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

by Gregg Olsen

  Shelly told him she felt the same way, that she was devastated by the loss of her best friend—but she seemed much more pragmatic about it, telling him what was done was done and they needed to pull themselves together.

  Shelly told the older kids that they needed to stay in lockstep from now on.

  “All of us will be in jail,” she warned, “if anyone finds out what happened to Kathy.”

  She sent up a trial balloon the day they returned from the motel.

  “She committed suicide and we didn’t want her family to know,” Shelly pretended to speculate.

  No one said anything. They simply let Shelly’s ridiculous musing fade away. Nikki and Shane didn’t see how anyone would believe that story. Suicide? Nikki doubted it. No one takes a five-year route to kill herself.

  Kathy had been beaten, starved, and tortured to death.

  With Dave back at work on Whidbey Island, Shelly had a chore for Shane and Nikki a few days after the fire had cooled. She led the pair outside to the pole building and handed them a Home Depot bucket.

  “Dad burned some insulation in the burn pile and I need you to find the bits and pieces and put them in here,” she said.

  They both knew that wasn’t what Shelly was looking for at all.

  Shelly went back inside the house, and they walked over to the burn pile. It was a gruesome task, and they poked through the dirt without saying much at all.

  “You think that’s something?” Shane asked, pointing his stick at a tiny shard of white.

  Nikki looked at it.

  “Yeah,” she said, feeling sick inside. “It’s part of Kathy.”

  Shane found quite a few pieces of what they both knew were fragments of bone, not insulation. He found some melted jewelry too. Nikki, who could barely keep her mind on the task, also found a couple of fragments. They gave Shelly the bucket at the end of the day. Shelly put the particles in a plastic bag.

  She made Shane look in the burn pile a second and third time over the next few days.

  On one of his next trips home, Dave managed to get his hands on a backhoe. He drove it over to the old burn pile and scraped off the top, down a foot or two into the clean earth. He drove the dirt out to a remote logging road up Ward Creek and dumped it on a fresh road the loggers had cut so that the soil would blend together.

  “Later,” he said, some years after the fact of the old burn pit in the backyard, “we planted a garden in that spot.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Kathy Loreno’s disappearance needed a cover story.

  Suicide was a no-go. After all, there was no body.

  Shelly, whose mood had brightened considerably since the first few days following Kathy’s backyard cremation, practiced her concept first on Dave. It was like she was spinning a tale from one of the thriller potboilers she loved to read. She was excited. Buoyant. It was as if she was lifting the curtain on some kind of big reveal and was waiting for the audience to gasp and nod in enthusiasm.

  “We’ll continue telling everyone that she ran off with Rocky. I introduced them and the two of them hit it off. She wanted to start over somewhere and, really, she didn’t have any boyfriends so Rocky would be really important to her,” Shelly said, testing out her story.

  Dave went along with the story, but he wasn’t sure anyone else would buy it. Kathy hadn’t really dated anyone they knew about. That she would run off with a guy—especially in her weakened condition—was far-fetched, to say the least.

  “I don’t know if anyone will really believe it.”

  “We’ll make them,” Shelly said.

  Next, Shelly held a family meeting with all the kids. She brought them all into the living room and sat them on the couch. Dave didn’t say much. He sat next to his wife and nodded in agreement at what she was proposing.

  “Remember my friend Rocky? Remember how he was so interested in Kathy? Wanted to date her?”

  None of the kids remembered anything of the kind. None of them had even met him, though they vaguely remembered having heard their mother mention the name back at the Louderback House.

  “You all liked him.”

  It was typical of their mother, however, to suggest a shared memory as if it were something that could be planted and made to become real.

  Shelly went on with her plan. “It’s very important that we stick together on this, okay? I need all of you to understand and know that Kathy went off with Rocky.”

  “But she didn’t,” Shane said.

