by Gregg Olsen
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It was. You killed her, Mom. You did it.”
Suddenly, Shelly became really quiet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Sami saw it as an admission.
“Sorry?” she asked, as though repeating the word of a foreigner just to make sure it was understood.
Shelly nodded. “Things got out of control. I couldn’t stop it, Sami. I tried.”
Part of what she said was true, and Sami knew it. Things did get way out of control. But no, Shelly hadn’t tried to stop it. She had made all of it happen.
Five minutes later, the wind suddenly shifted.
Shelly took back her words. She reeled back every single thing she’d said.
“You took everything the wrong way, Sami. I never said anything like that at all,” Shelly backtracked.
“She acted like she’d never admitted anything to me,” Sami said later. “It was just like, whatever. Like I was crazy that I would even think she’d confessed to anything.”
Sami didn’t care. She was enrolled in Evergreen. She was gone too.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Knotek finances continued to tumble downward. College expenses didn’t help, and they had debts all over town too. Stan the Hot Water Man was owed for work he’d done. The phone company threatened to terminate service. Shelly stayed fast on her feet with excuses to hold things at bay until some money came in. She told the water company that a family emergency had transpired and she’d be unable to resolve the bill anytime soon. Her husband, she wrote, had suffered a major heart attack.
“He is doing fine now . . . I am at his side constantly and am trying to do so many other things, it’s really overwhelming . . .”
In another missive to a lender, she pinned her tardiness on different fictional family diseases.
“My life has been very hard this year. My eldest daughter has been fighting MS and my father is very ill.”
Shelly would play the illness card whenever she thought it might help. When making excuses for a moving violation in South Bend, Shelly wrote traffic court that she was under a lot of stress and that her transgression—which had led to her car being impounded—should be forgiven.
“This has been a hard year for me. My daughter has cancer. I need to take her in for treatment in Olympia twice weekly. I left my job to be with her. My daughter is everything to me and she depends on me. I am not a criminal.”
The Washington State Patrol granted her hardship.
While Dave was barely functioning at work, cracking ammonia vials so he could stay awake to run the machinery and sleeping in his car because that was the best he could do, back home Shelly was on a perpetual spending spree at the little mall in Aberdeen. Dave had no way of knowing, of course. She had removed him as a signatory on the couple’s checking account. Dave never saw what happened to his paycheck.
Not that his paycheck was enough. Not for Shelly.
She also managed to procure more than $36,000 in personal loans behind Dave’s back—a testament to her persuasive nature with the Raymond branch of Bank of America. It was quite a feat. The couple had zero collateral. The house on Monohon Landing had been refinanced to the hilt, and their credit rating would have been abysmal.
Yet Shelly, persistent and ever resourceful, always found a way. And once she got the hefty credit line, she immediately went to work at whittling the balance down. She did it in a frenzy too. It was as though spending money had become a drug. Or maybe a replacement for one. Shelly wrote as many as thirty checks a day at stores at the mall in Aberdeen. One afternoon, she wrote nine at a Target store, moving from one red-smocked checker to the next as the day wore on. None of the purchases were large; most were only five or ten dollars. That could have been strategic on Shelly’s part. She might have been thinking that smaller checks would be more likely to go unchallenged. It wasn’t that she was lavishing on herself. She mostly purchased things for Sami and Tori and, occasionally, some little knickknacks for the house. Some of Shelly’s sprees were inexplicable not only for how many checks she was writing at a single place each day, but because the sprees repeated themselves over the course of a week. Every day. She’d return to Aberdeen and spend whatever she had—and some of whatever she didn’t.
She’d take a single day off, then start up again.
It didn’t matter that everything could implode around her at any time; she just bought until her reserves ran dry.
And when they did, the checks would bounce all over town.
Some months, Shelly was stuck with more than $250 in fees for overdrawing her checking account. When the balance became too thin, she’d simply go to another branch and open a new account. When it reached the point where she was spinning without a retail lifeline and no one would give her money at the moment, Shelly would drive to the branch in Raymond and withdraw money from her daughters’ bank accounts.
“That’s Raymond for you,” Nikki said later. “Such a small town that someone’s mom can go to the bank and empty out an account that she’s not even on.”
To apply for a loan or a security deposit—really anything in which a Social Security number was required—Shelly Knotek had surefire advice for everyone with money troubles.
Sami called her mom from school once, and told her that her Social Security number didn’t work.
“Just keep changing the last number until you get one that works,” her mother said.
Sami said she didn’t feel comfortable doing that.
“Then use your sister’s,” Shelly advised, as though that was perfectly acceptable advice. “Tori’s is clean at the moment.”
Sami refused to do that too.
Shelly’s alchemy with other people’s money and Social Security numbers went on for a very long time. Some years later, when Sami tried to get an apartment, her application was rejected because she had bad credit. There was a debt of $36,000 associated with her Social Security number. It wasn’t her name on the account, however.
It was her mother’s. Shelly Knotek had presented Sami’s number as her own.
