Mother's Day Read online

  “He was hollow-eyed, slightly potbellied,” she said. “I think Theresa loved him, but you could see how thin he was. Every time we’d pass a hamburger joint, he’d say, ‘Coke!’ I suppose that’s all he ever knew, was hamburger joints.”

  As much as they wanted the child, the Howards were ill-prepared. They were middle-aged, past child-rearing, and had long ago given away any baby clothes Bea had left over from her own children.

  “When Rosemary dropped him off, he had only three diapers and nothing more,” Bea remembered. “She said, ‘I’ll leave you the playpen for him to sleep in,’ but she didn’t even bring that down. We went out and spent about a hundred dollars for clothes ’cause he didn’t have any. He didn’t even have shoes. I think he had a couple bottles and that was it.”

  The boy fit right into the Howard household, though, and shed surprisingly few tears when his aunt drove away. Like a scared koala bear, he clung for dear life when Craig carried him around the yard on his shoulders, but he got used to it and giggled the next time his new dad gave him a ride. When the weekend was over, Rosemary did not return to pick Howard up as promised. Instead, her brother-in-law, Bill Norris, phoned the Howards with a plea that they keep the baby just a little while longer.

  “He said if I needed anything for the little boy to just call,” Bea recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t intend to keep track of what I spend and surely the little boy has a check coming. If I’m gonna keep him, the check’s mine. Come and get him if you want him!’”

  Nobody came and no check arrived. Eventually, Social Security would kick in with a monthly allotment—the legacy of his dead father. But Theresa would be getting those checks by then and using them as much for her own wants and needs as for Howard’s.

  For the moment Howard’s mother was still in the county jail and the youngster was strictly on his own, depending solely on the kindness of strangers. For the next three months Howard Sanders literally became Craig and Bea Howard’s son.

  “We got so involved. He was such a lovebug,” said Bea. “I got him on the eleventh of July, and on the sixteenth he was a year old. We had a playpen, and he was everybody’s love child. He was just adorable. Just a lovebug.”

  A photo album from that time shows the boy’s transformation from a thin, ragged wisp with spaghetti limbs and protruding ribs to a robust youngster, mugging with an ear-to-ear grin for the camera.

  “We had a granddaughter the same age as Howie and they played together,” Bea recalled. “We always called him Howie. Little Howie followed me everywhere. When I went outside, he went outside. We would’ve loved to have adopted him. Oh, he was a sweetheart!”

  But by autumn, Bea Sanders’s hopes of becoming a mother again ended with Theresa’s acquittal. She was coming home to Rio Linda and her baby. She was also coming home to problems. She might be a free woman, but Theresa was four months pregnant, homeless, jobless, and broke. Furthermore, her son had already started to forget her, according to Mrs. Howard.

  “When she came home, I said, ‘God, I don’t know what to do, Theresa. I hate to turn the little boy over to a total stranger, and you are a stranger to him,’” Bea remembered.

  The Howards remember Howard clinging to them and shying away from his mother. Bea offered to let Theresa stay with them until she got reacquainted with her son and back on her feet again. But she put strict conditions on the stay: no dating, help around the house, take care of her baby, and re-enroll in school.

  Theresa agreed, but began breaking the rules that same week.

  “She didn’t make her bed unless I stripped it. Then she’d make it, just to get back in it,” said Bea. “She didn’t cook a thing. She didn’t do a thing.”

  “She was the laziest human being you ever saw,” agreed Bea’s husband, Craig. “She’d sit in a rocking chair and rock and rock and rock. I just couldn’t hardly stand her. But she was a good-lookin’ gal.”

  And she was not going to let those looks go to waste. It was during this period that Janet Kelso remembers her talking about having an affair with an art instructor at a local college who paid her five dollars an hour to pose in the nude for him.

  Theresa wanted her social life back more than she wanted a high-school diploma or motherhood. She began hanging out at the American Legion hall and having her old friends over to the Howards’ to visit. One of them was Janet, who brought along a young army veteran confined to a wheelchair.

