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

by Gregg Olsen

  Pressed further, he came up with a story.

  “Shell lent Sam some money for something and Sam had to paint the pole building. She came home from school and she was really, really tired you know, but she went out and painted anyway. She was complaining how sore she was, this and that, and Shell was telling me that’s from a bad fall. I don’t know. I never seen it on Sam.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Sami Knotek was in turmoil. It was the summer of 1997, and she didn’t know how to take the next step forward. Through her mother’s devious sabotage over admission forms, she’d missed the enrollment period for Evergreen State College. College had been a dream that she’d had for as long as she could remember. There was something special about imagining that she’d be the first person in her family to earn a college degree. She loved her boyfriend, but she didn’t want to get married. She didn’t want to get a job in town like some of the other locals, stuck in the glue of their parents’ footsteps. Sami wanted more. Anything. Something bigger. She even mused about seeing what kind of work she could get in Hollywood.

  She planned her getaway on two occasions.

  The first had been back in April. The plan wasn’t fully baked. Plus, Sami wanted to go to a dance because she’d made a beautiful new dress and didn’t want to miss the chance to wear it—so she’d returned home a couple of days later.

  But Sami carefully planned her great escape in the last months of her senior year. It was hard knowing that she’d be leaving her little sister, Tori, behind, but she convinced herself everything would be all right. Her older sister was gone. Her little sister didn’t seem to be a target of their mother. None of the weird stuff had been happening for some time. The only people Sami let in on her plan were her friends Lauren and Leah—and she knew they could be trusted. Just before she, her mom, and her little sister left for a shopping trip to Aberdeen, Sami filled five black plastic garbage bags with everything she owned. All of her clothes, her boots, and the knickknacks that meant so much to her.

  “I was very materialistic,” she conceded years later. “I refused to leave one sweater behind.”

  The plan called for Lauren to break into the house, get Sami’s stuff while they were away, and meet up at Lauren’s house.

  Sami wanted to give Tori a vague heads-up.

  “If I don’t come back later today,” she told her sister, “I will leave a little note for you—just for you—under my pillow.”

  That was the only information Sami would provide. She trusted Tori, but knew their mother would stop at nothing to worm details out of the little girl, then eight. She’d threaten. She’d promise. She’d cajole. Shelly was never one to let go, and Sami didn’t want her mother to know where she was going.

  When they returned from Aberdeen, Sami went upstairs. All of her stuff was gone. The plan was now a reality.

  “Mom, Lauren ran out of gas and I need to go pick her up,” Sami lied.

  “All right,” Shelly said. “Fine.”

  Sami got into her little white car, looked up at the house one more time, and left for Lauren’s, where she hid for a day. Then she went to her boyfriend’s house for a night. She knew that Shelly was searching high and low for her, and the thought of her mother coming to get her made Sami sick inside.

  Even so, the hold her family had on her was like a leg trap and she was some animal out in the woods. Sami wrote a letter to her mother.

  “I thought of all the reasons why I couldn’t leave you because I love you so much. And because I love you so much, I wouldn’t want to hurt you. I started thinking about hurt and life and how much I hurt and how much hurt I cause. So then I thought it would be good for me to leave. Things would be quieter. Things got quieter when Nikki left and with me gone everything would be OK.”

  She closed the letter by saying she thought living in her car was an option.

  “It will be OK. If this is how it was meant to be, then this is how it was meant to be. I just wish you understood, but I know now you never will.”

  Sami had no idea where she’d go until she talked to Nikki. Her sister told her that she’d been in touch with their grandmother, Lara, and planned to see her too.

  “Call Nana,” she said.

  Which is exactly what Sami did, and Lara gladly invited her to her home, now located in Bellingham at the northern end of the state.

  Sami had heard that her dad was on the lookout for the car, that her mom had reported it stolen. She needed another way to Bellingham. Kaley’s mother, Barb Hanson, offered to take her. She’d never thought much of Shelly anyway, having been awakened once in the middle of the night with questions about how much money she and her husband made.

  “I told her I didn’t appreciate the call at that hour and it was none of her business,” Barb said later.

  Barb drove Sami to Bellingham the next day. On the way, Sami shared bits and pieces of what her mother had done to her and her sister. Later, when Barb was dropping Sami off, Lara told them additional disturbing details about things Shelly had done during her childhood and young adulthood.

  “She told me that my mom tried to set fire to the house,” Sami recalled. “Things she did to her sister. How she thought my mom poisoned us with Ipecac to stop her from taking us places. [Barb] sat there and took it all in. It made me feel better that it just wasn’t me saying what my mom had done, that there was someone else who backed me up. Someone who knew even more than I did.”

  Sami stayed with Lara all of summer 1997.

  Like Nikki’s experience in Canada, it was one of the happiest times of Sami’s life.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Nikki had struggled with her sisters’ absence from her life. Although she didn’t regret leaving, and felt she had saved herself, she missed her sisters. When she heard Tori had been ill, she sent a card.

