The Most Evil Mother in America

Theresa no is truly one of the most evil mothers to have ever existed she essentially held all six of her children hostage in their apartment and abused them for most of their lives but six children soon turned to just four when Teresa started instructing her own children to help kill each other so today's video is going to be another solved True Crime case today we're going to be discussing the case of Theresa Knoll this one has been highly requested literally for years now and it's been on my case list forever and I don't know why I haven't done it yet but here we are we're finally here but quickly before we get into the case I do just want to thank our sponsor for making this video possible establish titles listen up because this is a banging Christmas present I reckon so established titles is based on this old Scottish custom where people that owned land would be referred to as Lords and Ladies and established titles allows you to buy as little as one square foot of dedicated land 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the internet and I'm compiling into one video there's a few content warnings before we get into this case I do just want to warn you now that this is a really really heavy one and the victims in this case are children but the more specific trigger warnings include depression child abuse domestic abuse false prostitution and torture so if any of that is something that you don't want to hear about right now I completely understand click out of this video look after yourself and hopefully I'll get to see you again some other time with a different kiss but with all that being said let's get into the case so today's KS takes place mainly in California in the 1980s but first let's take it back about 40 years before that when Teresa Knorr was born March 12 1946 Teresa Jimmy Francine cross was born in Sacramento to her parents swanny and Jim Teresa was the youngest of four children her mother had two children to a previous marriage a boy and a girl named William and Clara and her new husband Jim had completely taken the these two kids under his wing he treated them as if they were his own and then when swanny met her second husband Jim they had two children together a daughter named Rosemary and then Teresa came along making it fall her father Jim worked as a cheese maker and her mother swanny worked at a local timber company and the fact that they had two paychecks in this household immediately meant that they were quite a well-off family compared to the rest of the neighborhood because in the 40s not many mothers did actually go out and get jobs they many of them were stay at her mother's but not swanny she went out and got herself a job this family had 2 two paychecks and so you know they were quite they were quite comfortable they yeah they were comfortable in the 1950s they ended up buying quite a big house in Sacramento and as far as my research could tell they were happy there that they were a very normal family with a cross family but things started to take a bit of a turn in the late 50s when Jim was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease now this causes the sufferer to shake uncontrollably and often quite severely like it's like a stiff Shake which means they they find it hard to like pick things up and hold things and they find it hard to do anything remotely like fiddly they don't have that kind of motor control anymore and as a result Jim had to leave his job as a cheese maker he physically just could not do his job anymore he was shaking too much and his disease was only getting worse and worse and worse with time it was borderline debilitating towards the end he couldn't really do anything he was barely leaving the house anymore he would have to just kind of stay at home form while the rest of his family went out and did things together and lived their lives and he just felt like his life was kind of over he was just kind of locked away in his house all day he couldn't do much and he became really really depressed and this Depression started manifesting itself in like resentment towards his family who could go out and live their lives and do whatever they wanted and he had to just sit and watch from home and he started to hate them even though they had nothing to do with his Parkinson's disease he started to hate them just because he was jealous and there came a point over the years where Jim started actually taking out this anger on his family and because swanny was out working all the time now the family was down to one paycheck she was picking up more hours this meant that the children would receive the brunt of most of Jim's anger so the kids are getting shouted out a lot for like no reason and swanny is absolutely exhausted because now she has pretty much taken on the whole family responsibility all by herself she's working she's working all the time to be fair now to be able to pay for the family she's doing all the housework she's doing all the child care because Jim literally cannot physically do anything she is forced to do everything by herself which she was willing to do because she loved her family but she was so so exhausted and burnt out and stressed and it was having such a toll on her so much so to the point where she was really struggling to to keep up with all these tasks and she was slowly gradually becoming less of a mother to her children because she was just so exhausted that she wasn't she wasn't the same mum that she'd always be things were getting really really tough in this household because things were changing rapidly and things were only going to get worse as well one day in March of 1961 swanny was going out to do the weekly food shop and she decided to bring along her youngest daughter Teresa the two of them planned to walk to the supermarket do the shopping and then walk back but they never even made it to the supermarket that day on the walk there swanny literally just collapsed to the ground and died collapsed to the ground on her walk to the supermarket in front of her young daughter she just died suddenly and unexpectedly she seemed fine that morning she seemed exhausted but she always seemed exhausted there was no sign that she was going to literally just drop dead in the street one day swanny's cause of death was established as congestive heart failure which is likely brought on by all of this stress and Teresa the youngest of the kids took her mother's death the hardest of course she she was literally there and witnessed it I can't imagine how traumatizing that must have been but also she was the baby of the family she was the one that that needed her mummy the most out of everyone and now her mum was literally just taken from her like that so unexpectedly and because she didn't really have her father to care for her either Teresa was essentially left to Rears herself after swanny's death and she really struggled she fell into a deep deep depression at a very young age and much like her father's depression Teresa's also manifested itself in Anger She would argue with her family almost every single day to the point where she actually started secluding herself in her bedroom more stairs all day more stairs because she didn't want to be around her family and of course swanny's death had a larger knock-on effect for the family as a whole because that was their only paycheck and now swanny isn't there to work she isn't there to provide for the family they started struggling financially everything just fell apart in her absence no one was there to do the child care of the housework or you know absolutely anything and it got to the point where Jim actually had to sell their house luckily they had quite a bit of money in the past and bought this big house so now he could sell it downsize the house and still have a decent sized house but get some of that money back so that he could then provide for his children but again this is another thing that really really affected Teresa especially as the youngest child it affected all the kids but especially Teresa she was growing developing and so much was changing hinging around her at all times her mother literally just died and now she's ripped out of her family home and put into a different house like it feels like everything is so turbulent around her right now she was very very vulnerable at this point in time she was about 15 or 16 years old by the time they'd moved into this new house and settled down and it was around this time that Teresa would meet her first boyfriend he was older than her he was 21 years old and like I said she was about 15 16 at this point in time um but this man's name was Clifford Sanders when they met the two of them very quickly became close I mean quickly as an understatement this is the Whirlwind Romance of the year the two of them were married within three months this relationship that Teresa and Clifford had was very unhealthy especially for Theresa because she just unloaded everything on this man I mean she was going through a lot um and she she did need to like vent and get it out and talk to someone about it but she made him responsible for her happiness she was so incredibly dependent on him she couldn't be without him after marrying Clifford Teresa dropped out of high school completely she didn't care about getting qualifications and she went and moved in with Clifford the two of them got a house well the two of them it was Clifford's house because he was the only one working he was the only one with money to pay for it so now they are married they are living together and let me remind you they are a very very new couple they've probably only known each other about half a year at most at this point which is quick by any relationship standards but especially because this was Teresa's first ever relationship she's a teenager she's a child this is her first ever relationship and now she's married living with someone like it's a lot all at once and that early on in a relationship you don't truly know who that person is or what your Dynamic is especially so young because you're constantly developing and changing and Teresa just was wasn't emotionally mature enough to be in such a serious relationship shocker I don't think any 16 year old is but she wasn't and she didn't really know how to handle her emotions she couldn't articulate things and everything would just come out in anger she used to lash out she was incredibly insecure this was one of her main issues in this relationship she was constantly accusing Clifford of cheating on her and he wasn't as far as I'm aware like as far as what he's kind of said within this case he wasn't but she was very very emotionally abusive with Clifford she would manipulate him she would try to control him she blamed him