“I thought she had died at one point in the night,” said Terry. “I thought she quit breathing. But then I got down on the floor with her, and I sat next to her and I shook her, you know, and I talked to her.… She started babbling at me again. So, yeah, she was still alive.”
The following night, July 16, the family got a later start in a different car. It was near midnight when Theresa told her brood to load up the Ford and get ready to go for another ride. “This time we put her in the LTD. Same seating arrangement,” said Bill. The one difference was, this time Terry was told to stay home.
Suesan remained mute and apparently unconscious, but would not have been able to speak even if she had wanted, or been able, to. Her mother had bound her wrists and covered her mouth with duct tape. She was as limp as a scarecrow. Her two brothers had to hoist her up, drape each of her arms over their shoulders, and drag her to the car fireman-style with her feet scraping the ground.
Instead of Highway 50, Theresa drove up Interstate 80 this time, and the engine gave her no trouble at all. They drove for the better part of an hour in heavy silence.
“I remember Sheila talking to Suesan just before the end and I thought I heard Suesan whisper back,” said Robert. “Then Mom told her to shut up. That was the last thing I heard her say and I wasn’t even sure what they were saying, if anything. And Sheila never revealed it.”
Just a mile or two before they would have passed through the Donner Pass town of Truckee, on their way toward the Nevada border, Theresa turned off the interstate. She headed south on Highway 89, weaving over the forested ridge that led down toward Lake Tahoe. She pulled to the side of the road, next to the Squaw Creek Bridge. There were no headlights or taillights visible anywhere on the highway. Outside, it was cold and dark.
“‘Okay, get her out,’” Bill remembered his mother telling him.
He and Robert unloaded their sister on the ground next to the LTD and got back into the car. Theresa turned to her two boys and told them that they were not finished.
“No, no, no. You get out, get the gas out of the trunk.”
“Why?” Bill asked.
“’Cause we’ve got to get rid of all this stuff,” his mother told him.
Robert and William unloaded the two Hefty bags out of the back of the LTD and set them on a sandbank, down near the creek bed. Then they picked up their sister one last time.
It was summer in the Sierras and the smell of pine tar was in the air. The place where they lay Suesan down was green and grassy, and the only sounds that could be heard were crickets and the cascade of spring snowmelt rolling over the rocks of Squaw Creek. It was pitch-black outside, but up above, a million stars twinkled and a new moon shone on Suesan’s ghostly face. Her brothers tucked the bags that contained all her worldly treasures beneath her and zipped up her yellow parka to keep her from the cold. Then Bill handed the gas can to his mother.
“And she threw this all over the place, the gasoline,” said Bill. “Threw the gasoline all over the place, and then she started dousing Suesan. And then the shrubs and a bunch of grass and stuff around.
“And I go, I said, ‘What are you doing?’
“And she goes, ‘Shut up or else the other kids are gonna hear and I’m gonna have to beat the shit out of you.’
“And then she finished dousing everything down and she goes, ‘I’m going to run back and start the car. You light a match, and you just drop it and run.’
“And I did.”
The night sky erupted in a flame as Bill leaped in the front seat and shut the door behind him. Robert was already in the backseat, unable to turn his eyes away from his sister’s funeral pyre as his mother pulled away. He shuddered.
Sheila, who had never left the car, sat next to him. She was shaking and saucer-eyed, but did not dare cry. The inside of the LTD was silent as a tomb as Theresa sped off into the night.
She drove south, along the edge of Lake Tahoe, for what seemed like hours, until she came to Highway 50, which led back over the Sierras toward Sacramento. Along the way she broke the deadly silence by speaking hopefully of Suesan’s soul and how she was certain she saw it leave her collapsing body and fly toward heaven while she and Bill were still splashing gasoline over her.
“We hit a bird on the way and my mom said, ‘See, that was a sacrifice. God thinks we did a good thing,’” said Bill.
“The rest of the way, not even a single word out of anybody. All the way back.”
