Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  “I acted the way my mom acted: ‘When I tell you to sit down and shit, you better shit, ’cause I’m your wife and I’m telling you to!’” said Terry. “I don’t like to act that way, but I tend to see myself doing it.” She might not have deserved to be hit, but she certainly did everything possible to provoke it.

  After her aborted pregnancy, she filed for divorce and called Michael to see if he would take her back. “Michael still loved me very much, which he still does,” said Terry. “I’m not saying the love wasn’t there on his part. It just wasn’t there on my part. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

  Michael sent her a bus ticket. Terry arrived back in Sandy, Utah, on July 5, 1993, and married him all over again.

  She started work again, this time at a grocery store where she had a good shot at advancement. Michael worked steadily, too, and though they continued to live with Michael’s parents, it looked like they would soon have a place of their own.

  Michael still didn’t believe her tale of midnight murder and the sacrifice of her sisters in the High Sierras after the embarrassing fiasco with the Sandy police, but who could blame him? No one believed her. Terry sometimes questioned her own sanity. Perhaps it was all just a bad dream and she never really had sisters at all. Perhaps it was all just one big mistake. Like ail the other mistakes she’d made in her life, it was just something she had to learn to live with. For whatever else people might say about Terry Groves, they could not say that she hadn’t lived. She had lived, by God. She had definitely lived.

  And her sisters had not.

  That was why, as she sat in front of the television watching America’s Most Wanted during the final week of October 1993, she was once more slowly getting plastered and sobbing softly to herself. The tears rolled from her pale blue eyes and splashed on the floor. She poured herself another drink.

  Terry had finally settled down to a safe, comfortable life of TV, monogamy, and steady work in a grocery store. But it still was not enough.

  “Mike and I had gotten into a big argument over my family that day,” she recalled. “He told me basically that I was a liar. He said my story about how my sisters got murdered was bullshit. So I got all drunk, and I was watching America’s Most Wanted, and I decided to get on the phone and do something about it.”

  She reached a woman named Sherry who told her that America’s Most Wanted really could not help her because the crime had not been investigated. America’s Most Wanted only took tips from viewers who had information about people charged with a crime.

  Terry broke down in sobs.

  “Well, what am I going to do about this?” she cried.

  “Ma’am, the only thing I can tell you to do is call the county where this happened,” Sherry said.

  It happened near Donner Summit, said Terry.

  That should be Nevada County, responded Sherry.

  Terry wiped away the tears, got out the map, broke out the phone book, and started calling directory information for Northern California. She got the number for the Nevada County sheriff.

  “I called, got a desk sergeant, and he said Sergeant Ron Perea was the only homicide detective and he wasn’t there at that hour,” said Terry. “He said he’d have to call me tomorrow.

  “The very next day, Ron Perea called and I told him what I knew. And he said he thought it would be a Placer County case, but he’d check it out and get back to me the following week.”

  Two days later Perea called the Placer County Sheriff’s Substation in Tahoe City and got Sergeant John FitzGerald. Perea had checked his files and found a Jane Doe that had been dumped near Martis Creek Campground back in 1985, but the case had been inactive for many years because Nevada County investigators had fixed the blame on a Texas truck driver. Could the other Jane Doe Mrs. Groves described be an open Placer County case?

  While Terry was at work that same day, the phone rang off the hook at her home. Terry’s father-in-law finally called her at midday to tell her that some cop from California had been calling her over and over for the past several hours.

  “I got off an hour early that night, went home, found out the cop’s name was John FitzGerald,” said Terry. “I said, ‘That’s not the same guy.’ I knew he wasn’t from Nevada County because they had only one homicide detective there and that was Ron Perea. So I figured John FitzGerald’s got to be from Placer County.”

  When she called the Placer County Sheriff’s Substation in Tahoe City, she was told Sergeant FitzGerald had left for the night. “I said, ‘I don’t think so. Look around. I guarantee you he’s there, and he’s waiting for my call,’” said Terry.

