Whatever Mother Says... (12 page)

Terry’s career on the streets was heavily influenced by Debra, who supplied her with drugs when she needed them and even owned a boutique in the area.

Debra was not exactly Terry’s fairy godmother, but she did at least guide the teenager sufficiently to help her earn enough cash to stay out of her mother’s clutches. She also introduced Terry to her lawyer, after Terry had told her about the killings of her two sisters.

Terry desperately wanted to see her mother brought to justice for those horrendous deaths. Up until that point, she simply had not met anyone in authority whom she could trust enough to even consider telling the full story to.

Debra provided her young friend with a Valium to swallow before her interview with the lawyer, to calm her nerves.

Terry told the lawyer the entire story,
but absolutely nothing happened.
There was no follow-up by him to her. He made no attempt to contact the police to get them to look into her claims. Terry was bewildered and decided that perhaps it had all been a stupid idea. She slotted those painful incidents back into a fragment of her memory bank and closed the door.

Unfortunately, Debra—who in a bizarre fashion had become almost like the mother Terry needed so desperately—eventually turned nasty on her young friend in just the sort of way Terry had become used to back in the Knorr household.

The incident that caused such an acrimonious parting of the ways for the vice girl and her sugar mommy occurred when Terry tried to reverse Debra’s car out of a driveway, hit the gas pedal instead of the brake and ended up crashing into a passing car.

A furious Debra threatened to make Terry work in a notorious whorehouse in Vallejo to pay for the damage. But Terry had no intention of being trapped in a vice den.

Once again it was time for her to run away. Keeping on the move somehow made her life more easy to cope with.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, the lure of the bright lights of Reno just a hundred miles east on Interstate 80 was proving irresistible for Theresa Knorr and her son Robert. With a few thousand dollars left over from the sale of the house on Bellingham five years before, mother and son decided to head to Nevada and the gambling halls of Reno.

With her startling blond hairstyle in place, Theresa thoroughly enjoyed spending hours at the slot machines and card tables that adorn the ground floors of hotels with such exquisite names as the Peppermill and the Nugget. One of her favorite places was Fitzgerald’s, a name that would come to haunt her years later when the hand of justice finally caught up with her.

Reno—the next biggest answer to Nevada’s multibillion dollar gambling habit after Las Vegas—is known in some circles as “life’s garbage can” because of the wandering souls of northern and central California who stream into the city from Interstate 80.

Theresa Knorr and Robert quickly put a deposit down on a modest apartment on the 1200 block of West Second Street. But she must have found life as the matriarch to just one child a lot different from raising a brood of six.

Robert, nineteen, did not exactly feel indebted to his mother. Thanks to her, he had witnessed and, it is alleged, been forced to take part in, two appalling murders. Rather than cramp each other’s style, they began living separate lives under the same roof. The control frenzy that seemed such an important part of Theresa Knorr’s life was crumbling fast.

The streets of central Reno—with its neon and tatty skyscrapers—were a melting pot for young drifters, many of whom had run away from the sort of abusive homes that Robert and his brothers and sisters would have longed to be a part of, compared with the unspeakable horrors that allegedly occurred in their household.

Robert thrived unhealthily among the oddballs, and soon became caught up in Reno’s lowlife. A charge of vagrancy followed after he was found asleep in a doorway to a store. A burglary was committed, and police later believed it was to obtain drugs.

Two Reno police officers called on Theresa’s apartment looking for Robert one day. She was shaken by their visit. Her son’s activities were alerting the authorities to her presence—and she wanted to avoid that at all costs. She got out a map, as do tens of thousands of Americans every day, and looked due east on her favorite Interstate 80. Salt Lake City, Utah, looked like the perfect place for her to start a completely new life …

*   *   *

Over at the office of Nevada County Sheriff William L. Heafey, detectives investigating the “Body in the Box” case as it had become known locally, believed they had a major breakthrough.

