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

by Gregg Olsen

  When the teenager with the big smile and eager sense of humor vanished, Shelly didn’t tell her stepmother about it for the longest time. In fact, whenever Lara sent a check for Christmas or his birthday, it got cashed immediately—endorsed by Shane.

  “Can I talk to him?” Lara asked Shelly, who adeptly pushed the request aside with an excuse.

  Shelly sighed as if she understood the disappointment. “He’s not home.”

  “He’s never home,” Lara grumbled.

  “Teenagers,” Shelly shot back with a short laugh. “What can you do?”

  Every time that happened, Shane’s grandmother would hang up, somehow placated by her stepdaughter’s insistence that Shane was doing fine, doing just what kids do. Later, it would eat at her as to why she put up with it. She should have pushed Shelly a lot harder. But she’d allowed herself to accept what Shelly was saying.

  Teenagers!

  “I have no doubts that Shane would have been happy to call me back,” Lara said, many years later.

  Except he never did.

  Finally, after a series of similar exchanges, Shelly finally divulged to her stepmother that Shane wasn’t coming back to Raymond anytime soon.

  “He’s up in Alaska,” she said with a sigh. “He’s working on a fishing boat up there. You know that he’s been wanting to do that for a long time.”

  Shelly’s story was plausible yet still not quite right. He would have told his grandmother his plans.

  “I just talked to him,” Shelly went on. “He’s doing great. He loves it up there. It’s his dream come true. I’ll tell him to call you the next time we talk.”

  “He never said that to me,” Lara said, pushing back a little.

  Shelly seemed miffed. “What?”

  Lara pushed a little harder. “That fishing was his dream.”

  “You aren’t close to him like we are.”

  “I’ve known him since he was born,” Lara countered. “He said he wanted to finish school, Shelly. You know that.”

  “He changed his mind.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look,” Shelly said, “Shane was all about making money. That’s why he left. He’ll be back. I know it.”

  But, just like before, Shane never called his grandmother.

  He never called anyone except Shelly.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  After graduating from Willapa Valley High in 1993, Nikki set her sights on two things: getting a college diploma and moving the hell away from her parents and everything she’d ever known. Or seen. She’d enrolled in Grays Harbor community college with the plan of earning a degree in criminal justice. She’d even managed to arrange for financial assistance in the form of a student grant. She’d been beaten down by things beyond her control, but still had a measure of genuine optimism. Yes, she was lonely and almost didn’t dare to hope for a future that involved happiness and love and freedom. But she did hope. She knew she deserved better.

  And then, like the drip, drip, drip of a leaky kitchen faucet, her mom went after her dreams.

  First the clothes Nikki wore to class disappeared. All she had to wear were the sweatpants she used when working in the yard. They were dirty and torn. To show up on campus looking like that would chip away at whatever personal pride she’d been able to grow by being away from Monohon Landing during the day.

  Next, Shelly told Nikki that she no longer had a bedroom upstairs.

  She pointed to a spot in the living room. “You’ll be sleeping down here on the floor.”

  It was the same place she’d made Kathy sleep.

  Something was happening, and Nikki knew it.

  Then Shelly took away the money and transportation to class.

  “We are cutting you off, Nikki. You don’t deserve anything we’ve done for you. You are selfish. Ungrateful. Dad and I mean it this time.”

  Nikki could cry. She could argue. Any reaction would have been expected, but she didn’t fall into her mother’s trap just then. She had no car, and no money for bus fare. No clothes to wear to class. That meant no more school. No more being in the world to get the hell out of Raymond.

  There was nothing she could do.

  Nikki was trapped.

  Shelly put her to work in the yard, digging out the garden, moving wood from one place to the next. Doing random tasks that never seemed to go anywhere. Her mom insisted that she make a new flowerbed, but she had no intent—or none that Nikki could see—to do anything with the space. She’d get up early and be told to get out the door and not come back in until nighttime.

