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

by Gregg Olsen

  “We all went out there in the morning,” Sami later said, her voice breaking. “Me, my sister, Shane . . . the snow was bloody and red all the way down the hillside. Like a big red stripe.”

  Tears flooded Nikki’s eyes when she saw the bloody snow that morning. She didn’t let them fall down her cheeks. Her mother would see. Her mother might enjoy that. Something else was at work, and the older Knotek sisters knew it. It was Kathy who was being tortured and punished, not them.

  “And as long as Mom was punishing Kathy,” she later said, “she was ignoring us. As sick as that was—and we knew it at the time—we were glad. We were glad Mom wasn’t doing it to us.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Kathy’s mother, Kaye, needed major heart surgery in March 1991, but her eldest daughter was nowhere to be found. They knew she was staying with Shelly Knotek, and family members had reached out to her there several times. Nothing. The phone rang and rang. Finally, when Shelly got on the line, she casually informed everyone that Kathy had moved away from the area.

  “She’s with her boyfriend, Rocky,” she said.

  “Rocky?” The name sounded vaguely familiar to Kathy’s sister, Kelly, but she’d never actually met him. Neither had her brothers.

  Shelly was short on specifics, but she was insistent. Then she hung up.

  Kathy was gone. But where?

  “We tried to find her,” Kelly said later. “We just couldn’t.”

  A short time later, Kelly received an envelope with a blurry photo of her sister standing in front of a semitruck. Inside was a note written in Kathy’s unmistakably girly handwriting. Kathy mentioned that she was sorry that she and Kelly didn’t have a close relationship, but she was fine.

  “She’d talked about Rocky,” Kelly said later, trying to catch a memory. “The story that was woven seemed plausible. I kept thinking I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to be in the family and if that meant I wasn’t going to see her again, that was okay. Maybe she found someone like in the romance novels. She’s living the life she wants to live and not miserable at home.”

  A month later, on April 15, 1991, the Knoteks all piled into the car for the drive to Washaway Beach, a spot on the Washington Coast known for its rapidly eroding beach, where ghost cabins and trailers hang over the swirling ocean and surfers ride the gray waves in the distance. It was Shelly’s birthday, and Washaway Beach was one of Dave’s favorite surfing spots. Tori sat up front with her parents, and the three older kids filled the back seat.

  Kathy, who rode in the trunk, was growing weaker by the day. Images captured by the family’s camcorder that afternoon show a woman in failing health. Her front teeth had begun to decay into black nubs, and her skin sagged where it had once been full. She sat in the sun, looking blankly at the water while her friend reveled in her special day.

  Shelly posed like a beach bunny on the windswept sand while Dave took her picture. Red hair lightened by the sun, blue eyes that sparkled when she laughed—no one who saw her could deny that she was strikingly beautiful at thirty-seven years old. She promised treats for the kids, and told Dave how much she loved him.

  No one could see what was going on behind that pretty face and the sweet words.

  Or how long she’d wear that mask.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sami Knotek didn’t know what her parents were thinking when they decided to buy the shingle-sided white farmhouse on Monohon Landing Road in Raymond in the summer of 1992. The house was no great shakes, and Shelly was mad about having to move there. It was a real step down from the elegance and charm of the Louderback House. It was a 1930s farmhouse that needed a ton of work. Dave was handy, but he wasn’t around much because of his job.

  The location wasn’t terrible. Fruit trees, mostly apple, formed a small orchard on the property, and a large field ran up to the edge of a second-growth forest of fir and hemlock. Elk rutted a path through the property, and blue herons had a rookery nearby. The house was situated on a winding road that ran along the Willapa River out in the country. Way out. About the only thing Sami could think of that made Monohon Landing desirable, from her point of view, was that it sat on a main road, not tucked among towering firs off the beaten path. Maybe things would be better there, she hoped. If the property was more exposed from the road, maybe Kathy couldn’t get as abused there. Maybe her mom wouldn’t make her work out in the yard naked. Maybe Nikki and Shane wouldn’t be forced to wallow.

