If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood

by Gregg Olsen

  The fallout came later. Books brought as gifts from Randy’s little brother to the new baby went missing. Randy couldn’t find them anywhere. Shelly said she didn’t have a clue what happened to them either. After looking all over the place, they gave up.

  After the family left, Randy sampled homemade candy his grandfather had sent as a gift. His grandfather had made it a hundred times. Randy took a bite and had to spit it out. It tasted of nothing but salt. He called his grandfather to tell him of the mistake with the latest batch. The old man couldn’t understand what had gone wrong—none of the other family members tasted anything but marshmallow.

  The only bad batch was the box delivered to Battle Ground.

  When it was discovered that Randy’s sister left some new clothing behind, Shelly offered to mail the articles back.

  The package arrived in perfect condition. Its contents, not so much. Someone had taken a pair of scissors and shredded the garments.

  Shelly told Randy she had no idea how that could have happened.

  “Someone at the post office must have done it,” she said.

  PART TWO

  SISTERS

  NIKKI AND SAMI

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain & Tennille and the Bee Gees’s “Jive Talkin’” played on repeat on Shelly Rivardo’s cassette player when her daughter Nikki came into the world in February 1975. It wasn’t a moment too soon either. Shelly had complained for weeks about her pregnancy, and how she was sure it was going to ruin her figure.

  With both her mother’s coloring and features, Nikki could not have been a more beautiful baby. Everybody said so, even Shelly, who saw her daughter as the perfect extension of herself. She told everyone how excited she was to be a mother. How she had big dreams for her little girl. Those who knew Shelly were skeptical, but hopeful that having a baby would refocus her attention away from herself.

  Instead of taking her newborn back to Battle Ground, Shelly decided that it would be best if Nikki was cared for at her parents’ rambling Tudor home in Vancouver. Lara couldn’t tell if Shelly was indifferent or worried about caring for a baby. With the exception of the disastrous stretch of babysitting for her grandparents’ neighbors in Hoodsport, Shelly had zero experience caring for a child.

  “I don’t think she’d ever held a baby in her life,” Lara said later.

  Lara was the opposite. She was born to be a mom, delighted to be a grandmother. When she’d first felt Nikki’s kick inside of Shelly, Lara had dubbed the baby Thumper after the rabbit from Bambi, and she had loved that baby from that little kick.

  What Lara thought was going to be a few days’ stay, however, turned into three months before Randy finally put his foot down and the three of them returned to Battle Ground.

  Lara drove up to see the baby every day.

  “I just didn’t trust her,” Lara admitted of Shelly.

  Randy didn’t either. Trouble in the Rivardo marriage escalated. His wife locked him out of the house at night. Whatever money he brought in, Shelly would spend without any regard for what the family needed.

  He told Lara something that stuck with her for decades.

  “Shelly is only nice to me when there are other people around.”

  Randy started sleeping in his car, something that became a nightly occurrence. Shelly wanted only his paycheck, which she insisted he hand over on Fridays. The checks weren’t a magnificent sum. Far from it. Even with a decent job and no rent payments, things were tight. Shelly was used to getting more of everything. She complained to her father, so Les Watson interfered and made it so Randy’s check got delivered straight into Shelly’s hands.

  “So I was sure to go home,” Randy said later.

  It didn’t take too much longer for Randy to decide that he couldn’t take it anymore—no matter how much he loved Nikki, he couldn’t ignore that his marriage, which had started on tenuous grounds, was now falling apart.

  Lara didn’t blame Randy for leaving his family, for leaving Shelly. No one did. Except Shelly.

  He got airfare from his parents and left Washington—and Shelly—as fast as he could. “I needed a fresh start,” he said. Yet when Shelly called him at his parents’ house two weeks later and professed a genuine desire to repair their marriage, Randy agreed to let her and Nikki come stay with him and his family, albeit reluctantly. He missed his daughter, and cared more for her than whatever he felt for Shelly.

  The reunion was short-lived, lasting just two weeks.

