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

by Gregg Olsen

  Shelly also trashed Lara, calling Tori’s grandmother a mean, destructive woman.

  “She used to treat me like dirt when I was a girl,” Shelly claimed.

  Tori took it all in. She absorbed the message: she had the best mom in the world, and Nikki and Lara were her sworn enemies.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  The connection between each of the sisters was at once broken and convoluted. The middle sister, Sami, was the one in contact with both Nikki and Tori. While Nikki, who was working on starting a life of her own, missed her little sister and asked about her all the time, it was not a two-way street. Tori had learned to stop asking about Nikki, which at least meant that Sami didn’t have to lie to her little sister and risk the fallout from her mother, who would surely consider contact with Nikki a betrayal of the highest order.

  Even once Sami went to college, Shelly’s incredible reach remained indisputable. Her need to control every aspect of her middle daughter’s life brought eye rolls from the other girls in her dorm at Evergreen. She’d call at ten or eleven nearly every night, and if Sami didn’t answer, she’d go through the roof and phone the resident aide or Sami’s boyfriend, Kaley.

  The best calls came at three in the morning.

  “Is she there?” Shelly would ask.

  Kaley would say she wasn’t, but then turn to Sami after hanging up.

  All they had to do was exchange a look.

  Sami had made a deal with her mom, but that didn’t mean she’d stopped continuing to confront her. She wrote a four-page letter reminding her that while Shelly claimed memory lapses about what happened at the Knoteks’ house, Sami hadn’t suffered the same fate.

  “I can’t forget and, no, I am not talking about Kathy . . . I might have been younger, but I remember what went on and I’m sorry to tell you this, Mom, but I think you forgot everything about that and conveniently remember just what you want to remember just like a lot of things. Like what you did to Nikki and Shane, wallowing and hot baths. You forgot, I guess. I will say that I was treated the best.”

  And while Nikki had moved on and put as much space between her mother and herself as possible—and Tori, as far as the older sisters knew, didn’t know the depths of their mother’s depravity—Sami kept coming back for more. What happened in their family was a burden on all of the sisters, but the one who always found a way to set things aside with humor was the one who was always in the middle.

  She continued to call her mother out.

  “I know what goes on in other people’s homes. Maybe not everything. And I know what is right and what is wrong. I have been living a lie my whole life and you cannot like me for saying that, but it is true. I know the truth about everything.”

  As Sami questioned her past, and her mother’s actions, Shelly thought of new ways to bring her back in line.

  “Honey, I’ve been diagnosed with lupus,” she said one time over the phone. “It’s really bad.”

  “Oh God, Mom,” Sami said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Sami didn’t know much about the disease, but she knew it was serious. Her mother filled her in about the treatment she would require. And if that weren’t bad enough, she also indicated another major health concern.

  “I have a massive ovarian cyst, honey,” she added. “Going to need major surgery.”

  Sami thought her mother’s cancer had been some kind of a game, a ruse, but for some odd reason, she didn’t think the latest medical issues were a lie.

  They were.

  “The funny thing is,” Sami said later, “I don’t think Mom ever mentioned the lupus again.”

  Her mom was a liar and Sami knew it. Yet she wanted proof. She needed proof. Sami decided to poke around her mother’s bedroom when she wasn’t at home, just to see what she could find. It was like turning over rocks to see what might crawl out. She was careful not to disturb things. Her mom had a talent for knowing if any item in her room had been moved even the slightest. Or turned. Sometimes it seemed she knew if one of the girls even looked at something.

  Under the bed, Sami discovered a small garbage bag.

  When she looked inside, at first she wasn’t sure what she was seeing.

  Dirt? Shells?

  She peered closer and shifted the contents toward the light.

  It was a bag of bones mixed with ash.

  Human bones.

  She knew they must’ve belonged to Kathy Loreno.

  Who else could they be?

