan waited to hear if any more sounds came from that closet. They knew that an extended silence probably meant Sheila was dead. On the third day, June 21, 1985, Theresa Knorr sent Robert over by bicycle to get his brother Billy Bob from the apartment on Fulton he was sharing with Emily Lewis.

As soon as Billy Bob and Robert got back, Theresa grabbed the bathroom knob, slid it into the lock on the closet door and gingerly prized it open. Terry and Billy Bob stood by and looked on.

The awful stench that wafted out of the closet was followed by the inevitable proclamation by Theresa Knorr.

“She’s dead.”

Lying in that closet—barely large enough to store a box of books—was Sheila. Clotted blood was smeared crustily across her cheek. There was a puddle of blood on the floor in front of her face. Her torso was virtually naked. She was curled up in a fetal position with her arms behind her back.

“I can’t recall whether her eyes were open or not, but I believe they might have been,” said Terry years later, still haunted by the image of her sister’s decaying corpse.

Theresa Knorr immediately suggested an outrageous plan to make sure that her daughter’s death would never be linked to her family. She told the others she wanted to smash off Sheila’s teeth with a hammer so that she could not be identified.

Moments later Theresa had second thoughts. She candidly confessed to the assembled children that even she considered the idea of smashing her own dead daughter’s teeth to bits a little daunting.

Theresa then carefully peeled on a pair of yellow Playtex Living Gloves, ripped a plastic garbage bag up and used it to line the cardboard popcorn-cup box Billy Bob had brought home from his work at the nearby Century 21 movie theater on Howe Avenue. Theresa used that particular brand of gloves because they had a little diamond-shaped grip on them that obliterated all fingerprints.

Then Theresa sat on her bed with a stack of pink-and-blue-flowered pillowcases and slowly plucked all the hairs off those cases until there were none. She wanted to ensure her family had no connection to the body.

She then took the same pillowcases and lined the garbage bag inside the box with them to soak up any blood. Terry was then ordered to stand outside the house to make sure that nobody was nearby.

Inside, Billy Bob and Robert leaned into that tiny closet to pull their sister’s remains out into the hallway. But the body would not move because half of the left side of Sheila’s face was stuck to the floor where she had been frozen in death.

Billy Bob then decided to remove the door of the closet in order to get more access to take out the body. A few minutes later, having taken the door off, the brothers pulled at the rotting corpse and finally hauled it out.

The boys then put their sister’s remains in the box—which had been so carefully prepared by Theresa Knorr—before wrapping silver duct tape around it. Then they carried the box outside and put Sheila in the trunk of their mother’s Ford LTD. Next they packed shovels in the trunk. Robert got in the rear seat in the exact same spot where he sat when they took Suesan off to the mountains almost a year earlier.

Moments later Terry watched as her mom and two brothers drove off into the darkness to find a final resting place for Sheila.

This time Theresa made the long drive up Interstate 80 to the Highway 89 turnoff, but instead of driving to Squaw Valley where Suesan had been burnt, they found a new location near the runway at Truckee Airport.

Nine

The battered child syndrome … characterizes a clinical condition in children who have received serious physical abuse, generally from a parent or foster parent.

Pediatrician C. Henry Kempe, who invented the term “Battered Child Syndrome”

It was hardly surprising that Terry Knorr found herself choking back the urge to vomit as she started cleaning out that closet of death while her mother and brothers were out dumping Sheila’s body in the mountains.

When they did eventually arrive home, her brother Robert cut the dismantled closet door up with a saw and then threw it in the Dumpster at the end of the driveway to the apartment complex that was attached to the house. Theresa and Billy Bob then collected all Sheila’s belongings and dropped them in the same Dumpster. There was to be no olive oil burning ritual this time.

Terry, gasping against the pungent odor, tried to drink an iced grape Crush soda as she scrubbed away on her hands and knees inside that tiny closet. But all she could taste was death. She held her nose, swallowed hard and tried not to breathe in the acrid fumes.

Terry’s brothers later told her they had tried to bury the box containing Sheila, but as they were digging, somebody had passed nearby and they got scared and drove off, leaving the container sitting in a clump of bushes.

Theresa Knorr had decided not to burn Sheila’s body because she did not want it to look in any way similar to Suesan’s death.

Terry’s memories of her sister Sheila center around a cowboy hat that had become like a calling card for the pretty teenager.

“It was black velour or velvet and it had a big, like, feather decoration on the front. And she loved that hat. It was a personal belonging, I mean really personal.”

Minutes after returning to the house, Theresa Knorr got rid of that hat. She thought that as long as any of her daughter’s possessions were there, her spirit would still be there to haunt her.

Theresa Knorr also called up Wes Seegmiller, the lawyer who was chasing the insurance company for compensation after Sheila had been knocked down on Auburn Boulevard, and told him: “Forget it. I want you to drop the case.”

*   *   *

Soon after Sheila’s death, Theresa began voicing her hatred toward her daughter-in-law Connie Sanders.

She decided Connie’s child should be taken away from her because she believed she was a bad mother. In order to do that, she figured she had to get Connie on unfit parent charges. With no evidence, she somehow became convinced Connie was drugging the baby so she did not have to feed it regularly.

Theresa decided that her youngest daughter, Terry, should become a police informant and help detectives set up Howard and Connie Sanders for a drug deal. First she told Terry to apply for a driver’s license in her dead sister Suesan’s name so that she could appear to be eighteen years old rather than fifteen. Then Terry could be recruited to make what police call a “controlled buy” of narcotics from her own brother and sister-in-law.

Local narcotics squad detective Richard Lauther had his suspicions right from the start when a mutual contact introduced him to “Suesan.” The first disastrous drug purchase, in which “Suesan” was supposed to pick up some amphetamines from Howard Sanders, ended in a no-show. Detective Lauther dropped her a short time later, unaware of the brutality and death that allegedly had occurred inside the Knorr household, but highly suspicious of the young girl’s real age.