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Authors: Wensley Clarkson

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The red-roofed, white building they lived in was really no bigger than a single garage, and contrasted drastically with the larger, more luxurious three- and four-bedroom homes on Elm, just fifty yards in the opposite direction to the railroad tracks. Up until the shooting, Theresa, Clifford, and Howard slept in a small room at the back of the house, while her father James slept on a couch in the living room, just by the rickety front door.

After her arrest, Theresa Sanders told Deputy District Attorney Donald Dorfman that her husband had threatened to beat her on the morning of the shooting and that he was packing to leave her. But she also admitted that he had not actually beaten her since the incident that almost led to him being arrested two weeks earlier.

It then transpired that just minutes before the killing, Theresa Sanders went into the bedroom where the rifle was kept loaded, got the gun, and returned to the living room as her husband was about to open the door, apparently to leave home for good.

“I remember holding the gun and having my finger on the trigger, but then everything went blank,” she told investigators at the time.

Theresa Sanders’s invalid father, James Cross, informed detectives that the gun was kept loaded with the safety catch on. Significantly, he also added that it would have been necessary for her to deliberately cock the hammer before firing it.

The couple had been estranged at the time, but Clifford Sanders—a carpenter for the American Safeway Scaffolding Company—had moved back into the Galt home with his wife and father-in-law about three weeks before the shooting.

The only witness to the killing was the couple’s eleven-month-old baby, Howard. He said later he was haunted by the knowledge that he was there when his mother shot his father dead, even though he was too young to actually remember the killing.

Within a few hours of Theresa Sanders’s arrest for murder, she told investigators she was pregnant with another child by her late husband. That unborn child was Sheila, a girl whose future was to be irretrievably connected to that fatal shooting.

On August 4, 1964, Theresa Sanders entered a plea of innocent by reason of self-defense in a Sacramento court to the charge of murdering her husband. She insisted she only intended to scare Clifford Sanders when the rifle she was holding went off, sending that bullet into his heart.

Her performance at the trial was considered very emotive by attorneys and police alike. She even tearfully told her own lawyer: “All I want to do is to go home and take care of my baby.”

Deputy District Attorney Donald Dorfman was not so convinced. He argued for a first degree murder conviction and insisted that Theresa Sanders was jealous of her husband’s attentions to other women and had regularly threatened to kill him.

“Not every murderer looks like the witch in
Snow White,
” he told the jury.

Theresa Sanders looked a lot less like the witch than she did Snow White: pure, sensible, sweet.

Dorfman insisted that just after the shooting, Theresa Sanders ran across the street and told a neighbor she had just shot her husband. Then, her cheeks burning and her pretty face twisted into a scowl, she added: “No man’s going to leave me.”

When Dorfman tried to introduce that evidence in court, the judge ruled it as inadmissible because the neighbor was the wife of the deputy sheriff and Theresa should have been advised of her rights.

Two extra bailiffs were even assigned to the trial after Theresa’s husband’s brother, Tommy Sanders, said he was “going to get a gun and shoot someone.” A witness at the trial, Tommy openly displayed his anger toward Theresa.

At one stage, the judge even permitted Theresa Sanders’s attorney, Robert A. Zarick, to carry a loaded handgun to court.

Once, he took the gun out of his briefcase, turned to the victim’s family, seated in the courtroom, and said: “None of you maniacs are going to get me like Cliff tried to get her.” It was a trial filled with controversy.

Theresa Sanders’s pitiful story of life at the hands of a wife beater who also frequently boasted of his prowess with other women, was totally contradicted by her husband’s sister Mrs. Lydia Hansen. She told the court that her brother worked hard, never drank, and gave his wife all his earnings. These claims have a familiar ring to them, as Theresa’s children later complained bitterly about how their mother made them hand over all their earnings every week.

Hansen, Theresa’s sister-in-law at the time, also insisted that her brother never once threatened or hit his pretty young wife. In fact, Hansen recalled that Theresa always drove her husband to work and back to be sure no other women ever got to look at him. She also kept his clothes in rags for the same reason, and gave Clifford Sanders just fifty cents for lunch money so he could not go to a restaurant where another woman might get a look at him.

