Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  Still, Rosemary attracted her share of boys, especially after she got her own car: a gasping old Studebaker with a radio that barely worked.

  “It looked like a torpedo. It was a riot,” remembered Heike. “We’d drive over to the Jolly Kone in Rio Linda after school or go down to Mel’s Drive-in in Sacramento, and one of us would have to get out of the car, stand on the pavement, and hold a wire to ground the radio to get it to work so that we could get the boys to come over and talk to us.”

  Skinny little Theresa, with her slight overbite, shock of Shirley Temple hair, and big brown eyes, was never asked along on these boy-hunting missions. She was only two years younger, but that was enough to drive Rosemary nuts.

  “Theresa was the pest. The younger sister who wouldn’t go away,” recalled Heike.

  Theresa was also her mother’s favorite.

  “You couldn’t ask for a better person [than Mrs. Cross], but she favored Theresa over Rosemary,” said Bea Howard, who knew the older of the two Cross girls from the Rebekah lodge, a local women’s auxiliary of the Oddfellows. Mrs. Martha Hafner sponsored her next-door neighbor’s older daughter for membership in the Rebekah’s youth group—another source of the growing rift between Rosemary and Theresa.

  Where Rosemary was social, Theresa tended to be more of a loner, recalled Bea Howard. Like several other women in town, she now believes that the sisters turned out the way they did in part because of Swannie Gay’s bias toward Theresa.

  “She was always saying, ‘Oh, my beautiful Theresa!’” recalled Mrs. Howard. “But I’ll tell you this: Theresa was a very selfish person. Rosemary wasn’t.”

  Theresa basked in her mother’s praise. In fact, she used to boast to school friends that Rosemary was jealous of her because Mrs. Cross openly admitted that she liked Theresa best.

  “Gay walked on water, to hear Theresa tell it. Her mother was a living angel,” said Bob Knorr.

  It was for that reason that the blow that befell Theresa outside the Hiland Market in nearby North Highlands on March 2, 1961, was as haunting as it was devastating. Gay Cross had a history of heart trouble. She was diabetic and dangerously overweight. But even so, her death was unexpected. It was only afterward that the coroner confirmed that she also suffered from arteriosclerosis—hardening of the arteries.

  “She loved her mom to death, and when her mom died, I think that had a lot to do with her mental state,” said Knorr. “Her mom picked her up from school one day, they went shopping, and as her mom was walking out of the grocery store, she just collapsed.”

  Theresa was standing at her mother’s side at 3:45 P.M. on a Thursday afternoon in March when her mother’s heart gave out. Bob Knorr said that she fell so hard against the doorjamb at the store entrance that she broke the frame. In later years Theresa would often repeat the awful story of how she caught her mother in her arms and helplessly watched as she went glassy-eyed and gasped before she died, waiting for the ambulance.

  “All I remember is just crying,” said Charlotte Harvey. “I just remember going into their front room and seeing several people gathered there and really not knowing what I was doing. And we just hugged and cried.”

  Swannie Gay Cross was fifty-three years old when she died. She was buried at Sunset Lawn Cemetery three miles south of Rio Linda on March 6, 1961, one week and one day before Theresa’s fifteenth birthday.

  “It seemed like Rosemary became the mother after her mother died,” remembered Heike. “During that time Theresa wasn’t much help. She was at a difficult age, a junior-high age. Rosemary was the strong one and had to take over. She held down a part-time job and went to high school. Basically, she had to grow up overnight.”

  Mrs. Cross’s death hastened the dissolution of the Cross family. At seventeen, while still a junior in high school, Rosemary took her mother’s place as nominal homemaker and quasi-mother to her little sister. She took a job as bookkeeper at the Thrift Way Market in order to help make ends meet. The carefree days of driving her old Studebaker down to K Street in Sacramento to flirt with the boys were now history. So was any hope of her going on to college.

  Theresa was not sympathetic, and the teenage rivalry between them escalated. Her grief metamorphosed into depression and desperation while Rosemary was trying to keep the family together and carry on.

  It was near Easter, just weeks after Mrs. Cross’s death, that Theresa convinced Janet Kelso to run away with her.