Shelly tried to explain it away. She told her daughter that there had been a mix-up at the bank. Sami knew better. Dave, however, continued to stand by his wife.
“Sami and Shell shared the same account. Our name had been screwed up in the account and it was the bank’s fault. There was a rift about that between Sami, Shell, and me, but it all got worked out,” he said.
For his part, Dave would scratch his head years later when confronted with what his wife was doing behind his back with their always-on-the-brink, completely chaotic finances. For a couple of years, he foolishly believed Shelly’s spendthrift ways were long gone. They had to be. They didn’t have any money to spare. It had been a problem early in their marriage that he believed he’d solved with a combination of tough love and a dose of reality.
“I had to curb [the spending] but she’d gotten better over the years. And, there’d be just stuff and it was for the house. She was buying a lot for Sami too.”
In reality, Dave, who had grown up dirt poor on the banks of Elk Creek, had never wanted the girls to go without. Arguments with Shelly over money never entered into the territory of depriving Nikki, Sami, or Tori of anything they might desire. Dance and drama lessons, sports, new clothes, birthday parties, and a menagerie of pets were all fine with him.
Yet Dave could never fathom where all the money went.
“Where the hell did that money go? I mean Shell obviously would have bought herself a car or something like that. Something nice. You know we drove around in junkers for years.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
All alone in the house now, Tori had been tagged you’re it.
Shelly had turned her attention to Tori shortly after Sami went away to college. She’d reverted to some of her old favorite bits before Sami was completely gone, but they were subtle. As early as elementary school and into middle school, Tori would often wonder if she was
losing her mind because she kept misplacing her homework.
“Mom, have you seen my paper?”
Shelly hadn’t.
“I know I put it away, but I can’t find it.”
Shelly would give her a look. “You’ll just have to do it again.”
Mom was weird, she thought. But Mom was Mom.
Some of Tori’s greatest difficulties came from how badly she missed her father. He was tired when he came home, but he spent time with her and they laughed and did things together. Later in life, she’d hold dozens of good memories of time with her dad—even if it was just small stuff, like watching TV or fishing in the river. Sometimes, however, it felt almost a little easier having him away. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him around. It was simply because whenever he was home, her mother would pick a fight.
Screaming and yelling would fill the air. Things would get thrown. Threats would be made. Shelly would call Dave every ugly name under the sun.
No kid wants to hear that.
“I remember being so excited for Dad to come home when I was little,” Tori said later, “but after a while I, like, got to the point where I was older, and I was, like, more of a teenager where I, like, didn’t care as much because he’d come home, they’d just fight . . . There were a couple of times where it was a good time, like we’d play video games. I think he had the ability to be a great dad when I was younger, but it was just a toxic situation. I know he loved me a lot.”
On no occasion could she remember the fights being her father’s fault. Shelly was always the instigator.
“Where’s your goddamn paycheck, Dave?” Tori remembered Shelly yelling into the phone. “You fucking hick! You said I’d have it today!”
Tori could only imagine her father on the other end of the line, likely insisting that he’d sent it. She couldn’t picture him delaying it or keeping it to himself. He gave Shelly everything she wanted.
“It wasn’t in the fucking PO box. I checked. I’m so fucking tired of you.”
And finally: “I should just divorce you. I should never have married such an idiot.”
When he came home, Dave slept on the floor next to the couch.
All of it was heartbreaking and confusing. “My dad seemed unhappy all of the time,” Tori said. “He looked really bummed, like he didn’t want to be home. I remember feeling bad in general that he was married to my mom because he looked so sad.”
In time, Tori could see that she was in the middle of a war between her parents. It was a knock-down, drag-out, and she was all but certain to be collateral damage.
There would be others, of course. Her mother’s first stealth attack against Tori came in the darkness of the night. The house was empty. And Shelly, who only slept when Tori was at school during the day, jumped on her daughter and pulled away the bedcovers.
Tori’s eyes popped open and she gasped. She didn’t know what was wrong. Maybe the house was on fire? Maybe her mom was having a heart attack?
It was sudden. Scary. And it came from nowhere.
“Would you ever consider killing yourself?” Shelly demanded.
“No, Mom,” Tori said.
Shelly stayed put for what felt like a very long time. Maybe she was looking for more of a response. Maybe a different response? Tori didn’t know. She stayed silent. She was too scared to engage with her mother.
Finally, Shelly left the room.
Tori couldn’t sleep. All sorts of things ran through her mind. One stayed at the forefront.
Oh my God, is she going to kill me and make it look like I killed myself?
The Knoteks kept a large ham radio tucked in under the breakfast bar of the kitchen. It was Dave’s and he was the only one who really messed around with it. Since he was never home, it just sat there. One day Shelly blew her top about something that Tori, then eight, had done and shoved her hard into the radio.
Tori was in shock. She knew her mother shouldn’t have done that. She couldn’t imagine her mom doing anything like that. Not to her. She touched the side of her head. It was wet.
Blood.
