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

by Gregg Olsen

  Her half sister Carol received similar calls too.

  Carol was doing some print modeling for Nordstrom at the time and had mentioned it to Shelly, who seemed interested. Strangely, Carol’s modeling agency had notified her to say that they’d been left an anonymous tip one night that she was a thief and that no one should hire her.

  That was on-brand for Shelly. Most of her ire was fired off late at night while the world dozed.

  “She was always like that,” Lara recalled. “She was nocturnal. She could never sleep even when she was younger. In the mornings she’d have big circles under her eyes. We couldn’t get her out of bed. And if she had to go somewhere it was a fight every single day. It was a knock down drag out fight no matter what it was.”

  Shelly was livid. She’d found out that there was a spaghetti dinner to raise money for one of Nikki’s high school classmate’s parents who had cancer.

  “Why didn’t you do that for me?” Shelly asked. “You don’t love me at all.”

  You don’t have cancer, Mom, Nikki thought.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said instead.

  Shelly shook her head in bitter disgust. “I don’t know why I bother with you at all, Nikki. All you do is disappoint me. What a fucking disappointment you are.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  At almost sixteen, Shane Watson was exhausted. He went to school, worked in the yard until dark, and slept in his cousin Nikki’s closet. He was physically and mentally exhausted. None of what was happening around him, the things Shelly and Dave forced on them, was right or normal. He hated it. He wanted out. Ultimately, however, Shane knew he was just as trapped as Kathy was. It would have been ironic if it weren’t so horrific. The Knoteks had been his backup plan, his great hope. They were the ones who had rescued him from a life on the streets, but for what?

  The way Shane saw it, Shelly was beyond a piece of work, but Dave was no better. Maybe worse. Dave was a grown man, and it seemed incomprehensible that he’d do whatever Shelly told him to do. Naked exercises for Shane and Nikki. Jumping jacks outside in the winter. Trips around the house in the middle of the night until they’d collapse. As he got older, and bigger, Shane would push back and let everyone know just what he was thinking. How fucked up everything had become before and after Kathy. He and Dave got into it more than once while Shelly lurked nearby telling her husband to teach Shane a lesson.

  “For his own good, Dave!”

  A few times at Monohon Landing, things escalated to physical altercations.

  One time Shane hit Dave during an argument in the laundry room. Years later, it would escape Dave’s mind what had transpired between him and his nephew and led them to come to blows that evening. It might have been something that Shelly reported to him about how Shane had disrespected her.

  “He was getting more opinionated on his own,” Dave recalled. “He kept running away. He’s just a boy unto himself. He’d challenge anybody.”

  And yet Dave liked Shane.

  “He’d call Shell Mom and me Dad,” he said later. “He worked hard. Tried to learn in school. Shell tried to help him cuz everybody disregarded him, and he was her nephew. Her blood. It was a struggle because Shane was hard. He always got in trouble at school.”

  Shane’s falling grades had everything to do with what was happening at home. But Dave couldn’t see that because he was never around.

  Shane wrote in some schoolwork what alluded to a crack in the façade that Shelly and Dave had tried to create in their home.

  “Well man is becoming more civilized but at the same time he is becoming more barbaric . . . well it is probably because I don’t like it hear [sic] and because I don’t like the people hear [sic].”

  In another class assignment, Shane made a list of the things that mattered to him most.

  “Put everyone in my family before me.

  “Do not do drugs or alcohol.

  “Never tell on or snitch.”

  Shane understood his role in the family. One time, he kicked Kathy with a boot because Shelly commanded him to do it. He’d watched Kathy struggle to get up, like an animal that had been bounced off the hood of a car on the road in front of the house. She was crying and screaming and begging for mercy.

  “Kick her again, Shane!”

  And so he did. Yet it wasn’t who he was. While he loved pushing Tori on the swing, or playing games with Sami, Shane’s closest confidant continued to be Nikki. When they weren’t talking about how much they hated Shelly or how they’d like to toss a hair dryer or radio into her bath, they plotted their escape. Shane was firm that no matter how dysfunctional his family life had been before moving in with the Knoteks, it was far better than what was going on there.

