Except for band practice, Bill rarely came home. He still turned over most of his paychecks to his mother, but that was a small enough price to pay for the freedom of being able to stay away from home, sometimes for days.
Terry, Sheila, and Suesan might not have been pampered as much as their brothers during the brief time that Theresa had money, but their mother’s reduced delusions did ease the pressure on them. “Even the nightly watches on Suesan were relaxed,” said Robert. “Granted, she was still chained to the dining-room table, but the watches were relaxed. Suesan was actually given some stuff. Sweaters, makeup. For a while we were really happy.”
Suesan even gave up witchcraft and claimed to have found God shortly after they moved to Auburn. “She was telling my mother she was convinced that she was possessed,” said Robert. “She was convinced that the demon came in and out.”
One day Suesan stood in the kitchen and asked Christ for forgiveness. Then she collapsed. “Like when someone cuts the strings from a puppet,” said Robert. “She just fell on the floor. I had seen that sort of thing at certain religious revivals, but for all I know, it could have been the effect of exhaustion. It could have been the effect of infection. I don’t know.”
Suesan’s act of contrition did little to pacify Theresa, though. In a daily ritual that no one was allowed to witness but Terry, Theresa weighed in on the bathroom scales and determined that Suesan was still secretly casting spells. Terry was called in to read the numbers because her mother could not bend over to see the scales herself. On hands and knees, Terry swallowed hard and revealed the unflattering truth. Theresa was past the 240-pound mark and climbing.
And she was not eating. At least that’s what she told her children. She was not eating!
Suesan was eating—whether she liked it or not—but she wasn’t gaining an ounce. In fact, she seemed to grow thinner as Theresa expanded. Theresa tried to make up for it by force-feeding her daughter.
“Suesan would throw up, so Mom started cooking a concoction of flour and mineral oil to bind her up, to make her keep things down,” said Robert. “A lot of the food that Suesan was getting was grease-laden. If I were to see it done today, I’d think Mom was trying to kill her by giving her a coronary. Things like big bowls of really greasy potatoes.
“Some of the food that Suesan was forced to eat was really unappetizing, to say the least, and it seemed like that was how it was supposed to be. There were times when Suesan would puke back into the bowl and she was forced to eat it.”
Sheila remained in the background during these dramas. Her role at Auburn was little different from her role back on Bellingham Way. “Sheila was the slave,” said Connie Butler, who officially became Mrs. Connie Sanders on June 1, 1984, when she and Howard eloped to Nevada. “Her mom would work her fingers to the bone. You’d actually see the girl falling asleep standing up. Sheila did all the cleaning, scrubbing, washing. She was the one sent to the store most of the time.”
When Sheila or Terry or Suesan got too far out of line, Theresa would still call on Howard to drive over and beat them into submission. The only pleasant aspect to Howard’s visits was that he frequently brought along pills or weed. Unlike the boys, Theresa’s girls were not adjusting quite so well to their new home. Their only means of escape were drugs.
“When I was in seventh grade, I got straight F’s because I’d started smoking pot,” said Terry. “I was being very abused at home and I didn’t know how to tell anybody. I was always afraid.”
She got no support from her fellow victims either—even Bill.
“They called me from high school to come pick her up on a couple of occasions,” said Bill. “Terry was having a fit in the classroom. Throwing books and cursing out the teachers and such. They asked if she had behavioral problems before, and I told them no.”
Bill had no problems telling such lies to Terry’s teachers. His sister backed him 100 percent: she had never been abused and she wasn’t acting out of emotional turmoil. She just happened to be in a bitchy mood, she said.
“We just got used to living with the abuse,” said Bill. “[Mom] said it was all our faults. I mean, if we hadn’t been such rotten kids, she wouldn’t’ve had to resort to such measures to keep us in line.”
By the spring of 1984, Theresa’s bank account was exhausted. She was back to scratching for dollars anywhere she could find them. One of the ways she decided to boost her cash flow was to put her daughters to work.
