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

by Gregg Olsen

  “She’d just get this horrible look in her eyes and then she’d end up hitting him or taking him out back, and I don’t know what happened because I was told to go up to my room.”

  It was a scenario that played out every night.

  And every day too. Ron was no longer allowed to eat any meals with Tori and her mother. Shelly served him toast and water. Twice a day, she’d feed him a handful of pills.

  “What are those pills you keep giving him?” Tori asked more than one time.

  “Sleeping pills,” Shelly replied. “To calm him down.”

  Ron changed almost immediately once Shelly started abusing—and drugging—him.

  “Ron was one of the smartest people I knew [but] after he lived here, he didn’t know anything,” Tori recalled. “He just wasn’t himself anymore. It was like he wasn’t even there.”

  Shelly evicted Ron from the bedroom upstairs. It was done unceremoniously and quickly, like a tablecloth yanked from under a set of dishes by a magician. She took away almost everything he owned and told him that he’d be sleeping on the floor of the computer room. For some reason, Ron didn’t resist anything Shelly told him. He was barely inside the house anymore anyway. She’d given him a laundry list of chores to do and he spent most of his time in the yard.

  Then it was Shelly’s next go-to move: restricting access to the bathroom. Shelly said Ron needed her permission to use the bathroom. With his room upstairs and the bathroom and the couch that she commanded all night downstairs, there was no getting around asking permission.

  “Shelly Dear, can I go to the bathroom?” he asked.

  The answer was no, right away.

  Again, the magician’s tablecloth.

  “Not the one in the house,” she said.

  “Dear, where do you want me to go?”

  “You need to do your business outside. I won’t have a fag using my bathroom.”

  And that’s the way it was.

  When Ron needed to urinate at night, he’d pee into a Windex bottle and try to hide it all day.

  One morning, Tori was using the computer, and Ron hadn’t made it out the door yet for his chores. She’d seen his bottle of pee, and he’d noticed. She wondered why he didn’t know better. When Shelly found it—and there was never any doubt she would—he’d be punished. Why would he disobey Mom? He knows what will happen to him. It made her so angry that he had done that.

  Tori’s tone was accusatory. “Why do you keep doing this?”

  Ron looked flustered. “I’m sorry, Tori,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Later, Tori would replay that moment and feel sick about it. She’d come off as cross, when that’s not how she’d felt at all. She just didn’t want him to get yelled at or beat up.

  Though she didn’t tell Ron, Tori did the same thing. She didn’t want to wake her mother with the creak of the stairs in the middle of the night and risk a tirade, so she peed into a container too. She’d dump hers out her window in the morning.

  She just wished Ron would be smarter about it.

  Every once in a while, Shelly would ask her youngest if she remembered Kathy. She’d seen pictures of Kathy taken with her when she was a baby. She knew Kathy had been a part of her life, but didn’t really know how Kathy fit into the family. She couldn’t quite understand why her mom kept bringing her up.

  “Has anyone asked you about Kathy?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “Someone at school? A neighbor?”

  Tori shook her head.

  “No one. I promise.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The office staff at Olympic Area Agency on Aging wondered how Shelly Knotek managed to get—and keep—a job there as a case aide, given her defiant and erratic behavior. A caseworker? Seriously? She was completely inappropriate in her dealings with clients, often switching between being overly involved or indifferent. Her boss wrote her up in early December 2000 for two incidents. She’d told one client that she didn’t need to take her medication, which led some staff members to worry that Shelly’s interference with doctors’ orders could lead to tragic and irrevocable outcomes. Another episode concerned a low-income client who complained that Shelly had absconded with a valuable handcrafted tablecloth. Shelly was ready with an excuse on that one, insisting that the tablecloth had been a gift for her help in getting the client settled in a new place after being evicted. The client disagreed.

  Shelly started lying directly to her coworkers. About small things at first, then larger as time passed. She fabricated comp time. She was chronically late, sometimes claiming it was because she’d been out seeing a client, though no one at Olympic could think of any reason why a case aide would need to make such early calls. She told a coworker she’d sent out the agency’s Christmas cards, but no one ever received them. When it was time to go to the company Christmas party in Aberdeen, Shelly said that was the first she’d heard of it. And though it was during office hours, she said she couldn’t make it as she was doing something with Dave at that time. She was also caught listening to office messages from home and deleting them without relaying the information to the respective parties.

  During a performance evaluation meeting in late January 2001, Shelly agreed that she could be doing things better. She promised to be a superior employee, but over the next few months, her performance continued to decline.

  The manager wrote of the feelings of a coworker.

  “[She] is unable to trust Michelle. She said Michelle lies and backpedals. [She] feels that she’s been compromised in the community.”

  When a male coworker refused to tell Shelly his birthday, she went behind his back and got the date by calling his wife at home. Next, she turned a pre-arranged lunch date into a surprise birthday party, cake and balloons and all.

  She invited everyone except the woman in the office who’d complained about her sloppy work. It was a well-aimed knife in the back. Shelly and the woman had once been friends. There weren’t many—any, really—women in town that Shelly could call a friend. It had been a huge betrayal. She told others that she had once loved the woman. Their kids had played together.