Detective John FitzGerald was only one of the legion of deputies, paramedics, medical examiners, and other officials who showed up at the Highway 89 roadside next to Squaw Creek the morning after Jane Doe #4858-84 was discovered lying there, smoldering atop a pile of half-burned clothes and ashen memories.
FitzGerald was new to the Placer County Sheriff’s Department. He’d worked in other cop shops over the years and was now pushing fifty. The hair was going silver and the waistline was expanding. He walked to places where he used to run.
He had begun thinking about retirement prospects when he began looking for a new position in the early 1980s—somewhere that appreciated a man with more than twenty years’ experience in police work but that wasn’t overrun with cement overpasses, stucco subdivisions, and all-night convenience stores.
FitzGerald picked Tahoe, in part because he liked the great outdoors and in part because he and his new wife had a young daughter. There might be drunken tourists and holiday traffic jams and rowdy ski bums to contend with, but basically Tahoe seemed like a good, safe place to commune with nature and raise a kid.
FitzGerald was among the last of the Placer County sheriff’s deputies to see Jane Doe #4858-84, but he got a good look at her.
Only half of her face remained, but it radiated such a deep, rich ivory sheen that it could have been Dresden porcelain. The long, blond lashes of her eyelid were the same golden color as her hair. She wore a melted yellow nylon windbreaker that was almost useless against the overnight temperatures in the Sierras. It was as if she had put it on at the last minute because she misjudged and thought it might keep her from getting cold up in the mountains. Bits of the charred yellow nylon matted her skin and hair.
The eye on the side of her face that remained unburned was closed, as if she were sleeping.
FitzGerald felt a wave of bitter sorrow clutch at his belly that would not let go. He hoped to God that she was dead before the fire had started.
XIV
It was nearly daybreak when Theresa and her children returned to the apartment at 2410 Auburn Boulevard. Bill went straight to bed.
Four hours later Theresa grabbed him by the ears like a bloodhound, the way she did when he was still a toddler. She shook him awake.
“When I call you, you better wake up,” he remembered her saying.
“What did I do? What did I do?” Bill asked in a panicky voice. Theresa jabbed her finger in his face and warned:
“If you ever tell anybody about this, you’re gonna be next.”
But her rage suddenly melted into the deepest and most bleak form of melancholy. She backed off and stared at her blond and blue-eyed athlete of a son, now the same age that his father had been when she had first met him. The moment did not last long. In a split second, she transformed from wistful to menacing again. Bill was never to leave her—or else, she warned.
“You ever try to leave here and I’ll just kill you ’cause I can’t take not having my kids,” Bill remembered her saying.
A few days later Theresa pulled up in front of Connie’s mother’s house.
She ordered Howard and Connie to climb in the LTD. Connie rolled her eyes at Howard, but they both complied. The two of them listened agreeably while Theresa told them how she and the children had taken Suesan to the mountains because “she was rotting from the inside out and she was losing control of everything,” Connie recalled.
She told them how they’d dressed her in diapers and a yellow windbreaker and set her afire to free her soul from the devil’s grip.
But just before she died, Theresa said, Suesan had revealed a secret: Connie and Howard were going to become parents.
The child would be a boy, he would have a heart defect, and he would be born on Valentine’s Day. As a witch, Suesan was obligated to steal the child and sacrifice it to Satan, Theresa said. The reason Suesan had to do this, she went on, was that Connie and Howard’s son would be the next descendant of James Cross, who traced his ancestry to the tribe of David, and the demons that haunted Suesan were obligated to wipe the tribe of David from the face of the earth.
“So she said we didn’t have to worry about our son anymore,” said Connie.
Suesan was no longer a threat. Suesan was gone. Their unborn child had been spared.
Connie and Howard traded knowing looks. Connie wasn’t pregnant to their knowledge. Theresa was ranting. They humored Howard’s mother a little while longer, and got out of the car. They would all visit longer when they had more time.