  But it turned out that the location was more secluded than Sami had expected. On the first or second day there, Shelly told Sami to go around the property and along the road—all vantage points—to see what a bystander or another homeowner might be able to view of their house and yard.

  “Privacy,” she told her middle daughter, “is very important to our family.”

  The almost seventh grader spent several hours doing as her mother asked. She walked up into the woods and over a recently logged area on Weyerhaeuser property. When she got home, she told her mother what she saw.

  “Nothing,” Sami said. “You can see part of the house, but nothing else.”

  The property was just shy of five acres, and mostly fenced. That was good. The Knotek household had its share of pets—mostly dogs and cats, though at the new house, the menagerie eventually grew to include horses, chickens, a cockatiel, and a rabbit named Buttercup. While Shelly professed a love for animals, in truth she only seemed to like collecting them and seldom actually cared for any.

  There was also a collection of outbuildings. Most of them were small—a chicken coop, a tool shed, a dilapidated barn, a well house, and a pump house affirmed that the place was indeed a mini-farm. The largest of the structures was a pole building the size of a suburban garage, organized with a workbench, storage racks, a pantry, and a freezer. Just steps from the back door, the aluminum building provided much-needed space for all of the things that wouldn’t fit in the house.

  The house was too small. Sami knew it. So did the other kids.

  At just over sixteen hundred square feet, with two tiny upstairs bedrooms separated by what they’d come to call the computer room and a master bedroom for her parents on the main level, there were not enough bedrooms for the three sisters, Shane, and Kathy.

  Plus, there was only one bathroom—and it was next to their parent’s bedroom. That alone made the house shrink even smaller.

  Tori slept in her parents’ bedroom on the first floor. Shane slept mostly in Nikki’s closet, without the benefit of a mattress.

  “Just a blanket,” Sami said later. “That’s it. The whole time he lived at Monohon Landing, Shane never had a room.”

  Neither did Kathy. She slept on the floor in the living room. By then, her belongings fit into a single paper bag. Almost everything she’d owned when she’d moved in with the Knoteks had vanished. Her bedroom furniture, most of her clothes, her books and other personal items—all gone. Dave parked Kathy’s old Plymouth Duster in the back of the new house. After a while, it disappeared too.

  Shelly immediately went to work making plans to refurbish the place—fixing the kitchen, adding a hot tub, and tearing out the junk left behind by the previous owner. For weeks, the family worked day and night, mostly at night, ripping out the carpet, gutting the kitchen. Dave would come home on weekends, exhausted from the five-hour drive from his construction job on Whidbey Island and do his best to get their home up to Shelly’s standards. Nikki and Sami were given carte blanche decorating their bedrooms. Nikki asked for—and got—a black-and-white fifties checkerboard theme, while Sami picked out coral-colored carpeting.

  After the house was in somewhat better shape, Shelly told Nikki that she was going to paint it barn red. When she picked up the paint, however, it was a bright red. Shelly shrugged off the color error, handed Nikki a one-inch paintbrush, and told her to get to work.

  It took the teen all summer long.

  Sami, for her part, was instructed to paint the pole building. To no one’s particular surprise
, Sami was given better painting supplies. Shane was stuck cleaning up the neglected yard and stacking wood. Shelly would check their work occasionally. Mostly she sat on the sofa watching soap operas and eating Oh Henry! bars, shoving the waxy wrappers between the cushions.

  The new locale and the hard work didn’t change the fundamental dynamic. Shelly continued her relentless attacks, focused mainly on Shane and Kathy.

  Shelly’s unpredictable abuse put everyone on high alert. Nikki flinched whenever her mother approached her. Shelly would bite her on the head. Slap her in the face. Punch her. Nikki got smacked one time because she fell asleep in the passenger seat of the car and her mother wanted her to be awake.

  At the school-bus stop one time, Shelly was mad at Nikki but waited for the bus to stop in front of the house before she slapped her good and hard on the face.

