Dark Curiousities
Theresa was charged in the torture slayings of her two daughters and arraigned in a Salt Lake City courtroom on November 15, 1993. Theresa pleaded not guilty and was remanded to the Sacramento County Jail. That same day, Judge Couzens ordered William Robert Knorr prosecuted as an adult.
On September 29, 1962, 16-year-old Theresa married Clifford Clyde Sanders, a man five years her senior whom she had met a few months prior. Immediately she dropped out of high school and became pregnant, and on July 16, 1963, she gave birth to her first child, Howard Clyde Sanders. The Sanders' marriage was rocky as Theresa was possessive and repeatedly accused Sanders of infidelity.
Knorr primarily focused her anger and abuse on Terry's older sisters, Suesan and Sheila. Theresa eventually got the idea in her head that Chester Harris had turned her daughter Suesan into a witch. It's not known where the wild idea first came from, but Suesan began taking advantage of it and would use it against her mother. She would regularly say that Harris was going to initiate her into his cult by deflowering her in the name of Satan. The stories did not serve to spare Suesan any abuse and she began suffering the worst of Theresa's blows.
Theresa lost her mother, Swannie Cross at 15 to a heart attack. This plunged her into severe depression due to her very close affinity with her mom. He also sold their family home having lost his job as a result of his ill-health. Although Theresa is already behind bars, and will remain there for the rest of her life, her crimes are so stomach-churning that humanity can never let them go off memory. Read through to learn all the facts you never knew about Theresa Knorr and her crime-decorated lifetime.
Swannie Cross had a son and a daughter from a previous marriage. Jim Cross worked as an assistant cheese maker at a local dairy. He eventually saved up enough money to buy a house in Rio Linda, California. In the late 1950s he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease which forced him to quit his job. He developed depression and reportedly took his frustrations and anger out on his family. Theresa was reportedly very close to her mother and was devastated when she died of congestive heart failure in March 1961.
Theresa and Terry apparently did not know they lived in close proximity and had no contact. In July 1984, Knorr and Suesan got into another argument during which Knorr theresa knorr stabbed her daughter in the back with a pair of scissors. A few weeks after the stabbing, Suesan, fed up with the abuse, decided to move to Alaska. Knorr agreed to let her go under the condition that Suesan allow her to remove the bullet from her back so it could not be used as evidence in the event that Suesan reported the abuse.
He received a sentence of three years that will run concurrently with his murder sentence of 1991. William was placed on probation and ordered to undergo therapy. The much-divorced Theresa started to drink even more, gained weight, and became severely short-tempered and abusive towards her children. Not satisfied with mentally torturing her children, she started physically punishing them too.
She coerced Robert and Bill into helping her dispose of Suesan. They drove her to Sierra Nevada, Interstate 80 outside Truckee, laid her down, poured gasoline on her and burned her alive. After escaping from her mother, Terry Knorr attempted to report her sisters' murders to the Utah police but they dismissed her stories as fiction as did a therapist she visited. In 1992, inspired by an episode of ‘America's Most Wanted’, Terry contacted the Nevada County Sheriff’s office and informed them of Suesan’s and Sheila’s murder.