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

by Gregg Olsen

  Shelly wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I don’t trust him, Dave.”

  “He’s okay,” Dave insisted, though part of him wasn’t completely confident. He could imagine an older Shane getting loaded in a bar and spilling the beans.

  “No shit. You think your family is fucked up? Mine killed a lady and burned her in the backyard!”

  Whenever Dave came home, Shelly would start up again. She wouldn’t stop. She kept pushing at Dave in an unrelenting, nagging manner like some kind of vocal tinnitus. Her words pointing the finger at Shane rang in his ears even when she wasn’t around.

  When Shelly didn’t get her way, she manufactured the evidence—the way she had with her hair loss because of the supposed cancer, the bruises when she claimed to have been raped by the intruder when she was married to Randy, or the forged cards to Kathy’s family.

  Proof was important to Shelly. Proof was undeniable.

  One time when Dave came home, Shelly met him at the door. He was exhausted from the drive, but his wife’s expression gave him the jolt of a thousand cups of coffee. Shelly’s face was red, and it seemed that she might have been crying. She was so angry that she was shaking.

  “I found them in the woodshed, Dave!” she said, holding up a pair of bloody panties. “Shane must have hidden them there.”

  Dave knew what Shelly was insinuating right away.

  “No,” he said. “Can’t be.”

  Shelly was as angry as she’d ever been.

  “They’re Tori’s,” she said flatly. “Shane’s abusing our baby! You have to do something!”

  Neither Nikki nor Sami believed a single word of it. They knew Shane, and they knew their mother. They were positive that she’d planted the underwear to get Shane in trouble. It was a game to her. Shane denied it with everything he had. He’d never hurt Tori. The idea that Shelly would even think it hurt him to the core. He wasn’t like that.

  Nevertheless, with Shelly egging him on, Dave beat Shane that night.

  The next morning, Shane, swollen and battered, renewed his vow to run away. He told Nikki that if she didn’t go with him, he’d go on his own. He’d had enough.

  Hadn’t she?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Suddenly, Shane was gone.

  Shelly and Dave gathered the girls in the living room to tell them that their cousin had run away. It was February 1995, just a couple of weeks before Nikki’s twentieth birthday.

  “He’ll turn up,” Dave said.

  “He always does,” Shelly added. “We’ll look for him.”

  “You kids hear anything last night?” Dave asked.

  None had.

  “Any noises at all?” Shelly asked.

  Neither Sami nor Tori had heard a peep. Though Nikki remembered that when she’d gone to bed, Shane was not in the closet where he usually slept.

  “Nikki, did you hear him come in last night?”

  “No, Mom.”

  Later, Shelly came into the kitchen holding a small wooden birdhouse, which the girls recognized as something Shane had built for a school project. On one side, he’d painted a little dog as a decoration. Their mother was misty eyed when she put it on the table. She said Shane had left her the birdhouse as a gift.

  “He left me a note too. He said, ‘I love you, Mom.’”

  No one ever saw the note.

  Nikki, for one, was skeptical.

  “Shane hated Mom,” she told Sami after their mom made a show of the birdhouse. “There’s no way he’d leave her a note like that.”

  Sami didn’t buy a cozy relationship between Shane and their mom either, but she didn’t want to think that the whole story was some big lie.

  “Shane’s always running away,” she reminded Nikki.

  Nikki didn’t answer. Something about the birdhouse bothered her; she knew he would never have left Shelly a gift, or a loving note. Yet Nikki didn’t want to think that anything had happened to the boy she considered her brother.

  Shelly and the older girls got into the car later that day and went looking for Shane, though the excursion was brief.

  Oddly so.

  “Usually Mom made us look for hours and hours. This time I doubt we drove around more than an hour,” Nikki said later. “I don’t think we looked for Shane more than a couple of times.”

  A few days later, Nikki was out feeding the horses and for a fleeting moment she thought she heard Shane’s voice. She spun around, but he wasn’t there. She went to her mother later and told her.