  “Anything would be better,” he told Nikki. “I need to get the fuck out of here. We all do.”

  Nikki wanted to get away too, but she only had a couple of years of high school to get through.

  “I need to graduate, then go to college,” she said.

  Shane shook his head. “I can’t wait for that.”

  “If you go,” she said, “please don’t leave me.”

  Shane always promised. “Right. We’re out of here together. But if I have to go really fast, I’ll be sure to come back for you.”

  “You better.”

  In her heart, Nikki doubted she’d ever really be able to leave. She had her sisters to think about. She knew that her mother had a strange, ironclad hold on her. She also knew that no matter where she went, or how far away, her mom would track her down. She’d found Kathy at the mall. She’d even managed to track Shane in the middle of Tacoma.

  Her mom was a hunter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Dave Knotek was a willing participant in the abuse of Nikki and Shane, but Shelly had insisted the kids were out of control and needed the harsh discipline to ensure that they’d be on the right path in adulthood. In some ways, that made a little sense to Dave. Kids did need a firm hand.

  He didn’t blame his dad for hitting him with the razor strap.

  But Kathy? Dave had a harder time defending what was happening to her. She was an adult, not a kid. Besides, she did what she was asked to do. She did the laundry. Cleaned the house. Fed the animals. She didn’t always do things the way Shelly wanted her to, but she was trying.

  Dave sat in his truck at the river landing. He was scared, tired—a leaf on the surface of a river—and felt unable to end what was happening to Kathy. It wasn’t that he looked the other way—really, there was no other way to look. He simply didn’t have it in him to fight Shell or even to tell her to knock it off.

  When Shelly blamed Kathy for bringing her state of affairs on herself or belittled her friend’s efforts to pull herself up by her bootstraps, Dave never flipped it back at his wife and pointed out how what was happening was Shelly’s doing. When Shelly blamed Shane for the cognitive issues Kathy was having, Dave didn’t call her out. He didn’t retort that Shelly was the one who forced Shane to kick Kathy.

  Dave could see where things were headed, and what his part in all of it had been. Kathy’s physical decline was escalating, and it was obvious to him that, if things continued, she might die. He pulled Shelly aside on one of his trips home to Raymond and offered a solution he thought might work.

  “Let me take her somewhere,” he said.

  Shelly didn’t understand. “What?”

  “I could take her to Oregon or somewhere and just drop her off.”

  Shelly didn’t think that was a good idea. For one, Kathy might tell someone what had been going on. Besides, she was going to recover.

  “Don’t worry,” Shelly said. “She’s going to get better.”

  Dave didn’t believe it, but as usual, he didn’t contradict Shelly. Still, he worried about what was going to happen.

  Besides following Shelly’s orders, worry was all Dave seemed to do.

  When it came to manifesting anger, Shelly Knotek was a kind of jack-in-the-box. She could be in a dead sleep in t
he middle of the night, then bolt from bed with an angry scream at one of the girls or Shane. She was like the villain in a slasher flick. She went zero to sixty, from calm to rage, in less than five seconds.

  Years later, her daughters would also say that, while there likely was no other person on the planet as lazy as their mom—she’d often lie on the sofa all day with her eyes riveted to a book or the TV—if something spurred her into action, then suddenly she was like a cat seeing a mouse run across the floor.

  It wasn’t a mouse one day.

  It was Tupperware.

  Shelly was curled up on the living room sofa when she looked over to the kitchen and saw a Tupperware container of feces on the kitchen floor. Shelly ran to the kitchen and grabbed an appliance cord from the counter. Kathy, who had been let into the house that day to work in the kitchen, cowered and tried to get away. Shelly was immediately on top of her, lashing her with the cord. Kathy started crying and begging Shelly to stop hurting her, but she wouldn’t let up.

  Shelly was Cujo. Freddy Krueger. The freaky clown, Pennywise, from It.

  “Goddamn you, Kathy!”

