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

by Gregg Olsen

  Sami didn’t see how it was hurting to help her friend, but she backed off. To help Kathy might incite even more violence against her.

  Her mom was often a passive abuser, usually making Dave or Shane do her bidding. It was what she didn’t do sometimes that showed her indifference to others.

  One time Sami followed her mother and Kathy out of the house to the walkway next to the pole building, and for some reason, all of a sudden, without any warning whatsoever, Shelly gave Kathy a hard push. Kathy went flying and landed facedown on the concrete. She didn’t even try to break her fall. She just fell flat. She started screaming and holding her head with her hands, writhing in agony like a hurt animal. Sami watched her mother hesitate for a beat before helping Kathy get up and putting her back into the pump house.

  Nikki thought she knew why her mother had put her there. It wasn’t because of some new mistake Kathy had made. It wasn’t really a punishment at all. It was because her mother had grown weary of watching Kathy after she’d tried to run away. Shelly didn’t say it outright, but Nikki suspected that her mother didn’t trust what Kathy might say.

  Like she had to Sami, her mother couched it all in something positive for Kathy. Exiling her to the pump house, for instance, was always for her own good.

  “I think she’ll be better off in the pump house,” Shelly announced, leading Kathy by the hand out the door and across the yard. “She needs some peace and quiet.”

  There was always a phony reason for whatever she did to Kathy.

  Now and then, Nikki helped her mom get Kathy to the pump house and put her inside. Kathy’s health was deteriorating rapidly. Her mom’s lie was audacious. Kathy needed medical attention. Not a stint in a dank outbuilding.

  Shane and Nikki didn’t need to be locked in there either, but that’s where they ended up whenever Shelly tired of a beating and wanted a punishment that had a longer duration.

  One that showed the magnitude of her control over everyone.

  “It got us—me, Kathy, Shane—out of the way,” Nikki said later, explaining the reasoning behind the banishment. “She didn’t have to monitor us and worry about what we might do. Especially Shane and Kathy.”

  In time, however, Kathy appeared to accept her situation. The same way she’d become used to riding in the trunk.

  One time, Sami was outside near the pump house when she heard the sound of Kathy’s voice. “Hello?”

  She went to the locked door of the pump house and leaned in. She didn’t dare open it. Kathy knew better than to ask her to do so anyway. Shelly had made it clear to everyone that Kathy was there as a punishment, but also as a way to help her heal and get better.

  “Is it raining out there?” Kathy asked.

  “A little while ago. Not now, Kathy.”

  “Oh,” she said, her voice a soft rasp. “I thought I could hear it rain.”

  As was usually the case, Dave was at work on Whidbey Island when Shelly needed to go into town to run errands. Before heading out, she told Shane that he was in charge of Kathy. He needed to make sure she didn’t yell or call out to anyone.

  “Or get away,” she said. “Make sure she stays in the pump house where she belongs, Shane. We can’t trust her right now. She’s not right in the head.”

  Shane pretended to agree.

  “Fuck this,” he told Nikki right after Shelly drove off. “I’m letting Kathy out.”

  Nikki hated the idea that her mom had locked Kathy in the pump house. She knew Kathy needed a doctor. She was getting weaker by the day. Her face was swelling up, and her last few teeth were like little brown acorns looking like they were going to fall.

  Shane removed the padlock and swung open the door.

  Light flooded the space, and Kathy winced. She sat motionless and finally looked at him.

  “Come out,” he said.

  She didn’t move.

  Nikki knew Kathy was afraid of Shane, although she had no reason to fear him when her mother wasn’t around.

  Shane pleaded at first, but then became irritated when she just looked at him.

  “Come on, Kathy, get out. You need to get out of here.”

  Kathy started to cry. She was pale. Battered. Bleeding. Her hair was nearly gone. She had on a thin, tattered muumuu and nothing else.

  “What’s the fucking matter with you?” Shane’s anger grew by the minute. “You need to go! Get the fuck out of here! This is your chance.”

