Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  But the jurisdictional battle between Nevada and Placer Counties continued through most of the summer. Under state law, a county can claim a murder victim as its own if the body is no more than 1,500 feet beyond the county line. When Placer County finally hired a surveying team to measure the distance from the county line to the spot where Sheila Sanders’s corpse was dumped, the official distance was 1,555 feet inside Nevada County—55 feet over the legal limit. Unless the case was moved to Sacramento, there would have to be two trials: one for Suesan’s murder in Placer County and another for Sheila’s in Nevada County.

  On August 12, four days before the long-delayed preliminary hearing was to have taken place, Judge Couzens gave in and ordered the trial of Theresa Jimmie Cross and her two sons moved to Sacramento County.

  While the lawyers wrestled in court, the shattered remnants of Theresa’s family bound their wounds and went on living.

  Bob Knorr found Suesan’s unmarked grave in the county cemetery in Auburn and bought a small headstone for his daughter.

  Howard Sanders found a new fiancée after his divorce from Connie was final. He studied to become a chef, reestablished ties with his sister, Terry, and worked hard at mending relations with his two young sons. Connie continued to protest his visits with the boys unless a court-approved counselor was there to supervise. When Howard sought custody, she moved and left no forwarding address, taking the boys with her. Through his attorney, Carl Swain, he declined to comment about the accusations of abuse and drug use leveled against him by his ex-wife and his siblings. Swain said his client did not want to discuss his family because he hoped to sell his story to TV or motion picture producers.

  Bill’s marriage could not withstand the threat of his trial or the possibility of his imprisonment. DeLois left him less than a year after his arrest. He still has the support of Bob Knorr and his family, along with a large circle of friends. Bill remains out on bail, working and waiting for his day in court.

  Robert lives on the protective-custody tier at the Sacramento County Jail. He reads and writes and looks forward to a time when he can start his life over the right way. Once he’s back in Ely, serving out the rest of his murder sentence at Nevada State Prison, he hopes to enroll in college courses and earn a degree in psychological counseling.

  Robert struck a deal with the Sacramento County District Attorney in the autumn of 1994, volunteering his testimony in exchange for reduced charges. A week before Christmas the DA dropped all the charges against him involving Suesan’s murder. By February the DA had dropped all the remaining charges except the single count of conspiracy to aid his mother in the murder of his sister Sheila.

  As for Theresa, she spends much of her time isolated in her protective-custody room in the women’s wing of the Sacramento County Jail. She writes or calls friends and former employers in Utah, but she has no visitors except her lawyers.

  Once, during a brief court appearance in November, a slimmed-down Theresa became briefly hysterical and fell to the floor in a faint. Usually she appears stoic and silent in court, her deep, deep frown hanging from her sadly defiant face like the permanent scowls etched across the faces of the damned souls in Dante’s Inferno. If she ever knew joy, it perished long ago along with any sparkle in her eyes.

  At the beginning of 1995, as another spring approached, Theresa agreed with her attorney that she ought to seek a sanity hearing to determine whether she could, or should, stand trial. She shaved her head and underwent examination by two psychiatrists who arrived at opposing conclusions: One declared her sane and the other did not.

  In a March 7 article in the Sacramento Bee, staff writer Wayne Wilson quoted some of those who regularly saw Theresa as witnessing a woman suffering from the illusion that jail was “just a hotel with really bad room service.” A formal sanity hearing was scheduled for June.

  As for her one surviving daughter and namesake, Terry Groves tried repeatedly to turn her life around—with mixed results—once she had turned her mother in. Before the first anniversary of her mother’s arrest, Terry had divorced, remarried, and filed for divorce again.

  She moved from Utah to California, working off and on as a butcher’s assistant, fast-food clerk, manicurist, baby-sitter, and maid. In June 1994, she married an acquaintance she’d met through a friend with whom she’d lived briefly. By Labor Day she and her new husband, Bill Gilbert, had broken up and been thrown out of their apartment. Two months later Terry was broke, strung out, and paying fifty dollars a month to sleep alone in a lean-to next to a ramshackle trailer in the run-down southwest sector of Sacramento.

  One morning at three A.M., she called me collect from the Sacramento Airport. She was crying. She wanted to fly to Kansas, to be with her estranged husband, Bill, who had traveled back east to live with his aging parents.

  Could I loan her the airfare?

  I did. Her reunion with Bill didn’t last long. Terry left to live with a girlfriend named Lydia—a single mother with two small children. Within a month or two, Terry and Lydia had quarreled; Terry moved on, and got back together with Bill. At this writing, the two of them rent a trailer near Junction City, Kansas. Terry suffered her second tubal pregnancy in April. Following surgery, she was told by her doctor that she would never have children.

  She cried for a week. When the tears dried, she did what she has always done best: she got on with her life.