She started to cry. Instead of apologizing or helping her, her mother just stood there, frozen, with a look of complete disdain.
“You pussy!” Shelly screamed. “Get up!”
The incident had a profound impact on the girl. After that, whenever her mom commanded her to do something that she knew was embarrassing or wrong, she thought of the time her mom had cut her head open. She knew that, no matter what, if her mom wanted to, she could really hurt her.
Shelly’s voice scared the hell out of her youngest daughter. At the beginning of the TV show Fear Factor, there was the sound of a woman’s terrified scream, and every time that intro came on—even though she knew it was coming—Tori would cringe, thinking it was her mother downstairs screaming at the top of her lungs.
At her.
Oh my God, I’m going to get it tonight, she’d think.
Shelly found a new use for one of Dave’s fishing poles when Tori made her angry by telling a friend that her mother had hit her with a wooden spoon. The other girl’s mom confronted Shelly about the beating at school, and Shelly later responded by striking her youngest daughter so hard the pole actually broke.
“You’re no good! You’re ungrateful. I wish I’d aborted you!”
Tori’s lower back and bottom were lashed in ugly red streaks. She was going swimming later that week and was worried that the marks would show and she’d have to make up some excuse.
“But the marks were gone by the time I had to go swimming,” she said later. “My mom made sure they went away.”
As was usual for Shelly, some punishments were less about physical pain and more about humiliation.
Shelly made Tori wear the same outfit to school every day for a week when she came home with a less-than-stellar grade on her schoolwork. It was a dirty pair of Winnie the Pooh denim overalls and a striped Tweety Bird top. No coat.
“I was really cold, and I remember hating her for that. People were noticing, asking me why I was doing that. I told them that I didn’t do the laundry or something,” Tori said later. “After about the third or fourth day, I just stopped saying anything.”
She wondered what, if anything, any observers of the goings-on relating to her mother were thinking at the time. Like her sister Sami, Tori was a girl who’d always dressed nicely. Always had new clothes. But now here she was, walking around in the same outfit every day. Did anyone think something strange was going on?
“I know it sounds like a very small thing,” she said years later. “But it felt like a big deal, because at school, you know, it is a big deal.”
When Tori hit puberty, Shelly instigated a new and very awkward routine. Once a month, she’d call Tori into the living room.
“Oh, Tori! It’s time now. Time to see your progress.”
If Tori didn’t answer the call right away, she’d be subjected to that awful Fear Factor scream of her mom’s.
“Take off your top,” Shelly ordered.
Tori was embarrassed and didn’t want to do it.
Shelly pooh-poohed her concerns. This was something very normal. Very natural.
“I need to see how you’re developing,” she said. “All moms do this.”
Okay, Tori thought, that’s so not true.
None of her friends ever talked about their mothers doing anything like what her mother forced her to do.
“I don’t want to, Mom.”
Shelly had that steely look. It was a look that often came before the belt or a punch.
“Look,” she said. “You do what I tell you to do when I tell you. I’m the mom. You’re the kid. Off with your top, Tori.”
“I don’t want to, Mom.”
“Why is that, Tori? Do you think I’m perverted or something?”
Tori knew it was an unwinnable impasse. Like all of them. She removed her shirt and stood motionless while her mother examined her.
“Okay,” Shelly finally sai
d. “Looks fine.”
It went on and on.
Sometimes Shelly would tell Tori to remove her panties too, so she could examine her vagina.
That was even worse than showing her developing breasts, but Tori did it anyway.
And one time she made a bizarre and humiliating demand.
“Tori, I need a lock of your pubic hair for your baby book.”
Tori didn’t want to do it. It was too far.
“That’s crazy,” she finally said. “No one does that, Mom.”
Shelly shrugged and looked disappointed. Even a little hurt.
“Your sisters did it for me,” she said. “Why do you have to be so difficult?”
“I’m not being difficult, Mom,” she said. “It’s weird. It feels creepy.”
First disappointment. Then hurt. Now complete indignance.
“Creepy?” Shelly asked. “There’s nothing wrong with the human body, and if you think there is, there’s something seriously wrong with you.”
With that, she handed Tori a pair of scissors.
“Sami and Nikki did this too?” Tori asked.
“That’s right,” Shelly said. “Even Nikki, who was nothing but trouble, did it.”
Tori took the scissors and went to the bathroom and emerged a minute later with the hair her mother requested. “Here.” She held it out.
Shelly looked her right in the eyes and started to laugh. “I don’t want that.”
Tori was in tears, embarrassed, and thoroughly humiliated.
“What?”
“I just wanted to see if I could make you do it,” Shelly said.
Tori felt completely alone. During that time, she lived for the weekends when Sami would come home from college. She’d stopped wishing for Nikki to come back. Her mother had waged a campaign to make her fear, and then hate, her oldest sister.
“That girl was a monster,” she said on more than one occasion. “Thank God for you and Sami.”
Tori didn’t have to ask for specifics. Her mom freely shared those.
“She beat on me, Tori. Can you imagine a girl beating up her own mother?”