Cold Case Files - Mommy's Rules

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

The bodies of two teenage girls are discovered. One set on fire, the other stuffed in a box and thrown in a lake. Both are Jane Does. Both have been murdered. Eight years later, a third woman comes forward and reveals their identities, and how she escaped from suffering the same fate.

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In Placer County, California in 1984, a couple on their way to Lake Tahoe for a day of relaxation notices a suspicious fire. Stopping to investigate, they discover the body of a young woman and find their way to a phone to call police. The body was smoldering on what was left of a large bonfire as Deputy Steven Frick arrived on the scene. She was blonde, probably early to mid-teens. I believe one of her legs had burned off below the knee and was resting on the ground beside her. One-third of all murder cases in America remain open.

Each one is called a cold case. And only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare cases. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. The woman had obviously been murdered. There was evidence of duct tape on her mouth and wrists. Her features, her face, had been effectively erased to make identifying the girl by sight impossible. Hydrocarbon tests, a test for petroleum-based accelerants, pointed to the use of gasoline on the victim's body before it was burned. The police discovered that this horrific scene was likely a dump site and not where the victim had been killed.

In other words, the fire was used as a tool to cover up a murder, not as the weapon. Here's Detective John Adams. In this type of situation with a body dump, you need to know who the victim is because you don't even know where she's from and there's no witnesses as to who she might be or who associated with her. You have really nothing until you can identify her. Around the body, detectives find plastic bags with personal items and clothes and baby diapers. The woman might have been traveling with an infant. They don't find any kind of identification card,

and little else can be determined from the evidence at the scene. They transport the body to the medical examiner, hoping that they might discover the victim's name through fingerprints or a dental chart. They don't, though. Here's John Adams again. Her hands were burned to where we couldn't get fingerprints, and about half of her face was pretty destroyed. She had no dental work. She had no fillings.

Nothing. With little other options, law enforcement turns to the technology of the time, a human sketch artist, who creates a picture of what the girl might have looked like. There's a picture of the sketch in the TV episode. It's heartbreaking. The sketch and details of the crime scene

are entered into the missing persons database at the California Department of Justice. Weeks pass, though, without a hit, and the police start to lose hope of making an identification, much less catching a killer. This is Detective Adams, again. As it got colder and colder, I thought it was very unlikely that we'd ever solve the case. About a year later, at Martis Creek Lake, within a 30-mile radius of Lake Tahoe, a couple decides to get in some early morning fishing.

It's not a fish that the couple catches, though, but rather a box that smells like tragedy. Still green, Deputy Liz Rykop is called to the scene to investigate. Nothing could prepare her, or anyone for that matter, for what was inside the box. Here's Deputy Rykop to explain. I looked in it, and it was pretty nasty looking. There were bed linens and things wrapped around us. You could just see part of the arm, but it was pretty bad.

The box was square, about two feet by two feet, and had been wrapped with tape. Inside were the badly decomposed remains of a woman. It was a dark color and it just, there was maggots, all of them. The maggots were just awful. And it was just a horrible, horrible scene. The bodies removed from the box revealing the woman inside to have been tied up. Along with the body were some sheets and pillowcases and maybe a towel, things you would use to protect something fragile.

It looks like she was probably wrapped up in those and then stuffed in this box. She barely fit in the box. She came all the way up to the top in there. I was amazed that they could get a body in a box that size. Investigators once again believe that the victim had been killed in another location and dumped near the lake. The body's transferred to the medical examiner for an autopsy, while Deputy Rykop continues to look for clues. She finds one, writing on the inside of the box. I'll let her tell you about it.

It had been used to hold popcorn cups that popcorn is served in. And I can't remember the brand now, but that was the only clue on the box at all. She calls the local theaters to see if there's a connection to the box, but she comes up empty. The forensic team is able to lift some fingerprints from the box, but there's no match. The girl's fingerprints and dental records were entered into the California database for missing persons, but there's no match there either. It's like the girl never even existed. We were pretty amazed because this was obviously a young woman, and young women just don't disappear without somebody most of the time

becoming worried about them and reporting them missing by some means or another. Eventually, the police at the two counties where the bodies of the victims were dumped started talking with each other. It did occur to us as a possibility. We don't get that many body dumps. And so we made sure that Nevada County was aware of all the facts and circumstances of our other case and exchanged information with Nevada County Sheriff's Office. In some ways, the cases are alike.