  Moments later a brusque but friendly voice came on the line. FitzGerald began by telling her that he was fairly certain that hers was the call he had been waiting for, for many years. Terry gushed.

  “She started talking as fast as she could,” said FitzGerald. “She was very emotional, very upset. I could tell by her tone. I felt this person had good information, ’cause she just kept talking nonstop.

  “So I let her talk, and the more she talked the more I felt she knew what she was talking about.”

  When she told him how many times she had tried to find someone who believed her, her hands shook so badly she nearly dropped the receiver. Nobody believed her. No one. Not even her own husband.

  FitzGerald let her pause for a few seconds to collect herself and then he said, “Young lady, if it’s any consolation to you, you can tell your husband this: I found a seventeen-year-old female burning near Squaw Creek on July 17, 1984. I believe she was your sister.”

  The conversation lasted about two hours, FitzGerald recalled. When he asked for specifics, Terry described an antique wedding ring Suesan was wearing the last time she had seen her. FitzGerald made a note. It was the same kind of ring Jane Doe had been wearing.

  The following day, Sergeant John FitzGerald and Inspector Johnnie Smith flew to Salt Lake City. For most of the afternoon they sat at Terry Groves’s dining-room table, taping her statement.

  When it was over, she was asked what she felt.

  Relief, of course. Vindication for sure. And something else: the emptiness that follows the betrayal of someone you’ve loved when that someone has committed an unpardonable sin. “My mom raised us kids like in a coven almost,” Terry said. “It’s kind of a trip. That’s why I feel so bad because I’ve broken something about the family that would never have been broken had she done to me what she did to my sisters. She never would’ve been caught, I have a feeling.

  “You know something my mother always told me? Still waters run very deep. That’s why I’m not a still water. I’m very outspoken. I don’t run very deep. I’m very shallow, as a matter of fact.

  “If somebody says something to me that I don’t like, screw that person. I’ll cut that person out of my life. Even if that person has meant something to me and screwed me over, I’ll cut that person out of my life. Just like I’d cut this arm off if it was rotten. Just like my mother.”

  Sergeant FitzGerald and Inspector Smith felt they had more than enough information to seek a warrant. They were on the next flight back to California. The following week they asked the Placer County district attorney to begin preparing a case against Theresa Jimmie Cross, William Robert Knorr, and Robert Wallace Knorr Jr. for two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder.

  Robert Knorr Jr., who, at this time, was doing fifteen years for second-degree murder in a Nevada prison, was easy enough to find. William turned out not to be difficult to locate either.

  Within four days Placer County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Chal DeCecco was knocking on the front door of the Sacramento area apartment that Terry’s older brother shared with his wife of two years, DeLois Ann Knorr. He was told Bill was at work, at the Target warehouse in Woodland, and that’s where DeCecco found him. He asked Bill to accompany him to the sheriff’s department up in Placer County, and he taped their conversation on the way.

  “Is it Bill or is it Wi
lliam?” DeCecco asked.

  “It’s William,” said Bill.

  “You like to be called William?” asked DeCecco.

  “Yeah,” said Bill.

  “Okay. William, basically we have a warrant here for your arrest,” said DeCecco.

  Bill Knorr was flabbergasted. He’d been questioned before about a murder, back in 1983 when his aunt Rosemary had been killed, and figured this must somehow be connected to that. But after he waived his rights to an attorney and DeCecco got more and more detailed about just what it was Bill was being charged with, the horror of realization began to descend on him like a slow-motion avalanche.

  Bill had worked hard to overcome his roots, he explained. He married a vivacious, ambitious young blonde who worked as an office manager for a franchising company. Bill himself had worked up to the position of warehouseman at a Sacramento distribution center for the Target department-store chain. Despite his lack of a high-school diploma, William Knorr had done something constructive and positive with his life.

  He told DeCecco how he left his loser of a family and struck out on his own, even before he quit high school. “I never tried to get in contact with any of them,” he said. “I never want to see any of them ever again. When I left, I was like: ‘I’m out.’ I know what the real world’s like. I’m leaving, forgetting this whole seedy affair. With the abuse and the putting-the-kids-against-each-other crap. I just … I was out and I was staying out.”

