Chester laughed at the two frightened little boys. After that incident he said Bill was the coward and Robert was the one with the balls to stand up to the devil. He would be a killer.
“I remember that to this day,” said Robert.
Chester had names for all of Theresa’s children. Besides Robert the Killer and William the Coward, he called Terry the Little Stripper and Sheila, who had grown up pretty but slightly retarded, Suesan’s Dog.
“It seemed to be a thing that was repeated over and over again,” said Robert. Since she was very young, Sheila had always followed Suesan around, patterning her own behavior after her younger, brighter sister. It wasn’t just Chester who slapped Sheila with the unflattering name. Everyone, including her own mother, told her she was Suesan’s Dog.
Suesan herself, however, was Chester’s pet. A precocious ten-year-old with an insatiable appetite for books, she was to be famous and have a harem of men at her beck and call when she grew up, according to Harris. Unlike her brothers and sisters, Suesan was flattered by her hideous stepfather, and found him to be as intellectually intriguing as he was physically repulsive. When Harris was sober, they carried on lively, even stimulating dialogues about everything from mythology to Chet’s favorite subject, politics.
“This guy bought my sis a puzzle book for kids four or five years older than she was,” said Terry. “My sister was later tested and found to be four years advanced of herself. She was a genius, like my aunt Rosemary.”
Suesan’s spindly child’s body was just beginning to fill out a bit, and she was showing the promise of growing up to be as attractive a teenager as her mother had been. Suesan tested bright enough in school to be placed in accelerated classes, but she remained shy and nearsighted, her natural good looks marred by thick eyeglasses. Chet drew her out of her shell, and for a little while it looked like he would finally become the father he never was to his own two daughters back in Pittsburgh.
But Chet’s interest in Suesan was not enough to keep the marriage together. His interest in pornography disgusted Theresa and her interest in other men enraged him. Near the end of their short time together Theresa went through a ritual each night before turning out the lights that absolutely unnerved her new husband.
“When she went to sleep, she put a gun under her pillow,” said Terry Smith, Chester’s daughter. “It scared the living bejeezus out of Dad because he didn’t know if it was because of him or what.”
Less than three months after they tied the knot, Chet threw Theresa out of the house and Theresa filed for divorce.
The way Bob Knorr heard it, things finally unraveled when Harris got a call one day from a nervous acquaintance who confessed to Harris that Theresa had gone out drinking with him and wound up giving him oral sex.
Word got around fast in gossip-driven Rio Linda. Surprisingly, sympathies were as much with Theresa as they were with the cuckolded Chester Harris.
“He married Theresa and she wanted to go out two nights out of the week, and he tracked her down and she was going with a new man,” said Bea Howard. “So he wanted out of the marriage. I said if he was stupid enough to marry that much of a younger person, that’s his hard luck!”
The house on Bellingham Way had been sold, but fortunately it had not yet gone through escrow. Theresa moved back in, derailed the sale, and took the house off the market.
On November 22, 1976, Theresa filed an affidavit with the court in support of her suit for divorce from Chester Harris. In it, she set out her version of the events that led to divorce:
At the time of my marriage, Respondent promised that we would live together as husband and wife. After the marriage, he instructed me to pose for lewd photographs and pornographic movies. When I refused, he evicted me and my children from the house.
The Respondent has attempted to choke me and I fear possible physical harm. I request that he be restrained from either annoying, molesting, or harassing either me or my children.
Chet had tricked and manipulated her, selling off more than $1,000 of her personal property since she had moved out, she wrote in her affidavit. What was more, she complained, the addition to Harris’s Rio Linda home turned out not to have been planned for Theresa and her children at all.
I learned that he had no intention of living with me as husband and wife and that the addition to the house was not for me but rather to be used by other people for immoral purposes. I request that Respondent be restrained from transferring or otherwise encumbering the title to the real property located at 6936 8th Street, Rio Linda, California, so that the court may decide my separate property interest in it.
On the basis of Respondent’s promise that we would live together as husband and wife, I allowed him to list my Orangevale home with a realtor. Because he evicted me and my children from the Rio Linda home, I, of course, must now live in my Orangevale home. Respondent is still trying to sell my home and I request that he be restrained from selling or ordering the sale of my residence at 5539 Bellingham Way.
The marriage lasted two months and seven days. In addition to her Bellingham Way address, her personal effects, and a lien against Harris’s Rio Linda home in the amount of $8,923.86, Theresa also demanded the washer, the dryer, the refrigerator, deep freeze, TV, dishwasher, stereo, furniture, and a statue of the Venus de Milo, with pedestal.
There was not much of a fight, though. Chet Harris gave in to almost all of Theresa’s demands.
“She got him good. He had to go take a loan out to get his own house back,” said Knorr. “He had to pay her off in order for her to sign his deed back over to him.”
It wasn’t luck or goodwill that won the day for Theresa and her children. She didn’t go to court alone. Theresa was no stranger to the justice system and knew the value of a good lawyer. The first thing she did after suing for divorce was to pay a visit to an old adversary.
“A woman named Theresa Harris shows up one day and asks me to represent her in her divorce,” said Donald Dorfman, the former deputy district attorney who had prosecuted Theresa Sanders for murder in 1964.
