Whatever Mother Says... (14 page)

He had proclaimed his love for Terry virtually from the moment he clapped eyes on her in a bar, and the two had decided to elope back to Mike’s home in Salt Lake City to get married, settle down, and live happily ever after. But fairy tales never come true … especially if you come from a family like the Knorrs.

Terry had so many reasons to want to leave those streets of Sacramento: her mother’s abuse, the murders of her two sisters, the sexual molestation, the prostitution, the drugs. Anywhere had to be better than Sacramento as far as she was concerned.

So when she and Mike traveled up to Salt Lake City, Terry—just like her mom had done a couple of years earlier—saw the streets of this thriving city paved in the sort of happiness she had never experienced in her entire life.

The marriage ceremony was a modest affair held at Mike’s parents’ house in Sandy, a suburb eight miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

Matron of honor Heidi Sorenson, who went on to become Terry’s best friend, explained: “It was a small, friendly gathering. A simple champagne toast after the ceremony. But I remember that Terry seemed so genuinely happy to be getting married. It was as if she had at last found some true happiness.”

The couple could not afford a honeymoon, but that did not matter to Terry. She had Mike and a new life—that was all that mattered.

But within months of marrying Mike Groves, all that pain and anguish was to return. The main problem up in Salt Lake City was that she was sharing her in-laws’ huge, badly maintained house, in the relatively wealthy suburb of Sandy. And besides being home to Ma and Pa, there was also Mike’s big, slow-witted brother to contend with. The house was dark, gloomy, filled with cheap, broken, outdated furnishings and filthy carpet on the floor. The Groves had bought it more than thirty years earlier, and a local housing boom had turned the once deserted area into an upper-middle-class neighborhood.

The parents tried hard initially. They made sure that Terry and Mike got some privacy in their basement apartment attached to the main house only by a spiral staircase into the ground floor hallway. But what Terry did not realize until she got to Sandy was that everyone in the house drank. Soon, domestic arguments were commonplace, and although not on anything like the scale of Sacramento, they had the effect of reminding Terry over and over again of her horrendous childhood.

However much she tried, she could not stop herself from getting drawn into these increasingly violent rows between Ma, Pa, and Mike. She had to act to stop the arguments before something dreadful happened. Subconsciously, she felt partly to blame. She felt she was the catalyst for yet more domestic upheaval. Eventually it got to her. She had a fight with Mike, hit him, and the police charged her with assault.

Terry soon became a familiar face at the Salt Lake County Jail, where she would spend many nights cooling off after yet another flare-up at home. Terry got quite aggressive inside prison and was known to certain prison officers as a hot-tempered troublemaker.

Sandy Police Department patrolman David Lundberg rolled up to the house in his all-white SPD Taurus one time in 1991. Although police did not arrest anyone on that occasion, Lundberg vividly recalled the house because it was such a high-income home maintained at a low income.

He recalled: “They were all fighting like cats and dogs. I tried to defuse the situation as best I could, but it all seemed so dysfunctional. In the end we settled things down, but it was pretty obvious there would continue to be problems there.”

David Lundberg never forgot his visit to the house in Sandy, and it would hold him in very high stead one day a couple of years later.

Still only in her early twenties, Terry’s desperate search for a happy life had seemingly ground to a complete halt. She loved her husband very much, but she feared that her mother’s evil ways were manifesting themselves inside her now.

Wed at a young age. No money. Constant rowing. Her married life was turning into a mirror image of the woman whom she so hated and despised.

If Terry had realized that her own mother—the very woman whom she claims caused all her problems—was living a relatively charmed existence just a few miles away, would it have made any difference? As it was, Terry’s difficult marriage incited her to try once again to do something to bring her mother to justice. She believed that the only way to finally destroy Theresa Knorr’s appalling influence was to get someone to believe her incredible story of life inside that horrendous family.

