After that, she began staying home more than she went to work. When she wasn’t working or drinking, or alternately terrorizing and being tender with her children, Theresa read aloud to them, as often from The Stand as from the Bible.
“My mother’s favorite author was Stephen King. I mean she read every freakin’ book Stephen King ever wrote, even the ones under his ghost name of Richard Bachman,” said Terry. “And get this: I like Stephen King today because my mom used to read his books to us when we were little.”
When Theresa’s readings were from the Bible, the children fell into a fearful silence.
“My mom … started reading the Bible when she started becoming abusive, and the more she read the Bible the more she twisted … what the Bible was saying,” said Bill. “And she would use that in her beliefs as far as why she was beating us for doing certain things.”
Theresa rounded out her library with other horror writers, including Peter Strauss and V. C. Andrews. She also liked true-crime books like Helter Skelter.
“One of her favorites was about a prostitute who used to kill her johns with a razor blade,” said Terry. “She had a different blade for every day of the week. My mom was the Lorena Bobbitt of fiction. While other parents were reading their kids Mother Goose, my mom was reading to us from Salem’s Lot.”
But the older her children got, the more difficult they were to control. They wanted to visit friends, not stay at home for readings from It or Ecclesiastes. William was among the first to begin plotting his escape.
“When we got to a certain age, we were no longer permitted to go outside,” Bill recalled. “We were always grounded. Friends that came over were told by my mom that we were grounded, or asleep, or not there. We had everything taken away from us.”
Theresa timed her children’s visits to school, to the grocery store, to church—and administered the third degree if they were a few minutes late getting home.
“She would never just go off and beat all the kids just to beat all the kids,” Bill explained. “It was, if you did something wrong, or that she saw wrong, like coming back late from the store, that was a beating right there. If I came home late from school, she knew I was out talking to somebody, so I was getting a beating.”
But while William dreamed of his eventual getaway, his older sisters were made to understand that they were different. They were girls. For girls, there was no escape.
When the family was out together, Theresa went so far as to make all of her daughters go to the bathroom with her so that she could keep an eye on them. When she warned them not to talk to strangers, there was a cold-steel edge to her voice that made each of the girls understand that she meant “don’t talk to anyone.”
She was still bigger than most of her children, but wielding the Board of Education was no longer as effective as it had been when they were small. Howard became her new tool of discipline. During her fits of terror, Theresa solicited help from her oldest son.
“Howard was the first one that was made to help hold us down,” said William.
The sweet young towhead whom Bea Howard wanted to adopt as her own had grown into a huge, confused, and bitter teenager. He towered over his mother, his constant dour expression matching hers. Even though she had put on dozens of pounds since leaving Chester Harris, her oldest son still outweighed her. He never crossed her, though.
“At the age of six, I was sodomized by my brother Howard,” said Terry. “He molested me, but he was expressing his sexuality, so I didn’t blame him.”
Terry’s mother was not so forgiving. When her young daughter and youngest son, Robert, teamed up and timidly approached their mother to tell her what had happened, she was incensed to discover that Howard had been sexually exploiting everyone in the household when Theresa was off at work.
“At that time I didn’t even have breasts, but they were, you know, my nipples were sore and they were red and I went to my mom and I told her, ‘Well, Howard pinched them, you know,’” said Terry.
Robert described how his older brother traded sexual favors with him for trinkets, making his humiliating submission to Howard a kind of incestuous prostitution. Once, he said, Howard ordered his scrawny kid brother to mount his older sister, Suesan. When Robert refused, Howard raped Suesan and made Robert watch.
Theresa was furious.
“She literally broke a chair over my brother’s back over that,” said Terry. “She beat him so bad over that, and he never did it again.”
But Theresa wasn’t through. She sat the rest of the family down and offered up an explanation for their oldest brother’s brutal sexual behavior. He had been molested as a small child, she explained. The molester, she said, was none other than their father, Bob Knorr.
