Chester Leroy Harris died on June 12, 1989. A year earlier he had declared bankruptcy after his medical bills ate up whatever liquid assets he had left. It was an aneurysm that killed him, not the cancer. A blood vessel exploded deep inside his alcohol-weakened body.
When paramedics showed up to remove his remains, they found transients living in his house. The young strangers claimed to have been taking care of him, but his sheets hadn’t been changed for weeks and he had died lying in puddles of his own waste.
“My dad had always been one to take people in,” said Terry Smith. “And while my husband and I can’t prove it, we think he took people in who had threatened him at the time.”
When Terry Smith and her husband flew out to attend his funeral and take care of probate, they found that there was no estate to speak of. The strangers who had been living in Chester’s house were gone, and so was everything of value, including the portraits of the five ex-Mrs. Harrises.
“Everything in the house was stolen or destroyed, and we didn’t get anything, including the pictures of my mom or any of the other things my sister and I wanted,” she said. “The people who had been living in the house with Dad disappeared just after he died, along with the air conditioner and everything else in the house.”
In his will, Chester divided his estate evenly between his two daughters, his sister, his third wife, Dona, and his dogs. He also left a provision that drinks at the American Legion hall were to be on him on the day that he was buried.
“It was a very crowded place that day,” said his ex-boss Robert Carney. “Chet would have been pleased.”
When Robert Knorr Jr. was not in jail, he spent the next three years getting high—a practice in which he had developed his own personal expertise, almost from the cradle. “My mom said I wouldn’t make it past eighteen, and I tried to prove her right,” he said.
Once, he drained an entire quart of Jack Daniel’s by himself. He’d seen his sister Suesan put down a quart of whiskey the night he had cut the bullet out of her back, so he knew it could be done. “I blacked out and the next day my friends said I was doing all kinds of crazy shit,” said Robert. “I got into two fights, fucked about three or four women. I had a real good time, but I didn’t remember any of it.”
He tried cocaine for the first time, liked it, and stopped using it. He was afraid he might get addicted. “It’s probably the only advice I ever took from my mother,” he explained. “She said in social situations, never drink what you like or do any drugs that you like.”
The reason to abstain, she had explained to her son, was so that one always remained in control. Staying in control was more important than anything else. Losing control spelled disaster. He might have believed in her advice, but he didn’t always follow it, as, for example, the time he lost his eyebrows.
His friends talked him into taking “power hits of crack” until he passed out, he recalled. Then, as a practical joke, someone shaved off an eyebrow—a definite sign that Robert had taken too much dope and lost control.
“I woke up when he was halfway through and hit him,” said Robert. “When I went into the bathroom, I decided to shave both eyebrows to make it even.”
But lack of control could result in losses far more serious than eyebrows. Robert was chalking up even more arrests as he floated through life. Each time he got high enough to be stupid, he found himself in police custody.
In 1989, he picked up a burglary conviction and spent several months at a minimum-security facility in northern Nevada. During the short time he was there he took and passed a standardized general education test and earned his high-school equivalency diploma.
But the positive was balanced out with the negative. He also met an influential new friend in prison: a Las Vegas native named Brian McNary. McNary had three felony convictions and a misdemeanor, and he was no older than Robert. McNary reminded him of his brother Howard. Like Howard, McNary had a tendency to knock down those who crossed him and protect those who did his bidding. Robert never saw himself as a fighter—a classic passive-aggressive male who might not like violence himself, but admired those who could use brute force to get their way. He and McNary became best friends.
Robert also tended to be a follower, not a leader. Later on, when his probation officer had him tested at the New Frontier Drug Rehabilitation Center in Fallon, Nevada, he was found to be above average in intelligence. And yet Robert Knorr Jr., a twenty-year-old legal adult, had the social skills and emotional development of a fifteen-year-old boy.
The following year Robert was busted for felony possession of a firearm and for possessing methamphetamine. This time when he was convicted, he graduated to a regular state prison. He was shipped to the southern part of the state and did eighteen months in a correctional facility. When he was released, he was within a few miles of Las Vegas and Brian McNary.