A lone female murdered and then dumped in a public place. In other ways, though, they're very different. In the first case, the body was burned, most likely to make identification difficult. In the second, they were able to get fingerprints. They have nothing but a cardboard box and a body. You're just stumped. It's just, because that's the basis of the investigation. Who is this person?

Who is this person, and why is she dead? Both cases of unidentified young women remain cold, and to this point, unlinked. That is, until another woman comes into the picture, eight years later, Terry Knorr. The police didn't believe me. Attorneys didn't believe me. Nobody believed me. They thought I was just a delusional psycho making things up. Terry was 23 years old, but she'd been on her own since she was 15. She was a number, a statistic, a runaway who'd been in and out of jail.

She'd told her story before, but because of her place in society, no one had taken her seriously. Maybe she was mentally ill. Maybe she just wanted attention. Maybe, if she kept trying, someone would finally listen. Sitting at home one night watching the TV show America's Most Wanted, the number for a tip line flashed across the screen. So Terry called it. I called down to him, and I talked to the gal named Sherry on the phone. And I was just bawling.

I told her I'm at my wit's end. Nobody believes me. What do I do? The woman on the other end of the phone calms Terry down, and finally someone listens to what Terry has to say. It was 1982, and Terry was 12 years old. She lived with her sisters, Susan and Sheila, her brothers, William and Robert, and her mother, Teresa Knorr. Her mother, it seems, had a less-than-nurturing parenting style. We pretty much walked on eggshells around my mom. We stayed away from her as much as we could.

She's just a vicious person. Vicious feels like a strong word to describe a person's mother, but Terry goes on to explain exactly how she came to that description. Like the time Terry was in the third grade and her mom came to school for a parent-teacher conference. We were all lined up just to come back in from recess, and I ran up to my mom and I threw my arms around her. And I gave her a big hug and I said, I love you, Mom. And she said, yeah, I love you too. Well, when I got home from school that day, I got locked in a deep freezer. Because my mother said that I had been telling the teacher that she was hitting on me and this and that and the other thing.

And I had never said no such thing. And so my mother put me in a deep freezer and locked me in there. That wasn't the worst of it, Terry said. One day, a neighbor noticed that Terry's clothes were worn, and she offered the family some hand-me-downs. That apparently sent Terry's mother into a frenzy. They didn't need charity. She took a rope, wrapped it around my neck, threw it over a door, stripped me butt naked, and proceeded to beat me within an inch of my life because she said

that I was going around telling people in the neighborhood that we didn't have enough, that we didn't have anything. And that's why that lady brought those to me. The children were pulled from public school and, for the most part, taught at home. Their lessons were religious in nature and backed up by something they referred to as the Board of Education. Oh yeah, I remember the Board of Education. The Board of Education was a board that was about, well, I don't know, three feet long. It was about half inch thick and about an inch and a half wide. And it had Board of Education scrawled on it. And that's what she beat us with.

If we moved, we got beat wherever she could hit. As the girls became teenagers, Sheila and Susan, the oldest daughters, became the main targets of abuse. I think my mother was just jealous, you know, because she was getting older. Her daughters were blooming into women. She wasn't the center of attention anymore, so therefore she had to take out her competition. Mrs. Knorr would manipulate and control her daughters.

Terry said at one point she would force them to have sex with people for money and use the money as household income. The cycle of abuse continues and escalates. One day, Mrs. Knorr orders her sons to beat her daughter, Susan, who was 16. Their mother then brings out a gun. My mom had on this chieftain, big dress, and had pockets in it. And the only thing I can really rightly remember is that she pulled the damn thing out of her pocket and she shot her.

