Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  On September 29, 1986, Terry accepted her mother’s offer.

  “She had me torch the apartment,” said Terry. “With Gulf Charcoal Lighter Fluid. I believe I used three bottles.”

  Following her mother’s instructions, Terry wore gloves so that she would leave no fingerprints. Then she sprayed the charcoal lighter all around the apartment. Backing to a side window so that she could leave undetected, she threw a match on the floor, climbed out the window, and ran down the street to the Las Robles Motel, where Theresa and Robert were waiting for her.

  “I saw the fire trucks going up to the apartment as I was running down the street,” said Terry.

  The American River Fire Protection District turned out to be quicker on the response than Theresa had figured. Within minutes of the burst of flames, sirens were squealing through the neighborhood.

  Bill had a friend who still lived in the apartment next door to the Knorr family. He called Bill at work not long after the fire trucks showed up.

  “He was extremely pissed because he had a newborn baby sleeping against the common wall,” said Bill. “And he called me up and said, ‘Better get down here! Your mom’s place is on fire.’ And I came down and everything was over with.”

  Despite her best efforts to have the place burned to the ground, Theresa’s empty apartment suffered only minor damage. Among other things, the linen closet was barely touched by the fire.

  She could not escape the inevitable. The fire department knew right away that the fire had probably been set, and they wanted some answers. Investigators managed to track down Theresa and her two remaining children to the Las Robles Motel. When they did, she was ready with her version of events. “Apparently she came up with some story that I guess they didn’t believe was true or something, to the effect she blamed my brother Howard for burning it down,” said Bill. “He had a very good alibi.”

  It took a day or two, but the arson investigators were able to confirm that Howard was in jail for beating his infant son. There was no way that he could have set the place on fire.

  “So they went back to find her to ask her more questions,” said Bill, “and she had dropped off the face of the earth.…”

  Actually, she and Robert had simply moved down the street to another cheap motel, but not before Theresa and Terry had their final showdown.

  Terry had blown her end of the bargain, according to Theresa. She had not set the apartment on fire correctly—if she had, arson investigators wouldn’t be snooping around, trying to find out who started the fire.

  “She started beating me, and I yelled at her,” said Terry. “I started putting my foot down. Made a big ol’ scene.”

  The scene was so loud and the managers of the motel were so used to putting down melees in their establishment that they had police on the scene in minutes.

  “They asked my mom, ‘Was there a problem?’” said Terry. “She said, ‘Oh, she’s outta control.’ Then the cops asked me if there was a problem and I said no, because I knew better. I just wanted to get outta there, go away, never see her again.”

  The police saw the incident as typical white-trash domestic violence: a grotesque, obese welfare mother mixing it up with her young tramp of a daughter, probably over a boyfriend who didn’t pay enough for services rendered before he’d left that morning. They saw the same thing in motels in this section of town all the time. Usually it was a pimp disciplining one of his hookers. In this case, it just happened to be a mother disciplining her daughter.

  They told Terry and her mother that they were causing a commotion and that they had to stop. They didn’t say what the consequences would be if they didn’t. Then they left.

  “As soon as the cops left, she put a knife to me,” said Terry.

  Terry stared at the blade and visions of her sisters’ dying faces whipped through her mind. It was then that Terry had her flash of illumination. “And I grabbed her arm and I flipped her around and I looked her square in the face and said: ‘You’re never gonna fucking touch me again. Get your fucking hands off of me!’ First and only time I ever cursed at my mom.”

  Theresa kept coming, but Terry was too quick. She dodged her every lunge. Theresa called on Robert to come hold his sister down so that she could give her the thrashing she needed.

  “And I said, ‘Yeah Robert! Come on in!’” said Terry.

  Robert, however, didn’t even try to stop his sister. He’d been told to hold her down before, and she had more or less let him. But he’d never seen her this angry or defiant. Restraining her, especially while his mother tried to hit her, would be an exercise in futility, if not a very real danger to himself. While his mother seethed, Robert did nothing.