By now, the pattern was deeply ingrained. Robert was back into trouble within weeks. This time McNary offered to show him the fast, loose town of Las Vegas, give his buddy a place to stay, and teach him how to make money breaking into cars.
Just before midnight on February 4, 1991, a security guard spotted Robert and McNary loitering near a 1987 Ford Taurus in the Circus Circus Hotel parking structure. They were both wearing trench coats. When the guard stopped the pair as they were trying to leave, he found McNary packing a .38 revolver and Knorr carrying a mechanism used by locksmiths to pop the lock of a car door.
Robert spent a week in the Clark County Jail until police discovered he had violated his northern Nevada prison parole. He was transferred to the Southern Desert Correctional Center for most of the rest of 1991, but was out and back prowling the Vegas strip by the first week of November. His old pal Brian McNary invited him to crash at his friend Bobby Coyle’s trailer on the northeast side of town until Robert could get back on his feet.
Sometime after two A.M. on November 7, 1991, a thirty-six-year-old bartender named Robert Arthur Ward was executed at Redd’s Place cocktail lounge, about two and a half miles from the trailer park where Robert and McNary were living. Ward’s killer fired a .25-caliber pistol three times into his skull and took about a hundred dollars from the cash register and another eight hundred in coins from the slot machines.
Investigators found a witness who described three men who had fled the bar sometime after two A.M. From his description, police artists developed a pair of sketches that were published in local newspapers. Though cartoonish, the sketches resembled Brian McNary before he shaved his mustache and Robert Knorr before he had a barber lop off his ponytail. In addition, forensics specialists dusted Redd’s Place from top to bottom and found both men’s fingerprints on drinking glasses and pool cues.
Within a week Las Vegas police found Bobby Coyle’s trailer and surrounded it with a half-dozen officers. Police Sergeant Albert Salinas called the number listed for Bobby Coyle in the phone book and told the man who answered that the place was surrounded. He ordered Brian McNary and Robert Knorr to back out of the trailer with their hands up.
The next day, the district attorney filed robbery and first-degree murder charges against the pair. Investigators tracked down a third suspect, William Wesenberg, to Kansas. Unlike McNary and Knorr, Wesenberg had worked for Ward and had been fired by him a week before the murder. According to prosecutors, Wesenberg was the most likely person to have instigated the robbery.
But the district attorney never had enough evidence to charge Wesenberg. In addition, the eyewitness who had supplied police with the descriptions of Knorr and McNary checked into a mental hospital in Colorado a few months after the murder. Before the case of People v. McNary and Knorr even went to preliminary hearing, it was in trouble.
Both men were held without bail and did not go to trial until nearly eighteen months later. The prosecution believed it had a strong circumstantial case, but not so strong that it would not accept a plea bargain.
On May 25, 1993, the day before the jury was to hear opening arguments, Rober
t and McNary cut a deal. They agreed to testify against Wesenberg in the event that he was charged. In exchange, the district attorney allowed the pair to enter a nolo contendere plea to second-degree murder. They would not face Nevada’s death penalty.
The following day, another inmate at the Clark County jail chased Robert down and beat him to a pulp after calling him a dirty snitch.
On July 1, 1993, Robert Knorr, twenty-four, and Brian McNary, twenty-five, were sentenced to fifteen years in the maximum-security Nevada State Prison outside of Ely, in the desolate eastern Nevada desert. They were told that if they cooperated during their incarceration, they would be eligible for parole by the end of the century.
Wesenberg, whom Knorr and McNary belatedly claimed to have been the triggerman that night at Redd’s Place, was never charged.
1 Not her real name
XVII
The calendar that hung on Mrs. Michael Groves’s kitchen wall read October 25, 1993. She sighed a hopeless, bourbon-flavored sigh, wiped a tear from her face, and switched on the television set.