  She didn’t care. She’d been slighted and she was at war. Sometimes, Shelly said, you just never know how far someone will go to get what he or she wants.

  Following Shelly’s poor performance evaluation, on January 20, 2001, Ron Woodworth wrote a letter to Shelly’s director, praising her care of his mother. The first part of the well-written letter of commendation was directed at Shelly’s supervisor, indicating how helpful and courteous he’d been, but Ron’s greatest words of support were all about Shelly.

  She was, by his estimation, one in a million.

  “Most employees in a bureaucracy quickly learn to do only the absolute minimum necessary to keep a job. And no more! Which is nothing less than an absolute shame, and clearly not the right thing to do! Mrs. Knotek, however, knows (and absolutely believes) that a true public servant must be willing to go the extra mile to help clients cope with their many problems. I have heard stories from around Raymond of Mrs. Knotek’s willingness to help clients rectify their many problems. Mrs. Knotek helped my mother when a visitor to her neighborhood accidentally struck the skirting of her mobile home with their car.”

  He signed his name and then forged his mother’s signature.

  It was a nice try. But decidedly too little, too late. On March 27, 2001, Shelly was given a written warning: shape up or face termination. She argued each point with her supervisor before agreeing that the list was a fair representation of what had been going on. Neither her performance nor her reputation improved subsequent to that meeting.

  “. . . MK got argumentative and defensive. MK told me she did not want to ‘be put in a corner again.’”

  Later that spring several calls came into the office praising Shelly and her astonishingly excellent work. The staff was sure that Shelly was soliciting each one in order to save her job. It was a campaign that was destined for failure.

/>   On May 9, 2001, Shelly was summarily put on probation by her supervisor. It was a move that made her blood pressure rise. She said so at the time. And in true Shelly fashion, she again challenged every point in a written statement. She insisted she would appeal.

  Her supervisor wrote of the encounter:

  “She said I did not like her. She said I was mean. She said I was like a police officer. She cried. She told me her blood pressure was 180 over 120. She told me she was separated from her husband and needs a job.”

  A few weeks later, Shelly’s conduct moved further in the wrong direction. The office was now a “hostile” workplace. She became more and more erratic, while at the same time promising to improve the way she did things.

  “MK said she is being picked on . . .” her boss wrote. “She said I’m not listening to her and that she is being spied on.”

  During that time, her boss questioned her about anonymous phone calls directing complaints against another employee.

  “Is Ron Woodworth a friend of yours?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she hedged.

  The boss didn’t tell Shelly that when the 800-number calls came in, all were traced to Ron. Nor did he mention to her that the employee who noted the complaint said that Shelly’s daughter Tori called him Uncle Ron and, in 1998, he had identified Shelly as his “sister.” Or that a coworker had seen a sign at Shelly’s house advertising “Uncle Ron’s Parking Spot.”

  The manager told Shelly about the complaints, vague in nature as they were. He didn’t mention that the coworker felt unsafe because of the calls and had taken to locking her office door during the day to protect “my job, my files, and integrity.”

  Shelly hesitated before answering.

  “Well, Ron hasn’t been in here,” she said before she shifted her ground slightly. “Ron hasn’t been in here for a long time.”

  At 3:30 a.m. on May 31, Shelly left a voice message on the company’s answering machine. She indicated there was a family emergency and she would not be in. It was the beginning of a drawn-out end of her employment.

  Less than three weeks later, on June 19, 2001, Olympic Area Agency on Aging cut her a severance check for $4,849 and some change. In a touch of irony, Shelly was also terminated from the Health and Safety Officer Team of which she had been a “valued” member. Shelly didn’t take the news well. She stormed out.

  Later that morning, she and Ron drove past the office windows, and Ron gave the finger to a woman Shelly had insisted had it in for her.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  In the summer of 2001, Ron’s friend from the service, Sandra Broderick, moved from the Tacoma area to Copalis Beach on the Washington Coast, a little more than an hour from Raymond. She wanted to reconnect with Ron, who was living with the Knoteks. She’d called several times, but each time Shelly said Ron was out in the yard or away. He never got on the phone.

  It was both tiresome and concerning.

  The next time Shelly answered and coolly told Sandra that she had no knowledge about where Ron was, Sandra wasn’t about to let it go. She’d had enough of what she was sure was some game.

  “You better have him call me ASAP or I’ll call the police, Shelly. I will. Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Well, I don’t know where he is,” Shelly said.

  “I’m filing a missing person’s report,” Sandra said. “The police will go to your house.”

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Sandra’s phone rang. It was Ron calling. He seemed nervous, upset. He confided that his money troubles had accelerated. In turn, there were legal issues.

  “I’m hiding from the police,” he told her. “Staying in Shelly’s attic. They have a warrant out for me.”

  Sandra heard a noise. Someone was breathing into the receiver.

  “Shelly! I know you are on the other line,” she said. “You better hang up right now!”

  The phone suddenly went click.

  Angry but determined to help, Sandra offered Ron a job working at the restaurant she then owned.