  “She wanted my friends to see so they could make fun of me.”

  Shelly showed up at Nikki’s junior high in the middle of the day looking for mascara that she was convinced Nikki had stolen from her bathroom. She got her daughter’s locker open and tore it apart, throwing everything on the floor while a bunch of kids looked on.

  “She took it!” she yelled in front of Nikki’s classmates. “She stole my mascara! That’s not right. A daughter shouldn’t do that! A good daughter wouldn’t.”

  As cruel as her mother could be to Nikki, she always saved the worst for Kathy.

  Kathy didn’t bathe often before or after the Knoteks moved to Monohon Landing Road. Like the older kids, most of the time she wasn’t allowed to. At first, the baths were much like the ones she’d been given at the Louderback House—the hose was turned on her while she stood naked outside on the grass behind the house. It didn’t matter what time of year or how cold the weather was.

  Soap was dispensed with. Instead, Shelly poured bleach on Kathy.

  “You’re a filthy pig and this will clean you up!”

  Kathy screamed as the caustic liquid splashed into open sores that mottled her skin from head to toe. When she cried out too much, or struggled to get away, either Shelly or Dave, when he was home, would duct-tape her legs and arms. When Dave wasn’t there, it was Shane who was told to hold Kathy down while Shelly washed her friend with the hose.

  One time Shelly put a piece of duct tape over Kathy’s mouth to stop her from alerting the neighbors.

  “You need to shut up! What’s wrong with you? I’m helping you. You stupid pig!”

  After a bath was over, invariably Shelly would switch over to a sweet, kind persona. She’d put her arms around Kathy’s shoulders.

  “Now, doesn’t that feel a whole lot better?”

  Dave asked Shelly about Kathy, and Shelly insisted that she was helping her get better. After a while, he saw less and less of his wife’s best friend. When he came home on the weekends from work, Kathy was nowhere to be seen.

  The girls told him that their mom kept Kathy in the pump house.

  That didn’t seem right at all, so Dave confronted Shelly about it.

  “Why is she in the pump house, Shell?”

  Shelly seemed perfectly fine with the arrangement. After all, she had good reason for it.

  “She needs to be protected,” she said.

  “Protected? Why?”

  Shelly shook her head knowingly. “From the kids, Dave.”

  The kids? That didn’t make sense. They were good kids. He was so tired of battling Shelly that he didn’t argue with his wife—something he’d later admit that he couldn’t do even if he’d had a good night’s sleep.

  Dave took Shelly’s word as gospel. She continually insisted that it was Shane who was abusing Kathy, and that when she put her best friend in the pump house, it was only to protect her from their nephew. “One time when I came home, Shane was dragging Kathy around the yard by her feet,” Dave recalled. Despite the likelihood that Shane had probably been doing so at Shelly’s bidding, Dave felt certain after witnessing that incident that Shelly must have been telling the absolute truth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Where’s Kathy?”

  Shelly got up from the couch in the living room at the Monohon Landing house and started yelling. She stood there in her robe, her hair bushy and unkempt.

  “She’s pulling weeds,” Sami said.

  “She’s gone,” Shelly yelled, looking out the window before heading back to the bedroom to get dressed. “Go look for her in the woods. Right now!”

  She didn’t need to add the “right now.” Everything Shelly said was a command that demanded immediate attention. Sami ran out the door and across the field to the woods behind the house. She called Kathy’s name over and over as she scoured the landscape. Sami knew that her mother wouldn’t be satisfied unless she looked until nightfall. The girls and Shane ran the deer trails of the forest.

  “Maybe she got away,” Shane said.

  “I hope so,” Nikki said.

  Shelly drove off, and two hours later, she was back with Kathy, who carried two bags of new clothes from the Wishkah Mall in Aberdeen. Shelly said she’d found Kathy with a friend, and had been able to talk things over in the privacy of a mall bathroom. Kathy had decided to come home. She had a green outfit and a red one; both were pants sets with striped shirts to match. She was also wearing something new, which surprised Sami and Nikki. Kathy looked better than she had in ages, though some of her hair and her teeth had fallen out. She appeared clean and seemed happier.

