Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  Then, one day in the spring of 1973, more than a year and half later, Ron Pulliam came to see Bob and Georgia. He was by himself. He looked haggard, angry, distraught.

  “Pulliam pulled up in a car, came to the door, and said he couldn’t find Theresa,” said Georgia.

  The story he told Bob and Georgia didn’t surprise Bob all that much. He’d lived through it himself. It seemed that Theresa had a drinking problem and a boyfriend—maybe more than one.

  At first, Ron explained, the Pulliams had seemed to be happy enough. They were a family in the traditional sense, with Ron bringing home the bacon and Theresa keeping house, staying with the kids. It was after they bought the place on William Way that things began to get dicey. Theresa would go off to the store or out visiting a friend and be gone for hours. Sometimes she didn’t return until long after midnight.

  Then it got worse. She would be gone all night long and the kids either became the responsibility of Ron or, while he was at work, Howard. The older children were missing school, and Pulliam himself had to call in sick a lot to work because Theresa wasn’t home half the time to watch the little ones. Then, one day, she disappeared altogether.

  “He had almost lost his job, trying to find her and staying home taking care of the kids,” said Georgia. “He asked Bob if he could borrow some money to help feed the kids.”

  Pulliam was a tolerant man, but he was not a doormat. He hadn’t simply stood by and let Theresa get away with her profligate ways. By the time he showed up at the Knorrs’ doorstep with his sorry tale, it had been nearly a year since he had filed for divorce. On March 7, 1972, twenty days short of their first anniversary, the Pulliams had legally separated. A week later, on March 15, Pulliam formally filed for dissolution of the marriage.

  Perhaps he believed that the sobering threat of divorce might bring Theresa back into line, in much the same way that Theresa’s divorce suit against Bob in 1969, before they traveled to Spokane, temporarily got them back together. Going to court could be a kind of shock treatment that would make her snap out of her impulsive, self-indulgent ways.

  But any good that going to court might have done was soon lost. Theresa continued to use the William Way house as little more than a way station between her increasingly frequent absences. The pattern was familiar to Bob: she’d leave, come home with booze on her breath, fight with Pulliam, make up—often in bed—and settle down for a few days before taking off again.

  Pulliam was not so fooled that Theresa was able to convince him through pleas or kisses to drop his divorce suit. His suit continued to wind its way through the court system, and on September 27, 1972, the Pulliams were officially no longer husband and wife. Ironically again, it was Judge Charles W. Johnson who presided over the end of Theresa’s marriage. Judge Johnson granted the interlocutory decree based on irreconcilable differences and gave Pulliam the house on William Way, plus the furniture. All Theresa got in the divorce was their 1967 Ford Country Sedan—the one she was always using to run off to “visit a friend.”

  Yet she and the children continued to live with Pulliam. Bob and Georgia speculated that Pulliam permitted this chiefly because he had grown so attached to her children. Terry Knorr has another theory.

  “I think Ron really did love my mom, but she didn’t love him,” she said. “I don’t think she’s capable of it.”

  Nevertheless, the divorcees continued to live as man and wife.

  Indeed, just before Christmas of 1972, more than three months after the divorce was final, Theresa and Ron went to a Sacramento department store and bought a dishwasher, refrigerator, and stove, signing two separate credit agreements on two separate occasions as Mr. and Mrs. Ron Pulliam, husband and wife. However rocky their marriage had been and however final the divorce decree, Pulliam was still willing to call Theresa his wife and was still keeping house with her at the start of 1973.

  But even Pulliam’s remarkable patience was pushed over the edge when Theresa flatly admitted one day that she had found a younger man and planned to live with him.

  Terry remembers his name as Ron Bullington—a serviceman from New Mexico stationed at nearby Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento. She remembered that her mother had met Bullington the same way she’d met most of the men in her life: in a bar. Unlike Pulliam, Bullington seemed still to wallow in adolescent self-absorption.