for everything she made him feel guilty for things that he hadn't even done he'd never even cheated on her but she was convinced that he had but all of this seemed to calm down a little bit about two years into their relationship no idea how they even lasted two or two years but about two years in when Teresa was 18 years old she felt pregnant and this pregnancy seem to kind of shock the two of them into getting along for a while it's like something shifted for them and they genuinely did seem a lot happier throughout the pregnancy Theresa gave birth to her first son in 1962. his name was Howard Sanders and for the first year of Howard's life everything was fine in the family it was as if Howard had come along and just fixed this family everything was fine but after a while things started to turn sour again and about a year later Teresa turned up at the police station one day accusing her husband Clifford Sanders of abusing her she told police that the two of them had gotten into an argument and Clifford had turned around and just punched her straight in the face and so police took this accusation very very seriously and they they opened an investigation into it but a few days in Teresa turned to the police and told them to drop all the charges against Clifford she didn't want to go ahead with this she didn't give much reasoning but that was it she just wanted them to drop it so anywhere at her request police dropped the charges and again following this their relationship seemed a lot less turbulent again it was as if something shifted and things were fine for another good few months until they were fine again the couple gradually started arguing again it got worse and worse and worse over time until it came to an end One Night in July of 1964. on July 4th it was Clifford's 25th birthday and to celebrate he decided to go out drinking with all of his friends while Teresa stayed at home and this really upset her really really upset her that he wasn't spending his birthday with her so this led to a whole slew of arguments and cheating accusations and Affair accusations she was sure that he had gone out on his birthday with his friends and cheated on him and Clifford was just so so worn down at this point he couldn't take any more of this constant aggravation and he decided he was done with this he was gonna leave Teresa and he told her that and this sent her into even more of a frenzy now she was screaming crying throwing herself on the floor throwing things at him she was an absolute state but this didn't change anything Clifford was still walking out of that door he'd seen her do this plenty of times and he was sick of it he was sick he was going as Clifford turned and walked towards the front door Teresa panicked knowing that this was the end and so she decided to do the unthinkable she grabbed a rifle sitting nearby raised it and shot her husband in the back killing him instantly to reason all had just killed her husband for trying to leave her and of course there was no way she was going to be able to hide this I don't know how police eventually ended up finding out but they did and it was very very clear who had done this to Clifford and Teresa was immediately arrested charged and a child it was set in her car trial Teresa tried to argue that this was manslaughter and not murder she hadn't intended to shoot and kill Clifford when she picked up that gun so her story was that the two of them had gotten into an argument and Clifford was drunk and often when he got drunk she said that he got violent and supposedly tonight was one of those nights he was drunk they got into an argument and she thought that he was gonna start getting violent with her and so in her statement she said I grabbed a gun to make him keep from hitting me and it went off she said that she just picked it up and the trigger went off accidentally and this was just all a horrible accident and she was so heartbroken that her husband was dead but it's been argued that this can't be true and I mean we kind of know it's not true but based on the evidence Clifford was shot in the back not in the front so if he was coming towards her like threatening to hurt her or whatever and she supposedly pulled this gun to keep him away from her how could he be shot in the back if he was facing away from her he wouldn't be a threat would he so why I don't I don't know Teresa did try and use her previous domestic violence claim as support for her argument in court that you know Clifford was just a violent man but because she'd never actually pressed charges against him she went and reported it and then dropped the charges he'd never even so much has been arrested for it so that can't really be used as evidence in court they never they never went through with that investigation so it can't they don't know if it's even true and Clifford's friends and family as well as Teresa's friends and family all stood up there in court and testified but Clifford wasn't a violent man he never had been not when he was drunk not when he was sober all of them felt that Teresa was lying about these accusations and even her own sister stood up there and said that she was manipulative possessive and this is an exact quote she said she would kill before any other woman could have him so it kind of makes sense that he was gonna leave her she didn't want him to be with anyone else if she couldn't have him nobody can and Sir she shot it but then a plot twist Teresa drops the bomb Michelle that she is pregnant with her deceased husband's baby and she actually was as well like she weren't even lying she was pregnant um but I think she definitely strategically kept that to herself until the very last minute and then she kind of realized she was losing This Kiss And she was like quick let's pull out the big guns I'm pregnant and shockingly Teresa was acquitted Of The Murder She wasn't even given manslaughter she was just completely let off of every single charge and a lot of people believe that that is because of the pregnancy bombshell that she dropped right at the end they think that people took pity on her didn't want to lock her away in prison and so yeah nothing ever came of that a man died and no one ever saw any punishment for anything everyone was just kind of expected to go back to normal life as if she hadn't just shot and killed someone so yeah Teresa went on to have the baby it was a little girl that she named Sheila Sanders and after the birth Teresa started drinking heavily it quickly became an addiction she was spending every single night at the pub and it was actually there where Teresa would meet a new man he was a U.S army veteran named Estelle Thornbury and Theresa fell for him very quickly and very hard she did this every single time she got so quickly and severely attached to people but lucky for her Estelle liked her back and he he didn't mind it too much Estelle hadn't had a girlfriend in a while he hadn't had female attention in general in a while because like I said he was away in the Army and the reason that he was discharged and out now was because he'd gotten in into a fluke swimming accident that had left him paralyzed Reports say that he was like different levels of paralyzed some of them said he was paraplegic some of them said he was quadriplegic which is like losing all the limbs they were all paralyzed I don't know to what degree he was paralyzed he was in a wheelchair that's the only kind of fact I know about this but he was paralyzed in this accident and it meant that he just hadn't really like gotten himself out there he hadn't really been speaking to women that much but then he met Teresa and they both liked each other and this accident had left Estelle quite traumatized he didn't go out that much he he very much just liked to keep to himself he stayed home a lot he wasn't that much of a party animal these days but Teresa was the complete opposite like I said she was in the pub every single night these two were chalk and cheese there was no way that they were gonna get a long long term when the two of them ended up moving into each other okay so they're in a relationship at this point in time obviously the two of them moved in together and Teresa would leave him home like nearly every single night to just go out to the pub but it's even worse when you remember that Teresa has two kids that she is leaving at home with this man while she goes out every single night and bear in mind Estelle is paralyzed how is he supposed to take care of these two children all alone like that's not fair these aren't even his kids and he's put on Child Care duty every single night and then to top it all off Teresa would come home at the end of the night really really drunk causing arguments causing stress because like I said she was a very manipulative person she was with every single boyfriend she ever had so she would come home and start arguments every single factor of this situation was just so jarring I don't know how and why Estelle stayed for so long Teresa started taking advantage of this more and more and more as time was going on like she some nights she wouldn't even come home like sometimes she would be gone for days at a time without even so much as texting Estelle to let him know where she was she'd essentially gone missing for like little chunks of time where she'd just be on Benders for days she'd just be drinking all day every day and Estelle was convinced that she was cheating on it he questioned her on it a few times but Teresa would just start arguments she would avoid the question she would start like gaslighting him she would be like why don't you trust me but it didn't take long for the truth to come out that Teresa was having an affair with her boyfriend's best friend no less Estelle was just heartbroken when he found this out and he broke up with Teresa that same night but this was kind of a win-win for Teresa because that meant she could go and be with the best friend Instead This best friend was called Robert Knorr and within a couple of weeks of her breaking up with Estelle he moved out and Robert had moved in to their family home his best friend's family home that he just kicked him out of this is a mad situation and now Robert Knoll was her kid's new stepdad the two of them very quickly married and the whole family took his surname to reason changed her name to Noah she changed the kids names to know and Teresa and Robert would go on to make a dumb lot of babies they had three in the space of two years so that's just like one after another after another that she's not even giving herself time to recover you know she's popping him out in order they had a baby girl named Susan and then two boys named William and Robert so now there's three boys and two girls and Teresa was still the same old