Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  Though he made no deals with the prosecution, Tapp did get one break for confessing. Instead of the death penalty, the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. In San Quentin, Tapp found religion and became Robert Quall’s pen pal. He seemed to regard the man who had put him away for life as a kind of older brother or, at the very least, a respected friend.

  “Tapp wrote me every week,” said Quall, who went on to become a municipal-court judge. “He was in the cell next to Charles Manson. He sent me an autographed picture of himself once, along with a poem by Keats that had been signed by Charlie Manson himself. He made purses for my daughters and one for my wife, and he made a mirror for me that said BEHOLD, THE GREATEST JUDGE IN THE WORLD.

  “He was really a very charming fellow. He just happened to be a cold-blooded murderer.”

  VII

  A large eucalyptus tree grows on the front lawn of the white stucco house where Theresa and her children lived at the corner of Sutton Place and Bellingham Way. There are dark green shutters and trim all the way around, and a chain-link fence rims the backyard so children can safely play. Schools are all within walking distance, and Pecan Park, with its playground and trees and a creek bubbling through its middle, is a half-dozen blocks away.

  Theresa’s kids used to catch crawdads down at the creek, just like all the other youngsters in the neighborhood. They loitered after school at an open field across the road from the park, where they discovered wild sauerkraut and fig trees and raspberries. In the mid-1970s, Orangevale was a good place to raise a family.

  The neighbors were chiefly hardworking young middle-class families, just like Mrs. Theresa Pulliam’s family appeared to be. On Saturday mornings, the sounds of power lawn mowers filled the air. On Saturday evenings, the smell of barbecue wafted over the neighborhood. Sunday mornings, families went to worship, including Theresa and her children, who attended services and Sunday school at the Hazel Avenue Baptist Church.

  The rest of the week, children went to school while parents went to work—Theresa among them. For a time she had a line job at a canning plant and, later on, learned to drive a forklift. None of her early jobs could be called a “career.” In the days before her children became old enough to escape her control, Theresa was a mother first and a member of the workforce second. If she had been able to keep a man around, she would have been a full-time mother.

  “The earliest thought I have of my mother was when she was still pretty,” remembered Terry, who was just three years old when the family moved to Bellingham Way.

  “She’d put on weight, yeah, but she was still pretty slender, and I remember she used to take me and my brother Robert to Dairy Queen all the time. And she’d buy us lunch. She would make us promise not to tell my older brothers and sisters, because the other kids didn’t get to go. They were all in school.”

  Half a mile to the west of their new neighborhood was a shopping center with a McDonald’s restaurant, a Pizza Hut, a pharmacy, a Raley’s supermarket, and a half-dozen other stores. To the east, at another nearby intersection, was a Hostess bakery shop where goods past their “sell before” dates went for half price. The neighborhood Capri Market and a martial-arts school where Bill Knorr learned the rudiments of karate, were across the street. Next to Capri was Mr. B’s barbershop, where Theresa Pulliam’s boys all got their hair cut, and down the block was a place called McHenry’s, where her girls shopped for clothes.

  But family shopping trips weren’t simply happy outings straight out of Ozzie & Harriet. They were instructive as well. By watching their mother, Theresa’s children learned how they were to behave. “My mom used to write a bad check and cash it at the Capri Market once a month. And she knew it was going to be bad, too,” Terry recalled.

  She also used a post office box so that bill collectors would have difficulty finding where she lived. Whenever the increasingly reclusive Mrs. Theresa Pulliam needed her PO box checked, or had any other errands that needed running, she would usually send one of her children to do it.

  “We were always ducking people serving papers on us from court,” recalled Robert. “But I can remember a sheriff’s deputy only showing up at the front door once.”

  In that instance, Theresa had successfully ignored bills from a furniture company for over a year. She bought sofas, chairs, a coffee table, and a pair of china hutches for the living room on credit, and made no payments. When she peeked through the front curtains one day and saw a patrol car pull up front, Theresa dispatched Robert outside to play, with specific instructions as to how he should answer if the deputy approached him and began asking questions.