  Kathy appeared terrified. “You’re lying!” she said.

  “No,” Shane said. “I’m telling you the truth. You can go! Get out of here.”

  Kathy cowered in the small outbuilding. Finally, she spoke, her voice a rasp. “If I leave, they’ll just find me. You know that. They will. She will.”

  Shane was beside himself. He couldn’t understand why Kathy didn’t run. The door was open. They were all kids and had nowhere to go. She was a grown-up.

  “This is your only hope, Kathy. Don’t be a fucking moron!”

  Kathy begged for him to let her be.

  Shane slammed the door, leaving Kathy back in the dark. “She’s going to die if she doesn’t get out,” he said, turning to Nikki.

  “I know.”

  Later, the two of them sat upstairs in Nikki’s room for the longest time. Both had the sinking feeling that what was happening to Kathy was beyond hopeless. When Shane had unlocked the door to let her run free, it was probably her last chance. Kathy just didn’t have any fight left. She’d simply given up.

  PART FOUR

  HUSBAND

  DAVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Shelly repeatedly reminded Dave that he was a lousy husband.

  “The worst ever!” she said, whittling away at his self-esteem.

  She should never have married him.

  She could have had her pick of any man.

  He had been a terrible mistake.

  Dave only agreed. He knew in his heart that Shelly was right. About everything. A good husband would be home all the time, helping with the house. Taking care of the kids. Reminding his wife that he was more than a paycheck. He was working sixteen-hour days and driving from Whidbey Island to get home for weekends during which he couldn’t really do anything that needed to get done. The construction job was manual labor, and he was bone tired. All day long, he guzzled thermos after thermos of coffee and popped No-Doz and Vivarin to stay awake.

  “I was running a Cat. Getting off. Getting on. Going up and down the hills to get the work done. It was physical, physical, physical,” he recounted years later. “I was fighting to stay awake. It got so bad at work that I’d take those ammonia inhalants from the medicine kit. I’d crack those just to stay awake in the Cat.”

  More times than he could count, Dave would find that he couldn’t make the drive home from Whidbey. He wondered how he never crossed the centerline and killed someone. There were times when he was driving so slowly on the highway that everyone would pass him, but he couldn’t figure out why. Sometimes he’d even hear something in his head he started to call “the screaming meanies.”

  Whenever the meanies hit him, he’d pull over to the side of the road and nap to try to get himself together. Sometimes he’d manage to fight through the episode and get within striking distance of Raymond. Or if he made it a little closer, he’d park Old Blue, his truck, at Butte Creek, a picnic area about three miles north of home off Highway 101. Those were the times he was too tired to press the pedal any longer. Too beat. And, truly, too weak to do battle with Shelly. He needed a minute to rest, to collect himself.

  To shake off the meanies.

  That didn’t stop his wife, however. One time, a sharp rap against the window of his truck awakened him.

  It was Nikki.

  “We know where you are, Dad,” she said before returning to the new Jeep Shelly had purchased for herself.

  Shelly hadn’t bothered to get out of her vehicle or even hurl a word in Dave’s direction. She’d let her eldest shame him and remind hi
m at the same time that, no matter where he went, wherever he hid, she’d be able to track him down.

  Shelly was like that. She was as relentless as a bloodhound. She had that stamina and the innate ability to find anyone.

  At any time.

  If Dave thought that he could grab a little respite from what was waiting at home and do so in peace, he was obviously wrong.

  Lara Watson thought her son-in-law had a serious drinking problem, but it paled next to his Shelly problem. Drinking, he could quit. Shelly, it turned out, not so easily.

  Lara was sure that, like Randy and Danny before him, Dave would eventually leave. While Dave would later concede that he didn’t have it in him to simply leave Shelly, he always hoped that one day he’d come home and Shelly would be gone.

  “Just be gone. Moved back to Vancouver or something,” he recalled. “I don’t know what I was hoping for. But she just kept hanging around.”