And there was more. Bob Knorr’s family had been involved for years in witchcraft, said Theresa. The Knorrs practiced sorcery beneath the pear trees of the ranch in Placerville where Bob grew up. His father and mother were actually a warlock and a witch and Bob had been raised in a coven, practicing black magic. An essential part of all that voodoo was sexual exploitation of the helpless, particularly small children and women. It was no wonder, she said, that Bob molested Howard. It was no wonder that Bob had introduced her to that demon incarnate, Chester Harris.
While the younger children listened to Theresa’s supernatural rantings in rapt awe, Howard ignored her. In fact, Howard ignored most of Theresa’s ravings and demands. He began to refuse to stay at home all the time and hold his brothers and sisters while Theresa thrashed them. He had become as coldly cynical as a KGB hit man before his fourteenth birthday and had no intention of being anybody’s stooge. Unlike his brothers and sisters, Howard defied her edict not to have friends and not to leave the house. Howard wanted more. He found it in drugs.
“That’s where I first did lines, was with Howard. He gave me my first taste,” said Terry. “Howard was doing speed and pot and mushrooms and dropping acid like it was going out of style!”
Howard initiated all of his siblings into the use of controlled substances. For them, it offered a kind of escape from semipermanent house arrest. And, in his own way, it was Howard expressing gruff affection for his brothers and sisters.
“I was doing bong loads of marijuana at the age of seven or eight,” said Robert. “He said if I was going to do dope, I had to do it like a man. I couldn’t smoke any prissy-assed joints. I had to do a bong load. So I learned how to do copious amounts of marijuana. I’m amazed I have any brain cells left. Howard did that quite a bit. I think that was his method of male bonding.”
Through junior high and high school, Howard Sanders developed a reputation as a user and seller of all sorts of pharmaceuticals, from exotic street cocktails to vials of prescription medicines that Theresa often lifted from the convalescent homes where she worked.
“I became his doorman,” said Robert. “Howard had a lot of people running in and out of the house buying dope. I answered the door, saw who it was, and told my brother who it was. If he wanted to deal with him, he’d deal with him. If he didn’t, I’d tell whoever was at the front door that Howard wasn’t there.”
Theresa knew he was dealing drugs out of her house, but she could no longer control her eldest son with brute force. Besides, he was paying rent by the time he entered high school and Theresa needed the money. While Howard managed to regularly turn all of his brothers and sisters on to one drug or another, Theresa herself refused to participate.
“My mother distanced herself from it,” said Robert. “While he was in his room, dealing, she would be in her room reading her Bible or in the kitchen making dinner.”
Yet no matter how often she read the Scriptures, Theresa was never able to find the calming passages that could help her lie down in the green pastures of a soul at peace with itself. She had been permanently infected by the witchcraft bug during her short time with Chester Harris, and remained obsessed with ideas and beliefs that smacked more of mayhem and Stephen King than King James and Catholicism.
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“My mom thought Suesan was a witch,” said Terry. “She was sure of it because she thought Suesan was trying to pass [into the devil’s dimension] when she was with Chester Harris.”
At first, Suesan and her mother seemed to have developed a new and loving bond after Chester Harris. Suesan even took to doing the readings from the Bible and Stephen King. At one point, it got to be a shared activity, with Suesan and her mother sitting together in the front room, the kitchen, or back in the girls’ bedroom, taking turns reading to each other.
But the mother-daughter love fest was short lived.
Whether it was true or just a taunt to make her mother crazier than she already was, Suesan began confessing to Theresa how Chester Harris planned to initiate her into his witches’ coven. Though he had never had sex with her, she said, Harris showed her how to use her thumb and forefingers to enlarge her vagina for the time that he would deflower her in the name of Satan.
