Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  In the meantime the bill collectors kept coming and Connie kept going to the door to tell them that Theresa didn’t live there anymore. Theresa’s bad credit was climbing to critical mass. In order to keep the gas and lights from being turned off, she had even put the utilities in her children’s names because her own credit was destroyed. She borrowed from everyone.

  The only time Connie met Theresa’s sister, Rosemary, was when she showed up at the front door wondering where the money was that Theresa owed her. “She was very nice, well-off, the complete opposite of Howard’s mother,” said Connie. “Her manners showed she came from a very well-to-do family. Howard’s mom was really jealous of her sister. She claimed her sister’s nose was so high in the air that she pitied us and looked down on us. But she still wanted us to act perfect around her, to be as polite as possible.”

  Besides owing her sister, Theresa also continued to borrow heavily from Howard, who no longer made any pretense about dealing drugs out of his mother’s house.

  One morning, strangers showed up at the front door, but they weren’t bill collectors and they weren’t relatives. “They were plainclothes and they came to the door without a warrant,” said Connie. “Howard’s mom and the kids kept them from getting in the house until Howard jumped out the bedroom window and ran over to my mom’s house.

  “We had just gotten up, I was in my robe, there were two policemen, and one pulled me into the living room, asking me questions. The other policeman took the rest of the family into another part of the house for questioning.”

  Connie gave the officer her name and told him she was Howard’s fiancée, but didn’t reveal Howard’s whereabouts. His partner got even less information out of Theresa and her children.

  Theresa selected an ID from her pocketbook that gave her name as Knorr, but she professed to know nobody named Sanders. She had just bought the house, she said, and the former owner must have been the mother of Howard Sanders.

  But the two cops were not fooled.

  “When they brought us all together, they had a whole binder full of pictures showing Howard in front of his dealer’s house. They’d had their eye on him for a long time,” Connie said.

  They had apparently followed Howard to his mother’s house and decided it was a good place to try to nail him with the goods, said Connie.

  Howard had always boasted to Connie that he would never be caught because he never sold anything to anyone he didn’t know personally. In fact, she said, it was Howard’s very good connections in the netherworld of drug dealing that kept him out of harm’s way on the day the two plainclothes cops busted in. He had heard several days earlier from a friend of his who was wired into the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office that he might be targeted.

  “So one night Howard and I took a little walk,” said Connie. “We buried a coffee can full of mushrooms, the scale, everything. It was all set up to where they wouldn’t find anything.”

  And they didn’t. Following a cursory and unsuccessful search for drugs in the house, the cops sat everyone down in one room to deliver a stern warning. “You tell him to knock it off,” Connie remembered being told. “Once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer. We know what he’s doing.”

  Connie began shaking. She looked around the room at Howard’s brothers and sisters and his mother, and saw that they were not going to volunteer anything. Their stoicism was absolute and impregnable. Suesan even sided with the family.

  “I wasn’t gonna lie to these guys ’cause you get caught in your lies eventually,” said Connie. “It always comes back around. So I told them: that’s Howard’s mom and brothers and sisters.”

  And with that, she was excommunicated before she had even married into the family. The cops left and did not return, but that made little difference in the eyes of Connie’s future in-laws. She instantly became persona non grata.

  In later years Connie compared the whole experience on Bellingham Way to that of becoming a Mafia wife. By violating the code of Omerta of the Knorrs, she had not signed her own death sentence, but she had guaranteed that she would forever after be shunned by the family.

  But it wasn’t drugs or cops or bill collectors who finally ran the Knorrs out of the neighborhood. “We got to be one of the few families ever run out by the Hell’s Angels,” said Robert.

  A few members of the outlaw motorcycle club lived in the neighborhood, and Howard knew them all, but they had never bothered Theresa or her younger children. In the autumn of 1981, however, a small group of angry bikers congregated on Theresa’s front lawn with an edict: sell and get out of the neighborhood, or else.

  The incident that sparked this final confrontation began innocently enough.

