“Mom took Suesan to see the pastor of the Hazel Avenue Baptist Church to try to have an exorcism performed,” said Robert. “It was after she had healed up and everything.”
Even before the shooting, Theresa had concluded that her daughter needed a cure for her soul a lot more desperately than she did for her body. Once she was out of the tub and able to walk, instead of taking her to a doctor, Theresa turned to the church.
“But the Baptist church wouldn’t do it,” said Robert. “I don’t know if they suggested psychiatric help or what, but evidently they did not believe that Suesan was possessed.”
Theresa pleaded with the pastor and Suesan’s former Sunday-school teachers to reconsider, but their answers were unchanged: Baptists did not perform, or believe in, exorcisms. Exorcism was a seldom-used rite of the Roman Catholic church, based on medieval belief in demon possession and devil worship. Except in popular novels and films, like William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist—which Theresa had seen several times—the practice of exorcism was all but extinct. It had not been in wide use even by Roman Catholics since the days of the Spanish Inquisition.
“Shortly thereafter things started happening at the Baptist church,” said Robert. “Their piano player’s arm got busted and a couple other bad things began to befall the church.”
The church leadership saw no correlation between its run of bad luck and Theresa’s outlandish request for an exorcism, but several of the church’s members did. They got together and delivered their own message to Theresa and her children.
“They said we were cursed of God. That what was happening to us was retribution, and as long as we were in the church, things would keep happening to them,” said Robert. “So we were told not to come anymore. We were excommunicated from the Baptist church.”
Theresa was undaunted. If she could not get help from the church, she’d try to perform the ritual herself, using the power of family. In the spring of 1983, she waited until after midnight and had her children hold a séance, although she didn’t tell them what she was up to.
“One night Mom woke us all up except Howard, who was asleep in his room,” said Robert. “She woke up Suesan, William, Sheila, myself, and Terry and had us go sit in a circle on the floor in the living room. Mom was on the sofa. She said, ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. And stay awake.’ If we went to sleep, we would be fucked over somehow.”
In the darkened front room, Theresa’s children did as they were told. They remained very still and quiet. They heard some vibrating coming from the water pipes under the house, but no other noises. Theresa told them the vibration was an overture for a spiritual visitation, and again ordered them to be still and listen.
The séance seemed to go on for hours without event. Robert believes he must have nodded off out of boredom.
“The next thing I remember, my mom slapped me in the face and told me to shut up,” he said.
He shook the sleep off and started to ask what he’d done to deserve a slap, but his mother’s attention had switched to the rest of the family members. Robert turned his own gaze to the opposite side of the room to see what his brothers and sisters were doing, and that’s when things began to get strange.
“I was looking around, and Sheila was crying but not saying anything,” said Robert. “Her hair was just hanging in her face and she was crying.
“William was picking at one of the bottom doors in the china hutch with his fingernails, and Terry was staring off into space. And as this continued William said, ‘We like your book collection. We like your library.’ Just really weird off-the-wall things like that.” His brother seemed obsessed with a pair of red-and-blue insulated Löwenbräu beer-can holders in the china hutch, describing in minute detail how the colors seemed to be melting into one another.
“Sheila just continued to cry,” Robert went on. “She never said anything. Terry mentioned seeing a guy in what I would have to describe as an eighteenth-century or Victorian-era costume. The man was wearing black with a white ruffled shirt. He was approximately seven feet tall.
“And she said there was a party going on in the dining room. Of course I looked. There was no party. There was no seven-foot-tall guy wearing anything. But Terry said she could see it all when she looked at the TV, which wasn’t on.
“I wasn’t saying anything, but everybody else was weirded out,” said Robert.
“Then Mom asked something about Bob [Knorr],” he continued, “and Terry said, ‘Bob’s had it long enough. We don’t need him anymore.’ And there was a bag lying on its side on the floor, which contained Bob’s Purple Heart and his picture and other things that belonged to him that Mother had kept, and all of a sudden it crumpled into itself, all by itself.”