  “Mom, Shane’s still around. I think I heard him.”

  Shelly looked concerned. “What are you talking about?”

  Nikki loved Shane. She wanted him to come back, like he always did. “Maybe he didn’t run away?”

  Shelly held her daughter’s stare for a second but didn’t say anything more.

  About a week later, Shelly packed up the girls for a getaway weekend at a motel in Aberdeen. It was a spur-of-the-moment vacation. They swam in the pool and ate at the nearby Denny’s. The older girls talked about Shane and hoped that he was doing all right.

  Wherever he’d gone, it had to be better than home.

  Finally, they got some answers. Their mother told them that their cousin was fishing on Kodiak Island.

  He called when you were at school.

  You just missed him.

  He’s doing great! He misses all of us.

  Shelly said that she’d also received a number of hang-up calls.

  “I got another one last night,” she announced with complete conviction. “I’m pretty sure it was Shane.”

  Nikki didn’t ask why Shane would call and then hang up. Or why only their mother would receive these calls only when no one else was around. Neither she nor Sami ever picked up the phone and heard only the click of a disconnected line. She didn’t think there was any point to challenging her mother on that particular lie.

  Shelly also reminded her daughters that if anyone inquired about Kathy, they needed to provide the party line.

  “What would you say if the police came and asked about Kathy?”

  “That she went away with her boyfriend,” Nikki answered.

  “What was his name?”

  “Rocky.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “He was a trucker.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Far away?”

  Shelly made a face. She was annoyed.

  “Think, Nikki. Be specific.”

  “California or Alaska.”

  “California. Why don’t you ever listen? Shane’s in Alaska.”

  Nikki could only hope he really was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Nikki attempted to twist the knob of the front door. Locked. With Kathy and Shane gone, she was on the outs again. Literally. She’d become her mother’s favorite target. She stood by the door and knocked softly. Too loud of a knock would make her mom even angrier. She rapped just enough to make sure her mother knew she was there, as if there was any doubt about it.

  “Please, Mom. Let me in.”

  No answer.

  “Please, Mom. I’m freezing out here. I’ll be good. I promise.”

  Shelly ignored her and stayed on the couch watching TV.

  It became almost a daily occurrence. One time Shelly handed her daughter a blanket. Usually, she got nothing at all. Once, Nikki stashed a sleeping bag and some matches under the old dilapidated barn. The next time she was banished from the house and went to retrieve them, they’d vanished.

  Her mother, she knew, had a knack for finding things.

  On some nights, Nikki slept in one of the outbuildings, but most often, she was out in the woods up behind the house trying to stay warm, wishing the night away. Wondering how she was going to get out of the mess she was in. She could see the headlights of a car as Sami’s friends brought her home from wherever they’d been. She would see the glow of the light in Tori’s bedroom window. She loved her sisters more than anything, t
hough she also wondered why her mother saw her so differently, treated her with such hatred. Why she told her over and over that she was garbage, a bitch, a loser, a whore, any nasty name that came to mind as she rattled off insult and epithet.

  “No one will ever love you, Nikki. No one!”

  Every now and then, Shelly would let her inside. It wouldn’t be the result of any of Nikki’s quiet begging or promising. It would just happen. Shelly would fix her something hot to eat and tell her daughter how much she loved her.

  “It would be good for a while,” Nikki recalled many years later. “Maybe a day or two. I didn’t trust her, but I always hoped it would last longer.”

  Then, without warning, back outside. Often naked. Sometimes with a change of clothes. Always with hurled insults and anger.

  The violence escalated too.

  One time when Nikki was outside working in her underwear, her mother came at her with a knife. Shelly was mad for some reason. It might have been because Nikki had been unable to get a new job after she lost her dishwashing job at Sea Star, or maybe she hadn’t been doing a good enough job with her chores. Whatever the reason, Nikki ran outside, then past the pole building into the field, with her mother on her heels screaming at her to stop.

