Whatever Mother Says... (16 page)

Many of her dresses, skirts, and pants were red. Red was her favorite color. It tended to be a very crimson shade of red. The color of blood.

Dozens of books lined the shelf of the white cabinet. They included books on Jews, Catholics, and Mormons. There were also many on the development of new drugs, plus one on herbal medicine. She also had medical manuals that described how to deal with people with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Theresa’s pride and joy was her own phone line. She had paid almost a hundred dollars to have it installed within days of taking the job at Alice Sullivan’s. Sometimes she would spend hours making secretive phone calls in her room.

But, much more surprising, in her double dresser there were at least six wigs. Blond, brunette, red, all lengths and shapes.

The neat, dark-haired bob hairpiece looked just like the hairstyle she had in her Utah driver’s license photo.

Neither Pat nor Bud ever recall seeing Theresa Cross wearing any of the wigs. No one has any idea why she kept them.

Theresa Cross’s errands were usually carried out before Alice Sullivan woke up, and often included a trip to her local Albertson’s Supermarket to stock up on food for the house.

No one knows if she ever noticed the girl at the checkout or if that girl recognized her. For Theresa Knorr’s daughter Terry worked at that same Albertson’s for most of the first half of 1993.

“They could even have glanced at each other—who knows?” reckoned one of the detectives who interviewed Terry later.

Terry even told investigators: “I felt the presence of my mother nearby. I knew she was close.”

Whatever the implications of Terry’s “sixth sense” about her mother’s close proximity, there were a number of other strange incidents that occurred before Theresa Cross’s eventual arrest:

1. Bud Sullivan and his sister Pat Thatcher say that Theresa Cross became much more secretive and reclusive around the beginning of 1993. She also seemed to be spending all her weekly wages, even though she had virtually no living expenses and, according to Bud, must have been capable of saving at least $1000 to $1200 a month.
    Bud’s brother-in-law, Vere Thatcher—the ex–Salt Lake City Police detective—speculates that Theresa Cross may have been blackmailed.

2. Why did Howard Sanders suddenly decide to track down his long-lost half brother Billy Bob after more than five years apart? Eventually Howard’s new fiancée traced Billy in June 1992, and the two half brothers met up to discuss what to do about their mother. But William Knorr wanted to just forget the past, according to statements later made to detectives.

3. Howard told the Placer County investigators that he kept in touch with his only surviving half sister, Terry Knorr, through a lawyer called Carl Swain, who is also currently representing Howard’s new fiancée in a personal injury suit. How much influence did this have on bringing Theresa Cross to justice, and what messages were passed between the two?

4. According to Howard, Terry called her brother Billy Bob’s wife, DeLois, on a number of occasions. These phone calls have been described in police testimony by Howard Sanders as being “threatening.” DeLois refused to put her husband Billy Bob on the phone to his sister, and told Terry: “No, you’re not getting any money out of Bill. You tell me why you want to get ahold of him?” During the call, Terry just kept repeating: “Let me talk to Bill. Let me talk to Bill.”
    DeLois later contradicted what Howard had claimed by telling investigators that Terry had called up, but she had pretended to Terry that she had rung up the wrong William Knorr.

5. Why did Robert Knorr Sr. and his son Billy suddenly reunite around this same time, even though they had not been in touch for sixteen years? Billy insisted to investigators shortly after his arrest that on the first night they met, he told his father that Suesan had been found dead in the hills after running away. But why were they talking about it anyway?

At the time of writing, these points remain unanswered. These questions do not suggest that the accounts given to investigators of life inside the Knorr household are inaccurate, but the circumstances behind how they were finally brought to the attention of police may require further inquiries.

*   *   *

By an unfortunate twist of fate, Terry’s life in Salt Lake City during 1993 was rapidly becoming as unhappy as her mother’s was becoming contented. Living in her husband’s family’s home was stretching the tolerance levels of all concerned, and police were being called to the house with even more regularity than before.

