Whatever Mother Says... (8 page)

It was exactly the same story a few weeks later when she stood on Suesan’s neck as punishment for some sin or other. Youngest sister Terry watched as Suesan—convulsing on the floor—was crushed underfoot by Theresa Knorr’s enormous frame.

Susan Sullivan—who lived in the apartment block attached to the Knorr house—took pity on young Terry and regularly let her come to her apartment to watch television.

But two incidents occurred that sparked some problems. The first was when Terry visited Susan’s apartment one day, and a few hours later Susan Sullivan noticed a pair of earrings missing.

She went to speak to Theresa Knorr about the missing items, and shortly afterward Theresa came back up to Susan’s apartment and gave her another pair of earrings, which clearly implied that the others had been stolen by Terry.

But Susan Sullivan was even more concerned when the attractive teenager started flirting with a male friend of hers, who was eighty years old.

“She started to get real over-chummy with this guy. It got to the point where I started to say ‘hold on there young lady.’” explained Susan.

“I decided there and then I did not want her around anymore. I did not trust her. Maybe it was the lack of a father around the house that made her so overfriendly with my guy. But she kept brushing against him, smiling at him real seductively and flirting with him the whole time. In the end I just gave her and the rest of the family the cold shoulder.”

A few miles away across town—on June 1, 1984—Theresa Knorr’s oldest son, Howard, married live-in lover Connie, but sadly, they were not destined to live happily ever after. Their relationship was in trouble even before the wedding.

Connie believes her marriage to Howard was ruined by his mother’s influence because he attempted to exert the same type of control over her. Connie says she suffered numerous beatings at the hands of her abusive ex-husband. He even spent a year in jail for one attack in the late 1980s.

Connie filed a list of incidents with spousal abuse agencies in Sacramento, including when she alleged Howard beat his baby son, Howard Jr., before going out on a drug run. Soon after, she fled the house they shared, filed divorce proceedings, and sought full custody of their two children.

In 1990, Howard was arrested after making threats to hire someone to kill his wife. Connie says she dropped the charges after getting scared. She also claimed that Howard boasted to her about beating a boy when he was a youngster at school.

To Connie, Howard had become like a robot on behalf of his mother. Even after the Knorrs moved out of that house on Bellingham, Theresa would call Howard everytime she had a problem with the children and ask him to come over and help teach them a lesson.

*   *   *

July 5, 1984, was one of those rare evenings when there was no screaming, no abuse, no stabbings, and no shootings inside the Knorr household. The atmosphere was about as laid-back as anyone could remember. The lull before the storm …

The main cause of all this, according to Terry, was the pungent whiff of cannabis that wafted across the living room of the cottage. Sitting on a couch, like two giggling students, were Theresa Knorr and Suesan, the daughter she had abused so horrifically.

Taking an enormous drag of the fat, badly rolled joint, Theresa Knorr gazed almost lovingly at her battered daughter before exhaling a vast cloud of mustardy smoke.

Daughter Terry, just thirteen years old at the time, watched her mother and sister taking those illicit drugs, convinced it was proof that perhaps her mother still had some sense of reality left in her mind. It was ironic that mind-altering substances might actually be responsible for cleansing Theresa Knorr’s soul … albeit temporarily.

Terry was amazed that her mother and Suesan—the object of so many vicious attacks—were actually talking together like a mother and daughter should. Suesan was yet again playing her role as the ultimate human sponge, prepared to soak up vicious attacks and virtually constant imprisonment, in exchange for the very occasional evidence of a loving, caring mother.

The cannabis also influenced Suesan to make one last desperate attempt to escape her hellhole. It was anesthetizing all that pain sufficiently so that she managed to beg her mother to let her leave home. Anything. Any life outside that house seemed preferable to what she had just gone through.

“Just buy me a plane ticket, send me to Alaska, I’ll be a prostitute on the pipeline. I don’t care, I just want to leave,” a very stoned Suesan told her mother.

Equally stoned, Theresa Knorr had actually allowed the pot to mellow her rigidity. She announced she would allow her daughter to leave home—but there was one condition. Suesan would have to let her mother remove that bullet still lodged in her back.

