From the day he enlisted in December of 1964, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, Knorr began building his self-confidence. Following boot camp, he flew off to the naval air station at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii for nine months of jungle warfare training with the 1st Marine Brigade.
“He was kind of a dreamer,” recalled Duke McIntyre, one of Knorr’s closest friends during his time in the marines. “No offense to Bob, but in a way, he didn’t have his act together.”
Knorr was still a minor and very much a youngster to the other enlistees, who, like Duke McIntyre, were all at least two or three years older. Nevertheless, he was a marine, determined to keep up with the others. Despite the difference in their ages, he and McIntyre hit it off right away. They both loved fast cars and Southern Comfort. Just like his peers, Bob carried out orders, bitched about discipline, and drank and partied when his platoon hit town on liberty. What doubts he had about himself as just another Sacramento high-school dropout began slowly slipping away.
But even after a year in the corps he was easy prey for a willing woman when he flew home for Christmas leave in 1965. Drinking and smoking and partying aside, one aspect of Bob Knorr’s youth was still very much intact. When he got home to Sacramento and his oldest brother offered to set him up on a date with Theresa Sanders, Bob Knorr was still a virgin.
Bob’s brother was friends with Larry Hafner, who’d grown up next door to Theresa in Rio Linda. Hafner’s wife, Carol, knew Theresa was taking care of Thornsberry at the time, but she thought the relationship was strictly business. Theresa took care of Lee and got paid for it. There were rumors that this was not the case, but Carol Hafner refused to see it that way. Pairing up with a handicapped man was no life for a lovely young woman who had had some tough breaks of her own, reasoned Carol. She took it upon herself to play Dolly Levi.
“She needed someone to take care of her,” said Carol. “She’d had a very hard life, I know that.”
Carol’s own brother had dated Theresa several times, but he wasn’t “in her league,” Carol said. Robert Knorr, on the other hand, fit Carol’s matchmaking criteria to a tee: a tall, handsome young marine with a crooked grin and piercing pale blue eyes.
To say that Bob Knorr and Theresa Sanders kissed on the first date is an understatement, according to Knorr. “She kissed me on the first date. Boy did she ever!” he recalled. “And she kept on kissing me, everywhere she wanted to kiss me!”
For the remaining two weeks of his Christmas leave, Knorr was in heaven. What is more, he was no longer a virgin. “She was my first,” he said. “I was a big young dumb farm boy, she threw the shit on me, and I liked it. What can I say? I’m not gonna tell you no stories. That’s exactly the way it was.”
Together, they hit the bars in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights almost every night. And, again, almost every night Knorr got lucky.
Knorr knew nothing about Theresa beyond what she wanted him to know. Bob never heard that she had two children, that she’d been acquitted of murdering her husband, that she was living with and engaged to a quadriplegic, but even if he had, it probably would have made little difference.
“My mother could see right through her,” Knorr said. “My parents told me, even before I went to Vietnam: she’s no good for you.
“I’d say, ‘Oh, I wanna marry her!’ And my dad would say, ‘You wait, son. Wait till you get back.’ I was ready to disown my folks ’cause I was underage and couldn’t marry her without their approval.”
Following Christmas leave, Knorr returned to Kealakekua Bay to finish up his guerrilla training before being shipped off to Vietnam. But he hadn’t been back in Hawaii three weeks before he heard from Theresa.
“She calls me and tells me she’s coming over,” said Knorr. “She borrowed some money from friends and told me she was flying over.”
Sure enough, Theresa was on the next plane to Hawaii. For the next three weeks she moved in with friends of Knorr’s marine pals who lived in an apartment just off the base. By now, Knorr knew Theresa had two children and that they were staying with friends while she came to see him.
But Knorr didn’t care. His hormones were howling and any discretion he might have possessed was dulled by alcohol or orgasm. Every chance he got, Bob made a beeline to the apartment where Theresa was staying. By the time his unit left for Vietnam in February of 1966, Theresa let him know that she was carrying his child.
