Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  At the time of the KUTV newscast, neither Debbie nor Bud had any inkling as to who Theresa Cross might be. She had good credentials as far as the Sullivans could tell and had earned their absolute trust after just a few months on the job.

  So when Theresa asked Bud for a $4,600 cash advance the day after Terry went on TV, he didn’t hesitate. Theresa told him she needed the money in order to pay back taxes to the IRS. Her taxes were her business, and if she needed a little help paying them, she was certainly worth it. Sullivan had no reason to believe that she would bolt, even though she’d left for brief periods before—usually with little or no advance notice. She was evasive and mysterious, but she was essential to his mother’s well-being and she always came back. She was exactly the same way with Alice Powell.

  “I mean, you knew when the woman was lying,” said Debbie Cheney. “She’d make up these stories and you’d think: ‘Why are you lying?’

  “There were a couple of times when she just took off. Once she said she was going to have surgery on her toes and that she was going to stay with her son in California. And we knew damn well when she came back she hadn’t had any surgery. But she maintained that she went to have this surgery done, and we just went along with it.

  “Another time she took off and said she had pneumonia or the flu or something. She couldn’t stay here with my mom. And Mother had to have round-the-clock care. You couldn’t just leave her.

  “I ended up having to come down with my kids and spend a couple of days. I mean, it was no big deal, but it didn’t make sense. This last-minute type of thing. She said she was going to a motel room to sweat her pneumonia out and the motel didn’t have a phone. Now, what motel room doesn’t have a phone?

  “She told us another time that she had stayed in the Comfort Inn and couldn’t be reached. Well, I know for sure that the Comfort Inn has a phone in every room. It was just things that she would say that didn’t quite make any sense. We’d call her on it, and she’d just lie her way right out of it. In fact, my niece Paula said to her once: ‘Theresa, what are you hiding? Why are you lying?’”

  FitzGerald and the other investigators didn’t know it, but they were running out of time. Theresa could vanish into thin air with the ease of a bona fide witch.

  Since she had abandoned her son Robert in a seedy Reno hotel room nearly five years earlier, Theresa had learned how to turn her skills as a nurse’s aide into a very comfortable and anonymous livelihood. Because Salt Lake City was the headquarters for the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Mormons were known to be big on caring for their elderly family members, she gravitated there.

  All she had to do was answer newspaper ads for skilled live-in nursing care, and she generally got the job on the spot. She looked the part of a stern but kind caregiver. She spoke the part. She did the job, usually above her employers’ expectations.

  In addition to a salary, Theresa found that she could get free room and board and, sometimes, free access to a car as well.

  She also got to travel.

  While she was living and working for another family in Salt Lake City, a man in New York by the name of Robert Kirsch had heard the same thing Theresa had heard: that the Mormons needed good caretakers and that advertising for a live-in type in the Salt Lake newspapers was a great way to land a dependable nurse. He placed an ad.

  Theresa responded to the ad. Kirsch liked what he heard and wired her the money to drive to New York. There, Theresa started taking care of Kirsch’s aging mother.

  “I’m sure we weren’t the first house she’d been to,” said Kirsch. “She used to wear wigs, you know? Maybe her purpose was to just not be found. She was certainly nice to my mother. Very bright and friendly, nice smile, but very strange in a lot of ways. Thank goodness she didn’t get that close to us.”

  Theresa lived in the house with Kirsch, his mother, wife, and children. She had her own room that she kept locked, and she didn’t use the family’s mailbox or their phone. She’d always leave the house to make phone calls and apparently had her own post office box, too. She lived with the Kirsches for about four months, and everything seemed to be working out spectacularly. What did it matter that she was a little evasive about some things? Everyone was entitled to their privacy.

  One day Theresa told Kirsch that she was going to the corner to make a phone call. She never returned.

  When she hadn’t come back for several days, the Kirsches became worried and broke into her room. It was empty. She had apparently been sneaking her belongings out of the house for the better part of a week and piling them in her car so that, when the time came, she could make a smooth, clean getaway.

