To neighbors, she was the brave single mother...

Raising her five kids alone in a rundown section of Sacramento, Theresa Cross Knorr seemed like the ultimate survivor. But her youngest daughter, 16-year-old Terry, told police another story: one almost too terrible to believe.

But accused of imprisoning her children in a house of horrors...

According to Terry, Theresa-no longer the petite brunette she once was-had turned insanely jealous of her pretty eldest daughters and enlisted the help of her two teenaged sons in a vicious campaign against their sisters.

Of beating, torturing and killing her own flesh and blood...

Terry's gruesome tale told how Theresa had drugged, handcuffed and shot 16-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 20-year-old Sheila and then locked her in a stifling 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.

She could be one of the most evil murderesses of our time...

It took Terry five agonizing years to convince authorities to investigate her grisly accounts of burning flesh, starvation and torture...of a mother from hell, so sadistic and so deranged, she had become her children's own executioner.