After Knorr shipped out, Theresa stayed on in Hawaii awhile longer. She was in no hurry to get home where all she had waiting for her were two babies, no job, and no car. Besides moving out of the Madison Avenue house they once shared, Thornsberry had taken back his Pontiac.
Returning to Thornsberry was out of the question, even though she probably could have patched things up. Despite all the humiliation, he would have taken her back. But Theresa was finished with him. If he didn’t believe it when she flew off to Hawaii to be with Knorr, Lee Thornsberry believed it when he got his final phone bill from the house on Madison Avenue. There were several hours’ worth of person-to-person charges between Citrus Heights and Hawaii. The bill was for more than five hundred dollars.
IV
Bob Knorr was in love.
His future with the woman of his lustiest, loftiest dreams was secure. He had everything to live for. For that reason alone, he radiated self-confidence when he shipped out for Vietnam in the winter of 1966. No chance he was coming back a corpse.
He had second thoughts almost from the moment he arrived.
“I got there in February and got shot in March,” he remembered. “The first time I was machine-gunned. I was hit from quite a ways away and it felt like bee stings in my shoulder. It hurt, it burned, it stung. The thing is, you don’t really hear the ones that hit you.”
The bullets just broke the skin. The flesh wounds were enough for several days at a field hospital, but not worth a trip to a bigger military hospital on the coast. Within a few days Knorr was back on patrol.
Less than a month later he was hit again.
“The second time I was sniper shot in the fatty part of my side,” said Knorr.
Again, the bullet barely penetrated the skin, but this time he spent a while longer recuperating. He was young and able-bodied, though, and after a week or two he was again sent back with his unit.
Despite his months of training in tropical Hawaii, Knorr found adjustment to Vietnam trying. On its surface, the country was primeval green and disarmingly peaceful. But those marines who let the picturesque rice paddies lull them into nonchalance did so at great, and often fatal, peril. The Mekong delta mesmerized, but death was ever-present in the form of snipers, booby traps, and bloody ambushes. Throw in the incessant paranoia of never knowing who was an innocent civilian and who was a Viet Cong awaiting just the right moment to kill, and the daily routine became unbearable psychological torture.
Far from fearing the prospect of more bullets, however, Bob talked himself into believing he possessed a kind of invulnerability. He’d cheated death twice and had only scratches and Purple Hearts to show for it. Besides, he had a drop-dead blonde waiting for him back home who pined for him as much as he did for her. Theresa wrote regularly, repeating that Knorr had to come back to see his first child born.
Bob believed Theresa’s letters. It was his destiny to return home safe and soon. He had a loving woman carrying his unborn son or daughter, and he was fated to get back to marry her, to give their child a name. Following his second discharge from the hospital, Bob’s self-confidence soared once again.
He didn’t twist his newfound faith into bravado. Bob settled into a more cautious daily routine and tried to stay alert during patrol. But with Theresa constantly on his mind, he sometimes forgot his vow of vigilance in the rice paddies and lapsed into automatic pilot, ignoring the worst of Vietnam while daydreaming about his girl, the end of his tour of duty … and his return to the States.
Each night he marked off the calendar, counting the days until he could get back.
Over the next two months his platoon roamed a section just south of the demilitarized zone in the Mekong delta, some forty miles outside of Saigon, keeping the peace and trying to flush out an elusive enemy nobody seemed to be able to recognize.
The monsoon season began around May. The heat was overpowering and everything smelled of swamp water. What was more, the villagers that Knorr and his fellow marines met during their patrols seemed sullen and steered clear of the Americans. They weren’t especially hostile, but they never seemed very friendly either.
As a low-level grunt, Knorr had no way of knowing what U.S. policymakers had in store for the men on the frontlines, but since his Christmas leave it had become more and more apparent that troop strength in South Vietnam had nearly doubled. New marines and army infantrymen poured in every day.
