26 Of Theresa Knorr Podcasts Interviews
Despite that, she was reportedly close to her mother and was thus heartbroken when she died of heart failure in early 1961. Therefore, even though she was just 16, when Theresa found a partner, she got married and left home in 1962. After a brief pause, Theresa ordered the other children to carry their injured sister to the bathroom and place her in the tub. Theresa did not want the police involved, so an ambulance was out of the question. The bullet had not passed through Suesan's body, but it was too deep to remove from the open wound.
Rather than spend the day with her and the baby, Clifford went out drinking with his friends. Later that evening, he strolled in drunk and Theresa boiled over. She berated him for neglecting his family and wasting their much-needed money on booze.
Police Chief Walter Froehlich described the crime scene and events leading up to Theresa's arrest. Rapping up the prosecution's side, Dorfman questioned several of Sanders' relatives in an effort to show the victim was not a violent or abusive person. "I grabbed a gun to make him keep from hitting me and it went off," Theresa said. Clifford's body was lying facedown in the doorway of the kitchen and on the opposite end of the room Froehlich found the rifle leaning against a wall. Froehlich arrested Theresa and transported her to the Sacramento County Jail.
Her body was packed into a cardboard box and dumped along the side of a road. None of Knorr's children were spared her physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. For years, Knorr abused and tortured her children in various ways, including burning them with cigarettes and beating them. Knorr focused her anger primarily at her daughters and trained her sons to beat and discipline their sisters. Theresa Knorr was born Theresa Jimmie Cross in Sacramento, California. She was the youngest child in the family and very devoted to her mother.
Sheila was beaten badly, tied up, and shut in an airless and hot closet without any food or water. Theresa quit junior high school and the newly-wedded couple moved into a one-bedroom apartment in California’s North Highlands district. With the insecure Theresa keeping Clifford on a very short leash, the marriage became strained very soon. Theresa Jimmie Francine Knorr (née Cross) was born on March 12, 1946, in Sacramento to James ‘Jim’ Cross and Swannie Gay. She was the couple’s second child; her sister, Rosemary, was a couple of years older to her. Theresa also had two step-siblings, William and Clara, both out of Swannie's first marriage.
The children seemed nervous, and Cross was secretive, never using the front door, they said. Theresa Jimmie Cross, 47, ruled her children by bullying and beating them into submission -- and when that didn't work, by killing seekers crime them, authorities said. "I knew they were weird, but I didn't know they were that weird," said Susan Sullivan, a former neighbor. Following Knorr's arrest, police decided to reopen the murder case of Theresa's sister, Rosemary Knorr Norris. Norris was found strangled to death at the end of a dead-end road in Placer County in 1983 after she went grocery shopping in Sacramento.
Her marriage to Clifford may not have been happy, but at least it provided her with a sense of belonging. Now, at just 18, she was alone and again desperately seeking stability. To cope, Theresa turned to alcohol and began drowning her sorrows at a local American Legion Hall. It was there that she met Estelle Lee Thornsberry, an Army veteran who had suffered a debilitating blow two years earlier when a swimming accident left him a quadriplegic. Nonetheless, Thornsberry's disability didn't seem to bother Theresa and the two began dating.
She later refered to this injury as the source of her destructive future conduct. As Nannie and her three sisters hit their teenage years, their father disallowed his four daughters from wearing makeup or alluring attire. This was with the goal that they were not depicted as promiscuous. Additionally, he stressed about them being molested by older men.