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

by Gregg Olsen

  Most of Shelly’s visits were unannounced. Many had Ron along for the ride. He’d wait in the car the entire time. Sometimes for hours.

  Sami and her boyfriend, Kaley, both noticed a rapid decline in Ron’s appearance.

  “He looks worse than last time,” they said to one another. “Yeah, he’s down another notch.”

  It was true. Ron was quickly becoming a shell of a man. He wore a woman’s oversized sweatshirt. He was disheveled. The bling of his jewelry, the style that told the people of Raymond that Ron Woodworth wasn’t from around there, was soon gone.

  Sami recognized something was going on. But could her mom really be doing to Ron what she had done to Kathy? Later, Sami would beat herself up for not taking a stand.

  Could she have helped?

  Nikki, for her part, wasn’t done trying to make things right. She didn’t know what the sheriff was doing with the information she’d provided, though it didn’t seem like much. She called her mother when she learned from Sami that Ron was living there.

  The machine picked up and Nikki left a message.

  “I know there is a man living there and you need to get him out of the house before history repeats itself.”

  Shelly called Nikki back right away.

  “He’s a family friend,” she said. “He’s really good with Tori. Nothing’s going on.”

  Sami seemed to back up her mother. She’d been there almost every weekend. She was worried, but she was keeping an eye out.

  “Everything is fine,” Sami told Nikki. “I keep asking Tori. She’s fine. She’s so much mouthier than we were. She’d tell us.”

  “Are you sure?” Nikki asked.

  Sami was positive. “She gets away with so much. She’s fine.”

  Sami was saying what she wanted to be true. Nikki was hearing what she wanted to be true.

  Everything’s fine. Ron’s fine. Tori’s fine.

  One time Sami mentioned Ron wasn’t wearing shoes, which she thought was a little strange.

  “But that’s all,” Sami said.

  Oh crap, Nikki thought before trying to put it out of her mind. Something is happening.

  Dave Knotek knew it too.

  He was still up in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, sending his paycheck home. When Shelly first told him that her good friend Ron Woodworth had moved in and was helping around the house, he had a sick feeling in his stomach. It was like a hard punch to an already queasy stomach.

  Seeing it up close only confirmed what he knew.

  “I’d come home on the weekends and this guy’s condition was just deteriorating. She had him down in the swamp with a weed eater, barefoot and in his shorts. Cut to shit. And I’d seen her make him slap himself over and over. And she’d hide his shoes.”

  When Dave confronted her about Ron’s lack of footwear, suggesting that they buy him a pair of shoes, Shelly just shook her head. “He keeps losing them,” she claimed.

  On one of the occasions Ron made a run for it, Shelly told Tori to get in the car so they could search for him.

  “Why are we looking for him?” Tori asked. “You don’t even like having him here, Mom.”

  Shelly gave her daughter a quick, cold glance. “He’s got all those marks on him,” she said. “He’ll lie and say that I did that to him. We’ll all get in trouble.”

  “I was in awe that she said that,” Tori reflected. “And even to this day . . . I think that’s really crazy she was so honest about that but it’s true. That’s why she didn’t want anyone to find Ron because he would have said all that.”

  When they found Ron, he got into the car. He said he was sorry and promised never to do it again.

  Whenever Ron ran away—which became less frequent as the months and years went by—he didn’t get very far. Like Kathy, like Shane, Ron didn’t have anywhere to go. Shelly would find him, usually behind a tree or in some brush in the woods hiding or trying to make himself as tiny and inconspicuous as possible in one of the Knoteks’ outbuildings.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  “Tori! Get your ass out here!”

  Shelly stood in the yard holding an axe.

  She was Lizzie Borden to the nth degree.

  “Get over here!” she yelled.

  Tori went to her mother right away. There was no room for even a second of delay when her mom had that scary Fear Factor tone permeating every syllable coming out of her mouth.

  “What?”

  “Don’t ‘what’ me. Come here.”

