Nancy Knuckles` life was, to outward appearances, the best it had been in years. She was financially more secure and had all of her children back under one roof. Then she was murdered.
Knuckles, a 40-year-old Villa Park woman, was strangled Nov. 28, 1984, by her 17-year-old daughter, Pamela, and Pamela`s boyfriend. Her three children and five of their friends were convicted for their roles in her death and concealing the crime.
The crime defied explanation, and the timing made it even more tragic. Nancy had finally achieved a modest material success and won acceptance in the Christian community of the Glen Ellyn Seventh-day Adventist Church. ”On the outside, Nancy was very compassionate, very willing to give of herself and her time,” a Glen Ellyn pastor said. ”If you didn`t see her with her family, I think you`d classify her as someone you could call a saint.”
Though Nancy worked hard and immersed herself in religious activities, her children were always there to be reckoned with when she went home. Pamela attempted suicide for the second time in her life. ”I was feeling lonely again,” she explained. Debbie, 15, was in trouble for shoplifting. Bart, 20, who had taken an interest in the occult and hoped to become a rock star, attracted a rough crowd of friends to his mother`s apartment. Loud parties, held while Nancy was working overnight as a nurse, frequently brought police to the apartment. The landlord nearly evicted them, but he felt sorry for Nancy and put her on a month-to-month lease instead. ”I`ll talk to Bart. I`ll do the best I can,” she told him. ”But they don`t listen to me. Maybe the Lord will help me out on this.”
Pamela said her mother was often depressed, complained of having ”a terrible life” and spent much of her time alone in her bedroom behind a locked door. Pamela`s aunt said Nancy frequently spoke of how nice it would be to die and go to Heaven.
With all of the family`s turmoils, Pamela traced the beginning of the end to a spring evening about six months before the murder when her mother waited up for her to return home. Nancy appeared to be sick or tired as she asked Pamela to begin keeping an eye on her because she had just found out she had cancer.
Pamela said she took the news hard. ”Are you sure?” she asked.
”Yes, I am having a lack of appetite. Can`t you see how much weight I am losing?” her mother asked.
Pamela said she felt ”miserable” about her mother`s illness and stopped all her own activities in order to help her mother. She prayed for her mother, she said, and worried about what would happen to her if her mother died.
She felt guilty because her mother had tried so often to get her to give up smoking. When Nancy later offered to send her to the Oak Haven Seventh-day Adventist center in Pullman, Mich., and to pay her $100 if she quit there, Pamela accepted.
She spent her days picking blueberries in the Michigan countryside. Away from the constant arguing to which she had become accustomed, she felt that she was learning for the first time to get along with people. For a while, she gave up cigarettes. When she went home for a trial visit, the family got along great, she said.
After two months she moved back home, convinced that her mother had been right all along: It was the cigarettes, an instrument of the Devil in Nancy`s eyes, that had been causing all the trouble.
Nancy often made up instructive parables for her children. During family worship one evening in the summer of 1984 shortly before the family moved to a townhouse in Villa Park, Nancy told a parable about a mother who had contracted cancer because her daughters were causing her such trouble. When the daughters in the parable started behaving, the mother was cured.
Pamela immediately realized that she had been duped. She was furious.
”From that moment on, I would have to say that I was the rottenest kid in the world. I would drink. I would stay out all night. We were fighting all the time,” she said. ”I just didn`t have any respect for her.”
In the final few months between the parable and the murder, Pamela experienced fits of uncontrollable anger, ”blind rages” she called them. The episodes became more regular and more intense. ”I hated getting angry like that because when I (did), I would get so bad that I would black out,” she said. ”I mean, I don`t know what I`m doing, and it would scare me and it would drain so much of my energy.”
One time she blew up at a 12-year-old boy for whistling at her and tried
”to break his wrist, to break his hand off his wrist,” she said. Another time she was about to push a neighborhood kid down the rocky enbankment of a highway overpass when Debbie cautioned her that she might hurt him. ”I know,” Pamela replied, and went ahead and pushed.
In November, a few weeks after Pamela`s 17th birthday and a few weeks before the murder, the violent episodes became more serious. Several young men, including Bart, Dennis Morris, Pamela`s 18-year-old boyfriend, and Steven Wright, a 19-year-old friend of Bart and Pamela, got in a brawl in a parking lot. Caught in the middle, Pamela picked up a chain and started beating a man. ”I just really flipped out there,” she said. ”It was like I blacked out. I just kept hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. And he was walking backwards, and every time I`d hit him across the head with the chain, his head would go flying that way.”