Halloween was near again and another year was winding to a close for the twenty-three-year-old woman whose maiden name had been Terry Marie Knorr. Five years had passed since the wisecracking blue-eyed blond bombshell in Lena Jackson’s modeling lineup had left Sacramento for Salt Lake City.
During those years Terry had packed in a lifetime’s worth of hedonism as well as her share of explosive violence and excruciating poverty.
She’d slept in dirt and eaten at the best restaurants; drunk from champagne flutes and jelly jars; charged expensive frocks at the finest department stores and worn the same fourth-hand thrift-store rags for weeks at a time because she couldn’t afford anything better. She had driven across five states at ninety miles an hour in gleaming high-test street chariots with a hard-body stud at the wheel, and had limped desperately through desert towns all by herself, piloting ratty vehicles with expired registrations and body rot.
She’d posed topless for a biker magazine, slept with God-know’s-who while she was stoned out of her mind, and spent a disappointing night with a porn star who claimed to have been John Holmes’s roommate, but still had trouble getting his substantial codpiece to stand at attention. She’d gotten pregnant, only to discover that it was a tubal pregnancy and that the likelihood of her ever being able to have children was slim at best.
She’d been married three times, two of those times to the same man: a Salt Lake City Mormon named Michael Groves who still lived with his parents even though he was the same age, size, and temperament as Terry’s brother Howard Sanders.
The third marriage, sandwiched in between the two to Groves, was a 1992 union with an auto mechanic named Dennis Roper, also the same age, size, and temperament as her oldest brother. She’d met Roper before Groves, back in Sacramento. In fact, it was Roper who whisked her off her feet and drove her to Salt Lake City in the first place, way back in 1987. Never mind that he belted her so hard on the way that he broke her nose. She loved him.
After she’d polished off a fifth of Jim Beam one night, she even let Roper tattoo PROPERTY OF DKR (for Dennis K. Roper) across her ass. He spent money on her. Bought her the things she’d always dreamed of having: designer-label clothes, perfume, even a little jewelry now and then. When he decided to leave Utah in a hurry, he took her with him. They stayed at nice motels and ate at great restaurants all the way from Ogden to Seattle.
Even after they found a place to stay in Vancouver, Washington, right across the Columbia River Gorge from Oregon, and even after Terry became a management trainee at Wendy’s in order to help pay the rent, Dennis continued to spend lavishly. He also belted her lavishly.
Once they got in a row over who got to use the shower first, and Dennis busted her up pretty badly. “I clocked him over the head with a cast-iron skillet, and the son of a bitch still came at me,” said Terry. “Did not stop. He had a head from hell. Six-foot-four, 250 pounds.”
She remembered that event because it occurred on the day she went to a battered women’s shelter and filed a police report against Dennis for battery. When the cops showed up, they found they had more than an abusive boyfriend on their hands. A computer check showed that Roper was wanted in Utah for passing thousands of dollars’ worth of bad checks all over the western United States.
Roper wound up spending three years in prison, and once more, Terry was alone, until Michael came along to rescue her.
It was 1990. Dennis Roper had just started his sentence in Utah State Prison in Bluffdale, and Terry was living in the basement of a friend’s house in the Salt Lake suburb of Sandy. To pay the rent, she ran the front counter at a McDonald’s. One night a tall, swarthy-looking dude came sauntering to the front of the line with his eyes glued right to Terry’s baby blues.
“He leans over and says, ‘I want a Big Mac, french fries, and your phone number.’ Hell of an opening line. I actually thought it was so cute I gave him my number,” said Terry.
He didn’t care that Terry wore a tattoo on her ankle that said CLASSIC BITCH and another on her butt that proclaimed her to be the property of some other man. He was interested in the third one, on her shoulder blade, which depicted a heart with a banner across it that read THERESA.
“The purpose of that is to show that I will always love me,” Terry told him. “If there’s nobody else out there to love me, I will.”
After three dates Michael decided he loved her, too. He asked her to marry him. “I had nowhere else to go, so I did,” she said.