  According to Robert, Howard owned a BB gun that he used for target practice in the backyard. Unfortunately, the family that had moved into the house behind the Knorrs had two small twin daughters who were afraid of Howard and his gun. When the twins’ mother asked Howard to stop, he refused. So she turned to a family friend for help—a friend who turned out to be a member of the Hell’s Angels.

  “Everybody and their brother who was a Hell’s Angel ended up coming to the neighborhood,” recalled Robert.

  Theresa knew a biker herself—a friend from high school named Marvin who lived up the street. When the Hell’s Angels showed up on her doorstep, she sent for Marvin.

  “So we had this little showdown, and shortly after that, we ended up leaving,” said Robert.

  The compromise hammered out by the rival bikers was simple, direct, and to the point: if Theresa sold the house, fast, and moved out of the neighborhood, the Hell’s Angels would not trash her home and beat her and her entire family into a pulp.

  Theresa put her house up for sale that same week.

  According to Sacramento County real-estate records, Theresa wound up selling 5539 Bellingham Way to Connie’s mother Diana M. Butler on November 10, 1983. Howard and Connie moved out the same week.

  “She sold that house right about the time I turned fifteen and she got a $35,000 check out of the house, and that’s when we moved into Auburn Boulevard,” remembered Bill.

  The apartment they moved to was a good ten miles away, in a run-down section of north Sacramento, but certainly not the worst neighborhood in the city. Up and down the block were pickup bars and motels that charged by the hour, mixed in with mobile-home parks and seedy but semirespectable housing. Their new home was sandwiched between a trailer park and Eddie’s Hofbrau, a venerable tavern and family restaurant. Theresa’s was the largest of six units in the big pink apartment house at 2410 Auburn Boulevard, just off the Interstate 80 freeway.

  As it turned out, selling her house became a temporary solution to many of Theresa’s mounting money problems. The family was able to afford some new furniture, buy a car, and put in a telephone. Theresa was also able to pay Howard what she owed him, plus interest, and she finally repaid her sister, too.

  “After the escrow closed, there was like four or five months of normalcy,” said Robert. “Mom went through the money quick. For some reason she thought she had to pay everybody double what they had loaned her. I guess there was an old loan her sister had made her, and I guess she paid twice the amount of what she got on that, too.”

  Theresa and Rosemary resumed real sister-to-sister dialogue for the first time in more than a decade. Terry remembers her mother telling her about Rosemary’s domestic problems after one such conversation. Her life was not the nirvana that Theresa had always believed it to be.

  Since her son Joey’s tragedy, Rosemary had been heartbroken. Her apparently rock-solid marriage turned out not to be so terrific either. Uncle Floyd had been carrying on with someone—perhaps more than one someone. And when Rosemary found out about it, she had gotten even by carrying on her own affair with another man. And there was more.

  “She’d had a miscarriage, and she was crying because she wanted another baby ’cause she missed Joey,” said Terry.

  Despite Rosemary’s shocking news,
Theresa did not confront her brother-in-law about his affair. In fact, she still felt free to call upon Floyd Norris to help her and her children move out of Bellingham Way. He never let on that anything unusual was going on between himself and Rosemary, and Theresa didn’t quiz him on his marriage. Floyd gladly made the round trips from Orangevale to the Auburn Boulevard apartment in his GMC truck. Robert met his uncle Floyd for the first and last time when the two of them unloaded a washer and dryer together.

  Three weeks later, while Theresa and her children were still settling in at the new place, the phone rang. It was the police. “I’ll never forget,” remembered Terry. “My mom was standing in the back bedroom of the apartment, and she had her back toward the window, her hand over her face. All of a sudden I hear this bloodcurdling ‘Noooo! Fuck you, son of a bitch, nooo!’ That’s when they told her.”

  The Placer County Sheriff’s Office informed Theresa that a man who was out walking his dog just after nine P.M. on the last day of November 1983 had found the body of a woman. It had been identified the following morning by Floyd Norris as his wife of nineteen years: Mrs. Rosemary Norris. Floyd said that he had been out of the state on business when she died.

