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clear the yard of thistles and weeds and not to go anywhere for four days until they had pulled every one of them out.
    The children soaked the ground of the backyard with water before going down on their hands and knees with their spoons. Howard was strong enough to pull the weeds out with his hands, but the others spent hours digging up tiny plots of earth as Theresa Knorr watched from the back window to make sure no one was being lazy.
    Not surprisingly, most of the family’s neighbors on Bellingham steered clear of the Knorrs, apart from a woman named Cherise Frederick.
    Theresa Knorr seemed to have a real friend in Cherise, who was one of the few people ever to be allowed inside the house and actually made to feel relatively welcome.
    But Theresa Knorr’s real motives in befriending Cherise seemed to be centered around her knowledge of the Bible and religion, and they would spend hours talking about their favorite quotations.
    The last couple of years at the house on Bellingham mainly featured a running battle between Suesan and her mother. Suesan was having a lot of emotional problems—besides regularly fleeing the house with her oddball friends, she was not helped by the fact that her mother kept ranting on about her daughter’s contract with the devil.
    Whenever Suesan acted strangely, Theresa Knorr would tell the other children that Suesan was “up to her usual crap again.” She had little or no sympathy for her seemingly disturbed daughter.
    Howard tried to stay away from the house on Bellingham because he could not deal with what was going on. But his mother just would not stop going on about Suesan playing with witchcraft and being a devil worshiper.
    Howard kept telling his mother that Suesan simply had mental problems. That she needed a doctor. But Theresa Knorr knew best.
    At one point, Suesan, then just fifteen, ran away and was arrested by police. She told them about some of the punishments inflicted by her mother, and they took her to the Child Protective Service offices in Sacramento, where she pleaded to be made a ward of court. The CPS even visited the house on Bellingham in response to allegations of parental abuse made by Suesan about her mother.
    A number of meetings at the CPS offices followed. But officials did not believe the teenager’s story, and her mother was allowed to regain custody of her daughter. Theresa Knorr convinced them that Suesan was just an uncontrollable child, and she assured the CPS she could cope with her. Youngest daughter Terry was forced to lie to CPS officials who visited the house, after being threatened with a beating by her mother. Years later, when police tried to find out the names of the social workers who recommended that Suesan be allowed back home, they were told that all the records had been purged under a five-year rule.
    Even the other Knorr children were astonished when Suesan was returned home, since they presumed she would never be allowed to move back into the house on Bellingham.
    After Suesan was compelled to move back, it became painfully obvious to Terry that Theresa Knorr was going to punish the teenager even more than before her escape. Her two other daughters were also scared. They could not understand why their mother hated all of them so much.
    One day, after years of never being seen, Robert Knorr Sr. visited the house in a bid to see his four children. Theresa Knorr sent Howard’s girlfriend Connie—living with Howard at the time—out to talk to Robert Sr. because she knew that he did not know her. Connie had to pretend she was the new owner of the house and that Theresa Knorr and her family had moved on months earlier. Theresa Knorr wanted to prevent Robert Sr. from ever seeing his children again.
    During those last few months that the family lived at Bellingham, Howard Sanders was heavily into dealing drugs. Howard contends that Theresa Knorr allegedly knew all about the illicit activities and even helped run the narcotics business in