Hansen also revealed that Theresa Sanders had shot at her husband once before, and that her brother had shown her the bullet hole in the floor.

“I believe with all my heart that Theresa Sanders planned to kill my brother,” she insisted to the hushed courtroom.

But then, in a remarkable show of compassion, Hansen said she wanted Sanders to go free so she could raise her brother’s children. Hansen’s final statement may have done more than anything else to sway the jury, and that decision could well have contributed toward the tragedies that later occurred in Theresa’s household.

On September 10—just twelve days after the trial began—a jury of nine men and three women told Judge Charles W. Johnson that they found Theresa Sanders not guilty as charged, after deliberating for an hour and forty-five minutes.

Theresa, dressed in a baby-blue maternity dress on that last day in court, wept when the verdict was announced. Then she approached the jury box. Many of the jurors smiled at her. She was desperately trying to thank them, but the tears just would not stop streaming down her face.

One female juror grinned warmly at Theresa Sanders and got up to put her arm around the innocent young mother. It was a touching scene.

Theresa Sanders held her weak little chin high and pursed her thin lips together in triumph.

Former chief Froehlich, now a crusty seventy-five-year-old, believes to this day that District Attorney Dorfman thought he had a clear-cut case against her.

Dorfman had tried to give the court the impression that Theresa Sanders was a cold, calculating killer. A few days later—in yet another strange twist in the even stranger life of this alleged murderess—Theresa coolly walked into Dorfman’s office to reclaim the rifle she had used to kill her husband.

She even told Dorfman: “I liked the way you came after me.”

Theresa Sanders was oddly in awe of the young prosecutor, and years later she even tried to hire him to handle the divorce proceedings for her third marriage. She also recommended Dorfman to that same tragic child, Howard, when his own marriage began to crumble more than twenty years later.

Theresa told her family that Dorfman was a superb attorney and she had great respect for him.

But Chief Froehlich’s most vivid memory of the aftermath following Theresa Sanders’s arrest was that of little Howard Sanders. Froehlich personally drove the child to a suburb north of Sacramento to stay with relatives while Theresa was in custody.

“That poor little fella. I always wondered what happened to him.”

Thirty years later, Howard Sanders has just one reminder of his father still in his possession. It is a rusted handgun with a broken handle.

*   *   *

Theresa Sanders could not stand the thought of moving back into the house where she shot her husband dead, so she, her father, and her baby Howard moved to the district of Rio Linda, North Sacramento, after her acquittal on murder charges. It was familiar territory for Theresa, since she had been born in Rio Linda on March 14, 1946.

Little is known about her true upbringing, apart from the fact that her mother died in her arms when Theresa was about twelve. Her father had a close bond with his daughter and remained a part of her life right up until his death in 1985. But Theresa Sanders spun such a vast web of lies to so many different people that much of what she told about her past has to now be completely discounted.

She told some friends about pleasant countryside, life on a farm, and riding horses every day. But to others, she reshaped her past to include an unhappy childhood, poverty-line existence, and a daily regime of brutality at the hands of a series of stepmothers. The truth is that no one really knows much about Theresa’s life before she was arrested for murdering Clifford Sanders in July 1964.

By Christmas of that year, Theresa Sanders had put her brush with the law behind her. Already in the later stages of her second pregnancy, she went back to calling herself by her maiden name, Theresa Cross, and settled back into life in a modest two-bedroom house at 6608 Cherry Lane, Rio Linda.

At twenty-two minutes past midnight on March 13, 1965—the day before her own birthday—Theresa, still just eighteen, gave birth to Sheila Gay Sanders, at the Roseville District Hospital, just a few miles from her home. On Sheila’s birth certificate Theresa had written
Deceased
under the sections marked “Husband’s Present or Last Occupation” and “Kind of Industry or Business.”