  “I’d been home about a year and a half when I met Theresa,” said Estell Lee Thornsberry, an ex-soldier who had been stationed in Germany before falling victim to a paralyzing accident. While on leave at a beach in Holland one holiday weekend in 1962, he ran into the surf and dove into unfamiliar waters headfirst.

  “He dove right into the sand. It just squished the fourth and fifth vertebrae and he almost drowned,” said his sister, Virginia Herron. “I remember the trauma that we all went through when he came home. It was almost like having a death in the family.”

  The accident made Thornsberry a quadriplegic, unable to control any of the muscles in his body below his shoulders and confined to a wheelchair for life. He returned to Rio Linda with full disability.

  Lee, as he preferred to be called, tried to pick up where he left off, but found his life changed forever when he went to the dances at the American Legion hall or tried to tag along with friends who were out barhopping. Although the government provided a generous monthly living allotment, he couldn’t spend his money on sports or fishing trips or cocktail lounges the way his able-bodied contemporaries did. So he bought himself a car. It was a dark blue 1965 Pontiac Bonneville two-door hardtop, especially outfitted so that he could drive it with his limited upper body movement. Theresa fell in love instantly with the Pontiac.

  “She and I started talking, one thing led to another, I took her to a burger stand, and it seemed to go from there,” said Thornsberry. “I let her drive the car around town and gave her money and things.”

  If she was brazenly taking advantage of a handicapped man, Lee didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “She was caring. She was not an abusive woman,” he said. “She didn’t yell, and we got along. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman either.”

  To make sure her good looks were at their very best, Theresa spent lots of time in a beauty parlor … but not Bea’s. She slipped away from the Howards’ house as often as she could manage and had her face, nails, and hair done. She bleached her shoulder-length brown hair blond and took pains with her makeup, spending what seemed to Bea like hours preening in front of the mirror.

  Bea Howard knew Theresa was breaking her “no dating” rule. Even though the young widow had just shot and buried her first husband, been tried for his murder, and was four months pregnant with his child, she spent no time grieving. Both of the Howards felt powerless to enforce their dating ban, though, because they knew that if they did so, Theresa would take little Howard and leave.

  Bea kept after her, however. Theresa ignored her, knowing the kind of spell her son had cast over the Howards. Finally, after it was clear that Theresa had no intention of going back to school and her relationship with Lee Thornsberry and his Pontiac had become a minor scandal in Rio Linda, Bea Howard issued her ultimatum.

  “I heard the baby fussing one night and went in there,” said Bea. “She was shoveling food down his mouth as fast as she could. I said, ‘What are you trying to do? You’re choking the little guy!’

  “She said, ‘I’m in a hurry. My ride is waiting.’ I said, ‘If you’re in that big a hurry, leave him here!’ When I went to take the spoon from her, I saw a big diamond on her finger. I said, ‘Where in heaven’s name did you get that?’ She didn’t answer me.

  “So the next morning I got up and I told her: ‘You get an apartment. You have not done anything I asked you to do! You’re on your own!”

  Theresa moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Rio Linda Boulevard. She no longer made any pretense about her relationship with the paralyzed veteran or the money a
nd gifts he showered on her. She bought a whole new wardrobe and spent as much time as she could out on the town in Rio Linda, trying to recapture some of the adolescence she sacrificed when she married Clifford Sanders. She reclaimed some of the missed dances, partied in the bars and lounges that catered to servicemen and veterans. But she was never able to recapture her laughter.

  “I don’t know that she did laugh much. In fact, I don’t remember her ever laughing or joking all that much at all,” said Lee.

  His younger sister, who occasionally watched Howard when Theresa and Lee went out at night, put Theresa’s lack of joy in blunter terms.

  “She had no sense of humor,” said Virginia. “I don’t ever remember her being in good humor. After she shot Cliff, I think she may have felt real guilty for it, even though she knew she could get away with it. That might account for part of it.”

  Nevertheless, in Theresa Sanders, Lee Thornsberry had found a rare soul mate: a pretty young woman whose life had been as crippled emotionally as his own had been crippled physically. They both had their youth cut short and they both tried anything—drink, TV, party crowds—to escape the pain. In Lee’s mind, they were made for each other.

