Whatever Mother Says... (18 page)

Fitzgerald went back to examine the other, larger closet. He was starting to doubt his mind. There was only one way to be absolutely sure. He picked up the phone and called Terry in Salt Lake City.

“It’s the smaller one just outside the bathroom on the right side,” was all Terry had to tell Fitzgerald to assure him that his instincts were correct.

The evidence technicians were stunned when Fitzgerald told them to start all over on the smaller closet. None of them could believe that any human being existed in such a small space.

Sixteen

Homicide is a function of both person and circumstance. We are all capable of killing under some circumstances, and none of us kills under all circumstances.

Charles Patrick Ewing, Author

On the west side of Sacramento, at the Target Warehouse Distribution Center in Woodland, two Placer County investigators were speaking to a very curious William Knorr about the death of his aunt, Rosemary Norris, in 1983. The entire interview was conducted purely to sound out Knorr, to see how he would react to an approach by a police officer.

“He was fine. Acted completely normally. He did not have any idea why we were really there,” said one of the investigators later.

But then why should William Knorr be suspicious? He had turned over a new leaf, married a pretty girl, settled down in a comfortable home, and avoided all criminal temptations. He had gone his way and Robert had gone in completely the opposite direction. William had a safe, secure life now … for the moment.

At 5:00
P.M.
that same day, Fitzgerald went and saw William’s one-time live-in lover Emily Lewis at the movie theater where she still worked. She told Fitzgerald she no longer knew Billy Bob but was able to recall conversations she had with him about his sister’s disappearance. She also gave the detective some important information about where Knorr had worked at other jobs.

At precisely the same time, investigators Smith and Fulenwider were knocking on the door of apartment 38, 9127 Newhall Drive, Sacramento—the home of Theresa Knorr’s oldest son, Howard Sanders.

Thirty years old and about to embark on his second marriage, Howard Sanders was disarmingly frank in his statement to Smith and Fulenwider. The two policemen started the interview on a traditional softly, softly approach, building gradually up to the most important points.

About fifteen minutes into the interview, Johnnie Smith decided to press Howard harder about the realities of life inside the Knorr household. It was subtle but very effective:

SMITH
: I got the feeling that you wanted to tell us something. You said there had been some weird things happening in your family.

SANDERS
: Yeah, well …

SMITH
: What is weird that’s happened that you wanted to talk about?

SANDERS
: Well, you know, there’s been a lot of, you know, a lot of problems in our family, you know, we all should be pretty much a loony tune …

The two detectives hoped that marked the point when they broke through Howard Sanders’s reticence. But not even they could have realized just how much he was going to tell them.

When Sanders faltered again about thirty minutes later, after it came to discussing the witchcraft inside the house, Inspector Smith, dour yet determined, would not let him off the hook.

The investigator started referring to how he had taken lessons in body language. “I still think there’s something that you want to tell me that you’re holding back…”

It worked. Sanders admitted he was holding things back. That second piece of gentle intimidation eventually opened up such a vast torrent of revelations that the two detectives could barely keep up as Sanders mentioned beatings, burnings, whippings, and his own disturbing admission about committing incest with Terry.

But there was one more aspect that neither Smith nor Fulenwider had even the remotest clue about. In another interview with Sanders thirteen days later, he admitted sexually abusing his brother Robert as well as Terry.

Even these two hardened detectives were stunned by his confession. Charges of sexual abuse had been there all the time, like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, sending wisps of smoke and acrid smells curling to the deck. But now this throbbing menace was about to explode without warning and roar up hidden passageways to sink the entire vessel.

By admitting those awful sexual attacks on his brother and sister, Howard Sanders was trying at last to deal with it and then hopefully put out the flames forever.

