Whatever Mother Says... (26 page)

The qualities that compel people to carry out episodic killings are eerily similar to those qualities that American society expects from successful individuals. They often see themselves as “doing good,” having penetrated the very society they hated so much.

But there is one part of the personality of such killers that remains in all of us—the need to be accepted and the will to achieve. In the case of the accused, there can be no actual satisfying or satiating it, whereas normally developed people can decide when to be “selfish” and preserve quality time for themselves. Dr. Norris and other experts say that virtually all such killers have little or no self-esteem—psychobiologically, many of them cannot determine the boundaries of their own selves and thus cannot conceive of themselves as having separate identities—and this is the factor that contributes to their eventual explosion of violence.

This means that most of them have spent a lifetime repressing the cancerous rage at the core of their personalities. A progressive and escalating loss of control and sense of madness becomes apparent to them from the time they first become aware of their own dark, primal urges. Such people learn to hate and fear their own evil side, yet cannot help but succumb to it in moments of pure reactive violence. However, they often develop a chameleonlike mask of sanity or normalcy whose purpose is to protect them from the turbulent and hostile violent central element of their psyches. This mask of sanity also camouflages them from the society they have learned to fear and hate.

During this period in an episodic killer’s development, a unique set of mechanisms emerges, composed of the same elements that make for sociopathy or sociopathic and multiple personalities, and these interact with the neurological impairments that cause significant but convenient losses of memory and gaps in reality: the episodes during which the series killings are committed. “The drive to live within society, the ability to hope and dream about the possibilities the future holds for them, and the sense of self that allows them to benefit from personal and vocational achievements, have all been physically or emotionally beaten away from them in their earlier years,” explained Dr. Norris, providing an eerie insight into the background of such killers.

Another characteristic of such episodic killers is that they become pathological liars. On the one hand, lying is simply an extension of chameleonlike ability to blend in with their background. They sense the information that people around them want to hear, and provide it. “Truth is not an issue for them,” Dr. Norris explained. “Survival is.”

Truth also demands that a person perceive a modicum of self-worth. Because most episodically violent individuals see themselves as having no real worth and no meaning for life, they are honest neither with themselves nor with others. On a practical level, say the experts, lying is a form of manipulation. If one can lie successfully, one can get others to believe what one wants them to. But when lying becomes chronic in the schoolchild or in the person whose recapitulation of basic facts may change from day to day, it is a clear indicator of other serious behavioral disorders. Dr. Norris believes that most episodic killers sincerely believe the stories they are telling when they are telling them.

Twenty-four

The violent act becomes necessary as a means of asserting the will and compensating for real or imagined humiliation.

Brian Masters, Author

This brings us to Theresa Knorr’s own background. Mind experts will want to delve into her family history before she met and fell in love with her first husband. They will probe her own childhood for evidence of incidents that might help to explain her later actions as a mother. The chances are that she herself was either molested or sexually abused as a child. Her parents’ attitudes toward crucial elements of her upbringing, like sex, money, and love, will also have shaped her later domestic problems. Undoubtedly, the premature death of Theresa Knorr’s mother will be considered as a significant turning point in her childhood.

In some other recent episodic killing cases, the death of a parent or grandparent has been cited by mind experts as a possible cause of resentment that gradually built up into a crescendo of horrific violence. Dennis Nilsen—Britain’s most infamous serial killer, with a tally of sixteen young male victims—was shaken by the death of his beloved grandfather when he was just twelve years old. Psychologists insisted after his trial that Nilsen’s obsession with death was fueled by the sight of his grandfather lying in an open coffin before his burial.

Only in the past few years have professionals begun to understand the process through which such ultimately malevolent individuals have been created in each generation. These so-called experts are now coming to appreciate how such episodic violence is shaped by patterns of child abuse, pathologically negative parenting, brain injuries resulting from physical traumas, inherited neurological disorders, chronic malnutrition, chronic drug and alcohol abuse, and even toxic poisoning from environmental pollutants.

There is a very common cycle of deprivation that involves the repetition of often similar offenses a generation later or sometimes even two generations later. Public health officials even concede that such cycles of violence in all their various forms have been spawned from previous generations. “Parents who abuse their children, physically as well as psychologically, install in them an almost instinctive reliance upon violence as a first resort to any challenge,” Dr. Joel Norris said. “Each generation teaches the next generation to react with violence, often reinforced and compounded by the media. Those patterns of violent behavior spread, consuming increasingly greater numbers of victims.”

Dr. Norris is particularly critical of the way that, until recently, episodic killers tended to be treated as either sociopaths or psychopaths and were immediately relegated to the care of the criminal justice system. “They are treated as though they were within the range of normal human existence, yet had willingly become deviant,” explained Dr. Norris. “But this is not the case. They are nonpersonality types who eventually come alive only during the episodic cycle of murder. However, because the criminal justice system concentrates on apprehension and punishment, rather than on discovering the causality of violence and preventing its spread, individuals who display this type of medical syndrome have slid through the system untreated.”

Dr. Norris believes that this lack of understanding has directly helped increase the number of killers in our midst. “The infection has been allowed to spread through society like a plague: the emerging killers are the carriers, transmitting the syndrome from one generation to the next.”

*   *   *

The Knorr case presents an extraordinary opportunity for criminal experts to examine in minute detail the background and circumstances of a series of killings that is unique in its very nature because of the close family ties between the victims and their alleged killers.

In the eyes of many, Theresa Knorr and her two sons should qualify as serial killers if found guilty of the charges they face in the deaths of Suesan and Sheila. The term “serial killer” usually refers to criminals who do not kill their victims simultaneously. In other words, there is a period of time between each death.

