A MODERN MURDEROUS MEDEA...
In June of l985, while her teenage sons held their half-sister down, Theresa Cross beat her l9-year-old daughter Sheila unconscious and then stuffed her into a 2' X 2' storage locker. After three days, the knocking, kicking, and cries stopped. Theresa and her sons dumped the girl's body in the desolate High Sierras....
The summer before, Theresa had dug a bullet out of her daughter Suesan's chest with a paring knife. When Suesan failed to recover (without benefit of doctors or hospital), Theresa and her two sons drove the delirious girl to the mountains , doused her with gasoline, and set her on fire....
For nearly nine years, Theresa Cross Knorr got away with murder, until her youngest daughter, Terry Knorr Graves, finally found a cop who believed the incredible story of her two murdered sisters.
That story is all here, the shocking life of a woman whose violence, jealousy, rage, and domination led to a brutally heinous crime of ruthless ferocity.
"Theresa Cross was a toxic mother, but the maternity myth blinded, deafened, and silenced those that might have stopped her." Dennis McDougal, with his flair for storytelling and his eye for vivid detail, is one of the best of true crime writers. In this book he profiles a very dark character indeed: a woman for whom neither her life nor her fantasies ever got beyond her sad, narrow world of severe men, twisted religious ideas, beatings, sexual jealousy, horror fiction and movies, and obsessive housecleaning. She had several husbands, one of whom she killed, until she ended up as a single mother with two boys and three girls. Then she began to torture and kill the girls, one after another, as they became old enough that their beauty made her angry. Prepare to enter a closed-off realm of nightmare, when you read this one.