  Terry backed out the front door in triumph without taking her eyes off of her mother. Theresa had beaten her for the last time. Once outside, she turned her back on her mother and walked away, free.

  “She seemed to focus her anger on one daughter at a time,” said Terry. “And by the time it got to me, Suesan and Sheila were dead. I was ready to boogie! She’d already done enough damage to me.”

  The same week that Theresa’s apartment burned, the phone rang at the upper-middle-class home of the former Miss Clara Tapp.

  Theresa’s half sister had gotten married back in the 1950s and had stayed married to the same man. She and her husband raised three children and both held steady jobs for the better part of a generation. Only once did they ever leave California, when her husband’s job forced them to move to Missouri for three years in the 1970s. The rest of the time they lived in the San Francisco Bay area, steadily building a life together and seeing to it that their children got both a good education and a decent chance at starting a life of their own.

  Now, as Clara reached for the phone, she and her husband were living in a comfortable two-story house on a hillside, overlooking San Francisco Bay. They were about to retire with a lifetime of savings and investments to cushion them.

  Clara had maintained no contact with her family over the years. She had no idea what had happened to her stepfather or his spoiled younger daughter, Theresa Jimmie Cross. After Theresa’s acquittal for the murder of her first husband, Clara had only heard about the family once: when the newspapers reported Rosemary’s murder. Clara wept over Rosemary. She remembered her as a good woman.

  But when she picked up the receiver and the caller identified himself as the chaplain at San Quentin State Prison, Clara listened with dry eyes.

  Her brother, William Hart Tapp, was dead at the age of fifty-eight. William had made peace with himself and his God while he was in prison, the chaplain said. He had even become an assistant to the chaplain, helping him perform services. He died of natural causes—a heart attack apparently. The chaplain asked Clara what she wanted done with his remains.

  Clara cleared her throat. Then, in a steady voice, she told him as politely as she could that she did not care what was done with her brother’s remains.

  She reminded the chaplain that before he had found God, her brother had been a cold-blooded, sadistic murderer and, before that, a selfish, conniving, mean-spirited bastard who would say or do anything to get his way. Perhaps he had made peace with himself and his God, and that was good. But he had not made peace with all those he had hurt and maimed and murdered during his miserable life. He had never apologized to her or to his own children or to any of the other survivors of his mayhem.

  She spoke for them as well as for herself when she instructed the chaplain to do with his remains whatever the state does when a prisoner dies without friends or family. Because, in Clara’s estimation, that’s exactly how William Hart Tapp died.

  XVI

  By the autumn of 1986, Robert was the only child Theresa had left.

  “My mom was even more demanding on me,” said Robert. “Everyone else had flown the coop. She was paranoid that at any second the cops were going to bust in and arrest her.”

  The paranoia didn’t come from feeling guilty about anything that she had done, ac
cording to Robert. In Theresa’s estimation, she had been a good mother who had done the best she could with impossible children. Her fear was simply that her wicked children would turn on her, turn her in to the authorities, and concoct stories about how evil she was.

  After Terry’s dramatic departure, Robert and his mother moved from hotel to hotel for the next few weeks and finally wound up taking an apartment near the Red Lion Inn, where Robert was still working. “I kept my job at the Red Lion Inn for a while, but she wanted me to quit that,” he said.

  He had met a girl on the job, dated her a couple of times, and even went home to meet her parents. Then his mother found out. Naturally, she disapproved and put a stop to it. “I guess she thought I was getting too friendly with Mary Evans,” said Robert. “I was even more constrained. I couldn’t go out anymore. I had to come home directly from work. She would call work to make sure I was there. And she would be up at night waiting for me to come home.”

