“Mom was convinced that Sheila’s soul was knocked out of her body for a split second and something jumped in,” said Terry. “And you know what my mother said about that? That my sis had actually died when he hit her. And she was just a demon in my sister’s body. That’s when she started beating my sister.”
Connie Sanders’s first child wasn’t born on Valentine’s Day as Suesan had allegedly predicted. His birth date was February 1, 1985. But he was a boy, and the obstetrician did say that he had a heart murmur. Two out of three correct prognostications by Howard’s deceased “witch” of a sister, as related to them months earlier by Theresa, planted more than a few doubts in both parents about the future of Howard Clyde Sanders Jr.
Thus, when they began getting heavy-breathing hang-up calls a short time after the baby’s birth, neither Connie nor Howard ascribed them to pranksters or one of Howard’s disgruntled drug customers. Howard was certain that the voice he heard on the other end of the line belonged to a sinister figure from his past. He was certain Howard Jr. was not out of danger, as his mother had reassured them the previous summer, because he was certain that the caller was Chester Harris.
“It was always Howard who answered the phone,” said Connie. “He’d get really paranoid, get out the gun, and say, ‘He knows where we are! He’s gonna come and get me!’
“I said, ‘We’ve got a newborn baby here. I’m not gonna live like this, wondering if some maniac’s gonna come in and kick the door down.’”
Howard and Connie had friends in Rio Linda and decided one weekend that they would pay them a visit to show off the new baby. While they were there Howard got tanked and conceived the idea of going looking for Chester Harris.
“He went out to that American Legion hall with his friend, and he came back white as a ghost,” said Connie. “‘I seen Chester,’ he told me. ‘I sat right next to him and told him not to bother my family.’”
For the rest of the evening Howard continued to drink and tell his friends the tales his mother had told him about the fat, sick old beer addict who sat at the end of the bar in the American Legion hall and who lived off the blood of babies, sacrificed virgins, disemboweled animals and humans, and chanted in ancient tongues to pagan spirits during the full moon. With enough alcohol, those stories grew more and more vivid. By midnight, Howard’s wide-eyed tales of terror had the skin crawling on everyone in the room.
And Chester lived just a few blocks away.
“Our friends we were staying with got so scared, we all left,” said Connie. “We came back to our house, and we didn’t sleep that night. I kept getting the willies.”
“Lucian King had a little trailer at Eddie’s Hofbrau, next door to the apartments on Auburn,” said Terry. “Originally it started out that my mom was cleaning his camper, then Sheila, and then it ended up that I was doing it.”
King was in his seventies and had been a gold-nugget dealer most of his life. He was something of an intellectual oddity at 2410 Auburn Boulevard. He spoke Spanish fluently, read the classics, had lived with a mistress for many years in Europe, but finally retired to the hills of California’s gold country, where he envisioned himself as a modern-day forty-niner. In his motor home and trailer, he lived like a happy hermit, free to pull up stakes at a moment’s notice and travel to any corner of the Sierras. He did most of his business in Nevada City, a gold-rush town on State Highway 49 in the heart of gold-rush country, but he lived fifty miles to the southwest, in the Sacramento flatlands, in a trailer right next door to the Knorr family. He didn’t like long-term relationships, but he did like to live in a tidy place. So when Theresa offered to clean his trailer for him, he didn’t think twice.
Almost immediately, items began disappearing from his trailer and turning up in the medicine cabinet at Theresa’s apartment. She pilfered a bottle of pills that King used to treat a thyroid condition, believing that they might correct her own perceived thyroid condition and reverse her weight gain. One thing that had not seemed to change following the ritual burning of Suesan by the light of the summer’s first moon was Theresa’s obesity. Instead of reversing the problem that had caused much of Suesan’s abuse in the first place, Theresa continued to balloon ever larger, according to Robert. At one point, his mother tipped the scales at nearly 270 pounds.
