On most days, automobiles pull up in the parking lot out front, loaded with suitcases, stuffed toys, and unwanted youngsters who will remain there for a few days, or a few weeks, until someone takes them off the county’s hands. “These are children of abuse, or runaways,” said Terry. “These are children that don’t have a good life. The Receiving Home looks nice from outside, but it’s hell on the inside.”
At first, Suesan didn’t see it that way. She saw it as a chance to escape. One of the first things she did was ask a counselor to locate her father and ask him if she could live with him.
At the time Bob Knorr had two other daughters he could barely care for, and he and his wife, Georgia, were increasingly quarreling over how they were going to make ends meet. Nevertheless, he said several years later, he would still have taken Suesan in, had he been contacted. But he never got the call. The way the message was related to Suesan, her father had been contacted and refused to accept her.
Her aunt Rosemary gave a similar answer. It wasn’t that Suesan was not wanted. It was simply that nobody had a place for her in their lives.
So Suesan ran away.
For the next few weeks she lived on the mean streets of the Del Paso Heights or “North Town” section of Sacramento, ducking police cars and falling in with other runaways. She turned on to whatever street drugs she could find and turned tricks to earn money for food, using men the same way that she had seen her mother use them. She found a protector who was more than willing to initiate the blond and buxom young freelancer into the “life” in exchange for a percentage of her earnings. One of the first special requests that Suesan made of her new boyfriend was to pay a visit with her to her old neighborhood in suburban Orangevale.
“A car pulled up in front of our house and Suesan was with some guys who said they were going to kill everybody,” remembered Robert. “I don’t remember the exact context of the shouting, but basically they were going to sacrifice a couple of people.”
The entire neighborhood emerged from houses up and down the block to see what was going on. The quiet home on the corner of Bellingham Way and Sutton Avenue had suddenly turned into a battleground, with mother and daughter hurling the foulest possible language at each other.
“I don’t know exactly what was going on with Suesan at the time,” recalled Chris Garrett, who lived next door. “She ran away and she came home to get some things or something, but her mom didn’t want her to leave. Her mom was trying to get her to stay home and they were out in the front yard screaming. They got into a big confrontation while Suesan’s friends were waiting for her up the street.”
The slaps and kicks and rage that had gone on for years behind closed doors suddenly had a public arena and a public audience. When Theresa yelled for backup assistance, Howard and his friend Bud Watson entered the fray. But this time Suesan had her own reinforcements.
“Her pimp punched them out,” recalled Terry. “Gave Howard a bloody nose.”
Before anyone could call the police, it was over. Suesan and the young man Terry identified as her pimp retreated with a couple of other guys and girls to a car waiting for them half a block away.
“Afterward, nothing was ever said about it,” said Chris Garrett. “Terry or Robert would come by every so often, but nothing was ever said about the incident.”
Suesan’s triumph over her mother was short-lived. Within a few days she was picked up by a truancy officer and sent back to the Receiving Home. This time county officials gave her behavior a much more serious assessment.
“After she ran away the first time, she spent some time at Sutter Memorial Psychiatric Ward downtown,” said Bill. “I don’t know if it was her evaluation or if it was … I don’t know what that was about. But she did spend time there.
“I went down with my mom to visit her one time, and they wouldn’t let me see her. I had to stay in their game room while my mom went in and talked to the doctors and Suesan, so I never actually saw the doctors and Suesan … I never actually saw her while I was there.…”
The reasons that Theresa relayed to her children for Suesan’s detention at the hospital were as lurid and unbelievable as any Stephen King story.
“The Receiving Home supposedly told Mom—or at least this is what she said they told her—that Suesan was caught engaged in lesbian activity with one of the other children there,” said Robert. “Actually, she said that what had happened was that Suesan had forced this other child to eat her pussy. According to Mom, they had also cut her hair and the next day it had grown halfway down her back, because she was a witch. At that point, they called Mom up and said, ‘Take her back. We don’t want her.’ So Mom was more or less forced to bring her back home.”
Terry remembers the day she and her mother went to fetch Suesan from the Receiving Home. Suesan had been pleading with her counselor not to send her back, claiming that her home was a concentration camp and that her mother was nothing short of Adolf Eichmann. When Theresa and her youngest daughter arrived, the counselor explained what Suesan had been alleging—that she had been a victim of the worst kind of abuse. Theresa looked the counselor squarely in the eye and told her it was not true. In addition to all of her other well-documented problems, Suesan was a pathological liar.
Then the counselor turned to Terry and asked her if she had ever been abused.
“I told her no. Never,” said Terry.
On the drive home, Suesan was dumbstruck and despondent. Her mother snarled that none of the other children would back up her story of abuse either. Terry did not share her sister’s silent, hopeless fear about what might happen once she got home. On the contrary, she shared her mother’s outrage that her sister would dare break the family silence about what went on inside 5539 Bellingham Way. She remembered turning to her older sister and telling her as much.
“I could have helped her, but I was scared,” said Terry. “You know, the only person I knew as loving me or taking care of me, as sick as her love was, was my mother.”