  “I hope you are feeling better, kiddo. I hear there’s snow on the way. I bet that will make you a little happier. Are you taking good care of Mommy and Sami? Well, when you’re not sick?”

  Tori never received the message.

  Shelly tried to keep in touch with Nikki during that time, but her oldest daughter refused to return her calls. Nikki didn’t want a thing to do with her crazy mother. She didn’t care if she ever saw either of her parents again. Then Shelly showed up unannounced. She was all sweet and concerned and told Nikki that she should come home. She could live at home. Go to college. Nikki knew it was a big lie. Everything her mother said had been a lie. Another time, an Island County sheriff came to the trailer and asked Nikki if she was okay.

  “Your mom is very worried about you,” the deputy said.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You need to call her.”

  She said she would, but she had no plan to do so. It was clear that her mother and father were unnerved by her newfound state of independence. Nikki knew the reason why.

  Fear. They were afraid she would talk.

  When a brick was thrown through the window of the ice-cream shop where she worked, it was followed up with a call that Nikki had been involved somehow.

  “I know my dad did it,” she said later. “He did it because my mom told him to. She wanted me to lose my job and move back home where they could keep an eye on me.”

  Not long after the brick incident, Nikki called Lara with the idea that she could maybe leave Oak Harbor and get a job with her at the nursing facility in Bellingham.

  Lara was thrilled at the prospect. She also had some very happy news.

  “It’s funny that you should call just now, Nikki,” Lara said, her voice full of excitement. “Sami’s here too.”

  Nikki could barely contain herself. She left for Bellingham on the next Greyhound.

  Tears came immediately to Sami’s eyes when she saw Nikki. It had been almost a year since the sisters had seen one another face-to-face. Sami thought Nikki had never looked prettier or happier. She had on fitted Gap jeans and a purple tank top. She was wearing makeup. Her hair, which their moth
er had always chopped off in the most cruel and unflattering ways, was long, slightly curly.

  “She was beautiful.” Sami remembered that reunion. “More than anything, she was confident. Until then I never pictured my sister out in the real world. Just as she’d been at home, in her holey sweatpants out in the yard all the time. She had no friends. She never had a boyfriend. Never, until she escaped from our house when she was twenty-two. She had nothing.”

  Nikki got the job as a nurse’s aide at a division of the care center where Lara worked. The work was tough, but the pay was better than the motel or the ice-cream store. Even better, she was free of her parents and everything that had happened back in Pacific County.

  “I was changing colostomy bags,” she recalled. “But I didn’t mind it one bit. I was away.”

  Not long after she started working there, her administrators at the facility started getting anonymous complaints that Nikki was unkind to elderly patients or incompetent when it came to giving them the care they needed. The state came in to investigate. Each time, Nikki and Lara would be dumbfounded as to why anyone would complain. The staff, patients, and their families all liked her.

  The anonymous calls hadn’t been the worst of it.

  Dave Knotek started to show up in the parking lot of the facility. Sometimes he’d be in his truck; sometimes he’d be standing in the bushes. He didn’t call out, but he wanted Nikki to see him. She saw it as a kind of implied threat. And she began to worry that he’d try to abduct her. Maybe he and her mom had plans for her.

  Like what had happened to Kathy.

  A few times Dave even followed Nikki as she drove home from her shift. Scared to death, Nikki took long, circuitous routes all over Bellingham to lose her stepdad on the way home.

  “I wondered if he was going to try to grab me,” she recalled. “I didn’t know for sure. I am almost positive . . . that they would try to grab me. I can just see Mom hounding him about me.” Given everything she learned later on, Nikki says, “I’m lucky to still be here. My sister thinks the same thing.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  It was more than halfway through the summer of 1997. Dave Knotek had been under increasing pressure from Shelly to find out where their wayward middle daughter had gone—and who she was with. Shelly had her ways, of course, and somehow, she’d heard that Sami was up in Bellingham with Lara and Nikki. The idea of the three of them together made her angrier than ever. The betrayal made Sami’s vanishing act all the more painful. It also made it more crucial that Shelly get her and bring her home.

  “They might tell someone, Dave.”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  Dave was sick of Shelly’s drama. He said he wanted to let the girls grow up and be on their own, but Shelly kept calling him at the job on Whidbey Island with every lead she could uncover.

  But, as always, he did his wife’s bidding, and followed up on every one of them.

  Shelly learned there was an open day at Camp Firwood, a church camp on the shores of Lake Whatcom that she’d heard Sami and Kaley were attending.

  It turned out to be a good bet.

  As Sami was making her way through the camp counselors and attendees, she caught a glimpse of a familiar face.

  Her dad!

  Startled, she almost did a double take because he was wearing an obvious disguise. He had on a pair of sunglasses unlike any he normally wore. A baseball cap and a hoodie completed his ridiculous charade.

  Oh my God, thought Sami. She felt sick. She loved her dad, but she knew he was there for a reason. He was there, she was sure, to bring her back home. Dave came up to her.

  “Sami,” he said, his voice muted and full of concern. “Your mom is worried sick. We need you to come home.”

