Whatever Mother Says... (21 page)

For a moment Bud was stunned. Then he remembered seeing that report about Terry Knorr and her dead sisters on the television a few days earlier. It jogged his memory.

Bud walked back into the kitchen where Theresa was calmly leaning against a sideboard.

“I don’t know why they are arresting me,” she said. Then silence, followed by an afterthought: “Will you sell my car for me?”

As is sometimes the case with honorable people, the hunter—in this case Fitzgerald—still had time to sound a little sympathetic toward his prey, Theresa Knorr.

“She was trying to do the best with her life and look more attractive. Wearing nice clothes and all. She wanted to run a clean life and enjoy it without getting involved in any trouble. She did not want to attract any attention to herself,” said Fitzgerald.

It sounded a lot like Billy Bob. He had also tried to start fresh … until John Fitzgerald came along.

Fitzgerald and Smith decided it wasn’t necessary to cuff Theresa Knorr inside the Sullivan house.

Fitzgerald led her outside by the arm and handcuffed her once they were in the front yard.

He put her in the investigators’ four-door rental, and SLCPD Patrolman Whitaker followed closely behind.

At 6:20
P.M.
Fitzgerald and Smith arrived at the Salt Lake City Police Department with their prisoner. They immediately took her to the interview room on the fifteenth floor, where she was read her Miranda rights by Smith. Theresa Knorr refused to waive those rights and sat in stony silence. The two investigators knew then that Theresa Knorr was not going to be opening her heart up to them for the time being.

“I want a lawyer,” was about all she would say.

Within a few minutes Fitzgerald and Smith gave up and decided it was time to leave the room. Fitzgerald went to the door; it was locked. Suddenly it dawned on him that neither he nor Smith had the key, because they were just visiting officers, not actually stationed at the SLCPD.

Theresa Knorr sat stoney-faced at the interview table, unaware of the situation until Fitzgerald started pounding on the door to try and get someone’s attention. Two Salt Lake City officers walked past, looked through the glass window and promptly barked at the two California cops: “Get away from there. You’ll be let out when the officer gets back.”

They thought that Smith and Fitzgerald were prisoners.

“In the middle of all this drama and talk about the appalling crimes this woman was alleged to have committed, we had ended up being prisoners in a police station,” recalled Fitzgerald. “It was ridiculous.”

As Fitzgerald continued pounding on the door, a sly grin came to the face of Theresa Knorr. It was the only time John Fitzgerald ever noticed her smile.

Eventually they got out of the interview room and escorted their prisoner to the Salt Lake County Jail—the same prison where her daughter Terry had been an inmate after her domestic flare-ups at her in-laws’ house. During the four-block drive, Fitzgerald gave Theresa Knorr his business card and said: “If you change your mind, just call me.” He wanted to be absolutely certain he had done everything possible to elicit a confession. Theresa Knorr took the card and said nothing. In fact, the only thing she talked about on the way to jail that evening was her three sons, Howard, William, and Robert.

But not once, noted John Fitzgerald a few months later, not once did she mention her daughters.

As they arrived at the jail, Theresa Knorr simply said: “I feel like a sacrificial lamb being led to the slaughter.”

The following day was the Veterans Day holiday, so the two Placer County investigators decided they would spend the day following up more leads, trying to contact people who might actually be at home rather than work.

*   *   *

Over at his mother’s house on South 600 East, Bud Sullivan was getting a taste of that much mentioned Andy Warhol phenomenon—fifteen minutes of fame. Masses of TV crews, photographers, and reporters had gathered outside the front door for a chat about Theresa Knorr.

Channel 2 proudly reported: “A murderer has been caught right here in Salt Lake City. The suspect: a forty-seven-year-old woman. The victims: her own two children. The case had been a mystery for almost a decade until a surviving daughter gave cops what they were looking for…”

Later that day, the hot news was updated to include some footage of the Sullivan house: “Forty-seven-year-old Theresa Knorr is in Salt Lake County Jail. She was arrested in this Salt Lake home yesterday. Knorr is suspected of killing her two daughters nine years ago in California. According to police, her seventeen-year-old daughter’s charred body was found in 1984. A year later in Truckee her other daughter was…”

In one report, Bud Sullivan—looking distinctly uncomfortable under the glare of the camera lights—said: “It was a complete shock. None of us had any idea about her past.”

