Whatever Mother Says... (11 page)

When the detective had asked Terry about her sisters, she replied coolly: “One ran off with an Indian to go work in Canada, and my other sister just up and left home one day.”

Terry was already passing into what psychiatrists describe as the denial stage of her horrendous childhood.

The Knorr’s neighbor on Bellingham, Sean Martin, met up with Robert Knorr long after the family had moved to the small house just off Auburn Boulevard. Robert, unlike his younger sister, dropped a huge hint about what had happened to one sister, but not the other.

“It was weird,” Martin later said. “First time I saw him, he said Sheila had met a used car salesman in Vegas who had swept her off her feet. Then a year later I met him and he told me that satan worshipers had come back and gotten his sister Suesan and set her on fire just off Highway 89.”

On that second meeting with Sean Martin, Robert seemed to have changed a lot. He was a much more menacing character, and Sean warned his own brother Chris to steer clear of Robert as well. He seemed really strange. Almost dangerous.

One time, Sean actually visited the house just off Auburn Boulevard, but he could not get past the front door.

“I saw Robert in the street on his bike, and he persuaded me to take a spin down there. Well, it was so creepy at that house.

“As I walked up to the front door, I heard the mother beating Terry with a stick and I could hear other screams coming from the back of the house. Suddenly Robert freaked out completely and said I had to leave. ‘My mom’s freaking out’ was all he would say. He was a very pale white color and seemed very shocked and upset.”

After Theresa Knorr’s plan to have her daughter-in-law arrested failed, she turned to Terry as the next object of her continuing war against the other women inside her family.

Those same handcuffs were pulled out of the closet and used on Terry with alarming regularity following the deaths of her sisters.

Theresa Knorr was consistent, if nothing else. She had always punished the eldest daughter the most, followed by the second eldest and so on. But now there was only Terry left to bear the brunt of her mother’s brutal regime.

In one horrendous incident, Terry claims the 250-pound Knorr jumped up and down on her while she was handcuffed underneath her antique oak desk. She crushed the young girl’s stomach and seriously affected any chance of her ever having a child.

More than a year after Sheila’s death—and following countless beatings at the hands of her mother—Terry heard the news that she hoped might just help to break up this incredibly unhappy family unit.

“We’re outta here. We’re movin’ out,” announced Theresa Knorr. “Terry, I gotta job for you…”

Ten

“My mom was a criminal genius. She knew how to do things so she could get away with them. That’s why I got the hell out.”

Terry Groves, in her statement to police

In the dense predawn mist, no one noticed the slight figure scrambling out of the back window of the small house just off Auburn Boulevard, the house that had been home to the Knorrs for the previous three years. The only noise was the occasional distant purr of a V8 engine on Interstate 80, a quarter of a mile to the west.

Terry Knorr’s heart was beating at a furious rate. The seconds were ticking away. Terry would later recall how she had been instructed by her mother to burn their home to the ground. It was 3:40
A.M.
on September 29, 1986.

Just a few hours earlier, Theresa Knorr had set out the plan in very professional terms. She had concluded that even though the closet where Sheila died had been very carefully cleaned and then another piece of board hammered over the top of the bloodstained floor, it still constituted a risk to her liberty. Lysol wouldn’t work. Spic and Span would not get it out of the air. Fire had worked before on one of her daughters. Maybe it would work again. Theresa Knorr was worried that whoever moved into the apartment after them would probably rip out that board and see the bloodstains.

She instructed her only surviving daughter to wear gloves, spray the Gulf charcoal lighter fluid all around the house quickly, then get out the window, before throwing the match in and running down the street to the motel where she was sharing a room with Robert.

The scared, confused sixteen-year-old spread the contents of the lighter fluid throughout the house and threw a lighted match on the floor
before
she had got out of the back window—and almost ended up suffering the same fate as her sister Suesan.

Scorching heat brushed the soles of her bare feet as she scrambled out of the window, the flames already licking through the back of the inside of the house.

