Whatever Mother Says... (7 page)

John Wesley, in a letter to his mother Suzanna

I beat the devil out of you all.

Suzanna Wesley’s reply

When Theresa Knorr and her tribe of children moved out of the house in Orangevale to take up residence in a rented cottage just off Auburn Boulevard, on the outskirts of north Sacramento, all the youngsters hoped that it might mark a new violence-free phase in the Knorr household.

The move itself, on October 3, 1983, initiated a reunion between Theresa and her estranged sister Rosemary, whose husband Floyd Norris helped the boys load their U-Haul truck to the brim with furniture for the move to the new place. For years the two sisters had refused to have any contact with each other. No one in the family knew the specific reasons for the feud, but then there had been so many weird incidents over the years, it could have been any of a dozen things.

The single-story property on Auburn was really an annex to the two-story apartment block it was attached to, and many of the residents on that block and in the trailers scattered nearby referred to it as the “laundry room.” But the sale of the house in Orangevale had enabled Theresa Knorr to walk away with $50,000 profit, and she was not about to fritter it away on some fancy home. At $280 a month, the Auburn house was a bargain.

Other children on the block soon got to know the Knorr kids, and some were surprised by their attitude toward their mother when her back was turned.

Billy Bob frequently described his mother as nutty and weird to neighbor William Hall. And Theresa Knorr showed herself to have a distinct lack of a sense of humor after Hall stopped to pass the time of day with her and somehow ended up getting around to the subject of Adam and Eve. When Hall joked, “That was a classic case of incest,” Theresa Knorr walked off in a huff, obviously deeply offended.

But within a few months Theresa Knorr made up with the Halls and became quite friendly with the young family. She even gave them a painting of a fountain scene for Christmas. The Halls—suspicious that there might be an underlying influence of satanism inside the Knorr household—became convinced the picture was in some way cursed, and eventually Bill’s wife made him take it off the wall because she believed it would bring them bad luck.

Suesan—the bullet still firmly lodged in her back—was still trying to keep out of her mother’s way, but life proved even more terrifying for her inside the new house. Theresa Knorr had deliberately chosen a smaller property so she could keep an even closer eye on her clan. She was especially determined to control every aspect of Suesan’s life. Since the shooting, Theresa had continued to decide when and where her daughter should eat. She was banned from joining the others at mealtimes for days on end.

Within a few days of the family moving into the house just off Auburn Boulevard, Theresa Knorr produced a pair of police regulation handcuffs bought at a pawnshop at nearby Del Paso Boulevard and ordered Suesan to put socks over her hands so the manacles would not leave any marks on her wrists. Later, she introduced canvas wrist restraints because, despite the preventive measures, definite marks could be seen on Suesan’s wrists.

Suesan complied with her mother’s orders because she knew she would be beaten either by her mother or brother Billy Bob if she disobeyed.

Theresa Knorr also regularly blindfolded Suesan with a silk scarf from her vast selection of scarves, collected since the early seventies, when they were considered fashionable.

Suesan was the child most feared by Theresa Knorr. She was still regularly muttering about her daughter being sent by the devil, and she always insisted that at least one of the other children stand guard over her. They were told that if Suesan got out of the house, they were in big trouble, and they knew what that meant.

Theresa Knorr’s other main motive for keeping Suesan prisoner was to prevent her repeating that previous trip she had made to the Child Protection Services in Sacramento.

Once, when Theresa went on a rare shopping trip with her newfound fortune from selling the house in Orangevale, Terry was left at home with Suesan and her brother Robert. Theresa had not fed Suesan for a couple of days and she was weak. Terry went into the kitchen and got her a glass of water with sugar in it so that it would help bring her blood sugar back up. Diabetes ran in the family, and Terry thought that her sister might have been diabetic. Also, there was no food in the house, so she could not give her anything more substantial.

*   *   *

Talk of black magic and Suesan’s so-called dangerous powers continued to dominate Theresa Knorr’s conversation inside the house off Auburn Boulevard. None of the children dared question their mother’s rantings. By this time, Terry recalls, Suesan was so battered and bruised by her mother and brothers that her appearance was physically altered. In the eyes of her family, that was yet more evidence of the devil within her.