  When Bob heard about him, he just laughed. “She was going to make him a businessman,” he said. “Take him down, get his fingernails manicured, get him well-groomed, haircuts, and dress him right and everything. I said, ‘What’s the matter? Can’t he dress himself?’ I guess he was quite a bit younger than her.”

  All Pulliam wanted now was to be rid of her. Like Bob, he was even willing to sacrifice the bonds he had made with the children in order to shed himself of Theresa’s lies and addictions. But Theresa wanted him to pay a higher price than the ’67 Ford sedan.

  On February 22, 1973, Ron went back to court and signed a stipulation that he would be responsible for $2,350 in community debts that he and Theresa had chalked up during their short marriage. He would pay off Sears, Household Finance, and all the rest of it. Theresa was to be responsible only for two hundred dollars in charges made to Weinstock’s, a department store where she bought her clothes. She had recently become an Amway distributor and figured on supplementing her meager income from her children’s support checks that way.

  But Pulliam was not yet finished paying for his bad judgment in marrying Theresa. After years of scrimping and saving, her sister, Rosemary, had recently moved her family out of the trailer in Rio Linda and into a brand-new town house in a wooded development in the suburb of Citrus Heights. Theresa wanted her own piece of real estate, too, and threatened to contest the court decision to grant him the house on William Way if he didn’t help her get her own place. Her approach was alternately to bat her eyelashes and threaten to return to court.

  Pulliam reluctantly agreed to help Theresa buy her own house in the suburb of Orangevale, just a few miles east of Rosemary’s new house. On March 5, 1973, Theresa signed a quitclaim deed, granting her share of the William Way property to Pulliam. A month later escrow closed on a four-bedroom, two-bath house at 5539 Bellingham Way, purchased solely in Theresa’s name for a price of $21,000.

  “That’s how she got that house,” said Terry. “My mother married for the money.”

  But it wasn’t over yet. Theresa had a new boyfriend and a big new house in a new neighborhood, but she had almost no furniture. On April 20, 1973, while Ron was at work, she had her boyfriend back a truck into Pulliam’s driveway and begin removing everything he could load, from appliances like the washer, dryer, and refrigerator down to the ashtrays, flashlights, extension cords, pots, pans, and her toothbrush.

  Four days later Ron drove to the house on Bellingham Way and confronted her. From the front door, he saw his TV set and the refrigerator they’d recently bought together. He left in a huff and reported the theft to both the sheriff’s office and the Sacramento district attorney. It didn’t matter that he had court documents showing that he was awarded the house and the furniture in the divorce. It didn’t matter that he had helped her buy the new house on Bellingham Way or that he had accepted the burden of almost all of their community debts. Both the sheriff and the DA refused to do anything. It wasn’t theft, they said. It was a civil matter.

  Ron was furious. He filed a civil contempt charge with the same court that had granted him his divorce seven months earlier. Once again, Judge Charles W. Johnson heard the case.

  In her defense, Theresa flatly stated that she and Pulliam had been living together in the same home as husband and wife for over a year since Pulliam first filed for divorce. They had even filed a joint income-tax return for 1972. In fact, Theresa claimed, Pulliam never even told her he had filed for divorce until after the interlocutory decree was final.

  When they finally did decide to split up once and for all, she said, they had agreed how the furniture and other househ
old items were to be divided. She was to get certain items, including all the furniture that she had taken, and he was to get the rest. It was only after Pulliam discovered that Theresa had a boyfriend that he decided to charge her with contempt, Theresa told the judge.

  She had stolen nothing, she said. In fact, some of the items he accused her of stealing from him—an antique telephone, a light fixture, plywood, and a roll of linoleum—he had actually stolen from his employer, Western Pacific Railroad, Theresa told the judge.

  Other items, such as silverware and mixing bowls, had belonged to her mother. The crystal ashtray that Pulliam had listed in his inventory of stolen goods was actually a gift from Theresa’s employer, Amway.

  Before the hearing was complete, Theresa brought out the same trump card that had worked for her in the Clifford Sanders murder trial: spousal violence.

  Pulliam had listed a missing .22 pistol among the items that Theresa and her boyfriend had loaded into his truck. Theresa’s explanation to Judge Johnson was that she felt she had to remove the pistol “to a place of safekeeping.”