  Rosemary’s body, it seemed, had been tossed next to a ditch at the dead end of a service road in an industrial park near the Sacramento suburb of Roseville. She was wearing blue jeans, wire-rim glasses, a sweater, jacket, and boots, but her purse was missing, along with the truck she had been driving just a few hours earlier. Less than five hours before her body was found, she had called a friend from her home phone, but the Norris residence showed no signs of having been broken into, nor were there any signs of struggle. In addition, the coroner found no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.

  Cause of death: manual strangulation.

  On the night that she died, Rosemary Norris was exactly six months shy of her fortieth birthday.

  XIII

  “When they had the viewing of my aunt Rosemary, my mother wouldn’t let anybody go because she was in a closed casket,” said Terry.

  Nevertheless, when Theresa returned from the funeral home, she told Suesan tales of how Rosemary’s mouth had been sliced into the cheek on either side and had then been sewn up crisscross style, like a football. Later that same night, Suesan gave her little sister more strange descriptions of the way their aunt’s body appeared in its coffin. “My sister Suesan told me that my aunt Rosemary had gone from having permed, shoulder-length hair to hair that was straight and gray,” said Terry. “We’re talking about a woman with beautiful chestnut-brown hair. Like my mom’s.”

  Both the sewing of the mouth and the graying of the hair were the devil’s work, Terry was told. Her mother and sister were certain that some cult had ritualistically murdered Rosemary—perhaps Chet Harris’s Rio Linda witches’ coven.

  The autopsy report did not reflect any of these shocking details, but the report was not available to an impressionable and superstitious thirteen-year-old girl. In the world in which Terry had grown up, the conviction that Satan had somehow had a hand in her aunt’s murder was inescapable. The police had other ideas. Rosemary’s body was barely in the ground before her husband, Floyd, began inquiring about payment on four separate life-insurance policies, totaling more than $250,000.

  “When I went to my aunt Rosemary’s funeral, Floyd didn’t cry,” said Terry. “Not one tear did that man cry. Danny was basically like his dad: very cold. Didn’t want nothing to do with the family. He didn’t cry either. Danny was very reserved.”

  Within weeks of Rosemary’s death, the homicide investigator assigned to the case told life-insurance claims adjusters to hold off on paying on Rosemary’s policies. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the statement Floyd Norris had given police, said Placer County Sheriff inspector Johnnie Smith. When Smith and his partner sought to reinterview Floyd, he referred them to his attorney, Clyde Blackman, who told the police to stay away from his client.

  For the next month or so Inspector Smith’s investigation focused on two suspects: Floyd Norris and his eighteen-year-old son, Daniel. Then Daniel was ruled out and the investigation narrowed to one. Floyd Norris is the prime and only suspect in this case, Inspector Smith wrote in a memorandum filed in Sacramento County Superior Court.

  But Floyd Norris never spent one night in jail. By March of 1984, less than four months after the murder, Inspector Smith’s investigation had hit a dead end. He had interviewed hookers who admitted that the balding, heavyset Norris had been a customer long before Rosemary’s death. He had found the missing truck that Rosemary drove the night she died, and went over it with a fine-tooth comb, turning up lots of questions but few answers. He had done a thorough background check of Floyd and traced his movements before and after his wife was murdered. But he still did not have enough to formally charge him with manslaughter, let alone first-degree homicide.

  It took another year and a series of lawsuits against the insurance companies, but Floyd Norris finally prevailed. He collected on his wife’s policies, sold the family home, closed his antiques business, and moved to Reno. Officially, the Rosemary Norris murder case was never solved.

  Rosemary’s murder had cast a temporary pall over Theresa’s family, but it disappeared by the new year. Theresa and the five children who still lived with her were in a new home, far from the trouble and dark memories of Bellingham Way. Theresa was still spooked by the murder, but she had money in the bank and money went a long way toward brightening her spirits. She kicked off 1984 with a spending spree unlike any she’d been able to have since her marriage to Ron Pulliam.