“My mom very rarely went out of the house when she started gaining weight,” said Terry. “The only time she’d shower was when she had to leave the house, and the only time she’d leave the house was when she had to go get a check.”
The thyroid pills didn’t help her, so Theresa made off with a container of protein powder that Lucian kept in the kitchen for quick breakfasts. This, too, she regarded as a means of taking off pounds and returning to a smaller dress size. It had no effect whatever.
Theresa found something more in King’s trailer while she was supposedly cleaning for him. It was his stock-in-trade: gold nuggets. He kept most of his inventory under lock and key, but there was enough evidence of his gold dealings lying around to give the wrong idea to someone with a weakness for free money.
“Eventually, he didn’t let my mom clean anymore because she kept flaking out, and his gold nuggets would turn up missing,” said Terry.
It was just as well that she had been caught. Theresa was so heavy that she got exhausted easily and did not do the crack cleaning job she had been capable of back in her convalescent-hospital days. She offered King a compromise. She would no longer come over herself to clean. She would make Sheila do it.
“Sheila, I think, was looking for a way out of the house,” said Bill, who had resumed coming aound to the apartment again by this time, even though he was living with Emily Lewis. On his irregular visits, the only real change that he witnessed in the family’s routine was a curious restlessness he’d never seen before in his docile older sister. She was not yet ready to confront her mother about leaving, but when she talked with her brothers or sister, Sheila made no bones about wanting to escape from beneath Theresa’s thumb.
Theresa noticed the difference in her daughter’s behavior, too. Even though Sheila dutifully brought home the money that King paid her each week, Theresa was convinced that her daughter was earning a little extra on the side and squirreling it away so that she could pursue Suesan’s dream of running off to Alaska to become a hooker.
“She did not want the kids to leave at any cost,” said Bill. “And that’s why when I was working before I got thrown out, I had to turn my paycheck over to her every Friday. And when Sheila got paid for doing this cleaning of this guy’s trailer, she gave my mom all the money from that. [But] my mom accused her of prostituting to this guy to get more money that she wouldn’t know about.”
To Theresa’s children, Lucian King seemed like an odd old bird, but not one inclined to carry on an affair with a teenager. Unlike Chester Harris, King’s interest in sex began to decline by the time he hit his sixties. He was more interested in good conversation than he was a roll in the hay.
But Theresa was blind to this fact, just as she was blind to the far more obvious object of Sheila’s fancy: a handsome young British Columbian Indian who lived in a trailer by himself near the back of the trailer court. He had an unpronounceable traditional Indian name and was known around the trailer court only as Chief.
“Sheila liked Chief,” said Robert. “But Mom never really stated any overt fear of Sheila leaving with him. I think Mom was convinced that Sheila would disgust the Chief sooner or later and nothing would ever come of it.”
Chief adhered to the native ways in which he had been raised on a Canadian Indian reservation. He wore his hair in braids, kept himself in good physical condition, and lived very simply. The walls of his mobile home were lined with hundreds of volumes about Native Americans: their religion, their relationship with their environment, their betrayal by the white man, and their inviolable inner strength. He trusted in nature and the stars. One of the few things he shared with visitors was his regret about what modern America had done an
d was continuing to do to the essential harmony between his people and the land.
Chief earned his living by turning out handmade golf clubs, prized by a wide-ranging clientele for their symmetry and style. He never wanted for work. It was one of the many ironies of his peculiarly spiritual lifestyle that he had never played golf and never had any desire to do so.
For all of his idiosyncrasies, Chief displayed a Zen-like patience with his neighbors. He was never without a smile and never spoke a cross word to anyone, if he left his spiritual plane long enough to break his silence at all.
Sheila saw all of this, and she fell in love.
Unlike Lucian King, Chief was still in his twenties and young enough to appreciate a beautiful young woman. But he did not believe in sex for the sake of sex. In accordance with his worldview, he believed that an invisible bond was created when a man and a woman joined in the act of procreation. It was not something to be taken lightly, and it was not something that a man could ever pay for. It was a gift. It had to be given.