After Dennis, Terry wanted nothing more than to be normal. Throughout her odyssey with Roper, there was not a drug, pill, mushroom, doobie, or white powdery substance that Terry hadn’t consumed. Drugs helped ease her nightmares, she believed.
But Michael’s love was not enough. When her memories of burning corpses and skeletal remains became severe, she turned to drugs again. A couple of times, when her secret pain overwhelmed her, she attempted to overdose. Once it was a handful of two-hundred-milligram aspirin tablets and a bottle of vodka. Another time it was a cocktail made of Haldol, Prozac, aspirin, and Seagram’s 7. In each instance, Michael got her to a hospital and a stomach pump in time. But he was afraid he might not be there for her a third time.
“I’m not afraid to die,” Terry explained to her husband. “I’m just afraid to die in pain. See, I don’t wanna die like my sisters did. I don’t wanna die. But on the other hand, I wanna be with my sisters. And I don’t wanna survive anymore. I enjoy life. Everything spills out of me.…”
Everything did spill out of her. She told him the whole awful truth about her mother, her brothers, her sisters, her tragedy.
Michael was stunned. If these murders were all true, why hadn’t anyone done anything about them?
Encouraged by Michael’s angry incredulity, Terry began telling her story to others. Eventually she told Heidi Sorenson, the ex-wife of Michael’s best friend and, as it turned out, a woman with a very sympathetic ear.
Heidi told her to quit carrying the burden around and unload it on the police. Let them track down her murdering mother. Heidi’s sister once dated a cop in Woods Cross, a tiny settlement about ten miles north of Salt Lake City. Maybe he’d listen.
Woods Cross had a population of six thousand, and since the city’s founding in 1960, exactly one murder had been committed there. Nevertheless, when Police Chief Paul Howard got a briefing on Terry’s story from one of his patrolmen, he insisted on taking a formal statement.
Chief Howard called her story “pretty bizarre,” but sent a one-and-a-half-page certified letter to the Sacramento police summarizing Terry’s statement anyway. He specifically pointed out that she had said that one of the victims’ bodies had been dumped near Truckee. He addressed the letter to Lieutenant Ken Walker, then head of the Sacramento Police Homicide Division. It was postmarked September 5, 1990.
Lieutenant Walker assigned a detective to check Terry’s story out. The detective phoned Chief Howard a few weeks later. Af
ter checking on unidentified female bodies in Sacramento and even phoning Nevada County authorities up in Truckee, the detective claimed that he had found no matches. The information was apparently bogus.
Chief Howard accepted the detective’s findings, set the report aside, and went about his business.
“Basically, nothing happened,” said Terry.
The Woods Cross incident only fueled Michael’s concern over his wife’s apparently overactive imagination. When she got crazy drunk and began throwing things at him, he fought back. The police were called on domestic disturbances at the Groves house with disagreeable regularity.
Michael and Terry were together nearly one and a half years before Terry decided to leave him. “He wouldn’t move out of his parents’ house, he was drinking up all of our money, we never did anything except sit around, and it just got to be a bore,” she said.
After Dennis Roper completed his three-year sentence, he reappeared in Terry’s life in 1992 just as dramatically as he had left it. When she broke off with Michael and he filed for divorce, Dennis asked her if she wanted to get hitched. He sent her a bus ticket and asked her to come stay with him in the Los Angeles suburb of Ontario.
Terry caught the next Greyhound, and they were married immediately in nearby Cucamonga. That union turned out to be null and void because her divorce from Groves had never become final. Still, Dennis and Terry were together for about a year the second time around. Unfortunately, he was as heavy-handed with her as he had been the first time. When she was pregnant, he hit her and she wound up in the hospital. She lost the fetus.
“Dennis was the only man I ever got close to, and he beat the shit out of me,” said Terry.
In fact, all of Terry’s boyfriends and husbands beat her at some point in their relationship, but she was gradually coming to accept her half of the blame. After her breakup with Dennis, she admitted that she, too, could be obnoxious and violent; that she, too, was manipulative, alternately playing the roles of poor little abused girl and shrieking banshee from hell.
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