  Kathy was the girl in the shower. The woman trapped in the car. She was the victim that begs for one more chance before her attacker finishes her off.

  “I’ll never do it again,” Kathy said.

  Shelly kept at it and started to pull Kathy’s hair and drag her about the kitchen. Kathy had lost considerable weight, yet she was still a large woman. Shelly moved her about like a rag doll. Rage gave her superhuman strength.

  Shane and the girls had seen that before. Adrenaline.

  “I don’t ever want to see anything like that in my kitchen ever. Ever! Do you understand? You are filthy, Kathy. That’s what you are!”

  The fact that Shelly had revoked Kathy’s bathroom privileges made no difference. That Shelly had to give her permission to urinate or defecate was beside the point. The fact that Shelly had been asleep, and Kathy didn’t dare wake her to ask permission to use the toilet, didn’t factor into any of it.

  It was time to think up something new. A punishment that would make Kathy understand once and for all that she needed to follow the rules of the house.

  Shelly told Dave when he came home what Kathy had done.

  “Tupperware full of shit in our kitchen, Dave! What in the fuck is that about? She’s really done it this time and you need to do something.”

  Dave agreed that what Kathy had done was beyond gross; however, he didn’t have any suggestions on what they could do beyond isolating her in the pump house.

  He liked Kathy. They all did. Yes, she’d misbehaved, but he didn’t want to beat her, kick her. It was pointless and—though he never said it out loud—crazy.

  Shelly already had an idea on what they should do to break Kathy of her bad habits.

  “Waterboard her.”

  She instructed her husband to build a seesaw device with a wide plank over a metal fulcrum made of an old tank from the pole building. Without saying a word, Dave went about it as Shelly barked orders. This was what they needed to punish Kathy. A bucket of water was placed at one end of the board.

  “You two stand watch,” Shelly told Nikki and Shane. Shane quietly muttered to Nikki that, while he didn’t think any of the abuse being inflicted on Kathy could be worse, this was “a whole new level of fucked up.”

  Shelly brought Kathy, now naked, from the pump house. Shelly helped her walk, because by that time Kathy was having a difficult time moving. She’d lost a lot of weight, and the sight of her made Nikki nearly gag. She was black and blue, and her skin hung in soft red folds.

  “I’m sorry,” Kathy repeated. “Please don’t do this.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Shelly snapped. “You are a no-good piece of shit and you’re going to listen to me!”

  Kathy begged and pleaded. She looked at Nikki and Shane with an expression Nikki read as, “Won’t anyone help me?”

  Dave put Kathy on the sheet of plywood facedown. She tried to fight him, but she was too weak. He pinned her down and ran duct tape over her body to hold her like a mummy on a stick.

  Shelly gave her husband a signal, and he lowered Kathy’s face and head into the bucket of water. He continued to hold her down for a moment. It wasn’t meant to drown her. Just to get her to follow Shelly’s orders.

  To be a better person.

  Once it got going, Shelly told Nikki to watch the road from the front deck, and she immediately went there. Shane was directed to the driveway to make sure that the family across the road didn’t hear Kathy’s screams. Sami was positioned in the yard to stand watch.

  They could hear their mother laughing at Kathy. Calling her stupid. Fat. Ugly.

  “You’re worthless, Kathy! You need to shape up!”

  Nikki tried to shut out the sounds of Kathy’s cries as the woman’s head was lifted and submerged into the water. Kathy’s voice was on the lower register, and it was more of a gurgling than a true scream as she fought for air and begged for mercy. Nikki stood at her post while her mom barked orders and her dad did the dunking. The scene was shocking, a horror show, and incongruous with the pretty bucolic setting of the country. Apple trees. Horses in the pasture. And a naked woman bound to a board and being dunked repeatedly.

  The waterboarding didn’t go on long. Maybe ten minutes or so. Long enough to freeze the image of Kathy, naked, duct-taped, and screaming for help, in Nikki’s memory forever.

  Later, Shelly would characterize the waterboarding punishment as a “shower” or “bath.” Her best friend hadn’t been keeping herself clean, so Shelly and Dave had employed the technique as a way to wash her.