Teresa in this relationship as she'd been in all of her other ones she'd go missing for days at a time she'd have affairs she was doing all sorts and she was still really really manipulative they would have explosive arguments but Robert was quite a match for her in that way in the argumentative way they were both very very angry people and they argued and shouted and screamed at each other all day every day and eventually this turned into physical violence Mutual physical violence they both abused each other most of these arguments events were triggered by Robert suspecting Teresa of cheating which is something that she'd always done to her partners and she was cheating she was she knew she was he knew she was but neither of them were going to leave so they were just going to argue about it after a few years Robert filed for divorce in 1970 he just couldn't he couldn't take this constant turbulence in the household anymore he wanted out and when he told her that he wanted this divorce Teresa turned around to him and told him that she was pregnant and she actually was as well this woman had insane timing with her pregnancies but Robert was like that doesn't change anything for me I still don't want to be married to you and he went ahead with the divorce although he did want to have like some custody of his kids he did still want to be in their lives he wanted to see them he still wanted this unborn baby he still was gonna care for it but he didn't want to be married to the mother but Teresa wasn't a big fan of that idea so much so that she just straight up refused to let him see his children she didn't and she ignored every single request for like joint custody just to spite him just because she was mad at him for leaving her and soon Teresa would give birth to her sixth and final child a little girl that she named after herself Teresa but she goes by Terry Terry not but Teresa wouldn't be without a man for very long because that's not very like Teresa is it she very quickly found her third husband a railway worker named Ronald pulliham and history repeats itself as it had in all her other relationships she was going out getting drunk cheating on him leaving the kids with him abusing him and eventually it was too much for Ronald and he too divorced her did they get married I don't know but he left her anywhere but fear not in comes husband number four a man named Chester Harris and actually from what I could tell in my research this one seems like a kraken fella he seems actually really nice he was supposedly a great stepfather to all six of her children he really just accepted them as his own he made an effort with them he would take them out he would buy them presents he adored these kids and he adored Teresa even though he didn't have much reason to her because she was a [ __ ] he also had a great job he provided for the family he was I don't know everything I read about this man he seemed incredible the best one yet for these kids especially but as always something had to go wrong didn't it Teresa's third oldest child Susan the younger of the two girls really really took a liking to her new stepdad Chester they became really really close and they spent a lot of time together and whatever whatever it was nice it was really nice she finally had a father figure in her life that wasn't abusive that wasn't angry like this man was genuinely just there to raise her and care for her and be there for her she was so happy all the kids were so happy but Susan was particularly close with chester and you know what a mum's like Teresa was crazy she started to get jealous of her daughter for spending too much time with her husband make it makes sense she's like what's six at that like and she's getting jealous that this six-year-old is spending too much time with her husband and what's even weirder than that Chester caught Teresa cheating on him one time this man really took all the hell that Teresa gave him he knew that she was cheating on him the whole time but he stood with her I don't know why he loved her so much but he did he caught her cheating on him one time and Theresa said something to the effect of well if you give me as much attention as you give Susan then maybe I wouldn't cheat I also just want to point out that they haven't even been married that long they'd been married a few months at this point if that but then about three months into their marriage everything came crashing down when Teresa found out about one of Chester's Hobbies he was into photography um more specifically nude photography of of like female models so like naked pictures of ladies but like artistic you know they're like paused it was proper legit stuff it weren't like you were like a creep taking pictures of naked ladies like this was actually like he would go to places with proper naked models and like it was artistic for him you know but the way that Teresa kind of took it immediately which is the way I think a lot of women would take this basically she just found all these pictures of naked women in her husband's possession one day and she freaked out um and she brought it up to him and he was like no no dad and don't worry like this is my hobby this this is all legit like they're models they're paired to do this but Teresa wouldn't have any of it Teresa started accusing him of cheating on her saying that like these these women were women that he'd been sleeping with and whatever and he was like look I promise you they're not but if it makes you this uncomfortable then I can photograph you instead he was perfectly happy never photographing another woman naked if she would let him do it for her but no she wasn't having it and Teresa was actually the one that filed for divorce this time I don't think Chester ever would because like I said from my research it seemed like he really loved her I can't figure out why but either way Teresa devast him and now she's a single mother with six children she was receiving government Aid at this point in time because she wasn't working um but pretty much all the money that she got to support herself and her kids and to to house them and feed them and clothe them she spent most of that money on alcohol because she had a debilitating addiction her drinking was worse than ever at this point in time she was going out every single night and she kind of stopped caring for herself in a lot of ways she started gaining weight she wasn't like keeping up with her appearance the way that she used to you know doing her hair and stuff like that and it was really really affecting her self-esteem her her self-esteem went like that I think this was down to a couple of factors of course the the sudden change in her appearance she gained weight she was like not doing her hair the way she used her she just lost a lot of confidence in herself but also this was around the time that her two oldest daughters Susan and Sheila were hitting puberty and we've already established that Teresa has a weird jealousy thing with her daughters she kind of views them as competition for male male attention her own husband's attention she was already jealous of Susan for being close with her own husband which is odd and now these young girls that she views as competition and now developing bodies you know they they are becoming young women and she sees her two daughters as more beautiful than her and she hates it she can't stand it it makes her feel even worse she don't care that there are daughters and that they're not actually her competition but Teresa's mind was you know quite messed up and she started to hate her daughters for for being pretty she started taking out this resentment on her daughters and she started like making Digs at them trying to knock their confidence like hers was not she was making Digs at them calling them different names and just in general treating them like crap as if they weren't her own daughters Teresa was so insecure that she became a recluse she never really wanted to leave the house because she never wanted anyone to see her and for that reason as well she never really had visitors over at the house only like very very close family she never let her kids have their friends over or anything she even went as far as to disconnect the phone line from the house because she just didn't want to be contactable she didn't even want to feel like she existed in the world she just wanted to be in her own little space where no one could see her where no one could judge her and since she's not leaving the house she's not working um and like I say all the government Aid is going on alcohol and so this family is really really struggling Financial they can barely afford to put food on the table Teresa couldn't afford to pay for their rent anymore and so they downsized to a one-bedroom apartment for seven of them for a mother and six kids they were sharing a one bedroom apartment it was quite an awful living situation that none of them wanted to be in so much so that the oldest son Howard to her first marriage he was like now F that I'm out and he was actually old enough to go out and get a job and be able to provide for himself so that's exactly what he did he moved out got a job lived his own life from this point on from now on Howard is gone so now it was just Teresa and her five youngest kids in that apartment and just to refresh in age order that is Sheila Susan William Robert and then their youngest daughter Terry the family's new neighbors at this new house immediately got a weird vibe from the Gnar family they said that they never let anyone into their apartment but when they had seen it like through a crack in the door when they'd seen one of them enter our leave it looked like such a mess it looked like an absolute state in there and apparently all the family smelled whenever they would walk past any of them they smelled like urine and the house smelled as well you could smell it from like feet away neighbors noticed that specifically the children seemed to not be washing they all smelled they all acted really on edge so we know that theresinore was suffering quite badly from depression at this point in time but it's highly speculated that she was suffering with something else as well because she was having delusions quite bad delusions when she was married to Chester she was convinced that he had turned Susan into a witch so that Susan could do witchcraft on her and turn her fat she she was convinced that that's why she'd gained weight was because her husband turned her daughter into a witch and then her daughter put this like curse on her to make her gain weight because that's the kind of woman she is everything is always someone else's fault she always needs to be able to blame someone else because she wanted someone to blame for that because it was