  “She didn’t seem to me like she was any more daffy than any of the women I knew at the time, [but] she was different,” Lee remembers. “She seemed to me like she had been through more than most people ever should have to. It seemed like she was going through some tough times.”

  Lee moved in with Theresa and helped her through her last few months of pregnancy. When her water broke, Lee and his mother drove her to a hospital in nearby Roseville to deliver her second child. On March 13, 1965, Sheila Sanders was born. Theresa gave her the middle name of Gay, after her mother.

  But instead of going home with Lee following Sheila’s birth, Theresa returned to Bea and Craig Howard’s place to recuperate.

  “I let her stay a week or ten days because, otherwise, they wouldn’t release her from the hospital,” said Bea.

  Mrs. Howard’s husband was happy to be able to toss little Howard up on his shoulders again, but a week of Theresa was about all he could stand. Theresa took full advantage of her new motherhood and demanded that Craig and Bea wait on her as well as feed, bathe, clothe, and entertain little Howard and the new baby. When Lee called to let Theresa know that he had rented them a house on Madison Street in the northeast Sacramento neighborhood of Citrus Heights, the Howards braced themselves for another round of separation anxiety.

  “Howie was only a year and half old, but, boy, he wouldn’t let go of me,” said Craig Howard. “He said, ‘I stay with you! I stay with you!’ It took two people to pry him off me. He wouldn’t let go. That’s how bad he didn’t want to go with his mother.”

  Theresa and the children moved in with Lee, and this time the future for this odd couple looked a little brighter. They started buying furniture and appliances and setting up permanent housekeeping. They were going to get married, they told friends. And, for the first time since her murder trial, Theresa began to open up to her fiancé about what had happened between her and Clifford.

  “She talked about how Clifford had abused her and beat her,” said Thornsberry. “She got into detail about it, and I figured if that’s what he was doing to her, he pretty much had it coming to him.”

  Janet Kelso remembered a different edge to Theresa’s recounting of her tragedy. “She wasn’t sad,” she said. “It was as if she was gloating when she’d threaten a guy and say she’d shot one man and she wasn’t afraid to do it again. It seemed to empower her. You could feel it when she talked about it.”

  She never broke down in tears during her tirades against her dead husband. Her voice broke with defiant anger more often than it did with distress.

  “She said that he had shoved her head through the wall,” said Lee. “She found the dentist that had wired her jaw together again after he had broke it one time, and she brought him into court. He testified, and she said that’s how she got off.”

  Lee believed her, but then he believed everything she told him. He wanted to believe her.

  “She lied pretty good, too,” he recalled with a bitter chuckle. “She was going out with other guys and saying that she wasn’t, even after I found out that she had.”

  The way he discovered Theresa’s infidelity was especially hurtful. Like the wheelchair-bound singer of the Kenny Rogers hit song “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” Lee would watch Theresa doll up in a low-cut dress, smear lipstick across her permanent pout, and walk between him and the television set, letting the screen door slam behind her. Then she trolled the bars in Thornsberry’s big, beautiful Bonneville.

  “’Course, I was half in the jug most of the time back then, too,” said Thornsberry. “I just wish I could remember clearer, but those days went by in one big blur.”

  But he knew in his heart where she had gone at night, regardless of her stories about going out with girlfriends. His worst imaginings were confirmed one morning when Theresa was inside, sleeping off a hangover, and Thornsberry wheeled himself onto the front porch and down to the Pontiac to drive to a store. In the front seat he found used condoms and underwear.

  “I found odds and ends in the car that just kind of jump up at you and call you a stupid sucker,” said Thornsberry. “I never caught my best friend doing it with her, but he was doing it. I know it.”

  Theresa’s attitude toward her children had been changing, too. In one way, she was becoming a better mother. In another way, she was becoming much worse.

  “Physically, she took good care of the kids,” said Thornsberry’s sister, Virginia Herron. “They always had clean clothes. They were always clean, diapers always changed. She took care of them that way, and they were always well fed. It was just the emotional side where she didn’t take care of them the way you would expect.”