They stayed up all night, but Robert never got an answer from his mother about why she had slapped him.
The next day, Theresa had her own vision. She told her children that she had seen Howard hiding in a closet with her .22 six-shot revolver and she believed he was planning to kill her.
“So she took off,” said Robert. “She went to north Sacramento and rented a hotel room. She ran away from home.”
The children were both relieved and panic-stricken. Her absence meant that nobody would get beaten or scolded, but she had left no note and told nobody where she was going. She hadn’t even packed, which is why the children thought she’d simply gone off on a binge somewhere and would return soon, hungover but safe.
But she did not come home after two days and nights, and their concern mounted. They went looking for her, without success. Then, on the third day, she walked through the front door. She had stories to tell.
While she was gone, she said, she had been stalked. They did not catch her, and she checked into a hotel. In her room, she saw red eyes peering in at her through a vent. When she rode the bus to get around downtown, people she’d never seen before approached her and, for no apparent reason, told her to read her Bible because Jesus saves. She was still afraid, but she finally decided it was safe to come home.
Afraid? Afraid of what? Robert wanted to know. Which led to Theresa’s explanation for slapping Robert’s face and telling him to shut up on the night of the séance. “She told me that I had been telling her how she was going to die of a brain aneurysm,” said Robert. “Describing how it was going to be so great to watch the blood drip out of her eyes and nose and ears. How I was going to dance and piss upon her grave. That was when she slapped me.
“I don’t remember saying any of that,” he added.
Theresa also explained to her son what she had seen happen on the night of the séance after he and his brother and sisters lapsed into their trances.
Theresa did not go to sleep. She remained alert and, after a time, began to see red beams of lights flashing through the front windows. The lights pierced the backs of each of her children’s heads, signaling their possession by something or someone from another dimension. Then she heard a voice.
“She said she was offered a cure for her disease if she would have the rest of the family follow the coven,” said Robert.
But the voice threw in one more catch, Theresa told her son. Without explanation, the voice had told her that she and her children were all descended from the tribe of David, through the Cross bloodline. She could have her youthful slimness and health back, she was told. But in exchange for curing her of her weight disease, the voice demanded that the Cross line be wiped off the face of the earth.
And Theresa refused.
In June of 1983, right after his high-school sweetheart graduated from Casa Robles, Howard brought her home, not to meet his mother, but to move in. They were going to get married, but for the moment they just wanted to live together.
Connie Sue Butler remembers that Theresa was pleasant to her at first. “She claimed she liked me when I lived with her and I was the daughter she never had and all this stuff,” she recalled. As soon as her prospective daughter-in-law was out of earshot, however, she denigrated the eighte
en-year-old brunette to anyone who would listen.
To Connie’s face, however, Theresa was all peaches and cream. “She showed me a picture of her from her younger years and she had bleached her hair blond,” said Connie. “And she used to not demand, but insist that I try on the clothes she wore when she was younger so she could see herself again.”
Theresa welcomed Connie to her house with open arms. She was so happy to have Howard home again that she gave up the master bedroom to the young couple, and began to sleep on the living-room couch. Nevertheless, Connie was intimidated by the sheer size of her fiancé’s mother and kept to herself a great deal of the time during those first few weeks.
“When I moved in, I was ten pounds overweight, but she was huge,” said Connie. “Being so uncomfortable around her, I stayed in the master bedroom a lot. I was eighteen, had just graduated from high school, and Howard had me controlled like a little puppet. I was told what to say to who, and anybody I talked to I had to report back on exactly what was said.”
Howard warned Connie about his mother before they moved in. She would talk one way but act another. And his brothers and sisters might seem to be normal enough kids, but they did exactly what their mother told them to do and they were all spies. And Suesan, of course, was possessed. He cautioned Connie not to believe everything she saw or heard.
