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

by Gregg Olsen

  The more he talked, the more Ron’s old friend from the military felt her concern grow. She could plainly see that Ron was in serious trouble. And she told him so.

  Ron just looked at her blankly. Nothing she was saying seemed to be tracking. He was in a fog, completely clueless as to how thin and weak he’d become.

  “He wasn’t the Ron I’d known for twenty years.”

  Not long after the meal at Slater’s, Sandra received an unexpected and very welcome call from Ron. He indicated, for the first and only time, that there were some things going on with Shelly that were bothering him.

  “She has my cars and won’t give them back to me,” he said.

  Sandra was incredulous. “Won’t give them back?”

  “No,” he said. “I keep asking.”

  The disclosure troubled Sandra enough to drive down from her place in Iron Springs for surveillance of the house on Monohon Landing. She drove by slowly and noted that Ron’s tan and blue cars were parked out front.

  Sandra didn’t stop to inquire.

  “I didn’t want a confrontation with [Shelly],” she admitted.

  If she had stopped, she might have seen what Shelly was able to hide.

  Sami was also alarmed by the changes she saw in Ron. She asked her mother about his significant weight loss.

  “Is Ron okay?”

  Shelly went into full-on defensive mode. “What do you mean by that?”

  “He’s not sick or anything?”

  “No.”

  “He’s lost a lot of weight, Mom. That’s all.”

  “He needed to lose weight, Sami. He was fat. He’s eating healthy. No more junk food. He’s in the best shape he’s ever been. He has muscles where he never knew he had them before.”

  Her mother crowed about how much the work around the house had been helping Ron get in shape.

  “He loves being outside and doing chores,” she said.

  Then Shelly cut off all of Ron’s hair, including his beloved ponytail. Sami cornered Ron in the yard and asked about it when she was sure her mother wouldn’t be able to overhear.

  “I like it this way,” he said. “I like it all gone.”

  She also inquired about his dental problems. He appeared to be down to a single remaining tooth in front.

  “Oh, those other teeth were fake anyway,” he dismissed. “I’m waiting to get dentures, Sami.”

  Of course, this wasn’t going to happen. When Ron’s teeth had started falling out, Tori had asked Shelly why they didn’t take him to a dentist.

  “He needs dentures, Mom,” she said.

  Shelly dismissed the suggestion out of hand.

  “He can’t get to a dentist because he has too many warrants out for his arrest. They couldn’t treat him. Besides,” she added, “dentures are too expensive.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  The last time Nikki saw her mother was at the Olive Garden in Olympia in 2002, the year Mac died. Nikki was hesitant about the get-together, but she figured she had nothing to lose. Maybe things would be better? Sami had continued to report to her sister that Tori was doing fine.

  “She says Mom is weird, but she’s treated fine. Not like us.”

  Shelly had dressed up for the occasion and looked good. It was apparent almost at once that her nice appearance was merely camouflage.

  She was the same woman she’d always been.

  “She was so rude to the waitress,” Nikki reported. “Belittling her, sending things back. I kept thinking, you know, I don’t need this. I don’t need to be part of this. It was mean, ugly. Seeing her was a terrible mistake.”

  Nikki didn’t tell her anything about her life. She’d shut that down before dessert.

  “I never saw her again after that.”

  Tori Knotek kept a brave face. She never said a word to her sisters or anyone about what was going on at home. Not because she didn’t want her mother to be held accountable for what she was doing, but because she feared the dire consequences of poking a bear.

  With all that she’d seen, Tori was terrified of what her mother might do to her. And she worried that it was all her fault somehow.

  She wrote to her mom in her journal:

  “I know that sometimes it might seem like I don’t understand you or I just don’t want to, but that’s wrong. Very wrong. I always can understand you and I will always want to understand you. I am just sick of me disappointing you and Dad so much. I know it’s my fault.”

  Though she couldn’t quite put it into words, on some level Tori knew her mother was only happy when someone else was suffering. There had to be a word for a person who found joy in another’s pain. Whatever it was eluded her. To smile when someone screamed? To revel in the agony of a cut, a burn?