  None who witnessed it saw it that way, of course. It had nothing to do with bathing Kathy.

  “My mom enjoyed doing that to Kathy,” Nikki recalled one afternoon from her Seattle-area home while her children played outside, and she took herself back to that time when she was a teenager in Raymond. “I don’t see how or know why, but she really did. It only happened that one time. The contraption was put away. We never saw it again.”

  Beatings. Waterboarding. Endless days in the pump house. Shelly was on overdrive when it came to harassing and torturing Kathy. It was as if Kathy wasn’t even a human being anymore. Shelly seemed to treat her like a sadist’s worst pet. She fed her rotten food from the refrigerator that she’d whirl around in the blender.

  “Drink this smoothie, Kathy.”

  Kathy’s hands trembled as she took the glass and looked at its brown and gray contents.

  Shelly kept her eyes fixed on Kathy. “Isn’t it good?”

  Kathy drank the concoction of far-beyond-pull-date hamburger and spoiled produce.

  “Delicious,” she said. “Thank you, Shelly.”

  Another time, Nikki watched her mother fill a kiddie cup of Morton Salt from the kitchen cabinet. She couldn’t understand what her mom was going to do, but she was morbidly curious. Shelly had enlisted Shane to be a part of whatever her plan was, and he did as he was told. Nikki followed the two of them out to the pump house. She didn’t go the entire distance, however, instead choosing to linger back and watch as her mother unlocked the door.

  Shelly handed the cup to Kathy, who by this point could barely stand without assistance.

  “Eat the fucking salt.”

  Kathy squinted into the bright light of day. “No.”

  Shelly said that the salt was good for her. “It will help your swollen feet.”

  “Obviously I wasn’t a doctor, but I think anyone would probably know that there was no way that salt was going to do anything good for Kathy,” Nikki recalled. “My mom acted like it was a big treatment. She always had a reason for all the shit she did to us and Kathy.”

  Kathy tried to resist, which was unusual. She was always so compliant.

  “I don’t want to.”

  Shelly wasn’t having any of that.

  “Eat it!” she yelled. “Eat the whole thing, Kathy!”

  Kathy resisted somew
hat. Like always, she was no match for Shelly’s indomitable will.

  Nikki couldn’t see Kathy from her vantage point all the time, but she could hear her refusing the salt as her mother and Shane screamed at her.

  “Eat the fucking salt! I don’t have all day!”

  Nikki heard the sound of Kathy spitting as she ate the cup of salt. Her mother and Shane kept at her until she finished every last granule.

  “Eat it all!”

  After that was done, Shelly gave Kathy some pills and told her to take those too. Then they locked the door and left.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  No one seemed to notice what was happening in the little red farmhouse on Monohon Landing Road. Some people would later say that they thought something odd might be going on over there, but other than a neighbor who called the authorities about the horses being neglected, nothing was ever reported. Even after the kids on the bus saw a naked woman running in the yard, Shelly’s quick thinking about the hot tub mishap had proved a winning cover story.

  No one heard Kathy scream as she was kicked or waterboarded in the yard.

  No one noticed the patches of sodden earth where Shane and Nikki had wallowed.

  No one.

  And yet inside the house was an overwhelming feeling of foreboding. It was heavy, like one of those lead aprons dentists use when taking x-rays. Teenagers Nikki and Shane talked about it when they shared a smoke out in the woods behind the house. They were allies more than ever, bonded over what Shelly had done to them.

  And even more over what they’d witnessed Shelly doing to Kathy.

  It was bad.

  “She needs to go,” Shane said of Kathy.

  “She can’t go,” Nikki said.

  And she was right.

  Kathy’s breathing was labored now even when she sat. Forget standing. She could barely do that under her own power. Her eyes seemed somewhat cloudy, and her skin was a map of swollen red tributaries with spots of blue. Every mark told a story of how Kathy had made Shelly angry. Shelly told Sami that they were going to bring Kathy inside from the pump house for a bath or a shower.