  The family searched the rest of the house, but nothing seemed to be missing. Theresa was deceitful and a pathological liar, but she was apparently not a thief—at least, not this time.

  After her New York sojourn, she headed back to Salt Lake City. It was then that she went to work caring for Alice Sullivan, finding that job the same way she had found the job of caring for Alice Powell shortly after she first came to Salt Lake City.

  “She answered a newspaper ad,” said Debbie Cheney. “One thing she told us was that she had two sons and one of them was killed in a motorcycle accident. She never mentioned having daughters.”

  In fact, Theresa often treated Debbie’s two girls almost as if they were her own. “She bought my girls each a pair of fifty-dollar L.A. Gear shoes, just out of the blue, for no reason,” said Debbie. “And for Christmas, she bought fourteen-carat-gold emerald-stud earrings for them. She said, ‘You know I love to spoil your girls. I never had any girls to spoil.’

  “Naturally, my girls thought she was great and so did I. She was a free baby-sitter. Who’s going to turn that down? I’d get ready to go out shopping or something and she’d say, ‘Oh, leave the girls. We’ll watch movies and order a pizza.’”

  Theresa seemed quirky, but harmless. The Cheneys could only recall a handful of instances when her obsessions and compulsions took on a menacing sheen.

  “My nephews came down to stay once,” said Debbie. “They’re from Montana and usually there’s no problem staying at Grandma’s. Well, Theresa threw an absolute fit. She said that her bishop said she was a single female and that these two boys could not stay. If they stayed under the same roof as Theresa, she would have to go to a motel.”

  Theresa got so agitated about it that Debbie gave in and sent her nephews to stay with other relatives during their visit, but she never understood what had set Theresa off.

  In another instance, Debbie’s sister Sheila and her daughter came to visit. From the moment Theresa laid eyes on Sheila’s daughter, sparks flew. There was no explaining it. Theresa simply did not like the little girl. The feeling seemed to be mutual. The girl was afraid of Theresa. During her stay, Sheila kept her daughter close to her and even let her sleep in her room.

  “Twice, Sheila woke up real early, like maybe five A.M., and Theresa was standing in her room, staring at her and at her daughter,” said Debbie. “It was startling. Sheila would sit up and Theresa would say, ‘Oh, I thought you’d like to know what your mother’s blood sugar reading is this morning.’ Right. Who cares what a blood sugar reading is at five o’clock in the morning?”

  There were hints of Theresa’s secret life, but never any revelations. She had no friends, and her only recreation seemed to be going to the movies. As Robert Kirsch discovered, she also had a predilection for wigs—so much so that she did not seem to know where her own hair ended and the wig began.

  “She wore a poufy blond wig all the time,” said Debbie. “It was kind of an ash-blond wig, very full. My kids called it the football-helmet look.

  “But it was very, very obvious that it was a wig. Well, I walked into the house one day and Theresa comes into the kitchen wearing a short, straight jet-black wig. I about fell over backward.

  “I guess she must have seen the look on my face, and she said, ‘Oh, I thought I’d dye my hair back to its natural color for a change
.’ And I stood there and thought to myself: Theresa, you know it’s a wig, I know it’s a wig. Who are you kidding with natural hair color?”

  “Three days later she had the poufy blond wig back on, claiming it was her real hair.”

  In November of 1993, while Theresa was packing her bags at the Sullivan house and preparing to get out of town, FitzGerald was running all of her known aliases through every computer database he could think of. One of them was the Utah Department of Motor Vehicles. In 1992, a Theresa Jimmie Cross obtained a driver’s license with an address in Bountiful. After a few quick phone calls, FitzGerald’s contact at the Salt Lake City Police Department zeroed in on the Sullivans’ house.

  “Theresa and Terry were living about twenty-five miles apart and never knew it,” said FitzGerald.