Chief was as different from the johns down at the car lots on Fulton Avenue, who paid $250 to go around the world, as night was from day. Sheila understood this and, with virtually no social skills to call upon at all, tried her very best to flirt.
“Sheila was slow, but she was not retarded,” said Terry. “Sheila was different. She had a beautiful voice, beautiful hair, beautiful skin. She was very petite, tiny. Nothing like the Knorrs. Sheila was tiny, like my mom when she was eighteen. Me and Suesan were always big girls, but Sheila was always small, thin, pretty.”
She and her brother Howard had so often heard themselves called “dirty Indians” as they were growing up that they both believed themselves to be more Indian than English or French or Irish or any of the other nationalities that were part of their heritage. Sheila saw Chief as her one true destiny. She began wearing her hair in braids when she did the laundry, hoping he would notice. Once, when she carried a basket of laundry past his trailer, she even wore a leather headband with a feather in it.
But before Sheila could catch Chief’s eye, Theresa confronted her about Lucian King. When Sheila denied that anything was going on with the old man, her mother slapped her allegedly lying mouth and called her the same names she once used for Suesan: a whoring, demon-infested slut.
“And my mom just started beating her, really bad,” said Bill.
Theresa had Terry take over Sheila’s cleaning chores at Lucian King’s trailer. King liked her well enough and even gave her the nickname “Burrhead” because her hair was just starting to grow back in. But he still wanted to know what had happened to Sheila.
Terry told him what her mother had instructed her to tell him: Sheila was sick and couldn’t work for him anymore.
“And he started asking all kinds of questions about her, and Terry came back and told my mom the guy was asking about Sheila,” said Bill. “And that made my mom more suspicious, and [she] beat her even harder.”
Theresa made Sheila sit on her knees with her hands in her lap and stare for hours at the edge of the carpet next to the kitchen. “And that’s where she had to stay, looking down,” said Bill. “She wasn’t able to look at anybody or talk to anybody.”
When Sheila moved, to scratch or adjust her weight from one knee to another, Theresa beat her with fists and feet. She tied her up with strips of sheets that she made Terry tear up for restraints. Terry also wound up having to feed Sheila because her mother refused to untie her.
Besides the possibility that she might escape with Lucian King or Chief, Theresa found yet another reason to persecute Sheila. She concluded that her own health problems, including the ever-increasing weight gain, might be attributable to venereal disease. It was a disease she was sure she had contracted from sitting on the same toilet seat that her eldest daughter used.
“My mom said Sheila had given her VD,” said Terry. “But my mom didn’t have any venereal disease.”
Theresa, however, was certain she had chlamydia, or worse, and was certain Sheila had gotten it first from Lucian King or Chief or some stranger she’d met while Theresa had her back turned. When she demanded answers from Sheila, her daughter told her she didn’t know what she was talking about and wound up with blackened eyes for her supposed insolence.
One of the items that Theresa had lifted from King’s trailer when she had been doing the cleaning was his telephone credit card. Once she was sure she had a venereal disease, she started using the card to call various doctors and clinics outside of the Sacramento area. She didn’t want to go to anyone nearby for treatment. The shame of having caught VD was not something she wanted bandied about the neighborhood. She called doctors as far away as Nevada to find out about the transmission and treatment of VD, according to Terry. She suspected that her youngest daughter had gotten it, too.
“One time my mom drove up to Carson City, Nevada, and she made me go have a pelvic exam,” said Terry. “She thought I had a venereal disease at age thirteen. She didn’t want the doctors here to know about it, so she took me up there, and made an appointment for me under some bogus name.”
Theresa watched to see how the examination was done so that when she got back home, she could do her own pelvic exams on her daughters.
