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

by Gregg Olsen

  Shelly Knotek will be released from prison in 2022, at which time she’ll be sixty-eight. She continues to maintain that her conviction was a mistake, claiming that she misunderstood the Alford plea. None of her daughters have seen her since she left Pacific County, though a visitor to the women’s prison in Gig Harbor, Washington, says Shelly’s hair is white now and that she’s fighting cancer.

  At least that’s what she says.

  From her big house in Raymond, Sami thinks her mother was a bad seed, someone whose evil nature was unfortunately given the opportunity to flourish. “I’m not sure she would have killed anyone if she had been born into a different family, a different town, married a stronger man,” she theorizes. “Mom liked to torture people. It just went too far, and she found she had a taste for it. I don’t know.”

  As for her father? She loves him, but she wrestles with what happened even today.

  “I don’t care what my mother did or how powerful she was,” Sami said. “If my mom put a gun to my head and said you need to shoot your brother, there’s no way I would have. Nikki too. No way. But our dad did.”

  Tori, now at a new job, has a few moments of nostalgia for the mother she had once loved. She doesn’t miss Shelly at all, though she does miss having a mom. Luckily, her sisters were able to fill that role. While she’s managed to forge a close relationship with her dad and recently spent Christmas with him, Tori wants nothing to do with Shelly.

  Shelly tried, of course.

  She wrote to Tori in care of Sami after she was sent to prison about how she was overjoyed that her youngest daughter had so many people in her life to love and care for her.

  “I’ve chosen so badly in life. I’ve made so many mistakes and wrong choices. Ones I regret so much. But you are not like me. Please never believe what you’ve heard. There is more to it all.”

  Sami never delivered that letter.

  “My little sister didn’t need to see it,” Sami said. “She’s smart and happy and Mom has no place in her life.”

  The Knotek sisters gather together several times a year, mostly at Nikki’s place near Seattle. Nikki returned to Raymond in 2018, for the first time since the case broke. It was hard, but Sami was there as Nikki revisited memories of their mother. She remembered a few times when her mom was kind—attentive, even. Those good memories brought tears. Sami also returned to the Louderback and Monohon Landing houses for the first time that fall. She had a visceral reaction to the bathroom at Louderback and the place where Nikki had been made to wallow. Tears came. Smiles too. She pointed out a fish pond that Kaley had made and the spot where he’d park his car to drop her off, honk, and flash his lights until Shelly gave up and let her inside.

  The sisters text and talk all the time. They see the insanity of the things their parents did, the horror of what happened while they were growing up. While Shelly may have sought to keep them apart, to control them forever, she underestimated the strength of their bond.

  Sisters forever. Victims no more.

  AFTERWORD

  BY KATHERINE RAMSLAND, PHD

  From the inside, a violent home looks starkly different than it does to outsiders. Children who grow up with cold, narcissistic, or sadistic parents don’t know that a caretaker with the potential for extreme cruelty is not the norm. Even when they see a contrast in the families of friends, they’ve already been robbed of the ability to challenge parental authority. Instead of seeking help, they hunker down and adapt.

  Increasingly more offspring of serial killers—mostly daughters—are speaking out about being related to the most monstrous of all offenders. They’re victims too, they say, and they are. You can find them on talk shows, on podcasts, and inside the pages of their own memoirs. Melissa Moore, the daughter of “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson, even developed a TV series in which she introduced relatives of serial killers to members of families whose loved ones were victims, hoping for healing for all.

  Some offspring are blindsided, like Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, Wichita’s “BTK” serial killer. A decade after his arrest in 2005, she described to a reporter her anguish and humiliation upon learning that the doting father she’d loved all her life had murdered ten people—including children—in her hometown. In A Serial Killer’s Daughter, she describes the difficult process of trying to understand why he did it and how to get on with her life.

  Yet others are not surprised at their criminal parent’s double life, because they’d witnessed open displays of abuse and rage. Some even led police back to their home. Terrified and shamed by feelings of betrayal, they nevertheless hoped to right wrongs and stop monsters.