  Their relationship deteriorated into one based on guilt. Theresa claimed that she was suffering from the debilitating chronic disease that Suesan and Sheila had given her and that she was eventually going to die from it. Apart from Robert’s income from bussing tables and washing dishes, she had no means of support except Sheila’s monthly checks from Social Security, for which Theresa remained the payee. At sixteen, Robert had become his mother’s sole caretaker, and she was his sole taskmaster.

  Theresa, however, did not give up on the idea of luring her other children back. She contacted Bill one last time in the hope of obtaining a free U-Haul truck so that she and Robert could move to their new apartment, but following this call, he essentially disappeared from his mother and brother’s lives. He was working two jobs, finishing high school, and living with Emily Lewis. He had no time for his mother, even if he wanted to share a moment with her—which he did not.

  Terry moved in for about three months with John Pief after she left her mother and brother. To save face, Theresa called Pief on the phone to tell him that he had her blessing. She was happy to be rid of her unruly delinquent of a daughter.

  Pief, who was several years older and already had a male roommate, was little more responsible than Terry. For three months “we partied like dogs,” said Terry. The rent money went for booze and drugs. After several warnings, the landlord kicked them out.

  For the next year or two Terry’s life fell into a general pattern: she stayed with acquaintances whom she ran into at work or at night on the party circuit. After a few weeks or months—sometimes after just a few days—she would wear out her welcome and have to move on to the next open door.

  Once, a well-meaning older friend who saw what the drugs and alcohol were doing to her turned her in to Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services. But the authorities took her to the Receiving Home, which only resurrected angry memories about Suesan’s experiences there.

  She moved through the county’s runaway system, from the Receiving Home to foster care to group homes, where troubled teens were supposed to receive counseling and education as well as a fresh start. All these homes did for Terry was remove her access to men, drugs, and alcohol and make her even angrier.

  Once, through the help of one of her foster families, she contacted Bob Knorr. “She was sixteen,” he said. “She was very streetwise.”

  Bob had divorced Georgia, his second wife, in July of 1985 and was married a third time to a woman with children of her own, including a daughter about Terry’s age. They lived in Citrus Heights, east of Sacramento, and did not have a lot of room, but Bob welcomed Terry home, if she wanted to stay. With hopes high, he picked his daughter up and tried to reestablish a bond that had really never been forged in the first place. There was trouble immediately.

  “She was kind of mature,” said Bob’s stepdaughter. “She used to tell me how to have sex with guys and all that stuff. She has big boobs and she used to say, ‘That’ll get anybody for you.’ She thought she could get any man she wanted. She was real smartmouthed—always lied. She’d say something to my mom, then turn around and tell Bob something else. She told so many lies, you couldn’t really determine what was the truth and what was not.”

  The homecoming Bob had imagined for his and Theresa’s youngest daughter did not materialize as he had hoped. She was evasive when he asked about his other children. The only thing Terry knew for sure was that Robert was living with Theresa and Howard was probably in jail. Bill was living with some slut and would no longer have anything to do with the family. He acted as though he was too good for his brothers and sisters, Terry told her father.

  When he asked about Suesan, Terry told him she had run off to Alaska and no one had heard from her for years. Same with Sheila. She had eloped with an Indian somewhere to the north, maybe Canada. It wasn’t until after Terry was gone that Bob’s stepdaughter revealed to him that Terry had tried to get her to go to a liquor store to buy some booze with a false ID—a driver’s license in the name of Suesan Marline Knorr.

  While Bob was hungry for any kind of news about his children, he was not so desperate that he let his newfound daughter walk all over him. For all of his own foolishness and youthful excesses, the adult Bob Knorr had assumed his role as a parent more fully than he had during his marriage to Theresa. He’d learned something from his own sorry experiences. Bob knew how to set limits for his children and he was relatively adept at detecting a teenager’s bullshit.

  “She told the kids so many things that it was unreal,” said Bob. “After a while you just tuned her out. Oh, man, the language! A real little trucker. I told her, ‘Don’t come into the house and talk like that! You gotta live under the same rules everybody else does: go to school, don’t smoke, don’t go out on school nights, be in by twelve on weekends.’ About two days later she was gone.”