By the end of the following year, Theresa revived her interest in men and met handsome young marine Robert Wallace Knorr. She had also moved to a comfortable house on Tioga Street, in San Francisco. Life seemed to be looking up.

Theresa gave birth to her third child, Suesan Marline Knorr, at 1:50
A.M.
on September 27, 1966, at the USAF Hospital on Mather Air Force Base, in central California. The birth certainly caused a stir among Robert Knorr’s family back in Minnesota. After all, he was only eighteen and the mother of his child was just twenty—and they had not even bothered to get married.

However, Knorr family pressure eventually resulted in Robert and Theresa going through a wedding ceremony in 1966. On September 15, 1967, a son, William Robert, was born. On December 31 the following year came Robert Wallace Jr. Theresa Knorr was just twenty-two years old and the mother of five young children.

Theresa Knorr and the children found themselves on the receiving end of some attacks by her husband in the years following the birth of their children. According to her son, Howard, Robert Knorr’s temper, combined with his experiences in Vietnam, had turned him into a highly volatile character. The children came to fear his presence in the house. One time, Howard had to pick his baby brother Billy Bob off the floor when Knorr Sr. kicked his son all the way across the room into a toilet and his head split open.

Theresa Knorr all too frequently became the last line of defense against her ill-tempered husband.

By the time a sixth child, Theresa (Terry), was born on August 5, 1970, at the Sutter Memorial Hospital, Theresa Knorr had already separated from her husband Robert. At the end of September that year, their divorce was finalized.

Two marriages followed in fast succession for Theresa Knorr. First there was Ronald Pulliam. Of all her husbands, he seems to be the only one no one has a bad thing to say about. The children even called him “Dad” when they all lived together in a comfortable house on Morris Avenue, in Sacramento, although the entire family lost touch with him years ago.

In February 1994, Pulliam said he just wanted to forget he had ever had a relationship with Theresa Knorr, let alone a marriage.

“I don’t want to talk about her. It all happened a long time ago,” were the only words he would utter.

Pulliam and Theresa broke up in the early seventies. A man called Bill Bullington then came on the scene, but none of the surviving children ever knew if their mother actually married him.

By 1973 the family had moved into their one and only large home—in Orangevale, West Sacramento. It was to be their home for longer than all their other places put together, and actually had enough space for the entire clan. Theresa then met and married a wealthy newspaper executive called Chester Harris, who worked on the now defunct
Sacramento Union.

Around this time, Theresa Knorr began putting on weight. She also started to grow her long dark hair farther down her back, giving her the appearance of some kind of medieval witch. Chet Harris had an interest in the occult, and he soon found a keen disciple in Theresa.

Two

Abusive parents thrive on isolation and a perverted sense of privacy.

Paul Mones,
When a Child Kills

There is no evidence of the much stressed, overworked, Theresa Knorr hitting out impatiently at her children when they were toddlers. She actually enjoyed bringing up the youngsters in those early years. She saw herself as the all-powerful mom who would ensure her children’s survival through thick and thin.

Theresa Knorr often took youngest daughter, Terry, and her brother Robert to the local Dairy Queen for a slap-up lunch followed by a big dollop of ice cream, and made them both promise not to tell their older brothers and sisters, who were at school, and would no doubt be jealous that they had not been taken out for a treat.

Theresa Knorr also made many other sacrifices on behalf of the children. One time, she even pawned her favorite diamond bracelet so that she could buy Terry some school clothes.

She was the only person the children knew as consistently loving them and taking care of them. She was their life. Their savior.

Throughout this period, Robert Knorr Sr. was like a black cloud looming over the Knorr household. He still came to visit his four children just about whenever he felt like it, and sometimes ended up kicking the hell out of the kids if the mood suited him. His temper got even more frayed when he suffered a serious shrapnel wound in the stomach in Vietnam. He also walked with a slight limp.

Theresa Knorr’s weight was still rising rapidly and she had taken up reading the Bible at every opportunity. She would sit in the living room and recite from the Bible, often underlining quotations and sometimes even forcing the children to join in as well.

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