Through the clouds of cannabis smoke it seemed a reasonable request. For the first time since being shot Suesan could see just a glint of light at the end of that awful tunnel. Having that bullet removed was going to be Suesan’s ticket to freedom.

The reason Theresa insisted on taking out the bullet before freeing her daughter, Terry told police, was because she knew it was evidence of the crime she had committed against her daughter. She was afraid she could be traced by the bullet. Some years earlier her guns had been taken by the police and ballistic tests done on them, and she believed they could be traced back to her.

One of the detectives investigating the Knorr case ten years later asked Terry what would have happened if Suesan had just got up and walked out of that house.

“Suesan would have ended up dead,” came the cold reply.

*   *   *

The surgery to remove Suesan’s bullet, as described by Terry, resembled a scene out of
Frankenstein.
Terry played the role of doctor’s assistant, but in reality her job was more like anesthetist/assistant surgeon/nurse all wrapped into one.

However, this was no operating theater. This was the kitchen of a tiny, overcrowded house, and there was not even a gurney in sight. Instead, just a slab of floor where Suesan was told to lie in preparation for her surgery. A pillow was placed under her stomach so that it would be taut enough for surgery to commence.

A couple of medical instruments lay idly nearby on the sideboard. Suesan was fed a handful of tiny green Mellaril painkillers, but it was a gallon bottle of Old Crow that would become the Knorr equivalent of anesthetic.

Before positioning her daughter for what in anyone’s terms was major surgery, Theresa Knorr thrust that vast jug of whiskey into her daughter’s lap and ordered her to drink it. Unlike the macaroni cheese all those months earlier, this was one command that Suesan believed was actually in her own interests.

Suesan rapidly swallowed back about half of the Old Crow before she was knocked out cold.

Meanwhile, Theresa peeled on a pair of rubber surgical gloves, making sure to stretch them professionally before squeezing them over those short, stubby fingers. She ordered her two sons, Billy Bob and Robert, to hold their sister down. Then she grabbed a scalpel and a pair of pincers, and got to work. She had stolen everything from her earlier jobs in convalescent hospitals.

Two hours later Theresa finally succeeded in digging the bullet out of her daughter’s back. Suesan had lost enormous quantities of blood, but that did not seem to concern her mother. Her main objective was to remove the evidence that could have resulted in her being prosecuted for attempted murder.

From the moment she extracted that slug, she grasped onto it, not even daring to set it down for a second, in case it disappeared. She did not trust any of her children—she suspected they would turn her in if given half a chance.

Suesan was still knocked out cold. Her face was twisted to the side, pressed hard on the cold kitchen floor. Her back arched at a grotesque angle. Somehow she was still breathing.

Theresa said nothing. Her assistant, Terry, was so dumbfounded that she could not speak …

*   *   *

Luckily for Suesan, she did not recover consciousness until the next day. Although some members of the family believe that she would have been better off if she had never woken up.

When Suesan did awake, she was still severely groggy and her body remained facedown on the floor, growing weaker and more feverish with each passing hour. Theresa Knorr ordered the other children to simply step around or over Suesan whenever they were in the kitchen.

She would not even allow the rest of the family to help Suesan to the bathroom. Theresa Knorr simply ordered Billy Bob and Robert to place diapers beneath Suesan’s pelvis and change them when the smell of urine and feces got too overpowering in the summer heat.

Theresa fed her daughter constant antibiotics to keep infection from setting in, and she gave her ibuprofen and Motrin for the inflammation.

But Suesan was deteriorating fast. A week after the operation, she started hallucinating and began calling her brother William, “Grandpa.”

“I can see my life passing before my eyes,” Suesan told her baby sister Terry.

Then lockjaw set in …

“She was dying. I just know,” says Terry today. “It was like a movie, you know…”

The other sister, Sheila, was so concerned she actually plucked up the courage to confront her mother: “Suesan’s dying. We gotta do something.”

“What d’you want me to do about it? I’ve tried to help her. There’s nothing more I can do,” came the terse reply from the only parent in that household.

