Even when the last of his children by Theresa was born, Bob refused to go to the hospital. Being with Georgia had made him stronger, but he remained afraid of falling under Theresa’s control once more. Besides, he had convinced himself that the infant had been conceived by someone else during one of Theresa’s affairs. She was not his daughter, he said.
Theresa Marie Knorr, the last of Theresa Jimmie Francine Cross Sanders Knorr’s six children, was born on August 5, 1970, at 10:25 P.M. at Sutter Memorial Hospital in south Sacramento.
Theresa Marie was not only her mother’s namesake. Little Terry looked more like her mother than either of her two sisters. Whereas Suesan was slender and fair like her father, and Sheila had the sharp features and swarthy complexion of Clifford Sanders, Terry seemed both delicate and resilient at the same time. From the beginning, she was just as strong-willed as her mother, too. Her hair was light, and her eyes were a ghostly electric blue—so blue, in fact, that they were a perfect match for Bob Knorr’s own blue eyes. For years, Bob continued to question her paternity. But to any objective outsider, there was no question.
The same day Terry was born, Bob asked Georgia to marry him. For the next several months he resolved to try to see his children. He suffered rebuff after rebuff whenever he made an appointment to pick them up. They weren’t ready. They were sick. Theresa couldn’t let one or two of them go without all of them going. And she wouldn’t let them go at all if that Mexican woman was with him.
Georgia hardened herself to Theresa’s vicious verbal attacks and accompanied Bob. Theresa let them in for brief visits, but only under her strict conditions.
“I wanted to show her that I accepted all six kids and that I wanted to get to know her and the kids better,” said Georgia.
What she saw was the same rigidity and spiteful abuse that Bob’s aunt and uncle had witnessed years earlier.
“She’d be brushing Susie’s hair, and Susie would be on her knees watching TV,” said Georgia. “And if she moved, her mother would hit her on the side of the head with the brush. She’d yell, ‘I told you not to move!’ so that any of the gentleness of brushing her hair was gone.”
Suesan learned about sex early. Her mother made certain all of her children knew what the male penis and female vagina were for. Georgia overheard Theresa lecturing Bob once about Suesan’s precocious sexuality: how, at the age of four, she provocatively took her clothes off in front of her brothers.
“She’s just a little girl,” said Bob. “All little kids do things like that.”
Theresa disagreed. It didn’t seem to matter that Theresa herself taught promiscuity by example. Suesan’s behavior was sick, and she told her ex-husband that she intended to teach the child to hate men. Georgia wasn’t sure why Theresa hated men so much, but she was certain that her anger against all men—not just Bob—went back a lot further than their marriage. She tried to tell Bob as much when he needed consolation for his failed marriage. Whatever anger Theresa harbored came from someplace deep inside that had little to do with the four years she spent as Bob Knorr’s wife.
Despite Theresa’s continued harassment, Bob married Georgia four months after Terry’s birth. On December 13, 1970, they made the obligatory matrimonial trek to Reno and moved in with Georgia’s parents until they could earn enough between them to get a place of their own.
Georgia’s first priority was convincing her new husband that not all women were like Theresa. “When we were first married, there was no trust,” she said. “If I hugged a friend, he’d get jealous. I said, ‘Look, I’m not your ex-wife! These are just good friends.’
“I had to exercise a lot of patience to convince him that I was a different person. For a long time after we were first married, he would be home right after work—not out of love so much as out of fear of losing me.”
Bob persisted in trying to see his children. One day Theresa called and told him to come pick up his youngest son. “She said she had no control over little Robert,” Georgia remembered.
Theresa told them Robert’s pediatrician had pronounced him “mentally slow.” For that reason, she said, she kept him confined to a playpen. Though he was already over two years old, Robert could neither walk nor talk. He had most of his teeth, but gagged on anything but baby food. “He couldn’t eat regular food. He almost choked on it. Even when I strained spaghetti for him, he couldn’t eat it,” said Georgia.
According to Theresa, Robert wouldn’t sleep and couldn’t be disciplined.