“Suesan was turning tricks on Auburn Boulevard at some car lots,” said Bill. “She was going from car lot to car lot turning tricks. I don’t know if my mom put her up to it or not. I don’t know that. I don’t.”
But Robert knew.
“She sent all three of my sisters down there,” he said. “Terry went along to keep an eye on them, but Sheila and Suesan were both doing guys.”
Terry was upset by her sisters’ actions, but not so much because it was prostitution. What unnerved the youngest of Theresa’s daughters was the gutter level to which Sheila and Suesan had been reduced by their own mother … and how neither of them fought back.
“My mom told Suesan to go up the street, on Fulton Avenue, and get $250 from this car-lot guy and screw him,” said Terry. “So she did and brought the money home. Now me, myself, personally, I would’ve said, ‘Hell, if I’m getting $250 for doing some guy up the street, I would’ve taken the money and I would’ve left home.’ But Suesan didn’t.”
Theresa did not reward Suesan for prostituting herself and bringing the booty home to mother. She began thinking that it must be part of Suesan’s master plan, along with the weight spell. Instead of thanking her for having sex with a stranger so that the family could buy food and pay the gas bill, Theresa began to suspect that her daughter’s “born again” religious experience of a few months earlier had been an elaborate con.
“My mom got it in her head that she was screwing these guys not for money, but for leverage to get out of the house,” said Bill. “She saw this as a control play and that’s [when] she really started beating Suesan. I mean hard.”
It was the worst that it had been since the Receiving Home episode. Suesan had to kneel for hours with her eyes aimed toward the floor. Whenever her mother passed her, she’d kick her or try knocking her down with her fists, like a bowling pin. She no longer slept in a bed, handcuffed to the headboard. She slept on a blanket and pillow on the dining-room floor, eyes closed most of the time. If she had to go to the bathroom, she had to raise her hand and wait for Theresa to nod that it was okay. She had to address her as “Mrs. Knorr” because Theresa refused to allow a demon to call her “Mother.” The rest of the children were forbidden to speak to, look at, or go near her, and if any of them gave Theresa a glance after she had beaten Suesan, they, too, were beaten.
“I remember my mom standing on Suesan’s throat till she was literally convulsing on the floor,” said Terry. “Then I watched my mom pound her in the chest and shake her. I knew my sister was doing the guppy on the floor, but I didn’t know she was convulsing.”
Suesan’s sin this time was unforgivable. At seventeen, she had hinted to her brothers and sisters that she liked getting out and meeting people again, even if it was for a quickie in a used-car lot. She implied that she might actually like to leave home.
“What was happening was when Suesan was going out and doing what she was doing and then coming home, she would talk to the other kids about it—Sheila, Terry, Robert, me when I was there,” said Bill. “And my mom saw this as a control play: teaching the kids how to get out of the house basically. And she didn’t like it at all.
“So when she saw it was getting too much in the head of the other kids, that’s when she started beating the shit out of Suesan. I mean, beat her constantly.”
When her mother gave her food, Suesan would now simply not eat at all. Theresa left the food in front of her, sometimes for days. Since the children were little, she had made a practice of having them clean their plates. If they fai
led to do so, she would make them remain at the table until they did. Though Suesan grew more pale and sick with each passing day, Theresa stuck to her forced-eating edict like a drill sergeant.
“If she wasn’t eating the food constantly, my mom would come over and crack her on the head, back, whatever, and make her continue eating,” said Bill.
From her spot on the dining-room floor, Suesan would pass out rather than finish the food her mother put in front of her.
“It got to a point where she wouldn’t wake up at all,” said Bill. “I mean, she was breathing, but she wouldn’t wake up. She wasn’t conscious.
“And my mom said, ‘Oh, she’s just faking it,’ and would kick her.”