  “God damn you, Nikki! Do not defy me!”

  She lunged and pinned Nikki down and sliced her leg with the knife. Blood oozed from the wound. Shelly looked at what she’d done, then let her go. Nikki ran for the woods, blood dripping down her leg from the two-inch gash that almost certainly needed stitches, though she knew she couldn’t seek medical attention for the same reason Kathy couldn’t.

  Then someone would know.

  Nikki slept in the woods that night. When she came back inside the house the next morning, cold and dirty but no longer bleeding, her mother said nothing about the violent altercation.

  It was like it never happened.

  Around that time, the chicken house became a hiding place for the sisters. Mostly for themselves, but also sometimes for things like blankets and coats, since they never knew when they’d be forced outside in freezing weather.

  One afternoon Sami was doing her chores—feeding the dogs tethered to the trees, then the rabbits, which were kept in the chicken house. When she went inside, she found Nikki sitting on a hay bale, laughing and crying at the same time.

  “I tried to kill myself,” she told Sami.

  Nikki pointed to some twine from the hay bales she’d fashioned into a noose that she’d hung over a beam. It had snapped when she’d jumped from a bale to the chicken shed floor.

  “I can’t even do that right,” she added. Despite the circumstances, both sisters laughed.

  Sami didn’t blame Nikki for trying to end her life. She tried the same thing later. She’d stayed out late with friends, and when she came home her mother refused to let her in.

  “You’re sleeping outside tonight.”

  It was fall and the air was chilly, and she’d had it. She was sick of her mother’s games and saw no way out, so she ran into the woods and found a bush with red berries that she knew were poisonous and she ate them. First one, then another, then a handful. She was crying, and it was dark and hard to see. She didn’t care. She just kept putting the berries into her mouth and swallowing.

  The berries, however, were a failure.

  “I came home after eating all those berries and my mom acts like nothing happened,” she said later. “It was past midnight and she wasn’t even looking for me. She knew I would come back. I was trying to make a statement by eating those berries and she didn’t even care.”

  She vomited and had diarrhea for more than a week. If she had hoped to make a statement living a real-life nightmare, no one picked up on it.

  In mid-September 1996, more than two years after Kathy Loreno vanished, Shelly applied for a teacher’s aide position with the South Bend School District. Despite the dreadful state of the Knoteks’ own finances, she boasted that she’d been a self-employed tax preparer but was now ready to return to her first love, caring for children.

  “I have spent a good part of my life raising my children, helping with their schoolwork, their school activities, volunteering at their school and even helping their friends from time to time.”

  She felt she had the necessary “patience” to work with special-needs children.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  While Nikki found herself banished to do yard work all day, the two youngest Knotek sisters went to school and acted just like the other kids. Tori was a quiet little girl who’d really been too young to see what their mother had done to Kathy, and she’d been shielded from the harsh punishments given to Nikki and Shane. Sami was a social queen bee who used her sense of humor as a cover for life with her mother. She didn’t cry about it. Humor was the curtain she put around everything. Her friends knew that her mom was a royal bitch with nonsensical rules and punishments that went far beyond any real or perceived transgressions. Because of that, they were also persistent. When Sami’s friends came to pick her up and there was no answer, they’d just wait. Nikki’s friends weren’t like that; if they came for Nikki and she wasn’t there, they figured she’d changed her mind or was off somewhere else. Sami’s friends knew that her mother was a weirdo who was holding Sami captive.

  So they’d knock.

  They’d wait.

  As long as they needed.

  Sometimes they’d go to McDonald’s in Raymond, then come back and wait some more. The teenagers could outlast and annoy Shelly, so that’s just what they did.

  “Go. Get out of here,” Shelly would finally call upstairs to Sami when the constant knocking and hovering on the front porch interfered with whatever TV show she’d been watching.