  “She had a way with guys and she found this one who wanted her to run away to Arkansas with him and she wanted me to come, too,” remembered Janet. “We had thirty dollars and he had a car. She talked me into it.”

  They didn’t get far. On the road east, somewhere near Sparks, Nevada, Theresa’s boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel, left the road, and rolled the car three times before it came to a stop. He had to have thirty stitches, but both girls emerged unscathed.

  “Before the police came, she told me, ‘Whatever you do, don’t say we’re runaways or they’ll put us in juvenile hall,’” said Janet. “All she could talk about was, ‘They’re going to find out I had sex. They’re going to find out I had sex.’ I said, ‘How? How are they going to find out?’ They could just tell, she said.

  “Well, the first thing I said when the police came was, ‘We ran away!’ and sure enough, they put us in juvenile hall. But it wasn’t bad. We played bingo and watched TV. I kind of liked it. But, boy, was I in big trouble when I got home.”

  Theresa wasn’t, though. Her father was a shaking shadow of his former self, now deeply grieved by the death of his beloved Swannie. The only one left to scold her was her big sister, and Theresa simply refused to listen to her. With rare moments of truce, the split between them began to expand into a lifelong gulf.

  “The whole time Theresa and I were married, I saw Rosemary twice,” said Bob Knorr. “It seemed like there was this big rivalry—a hatred between them when they’d see each other. They were very standoffish, very short with each other. One would say, ‘How ya doin’?’ The other would say, ‘Fine.’ And that was it.”

  Rosemary became secretly engaged to Floyd “Joe” Norris the following autumn. She had to, according to her half sister Clara. Though she would miscarry, Rosemary had become pregnant by Norris, a tall twenty-two-year-old apprentice carpenter from Rio Linda who was already losing his hair. He was unemployed at the time and lived at home like she did, with little prospect of a career. But Rosemary seemed happy enough when she was with him.

  “He was nice and gentle with her, and we were all so happy that Rosemary found somebody like that,” said Heike.

  Rosemary took the necessary classes to graduate midyear, ahead of her classmates, so that she could move out and marry Floyd Norris. She asked Heike to stand up for her at the wedding as her maid of honor.

  A Roman Catholic priest married Floyd and Rosemary on January 6, 1962. It was a typical overcast Sacramento Valley day, but the most unusual thing Heike remembered about the ceremony wasn’t the weather. When she looked around at the handful of guests, Heike realized she was the only representative from the bride’s side. Neither Theresa nor James Cross, nor any other member of Rosemary’s family or friends showed up.

  The reason was simple, according to Clara. Rosemary hadn’t told anyone from her family that she was getting married. In fact, she continued to keep it secret for several weeks afterward because she knew that Jim would not approve, even though it was a Catholic ceremony.

  In the photos from Rosemary’s wedding day, Heike stands out as the only one dressed in bright colors. Everyone from the groom to the priest to Floyd’s deaf older brother, William, who served as best man, seems to be wearing somber, dark clothing. In the photos, even Rosemary’s dress looks gray.

  After Jim Cross discovered Rosemary’s deception and Floyd had to find them a place to live, the newlyweds moved into a trailer behind Ken Green’s home on Tenth Street in Rio Linda. They remained there for at least the next half-dozen years—through a series of Floyd’s lacklu
ster jobs, through Rosemary’s budding career as a bookkeeper for the state of California, and through the birth of their two sons, Joseph and Daniel.

  “They were not the type of people who went and pushed themselves off on people,” said Green. “They didn’t have friends over too often. No real visitors.”

  The mysterious absence of Rosemary’s father and sister from her wedding and her life didn’t last long. Although their visits were infrequent, Green remembers Theresa Cross and her father stopping in to see the Norris family.

  By that time James Cross had become totally unemployable. He had been able to collect disability and some welfare for his two daughters, but when Rosemary married and left home, the state cut his income. He had to put the family home up for sale shortly after Swannie’s death and sold it for a lower price than it was worth, according to Larry Hafner—probably because Cross was desperate for the money. He spent the rest of his life relying on his daughters to look after him.

  In the months following her mother’s death, Theresa watched helplessly as her whole world quickly collapsed—first, with Rosemary’s departure, and next, the forced sale of the only home she had ever really known. It didn’t take long for her to follow Rosemary’s lead and begin looking around for a man who would be willing and able to take care of her and her disabled father.