“While Howard and Connie were living with us, a lot of the punishment sessions were curtailed for a while,” said Robert. “But we still had to watch Suesan all the time, so I know Connie had to see all that.”
She had heard about Suesan from Howard all the way through high school—how they had to tie her up and make her take drugs to control her psychosis. Once Howard had even asked Connie’s stepfather to come by his house, sneak up to the back door, and eavesdrop on one of Suesan’s rants. The idea, he told him, was to get an outside witness to verify that Suesan was nuts so that Howard and his mother could commit her to an insane asylum.
“He used to come over and tell me and my parents the stories of her and her being in the cult and the cult members trying to pull her away from the house,” said Connie.
After she first moved in, Connie rarely saw Suesan at all. And when she did see her, what she saw seemed normal enough.
“Suesan never put up a fight,” said Robert. “By that time she was pretty much docile. I think she was convinced that what was happening was for her own good.… She never told Connie anything and never tried to get away.”
The Suesan that Connie saw had become a slightly heavyset strawberry blonde of average height, with an ample bosom, bright blue eyes, and stooped shoulders. She wore thick glasses and skimpy clothes, but she was not the fire-breathing monster that Howard had described. Instead, Suesan struck her future sister-in-law as quiet and meekly submissive to virtually every other family member. “I’d only seen her come out to eat twice in, like, two weeks,” said Connie. “The rest of the time, they took food into her. They only gave her beans and rice.”
Over time, as Connie became a regular member of the family, she gradually got to see firsthand what it meant to live in the same house with a witch. “Theresa handcuffed Suesan every night to her bed, especially on full moons,” said Connie. “And she would feed her Mellaril, which Howard got through a friend of his in the Hell’s Angels. Supposedly the Mellaril made her normal, because at night she would freak out. Voices would come out of her, different voices. She was always trying to kill Sheila because Sheila was still a virgin and she was gonna use her for a human sacrifice.
“Living with her for the time that I did, I thought that Suesan was really nice. She was intelligent, if she was allowed to show it. But she kept her intelligence hidden. She played stupid to please her mother.”
Connie remained only half-convinced that Suesan was the psychotic her family said she was. It seemed to her that her future mother-in-law behaved in a far more deranged way than her daughter. “She was like a hermit,” said Connie. “She went to the store twice in the six months I was living there.”
Theresa was also a cleaning fanatic. She had her children clean house often and thoroughly, making them put on rubber gloves and use toothbrushes and ammonia so that the floors and walls shone immaculately. Like some gargantuan inspector general, she waddled through the kitchen rubbing her fingertips over shelves and counters, checking for specks of dust.
“Theresa would have these kids up at the oddest hours,” said Connie. “They’d be up all night long scrubbing the floor, getting it ready to wax. Theresa’d tell Howard and me, ‘You can’t come through the front door. We’re waxing the floor.’ So we’d have to climb through the bedroom window just to get into the house.”
Howard was around to protect his fiancée most of the time, but he did leave Connie with his mother once while he was away on business. Before he left, he stood Connie in front of his mother with this admonition: She doesn’t know how to clean the proper way. Teach her.
For the next three days Theresa gave Connie a boot-camp course in the “proper way” to clean. She learned to scrub the kitchen floor with a toothbrush, to wash clothes with ammonia so that they were absolutely antiseptic, and the correct way to do dishes: run them through the dishwasher and then boil them in vats on the stove to kill all bacteria before letting them drip dry.
“It was so clean it was like being in a hospital,” said Connie.
She was glad to see Howard return, although she was seeing some changes in his behavior that made her uncomfortable, too. The tender, vulnerable guy beneath the macho swagger whom she had first fallen for had all but vanished. All that was left was the macho swagger. When one of his younger brothers or sisters got out of line, he didn’t waste words. He boxed them into submission.
“Howard beat ’em up while I was living there,” said Connie. “And Howard beat up his own mother one time ’cause she got in his face. He pushed her head through a wall.”