  “And you can live with me.”

  Ron flatly refused and he did so in a New York minute.

  “No,” he told Sandra. “Shell is helping me find a new job. Housesitting in Seattle.”

  They talked a little more, but the call—and the offer for help—was clearly going nowhere.

  Sandra was worried but wasn’t sure what she should do. Ron was a grown man. He claimed to be in trouble with the police and she couldn’t do any more than she already had.

  A week later, Shelly phoned.

  “You’re stressing Ron out,” she said. “You’re no good for him. Stay out of Ron’s life, Sandra.”

  “I will not,” Sandra said. “Ron needs someone to take care of him. You’re not doing it, Shelly.”

  Then the line went dead.

  Sandra was right, of course. Ron had been sinking lower by the minute. He didn’t tell her, but in his quest to prove that Shelly was the best caregiver in the world, he’d crossed more than one line. Indeed, that summer, a lawyer for a Seattle firm representing the Olympic Area Agency on Aging dispatched a letter advising him to stay off the agency’s premises in Raymond because employees there felt harassed and unsafe. He was instructed that no contact would be allowed, including written and by phone.

  “Employees will call the police and request that you be arrested for trespass.”

  Since Shelly Knotek came into his life, Ron’s world was now a black hole of money trouble, legal trouble, and family trouble. And Shelly was right there, stirring the pot, making things worse and worse.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  At fifty-six, Ron was beside himself over the discord he was facing with his mother, Catherine Woodworth.

  And as it turned out, his new friend Shelly Knotek would be right there to help exacerbate things.

  Catherine had complained to other family members that the level of care her son was providing was subpar at best. Ron was indignant. Shelly pushed the issue, telling him that he’d been turned in to the authorities for neglecting his mother. It would be embarrassing and ruin him in town. Even before any charges could be filed, Shelly convinced him to put together a rebuttal.

  With Shelly hovering over his shoulder, Ron made a point-by-point list to counter what he insisted had been an unfair characterization of his duty as a son. The most substantive complaint centered on the cleanliness of her trailer, most notably the infestation of fleas that she’d told a reporting agency had been the by-product of Ron’s cats.

  “I kept her house up to her standards. Anytime my mother wanted me to clean the house, I would do so immediately. My cats were indoor animals completely and had no fleas when I moved them into my mother’s home.”

  Ron blamed a neighbor’s outdoor and indoor dogs for the infestation.

  “When I moved out of my mother’s house in late September 2000, she had very few flea bites on her—the complaints about the sudden infestation occurred after I moved out and before my mother unilaterally kicked my cats out of her house.”

  Unbeknownst to Ron, Shelly was also driving a wedge as deeply as she could between Ron and the rest of his family. She’d done it with Kathy. She’d done it with Dave too. In fact, Shelly seemed buoyed at the possibility of being both Ron’s benefactor and his antagonist. She cozied up to Catherine, and fanned the flames with Ron’s family back in Michigan. Shelly made calls to the Woodworths, lamenting over what was going on with Ron, painting herself as Catherine’s number-one advocate.

  “I lost my own mother at two,” she told Ron’s younger brother, Jeff Woodworth, during one of many phone calls she made behind Ron’s back; it was a bit of an exaggeration, as Sharon had died when Shelly was thirteen. “Your mom is like the mom I never had.”

  She went on to say how her husband, Dave, adored Catherine too.

  “She made him a pie for his birthday and he thought that was so great.”

  Shelly insisted that Ron could stay with them until he got back on his f
eet.

  “And in return for staying there,” Jeff recalled, “she quite bluntly told him what he was expected to do around there—feed the dogs, cats, and horse. Nothing major.”

  Later, Ron would complain about his duties at the Knotek house in letters to his family. For her part, Shelly told Ron’s family about a time when she gave Ron specific instructions regarding leaving two of her cats outside when she was away. When she returned home after picking up Sami, she was stunned to see that he’d disobeyed her.

  “I asked you to leave them outside,” she said.

  Ron piped up. “It’s okay. They’re with me. I’m watching them.”

  Shelly became angry, telling Ron she didn’t want the cats in the house because of her cockatiel.

  Ron pushed back a little. “I told you I was watching them.”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Shelly said. “I don’t want them in my house!”

  “I made a mistake! I apologize,” Ron finally answered.

  Just then, Sami came into the room. “Why are you yelling at my mom?”

  Ron didn’t answer. He didn’t say anything at all. He just stormed outside.

  On October 1, 2001, while Shelly looked on, Ron wrote a scathing letter to his mother. He’d regretted doing anything to help her.

  “When I brought you and father up here, I did not expect you of all people to stab me in the back. We both know that father would be very saddened by your heartless cruelty to me and my cats. Father could not be cruel to an animal if his life depended on it.”

  He told his mom that not only couldn’t he stand the sight of her, he considered her his murderer.

  “On June 8, 1997, Gary Neilson heartlessly killed me as a man when he abandoned me; well, congratulations, on October 1, 2001, you finished the murder by destroying my pride in being a Woodworth.”

  He closed his acid-soaked missive by saying he no longer had a mother.