  Her mother would come out every once in a while and harangue her for not doing a good job.

  “Is that all you did today? You lazy bitch!”

  At night—on those occasions when she was allowed inside the house—Nikki slept on the living room floor with a sofa cushion for her pillow.

  When Dave would come home, he’d join Shelly in a barrage of insults, berating Nikki for being lazy and worthless and needing to get a job.

  Tears would come, and both of her parents would push it even harder.

  Shelly seemed to enjoy her daughter’s tears.

  “You need to get a job!” she’d rail over and over. “You worthless piece of shit!”

  Seriously, Nikki thought. Really? How could I get a job? I have no transportation. No money. I shower outside with the hose!

  She was technically living in her family’s home, but she was homeless in nearly every way.

  Finally, she spoke up. It took everything she had, but it felt good.

  Very good.

  “I can’t get a job! Look at me! I have nothing to wear! No way to get anywhere!”

  “I was yelling at her and him”—Nikki remembered trying to defend herself—“and my mom would put on an innocent act and say, ‘You should have told me you needed a car! I had no idea that was your problem.’”

  Nikki was getting stronger. Her mental resolve had gone from rubber to titanium. One time when she refused to acquiesce to a demand, her mom came chasing after her. Nikki ran from the house to the chicken coop and tried to lock it before her mom got there, but her mom was too fast.

  “My mom had the adrenaline of a frickin’ linebacker and the strength too,” Nikki said later. “But I didn’t care anymore.”

  Shelly got on top of Nikki and started screaming at her and pulling her hair, and Nikki fought back. Her mother fell to the ground. She looked startled. Shocked, even. No one ever fought back.

  I’m almost as big as you, Nikki thought. I don’t need to be treated like this.

  “Fuck off, Mom! Don’t you ever touch me!”

  And then she got up and ran with Shelly right behind her.

  Nikki made it into the house and saw Sami.

  “I just told Mom to fuck off!” she yelled, but kept running, this time out the other door and into the woods, where she slept that night.

  It felt good. Scary. But good.

  A few days after the shoving match in the chicken coop, Shelly approached Nikki. She wore a weary mask of concern. Her voice stayed oddly calm, almost sad.

  “Sami doesn’t want you here anymore,” she said in a tone of heavy disclosure, “fighting with her mother the way you’ve been doing. I’m sending you to Aunt Trish’s.”

  That came out of the blue. Nikki didn’t know what was happening. Trish was Dave’s sister. She was nearly a stranger to Nikki, who’d only seen her a couple of times in her life. She lived four hours away in Hope, British Columbia, on a reservation. Shelly gave her daughter some clothes, fifty dollars in cash, and drove her to the Greyhound bus station in Olympia.

  This was sweet and understanding Shelly the whole way. She was going to miss Nikki so much, but it was for the best.

  “Ten days,” she said. “Then you’ll come back home, all right?”

  Nikki was just out of her teens, but had never been anywhere by herself, and was worried about the trip, and whether fifty dollars would go far enough.

  A
s it turned out, however, the stay with Aunt Trish in Hope turned out to be the best thing that had happened to Nikki in a long time.

  “Bad things happen at home,” Nikki told her aunt, choosing words that she thought got the message across but weren’t specific enough to escalate blame. “Please don’t make me go back.”

  The days turned into weeks, then a couple of months. Trish cleaned churches and houses and enlisted Nikki to help. On weekends, she learned to tie fishing nets. Nikki didn’t mind the work. She enjoyed it. No one yelled at her. No one told her she was worthless.

  Nikki never wanted to leave.

  Sami understood the reasons behind Nikki’s absence, of course. Tori, however, felt abandoned. She was just a little girl, fourteen years younger than Nikki, and she idolized her oldest sister, who’d been like a second mother to her. Nikki was beautiful, and kind, and she always made time for Tori. The night her big sister left for Canada, Tori asked Jesus to please bring her back. She had no idea where Nikki had gone, but she suspected that she’d left because their mother had been so cruel to her. Tori wrote a note to that effect and put it on her windowsill and went to bed.