  “Even my grandparents were disgusted by her behavior. She created such a furor there that I had no recourse but to file for divorce.”

  Shelly retaliated immediately by buying everything in sight and sticking Randy with a growing bill. This put her ex further and further into debt. Shelly didn’t care. Randy sent her an income tax refund check that needed to be countersigned. Randy told Shelly that the money would get him caught up with the collectors who had been hounding him.

  No such luck. Shelly double-crossed Randy and had another man forge his signature.

  She cashed the government check and kept the money for herself.

  And then suddenly Shelly simply dropped out of sight. Lara tried every number she had—friends, relatives. Anyone. She was worried about the baby.

  “I kept calling Shelly,” Lara said. “She wouldn’t answer. And I was frantically trying to get ahold of her. Trying to see her and she wasn’t home or wouldn’t answer the phone. She just stopped being a mother. Shelly got a job as a waitress in a bar on Main Street in Vancouver and that seemed to be enough for her.”

  This went on for some time. At one point, a relative in Battle Ground told Lara that she’d better come and get Nikki, for whom the relative was caring.

  “Shelly’s gone.”

  “Where?” Lara asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  Shelly stayed gone. What she was doing and who she was with was a bit of a mystery, though frankly, Shelly being gone was a very good thing. Less drama. Less worrying. Less of everything that tied the stomachs of those around her into knots.

  It would be almost a year before Shelly would return to collect her daughter from Lara. Shelly’s absence wasn’t even explained. She just popped back in and took Nikki. Lara’s love for Nikki was deep. She’d wanted to keep her—to have her declared abandoned by Shelly, to adopt her and raise her as her own.

  Lara vowed she’d do whatever she could to stay close to her granddaughter.

  In 1978, when Nikki was just three, her mother lovingly wrote about her feelings for her firstborn.

  Shelly dotted her i’s and underscored exclamation points with hearts to emphasize her unbridled devotion. She wrote in verse how seeing Nikki’s face brightened up the drudgery of a long day.

  “A face as darling as can be, her laughter . . . a bubbling brook . . . while her smile dimples her sweet little chin . . . All framed by her hair of gold . . . and those eyes—big and brown . . . sparkling with laughter.”

  She tempered her love letter with a splash of cheerful reality too.

  “. . . she’s in my jewelry box! My purse! My lipstick! Or pulling off some mischievous trick!”

  Shelly concluded with a telling rhyme:

  “Oh Nikki, though our tempers increase our love for her will not ever cease!”

  For a time, Shelly perpetuated a kind of “you and me against the world” story line. She told Nikki that her daddy had abandoned them, that her paternal grandparents didn’t love her. She said all of that to her daughter with sad eyes and her arms wrapped around her, but added that it was fine because she loved Nikki so, so much.

  Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be carefully curated fiction. Many years later, Nikki found a cache of letters from her dad and his side of the family, and discovered that her father’s family had sent birthday and Christmas gifts as she was growing up. Her mother had cut off th
e tags and put her own name on them.

  Lara and Les were concerned that Shelly was leaving Nikki alone while she went out, so they went over to her apartment in Vancouver to check up on her. There they met Danny Long, who was living across the hall from Shelly. Lara knew Danny’s mother because she’d bowled at Tiger Lanes. Danny was thin, with longish dark hair and a pleasant smile. He said he had keys to his neighbor’s apartment.

  “You must know my daughter pretty well if you have her keys,” Les said.

  Danny mumbled something and let them in.

  Shelly and Nikki weren’t there, but the Watsons did find a box full of things stolen from the cabin on Mount Hood, plus a full set of keys to their home, their cars, and, of course, the cabin. The keys had been missing from Lara’s purse for several weeks.

  Not long after, Shelly and Danny moved into the house in Battle Ground that Grandma Anna had always promised would be her favorite grandchild’s. Soon Shelly had a second baby on the way. The couple married in a small wedding chapel near the courthouse in Vancouver on June 2, 1978. Shelly was on her second marriage by twenty-four. A couple of months later, in August 1978, Samantha was born. She was a beautiful baby—blonde, with big, expressive eyes.