He slapped Connie around, too, when he discovered that she was reading his mother’s religious tracts. “He said his mom was trying to control my mind,” she said.
While Howard was gone Connie was lectured often about the tribe of David and Theresa’s direct line to God. She heard about Chester Harris and how he had turned Suesan into a monster, and how Theresa had grown to the size of a sperm whale as a direct result of Suesan’s sorcery. Connie also learned little-known facts about witchcraft from her fiancé’s mother, such as the precept that coal must be used to burn a witch, and that a witch can only be exterminated if she has been burned to death. She was also told that unless Theresa could somehow reverse the process that Chester Harris had set in motion years earlier, Suesan was damned to be a witch. She had swapped her soul for a promise to grow up to be famous and beautiful. And look where that evil past had gotten her.
Despite all Connie had heard from Howard before she moved in and all that she was told by Theresa afterward, the Suesan she came to know did not seem demented at all. She seemed tortured.
One night, when the moon was full and Theresa had forgotten to give Suesan her pills, Connie passed by her room. Suesan motioned for her to come in and talk. She wanted to show her that she was not crazy.
Connie could see that she was sitting in a chair, her arms handcuffed behind her. The room was dark, but Connie came in, sat down opposite Suesan, and listened. What she heard was the pitiful pleas of a sad teenage girl who felt trapped, without friends, without hope. But Connie didn’t stay long. When she got close enough to see Suesan’s face, she gasped.
“I don’t know if it was because of all the things they told me and the movies I’ve watched in the past, but I swore there was little knobs coming out of her forehead,” said Connie. “Looked like horns.”
Since then, she has explained away that moment to herself as the direct result of Theresa’s harangues. When she came face-to-face with the young woman everyone around her had described in diabolic terms for weeks, she simply saw what she had been conditioned to see, believing she was sitting in front
of a creature from Hades. Connie cut the conversation short and left.
Ducking bill collectors and process servers had become a daily ritual, so Connie was not surprised one afternoon when Theresa came bustling into her room in a panic, asking her to go to the front door and fend off yet another guy with yet another sheaf of papers in his hand. All Connie had to do, she said, was tell him that Theresa Knorr didn’t live there, that she had moved and Connie was the new tenant.
But the man she greeted on the front porch was not interested in collecting money. The man with the wavy, graying hair and the bulldog jaw demanded instead to see his children. As a stranger to the war between Theresa and Bob Knorr, Connie only learned for sure who he was after she’d sent him away.
Bob had tried off and on for months to track Theresa down. When he attempted to locate his children through their schools, he was told by bureaucrat after bureaucrat that “the mother would not allow me to see the children because it wasn’t convenient for me to see them at this time,” Knorr recalled.
It was roughly the same answer he’d been given for years by the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, and the county department of public social services. They’d get a message to her, but they wouldn’t reveal to him where she lived. Theresa’s right to privacy was more important than Bob’s right as a parent to see his own children, despite a divorce settlement that clearly stated that he was to be allowed reasonable visitation. Tired of bureaucrats, Bob wheedled Theresa’s address from a school secretary and went to the house himself.
So when Connie came to the door, he was both suspicious and disappointed. “This girl said she was renting from Theresa, that she wasn’t any relation to her,” said Bob. “I talked to her, gave her my home phone, and asked her if she could get hold of Theresa to tell her I wanted to see my kids.”
Years later he discovered Connie’s real identity and that his children had all been there that day, peeking at him from behind the living-room curtains.
Connie didn’t understand all the subterfuge, so Theresa explained in detail what an ogre Bob Knorr had been and why it was so necessary to hide from him. After hearing all the allegations of his terrible abuse when Theresa had been married to him, Connie was baffled. Somehow the brutality she witnessed on a daily basis at 5539 Bellingham Way seemed no worse than the kind that Theresa claimed the crippled Bob Knorr used to inflict upon her or her children.
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