  When husband threatened to kill wife, she took gun to home of a friend, she wrote in her sworn declaration.

  Judge Johnson was once more persuaded by the tearful pleadings and the lousy luck of the poor, pretty Rio Linda girl he’d seen acquitted in his courtroom nearly nine years earlier. She did look considerably older, but her life seemed just as out of control as it had been so many years earlier, when she wept on the witness stand about the way Clifford Sanders had threatened to kill her. On May 15, 1973, Judge Johnson found Theresa not guilty of contempt. Furthermore, she got to keep all that she’d taken from Pulliam’s house.

  Pulliam’s disgust with the court system was now as deep as his disgust for the sheriff’s department or the district attorney. Even with her track record, a weepy Theresa Cross Sanders Knorr Pulliam stood a better chance of hoodwinking the justice system than a sensible man with a clean record who had treated his wife and stepchildren with kindness and done all the right things. She now had both his car and his furniture, as well as her own house. To make absolutely sure she could not steal anything further from him, Pulliam filed a homestead document with the Sacramento County Recorder’s Office on June 13, 1973, officially noting that he was divorced and that the house on William Way belonged solely to him. When he sold the house a year later, he alone got the equity.

  Time passed. Ron Bullington was discharged from the service and, like all the other men in her life, eventually left Theresa, apparently returning home to New Mexico. “Bullington was a mama’s boy,” recalled Robert. “His mom basically ran his life, and when she told him to stop seeing my mother, he did.”

  Her mother found other boyfriends, but none who ever stayed with her for very long. She took to demanding that they take her to a hotel rather than drive back to her home to spend the night. She did not want her amorous activities to be witnessed by her children, she explained.

  Some of Theresa’s boyfriends left positive memories with the children. One was a white-haired Lithuanian contractor who installed a shower in one of the bathrooms on Bellingham Way. Another was an Italian named Al who worked in a restaurant and came by the house when Theresa was gone one evening, offering to cook dinner for the kids. The odor of olive oil and artichokes filled the house when Theresa came home, but far from being pleased, she slapped the children around for letting Al in. She never let anyone in her house after her breakups with Pulliam and Bullington. Not neighbors. Not lovers. Not family.

  She and Rosemary never visited each other. Though they lived only a few miles apart, Rosemary’s two boys rarely saw their cousins. In fact, Theresa and her children saw less and less of any of her old friends from Rio Linda. Her life revolved increasingly around the house on Bellingham Way, which she seldom left except to go to work or visit the bars. Her children had become her chief companions as well as her primary possessions.

  In the fall of 1972, as her marriage to Pulliam reached the final stages of disintegration, Theresa had begun paying attention to the newspaper headlines in a way she hadn’t since the summer of 1963, when she was awaiting trial for Clifford’s murder. This time the murder trial she followed was someone else’s: her half brother Bill’s.

  “My mother always talked about her brother Bill,” said Terry. “William Hart Tapp, who is a convict. That generation. They were all a bunch of lunatics running around without shrinks.”

  On October 8, 1972, a pair of Northern California newlyweds, Jay and Viola Taresh, were found dead on the living-room floor of their farmhouse near the town of Orland, about a hundred miles north of Sacramento. Their throats had been slashed so savagely that the knife left inch-deep cuts in the wooden floor. In addition, Jay Taresh had been held to the floor while he was shot three times with a .32-caliber gun: once in the chest, once through the top of the head, and once between the eyes. The apparent motive had been robbery: the place looked as though it was being ransacked when the unlucky Tareshes arrived home from visiting friends and happened through their front door at the wrong moment.

  Following a weeklong investigation, authorities arrested William and Robert Tidwell, two rowdy brothers in their early twenties with long records of violent behavior and jail time. In fact, both Tidwells had been convicted of murder in 1967, but their convictions were overturned by the California Supreme Court in 1971. They were granted a new trial and acquitted.

