Free Whatever Mother Says... by Wensley Clarkson

Sacramento, including when she alleged Howard beat his baby son, Howard Jr., before going out on a drug run. Soon after, she fled the house they shared, filed divorce proceedings, and sought full custody of their two children.
    In 1990, Howard was arrested after making threats to hire someone to kill his wife. Connie says she dropped the charges after getting scared. She also claimed that Howard boasted to her about beating a boy when he was a youngster at school.
    To Connie, Howard had become like a robot on behalf of his mother. Even after the Knorrs moved out of that house on Bellingham, Theresa would call Howard everytime she had a problem with the children and ask him to come over and help teach them a lesson.
    *   *   *
    July 5, 1984, was one of those rare evenings when there was no screaming, no abuse, no stabbings, and no shootings inside the Knorr household. The atmosphere was about as laid-back as anyone could remember. The lull before the storm …
    The main cause of all this, according to Terry, was the pungent whiff of cannabis that wafted across the living room of the cottage. Sitting on a couch, like two giggling students, were Theresa Knorr and Suesan, the daughter she had abused so horrifically.
    Taking an enormous drag of the fat, badly rolled joint, Theresa Knorr gazed almost lovingly at her battered daughter before exhaling a vast cloud of mustardy smoke.
    Daughter Terry, just thirteen years old at the time, watched her mother and sister taking those illicit drugs, convinced it was proof that perhaps her mother still had some sense of reality left in her mind. It was ironic that mind-altering substances might actually be responsible for cleansing Theresa Knorr’s soul … albeit temporarily.
    Terry was amazed that her mother and Suesan—the object of so many vicious attacks—were actually talking together like a mother and daughter should. Suesan was yet again playing her role as the ultimate human sponge, prepared to soak up vicious attacks and virtually constant imprisonment, in exchange for the very occasional evidence of a loving, caring mother.
    The cannabis also influenced Suesan to make one last desperate attempt to escape her hellhole. It was anesthetizing all that pain sufficiently so that she managed to beg her mother to let her leave home. Anything. Any life outside that house seemed preferable to what she had just gone through.
    “Just buy me a plane ticket, send me to Alaska, I’ll be a prostitute on the pipeline. I don’t care, I just want to leave,” a very stoned Suesan told her mother.
    Equally stoned, Theresa Knorr had actually allowed the pot to mellow her rigidity. She announced she would allow her daughter to leave home—but there was one condition. Suesan would have to let her mother remove that bullet still lodged in her back.
    Through the clouds of cannabis smoke it seemed a reasonable request. For the first time since being shot Suesan could see just a glint of light at the end of that awful tunnel. Having that bullet removed was going to be Suesan’s ticket to freedom.
    The reason Theresa insisted on taking out the bullet before freeing her daughter, Terry told police, was because she knew it was evidence of the crime she had committed against her daughter. She was afraid she could be traced by the bullet. Some years earlier her guns had been taken by the police and ballistic tests done on them, and she believed they could be traced back to her.
    One of the detectives investigating the Knorr case ten years later asked Terry what would have happened if Suesan had just got up and walked out of that house.
    “Suesan would have ended up dead,” came the cold reply.
    *   *   *
    The surgery to remove Suesan’s bullet, as described by Terry, resembled a scene out of Frankenstein. Terry played the role of doctor’s assistant, but in reality her job was more like anesthetist/assistant surgeon/nurse all wrapped into one.
    However, this was no operating theater.