In June, after Howard and Connie were married, Howard all but quit responding to his mother’s demands to come whip the kids into shape. As a couple, they saw even less of Theresa and Howard’s brothers and sisters. When they did see her, it was only when Theresa drove over to Orangevale and parked outside Connie’s mother’s house. She refused to come inside.
By then, the accounts Theresa delivered about Suesan’s transformation into a full-fledged witch kept Connie rapt, if dubious. Suesan’s “born again” experience was now a full-fledged fraud, in Theresa’s estimation. It was clear to her that her daughter had, in fact, signed a blood oath to do Satan’s bidding in exchange for a knockout figure and a future of fame and fortune.
Her blue eyes were turning green. Her strawberry-blond hair was now honey blond. Her body was downright devilish. A witch achieves her full powers when she turns eighteen, Theresa told her daughter-in-law.
“So her mom said, ‘She’s getting what she wants. She will get it by her eighteenth birthday. Something has to be done about it,’” Connie remembered.
Shortly after the first of July, Theresa and Suesan called a temporary truce.
Following a pattern that was now very familiar to all of the children, their mother had lapsed into a psychotic fury one night and thrown a pair of scissors at Suesan when she had her back turned.
“My sister didn’t die from it, but they had stuck in her back,” Terry said.
Theresa blamed Suesan for provoking her to throw the scissors, but even Theresa knew she had crossed over a line. She stopped abusing and berating her daughter long enough to dress the wound and talk with her a little. Soon they were carrying on a conversation just like old times. “Her and my mother sat and smoked pot together and got drunk and they started talking, you know,” said Terry. “I guess my mom still had some sense of reality left in her mind. They started talking like a mother and daughter would.”
Suesan took a chance and asked permission to leave. She would never reveal anything to anyone, she promised. Not the beatings, not the shooting, not even the fresh scissors wound in her back. All she asked for was a plane ticket to Alaska, where she could begin a new life. She’d become a hooker for the men who worked the Alaska oil pipeline. One thing she knew she could do to earn a living was deliver up sex for the right price. She’d disappear and never be a bother to her mother ever again.
Theresa thought about it and agreed. She would buy Suesan a one-way ticket to Alaska on one condition: that she let Theresa remove the bullet that remained lodged inside her body. Her reasoning was logical, in a paranoid way. If she were to let Suesan leave with the bullet still in her, and Suesan had it removed at a later date, the police would be able to trace it back to Theresa’s derringer. Theresa had been in jail once before for shooting a husband. She wasn’t going back because she was accused of shooting her own daughter.
So Suesan agreed to the operation.
Theresa’s preparations for surgery began with anesthesia. She ordered Suesan to swallow a handful of green Mellaril capsules and what seemed like a quart of hard liquor. Terry remembered it as Old Crow. Robert said his sister’s last cocktail was half a bottle of Southern Comfort. Regardless of the brand, the result was the same. Suesan passed out on the pillow and blanket where she had been sleeping for several months.
“She was knocked out cold by this point,” remembered Terry.
Robert recalls her lying flat on her belly on the dining-room floor as their mother ordered him and Terry to fetch the surgical tools that Theresa had filched from various nursing homes over the years. “Mother got an X-Acto knife, peroxide, gauze, a few other things. We had butterfly bandages that she made herself by cutting down bandages with scissors. Then I was told to cut into Suesan’s back and take the bullet out.”
In the more than two years since she had been shot, the bullet had traveled in Suesan’s body. It was now nearly visible—a dark swelling just beneath the shoulder blade on the left side of her back.
“It wasn’t in very deep,” Robert recalled. “I only had to cut one layer of muscle to get to it. After the first couple of layers of skin, you could see the black mark on her back where the bullet was, and feel the lump. So I cut, maybe two to three quarters of an inch and spread that apart with my fingers. And I could actually feel the bullet. I had to cut some of the muscle there, which was kind of stringy. It was hard to cut that with an X-Acto knife, but I was really surprised because there really was not too much blood.”
