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

by Gregg Olsen

  At the end of the day, Sami sucked up the courage and called her mother to see what was happening in Raymond.

  As expected, their mother was frazzled.

  “They won’t let us talk to Tori,” Shelly said. “We still don’t know what’s happening or why.”

  Sami had never heard her mother spinning around like that, both enraged and confused. Dave, who’d come home from Whidbey Island, got on the phone and asked Sami if she knew anything.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  He, too, was out of sorts, anxious and confused. It was as if Dave Knotek hadn’t a clue that anything out of the ordinary had ever taken place. Sami loved her dad. She knew that he had to know, because he was there! She was sure that whatever bullshit her mom had made him do was not his fault. At least not completely. She saw him as a victim and an accomplice at the same time.

  “Well then,” he said, “I’m going down to the county to find out what I can.”

  That night, the blue glow of the TV flooded the yard as Pacific County cruisers snaked past the Knotek property. Shelly watched a marathon of crime shows and flipped through the phone book in search of a good lawyer. Dave drank, popped antacids, slept out in his truck. Or tried to sleep. Shelly might have been oblivious as to what the real end game was, but he knew. It wasn’t all about Tori. And he knew that all of his wife’s bravado about how careful and smart they’d been to cover their tracks with Kathy didn’t apply to Ron Woodworth. He’d been moved from the freezer and buried in a big hole in the backyard. He wasn’t really gone at all. Dave was pretty sure that Ron’s body would be found.

  And when it was, everything would be all over.

  The next day, Dave left Shelly at Mac’s house to go find out what was happening with Tori. Between watching TV and hunting for a lawyer, Shelly had inserted a pair of messages written on Bratz-branded Post-it Notes into the blue-flowered bag that Dave carried with him to Child Protective Services for Tori.

  The first: “What is going on?”

  And the second: “Did you say anything?”

  Tori had indeed said something. So had Nikki. Sami too. Lara had also weighed in. They found out others had too. Kaye Thomas had even run an ad in the Willapa Harbor Herald with her daughter’s photograph and the headline “Missing Person.”

  And yet none of what any of them had to say would lead to an arrest.

  Dave Knotek took care of that all by himself.

  Unable to locate Tori, he went to the offices of the Pacific County sheriff. He was tired. Beaten down. He was exceedingly nervous too. When the investigators asked if he’d consent to an interview, Dave couldn’t think of any reason not to. He didn’t need a lawyer. He’d never abused his little girl and neither had his wife.

  As it turned out, that wasn’t what they asked about. They focused on Ron and Kathy. Dave stayed firm that he and Shelly had done nothing wrong, though little chips soon began to fall from his story and he started to cry. At one point, he said he needed to use the bathroom; the interrogators agreed, and one followed him down the hall.

  Just outside the bathroom, Dave broke down and told the officer where Ron had been buried and where Kathy’s remains had been scattered after her body had been burned in the firepit.

  Deputies picked up Shelly at Mac’s house. She was confused. Indignant. She clearly couldn’t understand why anyone would ever think she’d done anything wrong.

  She was all about helping people, after all.

  Nikki cried when she got the news her parents had been arrested. Her dad had admitted to disposing of Kathy’s and Ron’s bodies, but nothing else. He hadn’t pointed the finger at Shelly, and for her part, she’d kept her mouth clamped shut.

  There was a tragic irony to the date. It was Kathy Loreno’s birthday. Missing for a decade, the woman who’d told the Knotek girls not to help her, out of fear that something would happen to them, would have turned forty-five that day.

  Nikki sent an e-mail to her grandmother.

  “The police are going to search the house and the property today. Cross your fingers they find stuff. But I think the confession from Dave on disposing of the bodies might be enough along with our statements. We all have to remember that mother is pretty smart, and she manages to weasel her way out of A LOT of things. I hope this won’t be one of them.”

  As the whirlpool of truth began to pull Shelly and Dave downward, there was the matter of the other person who had vanished in the night.

  Shane.

  PART SEVEN

  TRUTH

  SHANE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  The day after her parents’ arrest, Sami and her boyfriend, Kaley, went out for a steak dinner at the Metropolitan Grill in Seattle to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday. Despite everything that was happening, Sami told herself that having a birthday celebration would be a small life raft in a raging sea. To many, such a response would have seemed strange, but Sami was a girl who’d spent her entire life trying to chart a course that at least made her life appear normal. No matter what. She’d played high school sports wearing leggings to hide the evidence after a beating. She’d made excuses when her mom didn’t come to pick her up, as though a walk home was what she needed.

  With each bite, she swallowed a little more of what was going on in her mind. She tried to make a joke of some of it, but it wasn’t funny. It was hard to even think. Newspapers and TV had been flush with stories about her parents. Pictures of Kathy supplied by her family were on TV, as was Ron’s driver’s license photograph.

  “Tale of abuse, deaths unfolding in rural Raymond.”

  “Raymond couple befriended 3 strangers who then disappeared.”

  “PROSECUTORS IN RAYMOND PURSUE POISONING ANGLE.”

  The reality of what was happening back in Raymond took the oxygen out of the birthday celebration, and the couple left the restaurant.