  “The cop asked me my name, and I told him ‘Robert Sanders,’” said Robert, even though his last name was Knorr. “So he starts going over his sheet, asking me all of mom’s aliases: Did Theresa Pulliam Cross Knorr live there? He had all of her various names except for Sanders.

  “Then one of my friends, Gabriel, comes over to see what’s going on and the cop points to me and asks Gabriel, ‘Is this Robert Sanders?’ Gabriel looks at me, I give him a little nod, and he says: ‘Yeah. Sure, this is Robert Sanders.’”

  With that, the deputy left, whatever papers he had to serve still tucked in his file folder. The furniture company never got its money, and Theresa never returned the furniture.

  The walking route to the intersection of Hazel and Madison Avenues where the family did its grocery shopping was a well-worn trail over a sloping, grassy hill. When Terry and her older brothers and sisters were assigned to go to the market, they made sure their mother wasn’t watching and then rolled themselves down to the sidewalk that ran along busy Madison Avenue like human logs. They’d wind up dizzy and dirty at the bottom, giggling all the way down.

  But much of the time they didn’t dare giggle or dawdle or roll down hills. If they came home too dirty, too late, or too giddy, there was often hell to pay. If they tracked mud in the house or smudged up the walls with grubby fingers or tore a hole in a pair of pants or a T-shirt, their mother could go off like a grenade. If they laughed or teased or clowned around, Theresa was likely to explode. If they did not get home on time, they got a hard and heavy dose of Theresa’s “Board of Education,” a board about an inch thick and four feet long with a grip at one end that she used to discipline the children.

  “We couldn’t go to the store and [fail to] be within five minutes of her time line [for returning home] without reaping the consequences,” recalled Terry’s older brother Bill. “I mean, we’d come home ten minutes late, regardless of the circumstances, and we were prepared to take a whipping.”

  But not always. If Theresa were in one of her self-absorbed moods, she might ignore her children’s lack of punctuality altogether. “Zoned out” was how Terry put it. She and her brothers and sisters could come home late, slop around the house like creatures from the Black Lagoon, and Theresa might look straight through them.

  Grenade or zombie. It all depended. Theresa was an enigma, even to her own children. Nobody knew exactly what might set her off, or when.

  “My mom started out as a normal person when we were real small kids,” said Bill. “Then something happened. I don’t know. Maybe change-of-life chemical imbalance. She said something about having her pituitary removed when she was like thirteen due to a weight problem she had of some sort. I’m not exactly sure exactly what it was.”

  Theresa had her scars—both psychic and physical—but she never had her pituitary removed. Like other fantastic tales that would eventually weave themselves into the unbelievable saga of the Knorr family, the pituitary story became part of the rationale for their mother’s utterly irrational behavior.

  She told her children that she had a twin brother who died at birth because the obstetrician had been drunk, and that was how she wound up with the middle name of “Jimmie”; that she was descended from the biblical tribe of David and her father was the last male in a long line of Crosses that evil spirits were conspiring to wipe off the face of the earth; that her mother predic
ted terror and tribulation for Theresa and her grandchildren before she died; and that Swannie Gay’s insistence that she make a bonfire of her musty old volumes about witchcraft and demonology out in the backyard of their Rio Linda home triggered the gloom and doom that Theresa now had to fight.

  Whenever Theresa related one of her stories, it inevitably put her into an emotional tailspin that climaxed in a rage.

  Terry, Bill, and their two brothers and two sisters spent much of their grammar-school years trying to second-guess the signs of an impending explosion.

  Terry thought she could predict her mother’s next tantrum most of the time, but she never became an expert. The cause-and-effect sequence was just too fuzzy. She remembered an unnerving incident at Pershing Elementary that illustrated just how fuzzy.

  Mrs. Gallagher, her third-grade teacher, greeted Theresa at a parent-teacher conference with a smile, an arched eyebrow, and a cheery “I’ve heard a lot about you!” At that same moment Terry walked over to her mother, wrapped her arms around her middle, and said, “I love you, Mom!”