The reason, Theresa explained to her son, was that Suesan had actually not been alive for some time. She was among the undead, animated by a demon, but essentially bloodless.
The next day, when Suesan came to, she was groggy and in pain. “She really never came out of the grogginess,” said Terry. “She just kept getting worse.”
For the next week Theresa fed her daughter antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and painkillers, all from her own private pharmacy. She tried different combinations, tossing in a Mellaril from time to time to subdue Suesan’s demons.
“And my sister just kept getting worse,” said Terry. “She started hallucinating. At one point she called my brother William ‘Grandpa.’ She thought he was my Grandpa Cross.”
When she passed into a feverish babble, she described her life as a movie passing before her eyes. She could not eat and only drank when someone held her head up and poured liquids down her throat. Each day she grew thinner and weaker.
“At one point I even exhibited the same symptoms to where I couldn’t hold down water or anything like that,” said Robert. “Mom slapped me around and told me not to do it. She said that I was doing it on purpose. To my knowledge, I wasn’t. All I know is that I went through the same thing and came out of it. Suesan kept going downhill until she was in a state of delirium.”
Finally, Sheila went to her mother and begged for the unthinkable. Her sister was dying. They had to get her to a doctor.
“‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’” Terry remembers her mother saying. “‘I tried to help her, to let her go. There’s nothing more I can do. She’s got lockjaw. If I take her to the doctor, I’m gonna go to jail because she’s been beaten so badly.’” If Sheila was so concerned about her, Theresa suggested, then Sheila could sit up all night with her, feed her, and make sure that she stopped vomiting.
So she did, but the all-night vigils didn’t help. By then, Suesan’s eyes had turned a yellowish green, as if she were suffering from jaundice. She could no longer control her bowels. Sheila and Terry took turns changing makeshift diapers that they pinned on their sister. During one of these changings, Terry noticed black marks on Suesan’s back opposite the wound that had been left by Robert’s amateur surgery. It looked almost like a rib was poking through, said Terry. She concluded that it was the result of internal bleeding and that her sister had been busted up inside far worse from her mother’s last beating than anyone had imagined.
Suesan’s condition deteriorated to a point where she could no longer even take liquids. She seemed to have slipped into a coma. By the evening of July 15, Theresa had made her decision.
“I came home from work on this fateful evening, and my mom had packed all [Suesan’s] stuff up into plastic bags,” said Bill. “[She] said, ‘We’re going on a car ride right now.’”
Theresa set two Hefty trash bags containing all of Suesan’s personal belongings, including clothes and books, next to her weakening daughter. When Bill asked where she was taking everyone, Theresa remained cryptic. “She goes, ‘We’re taking care of something,’” Bill recalled.
She ordered Bill and Robert to pick Suesan up off the dining-room floor and carry her out to the car.
“I didn’t have a thought to say no,” said Bill. “I mean, ‘no’ was not in my vocabulary at all. It wasn’t in Robert’s. It wasn’t in Terry’s either, or Sheila’s. And so I picked her up, and we take her outside and put her in the backseat of the Cougar. And we started driving off.”
Robert and Bill propped Suesan up as best they could and had Terry sit on top of her to hold her in place. Sheila sat on one side, and Robert sat on the other. Bill sat up front with his mother.
And Theresa drove. She drove east, past their old neighborhood, past the foothills and into the mountains along State Highway 50. After a short time on the road Bill told his mother that he smelled gasoline.
“She goes, ‘It’s gasoline in the back,’” said Bill. He started to ask her what it was for when the engine began making a terrible racket.
“She goes, ‘Ah shit. Rods knocking.’ Without another word said, she turns around, comes back [home],” said Bill. “We unload everything, pick Suesan up, put her back on the floor where she was.”
Terry was assigned to watch her. The rest of the night and most of the next day, she sat in her mother’s champagne velour rocker and stared at her sister’s frail, still form lying like a rag doll on the dining-room floor.
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