“We said we would take him for two weeks,” said Georgia. “Theresa had brought him over in his playpen, but he hated that playpen. He’d just start rocking in it and bang his head on the floor, lean against the side, beating his head against it. I’d try to put him to bed in the playpen at night and he would wail. I had to rock him to sleep.”
After just a few days the incorrigible baby became a model member of the household.
“While Bob and I were at work, my mom would work with little Robert. She would try to walk him around, rub his legs. His muscles weren’t used to walking, so we had to rub his legs down. We’d do the same when we got home from work: walk him around the house at night with his shoes on.
“We bought him junior baby food, and my mom would lash him onto a chair with a dish towel and sit him up straight so that he could learn to eat. My mom got him to chew on crackers. He didn’t know what suckers or candy were.”
At the end of two weeks Bob and Georgia asked Theresa if they could keep Robert.
“Absolutely not. She wanted him home right away,” said Georgia.
Bob was proud of the progress his son had made and wanted to show him off to his mother. He’d stopped rocking in his playpen and banging his head. He wasn’t talking yet, but had begun to experiment with sounds to show when he wanted something. He was walking and eating solid food.
Georgia sat silently in the front room as Bob tried to demonstrate Robert’s progress. He gripped the toddler’s hands and stood him up in front of his mother, urging him to take his first steps for her.
“It was the most awful thing,” said Georgia. “This two-year-old boy looked straight at his mom, picked up his little feet, and refused to put them down on the floor. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled away.”
Throughout this time Theresa didn’t let child rearing and pitched battles with her ex-husband and his new wife interfere with her social life. When she wasn’t out at the bars, Theresa and her next-door neighbor, Cherise Kelly, often sat up until all hours drinking and schmoozing about their favorite mutual interest: the occult. As often as possible, however, Theresa persuaded Cherise to assist James Cross and Howard in watching the other children while she went out trolling for a new husband.
Once, she told Bob, she had been to a bar where she had been drugged and raped outside in the parking lot by four or five different men. She even accused Bob of hiring the rapists.
“I never did believe she was raped,” said Bob. “She’d say things to make herself look big. She had to be the center of everything.”
For a short time she got a job tending bar at a topless lounge called Little Joe Ortega’s, according to Bob. She moved from there to other bars, pouring drinks or waiting tables. It was during one of these stints at a blue-collar bar on Sacramento’s industrial west side that Bob believes Theresa met Ron Pulliam, a twenty-eight-year-old railroad worker. Pulliam had been married before and had been raised near booze because his mother owned a bar, but he still met with Bob’s approval the very first time he met him.
“I always thought he was a pretty straightaway guy,” said Knorr.
Three months after Bob married Georgia, Theresa married Ron Pulliam.
On March 27, 1971, just two weeks after Theresa’s twenty-fifth birthday, they drove to Reno and exchanged vows at the twenty-four-hour-a-day Starlite Wedding Chapel, located directly across the street from the Washoe County Courthouse, where a divorce can be had for as little time and trouble as a wedding license.
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From the beginning, Ron Pulliam took an active interest in Theresa’s children. The gruff, brooding railway worker she’d met in a bar turned out to be an ideal father figure. He treated the three boys and three girls, ranging in age from six months to eight years, as if they were his own. They went for family rides in the car. He bought them toys and candy and played catch with the boys. The usual problems a stepparent has with his spouse’s children appeared to be minimal.
According to Georgia Knorr, Pulliam even built a special outdoor playpen for Robert so that the toddler could get some fresh air and exercise. Pulliam had taken up where Bob and Georgia left off and worked with Robert daily, teaching him to walk and talk. In Ron Pulliam, Theresa had found what she did not have in either of her first two husbands: a mature, steady man with a good job and a solid future. He only earned $718.48 a month, but it was a regular income and he invested almost all of it in his new family. Finally, it seemed, Theresa had found someone who could care for both her and her children.