  After her ill-fated attempt to run away, Theresa met an Alabama farmhand who had followed his older brothers and sister to California in 1959 to cash in on the post-World War II construction boom.

  Clifford Clyde Sanders was five years older than Theresa and easy prey for the blossoming young dark-haired beauty. When he met her during one of his cruises past North Highlands High School near his brother Tom’s house, where he was living at the time, Sanders was instantly smitten. Theresa quickly wrapped him around her little finger and taught him the meaning of the term “heavy petting.” He wanted her. She made him beg.

  “She always had a big ego and bragged about herself,” said Janet Kelso. “She liked to have this power over other people, especially men. So she made him get down on his knees and ask her dad to give his consent.”

  James Cross reluctantly agreed and accompanied his willful daughter and her anxious fiancé on a weekend trip to Reno, Nevada. Theresa married Sanders on September 29, 1962, with James Cross’s shaky “X” marking the marriage license at the spot where parental consent is required. Mrs. Theresa Sanders did not return to North Highlands High for the fall semester of her junior year.

  “I stayed friends with her and used to go over to their apartment to visit,” remembered Janet. “Once, they asked me to spend the night. Now, I was only sixteen myself and still pretty naive about things, and they had only one bed. They told me to get in with them and I did. Along about the middle of the night, Cliff’s hand crept over and got me. Well, I flew out of bed so fast. But I didn’t give it too much thought because I thought he was asleep and just thought I was Theresa.”

  But Clifford was twenty-one and not so naive.

  “He was a player,” said Bob Knorr, who never met Clifford Sanders himself, but heard the stories about him years later through their mutual circle of drinking buddies. “He liked the ladies. Theresa made him out to be the toughest guy in the world, but my friends who knew him back then—they said he wasn’t. He did keep her in line, though.”

  The tall, gawky Alabama farm boy was easygoing enough when he was sober. But Clifford fit the classic mold of a Southern good ol’ boy when he’d had a few. His taste for liquor and barroom brawls did not mix well with Theresa’s fear of losing her meal ticket to booze or another woman. Their marriage became a formula for disaster almost from the beginning.

  Even if he did want to chase after other women, Cliff Sanders was neither rich nor handsome. His buckteeth, hunched shoulders, and sheep eyes gave him a hayseed appearance reminiscent of TV’s Gomer Pyle. The chances of Theresa losing her grip on him to another woman were exceedingly slim.

  “She was jealous of him, but I don’t know why,” recalled Clifford’s older brother.

  Tom Sanders, who took his younger brother under his wing when he came out to California from Alabama, maintains that Clifford was no more wild than any other young man his age. He liked fishing, beer, and a little mix-it-up now and then at the local cocktail lounge. Tom took a dislike to Theresa instantly.

  “I told him not to marry her, but when [young men] got their mind set on what they’re going to do, they do it. They don’t listen to nobody,” he said.

  Like his brother-in-law Floyd, Cliff Sanders had drifted from job to job since coming to California. But once he was married, he tried harder to find a vocation. Tom got him a job helping to put up a water tower near Sacramento State University. Clifford might have been an unskilled day laborer, but he saw to it that the rent was paid and food was on the table.

  Shortly after they were married, Cliff and his new bride moved into a rear one-bedroom unit in a duplex on Q Street in North Highlands, a few miles from the trailer on Tenth Street where her sister and brother-in-law lived.

  The rivalry between the two sisters persisted after they were both married—even into the maternity ward. On July 16, 1963, almost ten months after their wedding, Theresa gave birth to Howard Sanders, her first son. The very next day in the same hospital, Rosemary bore Floyd Norris his first son, Joseph.

  Cliff and Theresa had been married over a year before he was eligible to join the Carpenters Local 586 and gain some of the medical, pension, and insurance benefits that go along with union membership. He hired on steady as an apprentice carpenter at the American Safeway Scaffolding Company on West Capitol Avenue in Sacramento. Though he had no education and only his hands to make a living, the rawboned and rowdy Cliff Sanders worked hard to support his young wife and infant son. He named the boy Howard after his own father and gave him his own middle name, Clyde.