Bud Sullivan was still having great difficulty believing any of the things he had heard about Theresa Knorr.

One neighbor, Cynthia Russell, talked happily to the TV crews about how her kids used to go over to the house and do odd jobs. “She was a very nice neighbor. My reaction is that they must have the wrong person or something.”

Inspector Johnnie Smith—head of the Placer County task force formed to bring the Knorrs to justice—privately admitted in an interview in February 1994 that he was just as surprised by Theresa Knorr as those neighbors.

“I was expecting an entirely different type of person after hearing all those evil things about her. She was more refined, she cared for the elderly, she was respected in the community, people were full of praise for her. No one had a bad word to say about her.

“It was as if she had ended one life to start another. In fact, I think that is what she did. She terminated that evil life and headed for Reno, then Salt Lake.”

Reporters even traced Howard Sanders, who, after learning of his mother’s arrest, said: “I’m really glad they caught her; I’m relieved. Maybe they can go forward now and find out exactly what went on. Nobody else can be hurt.”

At 9:15
A.M.
that same morning, Bud Sullivan got a call from Fitzgerald and Smith, who wanted to know how he came to hire Theresa Cross, as she was known to him.

Sullivan admitted, rather embarrassingly, that he had loaned Theresa Cross $4600 after she told him she needed to pay an outstanding tax bill. But he refused to agree with speculation that Theresa Knorr had been planning a long trip somewhere. He believes to this day that she was being pressured for money by somebody.

After speaking to the two detectives, Sullivan went over to the Salt Lake County Jail to try and see Theresa Knorr. Not only was he concerned about all that money he had loaned her, but he was also genuinely worried about her well-being. He still could not believe the murder allegations.

Bud Sullivan—who had never been near a jail before in his life—discovered the logistics of prison visiting are not as simple as one might imagine. Theresa’s other good friend, Hal Cheney, had already been contacted by her and made a visit at noon that day. Prisoners were only allowed one visit per day.

Cheney—another clean-living character who had no previous experiences of the Salt Lake prison system—had gotten off to a bad start when he turned up at the jail’s imposing entrance to be told there was no Theresa Cross in custody.

“But we have got a Theresa Knorr,” the prison warden informed him.

A few minutes later he walked into the stark visitors’ room and watched through the glass partition as he waited for Theresa to appear. When she did walk out of a side door, Cheney was taken aback by seeing her in prison tunic and wearing little makeup. She looked very different from the charming, quietly confident lady he and his wife Fran had known for more than three years.

He hesitated, then picked up the phone to talk to his friend on the other side of the glass screen.

“I want you to know that I am innocent of the charges against me,” she told the pensioner before he had even uttered a word.

“I don’t even know what the charges against you are,” replied a bemused Hal Cheney.

“I am charged with two counts of murder.”

For a moment there was silence. Cheney was visibly shocked by Theresa’s admission. He tried to say something more to her, but it was so difficult to know what to talk about after that.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he finally asked her.

“I could do with a toothbrush, some toothpaste. Those sort of things.”

Hal Cheney left Theresa a twenty-dollar bill and walked out of the visitors’ room of the jail. He saw Theresa two more times, leaving a twenty-dollar bill at the end of each visit. But he later admitted—in an interview in February 1994—that “we never talked much. Just sort of sat and stared at each other.”

Theresa Cross called Hal Cheney from jail a few days later and told him: “You don’t really miss your freedom until you have lost it.”

Later that first week of her detention, Theresa Knorr got a visit from her old friend at night school, Keith Bendixen. He arrived at the Salt Lake County Jail with a stack of religious books, only to be told he could not take any into the prison, in case he was hiding something in them to help her escape with. Keith had an awkward fifteen-minute visit and has not seen Theresa since.

On November 12, just before his departure back to California, John Fitzgerald visited the jail and asked Theresa Knorr if she would waive her extradition rights. She refused to and calmly told the investigator she had some things she wanted to take care of in Utah and had no intention of leaving if she could help it.