After handcuffing her to her bed each night, Theresa Knorr allegedly fed her daughter Mellaril tranquilizers to keep her sedated to prevent her from getting hysterical.

At night the other children lay terrified in their beds as weird voices emanated from Suesan. There were dozens of different tones and accents; deep, throaty roars; high-pitched screams; constant mumbling in Spanish. It was more like a scene out of
The Exorcist
than family life in a suburban California town.

Theresa Knorr told the others that Suesan had to be locked up, as she was trying to kill her sister Sheila because she was a virgin and she wanted to use Sheila for a human sacrifice.

And, Theresa insisted, Suesan was still sometimes feeding her huge doses of sleeping pills in her drinks at night, and she believed she was going to try and kill her. Theresa was also convinced that her daughter’s illness had caused her own excessive weight gain, intestinal problems, stomachaches, headaches, and high blood pressure. She insisted Suesan was deliberately making her sick because she had signed her name in blood and sold her soul to the devil.

To the outside world, Theresa Knorr’s ailments sound more like the classic symptoms of hypochondria. But in that household no one ever questioned her words of wisdom.

*   *   *

Murders in the sprawling blue-collar suburbs of Sacramento are not all that rare, so the violent, tragic death of Theresa Knorr’s sister Rosemary on November 30, 1983, caused no more than a ripple of interest in the city.

Inside the Knorr household off Auburn Boulevard it was very much the same story. It was as if the brutality that ruled the lives of Theresa Knorr and her flock of children had neutralized any real emotions when it came to anything that happened outside those four walls.

The
Sacramento Bee
daily newspaper followed police inquiries into Rosemary Norris’s murder in the suburb of Roseville with only a sprinkling of interest. Reading between the lines of the newspaper’s published reports, it seemed as if her demise was considered a low-life trailer-trash-type crime. Who cared?

A piece on page 6 headlined
INVESTIGATORS FINALLY IDENTIFY WOMAN STRANGLED IN PLACER
on December 2, 1983, seemed to say it all:

AUBURN
—The Placer County Sheriff’s Department identified Thursday the strangled woman whose body was left on a dead-end road in southern Placer County as Rosemary Norris, 39, of Citrus Heights.

An autopsy Thursday found that Norris died of “manual strangulation,” Sheriff Don Nunes said.

A Rocklin man found the body while walking his dog in the Sunset-Whitney industrial area between Roseville and Rocklin, Nunes said.

Investigators found no tracks or any sign there had been a struggle at the scene. “Her body temperature (when found) would suggest that she was only recently deposited there,” Nunes said.

Officials are looking for a missing 1967 white-and-blue GMC truck which belonged to Norris.

However, despite the
Bee
’s low-key projection of the murder, homicide detectives were naturally determined to find the killer.

Rosemary Norris had last been seen by friends at her Castillo Court home at 4:30
P.M.
on the day she disappeared. Unlike her lazier, younger sister, she had worked for many years at the state’s Department of Finance headquarters in Sacramento. She was the success story in the family.

Her husband, Floyd Norris Jr., had reported Rosemary missing to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department when he returned home the following day from a business trip.

Privately, detectives suspected who might be responsible for the killing, but they needed more evidence before they could even consider issuing an arrest warrant.

*   *   *

“Do you mind if I come in to ask you a few questions about the death of your sister?”

Detective Johnnie Smith had a hunch that Theresa Knorr might know something about her sister’s killing, so he called at the house just off Auburn Boulevard, in mid-December 1983.

The detective suspected there might have been some sort of relationship between Rosemary’s husband and Theresa because he had been spending a lot of time at the house.

Smith did not notice anything wrong inside that house when he sat down in the living room to interview Theresa Knorr. He saw all the children, except Suesan. And Theresa Knorr even struck him as a caring mother.

Theresa was charming to the visiting policeman. She told Smith a sob story about how her sister considered her the black sheep of the family because she had been married so many times. Smith never once heard Suesan Knorr whimpering, and he certainly had no idea she may have been manacled to a table in the kitchen while he was in the house.