  Such is the story of the daughters of the abusive killer, Michelle “Shelly” Knotek. A woman whose beauty and sex deflected suspicion, she ruled her home and subjected her children and her tenants to horrifying torment. Using cover stories and a caretaker’s persona to hide her sadistic cruelty, she got away with her violent behavior for years. She manipulated her third husband into helping to cover up her crimes, even to kill for her.

  It seems impossible that anyone could command such extreme compliance, but successful predators use a variety of tools to ensure success. They’re patient and observant, and they plan and prepare. First, they look for compliant people with few resources: their own children or elderly parents, friends in need, homeless people, the mentally ill, or those without family ties. Then they pursue a program of steady erosion of their victims’ ability to resist. Even in the face of outrageous behavior, such people will be too frightened, docile, confused, or incapacitated to retaliate or seek help.

  Having only superficial emotional attachments to truth and moral behavior, predators train themselves to imitate trustworthy behaviors like honesty and compassion so they can exploit what people expect. If confronted, they can pivot in a split second and slip their cover story into place with ease. They know what they want and what it will take to get or achieve it. Knotek used a contrived persona of charm and success to falsely engender trust in potential new victims. Once she drew these flies into her web, she brought out the stinger.

  Some predators are sadists, described as the great white sharks of deviant crime. Their capacity for criminal cunning is unequaled, as is their capacity for harming others. They’re happy only when they have crushed the lives around them, usually with mental and physical abuse. They enjoy whipping, binding, burning, hanging, electrocuting, stomping, piercing, or choking victims into unconsciousness and then reviving them. Controlling others with pain empowers them.

  A bent toward sadism forms during certain associations in early adolescence, coupled with a callous temperament that needs control and lacks remorse. Even so, more than one-third of sadists report discovering their perverted propensities well into adulthood; they enjoy the sense of authority that arises from having their way with a vulnerable and submissive human being, and their fantasies grow increasingly more sophisticated and perverse. Because they seek stimulation, they become quite inventive in the types of cruelties they inflict on others. The usual nurturing that accompanies parenthood means nothing to them.

  Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist and the inventor of the 22-point scale of evil, includes cases of “parents from hell” when he describes what goes wrong in an institution we regard as the ultimate arena of safety and protection. He labels as evil those parents who present a normal social persona to shield the harm they do in private. They serve their own needs and desires at the expense of their relatives, especially their children. The more pleasure they derive from acts of torment, the more they indulge. Indeed, Stone reserves the “most evil” category—level 22—for psychopathic torture-murderers, with torture as their primary motivator. They thrive on inflicting pain. Whenever they tire of one torture implement, they find or create another. They prefer to keep their victims alive as long as possible, acting out their most damaging fantasies, but know that ultimately, these people must die.

  Victims who want to get help re
cognize how difficult it would be to convince authorities of the sadist’s behavior. They know that if they try but fail, the punishment will be severe. So, they often decide to just wait it out and hope they can eventually flee. Even the sadist’s accomplices, once caught, might wonder how they crossed a line they’d never believed they’d cross. Once they looked the other way during torture or committed a heinous act at the sadist’s behest, they were compromised. They had little choice but to continue. Skilled predators know how to stay in control.

  Even when sadistic parents are caught, convicted, and sentenced, the nightmares continue for their children. Some shun the media, change their names, get therapy, and hope to live their lives as normally as they can. Others seek out a public forum. No matter which route they take, the offender has stained their souls. They might end up with sleep or eating disorders, an inability to sustain healthy relationships, or unrelenting episodes of PTSD. Perhaps they unwittingly abuse their own children or feel an uncontrollable urge to lash out at people they love. The more they learn about the abnormality of their early lives, the more potential there is for the damage to affect significant areas of their adulthood. They might even fear that they’ll pass along a genetic infection, so they watch their own kids with increased vigilance.

  The sadistic predatory “caretaker” can have a devastating ripple effect on the lives of surviving victims that can take years to heal. Even when they finally understand what was done to them, they often suffer from feelings of guilt. They might even still love the parent who hurt them, not quite accepting the enormity of the abuse. They might respond when the parent still tries to control them from prison. This is difficult for outsiders to understand, but no matter what form it has taken, home is still home.