  “And she just looked at me,” said Terry. “And when I got home from school that day, she locked me in the deep freezer because she thought that I had said bad things about her.”

  Theresa and Howard sat on top of the appliance to make sure Terry didn’t get out.

  In a similar jaw-dropping episode, a friend of Terry’s who lived a block away had outgrown some clothes. Though secondhand, the clothes were name brand and still nearly brand new, so the girl’s mother sent them down to Terry’s house to see if she could use them.

  “And my mom thought that I was going around telling people that we didn’t have enough, that we were so poor that she couldn’t afford to buy me things,” said Terry.

  As punishment, Terry was stripped naked and ordered to stand with her face against a door. Her mother then looped a rope around her neck, tossed the loose end over the top of the door, and had one of her other children hold on to it so that Terry’s naked body was stretched upward against the door. Then Theresa got a willow branch from the yard and proceeded to lay into her daughter’s flesh.

  “She beat me so bad,” Terry recalled. “She hit me everywhere she could hit me.”

  Terry recalls a whipping so prolonged and intense that she very nearly passed out. She was six years old at the time.

  “When we were kids, my mom beat the shit out of us a lot,” she said. “If we hugged our mom too much, it was like: Who were we trying to convince? That we loved her, or she loved us? On the other hand, if we didn’t hug and kiss and tell her we loved her, then we didn’t love her, and we were evil children. We were demon seeds that had been given to her by Bob Knorr.”

  Theresa’s explosions could be triggered by almost anything. And they grew worse and more frequent with each passing year. Though no one knew what set her off, all her children agreed that alcohol was a major contributing factor. Even while Terry was still an infant, Theresa would leave for hours at a time, often sitting at a neighbor’s house drinking until dawn. It fell to Howard to keep order in the house.

  “He basically raised me from a baby to a kid to an adolescent,” said Terry. “My brother would end up having me sleep on his tummy, ’cause I couldn’t go to sleep anywhere else. So he’d have to lay me flat on his stomach before I’d go to sleep.”

  Money was a constant worry to Theresa and her children. Her job at the canning plant didn’t last. She got almost no financial help from her ex-husbands. Pulliam had washed his hands of her altogether, and Bob Knorr stopped paying direct child support, though the Veteran’s Administration sent her forty-four dollars a month out of Knorr’s disability allotment—eleven dollars for each of his four children.

  “Economically, we couldn’t keep up with the friends that we did have,” said Terry’s older brother Robert. “You know, guys would say, ‘Hey, you want to go to Wet n’ Wild?’ Well, we couldn’t do that. We didn’t have the money for that.”

  Robert recalled one Christmas when his precocious older sister Suesan got fed up with being poor. “Suesan decided that she didn’t get enough Christmas presents and went over to one of the neighbors and said, ‘You know, we didn’t have enough money for a Christmas tree or any presents.’

  “The neighbors got together and called the Salvation Army out there and everyone chipped in,” said Robert. “They showed up with a new tree and everything. At that time my mom was working, so we had a tree in the living room and presents, and here they’re coming in with a turkey and everything else.”

  In one of the first dramatic contests of will between Theresa and her middle daughter, Suesan was severely punished for going to the neighbors. It was true that they could hardly afford much of a Christmas, but Theresa’s rule about keeping family problems entirely within the family was ironclad.

  Theresa hated the financial insecurity. After Bullington left her and she was once again utterly on her own, she sold Watkins Products for a while. She eventually settled into a new career, prompted in part by her visits to the Orangevale rest home where she had put her father. She saw firsthand the inner workings of a nursing home, where helpless seniors like Jim Cross were spoon-fed and diapered. Theresa was an expert at that kind of care. She’d changed children’s diapers and spoon-fed them until they were old enough to learn how to feed themselves. Why not get paid for what she had been doing all her life?

