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

by Gregg Olsen

“She died the day she killed my cats.”

  Two days later, Ron wrote what he promised would be his last letter to Gary.

  “You have shown no compassion for me since you murdered me in June of ’97. You were greedy, selfish, uncaring, dishonest . . .”

  Ron sent a second letter just four days after the previous one. This time he called his mother “Madam” in the salutation. Again, he railed more about her betrayal over the cats and told her that he was moving to Seattle, “where (maybe) I can forget my traitorous mother.”

  That same day, Ron sent a three-page letter to his brother and sister in the Midwest. Once more, he recounted all that their mother had done to him, the unspeakable cruelty of “kicking my beloved cats out into the cold.” Because of that, he noted, he could no longer watch over her. After all, he couldn’t trust her and couldn’t stand the sight of her. He indicated that it had all happened when he’d moved in with Shelly and she couldn’t take his cats and their mother promised they could stay with her for a week. However, “within three days” she’d let them out.

  “For my own piece of mind, I therefore must wash my hands of any and all responsibility for her or her care. I am, in fact, so mad and furious with her that I will within the next few months formally and legally change my name.”

  He told them he was moving to Seattle where he’d live under a new name—one that he would tell them, but they were forbidden to disclose it to their mother.

  He provided Shelly’s phone number if they needed to reach him.

  “For my emotional stability, we will for the foreseeable future be communicating through Michelle’s good graces. Michelle really regrets being in the middle of this since she cares about both of us. So I don’t blame her for anything. As always, I have to carry all the blame for everything.”

  One line caught everyone’s attention.

  “My heart aches, but I need to do this, or I could do something far more serious, and right now, that I do not want to do.”

  Ron’s siblings—and ever-helpful Shelly—saw it not as a suicide threat but as a threat to Catherine’s safety.

  Ron wrote a handwritten letter to his mother on October 9, 2001.

  Madam,

  This is to inform you that I am giving Mrs. Michelle Knotek permission to remove all my personal property from your home and storage building. What she does with it is none of your business. Once she has removed everything, you will receive no more communication from me. I pray that you will live for one hundred years in perfect health, both physically and mentally; and that for every day of the rest of your life you will remember the cruelty of what you did to me. You are now their responsibility, not mine.

  I was once your loving son.

  Ron was alone. He didn’t have anyone in his life.

  Just Shelly.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  By 2001, Lara Watson had retired from a career setting up operations for hospitals and nursing facilities and she wanted a new project. When she came across the opportunity to refurbish an old monastery in Sandy, Oregon, into a bed-and-breakfast and wedding venue, she jumped at the chance. She hadn’t spoken to Shelly in quite some time, and that was just fine with her. Every time they talked—about the cancer, her marriage to Dave, what was going on with Shane in Alaska—Shelly would offer up a one-sided conversation that went nowhere. Every call to Shelly seemed to end up with a sputtering monologue and a hang-up.

  It was in early July 2001 when Nikki called to say she was thinking of heading down to Oregon also to see about finding a new job. Lara was thrilled, of course. The connection between Lara and her granddaughter was powerful. Nikki was the baby she had nurtured years ago when Shelly had abandoned her. Lara remained close with the two older Knotek sisters. Sami was thriving in college, and Nikki was in Bellingham. Both of them were on the right path, which brought Lara a lot of solace.

  Nikki landed a job on her first day in Oregon, and it seemed like an echo of their happy time together up north in Bellingham. But things shifted, tectonically so, later that first night, when she and Lara were watching a crime show on cable TV.

  Nikki had always been fascinated by crime; she wanted to understand why bad people did the things they did. Before she dropped out of Grays Harbor, she’d even had aspirations for a career in law enforcement. Her mom, she knew, was the same way—though Nikki figured Shelly was less interested in figuring out how to catch the killer, and more in how to stay ahead of the police.