Dorfman, who had left the DA’s office to become a defense attorney in part because of his disgust over the outcome of the Sanders murder case, didn’t recognize Theresa when she first walked into his office in the fall of 1976. It wasn’t until she told him who she was that the usually unflappable lawyer dropped his jaw, made a quick recovery, and asked her why she decided to ask him to represent her.
“I liked the way you came after me at the trial,” she said calmly.
Dorfman referred Theresa to another attorney, but she named him in her divorce papers as her attorney anyway, along with Carl Swain, the lawyer who actually did represent her.
As it turned out, Dorfman’s wasn’t the only name from the past to show up in her divorce suit. In one of his final actions on the bench, Sacramento County Superior Court judge Charles W. Johnson declared the marriage between Chet and Theresa Harris officially ended as of December 17, 1976.
The sixty-four-year-old jurist who had presided over Theresa’s murder trial thirteen years earlier had also signed off on her two previous divorces, from Robert Knorr and Ron Pulliam. He never indicated in any of those divorces that he recognized the petite young woman he had once declared innocent of murder.
At the end of 1976, Johnson declared his intention to retire, following a barrage of bad publicity. In the spring, the Sacramento County Bar Association had singled him out in a poll of trial attorneys. Charles Johnson was voted the worst judge in the county.
Johnson refused to acknowledge the humiliation, telling a reporter for Chet Harris’s newspaper, the Union, that the only reason he had decided to step down from the bench was to “let a younger man devote his greater energy to the task.”
He ignored the bar association’s accusations that he failed to follow or keep up on changes in the law, showed blatant favoritism toward friends and political cronies, and based his decisions on whim. The vote of no confidence was “merely an expres
sion of pique on the part of a vociferous minority of the attorneys,” he said.
Johnson died two years later, exactly fourteen years and two months after setting Mrs. Theresa Sanders free and declaring the murder case of Clifford Clyde Sanders closed.
Whatever else she may have won in her divorce from Chet Harris, Theresa seemed to have lost her last shred of sociability, as well as her taste for men. “She dropped out of sight right after Chet Harris,” said Bob Knorr. “That was the last contact I had with her. I never even got to see the kids while she was with Chet Harris. There was always a reason why I couldn’t see them. But after that, I didn’t see her or the kids at all.”
IX
Back at the house on Bellingham Way, Theresa grew more reclusive, more unpredictable, and more violent, but nobody outside of her immediate family knew anything about it. Though she had always been hard on her children, it was her last husband who finally turned her into a monster.
“She really went over the edge with Chet Harris,” said Terry. “After Harris, she dated for a little while, but then she got to the point where she wouldn’t date or remarry or nothing.”
Terry’s older brothers William and Robert agreed, recalling that their mother’s gradual transformation from angry disciplinarian to raging eccentric took place in the late 1970s.
“Sometime around when I turned ten or eleven or so, she started becoming abusive, real short-tempered,” William recalled. “She stopped going out, seeing friends at all, on any level. She got rid of the telephone because she didn’t want any people calling. We weren’t allowed to have anybody inside the house.”
“When I was growing up, I hated The Brady Bunch because I knew that nobody lived like that,” said Robert. “I knew that because I knew what my family life was like. Nothing could be more different from the truth than that bullshit TV show.
“I grew up in an insane asylum basically, but what’s worse is we didn’t know it was an insane asylum,” he continued. “I never really admitted or even knew that I was being abused or that my family was being abused, because I thought it was normal.”
And yet as far as the neighbors knew, the Knorr family was no different from any other.
“Not that I want to say that they were private, but they stayed to themselves,” said Janet Garrett, who lived next door. “It was difficult to strike up a conversation with the mother. She just didn’t want to, it seemed like. You try a few times, and after two or three times you just say, ‘Okay.’ You just give up.”
Theresa’s changing behavior even went undetected by the neighborhood kids, who generally had a closer view of their friends’ private life than their parents.
“Not having a father figure around—that was the only thing about their family that seemed different,” said Janet’s son Chris Garrett.
He was the same age as Terry Knorr and went to her house to play from time to time. Once, he went to her birthday party—a party at which he noticed that he was the only non-family member.
“Terry’s mom wasn’t the silent type,” he recalled. “In fact, she was real talkative. Kept to herself, but talkative when you talked to her. Even so, I don’t remember her ever saying anything that you could call ‘off the wall.’”
But Terry’s mom was definitely different from the other moms in the neighborhood. “I will say this about her,” Garrett added. “Terry’s mom definitely had control of the kids. I didn’t see a lot of back talk or argument coming out of any of them. If they were told to be in by a certain time, they were in. If they were told to do something, they did it. They never asked questions. They never made a point to second-guess authority.”
Theresa’s children may have accepted this dictatorial isolation, but they didn’t understand it. They complained about not being able to have friends over, but if they whined too much about it, they were slapped into silence. They did not see the gradual evaporation of their contact with the outside world as the logical result of shutting themselves inside the house. Instead, Theresa’s children saw the neighbors’ distancing from their mother and themselves as indifference and an unwillingness to get involved.
