Mother's Day Read online

  Instead of criticizing Theresa, the Workses learned to hold their tongues. They quickly came to understand that if either of them spoke up, their chances of getting to keep Sheila with them would disappear and the little girl would wind up being punished. When Theresa went into one of her rages, the Workses felt powerless.

  “She’d yell, ‘She is my child, and she is going to mind!’” Mrs. Works recalled. “I’d try to explain that you can make a child mind, but not under those circumstances. And she said, ‘That’s the way I make her mind!’”

  As her pregnancy reached its final stages Theresa reluctantly relinquished Sheila’s full-time care to the Workses. They took the girl to a doctor when they first got her because they found abrasions on her ankles and the backs of her feet. The doctor told them that Sheila suffered from bedsores. He explained that her feet and ankles were rubbed raw from being forced to stay in bed, beneath the sheets all the time, not unlike an immobilized hospital patient.

  During those first few weeks with the Workses, Sheila sat and stared most of the time. The only time she showed much initiative was at mealtime.

  “As a little baby, Sheila had better table manners than any five-year-old child I had ever seen,” recalled Evie. “She would not pick up food with her hands. She had to have a fork. Sheila could not get dirty. She could not embarrass her mother in no way whatsoever.

  “Theresa demanded all of this of this little baby. And if she was embarrassed, Sheila was reprimanded for it. She would really go after her. Spank her. Slap her across the face. There was no part of her little body that Theresa would not go up against. She’d go after her like you would a ten-year-old kid.”

  For the first six months with the Workses, Sheila remained mute. Then, one warm spring evening Pat Works drove her along with one of his own daughters, Candy, to a nearby convenience store for a soda. Sheila evidently had something else in mind.

  “The first words that little girl ever said were ‘Daddy Pat, buy me an icee,’” recalled Evie. “My husband was so shocked. He turned around and looked at Candy and said, ‘Did you say that?’ And Candy said, ‘No, Dad. Sheila said it! Get her an icee.’” You can bet she definitely got her wish.

  “Evidently she knew how to talk, but she just wouldn’t say nothing. After that, she’d call me Mama Ev and she talked up a storm. That is, she’d talk until Theresa walked in. Then you wouldn’t hear a word out of her. She’d just clam up.”

  On September 27, 1966, while Sheila and Howard remained with the Workses, Theresa traveled to the military hospital at Mather Air Force Base just north of Sacramento and delivered her third child, a girl. She named her Suesan Marline Knorr.

  Bob got a release to visit his wife and daughter, but had to return within a few days to the Oakland Naval Hospital, where he was treated as an outpatient and assigned temporary duty status. His military doctors had determined that his wounds had partially disabled him, but not enough to warrant a medical discharge. He could continue serving as a marine. He was awarded the Bronze Star and put back to work.

  Meanwhile Theresa changed their residence. By the time she was ready to bring the baby home, she had arranged to move her father and herself out of the low-income apartment in Sacramento and into a house on Tioga Street in San Francisco so that she could be closer to Bob. It was a move prompted as much by jealousy as by love.

  Though they’d only been married a few months, Bob already felt a subtle shift in her attitude. Knorr the Boyfriend was a very different proposition from Knorr the Husband. He was now a possession. Despite his combat wounds, he still cut a dashing figure in his dress blues and Theresa wanted him nearby so that she could keep an eye on him. If a nurse was too attentive or Theresa caught her husband making flirtatious eye contact with a female patient, he got a taste of her fury.

  “She’d say, ‘If I ever catch you fooling around on me or if you try to leave me, I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you,’” he remembered.

  By this time Knorr and his entire family were fully apprised of the way Theresa’s first marriage had ended. Bob’s father tried not to rub it in, but he did point out to his son that he had tried to warn him more than once that he was absolutely certain that Theresa was hiding something from them. Bob defended his wife, though. When she first told him, he believed Theresa’s tearful version of the events—how she was regularly pounded into submission by the brute and how it led to her picking up the deer rifle to defend herself. It wasn’t until later on, when she threatened in the heat of their arguments to do to him what she had done to Clifford, that Knorr began to have second thoughts about his wife’s account.