  “Mom decided to spend money on everything,” said Robert. “That was her way of showing caring.”

  She donated cash to a church, got Terry new clothes, and bought three cars—two of them for William, even though he was barely sixteen and had no driver’s license.

  “She ended up buying a Karmen Ghia for William, but it had an electrical problem and he couldn’t drive a stick very well, so she traded it in and bought him what we called the ‘Pimp Mobile,’” said Robert.

  Bill’s second car was a 1978 caramel-colored Mercury Cougar with a vinyl top, sunroof, power windows, and a yellow interior. His mother told him it was his, but she wouldn’t let him drive it.

  “It was like one of her little toy games,” said Bill. “She’d buy stuff and let it sit out in front of everybody and say that it was mine. If I came in, she’d say it was somebody else’s. It was a little head-trip thing she had.”

  For herself, Theresa bought a maroon ’79 LTD Brougham with a white vinyl top, wire spoke wheels, and whitewall tires.

  She indulged her children, but only if it meant that she remained in control. When Bill decided he wanted to start his own rock band, Theresa bought him a bass and an amplifier, knowing he would have to stay home to practice. She did the same with Robert, buying him an electric guitar.

  “We ended up giving it to my sister because the members of the band decided they didn’t need another guitarist,” said Robert. “What they needed was a keyboardist. So she bought me a keyboard.”

  For the first time in their lives Robert and William got to go to a rock concert, courtesy of their mother. The Scorpions were in town, and Theresa bought them the best seats available.

  But Theresa’s free-spending ways didn’t end there.

  Robert had racked up so many school absences by 1984 that he was suspended from the public schools. It might not have mattered so much if he had been born a girl. Suesan and Sheila both dropped out while they were still in junior high school. But Theresa’s boys, on the other hand, had to have a proper education.

  “The only way Mom could get me back into school was to send me to Victory Christian, which is a private school,” said Robert. “The tuition was something like $2,000.”

  Money was no object for a while, but the money didn’t last, and neither did Theresa’s upbeat mood.

  “As soon as the money ran out, the old patterns started again
, even worse,” said Robert. “It was weird: when she had money, she was almost normal.”

  It was after they had lived at the Auburn address for a while and the money began to run out that Theresa’s anger resurfaced. She began using handcuffs for the first time on the other children as well as Suesan. Whenever she wanted to beat them, she got the boys to hold the girls down, according to Bill. “When she would whip one of the kids, she would make the other ones hold that one down,” he said. “And if we couldn’t hold them, then we would get a whipping ourselves.

  “She never beat me as bad as the other kids,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

  But even Bill caught a right hook now and then.

  Just as it had been at Bellingham, none of this torture was ever detected outside the apartment. To the neighbors, life appeared normal. Suesan almost never left the premises, so nobody outside the family even knew she lived there.

  “They were quiet,” said Susan Sullivan, who lived in one of the upstairs apartments during the entire period that the Knorr family lived there. “I didn’t see much of them. Terry and William came up occasionally and visited and talked, but other than that, I very rarely saw or heard any of them.”

  In school, Robert and Bill continued doing fairly well. Victory Christian seemed to turn Robert around. For the first time in his life he was getting good grades and enjoying going to class.

  Bill had transferred to Mira Loma High, where the ugly memories of the Casa Robles schoolyard melee did not follow him. He made the track and basketball teams and spent hours away from home at varsity practices.

  When he turned sixteen, he’d gotten an after-school job at Taco Bell. Within a couple months he’d graduated to an even better job, working for Agency Rent-A-Car. By the time the family moved to Auburn, Bill had taken yet another job, working at a book warehouse. At night, he also worked as an usher at Century Theaters. There he met Emily Lewis, a secretary three years his senior, and he took her to the company Christmas party. She became his steady.