  Shelly shot Shane a harsh look. She had a way of burrowing her gaze into another’s eyes as if she was willing them to believe what she was saying, simply because she was saying it.

  “You don’t know that, Shane,” she said. “You don’t know that at all.”

  Shane did, of course. He’d helped Dave start the pyre and drag Kathy’s body to the firepit. Nevertheless, he backed down.

  “Okay, if you say so, Mom.”

  Nikki knew her mom was full of crap too. But, somehow, Shane’s support of the Rocky story gave Sami a little hope. It made her think that somehow, maybe, she’d been wrong after all.

  Maybe Kathy was alive.

  Maybe what she thought had happened had only been a bad dream.

  A story needs details to make it persuasive. Shelly had one item already in her arsenal—a blurry photo of a woman standing outside a semitruck. Only if someone was told that the woman was Kathy could anyone imagine it was. Next, Shelly had Nikki forge cards and letters with Kathy’s signature to make the Rocky love-on-the-run tale even more convincing. She sat Nikki at the kitchen table with practice paper, cards, and a box of Ziploc bags.

  “Close, Nikki. Do another one.”

  And so that’s just what Nikki did. The messages were brief, extolling how much fun she was having on the road. She was in Canada. Mexico. California. She was happy and never coming back to Raymond.

  Nikki was thinking the same thing. She couldn’t wait for high school to be over so she could leave the craziness of Raymond too.

  Shelly studied every signature and praised her oldest daughter when she considered it work well done.

  “Mom never touched the letters,” Nikki remembered. “She actually wiped down each card and put them into the plastic bags. She was putting to use all of her forensic knowledge, I guess. Or thought she was.”

  When the missives met her approval, Shelly handed them off to her husband to mail to Kathy’s family.

  “She made me go all the way to Canada to mail the card to Kathy’s mom’s house in South Bend. So that’s what I did,” Dave later said.

  That wasn’t the strangest part of Shelly’s plan. Even though she’d made Nikki forge them and Dave mail them, she changed her mind about Kathy’s mom actually getting all of the messages, and on one occasion she instructed Dave to hurry back to South Bend, use the mailbox key that she’d taken from Kathy’s belongings, and steal a card back before Kaye got it.

  Dave did just that. He waited like a cop on surveillance, and when the card was delivered, he retrieved it and returned it to Shelly. She put the card in a Ziploc bag and squirreled it away.

  “I really don’t know what she was thinking,” he recounted. “An alibi? A diversion? It didn’t make any sense to me, but I was in such a panic over what happened to Kathy that I did what Shell told me to do.”

  Even as the Rocky plan was in full swing, Shelly shifted gears. She got quiet and worried. She didn’t say that she doubted her plan would work. She simply thought she needed a backup plan too. She mulled it over for a couple of weeks. The older kids and Dave could see that Shelly, who lived to be in control, was sputtering a bit. Maybe she’d seen something on television in which a perpetrator was caught through the skills of an FBI forgery expert? Or maybe an episode with a cadaver dog?

  Her plan needed adjusting. Shelly’s eyes landed on Shane during one of their family meetings.

  “If you tell anyone,” she said, “we’ll pin it all on you, Shane.”

  The kids look
ed at each other, mouths open.

  Shane stood up. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Shelly stayed on the teenager. “That’s what we’ll do, Shane. We’ll say you killed her. You killed Kathy.”

  “That’s a lie,” he insisted. “I’m not going to say anything. I would never say something against my family.”

  Shelly burrowed her gaze deep into his eyes.

  “That’s good,” she said. “I need to believe you.”

  “You can,” he said. “You can.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Later, Nikki and Shane discussed their mother’s surprise threat. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise. They knew she was a survivor—a selfish one at that. She’d do whatever it took to save herself. Everything that had happened to Kathy—the bloody snow, the waterboarding, the long stretch of time in the dark of the pump house—had been Kathy’s fault. Shelly had been forced to punish her friend. It was daunting and tragic, but everything she’d done was out of love for Kathy.