affecting her so badly like her confidence her self-esteem her mental health that she wanted to be mad at someone for her weekend I think it's a combination of her never being willing to admit that she is the problem and then when you mix that with mental illness and delusions she was coming out with the most impossible conspiracy theories and this was only one of many I couldn't really find examples of many others because this is like the main one that she stuck with for for ages she really believed that her daughter was a witch for way too long but there were some other little like weird things that she believed here and there she was just a very mentally ill woman and she was only ever diagnosed with depression but people that look into this case believe there has to be something more going on Sir at this point in time there is six of them in this tiny little cramped one-bedroom house and they're all living on top of each other and like I said this family well Teresa has been abusive to this family the whole time mainly verbally abusive she would use physical um punishments and so she would smack her children if they were naughty if they misbehaved now she was subjecting the children to regular physical abuse and it's not entirely clear why I mean her mental state was at an all-time law and she was a recluse in this house but I don't know why she suddenly just decided to to become abusive for no apparent reason she would do things like put her cigarettes out on her children's bare skin she would throw things at them sometimes even knives she would throw knives at her own kids the kids were always on edge around their mother because she would just give them random beatings and things like that they just never knew what she was gonna do next and it just kept getting worse and worse she soon started turning the kids against each other like when she couldn't be bothered abusing them herself she would make them do it to each other she would get them to pin each other down while she beat them and and on one occasion this this is awful on one occasion she got all four of the older children to pin down the youngest Terry Teresa went and got a gun and put it to Terry's head and told her that if she didn't start behaving she would kill her over time this abuse trickled into like all aspects of their lives it wasn't just like physical abuse and verbal abuse it was neglect their mother never let them go to the doctors or the dentist if they had like illnesses or required medical attention they weren't allowed to go to the doctors or dentist or anything she didn't feed them properly ever she didn't feed them enough because she was spending all her money on alcohol she even made all her kids drop out of school none of them made it past eighth grade she didn't care that they wouldn't have qualifications she didn't want the kids to like have their own lives outside of this abusive household so they weren't allowed to go and see their friends they weren't allowed at school and this meant that they actually had really quite bad social skills not not terrible because they had had a relatively normal life up until that point but from this point on they were pretty much locked in this apartment for years of their lives they were very rarely allowed to leave and so they weren't conversing with anyone outside of this immediate family and bear in mind they're in two rooms they have a one bedroom apartment there's two rooms in that house they're literally living on top of each other and since none of these kids were really leaving the house anymore no one was noticing the the bruises and the and the warning signs of this abuse no one was aware that these children needed help all five of those children were being terribly terribly traumatized and hurt behind closed doors but two of them in particular got the worst of it the two older girls Susan and Sheila she just had this uncontrollable jealousy towards her daughters even though there were no men around in the house anymore like she wasn't even letting them out of the house it was just simply the fact that she thought they looked pretty easier than she did and she didn't like that and she was gonna take out that anger on them physically it started with her Force feeding the two of them to try and make them gain weight because she wanted to try and make them less desirable how she felt she would feed them and feed them and feed them until they threw up and at points the girls would try and like clench their mouths shut so their mother couldn't physically shove any more food in their mouths and when they did she would just punch them in the mouth and break their teeth so that's kind of the level that the abuse was at at this point in time and it is about to get much much worse after Teresa received some really bad news her older sister Rosemary had been murdered randomly like she'd just gone to the supermarket one day and never returned and her body was later found strangled to death at the end of a dead end Road and they didn't know who did it I don't know if they ever figured out who did it but this really really affected Theresa even though she didn't didn't really talk to a sister that much anymore like I don't know just the knowledge that her sister was dead and in that way as well she'd been murdered it really affected Teresa it worsened her depression and therefore worsened the way that she was treating her children eventually things got so bad in that household that Susan the younger of the two girls tried to run away she couldn't stand being in that house any longer she literally just ran out of the door and ran down the street and just kept running and running and running she didn't have a plan she didn't know what she was gonna do but she just knew she needed to get out of that house and when she did she didn't really have a plan she didn't know what she was gonna do all she knew was that she needed to get out of that house as soon as she could and when she did Teresa didn't seem to care she didn't try and find her she didn't report her missing it wasn't even like she was angry that she'd run away it was just like oh okay I guess there's one less kid she was like so indifferent to it Susan was eventually found by police on the side of a road um they suspected her of being a prostitute initially so they pulled over and they started speaking to her and they very quickly realized that she seemed to be in the middle of like a nervous breakdown obviously and that's almost to be expected considering the situation she's just fled from she could barely get her words out to the police but she's trying to tell them this story about how she's been abused and they're not really taking her seriously they think she's in the middle of some sort of like manic episode and she doesn't mean what she's saying and so police drove her to the nearest psychiatric hospital for like help a check over she was there for a couple of days and they kind of nursed her back to health and while she was there she tried to tell anyone that would listen him what was going on at home she tried to tell everyone that she was being abused by her mother so was her sister so were all of her siblings their mother was keeping them there locked in that apartment to abuse them but staff weren't really believing her there were a couple of staff that believed her but ultimately they ended up calling to reason or to come down to the hospital to speak with Hospital staff and police and Theresa managed to manipulate every single one of them and say no my daughter's just really mentally ill she does this all the time she runs away from her makes up these outlandish stories about abuse and this and that she's just mentally ill don't listen to her and you know what it worked which makes me so angry because this girl Susan was covered in bruises and cuts and burns and her blooming teeth were broken her front teeth was smashed through and she is sat there saying my mum's abusing me she's consistently abusing me and they're like um I don't know about that how how can you possibly look at a girl in that state and think she's lying and obviously Teresa's gonna be like oh don't listen to her she's just crazy like where were people's common sense in this situation every single sign points towards her telling the truth but it's a Madness they let to reason or take her daughter home Susan had tried to run away and somehow ended up back in the home and this this whole situation her daughter running away had really truly pissed to reason or off on a new level things were about to get a million times worse than they'd ever been Theresa kept calm in the car journey home from the hospital but as soon as they were home and behind closed doors she grabbed a pair of leather gloves and started beating Susan with them she beat her so much that she got exhausted herself and had to go and sit down and then she ordered all the other four kids to beat her with them instead bear in mind all all of these kids are terrified of their mother they are terrified of Teresa and what she could do to them at any minute and so they kind of just do whatever she tells them no matter how hairless they will always follow her orders Susan was then tied up her wrists tied her ankles tied and she was shoved under the kitchen table and the other four children were ordered to stand guard and not let her try and escape this went on for days and then weeks and then months and then for the next two years Susan was bound under that table practically the whole time she was very rarely let out from under that table for two years she never once left the house that whole time she was rarely even allowed out to go to the bathroom so she was going to the bathroom under that table most of the time she was very rarely allowed food or water she became severely malnourished and dehydrated so much so to the point where her siblings used to try and sneak her food under the table and they would have to like hand feed her because remember her hands are tied Susan was in so much pain under that table she was so unwell and she would beg and beg and beg her mother to let her out but this would just piss Teresa off this was just annoying that this girl under the table is making so much noise and so she would go and gag her so that she couldn't cry and scream anymore it's just it's so evil this woman is evil then on one particular night in July of 1984 Teresa was in an awful mood like much much worse than her regular awful moods that she was always in this one was horrific this time she beat each of her children one by one by one by one and even then she wasn't done she needed to get more anger out and so she walked over to the kitchen table grabbed Susan pulled her out untied her and started beating her too and this barely ever happened