  Dave Knotek had not been back home to Raymond in a very long time. There were plenty of reasons for that too. His job was far away, of course. Other than his girls, there was nothing pushing him in the direction of home. Certainly not his wife. Shelly had threatened divorce off and on but for some reason—likely the steady paycheck—never took action. Dave sent his money home to Shelly, which seemed to be all she wanted anyway.

  It was a call from his father-in-law’s new wife that finally nudged Dave in the right direction, when she questioned why he hadn’t seen Tori in over a year.

  Dave immediately pushed back, making excuses for something for which there was nothing even remotely acceptable. He couldn’t put his finger on why he wouldn’t go home. It wasn’t that it wasn’t on his mind. His boss asked him every Friday if he was heading home, but Dave always deflected by saying he was needed up at the jobsite the next day.

  “Bullshit,” the boss would say.

  “He’d seen it in my eyes that I wanted to go home,” Dave said later.

  After the call, he sat there for a long time, thinking. He finally asked God for help.

  You gotta give me an answer, he recalled thinking. You gotta help me. What do I do?

  He was penniless, and he had no car at the time. Still, God answered him. Dave said God told him that he needed to live up to his vows and go home. His boss, a family man himself, loaned him an old Cadillac. It was a gas-guzzler of the highest order, but it was an answer to Dave’s prayers.

  “I’d get off work at five on Friday night. Bad traffic. Drive all the way from Sedro-Woolley to Oak Harbor in the company rig. From there I’d drive all the way back because I’d miss the ferries. All the way down I-5. I’d get home Friday night, midnight, one in the morning. Shell had dinner waiting for me. Tori’s up too. Everything was going good. Tori’s happy. Shell was happy. I was happy.”

  Everyone was happy. Or seemed happy.

  Until he’d leave town again.

  PART FIVE

  SCAPEGOAT

  RON

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Sami first heard about Ron Woodworth when her mother called her college dorm and mentioned a “new friend” who was helping out an elderly woman who owned dozens of cats but was being evicted from her home in the Riverview neighborhood not far from the local campus of Grays Harbor community college. Shelly had finally landed a job, as a caseworker for Olympic Area Agency on Aging in Raymond. She met Ron through Habitat for Humanity on the case of the woman with all the cats.

  “I brought all of her stuff to the pole building. I’ve asked her to move in, but she wants her own place.”

  Good, Sami thought. That was a huge relief. She didn’t want anyone moving in with her mother.

  “Ron,” Shelly went on, “helped find homes for most of her cats. She had something like eighty of them.”

  Sami thought the idea of eighty cats in a small house was beyond gross.

  “Ron sounds like a good guy,” she said.

  “Yeah, he loves cats.”

  Indeed, Ron also had several cats of his own. Around that time, Tori began visiting Ron’s trailer after school, and noticed how his cats had made a mess of his trailer. The place stank, but Ron, like a lot of people who live with more cats than they can handle, didn’t notice the smell at all.

  He wasn’t a large man, but when Sami first met Ron Woodworth a short time later, she noticed he had quite a belly; it hung over his belt like a fleshy fanny pack. His hair was thinning on top, but he kept it long in a ponytail that he s
ecured with a rubber band. He wore earrings and other jewelry and appeared proud of his appearance. A former copy editor at the local paper and a licensed caregiver, Ron was “going through some things” at that time and was unemployed.

  He was quick, sarcastic, and Sami liked him right away.

  During her after-school visits to Ron’s trailer, Tori looked through his books on Egyptology, a keen interest of his, and they talked about the gods and the mythology of that time in history. It fascinated him more than anything. He told her about the importance of life and the role of the hereafter.

  Later, when her mom would insist that Ron could be suicidal, Tori would transport herself to that visit.

  “He would never do that,” she claimed.

  Tori grew to love Ron. Sometimes he let her win at playing cards or checkers. She started calling him Uncle Ron. He was a friend, and she hoped, though she didn’t ever say so, an ally.

  Ron Woodworth had followed Gary Neilson, his partner of seventeen years, to South Bend in the late summer of 1992. Gary’s sister was already in the area, and in 1995, Ron’s parents, Catherine and William, also moved up the coast from California at Ron’s insistence, as his father was in ill health at the time.

