Free Whatever Mother Says... by Wensley Clarkson Page B

beaten so badly that I’m gonna go to jail. We can’t do that.”
    The children were told to sit with their sister and keep an eye on her all night long.

Seven
    When the child recovers from the attack, he feels enormously confused, in fact, split—innocent and culpable at the same time—and the confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken. To survive this ordeal, the child has to register the bad … as good.
    Albert Shengold, child care expert
    On the evening of July 12, 1984, police would later charge, Theresa Knorr walked into the children’s bedroom, sat down on one of the bunk beds, and announced to her sons and Sheila that she had come up with a solution on what to do with Suesan, who was still sprawled out on the kitchen floor. Her wound had become so badly infected that the skin had turned pink, then bright red all around the gaping sore.
    Terry—keeping guard over Suesan in the kitchen—could not avoid staring at her sister’s eyes. Her adolescent curiosity was getting the better of her. Suesan’s once pretty, sparkling blue eyes had transformed to a pale, yellowing greenish color in a matter of days.
    Theresa Knorr later told one family member that her daughter’s change of eye color had been caused by the devil. She told her daughter-in-law Connie that Suesan was definitely a witch. She insisted that the only way to kill a witch was to burn them.
    As Terry stared at her sister, her eyes panned down and noticed a rib almost poking through Suesan’s stomach and hundreds of black marks on her back.
    With just an undersized diaper around her waist, Suesan Knorr was actually experiencing less dignity in life than death.
    The following day, Theresa Knorr began her preparations for the scheme she had been planning with Sheila and the boys. First she went and bought a red, one-gallon gas can. Then she filled her son’s yellow 1978 Mercury Cougar—known around the Knorr household as the pimp mobile—with gas.
    Terry watched her mother pack the gas can in the trunk of the Mercury, together with a large box of six-inch-long Blue Diamond wooden matches. She also saw Theresa put all of Suesan’s belongings into a plastic Glad garbage bag and load that into the car as well; clothes, jewelry, purses, belts, shoes.
    The final proof of what was about to happen came when Terry witnessed her mother performing an extraordinary ritual in the yard behind the house.
    “I watched her take olive oil. It was her little God ritual thing. She took olive oil, poured it over my sister’s pictures. She pulled every picture she had of my sister, and she burnt them,” Terry later explained.
    Back inside the house, Suesan was being dressed up by her brothers and sister Sheila. They put her clothes on her like a toddler being prepared for school. First they struggled to get her into a dark-colored corduroy jumpsuit with a hood. Then followed white sneakers and a ski-jacket-style coat.
    It was past midnight on July 15 when Theresa Knorr, her two sons, and her daughter Sheila were finally ready to depart. Youngest daughter Terry pleaded desperately with her mother to be allowed to join them on their trip. Theresa had already admitted she was going to get rid of Suesan. The boys told her they were going to set her alight someplace in the mountains.
    Terry feared being left alone in the house. But Theresa rejected her pleas. She did not want her youngest daughter to see the sacrifice of her sister.
    “Loose lips sink ships,” she told Terry.
    In the background, groaning on the kitchen floor, was helpless Suesan, a constant stream of incoherent babbling coming from between her lips. Everything was slurred. She was mumbling.
    Just before they took her out, Terry leaned down and whispered in her sister’s ear: “I love you.”
    In another room, Theresa Knorr was getting the car keys and her purse as if she was rushing out to get to the local store before it closed.
    Robert and William crouched down on either side of Suesan