because obviously Teresa deems Susan as a Flight Risk she tried to run away once chances are she might try and run away again so she very rarely untied her and Teresa knew full well that there was a chance that Susan might try and escape again and so before she untied her actually she turned to the youngest daughter Terry and handed her a pistol and told her that if Susan tried to run for it she should shoot her and kill her her own sister and later on that same day Susan was shot in the back and there's two different stories about how this happened some sauces say that Teresa grabbed the gun herself and literally just straight up shot her daughter in the back which seems believable doesn't it but there's this other story that says that Terry was the one holding the gun and she was pointing it at Susan you know like as a constant like threat she had it pointed at her and then someone dropped something in the kitchen and it startled her and she pulled the trigger by accident and shot Susan in the back I don't know I don't know straight away she was bleeding heavily this was a serious wound and Teresa didn't plan on doing anything about it actually if her daughter was gonna die she was gonna die if she was gonna survive then sure she's gonna survive Teresa didn't care though she wasn't giving her any medical attention she weren't going to take her to the hospital of course not if she did they'd start asking loads of questions like why is she shot who did this like questions that Teresa couldn't be bothered answering couldn't be bothered coming up with lies for anywhere so instead Teresa literally just tied Susan back up tied a wrist tied her ankles and shoved her back under the kitchen table like nothing had just happened she was left to try and heal this gunshot wound in her back from under the table with with no medical assistance and Susan was in pure Agony of course of course she was and she was bleeding profusely and all Teresa did would shout at her for staying in the carpet Teresa didn't want to deal with this situation at all and so and instead she passed the responsibility onto her two other daughters Sheila and Terry Sheila was 16 at the time and Terry was just 12 years old which is crazy that she was the one that was given the gun and told to shoot her sister if she tried to escape so yeah Sheila's 16 Terry is 12 and literally all Theresa did was throw him some bandages and go up look after your sister so these two children are trying to save their sister's lives they're doing everything they can to try and stop the bleeding and you know what it worked I don't know how it worked I don't know how she got shot in the back and survived but she did but there was a problem with how it was healing the bullet was still in her back it was lodged in there and they kind of knew that they needed to get it out I don't think Teresa gave a crap whether it was out or not I think it was her siblings that knew they needed to get it out and so someone handed Susan a glass of whiskey to ease the pain while her brother Robert literally shoved his fingers in and pulled this bullet out of you and because this wasn't done properly and sterily sterily it wasn't clean and hygienic and everything this led to infections she got sepsis she was jaundice she was all yellow like her body was not recovering well from this at all and even still Teresa refuses to take her daughter to the hospital if she wasn't going to take her for a gunshot when she's not going to take her for sepsis either but yeah miraculously Susan survived being shot in the back albeit with all these other complications but she somehow survived that which is crazy and the family just kind of carried on after that as if nothing had happened so Susan was just still shoved under the table only being let out on the odd occasion just to be abused over time Susan became incontinent because she was abused so badly she was so malnourished still just ill in general that her body had just started packing in on itself she could no longer control her bladder and her bowels and so she was forced to wear adult nappies when Susan turned 18 years old she asked her mother one last time if she could move out she was an adult now she said I'll move out and I'll never bother you again just please let me go but Teresa's response to this was like her worst kickoff yet she grabbed a knife and stabbed Susan in the leg with it enough to make her bleed but not enough to kill her but this this stab wound on top of everything else that Susan was dealing with the infections sepsis malnourishment just healing gunshot wound like everything her body was pushed to its absolute limits and it started giving in she was so exhausted that she went hardly responsive she was falling in and out of Consciousness for days it was clear to everyone to Teresa and to all the other kids that Susan was dying everyone knew that she wasn't gonna survive for much longer and Theresa knew that she kind of needed to do something about that but not something to save Susan not something positive she needed to do something to get rid of this she saw this as a problem and she wanted to get it out of her life she decided that the best way to go about this was to just dump Susan off somewhere out in the wild for her to just die alone and then Teresa would pretend like nothing ever happened she would deny all knowledge sir for the very last time she started tying up her ankles her wrists they tipped over her mouth so that she wouldn't be able to scream for help she then instructed her two boys William and Robert to pack up all of Susan's belongings into the car and then carry her into the car too all four of them drove for about two hours right out into the middle of nowhere they reached this isolated patch of land and Theresa was confident that this could be the place to carry out her plan she then instructed her two boys to get all of Susan's belongings out of the car and lay them out on the grass in a big pile and then to get Susan out and throw her on top of the pile of all of her things Teresa then went to the car and grabbed a can of gasoline and just started pouring it all over her daughter all over her belongings and then she set it on fire her 18 year old daughter is laying there still alive she's in and out of Consciousness but she is still alive she is doused in petrol and set on fire by her mother to burn alive and then the other three just jumped back in the car and drive off back home leaving Susan there to Die the next morning there was a woman walking in the area and she kind of noticed this fire in the distance she saw it flickering and she panicked thinking that this was the start of another forest fire because this was California and it was the summer so she went over to investigate this fire but the closer she got the more she could smell this this really strong awful awful smell she didn't know what that smell was but she didn't want to know honestly she could tell that it was something bad and so she just turned and ran back to the road to try and I don't know get some help to try and put out this fire she managed to flag down a passing truck driver who conveniently had a fire extinguisher in the back of his truck so the two of them grabbed it they raced back out into the forest to go and put out this fire and when they did there were charred human remains laying on the ground among other things there was a lot of just stuff there along with these charred human remains which was the last thing they'd expected to find remember they thought this was a forest fire so they ran back to the truck called 9-1-1 and before long detectives arrived forensic teams arrived they were ready to start this investigation they took photographs of the scene they took soil samples as evidence honestly they were getting any and all evidence that they could no matter how obscure it was because they knew that this case was going to be so hard to solve these charred human remains were were unrecognizable they knew that the only way that they could identify this victim was through like DNA or dental records or something like that and so they really needed to collect as much supporting evidence as they possibly could but here's the issue remember I said Teresa had never taken her kids to the doctors or the dentist or anything so Susan didn't actually have any Dental Impressions like she had no Dental history at all so when this body was taken back to the morgue and her dental records were taken and they were compared against any on the system they couldn't find a single match and so Susan was officially a Jane Doe case right now if you're unfamiliar with that term gender or gender is like a placeholder name given to an unidentified victim when they don't know its name it's a gender or agenda she was given like some sort of autopsy where they tried to identify as much information about her from her physical characteristics as they possibly could so they determined that she was between 18 and 22 years old she was five foot three and 115 pounds at the time of her death which is all true to Susan this big description was all they really had to be able to identify their victim which wasn't it wasn't gonna work they weren't going to get anywhere with that but the autopsy did reveal some other quite important information it was very clear to the team that this victim had been physically abused for a prolonged period of time there were so many bruises on her in different stages of healing that it was clear that she had been consistently beaten there were some more recent some from like weeks ago they also found a pretty large tumor on Susan's ovary one that they believe would have had her in a lot of pain she would have been like doubled over in pain at this it's the kind of thing that you would seek immediate medical attention for you would want to get that gone as soon as possible but obviously Theresa wouldn't let Susan go to the hospital and so this tumor had just grown and grown and grown but one of the most heartbreaking things to come out of this autopsy was that they found a lining of soot in her lungs and this is what told them that she'd been burned alive because she'd been breathing in the Smoke as the fire was billowing she she was alive as she was burning to death so now police were in a really difficult situation they had this awful brutal murder case on their hands but they felt powerless when it came to solving it they had absolutely no leads especially because they didn't know their victims so they didn't even know where to start with like suspects or anything they didn't know anything about this woman's life all police could really do was talk about this gender case publicly and ask the public for any information and just see if that led to anything they hoped