  In a very real way, the relocation to Pacific County was a bit of a fresh start for Ron and Gary, who had been feeling some pressure and discord in their relationship. In fact, when Gary broached the subject of relocating, he told Ron to take it or leave it. No second thoughts came from Ron. Gary was the love of his life and there was no way he was going to let him go.

  But after his father’s death in June 1996, Ron’s behavior changed. Drastically so. He suddenly became unable to hold down his job as a caregiver or even carry on a conversation without becoming distracted. He’d been outgoing most of his life, but suddenly he was sullen and introverted. While Gary had sympathy for his partner’s loss, he could not take living with Ron anymore, and by 1997 he knew the relationship was over.

  Ron didn’t take the breakup well. He was both grief-stricken and volatile. When Gary returned to their trailer one day after work shortly after their split, the locks had been changed and Ron refused to let him inside.

  “He wanted to bargain with me for my property,” Gary said later. “I told him if he wanted it that bad he could keep it.”

  The next day, Gary returned to collect a few things Ron had secured in a shed for the purpose of handing them over. The two of them never spoke again—not face-to-face or even over the telephone. A month after that, Ron sent his ex a letter stating that neither he nor his mother ever wanted to see Gary again.

  After he found himself suddenly single, Ron Woodworth’s downward spiral began to spark concern among his small circle of friends. One of those friends was Sandra Broderick, who’d known Ron since their days in the supply department at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California, in the early nineties. After Ron moved to the Pacific Northwest, Sandra eventually did the same. Geography played a role in keeping their friendship intact, but there was also a genuine fondness between the pair.

  While Ron made some veiled threats post-breakup that he had “nothing to live for,” he didn’t explicitly threaten suicide. Besides, like Tori, Sandra figured Ron’s staunch beliefs in ancient Egyptian traditions prevented him from ever contemplating suicide, no matter how bad things were going.

  Even so, by 1999, Sandra could see that Ron was still having problems, so she offered to have him—and his mother—move into a five-bedroom house she owned in Tacoma. Ron was polite about the offer and even made a visit to check it out. He told Sandra that he preferred staying put for the time being, though he certainly wasn’t going to stay in Raymond or South Bend. Gary was living in Aberdeen, and Ron didn’t want to run into him around town. He told Sandra that he expected to move in with his friends Shelly and Dave Knotek, who he told Sandra were going to buy a house in Oak Harbor.

  And yet by July 2000, there still was no house in Oak Harbor, and Sandra heard once again from her military buddy. Ron was in financial trouble. He needed money to pay back overdue rental fees on his space at a trailer park in Willapa. She gave him $500 so he wouldn’t end up homeless.

  Later, she heard from another friend that Ron had borrowed $2,000 to retain a lawyer in his continuing quest to keep from losing his mobile home.

  Sandra called him the minute she learned the news.

  Ron acted as if things were under control.

  “He told me that he had given $1,000 to Shelly Knotek to get a lawyer,” she said later.

  Sandra was suspicious, so she asked Ron for the lawyer’s name.

  “He said that he would have to get it from Shell, because she had hired him. I never learned if an attorney was hired or not.”

  A little later, Sandra made the trip to Raymond to visit with Ron and his mother in her trailer at the Timberland Recreational Vehicle Park.

  Unexpectedly, Shelly also showed up, and the visit petered to an end.

  Those who knew her would later remark on Shelly’s propensity for marking her territory.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  In his midfifties, it was late in the game for Ron’s do-over. He had lost his home, his father, his partner. He was also estranged from his mother, with whom he had lived after the foreclosure of his trailer in 1999. Worst of all, he had lost his cats. Shelly told Tori that they were going to take Ron in, to help him get back on his feet. Tori didn’t know that this was one of the same lines Shelly had once used to sell Dave on bringing Kathy Loreno into their lives.