Back home, Washington painted the military buildup as a humanitarian effort welcomed by the grateful South Vietnamese. It was 1966 and the organized campus protests against the war had only begun to blossom in most parts of the United States. Where Bob and Theresa came from, near Sacramento, demonstrations were still muted. Besides, the buildup had created thousands of defense jobs at the military bases that surrounded Sacramento. If anything, most of the folks back home saw the war as a boost to the local economy.
But to the Vietnamese along the DMZ, it was a foreign invasion. Knorr discovered the depth of their resentment one day late in June, when the monsoon season was at its height and the hot wet winds from the Indian Ocean made patrolling the delta especially miserable, particularly for a marine decked out in full fighting gear.
“We were passing over a bridge and the only thing to hold on to was a steel rail, so we were holding on like we were walking on a tightrope,” Bob recalled.
His platoon was halfway across when the bridge exploded. Instantly, Bob Knorr no longer thought himself invincible.
“One minute I’m walking. Next minute I’m dangling off those rails, almost ready to go down into the river,” he recalled. “There was five of us hit with that one mine. The guy behind me got both his legs and half his butt blown off. Another got his privates blown off. Another guy got his ear completely blown off, just like they’d took a knife and severed it.
“And I got shrapnel in my arms and legs and back. Just blew me completely out of my combat boots. The soles were gone and my feet were just dangling through the tops.”
This time Knorr wasn’t patched up at a field hospital and sent back on patrol. Instead, he and the other casualties were flown to Okinawa for emergency surgery and skin grafts, then were shipped back to the Oakland, California, Naval Hospital via Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Their war experiences were over.
“Off and on I was in the hospital almost nine months,” said Knorr.
“I’d be released, then something else would go wrong with a wound and I’d have to go back. I’ve got thirty-seven holes in my body from shrapnel and bullets. And it hurt like hell—nothing like you see on TV, that’s for damn sure. I still got metal in me and permanent nerve damage in both my hands and arms.”
The first call he made when he arrived in Oakland was to his brother, who came to the hospital and took him home to visit his mother and father. In his euphoria at being back, he completely forgot about calling Theresa. But he already knew her well enough to know there would be hell to pay for that mistake. Even before they got married, he appreciated the wisdom of lying to his fiancée.
“She was the type of woman who didn’t get pissed. She got enraged,” Bob said. “I went back to the hospital a few days later, and then I called her. And I told her I’d just gotten in.”
Theresa was at his bedside in a flash, fussing over him, kissing him, possessing him. By now, her pregnancy was showing and she wanted to get married right away. So did Bob, only now there was nothing to stop him. He didn’t need his parents’ approval. He was over eighteen, head over heels in love, and as deaf and blind as passion can make a man.
“My folks told me, ‘You’re making the worst mistake of your life. Don’t marry this one.’ But I bitched and bitched,” he remembered.
Bob’s father was especially wary. He warned his son that Theresa acted like a woman with something to hide, but Bob was adamant. Even though he didn’t need their permission, he still wanted his parents’ approval. So, on the second weekend of July, he convinced his mother and father to drive him and Theresa to Nevada and act as witnesses at their wedding at the courthouse in Carson City. Reluctantly, the Knorrs agreed.
On Saturday, July 9, 1966, Mrs. Clifford Sanders became Mrs. Robert Knorr.
“She was six or seven months pregnant when we stood up in front of the judge,” said Bob. “He even made the comment, ‘Not a minute too soon, huh, kids?’”
There was no honeymoon. By Sunday, Bob was back at Oakland Naval Hospital, having the dressings changed on his wounds, and Theresa was out driving their ’61 Pontiac around north Sacramento, looking for a place to set up temporary housekeeping.
“From the time we got married, it was pure hell,” said Knorr. “Before that it wasn’t bad. But from that point on, it was like, once I said ‘I do,’ she said ‘You will.’”