  In the mid-seventies, Theresa juggled her roles as mother, homeowner, daughter of an invalid father, and ex-wife on the rebound so that she could fit in one more: career woman. Working at various nursing homes and hospitals whenever she needed the money, she slowly moved up from being a convalescent orderly to a nurse’s aide. In time, she told her children, she had hopes of going even further.

  “She furthered her education by working in convalescent homes,” said Terry. “She went from being a candy striper to a certified nurse’s assistant.”

  “She did want to be a registered nurse,” recalled Robert. “She took the classes at the convalescent homes, and I helped her study. I remember the little overlays of all the anatomical charts and the paperback pamphlets that they used to give her to read.”

  But when she wasn’t working or studying, which was often, Theresa continued to drink. She relied on the Social Security checks she received for Howard and Sheila and her father, the pittance from the VA, and whatever other money she could beg or borrow from boyfriends in order to make ends meet, and to buy booze.

  None of her children characterized her as an alcoholic, because she could go long periods without a drink. But drink she did, and when she had done so, it was not pleasant to watch. After a few drinks, her personality changed completely and her pent-up rage spilled over on anyone who got near her.

  Yet, in her own way, Theresa tried to be a good mother to her six youngsters. “She was a good cook!” said Terry, straining to recall something truly maternal about her mother. Even that positive recollection had to be qualified, though. “When she cooked, she was a good cook,” Terry added.

  Much of the time any cooking that was done was done by the children for the children. Same with the laundry, the dishes, and the housekeeping. If the kids found enough change lying around the kitchen sinktop or in the recesses of the living-room couch, they’d walk down the hill to McDonald’s for a feast. But usually that was too pricey a proposition for the Knorr and Sanders children.

  For family entertainment, Theresa would pack the kids into the car and drive to a nearby cemetery. It stood next to a drive-in movie theater and the screen could easily be seen from the cemetery parking lot. While Terry and her brothers and sisters watched the movie screen without benefit of sound, Theresa sat in the driver’s seat and drank.

  “When we went to the movies, it was to see things like The Exorcist or Beyond the Door, or any of the Omen movies with Damien,” said Robert.

  Besides movies, there was the TV in the front room to keep the family occupied and the children got their weekly dose of Gomer Pyl
e, U.S.M.C., LaVerne & Shirley, and Saturday-morning cartoons. But Theresa’s favorites were Star Trek and Kung Fu.

  “She had a thing for David Carradine,” said Robert.

  Actually, Theresa had a thing for any man whom she thought might save her from her fate. She hit the bars frequently between boyfriends, trolling for new ones all the time. When the children were too small to leave at home alone with the TV set as sole baby-sitter, she took them along with her. She’d park, put Howard in charge, and spend hours at a time in a cocktail lounge, looking for a knight in shining armor—though a lonely soldier or a used-car salesman would do. But men were getting harder and harder to come by. Theresa didn’t blame it on her thickening middle, her fading beauty, or her hair-trigger temper. She blamed it on her children.

  “Most people would agree that six children was a lot to build into a relationship with a man who just wants to have a good time,” said Robert. “Part of that was probably true, because you know how kids are. They’re still growing up. There are social fuckups, like spilling the cherry sauce on the guy she brings home for dinner. Kids mess up the house just before a big date. So some of that is valid.

  “But we got all the blame. It just became a cycle that fed upon itself. Obviously it was our fault that these people were running away, and not her winning personality.”

  The kids were certain that men figured into the formula that set her off, but they couldn’t figure out exactly how. Terry recognized early on that her mother seemed happiest when she had a man in her life—preferably a strong but malleable man who looked good and gave her presents, but didn’t protest too much when Theresa ordered him around.

  Terry remembered Ron Bullington as such a man. Her mother even took to referring to herself as “Mrs. Theresa Bullington” for a while, though they were never married. But Bullington hadn’t lasted much longer than Pulliam. For a while Theresa dated a man named Ollie. He looked promising, in part because he had a son of his own. The boy was an “obnoxious brat,” according to Robert, but his father at least tried to get Theresa’s brood to like him and he did seem to have some small understanding of what it meant to be around children.