  Once again, Terry escaped. With the help of Gary, a new boyfriend and a well-known north Sacramento pot dealer, she found her way back to the street life. Her father had tried to force her to give him a blow job, she told Gary. “My social worker said Gary was nothing more than an overgrown child molester because I was seventeen and he was twenty-five,” she said.

  But Gary would become the typical man in her life: at least five to ten years older, stout, at least half a foot taller, and prone to getting his way through liberal use of his fists. Despite the obvious hazard of getting involved in a losing bout, Terry repeated this pattern again and again, taunting a man into an argument with little or no provocation. “When I got pissed at Gary, I threw his glass bongs off the balcony. Broke every one of them,” said Terry. “I robbed this man of all his profits. He used to beat me up, and I used to get even by taking his pot.”

  One day, after she’d left Gary and was bunking temporarily with yet another set of her street pals, Terry was driving down a street near her old neighborhood with a girlfriend when she spotted a couple of familiar figures on the sidewalk.

  “I saw my mom walking with Robert and I shouted ‘Mom!’ from the car window,” said Terry. “And my mom turned around and looked square at me and turned around and kept walking.”

  Terry told her girlfriend to pull over. She got out and chased her mother down. “She started moving real quick,” she said. “She and Robert were trying to run. But I caught up with them, and she acted as though she hadn’t heard me when I was calling at her. So then it was all hunky-dory. Like, ‘What are you doing?’ and all that.”

  Theresa offered to take her daughter out to eat, so she and Robert and Terry met with a couple of Terry’s roommates at a restaurant and made an evening of it.

  “Mom proceeded to get drunk, tried to act the ‘Oh-I’m-your-friend’ bit, and told Terry, ‘Let’s go out and pick up on guys together,’” said Robert. “That kind of shocked me because I never saw her do that before.”

  Robert recalled his mother suddenly transforming herself from a strict disciplinarian who was too sick most days to get out of the house to a wanton trollop who propositioned the waiters. “I felt bad for th
is bus-boy because my mom was trying to pick up on him and she was being pretty lewd about it,” he said. “Basically, she offered him sex right there on the table.”

  Later on they all wound up back at the apartment where Terry was living with two older guys, one of whom was pushing forty and just a few years younger than Theresa. They all drank more—Tom Collinses, Scotch, bourbon, and gin. They even smoked a little pot, including Theresa, and she began babbling about the supernatural.

  “Terry’s roommate friend called her evil,” said Robert. “He looked like he was going to hit her, but he didn’t.”

  Eventually everyone crashed, including Robert. Sometime in the middle of the night, while the inside of the apartment was a symphony of snores and wheezes, Theresa shook her son out of his drunken stupor.

  “Mom woke me up and hissed at me that we could have gotten killed. We didn’t know who these people were. Basically she wound up putting all the blame on me for us being there,” said Robert.

  She continued to berate Robert as they sneaked out of Terry’s crash pad and returned to their own apartment, several blocks away.

  The next morning, Theresa and Robert were gone, but Terry’s roommates weren’t. Through headaches and hangovers, they reviewed as best they could what had happened the night before, when alcohol and cannibis turned Theresa’s bizarre stories of the occult into a soporific haze. Terry’s reunion with her mother hadn’t turned out the way she had hoped. The only positive thing she remembered from the evening was that Theresa had not tried to take a swing at her. Otherwise, she had been an embarrassment in public and a raving religious nut when they got back to the apartment.

  Ken, the older of Terry’s two roommates, had a helluva breakfast story to tell her about her mother’s behavior once everybody else in the apartment had passed out. “They ended up screwing that night on the couch,” said Terry. “That’s all right. They were close to the same age. But I still felt quite betrayed by my mother that she was fucking my roommate.”