Fibers taken from the box appeared to match those of the interior carpet in the cab of long distance trucker Benjamin Herbert Boyle’s vehicle. Boyle, from Potter County, Texas, had just been arrested on suspicion of a series of murders of upward of ten women. Detectives could not believe their luck after they sent off samples to Texas for examination and got the swift reply every law enforcement officer loves to hear: “It’s your man.”

Boyle told detectives he was also pretty grateful to have the opportunity to get the grisly murder off his chest. He was, as they say, singing like a canary.

In Nevada County the investigation into the “Body in the Box” case was closed.

It seemed that Theresa Knorr’s awful alleged crimes were going to remain undetected. It emerged almost eight years later that the two samples of carpet from the serial-killing trucker’s vehicle had actually come from the same place. A dreadful administrative error had somehow confused examiners in Texas into believing they had a sample of material from the cardboard box, when in fact the two pieces came from precisely the same truck.

Years later, one of the Placer County detectives investigating the crimes of Theresa Knorr tactfully described his neighboring county’s error as a little embarrassing.

The biggest tragedy of all was that Theresa Knorr’s reign of terror could so easily have been brought to a close much sooner …

Meanwhile, inquiries into the identity of the other Jane Doe #4873/84—Suesan Knorr—continued to be made by the Placer County Sheriff’s Department. At least that case was still marked open and unsolved.

On July 1, 1987, the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia—made famous partly thanks to the fictitious detective work of Agent Clarice Starling, played so convincingly by Jodie Foster in
The Silence of the Lambs
—contacted Investigator Brad Marenger at Placer County’s substation at Tahoe City to assure him that the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) had compared the crime analysis report submitted about Jane Doe #4858/84.

But, replied Quantico Unit Chief Alan E. Burgess, “no linkages have been detected at this time.”

“Linkages” were what Investigator Marenger so desperately needed. He knew only too well that the chances of solving that particular murder were fading rapidly. It would take a miracle to even manage to identify her.

Eleven

The most important point about a mother, your mother, is that she is your mother for always.

Rachel Billington, Author

Salt Lake City’s first real boom occurred when the famous California Gold Rush of 1849–50 resulted in large groups of emigrants trekking through the Salt Lake Valley en route to California. One hundred forty years later, Theresa Knorr made her own trek to the city from the opposite direction, having decided to create a completely new life for herself.

The city itself, with its thriving cosmopolitan downtown area consisting of a quaint blend of modern tower blocks and classic, older buildings, earned a glowing tribute from
U.S. News & World Report,
which dubbed it “an economic ace and one of sixteen newly bright stars in the U.S. economic sky.” With a population of 700,000 consisting of a multitude of backgrounds, it was the perfect place for Theresa Knorr to blend into anonymity.

While traveling east to Salt Lake, she passed the hours away planning her new existence: a job, a home, new friends, new surroundings, even a new name—she decided to revert to her maiden name, Cross, and became known as that from the moment she arrived in the city. It must have seemed terribly exciting to Theresa. The horrors she had inflicted back in Sacramento, according to her daughter Terry, must have been firmly slotted into a fragment of her mind she had no intention of reopening.

She even read up on the Mormons who founded Salt Lake City back in 1847 and had thrived ever since. U.S. soldiers were stationed in the area in the 1850s, bringing an immense amount of trade with them. Theresa Cross, as she was now known, was particularly interested in Mormon tradition. She had already decided that when the time was right, she would convert to the Church—it seemed the obvious thing to do if she were going to be easily and quickly accepted in the community.

Theresa Cross based herself in a modestly priced hotel near the downtown area, bought herself a copy of the Salt Lake City
Tribune
and the
Deseret News,
and started looking for a job. Her only previous employment had been as an orderly in convalescent hospitals, and she had already decided that looking after old ladies would be the perfect career for her new life. It also meant she would get free accommodation and free food and she would not have to live under the same roof as anyone prettier and younger than her.