Terry also remembered with chilling clarity the last thing her mother snarled at Suesan before they pulled up in front of the house. “She said, ‘If you think you were abused before, you just wait. I’ll show you what abuse is.’”
Once inside, with the shades drawn, Theresa let loose her full fury. If Suesan flinched or showed the least defiance, she was walloped even harder. Theresa put leather gloves on before administering a beating, but she made no pretense about leaving her daughter without bruises. The gloves were strictly to protect Theresa from injuring her own hands while she worked Suesan over like a side of beef.
“Suesan tried to protect herself by hiding her stomach, but she never tried to hit my mom,” said Terry. “None of us ever did.”
The other children were not allowed to leave the room or even to sit silently by as reluctant observers. Led by Howard, Suesan’s brothers and sisters were ordered to line up in order of size and age like the singing Von Trapp family and, one by one, don their mother’s gloves in order to punch their sister in the abdomen.
“We had to pass gloves from one to the other and hit Suesan in the stomach for what she did to the family by running away and everything,” recalled Robert. “And I had to hit her twice because I didn’t hit her hard enough the first time.”
That night, and every night thereafter, Theresa’s children took turns standing watch over Suesan to make certain she would never flee the family again. To make doubly sure that the “witch” would not make her escape by casting a spell over one of her siblings in the blackest hours between midnight and dawn, Theresa acquired a pair of handcuffs and shackled her daughter to the headboard of her bed. Then she offered her a dire warning against running off to Rio Linda and joining Chester Harris and his coven. “‘If you run away from home again, you will be separated from your siblings and you’ll end up in a worse situation than you ever were with me,’” Robert recalled his mother telling Suesan.
“Suesan was yanked out of school by my mom and never permitt
ed to go back, ’cause my mom didn’t want her talking again,” said Terry. “My mom got away with it because the truant officers never came to check or anything. Nobody was doing their job in this case. That’s why my mom got away with it for ten years.”
None of her brothers or her sister could explain why Suesan didn’t try to run away again. She never left the house, but she wasn’t always forced to wear the handcuffs. During the nightly watches, there was ample opportunity for her to slip out while Robert or Terry or Sheila napped. But she never did.
As time passed Suesan carried on as though nothing had ever happened. She helped her brothers with their homework, cooked dinner and breakfast for the family on occasion, teamed with Sheila to wash clothes and clean house, watched TV, continued to devour every book she could get her hands on, and even participated in family discussions. Her mother persisted in accusing her of witchcraft, however, and Suesan neither said nor did anything to dissuade her.
Terry speculated that her sister’s spirit had finally been broken. Like a cruel boot-camp sergeant who uses the entire unit to bring a single insubordinate recruit to his knees, Theresa enlisted every member of the family to keep Suesan in check. Suesan had become a prisoner of war, broken and brainwashed, and she simply gave up.
But Robert thought Suesan’s surrender went deeper. She and her mother were still on speaking terms much of the time, and an outsider—who did not know to what violent depths their debates could sink—might believe that their mother-daughter discussions of history, religion, psychology, music, movies, or family matters were perfectly normal. To Robert, that artificial normalcy was just one more paradoxical sign of Suesan’s irrational submission to Theresa’s brute force.
Suesan did not run, Robert said, because she could not. There was nowhere for her to run to. “Better the devil you know, than the one that you don’t,” he said.
XI
In the 1981 autumn semester at Casa Robles High, fourteen-year-old Bill Knorr “got the crap kicked out of him,” his youngest sister said, describing the beating he took outside the gates of the school.
His karate lessons never paid off in a black belt, and his brothers and sisters doubted he would ever use martial arts against a bully even if he had to. Bill Knorr was not one to pick a fight, or even to defend himself. He might hold one of his sisters down when Theresa wanted to belt her, but Bill rarely hit them himself. It was not in his nature.
William Knorr had learned instead to channel his aggression into basketball, cross country, and the hundred-yard dash at school. And the girls noticed.
So when one began flirting with him in class and her jealous boyfriend challenged Bill to a fight, he declined. The boyfriend was not appeased. “One day at school, this guy jumped on William from behind and started hitting him in the back of the head with a padlock from his locker,” Robert recalled.
School officials rushed Bill to the hospital where X rays revealed a mild concussion. After she picked her son up from the emergency room, Theresa told her other children that the doctors called their brother a very lucky young man. Bill had always had a bad sinus condition, and had he been hit in the wrong place with the lock, he might have died.
Bill came home bruised and bleeding, but very much alive, and another chapter in the family’s ignominious history of getting even at any cost was about to unfold.
Howard, who didn’t get along with his mother and was living more at his friend Bud Watson’s house than at home, still fancied himself the father figure at 5539 Bellingham. If one of his brothers or sisters needed a defender, Howard was it. He was a senior at Casa Robles at the time Bill was attacked and he wanted revenge, even if Bill didn’t. As the school’s premier dope dealer, Howard had precisely the right pull to get it.