*   *   *

The following day, Fitzgerald met at the Sheriff’s Department with his colleagues Johnnie Smith, Chal DeCecco, and Detective Karl Fulenwider. After discussing their follow-up tasks, they made arrangements to meet with the district attorney in order to obtain a search warrant for William Knorr’s home. They also needed to arrange for the issuing of arrest warrants for all three suspects: Theresa Jimmie Knorr, William Robert Knorr, and Robert Wallace Knorr.

Later that morning, John Fitzgerald gave a verbal affidavit to Judge Garbolino at the courthouse in Auburn and officially obtained the search warrant plus the arrest warrants. It was decided that an arrest should be made of William Knorr as quickly as possible, in case he was tipped off about the murder inquiries.

Investigators had gotten to the point where they did not know where the other brother and the mother were, so they needed to arrest William promptly.

At 2:00
P.M.
that afternoon, all four detectives traveled to the Target Warehouse Distribution Center in Woodland to arrest William Knorr. Smith drove in his small blue four-door Mercury with Fulenwider, while Fitzgerald and DeCecco traveled in the Explorer. On arrival at the plant, all four detectives initially feared their suspect was not at work because there was no sign of his car in the company parking lot.

But when Smith and his partner went into the personnel office, they were told that Knorr was at work. He had been given a ride in by a friend. The manager was then asked to page Knorr without informing him what it was about. The other two investigators sealed off the rear exit to the building in case Knorr tried to flee.

Five minutes later a bemused-looking William Knorr arrived in the front office, where Johnnie Smith approached him.

“We have a warrant for your arrest,” Smith told Knorr.

It took a few moments to sink in. Then William Knorr surprised the officers by asking them if he could call the guy he car-pooled with to tell him not to bother coming by to pick him up on the way home that evening. That was his main concern, rather than the fact he was under arrest for murder.

Three minutes after that, a grim-faced William Knorr was led from the building, where he was turned over by Smith to Fitzgerald and DeCecco, who read Knorr 821/ 822 of the Penal Code regarding magistrate’s advisement. Knorr immediately agreed to accompany the officers to the Placer County Sheriff’s Department. They snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists.

The two detectives began to interview Knorr virtually the moment the three got in Fitzgerald’s gun-metal-gray Explorer, and read him his Miranda rights. He was astonished to discover that the interview about his aunt’s death the previous day had just been an excuse to get close to him.

During the thirty-minute ride from Woodland to Auburn, Knorr told the detectives that both his sisters had disappeared and he had no idea where his mother or brother were now living. He talked openly about how his mother had abused all the children, and even confirmed that she did own the Ford LTD Terry had mentioned in her statement.

But Knorr was in complete denial as far as the deaths of his two sisters were concerned. He would not concede anything about them.

Then, just as Fitzgerald drove the Explorer through Auburn toward the Sheriff’s Department on the other side of town, William Knorr mentioned that he had been threatened with death by his mother if he ever tried to leave the family unit.

The two investigators sat in silence, hoping he would elaborate. But William Knorr did not say anything more. Moments later they parked outside the Sheriff’s Department.

On arrival inside the building, DeCecco escorted William Knorr to the investigation interview room. Knorr was being fairly cooperative, but still not candid about the actual allegations against him. A tape recorder and a video camera were permanently set up in the room to monitor all interviews.

William Knorr flatly denied any involvement in the disappearance of Sheila or Suesan. Then Fitzgerald and DeCecco advised him that they had already interviewed his sister Terry and half brother Howard.

“We kinda put our cards on the table,” said John Fitzgerald, ever the master of the understatement. “We wanted him to know that we knew what had happened.”

William Knorr looked worried. He immediately recalled for the two investigators a number of incidents inside the Knorr household, even claiming Suesan was out of control and turning tricks as a prostitute and that was why Theresa Knorr started beating her. He talked about how Suesan was trapped under the table on that kitchen floor.

William Knorr insisted to the detectives that when they took Suesan off into the mountains, his mother had simply informed them that they were “going on a car ride.” He also said—contrary to what Terry claimed—that Terry was in the car with them. He confirmed that the first trip had been aborted, and told them about loading Suesan into his mother’s Ford LTD the next day and once again setting off east on Interstate 80.