She told her mother and her sisters that Harris used to wear a black robe lined with red satin that he kept hidden in a footlocker beneath his bed, along with a scepter, a signet ring, and a stack of books on witchcraft. And all of this hocus pocus was not just confined to her and Chester Harris. Once Suesan was a full-fledged necromancer, she was supposed to initiate her sisters into the black arts as well.
Only many years later did Robert, Terry, and the rest of the children seriously question whether Suesan’s Chet Harris stories really happened or if their older sister was merely spinning fanciful Stephen King–influenced tales to top the tales their mother told them.
Whether the stories were true or not, even uttering Chet’s name was a remarkably effective way of driving Theresa nuts, and Suesan used it to full effect. Besides, Suesan had her own fascination with good and evil, dating back to Sunday school at the Hazel Avenue Baptist Church. A married couple who had a fire-and-brimstone approach to lay preaching for elementary-school children impressed Suesan, but not in the way that they planned.
“Satan was described as this real powerful evil guy,” said Robert. “They did discourses on Satan all the time. But rather than deter her, it fascinated Suesan. It impressed upon her more the power of Satan than it did God at that point.”
By the time she met Chet Harris, Suesan had a sympathetic picture of Lucifer that more closely approximated Mick Jagger’s than, say, Jimmy Swaggert’s. “My sister was intellectually superior and curious and she wanted to know did magic work?” said Robert. “There’s a lot of instances in history and even in the Bible, you know, where they describe witches and the power of Satan.”
Suesan’s strong will, quick wit, probing intellect, and growing good looks did nothing to lessen her mother’s conviction that she had made some sort of unholy pact during her short time as Chester Harris’s stepdaughter. In elementary school, the other kids nicknamed her “Fish” because of her thick glasses, but by the time Suesan was in junior high, even the glasses could not disguise the youthful grace of her growing bosom, hips, and dark blond hair.
“Suesan was a late bloomer,” said Terry. “She was beautiful. She looked a little like me, or rather, I look a little like she did. And we both looked like our father.”
Suesan was bright enough to be sent to the only school in the district for accelerated students. Not only was she a voracious reader, she was equally good with numbers and served as a kind of math tutor for the rest of her brothers and sisters.
By contrast, Sheila seemed slower and more intimidated. Compared with blond and buxom Suesan, the dark-haired Sheila was petite and dispirited. Theresa had turned her into little more than a scullery maid years earlier, forcing her to clean up after the rest of the family—a Cinderella without hope of a fairy godmother.
Robert described his older half sister as “borderline mentally retarded with severe manic depression.” “I remember her saying that her whole philosophy from the time she got into kindergarten was: ‘Why should I try? It’s only going to get harder,’” said Robert.
She was equally lackadaisical about her chores around the house. Doing the dishes was a daily exercise in futility, she used to complain. “‘Why should I do them? They’ll only get dirty again,’” Robert recalled her saying, like clockwork, every night after she and her sisters cleared the table.
Robert maintains that the only time he ever saw Sheila move quickly was when someone offered her sweets or she was doing something that she was not supposed to do and had gotten caught. The rest of the time it took her three times as long as any of her brothers and sisters to accomplish a task.
As an experiment, Robert recalled, Theresa once asked Howard to give his sister a dose of methamphetamine to see if it would hasten her through her housework. “Howard gave her some speed and Sheila went to sleep,” said Robert. “She laid there, hyped out, sleeping through her trip. Maybe she did it just to defy Mom, but as far as I know, she really went to sleep. It made Mom mad no end.”
Though she was three years older than Suesan, Sheila had the fire beaten out of her from the time she was a toddler, and she rarely spoke unless spoken to. The fact that she and Howard had a different father than the rest of Theresa’s kids made her place in the family hierarchy even more tenuous. Coming from Arkansas, Clifford Sanders apparently had Cherokee blood coursing through his veins, according to Theresa. The result was that Howard and Sheila both had sharper features and darker skin and hair than Bob Knorr’s children. At school, while Suesan was suffering the nickname Fish, Sheila was regularly tagged as a “dirty Indian.”