The only thing that stuck in the detective’s mind was that Theresa Knorr looked very strange at the time, with her black, greasy hair down to her waist and very overweight. But he also noted the children were coming and going in a relaxed manner.

“I have thought about this so many times since,” he said ten years later. “I thought about whether there was something I should have detected. Was there some problem? But I was there on an entirely different matter.”

Smith left the house that day none the wiser as far as his investigation into the murder of Rosemary Norris was concerned. Theresa Knorr had tactfully answered all his questions, but provided him with no fresh clues as to the identity of the killer.

*   *   *

Three months later, in mid-March 1984, two men sitting in their four-door sedan did not even merit a glance in the busy roadway that led to the apartment block attached to the house, just off Auburn Boulevard.

They watched four of the Knorr children coming and going without even questioning the fact that one daughter never seemed to emerge from the house. But then that was not the purpose of the Placer County Sheriff’s Department surveillance operation.

Their job was to observe the movements of Floyd Norris Jr. following his wife’s mysterious death. It was a last ditch effort to try and pin the murder on the husband. They were still intrigued by his continual visits to his sister-in-law’s home. Perhaps they were having an affair, as police had suspected months earlier? Or maybe they were involved in some business scheme or other? Whatever the reasons behind Norris’s trips to Auburn Boulevard, Detective Johnnie Smith wanted some answers, and since Floyd was not talking, a watching and waiting game was their only option.

For more than three days Smith and his partner observed Floyd’s movements, completely unaware of the fear and injury being inflicted by Theresa Knorr on her children inside that very house. As it happened, antique dealer and furniture restorer Norris was reupholstering some chairs for his sister-in-law, and that seems to have been the only motive behind his regular visits. Unknown to everyone at the time, Theresa Knorr had had another falling out with her sister just a few weeks before her murder, following a row concerning some money Rosemary loaned to her sister. But Theresa was and never has been a suspect in the death of Rosemary Norris.

Detective Smith later conceded that Floyd Norris had been a suspect, but detectives never uncovered any evidence that would pin it on him.

Floyd Norris moved to Reno sometime after his wife’s death, and police have completely lost track of him.

Six

Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death.

Exodus
21:15

Whoever curses his father or mother shall be put to death.

Exodus
21:17

With the arrival of spring, life inside that small house off Auburn Boulevard continued to go from bad to worse for Theresa Knorr’s daughters.

Terry remembers that by this time her mother was convinced that not only had Suesan given her a fatal illness, but her daughter was also suffering from venereal disease, which Theresa Knorr was in danger of catching if she did not take certain preventive measures.

Just after the police surveillance of the house ended, Theresa Knorr decided to ban Suesan from sharing the same toilet with the rest of the family for fear of getting VD from her. Unlike the house at Bellingham, there was only one toilet in their new home.

Suesan continued to be handcuffed to her bed each night. Theresa Knorr tended to make the manacles doubly tight on evenings when there was a full moon, according to the other children.

Gradually, the energy and health that Suesan had battled so bravely to regain following that shooting the previous year was being drained out of her body. Theresa Knorr seemed to take a perverse delight in watching her daughter slowly disintegrate in front of her very eyes. The move to Auburn Boulevard was in effect the final nail in Suesan Knorr’s coffin …

One night, Theresa Knorr made Suesan stand with her back to her in the tiny kitchen. Suesan was so sick with fever by this stage that she was virtually a walking zombie, too weak to argue with anybody about anything.

Theresa Knorr allegedly picked up a pair of scissors and aimed them at her daughter’s back as if she were about to throw a dart into a board. The scissors embedded at least an inch into their target. Suesan stood there in silence, and Theresa looked admiringly at her handiwork. A few moments later she pulled them out of her daughter’s back without a word, treated the wound with gauze padding, and then ordered her to her bedroom, where she was handcuffed and blindfolded once more. Naturally, there would be no calls to doctors. No professional medical advice. Theresa Knorr would take care of it all. And no one ever dared ask her what the sick and twisted reason behind that attack had been.