This is not to be confused with the description “repeater,” which is used when referring to criminals jailed following the killing of one victim and then released from prison only to murder again.

Criminologists across the globe will be watching the Knorr case closely. As acknowledged U.S. expert on murder Marvin Wolfgang said: “Homicide can be ‘caused’ by practically any type of major psychiatric illness.” World-famous forensic psychiatrist Dr. Peter Wood is particularly intrigued by the case: “It is extraordinary in itself that she allegedly killed her own flesh and blood. But to be apparently a joint serial killer with her two sons is even more unusual.” Dr. Wood, from England, has investigated the minds of many killers over the years and gained a unique insight into their minds. But even he is stunned by the alleged circumstances behind the deaths of Suesan and Sheila.

After some careful consideration of the facts behind the case, he concluded: “The mother who kills her children when they are older is likely to be either schizophrenic or paranoid psychotic.”

Dr. Wood believes that the most significant allegation concerning the crimes that Theresa Knorr is said to have committed is that she apparently managed to kill twice—and on separate occasions—and did it with two of her own sons.

“That makes her less likely to be psychotic because she has involved others. If you are driven by delusion, unless you draw someone else into your own delusions, the motive for killing is foreign to the person you are trying to involve in your behavior. Almost by definition, people who kill jointly are not psychotic. That’s the simplest way of putting it.”

One of the most astonishing aspects of the case—whatever the outcome—is that it took so many years for Theresa Knorr and her sons to be brought to justice. Terry Knorr’s efforts to alert authorities to the killings have already been well-documented in this book, but there is another aspect that has so far been overlooked—the inability of police to come up with any profile of the killer of the two girls, even though it was clear they had both been unlawfully killed (although authorities had not linked the deaths at that time).

Many criminologists believe that too much emphasis is being put on profiling killers. Often, some insist, these profiles prove wholly—or certainly partially—inaccurate. In the case of both Sheila and Suesan, no actual profiles were produced because investigators believed they did not have enough clues to build up a picture of the girls’ killers. They were also unaware of their family connection.

Privately, police in Placer County say that was the precise reason why so little action was taken initially to track down the killers. For over the past two decades, investigators have become so used to using profiles to help bring killers to justice that when no such “picture” exists, many police inquiries rapidly fizzle out.

Since the deaths of Suesan and Sheila ten years ago, police homicide units have become far more sophisticated in their investigations and tracking of killers. Detectives tended to be strictly reactive up until recently. When a murder was reported, investigators gathered what evidence they could, traced the victim’s identity, and tried to reconstruct the crime from what they could determine about the victim’s movements during his or her final hours. If there were witnesses, they were interviewed also. But this procedure fails miserably when dealing with episodic, apparently motiveless killings. The reason for this is simple: such crimes do not fit into any set pattern. The motive for murder is not dependent upon the particular situation or upon the individual victim. In this case, without an identity or any clues as to the allegedly domestic nature of the girls’ deaths, police were left with next to nothing.

The truth of the matter is that reactive homicide investigations depend upon things like weight of evidence, clues at the crime scene, relationship between victim and the murderer, involved witnesses or passersby, and, finally, the fear and guilt of the killer him-or herself. In the case of Suesan and Sheila, the police were virtually empty-handed.

Yet, the chilling facts of the matter are that, since 1980, more than twenty-five percent of all murders in the United States have been “stranger” homicides in which the killer is not driven by any apparent rational motive, and since detectives looking into the deaths of the two girls did not even have their identities, they could not link the killings with anyone. Investigators naturally find such cases frustrating because the killer may be in the area for only a short time before disappearing. Worse still, in rural areas like the Sierra Nevada Mountains, there are the added problems of jurisdictions that do not routinely share information about unsolved homicides. The alleged killers of Suesan and Sheila were never even the target of a combined task force, until after Terry Knorr had finally persuaded investigators to act upon her claims.

At the time of both girls’ deaths, detectives only had a crime scene as evidence. They had absolutely nothing else to go on until after the autopsies, and even those medical examinations did not provide many additional clues other than incidentals which proved fruitless to investigators. They also faced further investigatory problems because both girls died—or were near to death—in a different location from where they were eventually dumped. This created, in effect, two crime scenes, and caused added confusion to the detectives until they began a piece by piece search of the homes where the girls had lived. But again, this was
after
Terry’s story had finally been believed. Interestingly, many experts believe that the killer who strikes first and then takes the bodies to a remote location is less in control.

Another factor that undoubtedly helped the alleged killers of Suesan and Sheila avoid detection for so long was the lack of publicity the girls’ deaths attracted. Front page news in local newspapers was hardly enough to raise any real interest outside of the immediate communities where their corpses were discovered. In retrospect, the lack of any real press and TV coverage for those killings helped keep the police efforts out of the spotlight, and arguably, if the case had received more publicity, then someone farther afield might have recognized the descriptions of the bodies and done something about it. Further, it should be pointed out that although family members recall seeing small mentions of the killings at the time, more extensive coverage might have prompted them to react more positively.

Detectives have also speculated that the killers of the two girls found it easy to put the murders into the back of their minds because there were so few reminders of their crimes in the newspaper and on the television.

What is important about the profile of a killer from a policeman’s point of view is that it’s impossible to see a complete picture of the criminal’s motivation until well after he or she has been apprehended and diagnosed. Current police training still focuses on the traditional murderer who is not compelled to murder and who flees because he fears the police and prosecution. Often the episodic killer will go on committing enough crimes to ensure his own destruction. What made the alleged killers of Suesan and Sheila so difficult to apprehend was that they stopped killing.