Whatever Mother Says . . ‪.‬

In this true crime exposé, a single mother is accused of torturing and murdering her own daughters—and involving their siblings in the coverup.

Raising her five kids alone in a rundown section of Sacramento, Theresa Cross Knorr seemed like the ultimate survivor. But her youngest daughter, sixteen-year-old Terry, told police another story: one in which Theresa—no longer the petite brunette she once was—became insanely jealous of her pretty eldest daughters and enlisted the help of her two teenaged sons in a vicious campaign against them.


According to Terry, Theresa drugged, handcuffed, and shot sixteen-year-old Suesan, allowing her wounds to fester until the day she ordered her sons to burn their sister alive. Next, Terry said Theresa severely beat twenty-year-old Sheila and then locked her in a broom closet, so that when the girl finally starved to death, her brothers dumped her body in the same desolate mountain range where they had cremated Suesan.


It took Terry five agonizing years to convince authorities to investigate her grisly account of a mother so sadistic and deranged that she became her children's own executioner.