  Why was her mom wired that way?

  On a couple of occasions, Tori heard her mother tell Ron to get under the big desk in the living room, which was adjacent to her bedroom. The sound of furniture moving brought her to see what was happening.

  This time.

  “You are going to stay there,” Shelly said, “until I hear your cry.”

  Ron had stuffed himself under the desk. “I’m sorry, Shell Dear,” he said.

  “You’re not sorry enough, you good-for-nothing faggot!”

  Ron started to make crying noises.

  That made Shelly even angrier.

  “You goddamn faker!” she railed. “I know you are faking!”

  Tori asked her mom if she could let Ron out.

  “No,” Shelly said flatly. “He’s being punished. Leave him alone. He’s been very bad. I don’t want to go into the details. Just leave him.”

  A little while later, Tori noticed that Ron had been liberated. It wasn’t for long, though. Soon, he was back under the desk, crying.

  She was pretty sure by then the tears were real.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  When Pacific County sheriff’s deputy Jim Bergstrom attempted to serve a restraining order against Ron, brought forth by his mother, the deputy caught a glimpse of Ron on the porch as he pulled into the Knotek place. It was in the spring of 2003. Ron, a thin, spiderly figure, shot the deputy a startled look and then fled into the field through a narrow opening in the fence.

  “Hey, Ron!” Bergstrom called out. “I’m only here to serve papers on you.”

  After Ron vanished into the woods behind the house, the deputy gave up and knocked on the door. He waited. And waited. He finally left when no one answered, even though he was pretty sure someone was home.

  Someone had been.

  Fifteen minutes later, dispatch took a call from Shelly Knotek. She was irritated. Agitated. Concerned. She wanted to meet the deputy in front of the Raymond post office to find out what was going on. There, Bergstrom told her about the restraining order and his need to serve Ron.

  “He’s not living with us now,” Shelly said, looking Bergstrom right in the eye. “He’s living up in Tacoma.”

  “I don’t appreciate being lied to,” Bergstrom shot back. “I saw him at your place. He ran away. I know he was there.”

  Shelly, as always, had a quick comeback. She was always skilled with the redo.

  “He probably ran away because there are warrants out for him. He’s sick. I’ve been taking care of him. He has a heart condition.”

  She went on to promise that she’d have him call.

  Before leaving, Bergstrom asked about Kathy Loreno. He told her Kathy’s family was still worried that she’d just disappeared with that trucker boyfriend. He told Shelly that one of Kathy’s brothers had tried to find his sister with a private investigator and her mom had run a missing person ad in the paper.

  “I haven’t heard a word from her in a long time,” Shelly said.

  No one had.

  The encounter with the deputy seemed to rattle Shelly—and it had nothing to do with Ron. It was the idea that there were still questions about Kathy’s whereabouts percolating among her family—and law enforcement.

  A lit
tle while later, Shelly told Sami that she’d run into Kathy’s mother, Kaye, at a grocery store.

  “She was as sweet as ever,” she reported to her middle daughter. “Loved catching up with her.”

  Sami highly doubted that the encounter had ever occurred. At first, she wrote it off as her mom’s obsessive need to lie. Lying was like taking a breath to Shelly. Sami could never grasp why her mother felt compelled to lie when saying nothing at all would be a smarter course.

  Then it dawned on her. Her mom’s motive about her so-called encounter with Kathy’s mom was merely a way to test the waters, an excuse to revisit the Kathy story.

  “Do you remember the name of her boyfriend?” she asked.

  Sami was tentative. “Rocky?”

  It was a pop quiz. A game show. It was a cattle prod to a fake truth.

  Shelly snapped at Sami. “Think! Do you remember what kind of job he had?”

  Sami stepped up her game.

  “Trucker!”

  And so it continued. Shelly drilled Sami repeatedly about what Rocky looked like. How in love Kathy had been. How she’d gone off to live a life that she’d always dreamed about.