  The axe was completely scary. God knew what her mom was going to do to her, or make her do to someone else. Tori had no inkling of what she’d done to make her mother so angry, but she told her she was sorry anyway.

  Shelly thrust the axe at her.

  “You left this out overnight. How many times do I have to tell you to put things away?”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  Shelly made an irritated face. “Put this down your pants.”

  To anyone else, that command would be so nonsensical that the recipient wouldn’t understand what she had meant. Tori knew right away. She ran the axe handle down her pant leg and into her boot. The blade rested on her side.

  Satisfied, Shelly gave her a quick nod. “Now do your chores,” she said. “I don’t want to see that axe out of your pants until everything is done. Do you understand?”

  Of course she did. Her mom was crazy. Tori limped around the yard for the next couple of hours doing what she’d been instructed to do.

  It didn’t stop there. With her mother, things never did.

  Another time, her bed seemed lumpy and Tori pulled back the covers, exposing the family’s kitchen and bathroom trash. She knew her mother had put it there, and she knew why.

  “I had forgotten to take out the garbage. It was Mom’s way of reminding me never to let it happen again.”

  She picked everything up, took it outside, then went back up and changed the sheets.

  In the bathroom, Tori shook her panties and white dust fell to the floor. It was the Gold Bond that her mother routinely sprinkled inside. Sometimes when Tori was around ten, her mom would appear in the bathroom with the container of the antibacterial powder and instruct her to spread her legs and put it on her labia. The powder burned and Tori would cry out that she didn’t want it.

  “It’s medicine,” Shelly said. “You need it. All girls do.”

  “It really hurts, Mom,” Tori said, blinking back the tears.

  “Oh good God. Just buck up, Tori.”

  On a couple of occasions, Shelly decided Tori needed a shower.

  “You’re filthy,” she said. “Let’s go outside.”

  Tori followed her mother to the hose.

  “Get undressed,” she said.

  It was cold outside, but Tori didn’t say anything back to her mom. Being “mouthy,” as her mom called it, was never a good idea. She took off her clothes and her mother sprayed her with the water. One time Shelly used the pressure washer on her youngest. At least Tori was never made to wallow, unlike her siblings.

  She’d seen Ron wet and cold from time to time and assumed that he’d been given the same kind of outdoor shower. They never talked about it. They weren’t allowed to talk about anything.

  And so it went. However, Tori experienced less abuse once Ron came on the scene. Less of the worst was better than more.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  No matter where Ron was working on the Knotek property, it was important to always be on high alert. Whenever Shelly called out, he was supposed to drop everything and get to her as fast as he could.

  If he didn’t answer back, for any reason, Shelly would become enraged. She’d stand there fuming and balling up her fists. Her neck muscles would tighten; her eyes would narrow.

  “You fucking better acknowledge me when I call you!”

  Ron started for her in a panic.

  “I’m coming, Shelly Dear!” The sound of Ron’s scared and anxious voice gave Tori chills.

  “It was one of the scaries
t sounds I’ve ever heard still.” Tori shuddered, thinking about it years later. “He sounded like he was dying every single time he said it. It was like [‘Shelly Dear’] was the last thing he would ever say in his life, with such urgency and such fear.”

  Keeping him on his toes and frightened was only one tactic Shelly employed to “help Ron get better.” A major dose of humiliation seemed also to be part of her twisted regimen.

  Shelly pulled Tori aside one time while Ron sat with them in the living room.

  “Did you know Ron had a baby?”

  Tori looked over at Ron. He looked away.

  “In Vietnam,” Shelly carried on. “He got a girl pregnant and had a baby. Yes, a beautiful baby. But Ron, the piece of shit he is, didn’t do anything to help the baby and it died. Probably the best thing for the baby, I think. Who’d want Ron as a dad anyway?”

  Tori looked over at Ron, who was now curled in a ball.

  “Ron’s a good guy, Mom.”

  Shelly’s face went red. Her features stretched tight.