  In the autumn of 1966, though, they were still riding on the euphoria of being newlyweds. They went barhopping together when they could, even though Bob was still only nineteen and Theresa was just over California’s legal drinking age of twenty-one. Once again, he played champion to her damsel in distress. Bob was a reluctant warrior until he had a few beers in him, but Theresa usually arranged a pitched battle for him.

  “She just loved to see me fighting over her all the time,” he said. “When we went out, she was always trying to get me to fight someone about her. Being young and stupid, half the time I’d do it.”

  While Theresa settled in at the Tioga Street apartment, Bob’s superiors assigned him to the marine barracks at Treasure Island, where he stood guard at the main gate when he was not flying off on his new limited-duty assignment. For the remainder of his time in the military, he was told, Bob Knorr was to be a burial escort.

  “You’d take the bodies out to the plane and make sure they got loaded properly, fly to the proper destination, make sure the funeral home picked up the coffin, and stay with the remains until after the funeral,” he said.

  It was a grim but interesting job that took Knorr all over the United States. For the next two years he accompanied the increasing number of marines who came home in coffins to virtually every state in the country: New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Illinois.…

  While he enjoyed his new job, Theresa hated it.

  “When the military tells you you’ve got a job to do, you better do it,” he said. “During those periods I’d be gone, she’d go nuts. She’d accuse me of going out on her while I was away. She’d have to know the motel I was staying in, the funeral home I was going to be working at, and she’d call every hour while I was gone.”

  Their frequent quarrels over Bob’s absences did not, however, put a damper on their sex life. Less than three months after Suesan was born, Theresa was pregnant yet again. She didn’t let pregnancy slow down her social life, though. Leaving her invalid father in charge, she’d get in the car and be gone for hours—sometimes all night long. Pregnancy had never kept her from having a good time and it wasn’t going to do so now.

  “When I’d come home, she’d go out sometimes and wouldn’t come back until five in the morning,” said Bob. “She’d come home stinking [drunk]. When I’d ask where she’d been, she’d say she ‘went for a drive.’”

  When Bob wasn’t home and Theresa was gone, care of their new infant daughter fell increasingly to James Cross and his three-year-old grandson, Howard. The Parkinson’s disease had completely handicapped the old man by now, but he still retained his full mental faculties. He used Howard as “his arms and legs,” according to Bob, sending the boy on errands or instructing him when and how to feed or care for his little sister.

  “Howard was an exceptionally quick-learning kid,” said Bob.

  While Howard was growing up in San Francisco as a silent witness to his mother’s unpredictable brutality and quixotic worldview, his cousin Joseph was growing up in rural poverty but with some stability, living with his family in a rented trailer in Rio Linda. Joseph Norris, who had been born just one day after Howard Sanders, now had a younger brother. Daniel Lee Norris had been born on November 7, 1965, eight months after his cousin Sheila Sanders. Though the Knorrs and Norrises never lived far from each other, they rarely visited. The Norris boys grew up vaguely knowin
g that they had cousins, but almost never saw them. By the time she married Bob Knorr, Theresa was completely alienated from Rosemary.

  “Theresa and Rosemary never got along very well,” said Bob. “Rosemary was a big woman and a no-nonsense person. By the time I met her, she was also becoming a very successful state worker and that used to irritate Theresa a lot.”

  Despite being saddled with two sons and an “encyclopedia salesman” for a husband, Rosemary had firmly taken control of her life. She knew Floyd wouldn’t. While he floundered from job to job she was making painstaking progress in a government bookkeeping job, climbing the career ladder despite her limited high-school education.

  “Floyd was a deduction for Rosemary. Kind of flaky,” said Bob. “But Rosemary was successful and Theresa always wanted to be. And she hated that.”

  The Cross sisters had witnessed poverty firsthand, and earlier than most of their peers. Harsh reality as well as sex, bars, and booze—the cheap escapes from that reality—had always been all around them. While they were growing up, Rio Linda had more than its share of residents who lived at or below the poverty line.