  As Lara weighed things from a distance, she saw the precedent that Grandma Anna had set by making her husband sleep in the shed. Shelly’s first husband, Randy, had taken to sleeping in his car after rows with his wife. And now the same thing was happening to Dave.

  “He didn’t want to come home,” Lara said. “Or she wouldn’t let him. He was working day and night and then sleeping in his truck. Shelly got the big car. He got that truck, right? He was sleeping there or sneaking into the office after the people he worked for left for the night. Sleeping in the office on the floor.”

  Dave would later fasten the blame for what happened at the little red house on Monohon Landing on the fact that he’d quit his job at Weyerhaeuser. Shelly had insisted on it. Said the enormous timber company was taking advantage of him and he could make more working for someone else. But his job took him away from home, and that, he was sure, was what kept him from being an involved father and a good husband.

  “Everything was okay,” he claimed of life at Louderback House. “It was just me and Shell and Nikki and Sami and everything was fine. Came home every night—the way it should be. A marriage is fifty percent and after that I wasn’t keeping up my end of the deal. Raising kids is a handful. You can’t expect a mom to raise ’em all the time, you know, and be the disciplinarian, help with the schoolwork. I wasn’t there. And when I was, I was falling asleep. I couldn’t even stay awake to watch a TV show.”

  Shelly, as he saw it, was doing more than her fair share.

  “She was one hundred percent mom and then some. I mean, those kids had birthday parties, and you know, kids come down to the barbecue pit. All of that. Shell was always going to Sami’s track meets. Cuz Dad was never at Sami’s school things. I really faded off being a good husband.”

  By trying to survive by doing the right thing, Dave was sure that he’d actually done the opposite. He’d let everyone down in the process. He’d come up short. By his estimation, way short.

  “My dad provided for me, and you know, he worked very, very hard. My grandfather too. I failed my Knotek family. I let them down. It’s part of me, you know, just being a failure.”

  Medical bills were draining their bank account. Shelly demanded Dave work harder to make ends meet. It was life and death, she insisted. Yet Dave couldn’t work any harder. He was barely hanging in there, pulling in extra hours so that the avalanche of bills could be paid.

  At one point, Shelly even told him that he needed to ask his family for money. Dave called his sister, whom the Knoteks considered well off, to tell her they were short on funds.

  “Shell’s cancer is taking us down,” he pleaded.

  His sister said she would help.

  A few days later, Shelly returned from getting the mail. She was as angry as Dave had ever seen her.

  “Thirty dollars?” she fumed. “Can you believe it? So fucking cheap! I have cancer and that’s all they can do to help us?”

  Dave had hated to call for money. He hated even more that his wife was complaining about the gift.

  “They are helping us, Shell,” he said.

  “Not enough.”

  It was the best he could do. Dave always had her back. Asking for money. Working harder. Making excuses to his family for things Shelly did.

  The pattern continued: while Shelly demeaned Dave as a lousy provider and a weak man whenever she could turn the screw, Dave used every opportunity to tell his wife that she meant the world to him.

  Unlike some husbands who pull a card off the rack at the last minute, Dave was thoughtful. He never just signed his name to a sentiment written by a card writer at Hallmark. Instead, in his impeccable penmanship, he’d write messages to Shelly that were a testament to how he felt inside. Or a romanticized version of the truth.

  “Remember your words to me years ago? You once said that angels take themselves lightly. I’m married to an angel. Your eyes are the kindest eyes that I have ever seen. Your soul casts shadows of kind loving warmth wherever you are . . . You love and care about everything from your children, other people, animals, plants. You are truly genuine in heart and soul.”

  Whether he truly believed his own words was beside the point.

  His message was a wish and hope. It was what Dave needed to believe on the long drives to and from Raymond.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Shelly wasn’t a doctor . . . though she liked to play one—or so it seemed to her family. Sami remembered times as a young girl when she’d wake up and her mom would be waving a broken glass ampule in front of her face. She’d cough and nearly heave from whatever she was breathing into her lungs.

  She’d seen her do the same thing to Kathy.