  “You don’t know everything about him, Tori,” she chided. “He’s the worst of the worst and there’s no two ways about it.”

  Ron cowered while Shelly dropped bomb after bomb. She berated him for being fat, for being gay, for losing his trailer. Whatever she could think of in her free-association style of abuse. A favorite attack was questioning his devotion to her or his love for Tori.

  “You don’t fucking care about us, Ron. You don’t. I can just tell by watching the way you do things around here. You act like you’re doing us a favor. Big guy. You are the lowest of the low. You don’t care about me. Just using me. That’s what you are, a big fucking user.”

  Sometimes she would take his interest in Egyptology and twist it.

  “Oh, Ron, the gods are disgusted by you. They are. You’re going to hell, you fucking, little prick.”

  “If you looked at him, it was like all the life was sucked out of his eyes,” Tori said years later. She’d been too young at the time to recognize the parallels to what had also happened with Kathy, but she could easily see that, at some point after Ron had moved in, he’d become lost. “He didn’t laugh. He didn’t cry. He just sat there.”

  PART SIX

  OPPORTUNITY

  MAC

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Shelly still had a use for Ron, however, and it was an important one. Shelly enlisted him to help care for a Pearl Harbor survivor named James “Mac” McLintock, a family friend of Kathy Loreno’s mother, Kaye Thomas (and coincidentally, the reason Kaye had moved her family up to South Bend in the first place). He was a big man who favored second-shelf whiskey and woodworking. He loved his black lab, Sissy, and was grateful for the mobility of the scooter he relied on to get him around his house that overlooked the Willapa River.

  Shelly talked up Mac as the father she never had. She put lotion on his dry hands and made sure that he had everything he needed. She bragged to others about how much Mac loved her. She called several times a day to make sure he was doing okay. It wasn’t unusual for Shelly to show up at his place once or twice daily. Tori had grown fond of Mac too. He was a grandfatherly figure, and Tori enjoyed going over to his house while her mom went about her business as his caregiver. She’d listen to his stories, and in a few instances, they raced scooters down the street.

  She always let him win.

  On more than one occasion, Mac told Shelly that he wanted her to live with him.

  Instead, however, she moved Ron into Mac’s house.

  Tori knew that her mother had told Mac that Ron was gay. Mac balked at having Ron as his helper. Shelly persisted. She couldn’t be there all the time, but Ron could. At first, Mac didn’t like the idea of Ron bathing him and taking care of his personal needs; however, in time, the two of them worked things out. Ron was over there nearly every day and, sometimes, he slept over.

  While there were other bedrooms in Mac’s house, Tori noticed that Ron wasn’t occupying any of them. She ventured into the basement and opened a tiny, windowless storage area. Inside, she found some of Ron’s things, including some blankets. The space was small, almost like a tiny jail cell.

  Mom’s making him sleep in there, she thought.

  Another time, she found some bedding in a firewood storage area under the entryway to the house. Unlike the basement cell, this space was open to the air. The dirt floor was damp.

  Even in Mac’s house, away from Shelly, it was clear she still controlled Ron.

  He’s sleeping wherever she tells him to, Tori thought.

  Lara Watson hit the roof when she heard through Sami that Shelly was caring for an elderly man named Mac. She hadn’t been happy about Ron hanging around the Knotek place either. Something was going on. She was sure of it. She immediately phoned Deputy Bergstrom at the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office. She asked about the Kathy Loreno case, and Bergstrom told her that the case had gone cold.

  He was in the midst of a big trial and would get back to it as soon as he could, he told her.

  “I keep working it when I have time,” he’d said.

  That didn’t sit well with Shelly’s stepmother at all. She phoned her local chief of police, Dale Schobert, who urged her to give the Pacific County authorities a chance to build the case.

  “They are probably working it behind the scenes,” he told her.

  That scarcely satisfied Lara. All she could think about was how Shelly had done the unthinkable, and she worried about what she might do next.