  Then again, Shelly could surprise her. One time when they were watching Mommie Dearest, Shelly turned to her girls with a stunned expression on her face. “I can’t believe that a mother would do that to her kids!”

  Nikki and Sami had exchanged incredulous looks. Had their mom forgotten about the duct tape? The Icy Hot? The wallowing?

  That night, while they watched TV at Lara’s, Nikki suddenly got very quiet in a way that felt strange to Lara, though she didn’t say anything at the time.

  Maybe Nikki was tired from the long drive from Washington?

  The next morning, Nikki found her grandmother in her office sorting through paperwork.

  “I have something to tell you,” she began. Lara could tell she’d been up all night. Nikki’s eyes were wet and red. She’d obviously been crying.

  “What is it, honey?” She put her arms around her granddaughter. A long pause filled the small office.

  “Mom and Dad killed Kathy,” Nikki said finally.

  The word nearly stuck in her throat when Lara repeated it. “Killed?”

  Nikki nodded. “Murdered.”

  Both started to cry, harder than they might ever have cried before. Between the sobs that stopped and started her story, Nikki told Lara what had happened first at the Louderback House and then Monohon Landing Road.

  Lara was tough and had heard plenty of things in her day; this time, however, she could scarcely believe her ears. And yet, she knew of no reason why her granddaughter would fabricate such a tale. Nikki, she knew, wasn’t a liar.

  Shelly, however, always had been.

  Lara pulled herself together and came up with a plan.

  “We have to tell,” she said.

  Next, Lara phoned the local chief of police there in Sandy, Oregon. When he came over, Nikki shared what she knew, and he called the sheriff’s office with the jurisdiction over Raymond, South Bend, and Old Willapa—Pacific County, Washington. He got Pacific County sheriff’s deputy Jim Bergstrom on the phone and reported back to Lara.

  “He told me to write everything down and gave me his fax number,” Lara said later. “So that’s what Nikki and I did. We sent everything down to Pacific County.”

  On July 11, 2001, Lara Watson faxed three pages to Jim Bergstrom. She marked the cover sheet “urgent” and expected a response.

  She didn’t get one.

  In the fax, she wrote how Nikki had come forward with her story of what had happened at Monohon Landing and in the house in Willapa. She included a copy of Nikki’s original statement:

  “Long time ago, when I think I was about 16 when Mom did it. Mom was always mad at Kathy. She treated Kathy really mean. She would hit Kathy with steel-toed logging boots of Dad’s. She would give Kathy all kinds of drugs and Kathy was acting weird. This one night, us kids heard all kinds of things, so we peeked in Kathy’s room and saw Dad doing something to Kathy, ’cause [a] lot of white foaming stuff was coming out of Kathy’s mouth. I think Mom poisoned her. Or caused Kathy so much brain damage from hitting her in the head. But Kathy wasn’t moving. I think she was dead. We had to run back away from the room ’cause we are not allowed to be downstairs and we didn’t want Mom to know what we saw. She would beat us or do bad things to us if she knew what we saw.”

  Nikki had written how she and her siblings had been taken to a motel while their parents disposed of Kathy’s body in the burn pile on the Monohon Landing property.

  “We drove home. We smelled something really bad and rubber burning. Dad was outside throwing all of Kathy’s
stuff on top of the tires. He kept the burn pile burning.”

  Finally, Nikki closed by pointing out the fear she had in telling on her parents.

  “Mom’s going to do something really bad if she knows I told. Or she’s going to blame Dad. I hope Dad doesn’t commit suicide because of me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Telling her grandmother, Lara, what had happened to Kathy Loreno and the subsequent talks with the police were, Nikki knew, the right thing to do. She felt in her bones that Kathy’s family had been owed the truth for a very long time.

  That didn’t mean, however, that she wasn’t terrified. That her mother and father might be brought to justice had propelled her to disclose her story, but she knew it was no guarantee. What if they didn’t have to pay for what they had done? It niggled at her. What if they continued to get away with it? What would happen to Tori? Would Shelly take it out on her little sister?