  He started drinking heavily when he was seventeen, but only experimented a few times with cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana. The drinking, along with recurrent bad dreams about his childhood, contributed to the end of his first long-term relationship with Emily Lewis in 1987.

  But he kept working and building friendships. He continued to play music with his band. At one time he wanted to be a disc jockey, but he didn’t have the right voice.

  In 1988, he reunited with his father. “My dad got in touch with me when I was twenty-one years old,” said Bill. “I hadn’t seen him in seventeen years.”

  Bill didn’t want to meet his father at Bob’s house. He recalled all that his mother had told him about the evil that his father had done, and he was wary. They would meet, Bill told his father, but at a public place.

  Bob Knorr was overjoyed. He gathered his wife, Jeanette, and their children and drove out to a Carl’s Jr. that Bill had picked out. With tears in his eyes, Bob shook hands with, and then embraced, the son he’d never known.

  With his sandy-blond hair, quick grin, and lean six-foot frame, Bill Knorr was the spitting image of Bob Knorr. When father and son finally became reacquainted, Bob marveled at how very much he and his son resembled one another. A casual observer comparing Bill’s 1991 wedding photos with Bob’s 1966 Marine-Corps portrait would barely detect a difference.

  One of the first things Bob wanted to know was what had become of his other children. “He asked me about Suesan, and I told him what I knew,” Bill told DeCecco.

  What he knew, he told his father, was that Suesan had run off to Alaska. He’d heard somewhere that Robert was in jail in Nevada. But he had no idea where Terry was. What was more, he didn’t care. She had called him once from Los Angeles, and he pretended as though he didn’t know who she was. “I told her that I wasn’t who she thought I was and hung up the phone,” Bill told DeCecco. “My wife was there when I got the call.

  “Terry turned out to be a loser. The only thing I know about her is that when my father assumed custody over her a couple years ago, she was doing nothing but getting into trouble.”

  Bill wasn’t alone in his feelings about his family. He’d recently heard from his half brother, Howard, who was finalizing his divorce from Connie and trying to get his life back in order after years of trouble with the law. Like Bill, Howard was reluctant to reconnect with most of his family.

  “Howard was the same way,” said Bill. “He never contacted any of us for the longest time, and then he finally got ahold of me, like I said, earlier this year, probably like three or four months ago. Maybe a little bit longer than that.”

  When they finally did get together, the brothers’ conversation centered on a common enemy. The woman who damaged both of their lives, their mother, seemed to have disappeared. Neither brother had heard from or about her in several years. One point they agreed on: where she was or what she was doing didn’t matter as long as they didn’t have to have anything to do with her.

  Howard also asked Bill if he knew what had happened to their sisters. Bill said he didn’t know. Howard had his own suspicions, he told his younger brother. “He thinks that Sheila and Suesan may have been killed by my mom because Suesan kept trying to run away, and Sheila was working her way out of the house,” Bill told DeCecco.

  By the time they had arrived at sheriff’s headquarters, it was time for DeCecco to end the cat-and-mouse game. He took Bill into an interrogation room and sat down with John FitzGerald to take the rest of Bill’s statement. They revealed exactly what the arrest warrant was for, and like an eight-year-old house of cards, Bill’s excuses and guesses about what had really become of his sisters Suesan and Sheila began collapsing.

  In a halting voice that quickly became a torrent of explanations and rationales, the truths that he’d kept locked away in memory for most of his adult life spilled out into DeCecco’s tape recorder. How he had accompanied his mother and brother on the ride up I-80 that night in 1984 and set a comatose Suesan out by the roadside with all of her worldly possessions. How they baptized the place with gasoline. And how Bill was ordered to light the fatal match.

  He told about Sheila and how he and Robert had been instructed to load her decomposing remains in a cardboard box. He told about the long ride back up I-80 almost exactly one year after the burning of Suesan.