  She also checked in with Shane’s maternal grandparents, who she knew had been worried about Shane, and they said the same thing. They hadn’t heard from anyone either. Sami also said she’d never been directly contacted, which wasn’t strictly true—she’d just never called the sheriff back. And Nikki was never contacted after she reached out the second time, following her statement about Kathy.

  Not a single word.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Shelly was floating on air when she told Tori the news. James McLintock was going to leave his estate to his old black lab, Sissy—but “after Sissy dies,” she went on, “Mac’s house and everything goes to me.”

  Tori thought the news couldn’t be better. After her mom’s termination from her job as a senior citizen caseworker, she’d seemed a little lost. And decidedly more abusive. The idea that she was heir to Mac’s estate flipped the switch a little. It filled her mom with plans.

  Any plans that distracted Shelly from how to make someone beg for mercy were very welcome around Monohon Landing.

  Mac assigned Shelly power of attorney on September 7, 2001. It came at a very good time for the Knoteks, whose financial circumstances were beyond dire. Shelly had juggled and cooked the books to such an extent she could barely manage her own lies. Dave didn’t know how bad things were financially until his wife called him and said he needed to ask for an advance on his wages. He balked, so Shelly took matters into her own hands. She applied for a payday loan in Aberdeen on September 25, 2001. She listed the family’s monthly income at $3,500.

  Dave started coming home on weekends more often, and the yelling increased. Tori would make loud noises in her bedroom in hopes that the commotion would jolt her parents into toning it down, but that never really worked. While she loved her dad more than anything, she began to resent him for coming home. It seemed that her mother bottled up a lot of her anger at Ron until her father arrived to carry out whatever punishment he’d been instructed to do.

  The yelling was always about two things—money and their houseguest, Ron.

  “You need to do something about Ron,” Shelly told Dave.

  For his part, Dave didn’t have to ask any follow-up questions. Shelly steamrolled him with a litany of infractions Ron had supposedly committed.

  “He took a crap in the yard,” she said one time. “I saw him. Coming around a corner and there he was. We can’t have that.”

  With his wife looking on, Dave tore after Ron and grabbed him by the shirt,
pulling Ron so hard he lost his balance.

  “Don’t ever do that goddamn kind of thing around here.”

  Ron was stunned, but he had a way of deflecting with sarcasm or a look of annoyance.

  Was that a smirk?

  Whatever it was made Dave even more angry.

  “Are you listening to me?” he asked, pulling Ron closer.

  Ron didn’t answer, and Dave slapped him on the side of the head. Ron looked even more shocked.

  “I won’t,” he finally said. “I won’t do it anymore.”

  In time, Shelly had found—maybe even created—a compliant victim in Ron Woodworth. He almost never rebuked her ridiculous, incessant, and cruel demands. He barely blinked no matter what she did to him.

  Or had him do to himself.

  Shelly’s scream was like a shot in the dark.

  “You fucking prick! Do it!”

  Tori, suddenly awake, crawled out of bed to investigate the startling noise. It was the only time she saw this particular punishment in action. Later she’d recall hearing it occur multiple times.

  Ron stood in his underwear on the porch. His body was stiff, his eyes glazed over. From fear? Drugs? Shelly stood facing him as she bullied him into hitting his face with both hands with as much force as he could.

  “Harder!” she yelled at him. “You have to learn, Ron!”

  Tori couldn’t understand how anyone could do that to themselves. He was striking his face repeatedly so hard that his head jerked back with each self-inflicted blow.

  Shelly kept up with her ugly party mix of epithets and commands.

  “Faggot! Lazy fag! Don’t make me hit you myself! Tell me you’re sorry!”

  Ron wasn’t crying, but this time he seemed scared.

  “I’m sorry, Shelly Dear,” he said.

  “After all I’ve done for you, you pay me back with nothing but excuses. You make me sick, Ron. You really do. You make everyone sick. Your own mother was right when she told you to get lost. I was an idiot to take you in. You goddamn ungrateful fag!”