  Despite his promises to keep his mouth shut, Shane was smart enough to know that in time Shelly would turn on him. Someone someday would figure out everything and come knocking on the door.

  “We should tell,” he said. “We should have taken her to the hospital that night.”

  Nikki agreed with him, though she was too scared to say or do anything.

  “What can we do now?” she asked instead.

  Shane didn’t know, but he was thinking.

  Shelly wasn’t exactly discreet when it came to her doubts about her nephew either. She brought it up all the time to Dave, and within earshot of Nikki and Sami.

  “Shane’s going to tell,” Shelly said whenever her nephew wasn’t around. “He’s going to bring us all down.”

  Shane knew it was only a matter of time. He had two choices—tell someone or run away.

  Both options were on the table.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Shelly continued to juggle her lies and conspiracy theories about what had happened to Kathy, and how blaming Shane might be the answer. In the weeks following Kathy’s death, Shelly told Dave that she thought it would be a good idea to gauge whether Kathy’s family would even look for her. After all, they’d barely registered any interest in Kathy throughout the nearly five years she had lived with the Knoteks.

  “I’m going to call Kaye,” Shelly said. “Tell her that Kathy wants to see her and see if she’ll come over.”

  Dave was alarmed and almost didn’t know what to say.

  Invite her mother over there? To the place where her daughter died and had been burned?

  “Why do that?” he asked.

  “I want to see what her reaction is,” she explained.

  Dave thought Shelly was playing with fire, but he backed down and watched as she dialed Kaye at her little house in South Bend. The call lasted barely a minute.

  Shelly turned to Dave. She had a satisfied smile on her face. Her instincts had been correct.

  As usual.

  “Shelly said that Kaye was pretty abrupt,” Dave recalled. “Didn’t want to talk with Kathy at all.” He played that moment back in his mind later. In a way, it was a willful version of chicken, a concept that Shelly was a master at.

  Shelly had proven her point.

  They had nothing to worry about. Kathy’s family had disowned her. They wouldn’t be a threat whatsoever. The Loreno family out of the way, Shelly suddenly shifted her concerns to the neighbors across the street from their house on Monohon Landing Road.

  “I wonder if they know anything,” she told the oldest kids. “They might have heard or smelled something.”

  Nikki doubted it. She thought that if anyone had heard or seen anything that night, they would have called the sheriff.

  “We need to find out for sure,” Shelly said. “They could tear this family apart, you know.”

  Nikki understood what her mother was getting at. There was always the threat that if the sheriff figured out what happened to Kathy, her parents would likely get arrested and sent to jail. She and Shane would be homeless. Sami and Tori would end up in foster care. Their family would be gone forever.

  The neighbors in question had three little boys and were in a financial world of hurt. They were on public assistance and trying as hard as they could to try to keep afloat. Their yard was cluttered with toys and the house needed major repair, and since they couldn’t afford garbage service, they loaded up garbage behind and under their house. But no one who knew them could say they weren’t trying. The boys were clean, well fed, and happy.

  Shelly kept saying that she was sure the family was going to do something against them.

  “We need to find out what’s going on over there,” she said. “You need to go over there and listen.”

  “What do you mean?” Nikki asked. “Go over there and ask them or spy on them?”

  The scenario was crazy. The teenagers could only imagine such a conversation.

  “Hey, did you guys hear anything? Any screams? Did you smell a burning human being?”

  Shelly indicated they should spy on them.

  “Don’t get caught, whatever you do.”

  Nikki and Shane went off on the bizarre reconnaissance effort.

  “Your mom is fucking paranoid, Nikki.”

  Nikki didn’t know what to think. Her mom could seem so convincing. So smart about things. There were times when she and Sami thought their mom was psychic because she just knew things.

  “But what if she’s right?” she finally asked.

  Shane didn’t see how the family across the road was a threat of any kind.