  “If the police come, do you know what to say?”

  “Yes, Mom,” she said. “I do.”

  On and on it went—in person and over the phone. Shelly would fire questions and scenarios over at her daughter. Sometimes Dave would get the same treatment. In all cases, it was about making sure that everyone understood the stakes involved.

  “Our family will be ruined. Think of Tori! She’ll be in foster care!”

  Yet all the preparation in the world wouldn’t—couldn’t—have prepared Shelly for what happened next as the heat on the burner went from medium to high.

  Tori and her mom sat in the car while Shelly sifted through the mail. Bills were almost always ignored as she looked for things that mattered to her—a check from her husband, an offer from some cheesy catalog company for something she didn’t really need.

  And most certainly couldn’t afford.

  Shelly opened a letter, and instantly the mood in the car changed. Her face went white and her hands began to shake. Her eyes stayed fixed on a letter. It was addressed by typewriter solely to her, postmarked in Olympia on April 18, 2003.

  “The gunshots you heard last night were from Kathy. Like the Lord Jesus Christ, SHE also arose from the dead and is back to revenge you. Ashes to ashes . . .”

  Shelly freaked out. They’d all heard a gunshot the previous night when someone shot out a neighbor’s security light.

  For the next several days, Shelly repeatedly asked Tori if anyone had been coming around asking about Kathy.

  “This is important, Tori. Has anyone?”

  “No, Mom,” she said. “I promise.”

  “Think!”

  “No. No one.”

  Tori didn’t understand her mom’s over-the-top concern. Kathy, whom Tori could barely remember, wasn’t dead. She had run off with her boyfriend. She was living a happy life. Why would Kathy want to take revenge on her mom for anything? Kathy was her mom’s best friend.

  Shelly reported the letter to Dave, who had no clue where it would have come from. Neither thought that Nikki would betray the family. Maybe someone from Kathy’s family had heard something and wanted to avenge Kathy’s death? But if that had been the case, Dave and Shelly agreed that they’d have gone to the police.

  As far as they knew, that hadn’t happened at all.

  Shelly, in full-on frantic mode, called Sami at her teaching job in Seattle, a couple of hours away.

  Sami’s supervisor pulled her aside.

  “Your mom’s on the phone.”

  “I’m in the middle of class.”

  “Seems important.”

  Sami had talked about her mother with every manager or supervisor she had. Knowing how her mom could be, she considered it a preemptive strike. She knew that, whatever it was, her mom would keep calling until she got her on the phone.

  Sami got on the phone.

  “Kathy!” Shelly barked. “Has anyone been asking you about Kathy?”

  The Pacific County sheriff had tried, but Sami had dodged the authorities.

  “No, Mom,” she said.

  Shelly persisted. “No one?”

  “No, Mom. No one. What’s happening?”

  Shelly told her about the letter.

  The letter scared Sami. It meant that someone outside of the Knotek family was onto what her mother and father had done. Someone out there was digging into what had happened and using the threat of an anonymous letter to shake things loose.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said, though, deep down, she knew it did. If she’d lost someone and thought that another party knew, she’d find a way to get some justice.

  Kathy deserved justice.

  She thought of the necklace Kathy had given her on her birthday. She thought of how Kathy always had time for the girls, doing their hair, making them laugh with a story. She could think of a million good things about Kathy.

  “I know,” her mother said. “I don’t know what’s going on. Do you? Sami?”

  “No. I promise. I have no idea.”

  Sami hung up. She almost hoped Kathy’s family had put the letter in the mailbox. Kathy’s family, she thought, needed to know what had really happened.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Shelly studied the Kathy letter like a forensic examiner. She held it to the light. She rotated it in every direction. She scrutinized the postmark. After all of that, she couldn’t come up with a decent guess as to who might have sent it.

  Anyone could have. Even Shelly knew she wasn’t in line to win any popularity contests in Raymond.