And my sister gasped and slid down the door into the bathroom. There was blood all over the door frame. And she fell in the bathtub. and that's where she stayed. Susan lays in the bathtub with a bullet lodged in her back that had entered through her chest. Her mother handcuffs her to the soap dish and begins the sickening process of nursing her daughter back to health. My mom propped her up with pillows, and for, I don't know, maybe a week or so, she didn't look like she was going to make it. But she made it, and then started letting her get up out of the tub and this and that, and that was probably the longest time in that period of my life that I hadn't seen my mother hit her.

Susan is once again forced onto the street to earn money for her family. This time, though, Susan is determined to get away and leave the abuse behind. My sister said, Mom, I just want to leave. I promise I won't tell anybody nothing. I just want to go. So my mom told her, OK, I'll let you go, but you've got to let me take the bullet out of you. Mrs. Knorr forces her 16-year-old daughter, Susan, to drink whiskey and take some kind of

pills. Susan passes out on the kitchen floor, and her mother produces an X-Acto knife. It seemed like a long time, yeah. But I'm sure it really probably didn't take very long at all. I remember cutting the bullet out. I remember her taking the bullet and flushing it down the toilet. I believe is what she did with it. The girl is bandaged and handcuffed there to the kitchen table. She was so sick, though, and didn't seem to be healing as well as she had in the bathtub. She would just start mumbling incoherently. Her eyes and her skin had turned yellow from jaundice.

And my mother said that the yellow jaundiceness and all this was the demon in my sister had finally took her body over and this and that. Susan's mother ordered her two teenage sons to help her scoop Susan up off the kitchen floor. They put Susan in the car along with cans of gasoline and they headed to the mountains. She decided that the only way to purge this demon that was in my sister's soul was by fire. So that's what she had decided to do. She was going to burn her body to purge the demon out of it.

Terry never saw Susan again. More of Terry's story after the break. If you're like me, you want to eat well, but don't have time to find recipes, plan meals, or go grocery shopping. Thanks to Green Chef, what's for dinner is an open and shut case. Green Chef delivers gourmet meal kits with everything I need to cook delicious meals at home. It's so convenient. Each box includes organic ingredients and easy recipes that anyone can cook.

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Sign up today and pick the meal plan that's made for you. Go to greenchef.us slash coldcase and get $40 off your first meal kit. Hi, this is Ben Domenech, the host of the Federalist Radio Hour. We're a daily show coming to you five days a week from Washington, D.C., where we interview our nation's top journalists, politicians, authors, chefs, economists, entertainers, and more. If you're looking for a contrarian discussion on news, politics, or culture, give us a listen and subscribe at podcastone.com, the new Podcast One app, or at Apple Podcasts. A year after Terry's sister Susan had been driven out to the mountains, never to be seen again, her oldest sister, 20-year-old Sheila, had become her mother's main target.

My mom had a little habit of prostituting out her daughters. She said that my sister Sheila had gotten a venereal disease and that she was giving it to her via the toilet seat. And I was made to go in and handcuff her at night to the bottom of the kitchen table, the whole nine yards. At first, Sheila's beaten daily while handcuffed to the table. But then it's no longer enough. She's tied up with her hands and feet behind her back.

She isn't fed. She isn't allowed to use the toilet. She's not even allowed to wash. She's locked in a closet. I remember my sister sitting in there and, you know, crying, please, Mom, please let me out. Sheila gets weaker and weaker, barely alive. One day, Terry tries to sneak some water to her sister, but her sister isn't even strong enough to hold up her own head.

Under these circumstances, it isn't long until Sheila becomes her mother's second murder victim. The last thing I remember hearing from my sister was her mumbling something about crawling towards the light at the top of the roof. And then about three days after that, there was a horrible, horrible smell. Horrible smell that come out of the closet. Mrs. Nora calls her son William and asks him to bring home a large box from the movie theater that he works at. They stuff Sheila's body into the box. Terry's told that she has to clean out the closet that had been her sister's cage.

She didn't ask. She beat me and made me clean it. There was pieces of my sister's face in that floor. There was blood in that floor, and it was just, it was... Something I'll never forget. It was horrible. The closet looks clean, but the smell of death still permeates the house. I remember her telling me, you know, Susan told me that Mom was going to kill her and I didn't believe her.

