Theresa Jimmie Francine Knorr (née Cross; born March 14, 1946) is an American woman convicted of torturing and murdering two of her six children while using the others to facilitate and cover up her crimes.

Her father worked as an assistant cheese maker at a local dairy, eventually saving up enough money to buy a house in Rio Linda.

She immediately dropped out of high school and became pregnant, and on July 16, 1963, she gave birth to her first child, Howard Clyde Sanders.

She regularly drank at the local American Legion hall where she met Estell Thornsberry, a disabled United States Army veteran.

Thornsberry began to question Theresa when she stayed out for days at a time and ended the relationship a few months later, after discovering that she was having an affair with his best friend.

She also gained a tremendous amount of weight, and became reclusive to the point of disconnecting the home phone and refusing to allow the children to have visitors.

Terry said in an interview that her mother resented that Sheila and Suesan were maturing and blossoming into attractive young women while she faced the prospect of losing her looks as she aged.

[11] Knorr also pulled her other children out of school, removing their access to phones and not allowing them outdoors; most of them never advanced past the eighth grade.

While Knorr and the other children were in the kitchen preparing oatmeal, one of them dropped a spoon; the noise frightened Terry, causing her to accidentally pull the trigger and shoot Suesan.

Knorr immediately rechained her under the dining-room table; her only response to the fact that her daughter was profusely bleeding, begging to be taken to the hospital was to get upset that her blood had stained the carpet.

[14] They drove her to Squaw Valley, where Robert and William placed her on the side of the road on top of the bags containing her belongings.

Due to the state of her remains, a positive identification was never made, and Suesan was classified as homicide case Jane Doe #4873/84.

Following Suesan's death, Knorr began directing the majority of her anger and abuse towards her 20-year-old daughter Sheila, forcing her into prostitution in May 1985 to support the family.

Knorr forbade the other children to give her food or water or open the closet door, but Terry disobeyed her mother and gave Sheila a beer.

Once again she ordered her sons William and Robert to dispose of their sister's body, which had begun to decompose and fill the apartment with a foul stench.

In November 1991, Knorr Jr. was arrested after he fatally shot a bartender in a Las Vegas bar during an attempted robbery.

Shortly after his arrest, Knorr left Las Vegas and relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah.

[22] After escaping from her mother, Terry attempted to report her sisters' murders to the Utah police, but they dismissed her stories as fiction, as did a therapist she visited.

[23][21] On October 28, 1993, Terry phoned the hotline for the Fox television program America's Most Wanted, and was told to contact detectives in Placer County, California, where Suesan's body had been found.

Placer County detectives took her claims seriously and followed up with an investigation, soon linking the two Jane Does found in the area in 1984 and 1985 to Terry's detailed stories of her sisters' deaths.

Knorr initially pleaded not guilty, but then made a deal with the prosecution after learning that her son Robert Jr. had agreed to testify against her in exchange for a reduced sentence.

In exchange for his testimony, the prosecution dropped all charges against Robert Knorr Jr. save for one count of being an accessory-after-the-fact in relation to Sheila's murder.

[26][29][30]After running away from her mother's home, Terry Knorr married twice and eventually moved to Sandy, Utah, where she lived with her second husband.

[31] Following Theresa Knorr's arrest, police decided to reopen the murder case of her older sister, Rosemary Norris, who was found strangled to death at the end of a dead-end road in Placer County in 1983 after she went grocery shopping in Sacramento.

The 2010 horror film The Afflicted (also titled Another American Crime) is loosely based on the Theresa Knorr case.

Unlike the real case, the movie ends with the youngest daughter killing her mother and one of her brothers before committing suicide.

[33] The murders were profiled on the A&E series Cold Case Files, featuring an exclusive interview with Terry Knorr Walker.