  “I still have nightmares,” said Bill. “My wife knows about them.”

  FitzGerald glanced at DeCecco. They just about had their case sewn up. There was just one more thing. Where was Mother Theresa? “Do you have any gut feeling from back at that time as to where you think she might be going?” asked FitzGerald.

  “I have no idea where she was going,” said Bill.

  All the horrors Terry had related to John FitzGerald and Johnnie Smith on the day before Halloween were true. In addition to Bill Knorr’s incriminating statement, they also got interviews with Howard Sanders and his ex-wife, Connie, all corroborating the worst aspects of Terry’s tragic tale.

  It was too sensational a story to keep from the media. Two days after FitzGerald and DeCecco booked Bill Knorr for murder, the story broke on the national news wires. In the November 6, 1993, Saturday-morning edition of the Sacramento Bee, the headline screamed: MOTHER SOUGHT IN GRISLY SLAYINGS; 2 DAUGHTERS BURNED, STARVED.

  Law enforcement knew who their target was, according to the news stories. The search for Theresa Jimmie Knorr, 47, was extended nationwide yesterday, said the Associated Press. She was described as a 5-foot-4-inch, 250-pound convalescent home worker.

  But the truth was, investigators hadn’t a clue as to where she might be.

  FitzGerald and Smith were searching for a woman with a dozen different aliases who knew how to create a totally new identity for herself, with no bureaucrat being any the wiser. The detectives’ usual sources of information—the National Criminal Information Center, the department of motor vehicles, courts, property records—turned up nothing. No warrants, no arrests—not so much as a parking ticket.

  The best picture they had of Theresa was a scratched and outdated mug shot that she had taken for her California driver’s license several years earlier, when she was still using the name Theresa Knorr. But it was doubtful that she still used this last name, or first name, for that matter. A search of the personnel rosters of Sacramento-area convalescent homes and hospitals turned up nothing. The best that FitzGerald was able to do was track her last known whereabouts to Reno in 1988. From there, the trail grew cold.

  FitzGerald was beginning to worry. If Theresa
was as clever as she seemed, would all the publicity tip her off and send her even deeper underground than she already was? Or had she died long ago and all this effort was just an exercise in futility? No matter which turn the case might take, the police had to undertake the tedious process of systematically eliminating all of her potential aliases. This effort was dealt a severe blow when Terry decided to take matters into her own hands. “She contacted the local TV station, told them who she was, and they put her on TV,” said FitzGerald.

  Up to that point, all the police had been telling reporters was that an unidentified female informant had reopened the double-murder investigation. On Saturday night, the audience of KUTV News in Salt Lake City learned firsthand just who that informant was.

  “My mother is very sick,” said a grim-faced young woman identified only as “Theresa” for the TV cameras. “What the heck gave her the right to take my sisters from me?”

  A few miles away from the KUTV studios, in the Liberty Park section of Salt Lake City, a rounded block of a middle-aged nurse who liked to wear wigs and eat home-delivered pizza sat in the front room of her patient’s home.

  The name the woman had given her employer, Bud Sullivan, was Theresa Cross. In Sullivan’s estimation, she was just about the best damned live-in nurse he’d been able to find for his eighty-six-year-old invalid mother, Alice Sullivan. For more than two years Theresa dressed her, fed her, took her to the doctor, gave her her medicine, and generally took full responsibility for the woman. Thanks to Theresa, the Sullivans didn’t have to put their mother in a convalescent home. “She did an absolute super job,” Sullivan said.

  On the other hand, Theresa could be difficult to deal with at times. She had always been an “odd duck,” according to the Sullivans and every other family who had hired her. “It’s hard to explain Theresa,” said Debbie Cheney, whose own mother, Alice Powell, had been under Theresa’s care two years earlier. “She took incredible care of my mother. Just really good care. She’d take her places. Pack up the wheelchair, pack up Mom. We had family reunions that were an hour’s drive away, and she’d bring her on up to spend the day.”