“One of my first childhood recollections was of Ronald K. Pulliam,” recalled Terry Marie Knorr. “I thought of him as my dad. He was the only man I ever called Dad when I was a little kid. In fact, he was the only man I ever remember being there with me at all when I was little, besides my brother Howard.”
More than twenty years later Terry Knorr still remembers the tall, muscular railroad man with the mustache and the strong arms and shoulders as the only man in her mother’s life whom Terry could ever love or respect. “He used to throw me around,” she remembered. “I was his kid, and he treated me like his kid. He’d say, ‘How’s Daddy’s little girl?’ and he’d pick me up and throw me up in the air when he’d get home from work. I remember going places with him in his big shiny red convertible.”
Terry’s older brother Bill remembers Pulliam taking the family on camping trips to the Sierra foothills and to the beach. With Pulliam, it looked like Terry’s mother had a real shot at settling down. He recognized right away that his new family needed a permanent home and acceded to Theresa’s demands that they go looking for a house to buy soon after they were married.
It was Pulliam, Georgia is convinced, who finally curbed Theresa’s desire for vengeance against her ex-husband and pushed her into granting Bob and his new wife more time with the children, including a full-fledged weekend visit. In the spring of 1971, Bob got his first real unsupervised time with his children since the divorce.
“When we first moved out of my folks’ house and into our own home, we got to take Howard, Sheila, Susie, and William for a weekend visit,” said Georgia. “We were so broke that we had to borrow thirty-two dollars so that we could take them to see Pinocchio and drive out to Bob’s dad’s place in Placerville.
“I got to know Howard and Susie a little, but on the way home the first time I turned around in the car and said hello to all of the kids, William crossed his arms and stuck out his jaw and said, ‘My mom says I don’t have to talk to you and I don’t have to be nice to you.’
“Bob turned around from the wheel and pointed at me and said to William, ‘You talk to her or I’ll bust your little bottom. And if your mother doesn’t like it, I’ll bust her bottom, too.’ It broke the silence, and we chattered all the rest of the way to our house.”
A single weekend wasn’t long enough to do any kind of in-depth personality analysis, but Georgia did see marked differences in the four older children. William was stubborn but sensitive, putting on a comical tough-guy facade that melted as the day progressed and he grew tired of poking out his lower lip. Suesan was a typical little girl, full of giggles and curiosity. Once she felt secure, she spouted nonstop questions and requests.
“Howard was Mommy’s boy,” said Georgia. When the visits were over, Howard was the one who went straight to Theresa with a full report on everything that his brothers and sisters had done while out from under the eagle eye of their mother.
“Sheila seemed smart, but mysteriously silent,” said Georgia. “She was a normal enough little girl, but she barely spoke.”
Once they got home, things seemed to settle down.
“I pampered the girls, and Bob would make the boys feel comfortable,” said Georgia. “I caught the girls once, flouncing a little in front of the mirror with ribbons in their hair and I teased them about it.”
When it was time for bed, Bob and Georgia put the children down with blankets and pillows in the front room and told them they were “camping out.” Bob collected his good-night kisses from each child and was about to sternly instruct them to do the same for Georgia when she took him aside and whispered that she thought that forcing herself on them so quickly might not be such a good idea. To her surprise, all four of them voluntarily lined up to hug and kiss their new stepmother good night anyway.
“Next morning, Howard told me the breakfast was good, and in fact, they all acted like it was the kind of breakfast they’d never had before,” said Georgia.
After a short trip to Bob’s father’s home in Placerville, the weekend was over and Bob told the children it was time for them to return home.
“There was a dead silence,” said Georgia. “It was like they were scared to go home.”
As they pulled up at the Pulliams’ place Ron had to come out and coax the kids out of the car. Little Robert was on the front porch, and when he saw Bob get out of the car, he ran from the house wearing his new shoes, shouting “Daddy! Daddy!” according to Georgia. Inside, Terry watched from her playpen as her brothers and sisters shuffled through the front door and sat silently on the couch. As each of them kissed and hugged their stepmother good-bye, Georgia caught a glimpse of Theresa standing in a doorway, her arms crossed and a scowl as deep as Death Valley drawn across her face.