Theresa’s first job was as live-in help to seventy-two-year-old Alice Powell, riddled with multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and arthritis, and in serious need of twenty-four-hour attention. Alice’s three daughters all interviewed Theresa in their sick mother’s large, single-story home at 246 North Fourth East Street, Bountiful, a suburb just a few miles north of Salt Lake City. They immediately decided that Theresa was the perfect person for the job. Her transformation was under way.

Theresa Cross soon discovered that her new employer’s family were worth many millions of dollars because Alice’s parents had, at the turn of the century, bought vast lots of land in the area and then sold them during an economic boom in the fifties. Rumor had it that Alice was worth well over $4 million alone because her husband had retained some of the property and then cleverly developed his own share of the land before selling it.

Within weeks of Theresa starting her new job, Alice’s relatives noticed a real improvement in the old lady’s condition. They were particularly impressed by Theresa Cross’s patience and good nature—something that none of her own children remember their mother for.

Alice Powell adored Theresa Cross. Theresa was very good to her and regularly took her on outings in her wheelchair. Theresa appeared to really care for the old lady’s well-being, and the Powells were delighted with their new recruit.

Alice’s sister-in-law, Fran Cheney, seventy-six, and husband Hal, seventy-eight, lived just a few miles north in another suburb, called Centerville, and took a real shining to Theresa.

The elderly couple spent many evenings at Alice’s house in Bountiful talking to their newfound friend about the Mormon Church, which they both belonged to at the time. Theresa told them that she had been brought up a Catholic, but that part of her family was of Jewish descent. They spoke in great detail about the workings of the Bible. Theresa had referred to the Bible frequently when she shrieked excerpts from it at her children back in Sacramento.

Theresa Cross had a large collection of different Bibles and she knew the Old Testament particularly well. She regularly exchanged books with the Cheneys, and they gave her copies of a Christian Jewish newsletter about Orthodox Jews who accepted Christ. Eventually, Theresa Cross even joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons. Her transformation was complete.

But even though she went to the trouble to be baptized in the Church, she did not have much spare time to devote to it because she had to take care of Alice twenty-four hours a day.

During one evening with the Cheneys, Theresa gave a rare insight into her own upbringing. It was a story filled with rich detail and emotive visions of a childhood in the countryside. No one actually knows how much of it is fact and how much is fiction. She claimed she enjoyed a very happy life in the Midwest on a farm. She even talked aboout having owned a horse, and, she told the Cheneys, she was very fond of her father.

But then Theresa’s voice lowered to a virtual whisper as she told Fran Cheney how her mother had died in her arms when she was just twelve years old, and she provoked even more sympathy by telling her two elderly companions that her grandmother died in the Holocaust.

But, Theresa Cross told her companions, she cursed God for taking her mother away from her at such an early age. She felt bitter about it and blamed that heart-break for making her get married at a very young age. A few moments later she divulged her own secret guilt.

She told Fran and Hal she felt to blame for her mother’s death and that God must have put a curse on her, and she said, “Don’t ever go and die on your children.”

Then Theresa surprised her two friends even further by telling them:

“I speak to my mother regularly through the spirits. Through seances and things like that. I still love her very much. When she died, we burned all her belongings on a fire.”

That was exactly what, according to her daughter Terry, she did with tragic Suesan Knorr in that desolate countryside where they dumped her body.

Another weird aspect of that conversation with the Cheneys was that Theresa referred to her mother as if she were still alive.

But despite the obvious emotional turmoil she felt, Theresa Cross was very careful not to reveal the pain and anguish she had caused after she became a wife and a mother. Her conversations with the Cheneys suggest that perhaps she always believed that her mother was to blame for everything.

Theresa’s lapses revealed small fragments of her past. Like the time she told Fran and Hal about her cruel husband. She never disclosed which one. She never even admitted she had been married more than once.

But Theresa Cross did tell Fran and Hal she believed her husband was a satanist.