  Sami knew how to handle that. She knew that her mom wouldn’t want to be seen as anything other than wonderful. She’d go outside and tell her friends the same made-up story.

  “My mom didn’t know you were here,” Sami would lie. “She just heard you now.”

  And then the biggest lie of all:

  “She feels so bad.”

  Shelly never felt bad about anything. At least not when it came to other people’s feelings. The girls noticed she’d shed a torrent of tears for dead pets, but never for another person.

  Shelly assessed the relationship between her older girls. Tori was no threat, of course. She was young enough to be either clueless or easily scared by mere intimidation.

  Those other two? They were getting big. They were mouthy. They were spending too much time together. Just as she had at the Louderback House, Shelly told Nikki and Sami that she didn’t want them talking behind her back.

  She put it mostly on Nikki’s shoulders.

  “Sami, your sister is a bad influence.”

  Bad influence? The idea was laughable. Nikki worked in the yard from sunup to sundown. She didn’t drink or use drugs. She’d smoked cigarettes a few times with Shane, but she hadn’t even liked it.

  Looking back, Sami struggled to remember a single time when she and Nikki hung out in each other’s bedrooms after they’d moved to Monohon Landing. Their mother didn’t approve of them spending time together alone. The only contact they had was when they did chores. Over time, even those connecting moments decreased.

  After Kathy died and Shane disappeared, they stopped altogether.

  “Nikki was always outside,” Sami recalled. “She was out doing chores. Until late. Dark. I had my friends and was busy in school and I just remember my sister just not being there. She was there, but not around. In my heart of hearts, I think she was being groomed by my mom not to be here anymore.”

  None of Sami’s friends even knew Nikki lived there.

  One time when the girls were doing the dishes, their mother came in and literally pulled them apart.

  “No talking!” she said.

  “We weren’t talking about anything,” Sami said.

  “None,” she insisted. “No talking.”

  Sami left her sist
er to finish the dishes alone.

  “Most of the time we were talking shit about her,” Sami recalled. “We weren’t talking about homework, that’s for sure.”

  Shelly started to put more emphasis on her appearance, which was a welcome distraction. She’d gained some weight over the past couple of years. As Dave continued to send his paycheck home, Shelly decided that it was her turn for a little fun. She slimmed down, colored her hair, and went out to the bars a few times. One time she told the girls that she’d met a new friend.

  “He’s an airline pilot,” she said. “And girls, we’re just friends. Nothing more. I’ve invited him over to visit.”

  Sami had other plans and Tori would be content to be in her room during the time Shelly would be entertaining her new friend.

  Shelly turned to Nikki.

  “You need to stay outside and make yourself scarce.”

  Nikki promised she would.

  She saw the man’s car later, a new Geo Storm. Can’t be much of a big-time pilot if he drives one of those, she thought. He stayed a couple of hours and then left.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Nikki recalled. “I think she was teetering on the idea of an affair. Or maybe she had one and it didn’t go anywhere.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Lara Watson figured her grandson Shane was being a typical teenager whenever she reached out to talk to him. In addition, her timing must have been seriously off because he never made it to the phone.

  “Just missed him,” Shelly frequently moaned, claiming he was off hanging out with some high school buddies. A couple of times, however, Shelly played the victim and said she was at her wit’s end because Shane had run away.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, making a show of putting on a brave face. “He always comes back, or we’ll find him and bring him home.”

  During those exchanges, Lara would thank her lucky stars that Shelly was looking out for Shane. He’d be running on the streets of Tacoma if not for Shelly and Dave. Though she had initially been skeptical about the rough-around-the-edges boy’s potential impact on the girls, she was happy that he had a life that included school, chores, and family time like trips to the coast. Shane had never let on to Lara what was really going on at the Knotek place, with Kathy, or the things that Shelly made him do. Not even a whiff of it. He didn’t tell her how he slept on a concrete floor in a cold basement, or in Nikki’s closet, or, at times, in an outbuilding at Monohon Landing.