And she did. And she says, Terry, I'm telling you, Mom's going to kill me too. And then she's going to go to you. Terry Nora wonders when it's going to be her turn to die. By now, Terry's 15. She knows she's got to get out of her mother's house if she wants to survive. To her surprise, her mother makes a deal with her.

The closet where Sheila died still smells of death and decay, which permeates throughout the house. So Mrs. Nora tells Terry that if she does this one thing for her, she'll let Terry go off on her own. I was to go in and spread lighter fluid all over the house and light the match. And if I did what she told me to do, I was free to leave. So I did it. Teresa had Terry spread lighter fluid all around the apartment, light a match, and set their former home ablaze. If that was the price of her freedom, Terry was willing to pay. After the apartment was burnt, Terry met her family at a

nearby hotel. Her mother tried to go back on their deal. And that's when she put a knife to my throat and I grabbed her and I said, you're never going to hit me again. Never. And she called my brother in there and my brother Robert said, Terry, let her go. And I said, she's never going to hit me, Robert. She's not going to do to me what she did to Susan and Sheila. They said, I understand. Just let her go. And at that point, I think she knew she had to let me go because I wasn't playing with her. 15-year-old Terry goes out on her own and lives on the streets, surviving however she can and trying to forget about her past. One day though, her past runs right into her. I was riding with a friend in a car and we pulled

over and I got out and I, she's my mother, you know, I know she did horrible things, but she is my mother. And so I said, hi, Mom. And we got drunk together. And at that point, she had that gun in her purse at my apartment. She had opened up her purse and showed me the gun and said, you can never tell anybody. And I said, I'm not going to. And that was the last time I seen my mother. Very last time I seen my mother. Very last time. Terry Nora doesn't stay silent, though.

She tells anyone who will listen the story about her two sisters, her mother, and what went on during her childhood. Terry now has her own criminal background and problems with drugs and alcohol, so no one listens. Then, Terry calls the tip line number on America's Most Wanted and speaks to a woman named Sherry. Sherry suggests she calls the authorities near her home. Finally, someone listens, a Nevada County sergeant named Ron Perea. She wasn't even sure she had contacted the right agency or not. So I told her that, you know, your story sounds familiar, you know, it's believable, and

she basically had a sigh of relief only because she said that nobody believes me. Sergeant Perea recalls the body of a young woman being burned in nearby Placer County. He thinks it could be the body of Terry's sister, Susan. And I went and contacted their investigator there, who was John Fitzgerald at the time, and told him the story. And he right away knew exactly what he was talking about, because again, it was an unsolved case. Sergeant Fitzgerald from Placer County asked Terry if they could meet so he could talk to her more about her sister's murders. Do you know where Susan is at this time? She's dead. Do you know where Sheila is at this time?

She's dead. We talked for about an hour and a half, and she did most of the talking, telling me everything that had happened, what had happened, where it had happened, and describing different forms of child abuse that had occurred, up to and including the deaths of her two sisters. Sergeant Fitzgerald believes Terry, but unfortunately, Placer County has not preserved any tissue samples from the unidentified burnt corpse, so they have nothing that will establish forensically that it's actually Susan Knorr.

Instead, Fitzgerald uses details pulled from the old case file as a way to validate or reject Terry's story. He begins with the autopsy report. It notes a long wound in the victim's back, like maybe where an X-Acto knife was used to cut out a bullet. Terry was also able to explain why they had found diapers near the scene. She told me the reason for the diapers is because the mother kept Susan on the kitchen floor naked, except for the diapers.

They had a diaper under her because she couldn't get up and walk. Terry was also able to describe the antique ring Susan wore and her jingle bell earrings. Terry was able to describe these two pieces of jewelry to me without me even asking her about them. So I felt at that time that this information was very valid. The single piece of forensic information the Placer County PD had was fingerprints lifted from the nearby plastic bags. They were able to match those to Robert Knorr, Terry's brother, who is in prison.

At this point, cold case detectives try and connect the woman that was found in a box by a lake with Terry's other sister, Sheila. The best evidence that we had to be able to validate what Terry was telling us about Sheila was the fact that she told us her brother William had worked at the movie theater and that he had removed a box from the movie theater. Here's the audio from that conversation. Let's go back and let's talk about the box. You said that you thought it was drink cup boxes. What made you think it was drink cup box? I believe it said 32 ounce cold cups on the outside of the box.