  “Clifford thought the world of that boy, and he was just starting to do well with his job and all,” recalled Tom Sanders.

  Though they hired baby-sitters and still went out together on occasion, the happy young couple clashed in private. As well as he appeared to be doing on the outside, Clifford was having a tough time adjusting to domestic life with Theresa.

  She was convinced that he was philandering and constantly confronted him with her suspicions. She told friends and family that her big ol’ six-foot, 150-pound husband often bragged about the women he’d bedded, before and after their marriage. The jealousy, touched off by one too many beers, often led to hand-to-hand domestic combat in which pint-sized Theresa was inevitably the loser.

  “When Theresa married that first guy, Sanders, she started doing strange things,” said Esther Davis. “At my mom’s house one night Theresa came over and asked to hide because she was scared to death of him. He threatened her.”

  There were truces for a time, but a split between twenty-two-year-old Clifford and his fiery young wife seemed inevitable.

  In the spring of 1964, while Howard was still nursing, Theresa became pregnant for a second time. Now it was Clifford’s turn to scream infidelity. He questioned whether the child she was carrying was his.

  She had had enough.

  It was June of that year when eighteen-year-old Theresa and young Howard Clyde Sanders moved out of the house on Q Street and into a tiny white house in the Swiss dairy town of Galt, some twenty miles south of Sacramento.

  Galt was as flat, rural, and dirt-poor as Rio Linda. One of its chief sources of municipal revenue was traffic tickets, issued with regularity to motorists on nearby State Highway 99 after they failed to see the reduced-speed-limit signs as they zipped past the town. Outside of its reputation as a notorious speed trap, Galt was best known as a dairy settlement at the north end of the San Joaquin Valley wine country that produced milk, not wine.

  “Galt was fairly quiet in 1964,” said Ysabel May, widow of the longtime Sacramento County sheriff’s constable stationed in Galt. “In fact, Galt was fairly quiet all through the sixtie
s.”

  The whole southern half of Sacramento County was so placid back then that her husband, Resident Sheriff’s Constable Fred “Buster” May, would take the drunk-and-disorderly calls at his home as well as at his one-man office—sometimes, in the middle of the night. He’d roll out of bed and go to a bar where a donnybrook had turned serious or to the home where spouses were pounding each other with tire irons and rolling pins. The threat of violence to a law enforcement officer was not as commonplace as it is today, Ysabel May said. Buster would simply “storm in like a bull in a china shop and haul them in,” she recalled.

  “The backseat of the squad car got splashed with blood once in a while when people got drunk and knifed each other,” she continued, remembering the worst of the violent crime committed in and around Galt. Anything more serious, like murder, simply didn’t happen. Few people had guns, explained Ysabel. Drunks and madmen with knives could be dangerous, but rarely lethal.

  “There were a lot of knifings in those days, but not too many shootings,” she said.

  After a cooling-off period, Clifford had finally followed Theresa to Galt and reconciled—to be with the son he adored, if for no other reason, according to his brother, Tom. But the war between him and Theresa quickly erupted anew.

  James Cross had moved in with his daughter and grandson when they relocated to Galt. Now totally disabled by Parkinson’s disease, he remained powerless to referee the battles that exploded between Theresa and his son-in-law with increasing frequency. While Clifford was mild-mannered and sober most of the time, Theresa remained willful and stubborn whether she had been drinking or not. After a few drinks Clifford could be taunted into an eruption. When things got too bad, Clifford would bat his wife down and simply walk out. At the beginning of the marriage he’d leave for only a few hours, but by the time they had moved to Galt, he would sometimes leave for days.

  On June 22, 1964, Clifford came home to the little house at the end of Elm Avenue, just a dozen yards from the railroad tracks. He drank, argued with his wife, and threw her purse against the living-room window, breaking the glass. Then he hit her, she later told police. But this time she took action. On the advice of Constable May, who lived across the street, she went to the Galt police. She showed them the bruises around her wrists and neck, told them she wanted to make a citizen’s arrest, and filed assault-and-battery charges against her husband. But when it came time to book her husband, she refused to press charges. Clifford was released before the first paperwork was ever completed.