  The threat in the anonymous missive didn’t make Shelly retreat or try to tone down what she was doing to Ron. Instead, she wandered around the house in her half-open bathrobe carpet-bombing Ron with epithets. No matter how hard Ron tried, he couldn’t do anything right.

  His failures at pleasing Shelly were legion.

  Tori spied on her mother and father in the yard one weekend when her dad came home. Ron had fallen off the roof, where he’d been cleaning shingles, and was lying on the ground, crumpled and battered. Instead of rendering aid, Dave ordered Ron to get up and do it again.

  Without a word of protest, Ron gathered himself, climbed back onto the deck banister, and jumped off again. Tori was sure he’d broken a leg.

  “I remember going back upstairs and he fell again and then I heard my dad smack him down. It sounded really hard. I heard Ron yell. I’m assuming it was on his face, but I don’t know. And why? I don’t know why.”

  Maybe he was moving too slow or was too clumsy, she thought.

  It happened once more.

  And again.

  On a separate occasion, Tori heard her mother telling Ron to be a man and jump. She went to look and could see Ron, wearing only underwear, climb to the rail and hold himself up with the support post. His feet were bloody and he was crying.

  This time, Ron, in his quiet, unforceful way, resisted some.

  “I don’t want to, Shelly Dear,” he pleaded.

  “Just get it over with,” Shelly said. “I don’t have all night.”

  And off he’d go, landing with a thud in the gravel with his bare feet.

  “Get up! Do it again! You are a piece of shit and you need to be punished.”

  Ron somehow managed to get back up to the rail and do it all over again.

  How Ron could even walk at all mystified Tori. Every step was a struggle. It wasn’t only that his feet had been cut on broken glass buried in a hole in the garden, or that he’d been forced to jump from the roof or porch rail. It was also how her mother attended to his wounds.

  Tori watched her mother and sometimes her father in the way another driver slows and rubbernecks at a car crash. She didn’t necessarily want to see, yet she couldn’t really turn away.

  Shelly took a pan of hot water off of the stove, steam rising as
she carried it out to the pole building. Tori heard Ron yelp as Shelly and Dave made him plunge his bruised and bloodied feet into a combination of hot water and bleach.

  “I remember the smell of it was like the worst smell ever of my life,” Tori recalled years later. “It was like the smell of bleach and decomposing flesh, like it was burning his skin off. And it just was terrible. He smelled like he was rotting, literally the smell of dying flesh. He smelled like that for a month. Up until the very end.”

  Even as he declined, Shelly continued her practice of never letting Ron wear shoes while doing yard work or calisthenics outside. His feet hit the gravel so hard from the new jumping punishment that his soles split open and oozed blood and pus.

  She’d get out her bleach bottle and pour the caustic liquid over them and tell him to shut up and stop crying.

  “Yes, Shell Dear,” he’d say.

  Other times she’d boil water on the stove, fill a tub with it, and make him soak.

  “One night she made the water too hot, I think,” Tori recalled. “And he ended up burning his feet to the point where skin started falling off. That’s when my mom started to wrap his feet up with stuff.”

  The night his skin peeled off was the last time Ron slept in the computer room outside Tori’s bedroom on the second floor. The girl, then fourteen, thought it was because he could barely walk up the staircase. After that, he slept mostly in the laundry room, the pole building, or outside on the porch. His feet were bundled and bandaged, and he barely spoke. He certainly never complained.

  Years later, when Dave Knotek was told that bleach actually damages human skin, he seemed genuinely surprised. Shelly had used bleach by the gallon on Kathy, Ron, and even the girls. In fact, they never made a trip to the grocery store without replenishing the household’s bleach supply. Despite everything he’d witnessed, however, Dave still couldn’t comprehend that his wife would do anything that would hurt anyone on purpose.

  Shelly probably didn’t know that bleach was bad either, he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Like Kathy a decade prior, Ron was not getting any better. He was on the very edge of a black hole with Shelly’s foot placed firmly on his back. She acted concerned. She no longer berated him for killing her surrogate father, Mac. She even toned down the name-calling.