  The two of them snuck over anyway and looked around and tried to listen in the window. When they returned hours later, Shelly wanted to know what they’d found.

  “Nothing,” Shane said.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Nikki said. “They seem fine.”

  Shelly pushed for specifics and details. “What did you see?”

  Nikki told her mother about the lay of the land there, the garbage in the back, the freezer on the porch, and how she couldn’t hear anything coming from the window while she hunkered down.

  “Crawlspace,” Shelly repeated, letting the word hang in the air. “You need to go into the crawlspace and listen. This is important, Nikki. Our family depends on you. We need to stay together.”

  “The fucking crawlspace?” Shane couldn’t believe it. “I’m not doing that.”

  “She says it’s important, Shane.”

  Shane thought it was crazy.

  “I’m not doing it.”

  That summer, Nikki spent her days in the neighbor’s crawlspace, against the garbage, looking up between slits in the floorboards as the family that lived there went about their daily lives. She could hear only a few words here and there. She stayed frozen, terrified she’d be discovered, unsure of the point of it all.

  “I let my mom think I could hear them,” Nikki said later. “I told her over and over that they didn’t know anything.”

  Shelly could never quite be convinced.

  “You need to follow them the next time they leave,” she said.

  That’s just what Nikki did. She tailed the family to the grocery store, to the post office, to the welfare office in South Bend. She watched as they did the mundane things that people do. Then she reported back to her mother.

  “Mom,” she said, almost pleadingly, “they don’t know anything.”

  “You don’t know that for a fact, Nikki.”

  She didn’t. Her mom was always good at making people question facts. Nikki knew Kathy was dead, yet there would be times when she hoped that maybe Kathy had run off with Rocky.

  If Sami could believe that, why can’t I? Nikki thought.

  Her mom had Shane steal the neighbor’s food a few times too. He also put pepper spray on their door handles.

  “I think my mom had it in her mind that she could run them out of town. She was messing with them,” Nikk
i said later. “Trying whatever she could to get them away from here.”

  After the pepper spray and the constant requests to hassle the neighbors, Shane once more said he wanted to get out of there.

  “Your mom is off her rocker,” he said. “I’m going. Are you staying or leaving?”

  Nikki wanted to leave. She dreamed of leaving every day. All day.

  She couldn’t quite get there. Her mom was a monster, but she was the only mom she’d ever had.

  “I can’t,” she finally told Shane. “I just can’t.”

  For more than a year after Kathy’s death, Shelly burrowed in with her paranoid thoughts and bizarre edicts to the family. She tested the kids about the Rocky story. Sami wanted to believe it so badly that, in time, she allowed the tale to replace what she knew to be true. Shelly had Nikki follow the neighbors. Throughout all this, Dave stayed up on Whidbey Island—working as many hours as he could, partly because Shelly needed the money, but also to stay away from Raymond. With Kathy gone, she ramped up the punishments on the two oldest kids in the house, Nikki and Shane. The wallowing had subsided some, though the midnight hunts for shoes, homework, and hairbrushes continued.

  Sami lived in another world. She was popular. Wore nice clothes. She hated what her mom did to Shane and Nikki, and she knew they didn’t deserve it.

  But it wasn’t her.

  Nikki went to class and did her best to blend in. She was quiet. She didn’t invite anyone over. She didn’t have a boyfriend. She didn’t see how she could mix her school and social life with the craziness of what was happening at home the way Sami could.

  Shane had reached his limit. He wanted to finish high school, but he was ready to bolt the first chance he had. One more night in the pump house or being forced to run around the yard naked, and he’d be out of there.

  All the while, Shelly beat the drum.

  Shane is going to tell.

  Dave fought her on that.

  “He’s blood. He’s family. He’s not going to do that.”

  Dave had talked to Shane. Although he was angry at what had happened, Shane wasn’t going to squeal on his parents and send his cousins to foster care.