  Nikki was incredulous. She couldn’t make sense of why Kathy didn’t stay gone. Why Kathy hadn’t used her chance to tell someone. The friend at the mall? The police?

  Anyone?

  “I was shocked when she came back,” she said years later. “I was shocked my mom wasn’t in trouble. I could not believe it. I thought it was criminal. Kathy could go to the cops and say she was abused. Why is she back here? She’s just fucking crazy now. She’s gone. She’s mental. I thought that about my dad too. Why doesn’t he divorce her?”

  Years later, Sami would tear up at the thought of Kathy being happier. It was so ugly and unfair. “She got to stay inside a little while after Shelly captured her at the mall. Not very long. But some time.”

  A few days later, Kathy was back out in the pump house, as a punishment for running away.

  No one ever saw her wear those nice new clothes again.

  Kathy tried to escape again. And again. One time she even tried to make a run for it while naked.

  A kid came up to Sami at school with a story to tell about that one.

  “Ha ha!” he said. “They saw your mom from the bus. She was running around the yard naked! She looked like a big old naked bear!”

  Sami wanted to curl up and die.

  “I doubt it,” she said, deflecting what was entirely possible.

  “Erin’s mom saw it.”

  Erin’s mom was the school bus driver.

  Sami tried to shake it off, but the talk went around the school like one of those steel balls in an old pinball machine. It just wouldn’t let up.

  Sami told her mom all about it when she got home.

  “Shit,” Shelly said. “It was Kathy! She was trying to run away! I caught her though.”

  The explanation was what she’d half expected. “It’s really embarrassing, Mom,” Sami said. “They think it was you.”

  Shelly freaked out. It was Kathy! People would wonder what was going on at their house if they’d seen Kathy run around the yard naked. She made up a plan in all of two seconds.

  “Invite Erin over,” she said. “You girls can use the hot tub.”

  Later, when Erin came over, she and Sami were in the hot tub and Shelly approached.

  “Oh God,” Shelly said. “I’m so embarrassed. I was in the hot tub, naked, and all of a sudden it sparked, and I jumped out and ran across the yard. I was scared! I thought I was going to die!”

  The girls listened to the story and added a couple of “oh wow’s” as Shelly proceeded to point to a burned spot on the hot
tub walls while she explained how the wires had sparked.

  “My mom was that good,” Sami said later. “She burned that spot before Erin came over, so her story would seem more plausible. I don’t know if Erin believed her, but I almost did.”

  Nikki heard yelling and watched through the open door of the pole building where she’d been instructed to do chores. Kathy had been let out of the pump house that day to do some weeding, and it seemed that Shelly was dissatisfied by her performance. At Shelly’s direction, Dave dragged Kathy from the garden where she’d been weeding to punish her. When Nikki looked over at Kathy, she was naked and crying and lying on a slab of concrete.

  “Kick her, Dave!” Shelly commanded.

  Dave didn’t say a word. He almost never did. He was wearing the steel-toed boots that he wore out in the woods and he kicked Kathy in the head.

  “She was moaning, and she was just lying on the ground,” Nikki said later. “I think it was pretty hard. And then I didn’t pay attention. I just went back inside the pole building.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The pump house was the smallest of the outbuildings on the property that included an old barn, a pole building, a chicken house, and a couple of storage sheds. It was dark, musty, and cold. Shelly decided it would be a good place for Kathy to think about what she’d done wrong. Nikki and Shane had also been occasional inhabitants of the four-foot-by-four-foot structure.

  Kathy was forced to stay in there for days, even weeks, at a time.

  Sami brought some cushions from an old brown sofa stored in the woodshed to make it more comfortable for Kathy. When Shelly found out, she made Sami remove them right away.

  “We want her to get better!” Shelly said. “We don’t want her to be comfortable! She has to figure all of this out and understand why she’s being punished. We want her to come back inside the house, not live out here!”