  It scared Nikki so much that she didn’t show up for her new job, and instead returned to Bellingham, where the more than two-hundred-mile distance from Raymond would keep her safe.

  Once she’d started talking, however, Nikki found her voice to tell the story again. This time, after a few drinks had loosened her tongue, she confided the story to her boyfriend, Chad. She was a ball of nerves and felt like she was going to throw up when she told him everything.

  She told him that her grandmother had it all handled. That she’d faxed a statement to the authorities in Pacific County. Chad thought what he was hearing was complete bullshit. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Nikki but that it sounded to him like dropping a bomb and running away, which wasn’t the right way to get a murderer arrested.

  Even if the murderer was her mother.

  “You need to tell them in person,” he said.

  “I can’t do that,” Nikki said. She was too scared. “I can’t go back down there and just tell.”

  “Look,” he said, “either you tell the police, or I will.”

  “I don’t think I can tell.”

  “You can,” he said. “And you will.”

  The next day, they got into his Yukon and started for Raymond. Nikki’s stomach didn’t feel any better. She knew they were doing the right thing, but the idea that they’d be within close proximity of her mother was almost more than she could take.

  As they drove south, it passed through her mind that she had, in fact, taken a lot. And now, her tormentor, her jailer, the woman who’d poisoned her as a child, who’d shoved her naked into the snow or through a plate-glass door, was about to get hers.

  The tables were going to turn. Shelly was going to pay for what she’d done to Kathy.

  Around Mount Vernon, a few miles south of Bellingham, Chad’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number when he answered the call. A second later he turned to Nikki.

  “It’s your mom,” he said.

  Nikki couldn’t believe it. Somehow her mom had gotten Chad’s number. How? Maybe from Sami?

  Her mom had that bizarre power, it seemed. She just knew things.

  Chad pulled over, and the truck idled while Nikki spoke on the phone, her heart pounding like a sledgehammer.

  “I’m planning a trip to Disneyland,” Shelly announced, completely out of the blue and in a kind of casual way that suggested there had been no estrangement.

  But there had been one. A long one. A separation that had given Nikki a chance to make a life.

  “You girls and me and Dad,” Shelly said. “Won’t that be wonderful?”

  Nikki’s hand was shaking. “Yeah,” she said. “Sounds great.”

  Shelly went on about the trip, and Nikki made up a quick excuse that she needed to get off Chad’s phone, and ended the call.

  “I was freaking out,” she said later. “It was almost that she knew what was going on and she was trying to reel me back in. I was in shock. I was heading toward Raymond to tell on her.”

  Nikki phoned Sami next and told her that she was on her way to tell the police about Kathy. She also dropped a bomb.

  “I think Mom had Shane killed.”

  It was the first time she’d ever said it to her sister.

  Sami didn’t know what to make of it. She’d been sixteen when Shane had disappeared. She’d accepted her mom’s story of the birdhouse and the note and the phone calls.

  “Shane would never leave Mom a letter, Sami.”

  “I guess not.”

  “We barely looked for him . . . Not like all the other times he ran away. Why do you think that was?”

  Sami didn’t know.

  Chad waited outside while Nikki told Pacific County sheriff’s deputy Jim Bergstrom what she knew about Kathy. Bergstrom told her that he’d been out to the Monohon Landing house a few times in recent months, making inquiries to Shelly about Kathy and her disappearance at the request of Kathy’s family. After the interview, Chad took Nikki back to Bellingham.

  They broke up not too long after that.

  “Too much baggage, I guess,” Nikki acknowledged. “He was a good guy. And I’m grateful that he helped get me where I needed to go in terms of telling what happened.”

  Nikki felt sure she had started something big. She felt she’d started an earthquake.

  Yet nothing happened. Nothing at all. As far as Nikki knew, the deputy never followed up. Never spoke to Sami. Never searched the house.