Not daring to even look behind her, Terry just kept hearing her mother’s orders: “Keep running. Keep running.”

In the distance, sirens wailed.

As she weaved through the trailer park and toward the exit to Auburn Boulevard, Terry saw a fire truck turning in toward the house. But no one stopped her. No one even noticed her.

A few minutes later, out of breath and adrenaline still pumping furiously, Terry banged on the door of the room at the Las Robles Motel on Auburn. Theresa Knorr answered. Robert stood sheepishly in the background.

*   *   *

The fire at the house on the 2400 block of Auburn Boulevard was investigated by Officer Stan Brock. He found some clothes left in a rear bedroom by the Knorrs and rapidly came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no doubt the blaze had been started deliberately.

He also noted in his report on the day after the fire that Theresa “Knor Ross Sanders”—it should have been Knorr Cross Sanders—was three months behind with her rent and had been served with an eviction notice.

Case #86-86905 was never solved by the fire department, despite the fingers of accusation being pointed so firmly at Theresa Knorr and her clan. They tried to locate the family, but no one seemed to know where they had moved.

*   *   *

Howard Sanders thought he would actually behave like a dutiful son and go visit his mother a few days later, so he got quite a shock when he turned up at the house, completely unaware of what had happened.

Stunned by the burnt-out shell of the property, he strolled across the street to the property manager’s office. But all that earned Howard was a very painful earache.

“You know what happened. Your family set fire to it!” the manager screamed hysterically.

“Well, do you know where they went?”

“No. Good riddance!”

She slammed the door so hard in his face he thought it would come off its hinges.

While no one had any clue as to the grisly killings that had allegedly occurred inside the house, there was a definite feeling in the neighborhood that Theresa and her brood of children were a strange bunch.

Susan Sullivan, who lived in the apartment block attached to the one-story house, witnessed firsthand a classic example of Theresa Knorr’s cunning a few days after the blaze.

“She came up to my apartment and asked me if I had seen anyone hanging around outside the house, because some of her stuff was missing. I told her the door had been left wide open after the fire, so all sorts of people were coming and going. She seemed really pissed at me, almost as if she was accusing me of stealing stuff out of there. But from what I recall, there was nothing worth taking anyhow. It was all burnt to a crisp.”

And she added: “I can’t put my finger on it, but they were real weird people. The way they moved around. The way they talked. There was something not quite right about them. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross them.”

Fellow neighbor William Hall, who lived on the ground floor of the adjoining apartment block with his wife and young child and had become quite friendly with the Knorrs, has never forgotten that night. The heat was so intense, the walls of his apartment were too hot to touch. He believes he and his family were lucky to escape with their lives.

*   *   *

It wasn’t as though Theresa Knorr had a split personality. She appeared to be aware of what she was doing and where she was. According to her surviving children, she did not suffer from blackouts or fits of fury. For Terry, it was a part of her life that she could not understand, except that her mother had exercised such control and power over her family that it appeared to drive her to committing acts of violence. Terry knew that whatever was inside her mother prevented her from truly loving anyone. Theresa Knorr had professed love to her children on many occasions, but she could not possibly have experienced true love. She never asked forgiveness. Terry believed that her only fear was that her precious boys would all eventually abandon her …

With Howard married and Billy Bob living with a girl on the other side of town, Robert became the apple of his mother’s eye. He was the one person in her life whom she could cherish and adore. Yet there had been no strong ties between them when the killings began a few years earlier. Robert was the brother who turned squeamish at the sight of Suesan dying on the kitchen floor. He was also the one who sat terrified in the back of the car with her as she lay close to death en route to her outdoor cremation in the mountains.

Robert also took no direct part in actually pouring the gas over Suesan. Terry says it was Billy Bob who threw the match on her sister’s fuel-soaked body.