  FitzGerald and Johnnie Smith returned to Utah, got off the plane, flagged down a uniformed Salt Lake City police officer, and asked him to take them to the Sullivans’ house. By five P.M., just ten days after taking Terry’s initial statement, the two lawmen were standing outside Theresa’s front door with a warrant for her arrest.

  When they knocked, a chunky woman with sallow cheeks and an indelible frown answered the door. There was no one home, she told them. Just herself and the invalid woman she took care of. When FitzGerald introduced himself and told her who they were looking for, she showed not the slightest anxiety. She just blinked at them and repeated that there was no one home except for herself and the old lady.

  “She at first was evasive,” said FitzGerald. “I felt based on the way she looked, and the pictures I had of her, that she was Theresa Knorr.”

  Gradually, they coaxed morsels of truth out of her. “She told me she didn’t like using the name Knorr,” said FitzGerald. “She was using the name Cross. That was her maiden name, and it was one of her AKAs.”

  Theresa remained cool, even when the two detectives displayed the warrant. She said that she hadn’t known she was going to jail right at that time and asked if she could get somebody to take care of the old lady.

  They nodded, but FitzGerald ducked around to the back of the house as soon as Theresa left the front door. Just as he had figured, Theresa was chugging out the back way when she looked up and saw the silver-haired detective waiting for her with a pair of handcuffs, not unlike the pair she had once used on her children.

  “Theresa Jimmie Cross, I am placing you under arrest …” FitzGerald began, clicking her wrists together behind her back.

  Later that evening, after booking Theresa Cross into the Salt Lake City Jail, John FitzGerald called her daughter Terry Groves with the news. She cried.

  She was a survivor, she said, and she was proud to be a survivor. But surviving didn’t necessarily feel good.

  “Why did I get away?” asked Terry. “Was it because I was her namesake? I don’t want to be her namesake. I’m Terry, not Theresa.”

  It had nothing to do with names, said her brother Robert, whom she came to know and love once again in the days that followed her mother’s arrest.

  From his prison cell in Ely where he awaited judgment on his own complicity in the deaths of Suesan and Sheila, Robert traced his surviving sister’s emotional turmoil to the paradox of a child’s natural love for her mother coupled with the fact that her mother was a cruel, self-serving monster. Like himself, Terry did what she had to do to survive, he said. She saved herself first, and when she wasn’t able to save her sisters as well, she condemned herself.

  “The way we grew up, it was like being a Jew at Auschwitz: it was better them than you,” said Robert. “Human nobility doesn’t enter into the equation. You’re a child. You can’t say, ‘Well, I did my best to prevent this or this.’ It’s more like, ‘Well, I’m glad it wasn’t me this time. I could be next.’”

  The mind says save yourself. The heart says save everyone around you.

  “I live with a certain numbness,” Terry said. “When you’re a child you really don’t pay all that much attention to what family means. It’s just there. But when you become an adult, family becomes the most important thing of all. I had sisters. They were family. And they were taken away from me by my mother, who was also family. I lived with that all those years and it ate away at me. Now I’m having to search for the answers that I never got before.”

  Epilogue

  Theresa Jimmie Cross wasted no time proclaiming her innocence. She refused to return to California with John FitzGerald and Johnnie Smith, choosing instead to remain in the Salt Lake City Jail until Placer County authorities formally extradited her.

  On November 15, 1993, she was charged in the torture slayings of two of her daughters and arraigned in the Third Circuit Court in Salt Lake City. Then she was returned to her cell without bail until the courts could rule on her demand to remain in Utah.

  Theresa was not the only defendant fighting extradition. Robert Knorr Jr.’s court-appointed attorney back in Placer County also questioned whether his client could legally be brought back from Nevada State Prison at Ely to stand trial along with his mother and brother.

  “Whether the district attorney can proceed in this case is open to question,” Mark Berg told reporters immediately following a November 29 court appearance on behalf of Robert in Placer County Superior Court in Auburn, California.

  Both Berg and the attorneys representing William Knorr raised two other troubling questions about the brothers’ prosecution.