For the next few months she desperately tried to find someone to tell her story to. First she told a friend, Rhonda Morris, who sat and listened intently to Terry but then decided to ignore her extraordinary claims because she thought Terry had said her mother was already in jail for the killings.

Terry went on to inform at least five other individuals about the murders, including a psychiatrist in Salt Lake City, two employees at the Valley Mental Health Clinic, and even a mental health counselor she encountered during one of her spells inside the Salt Lake County Jail.

But no one seemed concerned enough to actually go to the police themselves. Many of them could not accept or believe Terry’s story of mental, physical, and sexual torture.

Meanwhile the domestic crisis inside her in-laws’ house in Sandy continued. When would someone stand up and take notice of what she was saying?

Thirteen

The vast majority of abused children treat their parents much better than their parents have ever treated them.

Paul Mones,
When a Child Kills

Terry felt an icy chill run through her body. She shivered, looked up. It was pitch-black, except for a tiny sliver of light in the corner above her. Instinctively, she pushed the palm of her hand upward. It smacked against something cold and plastic. She pushed hard again, this time with both hands. She had to get to that light. It was her only chance. But the ceiling would not move. The only noise was the crisp crumpling of the frozen bags that lined the floor she was lying on. As she adjusted her position, her elbow brushed the side of the wall next to her. It gave off a slight burning sensation because of the subzero temperatures. Terry was trapped in a deep freezer.

Sitting on the door to the coffin-shaped icebox was her 250-pound mother. She was punishing her youngest daughter because she thought Terry had been saying bad things about her to her teacher at school.

Inside the freezer, Terry gasped for air. Clouds of icy steam surrounded her every breath. She looked up at that small crack of light once again.

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

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

Terry’s sister’s voice just would not stop repeating the words over and over again.

Just then a movement from above. The door opened. The bulky shape of her huge mother was silhouetted against the light. Unlike her tragic sister Sheila, Terry had made it to that light above.

*   *   *

Terry awoke from her nightmare relieved to find that this time it had all been a fantasy. The freezer incident had been yet another appalling act committed against her by her mother a few years earlier. Her dreadful dreams had haunted her for more years than she cared to remember and they left her feeling angry, confused, even betrayed. Her anger was because her mother had disappeared into thin air and allegedly got away with murder. She felt confused because Theresa Knorr’s liberty implied that it was okay for parents to abuse and hate children—maybe they all did that? But the worst aspect was the betrayal that Terry felt because none of the people she told about her terrible childhood experiences had done anything to help bring Theresa Knorr to justice.

Only a few days earlier, Alan Rice, a counselor at the Valley Mental Health Center in Salt Lake City, had pleaded with Terry to go and tell the police one last time after he listened with horror to her story. But no one understood that Terry was afraid of walking into a police station alone and retelling her story. In any case, it had got to the point where she wondered if it was worth it.

But that evening—with Alan Rice’s advice still ringing in her ears—Terry decided to pour out her innermost secrets to Heidi Sorenson, her best friend in Salt Lake City.

They had become very good friends after Terry married Mike Groves, who just happened to be Heidi’s then-husband’s best pal. Heidi was the matron of honor at the wedding ceremony held at Terry’s in-laws’ house in Sandy. Terry would often drive over to Heidi’s place in her little truck, where she would sit and chat with her friend and maybe cook up a little pasta.

Heidi, now twenty-six, explained: “Terry seemed to be very introverted. Into herself. I remember when I first met her she was very difficult to get to know. She is a jeans and T-shirt type of person and comes across as kinda hard-core because of what she has been through.”

Heidi and Terry were sitting around at Heidi’s neat duplex home in Woods Cross, yet another Salt Lake City suburb, on June 26, 1990, when Terry told her friend she had something on her mind.

“I’ve got these things that are really bothering me. D’you mind if I tell you ’bout them?” asked Terry hesitantly. She was close to giving up on ever getting her mother brought to justice, but she felt the urge to have a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, and Heidi seemed the only true, genuine friend she had.