  Early the next morning, she woke to her mom punching and slapping her in the face.

  “What’s this?!” Shelly waved the note as she screamed.

  Tori, then six, started to cry.

  “You think I’m mean to your sister?” Shelly hit her again. “Is that what you think, Tori? Really?”

  It was exactly what Tori thought, but she told her mom no and that she was sorry. The truth was she was frightened—Shelly had never acted like this toward her before.

  “I think that may have been, like, the first time my mom, like, hit me in the face,” Tori recalled. “It was very scary.”

  Not long after, a few gifts arrived. There must have been something in Shelly that understood the impact of Nikki’s departure on her youngest.

  “This is from your sister,” she’d say.

  “Why can’t I see her?” Tori asked.

  “She just left this. She didn’t stay.”

  “But why?”

  Shelly never really had a good answer. In time, she started to do her best to end the relationship between the two of them.

  “She’s no good,” she told Tori over and over about Nikki. “She doesn’t love you.”

  And then, just like that, Nikki no longer existed. Shelly never brought her up. Neither did Dave. It was like she was a ghost that had faded away somewhere never to return.

  Sami never brought Nikki up either. She didn’t dare. She didn’t want her family to know that she was still in touch with her sister.

  Trish tried to keep her niece in British Columbia, but like just about everyone else, she was no match for Shelly. Eventually Nikki headed back to Washington.

  But she didn’t go home.

  Shelly told Nikki that she had some thinking to do and was not a good role model for the other girls. She couldn’t come back to Raymond after all. At least not yet. Instead, Nikki moved into a tent adjacent to her stepfather’s jobsite on Whidbey Island. It was far from ideal, but it was an eye-opener. Nikki saw that, despite working full time, Dave Knotek lived like he was destitute. He literally had zero money in his wallet. The two of them got groceries from a charity food pantry. They showered every morning at the state park not too far from the jobsite. Nikki remained justifiably bitter about the punishments her stepdad had forced on her, but mostly she now saw him as pathetic, a loser.

  She had no respect for him.

  “Why are you living like this?” she asked. “Why are you still with Mom?”

  Dave didn’t even blink. “You,” he said. “You girls.”

  A couple of weeks later, Nikki and Dave temporarily moved into an Everett condo to be near a job he was working near Paine Field. Hot running water, she thought at the time, is an amazing thing. Almost every weekend, they’d make the trip to Raymond for a night or two.

  Each visit home was the same. Her mother would treat Nikki as though the exile to Canada and then Whidbey Island had been a learning experience.

  “Do you think you are ready to come home? To pull your weight around here, Nikki?”

  “Do you think I am?” Nikki asked, knowing there was no way she was ever coming back.

  Shelly shifted her tone. She was irritated. “I can see someone needs more time to think about things,” she said.

  It was the kind of response for which Nikki had prayed.

  I’d rather be homeless, she thought.

  She and Dave moved back into the tent after the condo. It was cold and drafty, and by then Nikki had been looking for a way out. She got a job in Oak Harbor at Baskin-Robbins and then a second one cleaning motel rooms. The motel owner gave her the use of a single-wide trailer. It was a shabby dump, but she was grateful for it. All in all, she thought things were looking pretty good.

  She felt free.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Sami Jo Knotek knew not only how to hide her bruises, but the importance of doing so.

  Having someone see the marks left by her mother or father might have sparked a conversation that no one wanted to have. Or even worse, it might have led to something as dire as the ruin of her family. Even on the crazy train, there is a place where the world is shut out and things go on feeling as though they are normal or even worth fighting for.