  Thanks to the untimely death of their mother and their father’s disabling disease, Theresa and Rosemary were plunged into the panic and desperation that comes with having no income, no resources, no home. The Cross sisters saw—or should have seen—what too many children, too many cartons of Kools, too many six-packs of Bud, and too many late-night escapes into too many places with names like the Easy Inn or the Thunderbird Lounge, can do to dreams.

  But only one of the sisters did see the correlation. While Rosemary pursued her bookkeeping career after giving birth to Daniel Lee, Theresa continued having children, earning no income, and visiting bars. She depended on her husband to pay the bills.

  Less than a year after the birth of her third child, Theresa delivered her fourth. William Robert Knorr was born on September 15, 1967, also at Mather Air Force Base. According to Bob, Theresa named the boy for her older half brother, William Hart Tapp.

  By this time Bob was a lance corporal in the marine corps and the family had moved to the San Francisco suburb of Daly City. A month after William’s birth Bob’s mother died.

  “At the end my mom accepted our marriage and seemed to get along with Theresa,” said Bob.

  But at the funeral, Theresa refused to go near her mother-in-law’s body. She wore a deep frown throughout the service and remained outside the viewing room when the rest of the family shuffled by to pay their last respects. Knorr attributed her behavior to the trauma of her own mother’s sudden death. Still, he found it hard to forgive her.

  Whether it was the fear of losing her own family, prompted by Mrs. Knorr’s death, or the fear that she might lose the allotment money to Evie and Pat Works, Theresa suddenly decided after nearly a year of leaving her first daughter with the Workses that she wanted Sheila back. Her reason: They were a bad influence.

  “She just blew up one time and we got in a big argument over my aunt and uncle because my uncle came up to visit and had Sheila with him and Sheila had a little fingernail polish on,” said Bob. “And Theresa said, ‘That’s it. I’m taking her back right now.’”

  Theresa was certain that Evie and Pat Works were planning to adopt Sheila so that they could collect her Social Security payments, according to Bob.

  “But my aunt and uncle had never even thought of asking for it,” he said. “They were taking care of Sheila just to help. Sheila was slow to potty-train, to talk, and my aunt and uncle had helped a lot.”

  Evie and Pat cared for Sheila, but they had their own reasons for not fighting to keep her. By now, the entire family knew about Theresa’s violent and often irrational temper.

  “Before she died, Bob’s mother told me, ‘If Theresa ever wants her back, give her back, because, if not, Bob will be killed,’” said Evie Works. “My sister died in October of ’67, and only a month afterward, Theresa told me she wanted Sheila back. So we packed her clothes, took her up to my brother-in-law’s place in Placerville, and we let Theresa have her back.”

  Bob’s trips as a marine burial escort increased over the following year, and he made no secret of the fact that he enjoyed traveling. He got to eat out at restaurants, stay in hotels, and steer clear of his wife’s wrath for days at a time. But all his travel only increased Theresa’s jealousy—both of the trips and what she believed to be Bob’s adulterous liaisons, all over the United States.

  “The Christmas of 1967 she made me open every present I bought her so she could see them before Christmas,” said Bob. “She thought I was fooling around, cheating on her, and I was buying all these gifts for somebody else, even though they were under our tree.”

  Holidays were a toss-up. Some were good, some bad. But Theresa didn’t need a Christmas or Easter for her suspicious behavior to show itself. Whenever Bob had to report back to Treasure Island for duty, she encouraged him to go AWOL and remain at home.

  “She almost screwed my service record up for me,” said Knorr. “She had me staying home with her and not reporting back to duty. See, she couldn’t control me when I was out on base.”

  Bob blamed Theresa for his failure to climb any higher in the marines than lance corporal. “She just sat around trying to think of ways to harass me,” he said. “When I look back on it now, it really wasn’t a very good time in my life.”

  Even the passion that brought them together had cooled. According to Knorr, “She used sex as a tool. If she wanted something and she couldn’t get it no other way, she’d get it that way. Or if she thought there was something in it for her, she’d use sex to get it.”