  First, neither Robert, twenty-four, nor William, twenty-six, were legal adults when their sisters died. It remained unclear, therefore, whether the two could even be tried as adults. Juvenile court invariably deals with offenders far more leniently than adult court, and that was precisely what defense lawyers were angling for.

  Second, the bodies of the two girls were found in two different counties. It was clear that Placer County had jurisdiction in the case of Suesan Knorr, but what about Sheila Sanders, whose remains were found just on the other side of the Nevada county line? From the defense point of view, these were two separate deaths in two different jurisdictions, which meant two separate murder trials—one in the Placer County seat at Auburn, and the other twenty miles to the northeast, in the Nevada County seat at Nevada City.

  While Placer County’s prosecutor Dan Gong wrestled with all of those knotty legal issues, Theresa was finally refused sanctuary in the Salt Lake City Jail. On December 18, 1993, John FitzGerald flew back to Utah to bring Theresa home to stand trial for murdering her daughters. Theresa’s only request was that she be escorted back to California by train or car because she had a sinus infection and didn’t want to fly in an airplane.

  FitzGerald cuffed her and flew her back.

  The following Monday Theresa and Bill were arraigned together in Placer County Superior Court. Dressed in a jail-issue orange jumpsuit, Bill entered the courtroom shackled to about a half dozen other male inmates. A few moments later his mother entered, wearing the red jumpsuit issued to female prisoners. Bill cowered, looked at the floor, and would not make eye contact with Theresa. His attorney, Michael K. Brady, said later that his client became distraught and afraid the moment that his mother walked in the courtroom.

  Bill’s father, who sat in the second row of the gallery, was not so intimidated by the sight of his ex-wife. As deputies escorted Theresa to a seat against the back wall of the court, Bob Knorr sneered and shouted at the mother of his children: “I hope you burn in hell for what you did to my kids, woman!”

  The bailiff warned Bob that any further outburst would make him subject to arrest, so the burly ex-marine sat quietly through the remainder of the brief hearing, tears streaming past his glasses and down his cheeks.

  Theresa demanded that the court address her by her maiden name. She would be known as Theresa Cross and not by Knorr or any of her other married names. As Theresa Jimmie Cross she was formally charged with two counts of murder, two counts of conspiracy to commit murder, and two special circumstances—multiple murder and murder by torture—that could, if proved,
result in the death penalty.

  Because both of her sons were juveniles when the crimes were committed, neither of them had to face the death penalty under California law.

  Theresa postponed entering her plea until January 31, 1994. When she finally did answer the charges, she spoke a barely audible “not guilty” to each of the counts against her.

  Bill’s attorney, Kevin Clymo, asked that the trial be moved to Sacramento. Both girls had been murdered there, after all, so that there would be no dispute over jurisdiction.

  Clymo also demanded that Bill be tried as a juvenile and that the court rule out the possibility of life imprisonment. He had no prior criminal history and had been raised “by a mother who was extremely physically and emotionally abusive,” he told the court.

  But Placer County Superior Court Judge J. Richard Couzens ruled against Clymo’s motions. At twenty-six, Bill was too old to be rehabilitated in a juvenile facility. If found guilty, he’d have to do his time in an adult prison.

  Couzens did set bail, however. Bill scored a “ten” on his probation report, meaning that he was deemed to be a minimal flight risk. In addition, five friends and former employers testified at a bail hearing that Bill was a young man of exemplary character and that he led a stable life.

  The prosecution asked for $1 million bail, while Clymo asked that Couzens require only $50,000 for his client. The judge agreed to set Bill Knorr free once he posted $150,000.

  Even after his family and friends had scraped up $15,000 for Bill’s bail bond later that spring, his brother Robert remained in Nevada State Prison. Using both the jurisdictional and the juvenile arguments, Mark Berg managed to hold off Robert’s extradition until the end of June. John FitzGerald finally brought the last of the three defendants in People v. Knorr, Knorr & Cross back to California to stand trial on June 29, 1994.