  “Kathy would pass out from the abuse and my mom would bring her back,” Sami said. “So she could do it all over again.”

  One time at Monohon Landing, Sami had a headache. Her mom told her they were out of Excedrin and that she had something else for her.

  The pills were funny looking, unfamiliar, but she took them anyway. The next thing she knew, she was out on the porch on all fours, unable to lift up her head. Shane tried to help her. It was no use.

  “Your mom gave you muscle relaxers. Fucked up shit. She did that to me too,” he said.

  And despite her formidable drug supply in the house, Shelly was on the hunt for something she didn’t have at that time. She photocopied information extolling the benefits of the tranquilizer Haldol, a drug she was interested in procuring.

  For some reason. For someone.

  Shelly’s cancer treatments dragged on so long that Lara couldn’t take it anymore. The way she saw it, Shelly was putting her girls through a nightmare letting them believe that their mother was going to die at any time. Her husband should call her on it, she thought, but Dave was too gullible. Too nice. Lara took it upon herself to confront Shelly.

  Lara called her daughter Carol, Shelly’s half sister, and told her they were going to Raymond to take care of the cancer business once and for all. They weren’t going to give Shelly a heads-up either. Every time in the past that they had come for a prearranged visit, Shelly would make sure no one was home at the appointed time.

  Mother and daughter drove Lara’s 1992 black Chevy Blazer to Shelly’s house to find out what was really going on. When Shelly opened the front door, Lara could have laughed out loud if the sight wasn’t so horrifically twisted.

  Shelly looked like a Kabuki doll—a very unwell one at that.

  “She was wearing white makeup and she’d shaved off all her eyebrows,” Lara remembered. “Her face. Wow. I can see it right now. Honest to God. Unbelievable.”

  Shelly didn’t look happy to see her stepmother or sister on her doorstep. After a moment of silence, she let them inside.

  “I’m so glad you came,” she said.

  Lara had seen Shelly lie plenty of times, so she fibbed right back.

  “We want to talk to you about what you’re going through so we can do a better job of supporting you,” she said.

  Shelly lowered herself into a chair. “Oh, thank you.”


  Lara was on a mission.

  “We need the name of your doctors and the clinic,” she said. “This has been going on too long. We’ll need to go over all your bills too.”

  Shelly didn’t really respond. There probably wasn’t a lot she actually could say.

  Lara asked, “How sick are you after treatment?”

  Shelly looked right at her. “Really sick.”

  At one point, Shelly got up and went to the bathroom. Lara and Carol exchanged looks but didn’t say a word. The girls were there by then, sitting quietly and supporting their mother. There wasn’t any sign of Kathy Loreno.

  A few minutes later, Shelly emerged with a fistful of red hair.

  “Oh, Mom,” she said, dropping the clump of hair to the floor. “My hair. My hair is just falling out.”

  “Oh my God,” Lara said. She picked up the fallen hair while everyone looked on. She studied the hair and then confronted Shelly once more.

  “I’ve never known someone taking cancer treatment to lose their hair from the middle,” Lara finally said. “Usually they lose it from the scalp. Yours is breaking off.”

  Lara went into the bathroom to investigate what had just happened.

  “There’s a wastebasket in there with some crumpled tissue on the top,” she recalled, holding on to the vivid memory even years later. “I dug through the basket and there’s long hair and scissors. And there is still hair in the scissors. Red hair. I walked out with the scissors. Shelly was sitting with her back to me. Carol was on the couch and she about died. The girls didn’t say a word.”

  And still Shelly refused to tell the truth.

  Back in the car for the trip home, Lara turned to her daughter.

  “Oh my God, that girl is sick,” she said. She didn’t mean cancer.

  Carol, still in shock, agreed.

  Neither knew, of course, just how sick.

  A spate of early-morning phone calls began around that time. Startled out of bed, Lara would pick up at two or three to find someone screaming in her ear. Sometimes the calls would be hang-ups. Over and over. She never doubted for a second that Shelly was behind the calls. If not her, she’d put someone up to it.