A few days before the murder, Bart returned to the family`s Villa Park townhouse with several friends from Peoria. Some of the friends spent the night and returned to Peoria the next day. The others, Cindy Caruso, Bart`s 19-year-old girlfriend; Caruso`s 2-year-old son, D.J.; and Monica Hearn, a 14- year-old friend of Caruso`s; stayed on at the Knuckles home along with Wright and Morris, who lived in the western suburbs but were frequent houseguests.
One day after Bart`s return, Pamela cut him across the chest with a knife when he refused to let her leave the townhouse because he thought she`d been drinking too much. After cutting Bart, she slashed her own wrist with a razor blade. Both wounds were superficial. ”It wasn`t a real suicide attempt,” she said. ”I just wanted to make my point.”
Nancy came home from a nursing assignment the next morning and woke Pamela, who was scheduled to work with her at a health-food restaurant that day. Pamela told her she could not go to work because she had slit her wrist the day before. ”That`s no excuse. You shouldn`t have done it,” her mother said.
Pamela had been asking her mother to send her to a psychiatrist because the blind rages had become more frequent. This time, she said, ”I really begged my mom so bad: `Please take me to a psychiatrist.` ”
Pamela decided that because she was not getting her mother`s attention, she may as well go to work. When they got to the restaurant she showed her mother her wrist and said, ”Look, Mom, I was serious. Look.”
Nancy asked her why she had done it. ”Why don`t you take me to a psychiatrist and we`ll find out?” Pamela said.
”Pamela, you are such a mess. You just need to get down on your knees and ask the Lord to forgive you,” her mother replied.
On the night before the murder, Pamela crept into her mother`s bedroom carrying four lengths of white twine she had braided into a garrote. She said her mother looked so peaceful lying there that she changed her mind and was on her way out of the room when her mother awoke.
”Pamela, come back. What are doing in here?” Nancy said.
Pamela said she showed her mother the rope and cried, ”Mom, doesn`t this mean I need help? I came up here to kill you.” Her mother looked at her watch and said, ”Pamela, it`s 4 o`clock in the morning. I have to get up for work at 6, and it`s going to take me at least two hours to get back to sleep. That means I`m not going to get any sleep the rest of the night.”
The following morning, Nancy woke her children and their houseguests at 7 a.m. by banging on a pot with a large spoon and ordering them to get up, get out of the house, get jobs, and have $40 apiece by nightfall to contribute to running the household. She would not, she said, let her home be turned into a flophouse.
At 9 a.m., Pamela waited on the landing for her mother to pass. The braided lengths of white twine were tucked down the back of her jeans. Morris stood near the front door ”in case there was a struggle,” he later told police.
Nancy passed her daughter on the landing and briefly confronted her, saying, ”I see the Devil in your eyes and his name is destruction.”
Pamela followed her mother toward the door and slipped the rope around her neck from behind. She said that at first she held it loosely, but when her mother turned and smirked at her, she decided to go ahead.
She jerked the rope tight. ”Die, bitch!” she screamed. After a while, her mother fell to the floor. Pamela knelt beside her pulling on the rope.
Suddenly, she felt she could not go through with it and looked to Morris for help. Keeping the rope taut, she let him take up one end, then the other. Debbie came downstairs while Pamela and Dennis were kneeling over her mother`s body. Pamela said later she yelled at Debbie to go back upstairs.
”Pam and Dennis just killed the old lady,” Bart said Debbie told him when she got back upstairs.
When Bart went down, he called for his sisters to bring him their mother`s stethoscope. Depending on whether you believe Bart or the state`s attorney, he was either hoping that she might still be alive or checking to make sure she was dead.
Bart claims he then wrapped a plastic garbage bag around his mother`s face to shield it from the view of Caruso`s son, but he told investigators at the time that he placed the bag over her head and tied it with a bag tie. Pamela testified that Bart gestured to her that he was going to put the bag over her head. ”Well, she won`t die,” she quoted him as saying.
That night Morris, Wright, and David Dukes, 22, a friend of the Knuckles children, dumped a steamer trunk containing Nancy`s body in Salt Creek. When the three returned to the Knuckles home, the group passed the evening drinking beer and taking Polaroid photographs of one another. They were arrested after an anonymous phone call tipped off police that Nancy may have been killed.