  Victims of abuse can still love the monster. This ambivalent loyalty might just be the predator’s ultimate form of damage.

  Dr. Katherine Ramsland is a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. She has published more than one thousand articles and sixty-five books, including The Psychology of Death Investigations; Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer; and The Mind of a Murderer. She presents workshops to law enforcement, coroners, and attorneys and has consulted for several television series, including The Alienist, CSI, and Bones. She also writes a regular blog for Psychology Today.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The subject matter is dark and scary, but my overwhelming feeling while writing this book was one of hope and appreciation. That has everything to do with Nikki, Sami, and Tori. I am so grateful to the brave Knotek sisters for trusting me with their story. I grew up in a family of brothers, but if I had been so lucky as to have a sister, I would wish for any of these three. Each reminds me that as terrible a person’s starting point in life might be, it’s where one ends up that really matters. And each one of them is living proof that, no matter what, the love of family is the one thing we can always count on.

  I’m also indebted to their father, Dave Knotek, for meeting me to talk about the very worst of his own journey through life with Shelly. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but now I see him through Sami’s and Tori’s eyes. I know that he will never minimize or try to shed his culpability in what happened in Raymond. He will spend the rest of his life atoning for what he did, and he only helped me write this story because his girls wanted him to.

  Lara Watson is everything you’d want your grandma to be. I will never forget our interview in Portland and her consistent support for telling the story since moving to sunnier climes. I also thank her youngest daughter for the photographs that helped me put the faces to the names of family members.

  Shelly continues to be the game player she always has been. We exchanged a number of letters and she agreed to meet me, but then kept putting me off, telling me she was too busy to find the time. We had a brief phone call too. For more than a year, I stayed somewhat hopeful that we’d connect for an interview. Silly me. She’s like so many of her ilk, a victim of circumstances that have nothing to do with anything she’s ever done.

  Many thanks to Kelly Paananen for the haunting memories of her sister (and for the cookies she brought back from New York). I know her heart is still heavy from the loss of Kathy. It’s a hurt that never goes away. Thanks to her brother Jeff Loreno too. I also appreciate the time and perspective Kaley Hanson and his mother, Barb, provided me on one of many visits to Raymond. And huge gratitude goes to Pacific County Senior Records clerk James Whorlton for saving the day when a file went missing.

  That leaves the publishing side of this book to recognize. I’m supremely grateful to Shannon Jamieson Vazquez for the great care and insight she provided during the editing process. She challenged me to dig deep, and while, admittedly, it was painful at times, it was exactly what I needed to do. And to the team at Thomas & Mercer and Amazon Publishing . . . what can I say? Gracie Doyle and Liz Pearsons, you are awesome—and you know an important story when you see one. I am the luckiest author ever.

  I haven’t written a true crime book in many years, so people ask: Why this book, why now? Shelly Knotek occupies a kind of strange space in the annals of true crime. Everything she did was the action of a monster—so horrific, so cruel. And yet, so unknown. She skated under the radar with the passage of time and the Alford plea. There was no sensational trial. No real public airing of all that she’d done.

  Nikki, Sami, and Tori wanted the world to know what their mother had done. It’s a warning to the vulnerable that will cross her path when she’s finally released. All worry that she’ll do it again.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Claudia Olsen

  #1 New York Times and Amazon Charts bestselling author Gregg Olsen has written more than thirty books, including Lying Next to Me, The Last Thing She Ever Did, and two novels in the Nicole Foster series, The Sound of Rain and The Weight of Silence. Known for his ability to create vivid and fascinating narratives, he’s appeared on multiple television and radio shows and news networks, such as Good Morning America, Dateline, Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and MSNBC. In addition, Olsen has been featured in Redbook, People, and Salon magazine, as well as in the Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, and New York Post. Both his fiction and nonfiction works have received critical acclaim and numerous awards, including prominence on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Washington State officially selected his young adult novel Envy for the National Book Festival, and The Deep Dark was named Idaho Book of the Year.

  A Seattle native who lives with his wife in rural Washington State, Olsen’s already at work on his next thriller. Visit him at www.greggolsen.com.