After the fire at the house near Auburn Boulevard, Theresa Knorr and Robert stayed at the motel for a few days. Billy Bob was over at the apartment he shared with live-in lover Emily Lewis. Terry, meanwhile, saw the whole sequence of events as a perfect opportunity to escape, and she headed off for the red-light districts where Sheila had worked the streets just eighteen months earlier. Anything was preferable to life with her mother.

Eventually, Robert and his mother headed a couple of miles east to Carmichael, another suburb of Sacramento. It was around this time that she cut her long dark hair and started using a variety of blond wigs, and even sometimes dyed her hair as well. No one knows if her change in appearance was prompted by her own inbuilt fear of being one day apprehended for the alleged murder of her daughters, or just the simple vanity of an overweight woman reaching middle age.

But a blond and far more expensively dressed version of Theresa Knorr started to be seen out at the shopping malls in the area, usually with tall, handsome Robert dutifully following behind, loaded up with shopping bags.

Daughter-in-law Connie Sanders met Theresa Knorr at her apartment in Carmichael on one occasion. She was astonished by the new blond look. She also noticed that much of Theresa Knorr’s anger and hatred seemed to have disappeared.

Theresa Knorr even persuaded Connie—once her sworn enemy—to try on the clothes she had worn when she was younger so she could see them once again. The fashion display by her daughter-in-law appears to have been a rather feeble attempt by a grossly overweight woman to fantasize about what might have been.

A few months later, Robert dropped by at his brother Howard’s apartment, saying he wanted to see his niece and nephews.

Howard was naturally curious to find out how his mother was keeping. But Robert was mysteriously reticent.

“She’s living with a guy,” came the kid brother’s reply. But he refused to say who or where.

“Is she planning on getting married to this guy or something?” Howard asked, well aware that his much married mother did not make a habit of living with men unless she intended to marry them.

Robert indicated that her intentions were to remarry, but he continued to refuse to provide any details of who might become Howard’s latest stepfather.

Then his brother told him that their mother did not want Howard to know where she lived. The conversation ended abruptly, and Howard never saw his brother again.

Sometime later, Robert once again came looking for his older brother, but Howard had been jailed for a year for spousal abuse, so he never even realized his stepbrother was trying to find him.

*   *   *

By this time, Terry had already established herself in the same profession her tragic sisters had been involved in—prostitution. A brief reunion with her real father, Robert Knorr Sr., had ended abruptly when he tried to molest her after telling her that she reminded him of her mother Theresa.

Her passport to vice was, ironically, another California driver’s license in the name of her dead sister Suesan Marline Knorr. This time the address given was 5804 Garibaldi Street, Sacramento. Unlike the earlier fraudulent license issued for Terry’s undercover work on behalf of the narcs, this one described her hair as red and her weight as 155 pounds, an apparent increase of twenty-two pounds. At least the date of birth, 9–27–66, was the same.

The license had the words
Age 21 in 1987
emblazoned across it. But it provided Terry with a safe haven from child-care authorities who might put her in a home if she was picked up by cops and gave her true age at the time—just sixteen years old.

As Terry told detectives years later: “I got that so I could be with the older crowd and not be caught for being so young. The people I was living with at the time were basically hiding me out from my mother and my family.”

Another license was eventually applied for by Terry so she could safely continue her work as a prostitute with a lady named “Debra.” She convinced Terry to reapply for a license in Suesan’s name the moment her sister would have been twenty-one so that she would not have problems going into local bars where many potential customers hung out.

Terry held on to that license and her sister’s identity for another five years, in fear that her family or authorities might trace her.

Back on the mean streets of Sacramento’s red-light district, word of Terry’s tragic background filtered through to many of the girls working the area. Stories of abuse, sexual molestation, and poverty are two a penny among women and men forced to work in the vice trade. Some of Terry’s new friends were particularly interested in adopting the identity of her other dead sister. One girl, known only as Mara, skimmed the details of Sheila’s short life from conversations with Terry and got herself a driver’s license in her name. It was years later that police realized the girl named as Sheila Gay Sanders on the license was in fact a petty criminal.