“Howard got the football team in full-dress football gear, and they went out and surrounded this guy so the teachers wouldn’t be able to stop him,” said Robert. “Then Howard beat the hell out of him for jumping William. There were even some pictures taken of it for the yearbook, but they never got put in.”
At six feet and 195 pounds, Howard was no weakling, but his brother’s attacker, though three years younger, was just as big.
“Howard was a little bit afraid of him, so he hit him with everything he had when he first landed on him and the kid didn’t fall down, so Howard kept hitting him,” said Robert. “Howard is what you call a scared fighter: he gets to hitting you and just keeps on doing it until you don’t move anymore. What he didn’t realize was the first punch had already put the kid out on his feet.”
While Howard punched, the incident took on elements of slapstick. The girlfriend who had started the whole thing by flirting with William got into the act by shrieking and jumping on Howard’s back like a scared monkey. When he drew back to slam her boyfriend once again, Howard accidently belted her. Then, in order to save Howard the dishonor of being accused of hitting a female, several of the other freshmen girls who admired the handsome young athlete William Knorr and his gallant older brother Howard Sanders, pounced on the girlfriend. They thrashed her in a separate battle while Howard finished beating her boyfriend to a pulp.
When it was over, and the boyfriend was sent to the hospital with a concussion, Howard was arrested for battery. As a minor, the court gave him three years informal probation, but it was a small price to pay. Howard had become a legend at Casa Robles High, and the family honor had been restored.
“There was a loyalty there, but in a screwed-up sense,” said Robert.
Terry was more blunt about Howard’s savage sense of discipline and family honor. Just as easily as his angry pride could avenge and protect a brother, it could be turned against a family member. “Howard’s a control freak like his mother,” said Terry. “If he can’t control you, then he’s gonna beat you up and make you do what he wants. I don’t know what he’s capable of, personally.”
His girlfriend, Connie Butler, knew he was capable of manipulating and strong-arming others because he had manipulated and strong-armed her. But she also admired that strength and saw a sad and, she believed, more sensitive side to Howard as well.
“I met him in high school through my brother,” she said. “When he first started coming around, he talked big words, sounded real smart and intelligent. He played little games, talking about auras. He could tell me what I was thinking. I felt like: ‘This guy really knows me! He knows how I feel!’
“He’d come and cry on my mom’s shoulder, saying how he loved me all the way. He convinced me to be with him. I’d have problems with my parents and go talk to him, and he’d make me feel like everything was okay.”
Howard confided in her, dropping the machismo curtain he used to hide himself away from the rest of the world. He told her how he had to take full responsibility for all the other kids in the family once his various stepfathers were out of the picture. He told her how Bob Knorr used to beat him when he was young—how his stepfather entered his room when he was small, throwing toy soldiers at his chest, and calling him a dirty Indian. He spoke of the terror of watching his stepfather rape his mother, right in front of him and his invalid grandfather.
“He was so emotional about it,” said Connie. “He’d break down and cry that he never wanted to be that way. He was afraid of hurting people.”
Whatever else might be said about his brutal side, Howard Sanders tried his best to fulfill the big-brother role that he had inherited. “He was the oldest and the biggest,” said Connie. “He took on the father image in that, you know, he disciplined the kids when the mother couldn’t do it physically. He set down the house rules. You name it.”
But Howard had, at times, odd ways of demonstrating brotherly concern. “One time he beat the living shit out of me because I got some dope from somebody else,” said Robert. “He told me, ‘You don’t know what you’re getting from somebody else! You get your drugs from me!’”
Howard Sanders had developed a reputation as a neighborhood character—both sinister and comical. He
was seen as a gruff, burly cross between a stand-up guy and a junkyard dog. The Garretts, next door to the Knorrs, and the Lane family across the street were all certain that Howard ran a brisk drug business out of his mother’s house, but no one ever reported it.
Howard also tried to run with the toughest crowd he could find. At one point, he and his pal Bud Watson even became chummy with the Hell’s Angels.
His brothers and sister don’t remember him ever holding a real job while he was in high school, though he did go to work as a dishwasher at a restaurant not long after graduation. He cut his hand on a knife during that job and had to go on workmen’s compensation. Howard was skilled at earning money in other ways, though.
Before his after-school showdown with Bill’s attacker, he had an accident in the hallway at Casa Robles that turned out to be as lucrative as it was painful: he ran the palm of his hand through a piece of metal that stuck out of the lock mechanism on one of the student lockers.
“I guess he got pushed into the part that you pull up in order to open or lock the door,” said Robert. “He impaled his hand, sued, and got a settlement.”
The settlement was substantial enough that Howard was able to loan his mother about $2,000, according to Robert, and still live fairly well for quite some time afterward. He was not so disabled by the injury that he could not protect his family.
“Once I was getting some medication for his hand and I got hit by a car over there by the Capri Market,” recalled Robert. “Some asshole was looking at the dress-shop window and rolled up on the sidewalk and hit me while I was on my bike.” Not only had the driver wrapped the front of Robert’s bicycle around his front axle, he had also pinned Robert beneath the tire and “tore just about every ligament in my left leg,” Robert recalled.
Mother's Day Page 18