Theresa found a place built over a garage in a low-income housing project at the edge of north Sacramento. One of her first orders of business was moving James Cross out of a convalescent home where she had put him while she tracked down a new husband. From the day Bob and Theresa were married, James Cross lived with them. Theresa added his monthly retirement check to those she was already collecting from the Social Security Administration on behalf of Howard and Sheila. Under federal law, both children were to receive monthly allotments until their eighteenth birthdays. Bob remembers her collecting over four hundred dollars a month in allotments for Howard and Sheila during the late 1960s. With cost-of-living increases, that amount climbed over the years.
In addition to this income, Theresa took charge of Bob’s paychecks.
“She had all our money,” said Bob. “She had control. But I’d been that way all my life. I just didn’t want to be bothered with paychecks and stuff. I’d just say, ‘Here’s the money. You take care of it.’”
While she awaited her third and Bob’s first child, Theresa looked around for a new baby-sitter for her other two children. At first, she left them with Bob’s mother. But Mrs. Knorr had fallen ill with the cancer that would eventually kill her, and Theresa had to turn to Knorr’s other relatives for assistance.
Bob’s aunt and uncle, Evie and Pat Works, told the young couple that they would be happy to help them get on their feet. Evie even offered to do for Theresa what Bea and Craig Howard had done: act as surrogate parents for her toddlers until she and Bob got settled.
Evie Works, who had sons and daughters of her own, had firm rules for raising children. From the very first, she sensed something very wrong in the way Theresa behaved toward her own children. To begin with, Bob’s young wife clearly played favorites. She might yell at Howard, but it was Sheila who really caught hell. Every time Sheila moved or made a sound, Theresa fixed her with an icy glance. The little girl didn’t dare cry.
“We had seen her sit Sheila down in front of a blank TV as punishment,” said Evie. “All the little girl would have to do was try and eat her breakfast, and if she’d pick up a glass of milk and spill it, Theresa would jerk her up by one arm, take her from the kitchen, spank her, and sit her in front of a blank TV. She’d order her to just sit there and watch it. Now, mind you, Sheila couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old!”
Actually, the petite, dark-haired child seemed far younger when Evie first got her. It was as if both her growth and behavior had been stunted. While Sheila was slow and fearful, Howard was bright and unafraid. He was Theresa’s “pet,” according to Mrs. Works. Theresa made it plain to both Evie and Pat that she cared a great deal about her son. Even though she could be just as quick to lash out at Howard as she did at Sheila, there was a real difference in the degree of severity with which she punis
hed her daughter.
“Howard could get away with almost anything, but Theresa was downright cruel to Sheila,” said Evie.
She was careful about letting strangers get a glimpse of that cruelty, too. The children might get the tar whipped out of them behind closed doors, but out in public she insisted on maintaining the illusion of a perfect family.
Appearances were extremely important to Theresa. Evie recalls her spending as much as thirty-five dollars a week at the beauty shop just to maintain her nails, complexion, and champagne-blond coiffure—all at a time when Bob barely earned that much in salary. Theresa was equally exacting about the appearance of her house. It had to be immaculate and everything had to be in its place. Her obsessive attention to perfection extended to her children.
“Anything cute the kids did, she could not see as cute,” said Evie. “My sister had given Sheila a bowl of peaches once and Bob’s shoes was right there, and I guess she spilled the whole bowl of peaches in his shoes. Everybody else in that place laughed, but it was not funny to Theresa. It was embarrassing to her. And probably Sheila got her butt beat again.”
Mrs. Works remembered one disturbing incident before she and her husband had taken Sheila full-time. She drove over to pick the child up at Theresa’s apartment and found her head completely shaved.
“The minute I walked in the room, the little girl ran over to me, and there were little cuts all over the top of her head,” she recalled. “And I asked, ‘Theresa, what’s the matter with her head? Is she digging at it?’ And she said, ‘No, I sat her on the chair and shaved her head. And every time I pulled that razor, I wanted to go down into her brain with it, but I just didn’t have the guts to.’”
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