  Danny was good to the girls but pushed back on Shelly more than she’d been used to experiencing. The two of them fought constantly, hard and physically. Dishes shattering. Yelling. Running out the door. All that kind of drama. One time when Lara visited—on a rare occasion when she was allowed to—she noticed holes punched into the drywall. The smart money might’ve been on Danny, though in truth Lara couldn’t be sure which of the adults had slammed a fist into the wall.

  Indeed, Shelly’s marriage to Danny was very tempestuous, as had been the case with her marriage to Randy, and ended just the same. When a spat ended and Danny left to cool off or get away, Shelly would pack the girls in the car and start looking for him.

  Shelly, her family would later say, always liked to hunt.

  Whenever there was a new boyfriend, Shelly had a singular instruction for Nikki.

  “You need to call him Dad,” she said.

  So Nikki did. When she went to school, her mom would simply enroll her under her new man’s surname. No legal formalities at all, just Shelly’s insistence and good word that she’d created a new family.

  Just like that.

  Five years into her marriage to Danny, Shelly phoned her father and said she needed money for a divorce. She complained that Danny had betrayed her.

  As usual, Les didn’t question any of it.

  Anything for Shelly.

  It was 1983 and, at twenty-nine, Shelly had a new guy on the string.

  “I thought of Danny as my dad,” Nikki recalled, many years later. But once Danny was out of the picture, Shelly set her sights on mild-mannered Dave Knotek. “I remember Mom bringing Dave around at our place in Battle Ground and telling me that he was our new dad. I hated him because I loved Danny. And not too much later, we were packed up for Raymond.”

  Even now, Nikki holds on to a memory that comes to her occasionally, visiting her like a ghost.

  It was just before the move to Raymond. She was asleep in her bed in the house behind the nursing home in Battle Ground. All of a sudden, she woke up, unable to breathe through a pillow pressed over her face. Nikki started screaming for her mother, and suddenly—as in that very instant—Shelly appeared.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  Nikki, crying, said someone had put a pillow over her face.

  “It was a bad dream,” Shelly said.

  Even then, Nikki knew better.

  “It wasn’t a dream, Mommy.”

  Shelly fixed her eyes on her little girl and insisted she was wrong. She wouldn’t back down. She didn’t have to. She was, as always, right about everything.

  The encounter stayed with Nikki. The speed with which her mother responded. The peculiar look on her face—more interested than concerned.

  Later, she would wonder if that was the first time her mother had messed with her mentally, and if she’d done the same thing to others in her life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Timber. Oysters. And decades later, marijuana.

  Soggy and exceedingly gray, Pacific County, Washington, has always relied heavily on nature. It’s been on a boom-or-bust trajectory since the first white settlers came to the rainy, windy spot in the state’s southwest corner in the 1850s. It seems almost dismissive to call the people who live there a hardy lot, but there’s really no denying it. The place where the Pacific Ocean meets the Willapa River and various tributaries is the kind of place in which abundance wasn’t given, it was earned. Its triad of towns—county seat South Bend, Raymond, and Old Willapa—are the county’s backbone. Huge Craftsman homes run along the hills above the bay that empties into the ocean. They speak of a time before the economy ebbed, as it always does in places that depend on natural resources. Only the courthouse, with its Beaux Arts design and magnificent art glass rotunda, still does a booming business. Its annex is where the welfare office is located.

  Soggy as it is, the region along the Willapa River to the bay has made its mark in popular culture. Maybe more of a smudge than a mark. Nirvana, originally from Aberdeen, one county away, played its very first gig in Raymond, a town of less than three thousand. Lyricist Robert Wells, who wrote “The Christmas Song” with Mel Tormé and the theme from TV’s Patty Duke Show, grew up there. Author Tom Robbins wrote his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, in South Bend.