Heidi had absolutely no clue what Terry was about to tell her. Terry had never even told her husband the full details of those horrendous years in the Knorr household, and it was hardly something you talked about over popcorn at the movies or dinner at Denny’s, which were the sort of things the two couples had done together.

Tears welled up in Terry’s eyes before she had even begun to tell her friend. Heidi’s two young children were still up, but playing so noisily in the kitchen that they would never have overheard the disturbing story Terry was about to reveal.

She told Heidi everything: the killings of her sisters, the beatings and torture she received, the abuse inflicted to and by her brothers, her sister’s mottled hair when they found her body rotting in that closet, Suesan’s desperate cries for help.

Terry then lowered her voice to a whisper.

“Sometimes I think I am going crazy. I wonder if I imagined it all. No one ever seems to believe me.”

Heidi was so stunned by her friend’s account of life as a child that for a few moments she also wondered if Terry was actually telling the truth.

“It was so bizarre. It was hard to believe things like that could have happened,” says Heidi now.

Then she felt a chill in the air, thinking about what her friend had just told her.

“The house seemed to get real cold after she told me. It was weird. Almost as if…”

Heidi put her arm around Terry, who sobbed: “I can’t understand why nothing has been done. I can’t understand.”

Heidi was appalled by what Terry told her. “It just wasn’t right that someone could get away with doing those things,” she said.

Terry had so much bottled up inside her, but she felt she could trust Heidi. She told her friend about the never-ending nightmares and how what had happened had stopped her from getting into many relationships. How it had affected her schoolwork; she did not even graduate from school.

Heidi particularly remembered that because the two women were, in many ways, like chalk and cheese. She had been to college and was even studying nights at business school to get more knowledge of the legal aspects of big businesses.

It was around 9:00
P.M.
by the time a tearful Terry finished telling her horror story. Heidi, appalled by what she had heard, felt she had to help in some way. Then she remembered that her sister used to go out with the son of the local sheriff. He would do something, she thought. But when Heidi told Terry that she was going to call Sheriff Clarence Montgomery of the Woods Cross Sheriff’s Department immediately, Terry was not overly impressed. After all, she had already told a number of people she thought were in authority, and they had done absolutely nothing.

But this is a cop, Heidi assured her. Not some fancy psychiatrist or social worker. This was someone out on the streets who would actually know how to get some action. She picked up the phone.

“I got someone here you gotta talk to, Sheriff. I need you to come over tonight…”

The moment Heidi mentioned the word “murder,” Montgomery’s ears pricked up. Woods Cross, a suburb with a population of just 6,000, ten miles north of Salt Lake City, had seen only one murder in more than thirty years.

“I’ll be right over.”

By 11:00
P.M.
Sheriff Clarence Montgomery was sitting down on Heidi’s couch, his Sony Dictaphone minicassette recorder whirling as he prepared to listen to the most extraordinary account of domestic abuse he would ever hear, even in his long and distinguished career.

With the kids now safely tucked up in bed, a deathly, expectant silence shrouded the house. Sheriff Montgomery asked red-eyed young Terry sitting opposite him to run through the whole story one more time.

Terry started from the beginning once again. Maybe this time something would actually get done. Heidi sat next to her friend, holding her hand for comfort.

Heidi was surprised to notice Sheriff Montgomery’s attention wavering several times as Terry told her account of life back in Sacramento. In fact he dozed off several times. But it was very late at night.

At around 12:30
P.M.
the minicassette clicked off as it came to the end of the second side of the tape—and that marked the end of the interview. Unfortunately, the batteries in the machine were too low to record the latter half of the interview, it was later revealed by embarrassed investigators. Heidi did not dare tell Terry that she was a little concerned about the sheriff’s catnapping. She just hoped that something would now be done to track down Theresa Knorr.

Terry went to great efforts to emphasize to the sheriff that she had told many others, who had done nothing, and she hoped some action would be taken. The sheriff assured her that it would.