At Placer County Jail, on hearing of his mother’s arrest, William Knorr met with task force member Chal DeCecco and insisted that his mother had admitted murdering her first husband and been involved in the death of her sister, Rosemary Norris, even though detectives had already discounted such suggestions.

Nineteen

The most insidious effect of abuse is that it dramatically increases the likelihood that the victim-child will become a victim-spouse or worse, a child abuser.

Paul Mones, Author

At 10:00
A.M.
on that same Veterans Day holiday, John Fitzgerald spoke to David Lundberg at the Sandy Police Department to see if he had come up with any record of Terry having told the police previously of her sisters’ killings. Lundberg told Fitzgerald about all those domestic violence calls from the house on Pepperwood where Terry lived with her in-laws, and how he had confronted one of his fellow officers in Sandy.

At 10:30
A.M.
Fitzgerald contacted Terry at the house in Sandy and tried to get some more specific details on those earlier occasions when she told the police about what had happened inside the Knorr household. She mentioned telling a sheriff who came over to her friend Heidi Sorenson’s home, and she gave Fitzgerald the names of seven other people she had told over the years.

Fitzgerald was very concerned about these alleged earlier reports, and headed over to the Bountiful Police Department at 12:15
P.M.
lunchtime to try and track down some concrete evidence of Terry’s claims. All they could come up with was an address for Heidi Sorenson on West Center Road. Fitzgerald went straight over there, but no one was in, so he left his business card and a note asking her to contact him, that it was urgent.

The following day, Fitzgerald went to the house in Bountiful where Theresa Knorr had worked before moving to Alice Sullivan’s place. He was trying to fit as many pieces of the jigsaw together before he had to fly back to Sacramento.

Fitzgerald was fascinated by the way Theresa Knorr had changed her entire life after moving to Salt Lake City. Everywhere he went, people talked in glowing terms about her. It was as if she had reinvented herself.

It took Fitzgerald another three days of digging to uncover which cop Terry had spoken to when she met Heidi’s friend the sheriff three years earlier. He located Woods Cross Police Department Chief Paul Howard and discovered that the report had been made by Clarence Montgomery. Fitzgerald then tracked down the name of the detective in Sacramento who handled the inquiry.

Meanwhile, Theresa Knorr continued to fight extradition back to California. That meant Smith and Fitzgerald would have to go back to Sacramento without their star defendent.

The
Sacramento Bee
—still following the investigation closely—ran a story on November 13 that rubbed disappointment into John Fitzgerald’s wounds:

WOMAN CHALLENGING EXTRADITION IN DEATHS OF
2
DAUGHTERS

Placer County sheriff’s detectives returned empty-handed from Salt Lake City on Friday after learning that the woman charged with the murders of two daughters will challenge authorities’ attempts to return her to California.…

The following Monday, Theresa Jimmie Cross—charged in the torture slayings of two of her daughters—was formally arraigned when she appeared before the Third Circuit Court in Salt Lake City. She was ordered to be held without bail.

At the Placer County Jail, in California, William Knorr was scheduled to face a fitness hearing in the local juvenile court to decide whether he should be tried as an adult for his alleged crimes. He had been sixteen when Suesan was killed and seventeen at the time of Sheila’s death.

*   *   *

Since the murderous antics of Ma Barker and her son Fred in the thirties, through the weird, sick killings by the creepy McCrarys, in Texas, to the sexually depraved California orgies of death committed by Gerald and Charlene Gallego, America has always loved families that allegedly commit heinous crimes. And now, in middle-aged Theresa Jimmie Knorr, it had the suspected ring leader in the flesh! Within days of the news of her arrest leaking out, Theresa Knorr’s story and photograph became front-page news across the world.

First, big profile coverage came in the prestigious
Los Angeles Times
on November 14. In a lengthy front-page piece headlined ‘
UNBELIEVABLE
’
TALE REVEALS GRISLY CRIMES
, the paper reported all the details, peppered with quotes like, “I have been here 33 years and I have never seen such a bizarre case” from Placer County Sheriff Donald J. Nunes.