  And yet most of those who live there—especially those who have grown up with sawdust and oyster shells—are not famous. Not by a long shot. They fit mostly in that tight space between salt of the earth and hardscrabble.

  Dave Knotek was a local Pacific County boy through and through, having lived his first four years in nearby Lebam, before his parents, Al and Shirley, moved along Elk Creek into a little wood-frame house in Raymond. Al was a timber faller, but work in the woods could be spotty. That the Knoteks never had a lot of money was an understatement. Dave and his brother and sister made their own toys—bows and arrows out of sticks and chicken feathers. Country kids like the Knoteks could often be spotted in a Raymond classroom. Their clothing was older, not always in the best shape.

  “A few times I started the school year with the same clothes I wore the year before,” he recalled. “No disrespect to my parents. They worked very hard. We just didn’t have the money.”

  The daughter of a sawmill worker, Shirley picked up the slack by working in an oyster cannery for quite some time, and then later at J. C. Penney.

  Of the three kids, Dave was the hellion of Al and Shirley’s brood—messing around, stealing his dad’s smokes, even a half-hearted attempt at running away with a buddy in the fourth grade. And because of that, he was disciplined in the way his father had been. Al had a razor strap and wasn’t averse to using it on the kids if needed. Dave felt its sting more than a time or two, but never thought he didn’t deserve it. It was the way it was.

  At the time, Raymond was bustling. The mills were running three shifts, and the endless supply of timber kept logging trucks on the roads all day long. The river was nearly clogged with log rafts.

  In 1971, Dave graduated from Raymond High School—home of the Seagulls—with the idea that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a logger, though his dad did his best to convince him otherwise.

  “Dad didn’t want me to do any of that. Too hard. But that’s what I ended up doing.” He worked in logging for a year before enlisting in the navy.

  “I wasn’t going to be a timber faller like my dad, but I enlisted in the navy like my dad had and learned to run heavy equipment. And that’s what I did for twenty-two years—running a dozer in the woods.”

  The military gave Dave a much-needed boost of self-confidence. When he came home to Raymond after serving in Hawaii and Alaska, Dave Knotek was suddenly viewed as a very eligible bachelor. He was a nice-lo
oking, athletic guy, having learned to surf in Hawaii. He had a kind, gentle personality, though he could also party. Best of all, he had a good job at timber giant Weyerhaeuser. Upon his return, he became a member of fraternal orders like the Elks and the Eagles, and his popularity surged. He got serious with a couple of local girls, but those relationships didn’t pan out.

  “The girls chased me a little,” he said later with a smile.

  At the time, he didn’t know that the wrong one would end up catching him.

  There was no particular reason why Dave Knotek drove down to Long Beach, Washington, on a Saturday near the end of April 1982. It wasn’t beach weather—that doesn’t hit the Washington coast until the end of August. Dave, recently dumped by a girl, was in search of a beer and a little distraction. In fact, when he left his place in Raymond and drove his orange VW surf buggy toward the highway, he didn’t know if he should turn right to Westport or left to Long Beach. Long Beach won. When he arrived at a tavern called The Sore Thumb, it was packed with young men not doing much of anything.

  Shooting the breeze.

  Shooting pool.

  Talking about shooting.

  Yet amid all the guys was the most beautiful girl Dave had ever laid eyes on.

  Though there were hiccups in Shelly’s life when it came to choosing men, there was no denying she was very good-looking, with light eyes, red hair that she wore big and long, and the kind of figure that little girls hope for when they are growing up. Curves in all the right places. Shelly understood that men liked a girl who flaunted what she had, and in her early years, she was more than happy to work it.

  By Dave Knotek’s estimation, Shelly Watson Rivardo Long was way out of his league. He just knew it. He watched her from the sidelines. She was all auburn hair and had a killer body. Dave had been a late bloomer. No girlfriend to speak of in high school. He was shy back then. Even after the navy, he was still shy. He sipped his beer, and tried to get up the nerve to ask the pretty redhead to dance.