Whatever Mother Says... Read Online Free PDF Page A

more awful life within those four brutal walls.
    Terry explained to investigators more than fifteen years later: “I didn’t know what he was doing; well, I knew what he was doing wasn’t right, but I wasn’t, you know, I was afraid to tell anybody, and … I went to my mom because it hurt.”
    Theresa Knorr was outraged when she heard that Howard had molested his half sister. She broke a chair over the boy’s back and seriously beat him to make sure he never did it again.
    Howard Sanders later confessed to having illicit sex with his sister in dramatic tones to two stunned Placer County investigators during a tape-recorded interview conducted at his home in Sacramento on November 16, 1993.
    POLICE OFFICER : I’m going to make this very short and sweet. There’s been allegations of molestation and that you molested Theresa, your sister. Are those allegations true?
    SANDERS : Yes.
    POLICE OFFICER : And that was sodomy, anal sex.
    SANDERS : Yes.
    Terry will never know if that attack by her brother sparked the eventual terrors that filled the Knorr household, but shortly after being molested by Howard, bad things started to happen.
    The first incident occurred when the mother of one of Terry’s best friends, Jennifer—who lived on Sutton, just around the corner from the house in Orangevale—called at Theresa Knorr’s front door to offer her some of her daughter’s clothes as a gift.
    Theresa Knorr was furious. She thought Terry was going around telling people that the family didn’t have any money, that they were so poor they couldn’t afford to buy the children clothes.
    Once Jennifer’s mother had gone, as later recounted by Terry, Theresa Knorr grabbed her youngest daughter and made her strip naked before dragging her through the house.
    Then she grabbed a piece of rope, wrapped it around Terry’s neck and threw it over a door. Theresa Knorr’s two sons, Billy Bob and Robert, then held the rope, forcing Terry to stay in one position while her mother beat her with a weeping willow limb until she almost passed out. Terry remained jammed against the door throughout.
    Theresa Knorr’s violent outbursts seemed to escalate when she was introduced to witchcraft by Chester Harris after he became her husband.
    Theresa immediately began claiming that her daughter Suesan was involved in devil worshiping. And she began making veiled references to Suesan plotting to kill her mother before she reached the age of eighteen.
    “To fulfill her contract with the devil…”
    According to Terry, something happened between Chester Harris and Suesan. It was something that may have driven a wedge between her and her mother. It also had the effect of breaking up Theresa Knorr’s marriage to Harris.
    After the split with Harris, Theresa Knorr began frequently disappearing from the house on Bellingham, in Orangevale, for days at a time, leaving Howard—just fourteen—to look after the rest of the clan.
    On one occasion she took off for at least four days after running out of the door of the house in front of the children. She came back with the police, claiming that Howard had threatened her.
    Howard—sitting in the living room with a friend—cried because he felt so betrayed by his mother’s abandonment and her false accusations against him.
    Years later Howard wondered whether Theresa Knorr had been suffering from a nervous breakdown at the time. What other reason could there be for a mother to run out the front door and leave her children in the care of a fourteen-year-old?
    Theresa Knorr gave her son a bizarre explanation when he asked where she had been during those four days she disappeared.
    “She told me she had found some pennies and she threw these pennies away and that, you know, these pennies showed back up in the motel where she was staying, and no matter what she did, these pennies kept showing back up, you know,” said Howard.
    “I mean, I didn’t understand it at the time. But looking back on it, I mean,