  She didn’t say anything right away. What could she say? Her mom was a monster, and Sami was justifiably distrustful of her.

  Instead, she led him past a rope swing down a secluded path and they took a seat. No one said anything at first.

  After a beat of silence, Sami finally told him why she’d left. A lot of what she said centered on Kathy.

  “I know she’s dead, Dad. I saw her.”

  Dave just sat there, looking beaten. He said nothing.

  She also launched into her thoughts about her mom’s dubious cancer diagnosis, a disease that had required constant medical attention for her entire childhood.

  “You don’t have cancer that long,” she said. “Mom would have been dead by now.”

  Dave refuted that one. “She has it,” he said. “I know it.”

  “Look, Dad,” Sami said. “She doesn’t. Have you gone to her appointments?”

  “I’ve dropped her off.”

  “Have you ever gone in? Have you ever gotten a doctor bill?”

  The questions she asked were the same ones Lara had asked years earlier.

  When he finally answered Sami, it was with that same kind, understanding demeanor. He didn’t specifically deny or confirm.

  “I’m sorry, Sami. I know. I know.”

  They cried, and they talked for a long time. Sami could see that her father was a broken man. That was obvious. She could tell that her mom’s hold on him was the same one she’d had on Kathy. No one who knew Dave Knotek would say a bad word about him. Town locals all thought he was the quintessential nice guy. He was a timberman’s kid. He was one of them.

  But that woman he was married to? She was not only an interloper, she was something else. They even had a nickname for her.

  Crazy Shelly.

  Or, for those who preferred a little alliteration with their coffee and smear, Psycho Shelly.

  “I’ll come home, Dad. But there’s something I want. Mom screwed it up. I want her to fix it. I want her to get the paperwork done for college.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dave said.

  But Sami, like her older sister, had found her voice. If attending college to pursue a teaching degree meant making a deal with the devil, she decided she was willing to do just that.

  After her dad left Firwood, Sami called her mother to say she was considering coming back home if she could get some financial support for school. Shelly balked, and ran through a litany of excuses. Money was in short supply, as always. Marital discord between her and Dave had also escalated to the point Shelly confided that a divorce was imminent. And if that wasn’t enough, she wasn’t feeling well either. The cancer was back, Shelly said.

  Sami hoped her parents would get divorced. She’d heard from Nikki how their dad lived while he was working. A goddamn tent and trips to a food bank when he worked all kinds of hours making his body old before its time!

  As far as the cancer went, Sami never considered the disease anything to joke or laugh about, but honestly? Her mom was a freak to carry on like that for so long.

  Sami ignored all of that. She went for what she wanted—college.

  “You said I could go,” she said. “You sabotaged me, Mom. You know it and so do I.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  Really, Mom? Are we still going to play that game?

  “You do,” Sami said, letting the space between them fall silent.

  The long pause was one of her mom’s favorite techniques. She was like a predator that way . . . content to wait until the weaker party caved and gave up what she wanted.

  “I won’t tell anyone anything about what happened,” Sami finally said.

  There was a stillness on the line for a beat. “What?”

  Sami was on a roll. “You know.” She could imagine her mother’s face. The red coming. The eyes so angry.

  Shelly Knotek hated being called out, and if she was, it was only that one time. No one wanted a second helping of Shelly’s wrath.

  Sami hadn’t been explicit. She didn’t need to be. It was a clever blackmailing technique, and it worked. Before she returned home to Monohon Landing at the end of the summer, her mother had not only filled out t
he paperwork, she’d turned it in.

  That same summer, Sami celebrated her nineteenth birthday with a surprise party at Planet Hollywood in Seattle. It was the best birthday she’d ever had. She felt happy and free, and hopeful. She’d been in touch with her mom and knew things were moving along the way they needed to. She and Nikki remained close, a relationship they kept secret from Shelly. The secrecy was needed. Shelly had it in for Nikki, and both girls were unsure how far their mother would go to get even.

  When Sami and her boyfriend, Kaley, got to the door at the Monohon Landing house, Shelly met them with a frightened and panicked look on her face. She’d shaved off her eyebrows and applied the same white powder she’d used when Lara and her daughter Carol had visited.

  She shook her head sadly. “The cancer’s back.”

  Kaley and Sami looked at each other. It was all they could do to keep from laughing. It was ridiculous and embarrassing at the same time.

  “Why does she do crap like this?” Kaley asked Sami later.

  “I have no idea. She likes the attention, I guess.”

  There were better ways to get attention than claiming cancer, both Kaley and Sami thought.

  When Kaley left, Shelly pounced and read Sami the riot act.

  “Your dad said you don’t think I have cancer! Well, look at me, Sami! Look! I am losing my hair!”

  Sami pushed back. Hard. She had a new sense of confidence that she’d never had before.

  “I know you are lying,” she said. Shelly just fumed. “I know Kathy is dead. I know you killed her. I was there, Mom. I was on top of her. She was dead.”

  Shelly waived her finger. “She choked on her own vomit.”

  “Because you abused her, Mom.”