that maybe someone might report a young woman as missing and then they might be able to match up the characteristics and identify her that way but no one was reporting anyone missing there were no young women reported missing in the area none that matched this description anyway of course Theresa wasn't going to report her daughter is missing because she was the one that murdered her now before long police couldn't hold this body in the morgue any longer the MOG was filling up and they needed to make space they needed to get rid of Susan's body but because they were hopeful that they might be able to identify this gender one day they decided to take all of her identifying body parts and this is actually really really Grim they cut off all her fingertips so they had her fingerprints they took away her jar like like her bottom jar and her upper jar they like dismantled her skeleton so that they could potentially match up dental records if they turned up one day I don't know what happened to the rest of the body I don't know what happens in that situation at all because it seems kind of crazy to me that they could just like cremate the body or something I don't know I don't know what they do but that's about as far as the police investigation could go into this and to reason or had gotten away with murder but now that Susan was gone Teresa had lost that outlet for all of her anger and abuse and very quickly she found a new victim to focus on her other older daughter Sheila she wasn't immediately like tied up and abused in the way that Susan was but Sheila was certainly getting the more severe beatings the more frequent beatings and then Teresa got another idea as we know the family was struggling a lot financially and struggling is an understatement they were barely eating because all all of the government Aid that they were getting was going straight on alcohol they could barely afford their home they could barely afford anything absolutely anything and Teresa was drinking more and more these days the more she got into her addiction the more it took to kind of get her to the same drunkenness as she once was and so she was drinking maramara mom when he was going on alcohol money was getting tighter than it ever was and they needed to find a way to to make something and that's where Sheila came in Teresa started forcing her daughter into prostitution to be able to make a bit of money for the family of course when she first mentioned this to Sheila she begged her mother not to go through with it she said that she could go out and find a job elsewhere she didn't need to do that but her mother was adamant and at the end of the day what Teresa said goes ultimately Sheila and all of the other kids knew they never had a choice in the matter in any matter whatever Teresa wanted she was gonna get otherwise she would kill them the way that she did with Susan the kids were so terrified of her now they would they'd always been so scared of her but now she'd killed one of them the kids were literally doing anything and everything they said out of fear for their lives now so this began Sheila was forced into prostitution and at first she absolutely hated it it of course you would wouldn't you but as time went on she started to realize that this could actually be her way out of this abusive household potentially so the way that this would go I believe was that Sheila was allowed to leave the house to go and pick up clients of course she'd need to go and like stand on road corners and whatever she'd have to go down to specific areas to be able to pick or for men to be able to pick her up and of course Theresa couldn't go with her that would be weird so Sheila would go out she would do her job and then the men would give the money directly to Sheila now Teresa wanted Sheila to bring all this money directly back home and give it to her and and Sheila acted like she did but she would secretly pocket some of it every single time and so she had a growing pile of money that she felt was going to be able to get her out of that abusive household one day she just needed to save up enough money to be able to escape and survive on her own and honestly as as awful as the concept of this job was that she was being forced into prostitution this was the happiest Sheila had felt in a while because she had a bit of Freedom she had time outside of that that cramped horrible smelly apartment she had time away from her abusive mother like as awful as this situation was the thing that she had to do to get out of the house have sex with these strangers it was worth it for her because it got her away from her mom but this would all come crashing down within just a few months when Teresa contracted an STI and she blamed it on Sheila she said that Sheila must have caught it from one of her clients when she was out working and then she must have passed it on to her mother via their shared toilet seat that was that was what Teresa believed and she was fuming at Sheila for bringing this infection into the household I don't know how accurate that is I don't know if he can do that can you transmit STIs through a toilet seat I don't know I should probably know that actually but either way Teresa was very delusional and she very much believed that this was the case and she believed that Sheila had to be punished for this and Teresa was about to hit a new law because this punishment that she was about to give Sheila was very similar to Susan's but somehow even worse she grabbed Sheila tied her wrists and her ankles just like she had with Susan and this time she shoved her in a two square foot cupboard in the house so she was cramped in like the tiniest little jail cell there was no ventilation or light or fresh air in this cupboard it at all Sheila could barely breathe she wasn't fed or given any water or anything the whole time she wasn't allowed to go out to the bathroom either Susan had sometimes been allowed to go off to the bathroom whereas Sheila was never allowed so you can imagine how smelly and unhygienic and gross this little horrible cupboard cell she was in and because she wasn't given any like food or water or anything her siblings had to just sneak her whatever they could whenever they could and they couldn't always do it because like I said this was a one bedroom apartment Teresa is always around she always she's aware of everything that's going on in the house so they couldn't really sneak food to her very often and Teresa quickly caught the other kids sneaking Sheila some food it wasn't quite as discreet as what they could do for Susan like they could like just shove it under the table and she could eat it but with Sheila they had to like physically open this cupboard door and give her it and so Teresa very quickly caught them and she made a new rule to prevent the kids from doing this she said that the next person to be caught helping Sheila giving her food would receive the same punishment that she was getting and this scared the kids shitless because they knew the direction that this had gone once before Susan had lost her life they feared that Sheila might lose her life in the same way and then them as well this was enough to scare the kids from ever giving anything to Sheila again and from that point none of the kids spoke to Sheila none of them tried to help her which makes this situation all the more harrowing it's horrific enough that she is going through this but now her allies have been stripped away from her she has no one and nothing left she is all alone in this cupboard for months but one day her youngest sibling Terry cracked she couldn't stand to see her sister go through this she was so torn up over the death of Susan that she didn't want the same thing to happen to Sheila and so one day Terry went and got a beer out of the fridge and snuck it to Sheila in the cupboard and when she did they had a little bit of a conversation she said that she thought Teresa might let Sheila out of that cupboard if Sheila just admitted that the STI was her fault because that's all Teresa really wanted she always just wanted to be right and she wanted everyone else to be wrong and blameable and she never wanted the blame on herself so that was kind of the main issue here she wanted Sheila to take responsibility and to apologize and to grovel and to admit that she was a [ __ ] and all these horrible awful things that Teresa had been telling her but Sheila wasn't willing to do that she really didn't think that she was the one that brought this STI into the house again I don't know if it is possible to transmit an STI through a toilet seat I'll Google it actually there you go is it um people that look into this case believe that Teresa did contract it herself but she just didn't want to admit it and she wanted Sheila to admit it and so Terry was telling her look if you just admit this then she might let you out that's all she wants whether it was true or not it was worth just saying all these things that Teresa wanted to hear and then she might have her Freedom again but Sheila wasn't willing to do that especially not after all this after she'd locked her up and killed her sister and abused her and not allowed her to go to the toilet like she wasn't just gonna back down and give her mother what she wanted she knew that she was in the right and she wasn't gonna pretend like she was after that the daughter of the cupboard wasn't opened again for for dares days and days and days and Teresa wasn't giving her food or water at all she would occasionally rarely like just shove us some food in and walk away but for days on end there was nothing the door didn't open once and her siblings were getting worried now because obviously there's only a certain amount of time that people can survive without food and water and I think that's why Terry tried to sneaker the beer but they couldn't find the opportunity to try and sneak or anything else Sheila was screaming and shouting and begging from the cupboard to be let out or to at least be fed at least be given something but her cries were always ignored on June 21st 1985 the screams from the cupboard slowly came to a stop it was as if Sheila just had nothing left in her she had no energy left to cry or to beg and then later that same day the family heard a really loud thud come from the cupboard and not a single noise followed and they all knew what this meant they all knew what that noise was Sheila's body had finally given in on her and she had passed away and just collapsed to the ground they all knew it they all knew that was what that sound meant and the fact that they hadn't heard a single thing from the cupboard since they all knew but Teresa's rules were still very Stern no one was allowed to go in that cupboard and she didn't want to either so that