  On the outside, Sami was blonde, pretty, popular. She was homecoming-court material. She was smart, and funny too—the kind of girl who got the attention of the boys with a funny quip. Yet by her senior year, Sami was taking a “fuck it” approach to life. She’d grown tired of covering up what her mom had been doing to her and her older sister. She’d learned from Nikki’s experience that not rocking the boat didn’t stop bad things from happening. It only allowed them to continue.

  “You’re late with your homework,” the teacher said.

  “My mom threw away my paper,” Sami said.

  And so it went. Time and again.

  “You are late to class.”

  “My mom made me sleep outside last night and only let me in this morning to get dressed.”

  “You’re going to be charged for missing library books.”

  “Fine,” Sami said. “My mom burned my books in the fireplace.”

  And so on.

  Not long after, Sami was called in front of the school counselor.

  “We’ve been listening,” the counselor said. “You have a little sister at home and we’re concerned about her too. We’re going to report what you told us.”

  Sami sat there with mixed feelings. They believed her—that part was good. But now shit was going to hit the fan.

  Big time.

  As that dawned on her, she grew frightened. The elated feeling of calling her mother out for being a cruel, chronic abuser was fading. Fast.

  “We’re going to make arrangements to have your sister removed from the home,” the counselor said. “We are going to call your mom now.”

  As the counselor reached for the phone, Sami panicked.

  Years later, it would be difficult for her to articulate why she backed down at that point, but that’s exactly what she did.

  “All of a sudden,” she said, “I don’t know. The truth became scary. I took it all back. I said that I’d made everything up. I said I was lying. I guess I didn’t want them to make my mother mad.”

  Sami and her high school boyfriend, Kaley Hanson, had been out late to a party. Sami knew what her boyfriend would do. He’d keep his headlights on and wait for his girlfriend to get inside safely. If she’d been locked out—as had been known to happen—he’d ratchet up his duty by honking the horn a few times to let Shelly know that someone needed to get into the house.

  Shelly would let her inside . . . until Kaley’s car disappeared. Then Sami would be sent back outside to sleep on the porch.

  One night, Shelly stood there with a big glass of water and told her daughter to get out.

  “You’re sleepi
ng outside.”

  “I’m not. It’s cold and you aren’t going to make me.”

  With that, Shelly threw the glass of water at Sami and shoved her outside. Sami immediately started running to Kaley’s house. She’d had it. She wasn’t going to take it anymore. It was more than a mile, but Sami was a track star; she’d lettered in the four-hundred-meter run and the mile relay.

  Every time headlights cut through the darkness, she threw herself into a ditch, sure that her mother would hunt her down and bring her home. But Sami kept going and finally got to Cemetery Road where Kaley lived.

  Sure enough, her mother’s car, hot on her trail, went by like a shark searching in the dark. Sami was terrified, but she let herself into the Hansons’ garage.

  She stayed there for a while, dodging her mother and hoping she hadn’t made things worse.

  Dave Knotek would later say that he wasn’t at the Monohon Landing house all that much, so he really didn’t have a clue about how bad things actually were. He insisted that Shelly would never, ever hurt Sami or Tori. He loved his girls, but he stood by his wife. Sami, he thought at the time, was a storyteller, and he’d “have to raise an eyebrow” about what she said. Indeed, nothing would convince him that anything abusive was going on.

  “There’s no way Shell’s going to sit there and beat Sam or Tori,” he said years later. “She’d spank Nikki. I’ve spanked Nikki, okay? That’s it. Those kids didn’t suffer no abuse like that.”

  Even after his own world had disintegrated, Dave just couldn’t find fault with Shelly. He turned a blind eye to physical evidence too. The day Sami graduated from high school, she was badly bruised from injuries inflicted by her mother in one of her tirades—the reason behind it so minor, no one could even remember later what the transgression was. Not doing the dishes to her satisfaction? Not watering the animals? Loaning a jacket or sweater to a friend? But Dave attributed those graduation-day bruises to Sami’s own side of the scorecard, saying that she’d been a daredevil and risk-taker and had injured herself in a fall.