This image is the cover for the book Whatever Mother Says . . ., St. Martin's True Crime Classics

Whatever Mother Says . . ., St. Martin's True Crime Classics

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.

Wensley Clarkson

Wensley Clarkson was one of Britain's most successful young journalists before moving to Los Angeles with his wife and their four children in 1991--an experience that inspired his book, A Year in La La Land. His other books--which have sold in more than a dozen countries--include the tabloid newspaper expose Dog Eat Dog, a biography of the actor Mel Gibson, plus four best-selling true-crime books Hell Hath No Fury, Like A Woman Scorned, Love You to Death Darling, and Doctors of Death.

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