cupboard stayed shut with Sheila's dead body inside for the next three days not a single person opened it and in fact the only reason they opened it in the end was because it smelled so bad in that apartment this was the summer in California Sheila's body was decomposing at a ridiculously fast rate just locked away in that cupboard it must have been so hot and it was making the whole apartment smell and honestly Theresa didn't care so much about that but she did care that the neighbors might start smelling it and she knew she needed to do something just to put that into perspective by the way I know I keep saying it but just to emphasize this was a a one bedroom apartment this is a two room house they've got like a living room kitchen and a bedroom and this whole family are just living in this house knowing full well that their sibling is dead in the cupboard and they're not allowed to do anything about it but they can smell it like that's the most horrifying situation So eventually after about three days Theresa goes and opens that cupboard and when she does she finds her daughter's Sheila's dead body laying on the ground curled up in the fetal position with her wrists and her ankles still tied together Teresa once again couldn't really be bothered dealing with this herself and so just like last time she ordered her two sons William and Robert to be her henchman she ordered them to make a DIY like homemade coffin out of cardboard boxes and blankets and pillows which honestly strikes me as quite odd from Teresa that's quite out of her character because why does she care about how she's laying her daughter to rest when she's treated her so vile in her life why is she then taking the time and effort to make this coffin that that it just doesn't seem in keeping with her character she never once treated her children like human beings the whole time they were alive so why is she so insistent that they give her daughter this dignity and death I I really wonder what that what that mindset was anyway this makeshift coffin was made and then the boys were instructed to put her body inside the coffin and then put the coffin in the back of the car and they were gonna drive it out somewhere this time they drove out much much further than they had when they'd dropped off Susan's body mainly because they didn't want the two bodies to be left anywhere near each other because they didn't want to risk police finding the two and connecting them and then that help in the investigation and it worked police didn't connect the two Sheila's body was found very very quickly after she was dropped off there literally within a few hours they dropped her off off like on off the side of a hiking trail and a man that had been walking up there had noticed this pile of boxes and he was just a bit nosy he just kind of wanted to know what what we're in and what were going on and he walked over and he saw the dead body of a young girl in there and just freaked out police were alerted they came down to the scene of the crime and immediately they ruled this as a homicide they could tell from looking at Sheila's body that she had been horrifically abused in her lifetime she was so thin she was so malnourished she just looked ill and on top of that there was remnants of tape on her wrists and on her ankles proving that someone had tied her up Sheila became yet another gender kiss because of course she had no Dental history no records to be able to match this body to her and so Teresa had gotten away with murder again for the second time but that didn't mean she wasn't insanely paranoid about getting caught because she was like she was getting a erratic it was all she could think about she thought police were onto her at all times even though they actually were she spent years and years and days scrubbing cleaning their home with every product Under the Sun to try and get rid of that smell of decomposition but it just wasn't going she was really really worried that that was how she was going to be caught and actually at this point in time I think she was having quite a prolonged mental health episode of course we don't know what illnesses if any she had so I don't know what kind of episode this was but she was acting really really erratically in this short period of time which makes me think that something different was going on with her she was so so paranoid about this cupboard that she decided that she and the rest of the family needed to uproot and move somewhere else and they literally did it that same night in the dead of night they packed up all their belongings in the car and they drove away they stayed in California albeit a different part of California and there's there's four of them now so it's Theresa William Robert and the youngest guy girl Terry and that same night the night that they ran away Teresa sent Terry the youngest back to their old house with a can of gasoline and told her to pour it all inside all outside and then set it on fire and burn that whole house to the ground every piece of potential evidence inside there that links to the murders get it gone but this didn't quite go to plan because Terry set this fire when people were still like up and about going about their dares I don't know if it was last thing in the evening or first thing in the morning but either way she set this fire and it was immediately spotted within like less than an hour one of the neighbors spotted it called firefighters down to the scene and they managed to put out this fire before it had really done much damage to the apartment it had done a bit of damage but certainly not on that cupboard the cupboard wasn't even touched by the fire but sadly no investigations were done inside the house I mean why would they they did they there's nothing in that house that suggest yes that anything weird had gone down there that it like it wasn't an obvious murder scene and so there wasn't really an investigation and for the next few years Teresa was just living a normal life she she'd managed to run away from her old life restart a new one and just and get away with murder twice and now everyone in her life has no idea what a horrid abusive person she was and it was as if she was a normal woman now which is so crazy that she could have gone from the most abusive evil human being I've ever heard of to to to now just pretending to be a normal mum as if nothing had ever happened over the years the kids grew up and moved out well William did Terry did and there was just one son left in the house Robert well actually I say I moved out William did move out he found a woman got married got a wife got their own house he just lived a completely normal separate life but Terry actually ran away she didn't voluntarily move out she ran away when she was still a teenager she managed to steal Sheila's ID that her mother still had in her possession she found it one day stole it and ran away and pretended to be Sheila because I think Terry ran away before she was an adult but Sheila's ID said that she was an adult so she was able to do things and take us Health places and and live a life from that point on as Sheila Teresa never once reported Terry is missing like I say she never seemed to care when her kids run away like she she was just so indifferent to it in 1991 Teresa and Robert moved to Nevada and Teresa still wasn't working and Robert was so they did at least have one paycheck but Teresa was sorely relying on him but they were barely even scraping by with this one singular paycheck and Teresa refused to go out and get a job she told Robert that he needed to be doing more but again he didn't want to go out and get a second job so what he decided to do was Rob a bar I don't know I don't know if you need a little bit of money I feel like there's easier ways to go about it but he set up this master plan to go and rob a bar called Red's place well actually I say he set up a plan no he didn't his plan was literally to just walk in with a gun point it at the bar man and say give me all the money in the till so he did that and the bar one just kind of looked at him and went no how embarrassing like that's actually humiliating imagine going in there trying to rob it and the and the guy just got no the barman clearly didn't think that Robert was serious about his threats like he was holding this gun to him but the Batman didn't think he was serious and actually if anything he tried to trap Robert in so that he could call the police and police could come in and get him and arrest him he managed to trap him in and Robert tried to escape but he couldn't and that was when he fired the gun he fired the gun at the barman and killed him immediately of course there was no chance that Robert was going to be able to get away with this this bar was full of people so many people had just seen him do that Robert Knorr was found guilty of second-degree murder and spent 16 years in prison for this and Teresa honestly didn't care that much about it at all in fact the only thing that she did care about was that police were now sniffing around a bit too close to her her son's just been jailed for murder and she knows that she is a two-time murderer that is currently getting away from him so she didn't want police digging around she knew that she had to get the hell out of there so in a panic Teresa packs up all of things and runs off to Salt Lake City in Utah which is actually the exact same city that Terry lived in now neither of them knew this obviously Terry ran away from home she's not telling her mum where she is so now they're in this really random coincidence that they both live in the same city but they never actually crossed paths they were blissfully unaware that they were living so close to each other um but yeah Teresa is now in Salt Lake City and she starts setting up a new life for herself she actually finally goes out and gets her first job as a carer and the person who she's caring for it's like an elderly woman their son actually owned an apartment he was a landlord and so he offered as part of the payment for caring for his mother to also house Theresa this was the perfect situation she now had a house she had a job she had income it was perfect for her to build herself a new life she was on benefits alongside that as well so she did have a decent amount of money meanwhile Terry the youngest of all the children is now growing up and she's meeting new people and this is all making her realize just how awful the abuse that she and her siblings had faced really was she'd always known it was it was bad she'd always known it was horrible but because she had only ever socialized with other people going through that same abuse remember she wasn't allowed to like go out and have friends and and hang out with people the only other people