At Dwight Correctional Center years after the murder, Pamela talked about her mother with a mixture of love and anger. She said that her fellow inmates sometimes looked at her strangely when she talked about her mother.
”When I`m talking with girlfriends I`ve made down here and they`re talking about their mothers, I might, you know, chip in with something about my mom. I don`t think it`s weird. Whenever I give somebody advice, if I give somebody advice on nutrition or health or something, I`m always real sure to tell them that that came from my mom, so it`s good advice.”
Like her mother, Pamela places a great deal of importance on her education. She takes community college classes at the prison and extension courses from Illinois State University. Last November she received an associate-of-arts degree in a ceremony held in the prison gymnasium and attended by her grandmother, father and sister.
She still tries to figure out what happened to her family. ”I sit in my room and try to analyze my problems and (my mother`s) both, and my sister`s and my brother`s,” she said. ”I`ve always been doing things like that but it was hard for me when I was around them because when you are in a problem, you can`t see it right. So now I try to take the time. I`m not sure if it was something from (my mother`s) childhood or what. Most of the stories she told me were sexual scares that she had had,” she said. ”I think somewhere along the line, she got hurt real bad.”
Pamela said that although she admired her mother`s ”good qualities” and understood ”her emotional problems,” the children were alienated from Nancy. ”We were the leftovers from her marriage. She didn`t want us. I just know she didn`t.”
Turning to herself, Pamela said, ”I think my emotional system is screwed up. I mean, I have a very, very hard time feeling sympathy for anyone. It takes a lot for me to cry. I can`t cry. I try to tell myself I have feelings, but at the same time I don`t feel anything for anybody. I just never really
(did), except for my first boyfriend that I had, but after that I never really cared if I had a relationship that worked.”
Other inmates have told her that she is cold and hard, but she disagrees. ”I think my feelings are there. I just can`t express them,” she said.
”The only people who can make me feel sad are my brother and sister, then I can really show it. . . . But other than that, I just have a hard time expressing feelings for other people and even for myself. I just talk myself out of it. I`ve been doing that for so long. It even got to the point, not just with the spankings when I was younger but when somebody would hurt my feelings, instead of being cross and feeling rejected, I would say, `Okay, so what? Who cares?` I would tell myself I don`t need anybody but me, and who cares what anybody else thinks of me. And it`s gotten to the point where I don`t. What people say, they don`t hurt my feelings. I get angry, though. I`ve never been able to control that. I always get angry.”
Pamela does not know whether she should consider herself to have been abused as a child. ”It`s hard to say. I don`t really know what qualifies somebody to claiming they are abused. I had it rougher than a lot of kids. At the same time, I tried to think, well, I couldn`t be an abused child because I had a basically good-well, basically, with the health and all that, it was a good family structure. But then I have to wonder if maybe a lot of other people that could be legally considered abused had a good family structure-health, the family`s provided for, their education and so on. So I really don`t know,” she said.
Asked if she ever felt justified in what she did because her mother treated her so badly, she replied:
”No, because she didn`t kill me, so I had no right to . . .” she began, then stopped herself. ”I know I have no right to ever take anybody`s life,” she continued, ”because it could be 10 years from now she might change. The only slight thing that makes me feel justified is just the fact that she knew it was coming. She knew it was. I mean, the night before when I came in there, it was a warning and she knew it was, and she still refused to help me. And that`s the only thing I can justify about it. But I know I was wrong.”
Pamela wishes she could blot out her memory of the murder, but she hasn`t been able to. ”I just wish I could tell her I`m sorry. I guess it kind of looked like she was in pain or something. I can`t imagine, I can`t imagine hurting her, I really can`t. It sounds stupid for me to say that, I know, but I just can`t. I mean, I`ve tried, until that moment, I`ve always tried to keep my individuality and, at the same time, make her happy and try to keep her from being hurt. . . . I should have just run away from home.”
She is relieved that the part of her life that led up to the murder is over. ”I don`t know how to explain it,” she said. ”It`s not so much that she was telling me what to do. That`s normal. Parents are supposed to tell their kids what to do. It was just her attitude. I don`t have to listen to that anymore, and I don`t have to be criticized anymore. . . . Like now I`m enjoying my schoolwork a lot more because I`m doing it for me, not for her. I`m relieved. I feel I`m just myself now. . . . Now that it`s all over, I`m cleaned out inside.”