Terry’s only escape had been the job at Albertson’s. But if she did catch a glimpse of her mother, then that must have turned into a dreaded place as well.

Then there was Terry’s desperation to have children. She was convinced that having a baby might turn her life around. But she also knew that her mother had crushed her stomach so many times that she would have to continue having medical tests before she would know if she could even get pregnant.

Also, Terry was worried that having a child might reopen a much more dangerous scenario. She feared that if she did have children, they might end up being abused in the same awful way that she was. Terry was frightened that her mother might have handed down that propensity for violence to her only surviving daughter. Like mother, like daughter. The very thought haunted her, and it almost resulted in a disaster when a close friend asked Terry if she would look after her two children for a couple of days while her friend went off on a romantic weekend with her husband. Terry agreed because she felt she owed her friend a favor, and she also longed to be in the company of children whom she presumed had actually had a real childhood instead of the brutal regime she had faced day in, day out within the Knorr household.

In fact, Terry was positively excited by the prospect of looking after the youngsters. If anyone had romanticized the very notion of parenthood, it was Terry.

But the first night of looking after those children almost turned into a tragedy. Leaving one of the children alone in the living room while she cooked a meal in the kitchen, Terry did not notice the little boy creep down the stairs to the living quarters of that house in Sandy she shared with her in-laws.

Within minutes she smelled burning. Emerging from the kitchen, she rushed down the spiral staircase and found the little boy in the process of setting fire to her husband’s stereo with a box of matches. At first, Terry felt the urge to strike out at the boy.

But then she stopped herself.

She thought she would have been justified in hitting the child, but she also feared what it might lead to. So, instead of harming the child, she immediately made arrangements to get the boy taken elsewhere.

The incident made Terry feel very vulnerable. She had managed to hold herself back from repeating her mother’s alleged sins. She knew that traditionally, the abused child tends to end up abusing his or her own children. She wanted to prove she had broken the cycle.

Terry also had to face another aspect of her abuse at the hands of her mother: She still had not brought that woman to justice. God knows, she had tried hard enough.

Watching television one night, she found herself glued to the show,
America’s Most Wanted.
Many of the criminals on the lam featured on the program that night had committed crimes even longer ago than Theresa Knorr. She was particularly fascinated by one case in which the tipster bypassed all the usual police officials and went directly to the actual investigators to get some action taken. Terry realized that charges could still be brought against her mother, but she would have to get to the right people.

This time she would do it. She would actually make the first move to get her mother finally brought to justice. No more halfhearted chats with psychiatrists. No more tearful confessions to friends. This time she would directly call the police department that would have dealt with the deaths of her two sisters.

Terry took a map book off the shelf in that dark and dingy house in Sandy and started to look for the town of Truckee, California …

Fifteen

“As sick as her love was, she was my mother and the only person I knew as loving me.”

Terry, only surviving daughter

Police Sergeant Ron Perea, of the Nevada County, California, Sheriff’s Office, was used to taking phone calls from all sorts of weirdos, but there was something about the female voice on the other end of the line that had a ring of authenticity about it.

The caller said that her name was Terry Knorr and her two sisters had been killed some years earlier and their bodies dumped in the Nevada County area. Then Terry mentioned that one of her sisters’ remains had been left in a box. Sergeant Perea immediately remembered the girl the Texan serial killer had confessed to killing, and his initial impression of the caller altered. Maybe she was just another makeup artist, an attention seeker. After all, they had closed that case years earlier.

Then Terry mentioned the fate of her other sister, and Perea’s ears pricked up again because he knew that his colleagues in neighboring Placer County still had an open investigation on a charred corpse found about eight years previously.

At 10:00
A.M.
the following morning, October 28, 1993, Sergeant Perea called up Sergeant John Fitzgerald at the Tahoe City substation of the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, told him about the call from Terry, and gave him her phone number.