The next day, Theresa called Bob at work. “‘I don’t want my kids kissing that bitch,’ she told him,” Georgia remembered. “‘I don’t want you taking them to your scummy father’s house either.’”
There were a few more attempts to visit with the children, but they dwindled quickly.
“After that weekend visit, the kids weren’t the same,” said Georgia. “She tormented us with them. Theresa asked questions when they came back from visits. She wanted to know what we did. I think the kids came home happy, she noticed that, and she was jealous.”
From Georgia’s point of view, the children were still not getting what they needed, even with Pulliam acting as a father. When Theresa packed for the children’s visits, their clothes were “worse than welfare clothes.” “I don’t know if she was trying to show Bob that he wasn’t supporting them enough or what. At the time he was paying her seventy-five dollars a month,” she said.
It was only half the support he had been ordered to pay by the court, but it was all that he said he could afford. After leaving Theresa, Bob had qualified for a Cal Vet education loan and enrolled in a yearlong retraining program at the Sacramento Skill Center, where he learned how to rebuild engines and transmissions. In the meantime he and Georgia continued working in order to earn enough to buy a place of their own.
The last straw for Georgia came when Theresa sent bill collectors to Georgia’s employer. It seemed that Bob still hadn’t paid for his half of Theresa’s wedding rings, purchased several years earlier. “She wanted me to pay Bob’s half of the bill for her rings!” said Georgia, who remained aghast at the first Mrs. Knorr’s unmitigated gall for years afterward.
In addition, Theresa continued to use the children to torment Bob. She taught them to fear their father, told them that he had developed a drug habit, and that he was prone to violence … stories that stayed with the children, even after they grew to adults and met with the man they had known only as an ogre who had abandoned them.
“He had a drug problem,” said William, recalling his earliest memories of his father. “And when he would get loaded up, he was abusive.…
“When I was right around five years old I think was the last time I recall him being anywhere near around. H
e abused Howard quite a bit. He was real resentful of the fact that my mom had kids that weren’t his. He threw me across the bed, into a dresser at one point when I was just a couple years old. Frankly, I don’t remember it. Howard told me about it.”
Terry Knorr did not remember physical abuse, but she did remember cruel indifference.
“I never had a lot of respect for my father ’cause I watched my father torment my mother for years,” she said. “I think he just totally destroyed her when he left her with six kids.”
Bob recalls things differently. He admits to having had a drug problem, and he was occasionally stern when his children misbehaved, but he was never abusive. The abuse stories sprang from Theresa’s fertile imagination and became a part of the family lore, drilled into her children’s memories like a cruel Rosary.
Though she had lost Bob to another woman, Theresa still held the children out as lures to get her ex-husband to do as she wanted: if he didn’t pay his child support, pay for her wedding rings, get rid of Georgia, and so on, he wouldn’t get to see or even speak with his children. After months of such harassment Bob finally decided to give up.
“He said he had to make a choice so that we wouldn’t be hounded. So he didn’t bother to call them anymore,” said Georgia, fighting back tears. “She had the control. We couldn’t afford to go to court and fight. We couldn’t afford a lawyer. There was nothing we could do.
“We called Pulliam and told him we weren’t going to try to see the kids anymore because it was tearing us apart.”
In the meantime Theresa stepped up the pressure on her new husband to buy a house. On August 26, 1971, Ron and Theresa bought a five-room bungalow at 3825 William Way, near Del Paso Country Club in the suburbs east of Sacramento. They paid $18,000 and their monthly mortgage payments were $172. By now, Theresa had her father in a rest home, so it was just she, Pulliam, and the children living together.
All seemed well for a time. Bob and Georgia started their own family with the birth of a daughter, Dodie, in August of 1972. Bob’s bitterness about losing his family softened when he was able to start another. He let his child-support payments slide. But Theresa’s harassment and hang-up calls faded and any guilty conscience he had about his four children, living under her roof and her control, faded along with them.
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