  She could be remarkably cruel, calling the ugly scars left by Bob’s war wounds disgusting disfigurements that made him less of a man than the one she had first slept with.

  She rarely smiled and never laughed. The good times they’d had together before they were married simply evaporated. Even when they went out, Bob and Theresa were no longer really a “couple.” Wherever they went, they took the kids. There was little opportunity for them to spend time alone. By the summer of 1968 they had four children between them and a fifth on the way.

  Theresa liked the idea of motherhood, according to Bob, but she hated what it did to her looks. After four pregnancies, she still hated the bloating, the sleepless nights, the aches and pains that appeared in lines across her face. And she felt that Bob didn’t show the proper attention to her while she was pregnant either.

  Bob maintains that he stayed true to Theresa throughout their marriage, despite the boredom that set in near the end. When he was on duty in the marine corps, there was simply no time to fool around, even if he had wanted to. But Theresa didn’t believe him. The longer they were married, the more volatile she became about her husband’s alleged adultery, until Bob came home from the base one night and found her, the children, the furniture … gone.

  “Theresa was supposed to pick me up from the base when I got off duty, and I called the house and I told her, ‘I’m pretty tired. I’m gonna take an hour’s nap. Why don’t you pick me up then?’ And she said, ‘No problem.’

  “I never did see her. When I got to the house, she’d had everything loaded and moved out. That’s the way she did things.”

  Theresa simply packed up all four children, James Cross, and the furniture and moved to a house in Rio Linda. Bob tracked her down by going to Rosemary’s—the second and last time he ever saw his sister-in-law.

  “I just wanted to find out what I did to make her move,” he said. “She said she wasn’t gonna put up with my cheating anymore.”

  When he finally convinced her to give it one more try, they moved back in together just as Bob’s enlistment in the marines was winding down and he was about to become a father for the third time. Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve of 1968, Theresa gave birth to the third of Robert Knorr’s children, and his namesake: Robert Wallace Knorr Jr.

  “He was the last baby born at Mather [Air Force Base Hospital]
in 1968,” recalled Bob.

  A new baby may have brought Bob and Theresa back together again, but it didn’t make things any easier. With five children to feed, the Knorrs’ only steady income was James Cross’s retirement checks and the two monthly Social Security allotments for Howard and Sheila. Bob went job hunting, but until he could get a good job and/or qualify for Veterans Administration disability payments, he had to be satisfied pumping gas at a local service station.

  Theresa worked as a nurse’s aide when she worked, earning about fifty dollars a month after taxes. Their new financial crunch didn’t dampen her spending habits, though. She used credit cards to buy everything from appliances to clothing to jewelry.

  “She wanted everything to be name-brand labels. Christian Dior and all that,” said Bob. “Yet she never really had [name-brand products]. She just made people think she did. Shortly after I got out of the service, she ran up the credit cards and buried me so far into debt, I wasn’t never going to get out.”

  Despite their bleak financial picture, the Knorrs bought a brand-new 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner with payments of $116 a month. Theresa got to drive it while Bob drove his old 1959 Chevy pickup truck.

  But buying her a new car didn’t help. By June of 1969 things had deteriorated between them to the point that Bob moved out of the family home. Theresa filed for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty.

  In her court declaration, she said that she was the fit parent, and it is in the best interest of the minor children that I have custody, subject to rights of reasonable visitation of the defendant.

  With the help of her lawyer, she went on to describe in detail the pitched battles she and Bob had been having:

  On numerous occasions, the exact dates of which I do not now recall, the defendant has threatened me with great physical violence and, in fact, carried out that threat at least once a day during this period. During the first week of June, 1969, defendant did strike me upon the lower extremities thereby causing injury to the body and shock and injury to the nervous system. [On] June 10, 1969, while I was driving the family automobile, with the defendant in the front seat, he attempted to force the automobile off the roadway and when prevented from doing so, he commenced beating me about the head. Based on the foregoing, I believe that the defendant intends to and will—unless restrained by order of this court from doing so and ordered to vacate the family residence—continue to annoy, molest, and injure me.