  When she gets back on her feet, which should be anytime now, she said she wants to start a day-care center or maybe a home for abused children and name it for her two sisters. She wants to finance it with whatever money she can get for selling her life story to a TV or movie producer. The Suesan Marline Knorr and Sheila Gay Sanders Home for Abused Children will be a haven, she said. It will be a good and safe place for babies to grow, Terry promised.

  With or without their mothers’ love.

  Dennis McDougal, May 1995

  Afterword

  On October 17, 1995, a thin, unshackled Theresa Jimmie Cross sat in dazed defiance in the Sacramento courtroom of Judge William R. Ridgeway. Since her last courtroom appearance the previous spring, she had lost more than fifty pounds. The once-obese monster who cowed her husky teenaged sons by merely looming up from her chair had starved herself to the point that she resembled a scarecrow. Both her flesh and her jail clothing hung from her emaciated frame like loose reptilian skin.

  Prosecutor John O’Mara told those gathered in the crowded courtroom that Ms. Cross, who had adopted her maiden name since her arrest two years earlier, had committed unspeakable crimes. It wasn’t just that she brutalized, tortured, and finally murdered two daughters, abandoning their mortal remains along desolate highways in the Sierra high country. Her horrors also included a cruel legacy of abuse that she’d heaped to varying degrees on all four of her surviving children.

  “While she’s down at Chowchilla [women’s prison] getting three hots and a cot, her children will be having all the nightmares and bad dreams that go with all the things she said and did to them,” proclaimed O’Mara. “She’s saddled them with so much emotional baggage they are never going to come out of this whole.”

  Three psychologists examined Theresa before her court appearance. One of them diagnosed her as suffering from multiple personality disorder. But the other two had her pegged as a malingerer who might behave like a dissociative mental case but actually had a genuine grasp of reality and definitely understood the difference between doing right and doing wrong. To the prosecution, Theresa Cross was a narcissist—totally and utterly self-involved. She had a single focus in her life: the comfort, welfare, and well-being of Theresa Jimmie Cross.

  When it was his turn to speak to the court, her defense counsel, Hamilton Hintz, painted a very different portrait of Theresa. She was a pitiful, poverty-stricken young woman who went from an abusive home life to an early abusive marriage and who, ultimately, “never had a fair chance in life.”

  He reprised the well-known story of Theresa’s four marriages and six bir
ths; her faltering attempts to raise her children in suburban Sacramento, utilizing a combination of welfare checks, menial salary from convalescent home jobs, and occasional larceny to pay the rent and keep groceries on the table; and her own crushed dreams.

  “She was raising these kids as best she could when she was still a child herself,” said Hintz.

  Judge Ridgeway was unmoved. In his eyes, Theresa’s crimes represented “callousness beyond belief.” He was especially stung by a letter that Robert Knorr Jr. had written to Ridgeway from Nevada State Prison, where Theresa’s fifth child was serving his sentence for participating in a Las Vegas barroom killing.

  “She cruelly and calculatively tortured her victims both physically and mentally over the course of years, killing them in every way possible, over and over again,” wrote Robert.

  Theresa destroyed her family, either through murder, torment, or abandonment, Robert told the judge. As the child who had remained loyal to Theresa the longest, twenty-six-year-old Robert seemed to understand better than any of his siblings the true and bitter depth of his mother’s depravity.

  “We have all been sentenced to life without parole, reliving our own private nightmares in the early hours, imprisoned in our memories,” Robert wrote Judge Ridgeway with a piercing eloquence that transcended his own crimes and his lack of even a junior high school education—yet another of the basic rights that should be granted to any child, but which Robert’s own mother made certain he would never have.

  When she was prompted to do so by Hamilton Hintz, Theresa stood, hesitating at first to plead guilty to charges of murdering her two teenaged daughters, Suesan Knorr and Sheila Sanders. With a paucity of words, she finally squeaked the necessary yes answers to the judge’s routine questions about accepting her guilt and understanding her responsibility for the crimes of which she was accused. In a matter of minutes, one of the most sensational murder cases in California history came to a close.

  In exchange for her guilty plea, the prosecution did not ask for the death penalty. Theresa Cross, forty-nine, was sentenced instead to two consecutive life sentences. She would be eligible for parole in thirty-two years.

  Theresa’s son Robert, on the other hand, will be eligible for parole from Lovelock Correctional Center near Reno, Nevada, in the year 2001. He will be thirty-two years old and will have spent a third of his life behind bars, but he hasn’t been idle. By the summer of 1998, Robert had begun to reclaim the education of which his mother had robbed him. He made the honor roll of a Lovelock high school that offers courses to inmates, and he expects to earn a diploma by early 1999. Then he intends to enroll as a psychology major at a nearby community college. His long-term goal once he has finished his prison sentence is to counsel juveniles who, like himself, find every door shut to them and see only a bleak Oliver Twist future for themselves.

  His older brother William received probation for his role in the deaths of his two sisters but did no time in prison. Instead, the court ordered him to undergo therapy. Now divorced, William lives and works in a Sacramento suburb. Howard Sanders, the oldest of Theresa Cross’s four surviving children, moved to Michigan.

