Whatever Mother Says... by Wensley Clarkson Read Free Book Online

his absence. And when Howard did not have enough cash, he paid his mother the rent in drugs, which she either smoked or made him sell during subsequent drug deals.
    One time, Howard was even tipped off by a friend at the Sheriff’s Department about a planned raid on the house by private detectives, and cleaned it out of drugs hours before they arrived.
    Much of the time, Howard’s drugs made the house virtually a pharmacy. Howard was known locally as the mushroom man. He had acid. He had connections for coke, crank, and he always had two different types of weed on him. He also had connections with someone who ripped off pharmacies for speed. He often got the drugs in their sealed bottles straight out of the stores.
    With the influx of drug trade to the house came the occasional brush with a number of unsavory characters, who accused Howard Sanders of ripping them off during drug deals.
    The Knorr family were warned by some Hell’s Angels who lived around the corner that they were going to come over and “rape all the women.”
    The Angels were angry that Howard had taken away some of their business. Howard even gave his girlfriend Connie that old .22 of his dad’s to carry for protection whenever she went to the local store.
    Theresa Knorr also frequently issued warnings to Connie, but they had nothing to do with the drug trade. She was concerned about Connie’s safety, living under the same roof as her daughter Suesan.
    Theresa Knorr told Connie to always lock her bedroom door at night because, she explained coolly, “Suesan is going to try and kill you because she does not like you at all.”
    Connie was terrified by the threat of murder, especially since she suspected it was partly caused by Suesan’s jealousy because Howard had committed incest with her.
    But there was another reason why Suesan disliked Connie so much. When she and Connie had been at Pershing Junior High together in Orangevale, Connie and her brother had frequently teased Suesan by calling her “fishface” because she wore big, thick glasses and looked like a nerd.
    *   *   *
    Suesan Knorr greatly contributed to her reputation as the devil’s child within the family by cutting off both her mother’s eyelashes, removing bits of her long, spindly fingernails, and stealing a few strands of her waist-length black hair during a daring midnight raid on her mother’s dingy bedroom. Theresa Knorr claimed afterward that she did not wake up during the incident because Suesan had drugged her coffee with masses of sleeping tablets.
    Theresa Knorr was furious when the children refused to tell their mother who was responsible. She systematically burnt each of them with cigarette butts until they told her who had done the evil deed.
    Theresa Knorr knew it was probably Suesan because she suspected that the specimens had been removed for some sort of witchcraft ceremony. She also believed Suesan was jealous of her good looks.
    Once Theresa Knorr had confirmed that it was Suesan, it marked the start of a series of horrendous attacks. Theresa Knorr utterly detested her daughter’s daring behavior, and she began claiming that Suesan was suffering from sexually transmitted diseases as well.
    Shortly afterward, Theresa Knorr told Howard’s girlfriend Connie: “She is a witch, and the only way you can kill a witch is by burning them.”
    Theresa Knorr also warned Connie that anytime she cleaned her hairbrush or trimmed her nails, she should flush it all down the toilet because Suesan could get the remnants and use them for her devil worshiping. Theresa Knorr even ominously told Connie that Suesan would be after her blood eventually.
    Even Howard Sanders—hardly a saint by anyone’s reckoning—continued to try to get Suesan some discreet medical attention, because he firmly believed she had a mental problem. One day he went over to Connie’s stepdad’s place on Pershing, in Orangevale, and asked him for advice on how to get his sister committed. But