  “He never even brought Mom in for questioning,” she said. “He should have done that.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  The Pacific County sheriff’s deputy had, in fact, tried to reach Sami, with whom he needed to verify what Nikki had told him. Sami got all of the messages but pointedly declined to call him back.

  She figured that Nikki and her grandmother had told the police everything they needed to know. And while Sami believed that what Shelly had done to Kathy was beyond forgiveness, Shelly was still her mother, and she didn’t want to be the one to put her and her dad in jail.

  She told herself that if her mom got picked up, she’d talk then. Not before.

  She also hedged her bets that her mom might get arrested, so she told her supervisor at the preschool where she worked that her mother was a little crazy, though she wasn’t specific.

  “My mom might get in trouble for something,” she told her boss. “It could be big.”

  Part of Sami’s fear of talking to the police was stoked by the reaction she’d received from the one person with whom she’d shared the truth—her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Kaley Hanson.

  Sami and Kaley had been drinking beer in her dorm at Evergreen, talking about everything and nothing.

  Sami leaned into Kaley. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  He disclosed something she considered somewhat dark, yet it paled next to a million things Sami could share from her childhood.

  She decided not to mess around. She went for the biggest skeleton in the Knotek closest.

  “My mom killed somebody,” she told him. “Her friend Kathy. She moved her into our house and Mom tortured her until she died.”

  If it was a game like “never have I ever” or “truth or dare,” Sami was the winner.

  Kaley’s face went white, and he jumped up and ran for the door. Sami hadn’t expected that kind of reaction. She’d never told anyone before what her mother had done. She’d felt safe with Kaley. She’d lived with it so long that she’d nearly made it seem like a story, something that’s mostly true but not completely so. She thought of it so often—and lived through such craziness—that she said the words as though they needed no preamble. No “are you sitting down” cues that something big was coming.

  What did she just do?

  She chased after him and brought him back into the dorm. He was in shock and had been sick. Too much beer.

  Too much of a real-life horror show.

  “I was just joking,” she said, trying to walk it back.

  “Joking?” he repeated. “That’s seriously fucked up, Sami. That you would
even joke about something like that.”

  That reset button had failed. It made things even worse.

  “Okay, I wasn’t lying,” she blurted. “It’s true. I’m not lying.”

  She went on to tell Kaley everything she could remember. She provided all the context she could, including how much she’d loved Kathy and how trapped she was.

  How trapped they all were.

  After Kaley took it all in and tried to process it and left her a second time, Sami sat there in the dark, thinking over and over that telling someone was not a good idea. It hadn’t felt good. It hadn’t freed her from anything. Instead, it had made her sick to her stomach, angry, confused. It didn’t matter that she trusted Kaley. It was his reaction that had sucker punched her. She’d been a part of something so terrible that, even though she’d been a child, it felt like a huge, ugly mark against her.

  Against the family. Against her sisters.

  What would Kaley do with that information? Would he tell someone?

  It wasn’t until years later that it would occur to Sami to consider what passing the burden of that secret onto Kaley might’ve done to him.

  “I honestly never thought about how it affected him, being around my mom after he knew what she’d done,” she said later. “I’d been around her and what she’d done my entire life. I still loved her. I didn’t think what it might have felt like for someone else to come into our home and being around her, knowing what she was really all about.”

  Sami had managed to broach the subject of Kathy with Shelly on a few occasions. She no longer believed the fantasy that Kathy was off with Rocky. She’d never truly believed it anyway.

  One time, Shelly had been talking about Nikki, and how Nikki had been locked out of her life. Then, she added, “I wonder if Nikki told anyone, you know, what happened.”

  About how you killed Kathy? Sami thought. And yes, she told Nana and the sheriff.

  Finally, she spoke. “No, Mom.”

  Shelly looked satisfied. Sami, however, pursued the topic, and let her mother know how she really felt.