I don't know what made me believe it. I read somewhere and it said drink cup. And the one thing that's stuck in my mind all these years is that it was for drink cups for when you get your drinks at the movie, you know. At the movie theater? Right, and it was the only one he could find that was large enough that she would fit in. And that was the same type of box that Sheila was found in. And we were able to determine that that box did come from the movie theater.

Additionally, Terry told us that Sheila had her front teeth broken one time while she was being force-fed by her mother. And during the autopsy, her teeth were examined. The front teeth broken one time while she was being force-fed by her mother. And during the autopsy, her teeth were examined, and the front teeth were broken. Those two pieces of evidence corroborate Terry's story and confirm for detectives that Sheila is in fact the woman who had been found in Nevada County. Despite decades of disbelief, Terry Knorr's story of murder in her own family is finally being investigated. Detectives issue warrants to pick up the two Knorr brothers, William and Robert, both potential accomplices to murder. They hope that playing the brothers against each other will produce a confession.

So, on November 4, 1993, cold case detectives sit down with William Knorr and tell him that they believe at least one member of his family has committed murder. William says he knows nothing about Susan being shot, but she was beaten badly and very sick when his mother decided that they should take a drive with Susan into the mountains. This is part of William Knorr's statement. She looked out on one side with Teresa sitting on top of her. She was in the middle of the crowd

and sat on the other side and then I sat in the front seat. And we started driving. I go, well, where are we going? She goes, just shut up. The Norris family drives up into the mountains and when they've gone a sufficient distance up Highway 80,

Teresa tells William to pull over. And she says, okay, get her out. and when they've gone a sufficient distance up Highway 80, Teresa tells William to pull over. And my mom comes over and grabs the gas and starts throwing it all over the stuff. And she goes, here, hold these. Give me a pack of matches. And she threw all of this, like, the gasoline, threw the gasoline all over the place. And then she started bouncing the suit. Then she finished bouncing everything down. And she goes, I'm going to run back and start the car. You light a match and you just drop it and run. And I did.

William then talks about the second drive, a year later, with his sister Sheila. She was already dead. Her body was shoved and taped inside a cardboard box. They once again head up Highway 80 and pull over. They start taking the box out of the car when a police car pulls up. bathroom. Then we got back to the car and he goes, okay, you're not allowed to be the police. You scared my mother. You never live with my mom, okay? She would have done what she said she was going to do. If she said, you don't help me here, I'm spoiled, I'm going to come down and kill you,

she would have come down and killed me. Cold case detectives finally have enough information to make their case against Teresa Knorr. They track her down in Salt Lake City, where she'd been hired by a man to take care of his elderly mother. Police find her and arrest her for the murder of her two daughters. Before trial, Teresa Knorr is transported back to California where she pleads not guilty to two counts of murder.

She undergoes psychiatric testing in preparation for trial. Are you aware that you're charged with two counts of murder, Teresa? No. Well, I'm now telling you. I'm apparently the first to inform you that you're charged with two counts of murder. What is your reaction to that? This blank. that you're charged with two counts of murder. What is your reaction to that? Disbelief. Do you know who you're charged with having murdered?

No, I do not. Mm-hmm. I don't. You seem awfully strange to me. Mm-hmm. Teresa Norris judged by the court mentally fit to stand trial. Then, in a gesture I could not begin to understand, she decides to cut a deal. In return for a promise not to prosecute her sons, she pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.

She's sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in 1993. In April of 2003, Terry Knorr was married and going on with her life, despite the trauma of her past. I wanted my mom to pay for what she had done. I've always tried to be a pretty honest person. You know, I always face up to what I've done. And I accept the consequences as they come. And she needed to do that as well. I never understood why, per not having any family,

she decided that I didn't need one either because I did. I wanted my sisters to have their names back. More than anything in the world. They were somebody and they were, and they still are. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Scott Brody. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're edited by Steve Delamater

and distributed by Podcast One. Cold Case Files Classic was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetb.com and by downloading the A&E app.