  A few days after the Tidwells were charged with the Taresh murders, a third suspect was arrested. He was older and had spent much of his adult life in Folsom State Prison, and it was he who police first believed to have been the slasher. A forty-four-year-old Chico auto mechanic who had once worked in a slaughterhouse, the suspect had a twenty-year history of felonies ranging from assault and burglary to armed robbery.

  His name was William Hart Tapp.

  It wasn’t the first time Theresa’s brother, Bill, had turned up in the newspapers. Back in the summer of 1967, when Theresa was trying to come up with a name for her first son with Bob Knorr, her notorious half brother popped up in the headlines as a suspect in a bizarre kidnapping/robbery case near Oroville. He may never have known it, but brother Bill became the inspiration for naming her son William Robert Knorr.

  According to newspaper accounts from the 1967 case, a thirty-three-year-old waitress at an Oroville tavern told sheriff’s deputies that a drunken Tapp had put a knife to her back while she was getting cigarettes for a customer. He ordered her to his car, told her to give him her money, and then made her strip while he held his knife to her throat.

  He drove off with her in the car, holding her head down on the seat so that she couldn’t see where he was taking her. On the way he tried to get her to take some pills and get as loaded as he was, but she refused. When Tapp arrived at his house in the rural outskirts of Oroville, he forced the naked waitress out of the car and into the living room. When he went to the kitchen for a cigarette, she streaked out the front door.

  “I awoke to someone outside screaming, ‘He’s gonna kill me!’” recalled Leona Kohnke, who lived with her husband next to Tapp’s place. “All of a sudden this woman was scratching outside our bedroom window. We went out to the front porch and Tapp was trying to drag her away. And she was stark naked.”

  Leona and Richard Kohnke had witnessed Tapp’s brutality before. They were sure he was a wife beater, a fact confirmed just a few weeks before the kidnapping incident. According to newspaper accounts, Tapp had been charged with breaking his wife’s jaw with a sockful of buckshot, but the jury deadlocked ten to two for conviction and he did not go to jail. His wife had finally had enough, however. She took their sons and left.

  But Tapp didn’t reserve his brutality for humans. For a time after he had gotten out of Folsom Prison and moved in next door to the Kohnkes, he worked for the local humane society. On occasion he’d bring animals home, tie them up, and tease them. Once, the Kohnkes watched in horror as he hamstrung a cat and left it on the front lawn t
o die.

  They were afraid to intervene. Tapp owned a German shepherd that he taught to kill chickens and nip at his neighbors’ horses. It was the dog, in fact, that the Kohnkes thought was causing the ruckus on their front porch when they switched on the light that night and saw their drunken neighbor trying to drag off a nude waitress by the hair, as if he were a caveman and she were his naked prey. Richard Kohnke got his rifle and told Tapp to turn her loose.

  “He just let go and she ran in our house. She ran all the way through the living room and into the kitchen,” recalled Mrs. Kohnke. “She sat down at the kitchen table, shivering. Her feet were all bloody from running over the gravel road to get away from Tapp. He had cut her with the knife, too, it looked like. She was bleeding all over.

  “The neighbors all heard the screaming and came over. We called the sheriff. But Tapp got in his car and drove off with his lights out, down the road.”

  He hid out for three days but, once he sobered up, turned himself in to sheriff’s deputies.

  Following the kidnapping incident, Tapp went back to jail for a while, but was out on parole in the fall of 1972, when the Tidwells asked him if he’d like to join them in their expedition to the Tareshes’ farm. Again, he blamed his behavior on booze and pills. When he was sober, he insisted, he was a different person.

  “He was a killer, but he was very personable,” said Robert Quall, the prosecutor who put both Tapp and the Tidwell brothers behind bars following a two-month trial in 1973.

  Tapp pleaded guilty and turned against the Tidwells on the witness stand, testifying that he held the Tareshes down while the Tidwells slashed and shot them. Tapp remained a charmer, even when it came to making a deal with the prosecution. All he demanded of Quall and the district attorney’s office was that his jailers take him out for a steak dinner at the Holiday Inn the night before he was to take the witness stand.