  As they drove through Tacoma, Sami’s cell rang.

  It was her grandmother.

  The call started with a short pause as Lara tried to frame the words in a way that didn’t hurt. There was really no way to do that.

  “Shane’s dead,” Lara said in a shattered voice. “Dave confessed to killing him.”

  Sami dropped the phone and started screaming. “He’s really dead! He’s dead! Shane!”

  Kaley tried to comfort her, but there was nothing he could do but drive. Sami screamed until her throat hurt.

  She’d consoled herself through the years with the thought that Shane was off somewhere, happy. Maybe having kids. Living and working and being a grown-up version of the kid he’d been at Monohon Landing and before. Now the fantasy went up in smoke. Gone.

  It had been a game she played with herself. It was also a hope that in the end was a lie.

  “I looked for him over the years,” she said later. “In a crowd on the street. I knew that something was wrong and that he wouldn’t just disappear, but I wanted to believe that he was out there being happy.”

  Dave Knotek would admit to a lot of things that he’d done. The murder of Shane Watson, however, was one subject that never really made its way to a full, recorded confession. He and the sheriff’s investigators were out at the property when he finally conceded that his nephew was gone.

  “Shane’s in the ocean,” Dave said, standing on the edge of the field as criminalists and dogs scoured the property.

  Later, he told investigators that he’d come into the pole building and found Shane playing with the rifle—something that he had explicitly told him never to do.

  “Shane, give me the gun!” he claimed he’d demanded.

  The teenager refused.

  “Give it to me,” Dave repeated.

  When Shane continued to balk, he said he’d tried to wrestle the gun away, when all of sudden, it fired. After he saw what he’d done, he went back inside the house in a panic.

  The three girls were upstairs. He was sure no one had heard the shot. He immediately told Shelly what had happened, and she sta
rted crying. The two of them went outside.

  “I want to see him,” Shelly said.

  Dave held her back, refusing to let her see Shane’s body. He started to cry too, and Shelly had clutched him like a baby.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  At that moment, he didn’t know. He was petrified. Too scared, he’d later insist, to report the accident in the pole building.

  If that’s indeed what it was.

  Nothing could be worse. Nikki wrote an e-mail to her grandmother after learning Shane had been murdered too.

  “I seriously don’t think I can handle much more of this. I wish I could have a quiet life. I never do terrible things and I stay out of trouble. I can’t turn on the television without seeing my mom.”

  She’d always known there was a significant possibility that Shane had been killed, but she’d wanted more than anything to believe he was okay. She was horrified to have to truly confront the idea that something she’d told Shelly might’ve led to what happened to Shane.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  The day after Kathy Loreno died in the summer of 1994, Shelly had been a caged animal, pacing the floor of the Monohon Landing house as though there were no way out of the trap that she’d created for herself and family. She cried. She scolded. Mostly, she seemed determined. She even made a vow.

  “I’m not going to let anyone take this family down,” she said.

  Dave, who’d done his wife’s gruesome dirty work, told her everything would be all right. “No one will. I promise.”

  Shelly wasn’t convinced, and she immediately focused on the two oldest. Shane and Nikki were close. They were out working in the yard together, talking. Shelly told her husband she knew what they were talking about and she didn’t like it one bit.

  “They are going to tell,” she said.

  Dave disagreed. “No, they won’t. Nikki is blood. So is Shane.”

  “Shane’s not our blood,” she said. “He’s going to tell. He’s going to ruin the family.”

  “He won’t,” he said. Though, of anyone in the household, it was obvious to Dave that Shane was indeed the weakest link.

  Shelly kept at her husband. She was the record album that skipped a track. She called him at work. She reminded him the minute he got home. A storm was coming and the boy in the house was the cause of it. He’d be their complete ruin.

  “We need to get rid of him,” she said.

  Dave didn’t have to scratch his head or ask for any more information. He knew exactly what Shelly meant. The only solution to ensure that the rest of the family would survive was eliminating Shane from the picture, but Dave didn’t like that idea at all. Shane was like a son to him.

  “I don’t know,” he told her.

  Shelly loathed weakness and ambivalence. “You do. You’ll figure it out. It has to be done.”

  Shane, it turned out, was ready to do something about what was going on in the Knotek family. He told his confidant, Nikki, that he had something he needed her to see.

  “But you need to keep it a secret.” He was dead serious and spoke in his quietest voice. He told Nikki to meet him in the pole building. While Nikki looked on, the cousin she considered more of a brother pulled three photographs from a hole he’d cut in a small, plush teddy bear.

  They were Polaroid images of Kathy, naked, black and blue, crawling on the floor.

  “They murdered Kathy,” he said, setting down the photos. “You know it. I know it. We need to tell the police. Your mom is psycho and your dad is seriously fucked up too.”

  “Where did you get those?” she asked.

  “Swiped them from your mom.”

  Nikki kept her eyes on the photos. She didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m going to take them to the police,” Shane went on. “You want in?”