John Fitzgerald later confronted Terry about her brother’s claims that she had been in the car when both her sisters were dumped. She denied it categorically.

William Knorr even admitted to the two officers that he doused his sister in gasoline and then lit the fatal match. For the second time, he insisted his mother had threatened him with death if he should decide to tell anyone about that night’s activities.

“What about Sheila?” the investigators asked their suspect. William claimed he was once again ordered to help dispose of her by his evil mother. William said Sheila was not alive when they removed her body from the closet.

Then he revealed that just before the family dumped Sheila, they stopped by the side of the road to look for potential locations to leave the box containing her body and were spotted by a passing police cruiser.

As the two brothers scanned the bleak and darkened terrain a few yards from the Ford LTD, two patrolman approached Theresa Knorr, who was still sitting behind the wheel. They asked her what she was doing out in a deserted area late at night.

“The two boys are just over there urinating,” came Theresa Knorr’s very calm reply.

The two policemen accepted her response and did not even stop to inspect the contents of the trunk of that car. If they had opened it up, they would have found the box containing Sheila’s withered corpse and prevented her alleged killers from keeping their liberty for more than eight years.

As the interview at the sheriff’s headquarters drew to a close, William Knorr insisted to the investigators that he had cut himself off from the family and did not want to remember any more facts about the deaths of his two sisters. But he did admit that he had not intended to ever tell authorities about the two deaths.

Meanwhile, Smith and Fulenwider traveled to William Knorr’s home at 4016 Tressler Avenue, North Highlands, where they told his wife, DeLois Ann Knorr, that her husband had just been arrested for murder. She was stunned by the news, but agreed to help detectives with some background information.

DeLois—a pretty, slimly built blonde with a preference for neat, tight-fitting power suits and two-inch heels—told the investigators she had never met William’s mother and that her husband had told her that she had been very abusive toward the children.

She also revealed to detectives that William Knorr had told her that one of his sisters had been climbing on a shelf after being ordered to do so by his mother and that his sister fell and broke her neck.

By 3:35
P.M.
Fulenwider and Smith were executing their search warrant at William Knorr’s home after reassuring a very shocked DeLois that it had to be done.

An hour later the two investigators encountered Robert Knorr Sr., who had been alerted to the situation by DeLois. His first response to the detectives was not horror at the news of the arrests, but a mild concern that two of the Veterans’ Administration payment checks sent to Theresa Knorr to help Terry once she turned eighteen had been returned.

Knorr Sr. informed detectives that, apart from William, he had not seen his kids in seventeen years.

Then the father of Suesan Knorr told investigators that Theresa Knorr never liked Sheila. He insisted that his ex-wife had hit and beaten Sheila on a regular basis, and he recalled one particular incident when Sheila was about three years old and Theresa Knorr beat the little girl’s head so hard against a wall he had had to intervene.

Neither of the investigators responded openly to Knorr’s remarks, but privately they were starting to wonder why no one had ever brought Theresa Knorr to justice years before she began allegedly killing her daughters.

Back at the Placer County Sheriff’s Department, methodical computer checks had finally uncovered a possible location for Robert Knorr—the Nevada State Jail, at Ely. No one was that surprised to find Robert was already incarcerated for the murder of a bartender, completely unconnected with the abuse and killings alleged to have taken place inside the Knorr household. Or was it?

The Knorr task force decided not to rush across the state line to interview Robert. He had nowhere to run. Their main priority was to locate Theresa Knorr before she completely disappeared under a haze of false names and disguises.

At 2:30
P.M.
the following day, November 5, Fitzgerald and DeCecco went to see William Knorr, this time in his cell at the Placer County Jail attached to the main courtrooms in Auburn. Again William was read his Miranda rights before DeCecco switched on a Dictaphone minicassette recorder.