she'd ever conversed with were also going through that so then when she ran away and like made new friends and whatever she was telling them about her home life and they were like whoa that is the most effed up thing I've ever heard and this was all making Terry realize like [ __ ] my mum is evil and now finally she felt safe enough to be in a position to be able to try and do something about it she tried to go to the police a bunch of times but they kind of dismissed her or like just strung her along and then like stopped contacting her and I believe this was because she was going to the Salt Lake City police in Utah when all of this had actually taken place in California they were kind of the wrong police to be contacting shouldn't work like that you should be able to contact the police wherever you are and then they can get in contact with the correct Police Department that they need but they weren't doing that for Terry she was so incredibly frustrated that no one seemed to care no one seemed to want to help her no one seemed to want to do anything I'll get Justice for her and her sisters that was until one day in 1993 Terry was sat home watching an episode of America's Most Wanted and the case that they were talking about in this episode was very very similar to one of her sister's murder cases I can't remember which one it was but it was a cold case of a very similar situation and this really triggered Terry but that was when she realized that this sure seemed to really care about cases like that kisses like her sisters the police didn't seem to care but maybe this sure and the people that work on it might and so she called up the sure's helpline and told them her whole story and they were the first people to ever give her the time of day and they actually gave her some really useful advice they told her that she would be better off contacting the Californian Police Cold Case Department rather than the police in Salt Lake City because they they can't do anything about it the police over in California will have all the right documents and reports and you know they have all the evidence over there that's the people that she needs to be talking to so she came off the phone with the people on the show and she immediately called the police in California and told them everything and they were down to help her they wanted to hear her out and hear what she had to say so they sent a police officer to Utah to go and speak to her and as soon as she told them this whole story this detective believed her he was the first person to properly properly believe her this whole time and the reason they knew that Terry was telling the truth about all this was because she knew certain details about these cases that no one else could have possibly known they weren't like printed in the news or anything so for example she was telling this detective that her sister was abused so badly Susan that she became incontinent and she had to wear adult nappies now this police officer knew that when this Jane door case was found when the body was found she was laying on top of a bunch of what seemed to be her own belongings and in there was adult nappies and they'd seen that at the time and thought it was quite odd it was really random and so they remembered this this was really significant in their minds and when Terry's telling them that her sister used to have to wear adult nappies it's clear that she's telling the truth she told the police that both of her sisters had died in very similar circumstances and so they started searching through the whole gen door database that they had trying to find any similar cases and then they asked Terry if she would be willing to give them a DNA sample which of course she was they tested this DNA against a bunch of different different a bunch of different genders and you know what they got two matches to sue Susan and to Sheila they had finally identified these two girls bodies so one of the first things police did in this case was contact William and Robert the two boys that had helped out in these murders because that's what Terry had told them and they were both quite easy to contact of course Robert was still in prison so they knew exactly where he was and William had just settled down and he had a normal life and his address was easy to find like through through just normal means and so they were able to go and speak to these two men they were both questioned and at first they both denied everything they denied ever like knowing about any abuse they denied even knowing that their sisters were dead which is crazy how can you not have noticed that they went missing in their teenage years like it wasn't believable and it was never gonna be believable but then I think the police said something to them both of them very suddenly changed their tune when they realized that they wouldn't get in as much trouble for this because they would be found to be acting under duress like they feared for their lives in that household so that explains why they went ahead with such horrific actions helping to kill their sisters because they thought they would be killed if not and if a person acts under duress they don't get as strict of a sentence because their life was literally at stake they acted because they felt they had to and as soon as these two men William and Robert knew that that would be the case they suddenly told the truth they told police everything and their stories matched up completely with Terry's so they knew that everyone was telling the truth here so now the only thing left was to try and look at Teresa but this was going to be so so hard because she could be anywhere right now they had no idea where she was what she was doing it was going to take him a long time so they they got working on it they were on it for weeks and in the meantime Terry decided to go on the local news station and tell her story of course she didn't know at this point in time that her mother was also living in Salt Lake City in Utah so she went on a local news station that was going to be broadcast all over the area chances are Theresa might see it we don't know if for sure if Teresa did see it but what we do know is that immediately after that news broadcast she quit her job went down to the bank Drew out four thousand dollars in cash certainly to me seems like she saw it [ __ ] herself and realized she had to go on the run so this was her prepare wearing she was getting ready to flee but fortunately she didn't get a chance to flee because police found her first they'd managed to figure out her address they went down there and they arrested her because Teresa had applied for a driver's license or something and she'd put her real address on there so it was dead easy to find they went down there and they arrested her when they arrived at the house her landlord was actually there with her and he was completely and utterly shocked to hear about these accusations against her he was also a question by the police and he said I can't say anything bad about her she was there with us 24 hours a day for the last 15 months we consider her part of the family it's just crazy that they'd never seen this side of her she was she was capable of being so horrifically abusive to her daughters yet somehow the landlord and his mother saw her as an angel in November of 1993 Theresa narr was charged with two counts of murder along with a load of other supporting charges of course she'd done a lot of horrific things in her life the two sons William and Robert were both also charged with being an accessory to murder although the fact that they acted in duress meant that their charges no not their charges their sentences were probably going to be a lot lower Robert was actually offered a plea deal if he testified against his mother-in-car and of course he took it because Robert was already in prison at this point in time he was trying to minimize the amount of extra years that he was gonna get so at first at the start of this trial Teresa Gnar pled not guilty to all of her charges but then the prosecution announced that they were going to be seeking the death penalty against her and quickly she changed her mind she proposed her own plea deal to the car and she said look if I plead guilty to all of these charges every single one of these charges please don't kill me so she was saying she would plead guilty to everything if they took the death penalty off the table and you know what they agreed they said okay plead guilty and we were executed William was actually acquitted in car by the way it I don't I don't know why so he got absolutely no like sentences or charges I don't know if it's because Robert had already committed murder he was already in prison for murder and now this is another similar kind of murdery charge um either way William was let go without any any consequences or punishment whereas Robert was given a little bit of time I don't know exactly how much he was given a little bit of time to run alongside his current sentence Oh William was required to undergo regular therapy to like deal with all this trauma that he had from his childhood just to prevent it manifesting in the way that his mother had but Theresa nog got life in prison and she will be eligible for parole in 2027 when she will be 80 years old but that is all I have for this case thank you so so much for watching and thanks again to established titles for sponsoring this video and if you want to get that 10 discount that I told you about earlier just go to establishtitles.com forward slash Eleanor Neal and use the code Eleanor meal at checkout a huge thank you to all of my channel members for supporting the channel and helping me decide the cases that I cover all of my tier 2 members are on screen right now so thank you so much if you want to become a channel member you can click the join button down below but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below that would really help me out if you want to watch another one of my videos there there click that if you want to subscribe to my channel because I post videos all the time to be fair uh click that click little circle with me I didn't it anyway that's all for today thank you so much for watching bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 2,200,746

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, true crime, solved, documentary, serial killer, podcast, true crime podcast, netflix, 2022, theresa knorr, theresa, knorr, robert, sheila, suesan, daughters, mother, evil mother, most evil mother in america, most evil mother in the world, america's most evil mom, america's most evil mother, most evil mom in the world, most evil mom in america

Id: qSd-81xpmC8

Length: 85min 42sec (5142 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022