  Nikki, as scared as she’d ever been, finally answered.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  They talked about finding the right time and making sure that they had a game plan for when the police came and arrested Shelly and Dave. Nikki told Shane that she was all in. She wanted her mother in jail. She wanted her to pay for what she’d done to all of them, especially Kathy.

  The bloody snow. The kicks to her head. The shower that ran red with her blood. The rancid smells of those smoothies her mother made for Kathy.

  “I hate Mom,” she said to Shane.

  “I do too,” he said.

  Good. They were on the same page.

  Shane had always been her ally. She agreed with everything he was saying, but inside she was worried. “What if they don’t believe us?”

  Shane slid the photographs back into the fluffy filling of the stuffed animal.

  “The photos are proof,” he said.

  Nikki continued processing the plan and the consequences. She wanted to go to college and create a life far away from Raymond. Although her mother picked away at her self-esteem, there was still part of Nikki that knew she was strong enough to make it. The truth would feel good, and it would right a very big wrong. All of that was incontrovertible. She thought about her siblings and how they’d be parceled off to foster care. What would happen to them? Would they end up with relatives? Or strangers? Would they be worse off than they were now? Tori was adored and happy. Sami seemed to navigate Shelly’s abuse more effectively than Nikki did. She didn’t rock the boat. Things were bad for her and for Shane, although they weren’t terrible at the moment.

  Nikki could barely sleep that night as she wrestled with Shane’s plan. She didn’t want him to tell. She didn’t want the family torn apart.

  The next morning, she saw her mother. Her stomach was in knots.

  “Shane has pictures, Mom.”

  Shelly stopped what she was doing and studied Nikki. “Pictures of what?”

  “Kathy.”

  Shelly flew into a rage. “Where?” She went over to Nikki and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “In his room,” Nikki said, stepping back a little. “In his teddy bear.”

  Nikki knew it right then. She had lit a fuse. In that very second, she wished she could take it back. She saw the shark look in her mother’s eyes. It was the same look that the dogs had when Shelly tied them to the apple trees and told the kids that the animals were fine. How, they, too, could skip a meal or two.

  Ravenous. Determined. Just one bite.

  Nikki would spend more than twenty years trying to understand what led her to tell on Shane that day. She loved him. She thought of him as a brother. They were united in their hate for Shelly and Dave. They wanted both of their parents in jail. If anyone deserved to go to jail, it was them. Not for what they’d done to her either. It was for Kathy.

  She asked herself over and over why it was that she’d betrayed Shane.

  “I didn’t want to get him in trouble,” she said. “I just was so scared that if he told, everyone would know about what had happened. I didn’t say that he was going to show the pictures to the police. I only said that he had them.”

  Shelly sounded the alarm and called Dave the second Nikki told her about Shane’s photos. Dave didn’t understand what she was talking about at first.

  That irritated her even more.

  “I’m telling you he has a photo of Kathy,” she said. “A photo of her that he is going to take to the police. We need to find the photo!”

  “What is the photo of?” Dave asked.

  “I think it was taken after she died. A Polaroid. It’s going to make us look bad. We didn’t do anything wrong, but a photo like that . . . it will ruin us. You fucking have to find it.”

  Dave was exhausted from the drive from Whidbey. The idea that there was photographic proof of what had happened to Kathy jolted him into alertness. Dave started looking the minute he got home, but the teddy bear was nowhere to be found. He went through the outbuildings and even dug in some places in the yard where Shane might have hidden a photo. At the same time, Shelly had torn up the house.

/>   Neither found the photos.

  Next, Dave confronted Shane.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  Nikki heard yelling coming from the woodshed. It was her mother’s voice. Her father’s too. The voices were loud and violent and completely terrifying. Every now and then, between the breaks in the adults screaming, Nikki could make out a yelp coming from Shane.

  It was like the sound of an animal getting hit. With an electric cord. With the handle of a shovel. With a fist.

  “What were you going to do, Shane?” Shelly was screaming. “You ungrateful fucking piece of garbage! You won’t ruin our family. You won’t be the cause of sending your sisters off to some shithole state institution!”

  “No,” Shane said.

  “You were going to tell!” Dave yelled. “You were going to ruin our family! You piece of shit! Why in the fuck would you ever want to do that?”

  It went on and on. And then silence.

  The next time Nikki saw Shane, he was black and blue.

  “They beat the fuck out of me,” he said. “About the pictures of Kathy.”

  “That’s what she does, Shane,” Nikki said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  Nikki felt terribly guilty for what had happened, although as far as she knew, Shane wasn’t aware that she’d been the one to tip off her parents.

  “It was my fault,” she said later, blaming herself for what happened.

  Shelly wouldn’t let up.

  “What are we going to do with Shane?” she repeatedly asked Dave.

  He knew she meant what was Dave going to do. That she meant killing a teenager who was like a son to him.

  Every time Dave came home, Shelly pressed him on a plan to commit murder. And when he just sat there, in a near stupor because he didn’t know what to say or how to placate her, Shelly would make her own suggestions on how it could be accomplished.

  “I need it to look like an accident,” she instructed him.

  “Right.” Dave wished the conversation was about any other subject. “An accident? I don’t know, Shell. I don’t know if I can.”