  “I heard he was in White Lake and found a new wife, started another family,” said Terry Knorr, the youngest child and sole surviving daughter of Theresa Cross.

  The child who finally blew the whistle on her murderous mother has led the very life that prosecutor O’Mara predicted during Theresa Cross’s sentencing hearing. Since the climax of the case against her mother, Terry has run from state to state, man to man, and false hope to false hope. A drunk driving charge landed her in a Kansas women’s self-help home for six months, and she has spent nights in both jail and hospital emergency rooms following barroom melees in which Terry inevitably has been a central figure.

  Her notoriety as the courageous daughter who turned in her mom has earned her invitations to appear as a guest of Montel Williams, Maury Povich, Leeza Gibbons, and other TV talk shows. With each televised appearance, she reiterates her dream of opening a home for abused children in the name of her two murdered sisters, but Terry’s own demons drive her back to the bottle and bad relationships. Her resolve has never been a match for her good intentions.

  In October 1998, three years after her mother went to prison for the rest of her life, Terry was supporting herself as a baby-sitter in Missouri. She has no contact with her brothers William or Howard and hears from Robert only when he writes to her. She complains of gaining weight and fears that, in some ways, she could turn out like her mother—yo-yoing from fat to thin and leading a life that goes nowhere.

  But in one very significant way, she is not like her mother at all. If she has done nothing more in her life as she approaches her thirtieth birthday, Terry can take pride in helping to bring Theresa Cross to justice.

  “I may be trash like my mother,” she says with self-deprecating candor, “but by God I know what’s right.”

  Dennis McDougal, October 1998

  Acknowledgments

  Mother’s Day belongs as much to Robert Knorr Jr. and his kid sister, Terry, as it does to my publisher or me. These two ravaged children, who were brought up in a nonstop atmosphere of hate, cruelty, sordidness, superstition, and murder, are living proof of the indomitable will and ever-evolving goodness of human beings. Along with Sergeant John Fitzgerald of the Placer County Sheriff’s Department, Robert and Terry are the soul of this story. At the end of every human tragedy, there is always some glimmer of hope. If there weren’t, none of us would have much reason to carry on. I don’t think I give anything away here by revealing that these three people are that glimmer of hope at the end of Mother’s Day.

  Special thanks also to Don Dorfman, Carol Vogel, Ray Thielen, Robert Knorr Sr., Connie Sanders, Wayne Wilson of the Sacramento Bee, Janell Deter Bekauri of the Galt Herald, John Trumbo of the Auburn Journal, Jeff Cole of Inside Edition, Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the wonderful staff of Placer County Superior Court Judge J. Richard Couzens, and Inspector Johnnie Smith of the Placer County Sheriff’s Department. My gratitude, too, to all those who shared their memories and mental notes with me about Theresa and her family, but asked to remain anonymous.

  On the home front, I thank my support group, which seems to grow stronger and more dedicated with each of my published parables about California crime: my pal, partner, and first-line editor, Sharon McDougal; my wonderful parents, Carl and Lola McDougal; my sister, Colleen, and my brothers, Neal and Pat; my children, Jennifer, Amy, Kate, and Fitz; and a small army of friends and peers, including Pat and Jim Broeske, Julie Payne, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, Dot Korber, Lee Gruenfeld, Vince Cosgrove, Randy Bean, Gary Abrams, Brian Zoccola, Richard Lewis, Bella Stumbo, Dave Farmer, David Levinson, Larry Lynch, Dominick Dunne, David and Margo Rosner, Kathy Cairns, Bob Sipchen, Michelle Winterstein, Steve Weinstein, Barbara Howar, John Horn, Leo Hetzel, Tim Fall, Laurie Pike, Wayne Rosso, Jim Bellows, Jill Stewart, Julie Castiglia, Lisa Sonne, Mark Gladstone, Pierce O’Donnell, Tom and Donna Szollosi, and Brian Taggert.

  The men and women who keep the court and other public records in Sacramento, Las Vegas, Reno, Nevada City, and Auburn rarely hear a thank-you for their polite efficiency. With this acknowledgment, I hope to correct that. Same goes for the staffs at the Sacramento County Public Library, the library at California State University in Sacramento, and the morgues of the Sacramento Bee, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Amarillo Globe News.

  Thanks to Susan Randol, my editor at Ballantine, who became a mother herself during the molding of Mother’s Day; and to Alice Martell, another mom, who also happens to be the best agent in New York City; and to her aunt, Edna Harris, who became mother to Mother’s Day when she had the audacity to send her niece a news clipping about an unbelievable crime that had been committed out in California, where all those crazy people live, along with the suggestion that it might make a good book.

  And finally, thanks again to Irv Letofsky. He may not
be a mother, but he remains the best editor on the planet, in addition to being an unswerving friend.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1995 by Dennis McDougal

  Foreword copyright © 1998 by Dennis McDougal

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1100-6

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