The next morning, Connie cracked the newspaper and read an article about a charred body found in the woods near Lake Tahoe. It was clad in diapers and a yellow windbreaker. It had been burned beyond recognition and there was no ID. She called Howard to the breakfast table and stabbed at the article with her index finger.
“We read it and Howard got real upset,” said Connie. “He was crying and everything. Howard told me never to speak of it.”
On the first of August, Robert was taking the rent check to the landlord when he was stopped by his next-door neighbor. The man asked where he was going, and when Robert told him he was paying the rent, he joked that he was under the impression his brother Bill was the one who worked in the family and it was he who paid the bills.
“My brother goes back, tells my mom that I’m spreading all these rumors about her,” said Bill.
When Bill got home from work that day, his mother was waiting for him. She was angry.
“So you’re telling everybody you’re paying our bills. You go out and pay your own. Get the fuck out,” she snarled.
He wasn’t allowed to get his clothes, his bass guitar, or even a toothbrush.
“When I was thrown out, I was flat thrown out,” said Bill. Nevertheless, he calls his expulsion from his mother’s apartment “the best thing that ever happened to me.”
He moved into his girlfriend Emily’s apartment a couple miles away on Fulton Avenue. They lived together for the next year and a half. Bill was now far enough from the nightmare on Auburn Boulevard to begin a refresher course in how to live as a normal human being, but he remained close enough to return to do his mother’s bidding if she commanded him to do so.
In the summer of 1984, Robert got a real job and lost his virginity. Theresa wasn’t very happy about either development.
Her youngest son had been folding burritos for a couple of months at Taco Bell, until he found a job at the Red Lion Inn, where he was working at the time his mother took the family on its midnight drive to Tahoe. Unlike his older brother, who stopped turning his weekly paycheck over to his mother after he got kicked out of the house, Robert still had to give everything that he earned to Theresa. His social life, therefore, was confined to the apartment building and the trailer court next door.
“At that time I was really socially inept,” said Robert.
He did manage to befriend an older guy named Mike who lived upstairs. He offered Robert his first beer away from the stifling presence of his mother and the two of them got to be drinking buddies.
At about that time a woman in her late twenties moved into the apartment next to Mike’s. Her name was Connie. She was smart, she was attractive, and she was partial to halter tops, just the way his sister Suesan once had been.
“I was trying to look underneath it and see if she was really wearing a bra, which I didn’t think she was,” said Robert. “I must have succeeded with all the stealth and slyness of a fifteen-year-old because I guess she decided she wanted to teach me.”
Connie contrived an excuse to get Robert into her apartment, hit the lights, and locked the door. For the next two months they were lovers.
“At the time my brother and his friend Willy were making fun of me, saying I was a little effeminate, maybe even homosexual,” said Robert. “And here I was, you know, Connie wanting me to live with her. I was going to move out, and she was going to support me while I went through school.”
And it might have happened, if it hadn’t been for Robert’s passion for Doritos. “I had this thing for [them],” he said. “If there’s an open bag of Doritos, especially ranch style, it’s not ‘take a little and have a little later.’ It’s—the bag is gone. I used to do that over at Connie’s house.”
Since his sympathetic illness during Suesan’s final days, Robert’s appetite had returned with a vengeance. His sister Terry, who also went upstairs to talk with Connie now and then, took note of the fact that Connie did not have a Dorito in the house, thanks to her brother.
“Terry mentioned to Mom that Connie said, ‘Doesn’t he get enough to eat at home? He wolfed down like two bags of chips over here!’” said Robert. “An innocent enough comment. But my mom went ballistic.”
Robert came home one day from Connie’s apartment, and Theresa laid into her son with a haymaker. She was at least as angry that he was acting like he didn’t get enough to eat at home as she was that he was sleeping with a woman almost twice his age. She forbade him to ever see Connie again. Robert complied.