  “To help her,” Shelly had told Dave about Kathy. “And she can help us at the same time.”

  Shelly put out the welcome mat for Ron and set him up in Sami’s old room. He had a bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with a bedside lamp. He brought along a bunch of his books and personal things that he’d been able to gather from his mother’s place.

  Dave hadn’t heard much about Ron Woodworth, or if he did, it had gone in one ear and seeped out the other. There was good reason for that. He was still working in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island and was almost never at home; whatever was going on there eluded his attention. He only discovered that Ron had moved in when he returned to the Monohon Landing house one day.

  Shelly was sweet and excited when she made the introduction.

  “This is my friend Ron,” she said, quickly adding, “He’s gay. He’s been evicted from his place and he’s going to work around here.”

  Frankly, Dave didn’t care at all. He wouldn’t have cared if Ron was interested in Shelly. In fact, it would have been great if he were. Dave wanted out. He couldn’t handle the stress of being in Shelly’s life with all the stories they had to juggle.

  And secrets to hide.

  “I was waiting for Tori to grow up, so I could leave,” he admitted later. “I only had to hang in there for three or four years or whatever and then I could leave.”

  Shelly went on to say that Ron had babysat Tori a few times and was very loyal and trustworthy.

  Ron shook Dave’s hand. He was a short man with thick glasses. His ears were pierced, and he wore a number of gold necklaces coiled around his neck, including an ankh pendant.

  “He seemed nice. I just wanted out of the stress,” Dave said. “Just didn’t get out of there in time.”

  Oh shit!

  Those words popped into Sami’s mind when she heard Ron had moved in with her mother and sister. This isn’t a good fit, she thought before reeling it all back inside. It was what she had done her entire life. She was smart enough to see what was right in front of her, but survival mode gave Sami the singular ability to shove it all aside.

  She told herself that despite everything she knew of her mother, there was no way that history could truly repeat itself. She’d seen her in action with Kathy, her father, and other people. Shelly was all about Shelly, and that meant that she needed to be front and center. Always in control. Everyone else existed only to serve her needs. Shelly was the boss. But Ron was Ron. He wasn’t Kath
y. He wasn’t Dave. Sami was sure Ron could hold his own.

  That thought. That wish. That prayer. It was tenuous at best. There were warning signs that Sami was wrong almost immediately.

  On her first visits home at that time, Ron and her mother were what Sami would later describe as “lovey dovey.” Still, she noticed how Ron waited on Shelly and did whatever she asked.

  “Yes, Shelly Dear,” he’d answer to any request.

  Shelly would either give him a big hug and thank him for being so good to her, or she’d chide him for not doing something that she wanted done, but in a gentle tone that mimicked the way a mother might reprimand a small child who didn’t understand what had been requested or the importance of getting it done.

  At dinnertime, she’d call him to the table.

  “Ron, come and get your dinner!”

  “Oooh,” he’d say. “It looks so good, Shelly Dear.”

  It didn’t matter what was on the plate. To Ron, it was a gourmet meal made by a contender on Top Chef or some other TV show.

  Shelly’s initial warm welcome cooled quickly.

  Around his second week there, things started to change. Tori noticed how Ron seemed to irritate her mom.

  “I saw you roll your eyes,” she snapped at him. “I don’t appreciate that at all.”

  “I’m sorry, Shelly Dear,” he said.

  “Did you mean to insult me with that tone?”

  Ron backed down. “I’m sorry, dear.”

  Soon epithets were mixed into her dialogue.

  It was jarring and mean. Tori couldn’t believe her mom was talking to her friend like that.

  “I don’t want a useless fag like you talking to me,” Shelly said. “You disgust me, Ron. Get out of my sight and stay away from my little girl. You’re a bad influence.”

  And then it got worse.

  A whole lot worse.

  The truth was, things got easier for Tori once Ron moved in. Her mother’s attention moved swiftly to the newest member of the household on Monohon Landing Road. Where Tori had once been the object of abuse for any minor transgression, now Ron was the victim.