Fitzgerald—forty-six years old, brawny, Brobdingnagian, his mustache freshly trimmed, in his favorite brown tweed sports jacket—was crisply authoritative, a master of cop jargon with a soft, friendly center.

“I’ll get right on it.”

The detective instantly knew precisely which unsolved case Perea’s caller was referring to. He had joined the Tahoe substation as a detective just a year after the discovery of the body. Also, he had only just printed up some brand-new flyers with a specially enhanced photograph of Jane Doe #4873/84, prepared from autopsy photographs by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Arlington, Virginia. The poster, headlined
DO YOU KNOW HER
? also featured photos of Suesan’s ring and one of her earrings.

Fitzgerald picked up the phone almost immediately and tried to contact Terry Knorr. There was no reply. He tried again later in the day—still no answer.

*   *   *

Raised in Panama—his grandfather helped build the canal—John Fitzgerald had an interesting and varied life history. His family settled in the U.S. from Ireland four generations back. He went to a small private school. Then, just as he was about to go to college, the Vietnam War came along. “I was a plane captain in the Navy on the USS
Independence
aircraft carrier,” he explained. “That’s the guy who’s in charge of a particular plane, inspecting it before and after service.” He spent four years in Vietnam, and placed that experience in an interesting perspective by commenting that “basically, I saw no action. I was out at sea the whole time.” After his discharge in 1970, he enrolled in college and became a reserve police officer. He studied criminal justice, graduated from Sierra College, near Auburn, California, and went to work for the Rosewood Police Department, just east of Sacramento. Fitzgerald was anxious to make his mark, but he wanted to do it cleanly, without owing favors and without compromising his ethics. He was a true son of the 1960s.

Fitzgerald moved over to work for the Plumas County Police Department before switching to the Roosevelt Police Department, and then took the job of detective up at the Placer County Sheriff’s Department nine years ago. Married for the second time, with five children between him and his wife, Fitzgerald is a cop with a heart that he openly wears on the sleeve of his always immaculately pressed shirt.

*   *   *

At 4:45
P.M.
that day, a female came on the phone who identified herself as Terry Knorr. Close to tears, she repeated her account of life under her tyrannical mother and the eventual tragedy of her sisters’ killings.

As Fitzgerald later recalled: “She started talking and talking. I’d call it nonstop verbal diarrhea.”

Fitzgerald sat on the other end of the line, transfixed by the gruesome account of life in Sacramento. Terry disclosed incidents like being locked in a freezer, having knives thrown at them, being handcuffed to the table and beaten, being hung from the door, suffering regular kickings from her mother, being burned by cigarettes. Then she spoke about the force-feeding, the hot bowl burning the inside of her sister’s legs, the molestation by her father, the time her mother stood on her sister’s neck.

Terry even gave Fitzgerald the locations where all this occurred: 5539 Bellingham Way, Orangevale, and then the tiny house off 2410 Auburn Boulevard.

“She was very excitable. She was fed up of people not listening to her. She desperately wanted to get the whole thing off her chest,” said Fitzgerald.

Then, weeping periodically, Terry went into graphic detail about the deaths of her two sisters, even describing how the family was spooked when that bird hit the windshield on the way back from burning Suesan’s body.

The conversation went on for an hour and a half. Toward the end of the call, Fitzgerald started to test the authenticity of her claims by asking Terry questions that only someone close to the case of the burned body at Squaw Valley could possibly know.

“Describe to me the ring that your sister was wearing,” asked Fitzgerald.

“It had three rows of diamonds,” came the accurate reply.

“What about other jewelry?”

“She had earrings with bells on them.”

And so it went. Every time Fitzgerald asked a tricky question, Terry came back with the perfect answer.

Fitzgerald was fairly certain about Terry. But there was one final question about his Jane Doe that had always baffled him and all the detectives who had handled the case over the years.

“Why did she have those diapers in her possession?” asked the detective.

Terry’s reply set her off on yet another graphic description, this time of Suesan’s miserable last few weeks of existence.