And nobody stepped to her defense. Everything conspired to turn Sheila’s natural shyness into a sullen powerlessness. She protested by becoming even slower than she seemed to be by nature. She did not have Suesan’s fire. In an eerie affirmation of Chet Harris’s pronouncements about Theresa’s children, Sheila really did seem to tag after her younger sister, almost like a dog. She rarely challenged her mother the way Suesan did.
So when the children became teenagers, the first and most frequent victim of Theresa’s beatings while Howard pinned her arms behind her and kept her feet from kicking was Suesan. If she broke free or fought back, Theresa enlisted the help of her other sons to hold her down while Theresa slammed her with fists, feet, and her Board of Education. William and Robert had plenty of incentive for helping Howard wrestle Suesan to the ground.
“If the other ones held that one sufficiently, then that was the only person that got beat at that time,” Bill explained.
The boys had far less to fear than Theresa’s daughters, though. William and Robert had to break one of Theresa’s many rules in order to deserve a slap. The girls, on the other hand, could wind up on the floor screaming for mercy, never knowing what they had done to deserve their punishment in the first place. Theresa saved most of her wrath for her girls, especially Suesan.
“She loved her boys and hated her daughters,” said Terry.
If any of the children were given preferential treatment, it was William, or “Billy Bob,” as their mother used to call him. The reason, according to Terry, was that Bill most closely resembled his father in appearance. He became almost a surrogate for his father.
“Bill slept with her every night until he was almost twelve years old,” said Terry. “Howard didn’t. Robert never did. When Bill quit sleeping with her, I started sleeping with her for a little while, until she started knocking me out of bed and I ended up sleeping on the floor.”
Bill recalled that Theresa did seem to go lighter on him than anyone else. He still got enough kicks and slaps to want to steer clear of his mother as frequently as possible, but he had a facility for getting along with her that none of his siblings ever seemed to be able to master. Bill learned to mask his true feelings at a very tender age.
Bill also learned early how to get out of the house. At the age of ten, he started working. It wasn’t for extra spending money because the family had no extra money. (At the end of the month, William had to turn his earnings over to his mother, who kept track of
his income to make sure that he wasn’t holding out on her.) It was one of the few opportunities that William had to get out of the house without his mother keeping tabs on exactly how long he was gone. In fact, if he was gone longer than planned, that could be good, because he might be working overtime and bring home extra money.
His jobs began with yard work around the neighborhood and a paper route that Terry remembers at least as well as Bill does.
“My brother William had this Sacramento Bee route, and the girls—myself and my two sisters—ended up getting stuck helping him out, if not doing it for him, because he wouldn’t get out of bed. He was Mommy’s little baby,” Terry said sarcastically, years after she had delivered her last paper for her brother.
Once, when Terry refused to get out of bed and Suesan and Sheila wound up delivering the papers, the two older girls found a treasure trove waiting for them on the streets of Orangevale.
“Once a year everybody throws all their trash out, like spring-cleaning day,” said Terry. “They throw out all their appliances and everything. One person’s junk could be somebody else’s fortune or treasure. And this particular morning when they were throwing my brother’s paper route, my sisters went searching through all this garbage, and they brought home stuff.”
Theresa was delighted. There were clothes that could be washed and worn, appliances that might be rewired and refurbished. She found a hand mixer that looked like it had been used to blend cockroaches, but Theresa patiently took it apart, cleaned it, and put it back together, as good as new. It looked as though her daughters had actually done something that had pleased her for a change.
“But my mom was going through all this shit and found a Book of Mormon,” said Terry. “To my mom, this was evil. She believed my sister Suesan found it because she was a witch and the devil was giving my mom a sign, because she had brought her this book.”
Theresa’s delight instantly turned to rage. She howled at Suesan, accusing her of selling her soul to Chester Harris and carting blasphemy into the house under the pretense of digging through the neighbors’ trash.
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