Mother's Day - Softcover

McDougal, Dennis

3.93

1,497 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449149307 ISBN 13: 9780449149300

Publisher: Fawcett, 1995

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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.

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Review:

"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.

From the Publisher:

Among many other things, my department is responsible for watching the backlist and making sure that we reprint titles that need to stay in print. Without fail, every year since it's publication in 1995, the reorders on this title pick up dramatically right before Mother's Day. Every year we reprint it, just before Mother's Day. It's a great book, and I'm glad it reaches new audiences because it has a lot to say about the darker side of the revered role of the mother; and it "sells-through", which means the stores don't have to return it because customers buy enough of them. But somehow I envision these out of control computers churning out reorders based on the title alone," thinking" that it's a delightful little book honoring Moms. Maybe it sells so well be cause that's just what it isn't!

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