  Virginia started to come around more and more to help her brother as well as to baby-sit the children while Theresa was on her jaunts. She remembered an odd difference between Theresa’s treatment of Howard and Sheila.

  “Sheila and Howard were real cute kids,” she said. “Everybody loved them and had a good time with them. But it was obvious that Theresa favored Howard and neglected Sheila, even when she was tiny.

  “One day Sheila had gotten in trouble for something, and Theresa scolded her. Sheila was crawling around crying, looking for somebody to pick her up. I wanted to get her, but none of us were allowed to pick her up. Theresa just wouldn’t allow it.

  “After this whole thing was over, I felt really bad ’cause Theresa had treated Sheila so bad, and she was such a cute little girl. So I asked her why? And Theresa told me that she intended to raise these two kids exactly the way that her mother had raised her. Her mother had favored one sibling over the other. She told me she was going to favor Howard and neglect Sheila just the same way her mother had done.

  “I thought it was strange, and I never forgot it. I just remember the day she told me that, and I always worried about Sheila after that.”

  Bob Knorr, who had become one of Theresa’s mystery suitors by this time, got another explanation from Theresa as to why she cuddled Howard and spurned Sheila. “Theresa hated her from day one because she was pregnant with Sheila when she killed Clifford,” he said.

  According to Knorr, Theresa somehow managed to blame the fetus in her womb for starting the chain of events that led to the shot that ended Clifford’s life and changed Theresa’s forever. “She blamed a lot of that on Sheila,” he said. “Clifford accused her of sleeping around and said that Sheila wasn’t his. He told her when Sheila was born, he was gonna have blood tests done. He had threatened to take Howard and leave.”

  Now it looked as though history was on the way to repeating itself. The arguments between Lee and Theresa began increasing in volume and frequency as they had done between Clifford and Theresa. But Thornsberry didn’t pay them much mind. After the shouting match, he’d simply buy a bottle and drink away his despair while T
heresa took off with his money for a night on the town.

  “Theresa was living with my brother, and meanwhile she was carrying on with Bob,” said Thornsberry’s sister, Virginia. “I remember thinking how horrible that was. She’d get dressed to kill, put the kids in the car, travel around to bars, and sometimes leave the kids locked up in the backseat, out in the car for hours at a time.”

  Lee withstood the humiliation of being a cuckold for the better part of a year, but he finally broke up with Theresa when her neglect, profligacy, and extravagance pushed him over the edge.

  “I think he moved back home because he wasn’t getting the proper care,” said Virginia. “He was a quadriplegic, so he really needed somebody around all the time.”

  Lee moved out of the house on Madison Avenue near the end of 1965, but Theresa stayed on through the first of the year, until she had to move. When Lee returned to retrieve his few remaining things, both they and Theresa were gone.

  “I remember the washer and dryer had miraculously disappeared out of the house,” he said. “Everything else, too. It was after we’d split up. I’d went back to get my stuff and everything was gone except for junk.”

  It seemed that Theresa had found a new place to live. She’d found a new father figure, too: a six-foot, blond, and blue-eyed marine, two years younger than herself, who followed her around like a puppy and cut a strapping figure in his dress uniform.

  Bob Knorr had joined the marine corps a year before he and Theresa met. He was hopelessly naive about women, but was nonetheless a restless, cocky tenth-grade dropout from North Highlands High, just like Theresa. And, also like Theresa, he wanted something—anything—other than the future that his own parents had opted for.

  “You gotta realize I was growing up on a pear ranch in Placerville, with my mom and dad, working farm-work. I joined the marine corps to get away from home,” Knorr recalled.

  The youngest of three sons who lived at the edge of poverty much of their lives, Knorr had neither the discipline nor the aptitude for school. He preferred driving a tractor on Gus Winkleman’s ranch, where his father worked as a mechanic and general handyman. Despite his disdain for school, he had no desire to step into his father’s shoes and become part of a world where men settled for any kind of job—fruit picker, fry cook, tractor driver, gas-station attendant—just to make the rent payment. He was young, but not so young that he couldn’t foresee a time when the end of the week might roll around and all he’d have left from his paycheck would be enough for a few beers at the corner bar.