Theresa Knorr allegedly conceded that her daughter did need proper medical attention, but she strictly forbade any attempt to call in a doctor, for fear it would expose her. When she wanted to see if Suesan was still alive, she kicked her and listened for a groan.

“She needs a doctor, she needs to go to a hospital, but if I take her to a hospital, she’s been beaten so badly that I’m gonna go to jail. We can’t do that.”

The children were told to sit with their sister and keep an eye on her all night long.

Seven

When the child recovers from the attack, he feels enormously confused, in fact, split—innocent and culpable at the same time—and the confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken. To survive this ordeal, the child has to register the bad … as good.

Albert Shengold, child care expert

On the evening of July 12, 1984, police would later charge, Theresa Knorr walked into the children’s bedroom, sat down on one of the bunk beds, and announced to her sons and Sheila that she had come up with a solution on what to do with Suesan, who was still sprawled out on the kitchen floor. Her wound had become so badly infected that the skin had turned pink, then bright red all around the gaping sore.

Terry—keeping guard over Suesan in the kitchen—could not avoid staring at her sister’s eyes. Her adolescent curiosity was getting the better of her. Suesan’s once pretty, sparkling blue eyes had transformed to a pale, yellowing greenish color in a matter of days.

Theresa Knorr later told one family member that her daughter’s change of eye color had been caused by the devil. She told her daughter-in-law Connie that Suesan was definitely a witch. She insisted that the only way to kill a witch was to burn them.

As Terry stared at her sister, her eyes panned down and noticed a rib almost poking through Suesan’s stomach and hundreds of black marks on her back.

With just an undersized diaper around her waist, Suesan Knorr was actually experiencing less dignity in life than death.

The following day, Theresa Knorr began her preparations for the scheme she had been planning with Sheila and the boys. First she went and bought a red, one-gallon gas can. Then she filled her son’s yellow 1978 Mercury Cougar—known around the Knorr household as the pimp mobile—with gas.

Terry watched her mother pack the gas can in the trunk of the Mercury, together with a large box of six-inch-long Blue Diamond wooden matches. She also saw Theresa put all of Suesan’s belongings into a plastic Glad garbage bag and load that into the car as well; clothes, jewelry, purses, belts, shoes.

The final proof of what was about to happen came when Terry witnessed her mother performing an extraordinary ritual in the yard behind the house.

“I watched her take olive oil. It was her little God ritual thing. She took olive oil, poured it over my sister’s pictures. She pulled every picture she had of my sister, and she burnt them,” Terry later explained.

Back inside the house, Suesan was being dressed up by her brothers and sister Sheila. They put her clothes on her like a toddler being prepared for school. First they struggled to get her into a dark-colored corduroy jumpsuit with a hood. Then followed white sneakers and a ski-jacket-style coat.

It was past midnight on July 15 when Theresa Knorr, her two sons, and her daughter Sheila were finally ready to depart. Youngest daughter Terry pleaded desperately with her mother to be allowed to join them on their trip. Theresa had already admitted she was going to get rid of Suesan. The boys told her they were going to set her alight someplace in the mountains.

Terry feared being left alone in the house. But Theresa rejected her pleas. She did not want her youngest daughter to see the sacrifice of her sister.

“Loose lips sink ships,” she told Terry.

In the background, groaning on the kitchen floor, was helpless Suesan, a constant stream of incoherent babbling coming from between her lips. Everything was slurred. She was mumbling.

Just before they took her out, Terry leaned down and whispered in her sister’s ear:
“I love you.”

In another room, Theresa Knorr was getting the car keys and her purse as if she was rushing out to get to the local store before it closed.

Robert and William crouched down on either side of Suesan and pulled her up, holding her arms. Suesan had drop foot and they had to drag her across the floor, her feet hanging limply behind her. She could not walk. She wasn’t even attempting to.

Terry was then ordered to hold the front seat of the two-door car forward while they stuck Suesan in the backseat. Her head slumped onto Sheila’s lap and then her knees were pulled over Robert’s lap. It was one hell of a squash by all accounts, as the Cougar was not a big car. Up front Billy Bob and his mother, who drove, sank into the bucket seats.