“Connie actually wrote me a note wanting me to explain why I was dumping her, and I ended up throwing that note away,” said Robert. “Strangely enough, later on when I told my mom about it, she said, ‘Oh, you could have kept the letter.’
“I could have kept the letter, but not the girl.”
Terry still played halfheartedly at the game of trying to please her mother and win her approval, but it was clear to her after Suesan that it was a loser’s game—especially if you were a girl.
“To me, my mom died when my sister Suesan died,” said Terry.
Howard had been able to get away, as had Bill. The odds for Theresa’s daughters leaving home, on the other hand, had suddenly plummeted. At thirteen, Terry watched her remaining sister become little more than a zombie.
As she was ordered, Sheila cleaned up the mess in the dining room where Suesan had spent her final days. She scrubbed down the apartment with a mop and toothbrush and disinfected with ammonia, but she did this without saying a word, without even humming a song. She fell into a “concentration camp” hush while dutifully sterilizing away the last remaining traces of her sister.
Terry was determined not to let Sheila’s defeat become her own. Despite her mother’s efforts to keep her indoors like her sisters, she stayed in contact with the outside world.
“My mom was never not in a rage!” she said. “She got angrier at certain times, but she was just always an angry person inside. She was never bubbly and happy. She’s nothing like me at all.” Theresa’s anger made her a recluse—a quality she pretty much succeeded in passing on to Sheila.
But Terry was anything but a recluse.
When her brothers Robert or William went out visiting the neighbors, she tagged along. As the two youngest Knorrs, Robert and Terry became recognized around the apartment complex and trailer court as a team. “If you saw one, the other’d be right nearby,” said Lucian King, one of the trailer court’s oldest residents. “They were always together.”
But Theresa even used this closeness of her two youngest children as a weapon against them.
Whenever Robert and Terry went anywhere, Theresa would quiz them separately upon their return, like a cop trying to get two suspects to trip one another up. Nothing her children ever said or did fell into the category of “innocent fun.” Everything was unruly mischief at best, deceitful evil at worst. If her cross-examinations revealed that one of them was hiding something, as in the Doritos incident, she punished the transgressor and rewarded the snitch.
“Me and her went to one of her
school friends’ birthday parties and we forgot the presents,” said Robert, recalling one such incident. “My mother thought for sure that we weren’t at a birthday party, that we were probably engaged in some kind of sexual activity, especially Terry.
“And the more I denied it, the more my mother assumed I was lying for her. So my mom decided to give her a haircut to make her a little less popular in school. And she ended up shaving her head—something she said was a punishment for sluts in the old days.”
The head shaving was something that the boys had gotten used to early. Both William and Robert had their heads shaved while they were in elementary school. Theresa told them that it would make their hair grow back thicker. But the effect at school was devastating. The Knorr boys were treated like pariahs by their classmates. William came home crying, and his mother relented. She stopped cutting his hair. Robert was not so lucky. His tears seemed to mean less to his mother. She kept sending him to school, bald as a cue ball, for years.
“It made me real popular in school,” Robert said.
Terry cried, too, but her mother told her to hold still or she would slice her head open.
The shameful shearing had its desired effect. Terry’s hair grew back, perhaps even thicker than it was before. But it didn’t matter. When the school year came around again, rather than submit to the merciless gibes of junior high classmates, she simply didn’t go.
That winter, Sheila was hit by a hearse.
“She was on a bicycle, and this guy pulling out of Lombard and Company Mortuary on Olive Boulevard at about twenty miles an hour knocks her off her bike,” said Terry.
Sheila almost never left the apartment except to run an errand for her mother, so when she came back to report what had happened, her brother and sister found the whole thing both funny and sad at the same time: during one of the few times their sister had gotten out of the house, she wound up flattened by a funeral procession.
Theresa saw nothing funny about it at all. From that point on, she began wondering what her daughter was doing near a mortuary in the first place, and what might have really happened to her as she lay there, while mortuary officials scrambled around her in a desperate effort to revive her and discourage her from filing an accident report or a lawsuit.
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