By this time the question of whether Sheila did or did not have a venereal disease had become moot. She never left the apartment, was punished every day, and had no appetite. In the spring of 1985, she had fallen into the same anorectic pattern as her sister had done just one year earlier. Her mother saw her refusal to eat as yet another act of defiance and took to force-feeding her. During one feeding session, she rammed a spoon in her mouth and broke off one of her daughter’s front teeth.
But Sheila was not Suesan. She continued to remain defiant. If she ever got away, she could run off with Chief. She had something to live for.
“Sheila was the only one with the nerve to talk back to her mother,” remembered Connie Sanders.
One day in June, just about a year after Suesan’s death, Sheila pushed her scorn one step too far.
“Sheila kicked her,” said Robert. “There was an argument because Sheila had stopped eating and she was going through similar symptoms the same as Suesan was for a while, and Mom was extensively arguing with her to ‘save her life.’
“I was told to grab hold of Sheila while Mom was arguing with her. Mom slapped her a couple of times, and Sheila kicked her in the shins. Mom said that Sheila had broken her shin.”
Later that night Robert called on his older brother Bill. Their mother had ordered the two of them to wrestle their sister down and shut her in the linen closet in the hallway of the apartment. She screamed and fought. Unlike Suesan, Sheila would not be brought down like a steer and sent to slaughter.
But she was no match for Theresa’s two boys. They finally got her inside the closet and shut the door.
“The only thing Sheila did while she was in the closet was beg to get out,” said Terry. “My mom would stuff towels underneath the door so we couldn’t hear.”
It was hot in June, and the apartment had no air-conditioning. Sheila’s prison was a two-by-two-foot space that was four or five feet deep at most. After a few days she stopped yelling and pleading and scratching at the wood to get out. Terry and Robert did not remember their mother opening the door to feed her. If she was allowed to leave long enough to go to the bathroom, neither of them ever saw it.
One particularly warm summer day, Robert and Bill were both at work and Theresa left the apartment to go to the store.
“It was the only time I was left alone with Sheila,” said Terry. “Very seldom did [my mom] go to the store. She always made us bring the groceries back in a shopping cart, and then walk the cart back up to the store.”
On this day Theresa drove off in the LTD and Terry tempted fate. When she was sure she was alone, she opened the door to the linen closet. Sheila’s hands were tied, and she was half-naked.
“I was only there for like half an hour in the
house by myself, and I knew she was coming right back,” she said. “My sister Sheila was twenty, and I was like fourteen. Her body was so sweaty and hot. And Sheila was such a tiny little thing. She looked really bad. I didn’t realize she was dying at the time, but she was drenched with sweat.
“And she just fell out onto the floor when I opened the door. I cried, I felt so bad. I had opened the closet because my sister was crying that she was hot, wanted something to drink. I took her a beer. That’s all my mom wanted her to drink. That’s all my mom would give her.”
Terry started to talk with Sheila, but the conversation died before it began because Terry heard her mother’s LTD pull up and park outside the apartment. In a panic, she shut the door on Sheila. Her sister was too weak to push it back open.
“I shut it because it was either shut the door or me end up in there with her,” said Terry. “Basically I was putting my life above hers, and I shouldn’t have done that. That’s why I’m having a hard time, because I did shut that closet. My mother was coming into the apartment. She had pulled up outside, slammed the car door, and she was coming into the apartment.”
Robert doesn’t remember exactly how long his sister remained in the closet. It might have been a week. It might have been two weeks. Maybe longer. But he does remember the smell.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever left a chicken to defrost in your sink, where it bleeds a lot and you get a little water in there,” said Robert. “If you leave it in there for a few days, you get that smell. The smell of rotted flesh and blood.”
Theresa didn’t open the closet herself to find her dead daughter. She called on Bill.
“Mom and Terry were asleep in the bedroom together,” said Robert. “Terry was sleeping on the floor, and Mom was sleeping on one of the bunk beds. Their room was right across the hall from the closet. As I remember it, William was in the shower. He was supposedly leaving for work when they heard the noise in the closet.”
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