“Our neighbors backed off,” said Terry. “They knew better than to screw with our family. Everybody shuts their eyes, nobody wants to get involved.”
The Knorr children’s blind obedience to their mother stemmed from a constant state of terror that remained invisible to the Garretts and every one else who lived along Bellingham Way. Even in the early stages, the terror was so bizarre and their mother so skilled at keeping it “in the family,” it would have taken more than simple curiosity on the part of the neighbors to uncover what was going on. Had the Garretts or any of the other neighbors known about it, Terry wonders even today if they would have done anything.
“When my mother got drunk, she used to lick the ends of steak knives,” Terry recalled. “Serrated-edged knives. And she threw them at us to see if her aim was good.”
Knives weren’t Theresa’s only deadly playthings when she’d had a little too much to drink.
Terry still blanches, remembering the chill in her mother’s voice one evening when she went in to say good night. Eyes half-closed, her mother sat in a deep chair in the living room and motioned for Terry to approach. In her drunken stupor, Theresa howled at her shivering but stoic young daughter, boasting of that defining moment nearly fifteen years earlier when she pointed a gun at Clifford Sanders and pulled the trigger.
“She owned two guns, a derringer and a revolver,” Terry recalled. “At one point, she took out the bone-handled old cowboy gun. It looked like a toy, but it was a real six-shooter. A .22 pistol.”
Aiming the pistol at her daughter, Theresa told Terry, “I shot once and I can do it again.”
Terry froze, standing terrified before her.
“And she told me to come to her. And I did,” Terry said with a shudder, remembering. “And she put the gun to my head, so hard that the next morning I woke up and I still had a knot from where the barrel had sunk into my temple.”
On the evenings that followed, sobered and sentimental, Theresa would try to make amends by taking everyone out for a family ride, as if nothing had happened. She’d load them into the car and drive up Highway 50, past Placerville, into the High Sierras.
“It was one of those see-how-nice-I-can-be type things,” Bill recalled.
There was no point to it, other than to commune with nature. They never went to play in the snow or hike in the forest. It was just a tour through the mountains. Unlike six-lane Interstate 80, which cut through the relatively barren Donner Pass, the Placerville highway had more vistas, more wildlife, and more trees, which appealed to Theresa’s aesthetic sense. But the family drives did little to make up for the savagery that went on back home.
“It was beat us, lock us in our room for days, and then, she’d be all lovey-dovey,” said Terry. “My mom was so blatantly contradictory. She played the part of a mother, but she also played the part of a very torturous, sadistic human being. Oh yeah, she was schizo.”
But that information was not for popular consumption. What families did to each other behind closed doors was private. Underscoring that basic human “truth” was an incident that happened to Terry shortly after they returned to Bellingham Way.
While Terry was attending Palisades Elementary, one of her few remaining friends came to school one day with bruises. She confided to Terry that she, too, had been a victim of abuse: her mother slapped her around. Terry, who had been appointed one of Palisades’ “Guardian Eagle” playground monitors, reported the abuse to a counselor. The following day Terry found that she was being stalked.
“The girl’s mother followed me home from the bus stop, came in my backyard, shaking me, banging my head against the wall,” said Terry. “And my mother was standing in the kitchen window watching. She did nothing. Finally, she calls my brother, whose naked asleep in bed, and tells him, ‘Howard, come get this woman out of the backyard!’ And all this time this woman is beat
ing me up.”
Howard threw something on and did manage to eject the angry woman from the yard, but Terry got no sympathy from her brother or her mother. Instead, Theresa shrieked at her daughter for making waves at school and bringing the crazy woman to their home. As usual, Terry was punished. Then, a few days later, her mother was making amends again.
“I remember, right after the lady beat me up, my mom pawning her ring,” said Terry.
It was a platinum cocktail ring that Theresa had custom-crafted from diamonds she’d taken from the wedding sets Clifford Sanders and Bob Knorr had given to her. She used to say that the single-carat diamond at the ring’s center was the sun, trailed by smaller diamond stars that encircled a moon.
“To her, that ring had a lot of meaning, and she went and pawned it so I could have some new clothes,” said Terry. “I always had to wear hand-me-downs until my mom hocked her ring and bought me brand-new Smurfette clothes. That was a big thing for me. And it was right after that woman came in our yard and beat me up.”
Money remained a problem. Theresa continued to work odd hours at convalescent homes, where she claimed to have become something of an expert in moving the addled and the infirm from place to place. She bragged of being able to “curl” two-hundred-pound men, getting them from wheelchair to bed all by herself. But she didn’t complain about the nursing homes as much as she had her other jobs. She liked taking care of people—particularly those who were under her absolute control. She took her job so seriously that she enrolled in and completed the necessary classes to earn a certified nursing assistant certificate from the California Nurse Licensing Board.
But one night, her budding nursing career was cut short by a flying fist. A strong but senile patient lashed out at her as she tried moving him onto his bed. He knocked her flat to the floor, wrenching her back and hurting her hip. She never walked the same after that, though her children believed that her growing weight problem was as much to blame for her pained, rolling gait as the back injury.
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