by Gregg Olsen
“I’m not ever going to have a normal life, Mom. Because of what happened. I’ll never be able [to] share this with my husband. It’ll be a big secret forever.” Sami went on. “Maybe it would be better if we told.”
“What good would that do?”
“I don’t think it’s right that Kathy’s family doesn’t know what happened to her,” Sami said. “Maybe we should tell the police?”
Shelly gave her middle girl the slow burn. “Are you fucking serious? Do you want to ruin your life?”
“I don’t know that I can ever have a normal life, Mom,” Sami said. “Not with this hanging over us.”
Shelly gave her a dismissive stare. “You never cease to disappoint me, Sami.”
Sami didn’t back down. “Kathy’s family is still looking for her,” she said.
“It’s better off that they don’t know,” Shelly shot back. “They are probably happy that she’s with a man who loves her.”
“She’s dead, Mom.”
“I know that, Sami. But talking about it now will ruin all of our lives. Do you want your friends to know?”
Sami shook her head. “No. But . . .”
“You will ruin your sister’s life,” she said, playing the trump card with Sami. “Tori is completely innocent in all of this. Besides, Kathy committed suicide, Sami. You know that.”
Suicide, Sami thought. Where’d Mom come up with that?
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Shelly thrived on segregating people. The girls from each other. Their father from the girls. Shane, Kathy, and Nikki were isolated from everyone.
Putting a wall between people allowed her the opportunity to do whatever she wanted. People were game pieces. Toys to be abused. It didn’t matter who they were.
Shelly occasionally withheld food from Tori. Not for long, usually no more than a day or two. Sometimes it was a punishment, though other times, it might have been merely because Shelly was too caught up in her TV watching to be bothered to go to the store or prepare a meal. On a few occasions, Tori found herself in the pole building digging into the depths of the old chest freezer. It had to be done very quietly. She, like her sisters, was convinced that their mother had some evil superpowers, an ability to uncover anything they tried to keep secret.
She ate frozen pancakes and carefully hid the wrappers so her mom wouldn’t find out. She also made sure that she didn’t eat too much of the food so that her mom wouldn’t see the supply dwindling. She rearranged the contents of the freezer, shifting things around but making it appear as though it was just as Shelly had left it.
Shelly, as expected, caught on. Tori later surmised that her mother must have found the wrappers because, the next thing she knew, all of the freezer’s contents were missing.
“She threw out all the food,” Tori said later. “Every last bit of it. She didn’t say anything about it either.”
And then came more of her mother’s stealth attacks.
The lights in her bedroom flooded the darkness. Suddenly the covers were yanked from the bed.
Shelly stood there with her robe half open, a breast hanging out.
“Get up. Get undressed!”
God, what now?
Tori’s heart was already pounding fast, adrenaline speeding through her body, but she didn’t fight her mom.
And down the stairs they went. Soon she was out in the yard, naked, doing jumping jacks or running in place in the living room while her mother sat on the sofa.
“Faster!” Shelly screamed.
Tori picked up the pace. Sometimes she cried. Mostly she just did whatever her mother said.
“You aren’t even trying!”
“I am, Mom. I am. I promise I am.”
“You are an ungrateful little bitch.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Jump higher! I want you to jump higher.”
It was embarrassing. Humiliating. Any kind of refusal meant the duration of the punishment would be longer. As she did what her mother said, Tori never wondered why her mom was linking her punishments to nudity or pulling midnight raids on her bedroom. She only wanted it to be over.
“She was really scary,” she said later. “I felt like, okay, I have no choice. It made me feel like a little person. Embarrassed. I didn’t talk back because I knew it would be worse if I did.”
She was powerless.
And yet, when it was over, the same thing always happened: “Two hours later you love her again because she’d be holding you and saying, I’m sorry, I love you.”
Unlike her older sisters or Shane, Tori didn’t endure many repeat punishments. In fact, Shelly rarely gave her youngest the same punishment twice.
One time Shelly got the big idea that they needed to clean out one of the sheds in the back of the property.
“Right now!” she told Tori out of the blue.
As always, Tori jumped.
She followed her mom across the yard to the shed, and Shelly told her to start picking up newspapers and other garbage.
“I want you to put it in your boots!”
It didn’t make any sense. It never made any sense. Yet Tori did as she was told.
“Stuff it in your underwear, you little shit!”
Tori gave her mom a quick look, but she didn’t telegraph what she was thinking. She was only ten or eleven at the time, yet she knew this was bizarre.
“The weirdest part,” Tori said later, “was that she’d just sit there and watch me do it. Just watching and enjoying it, I guess. I remember that was one of the first times as a kid where I was just like, this is really weird, like this is really odd, like, there’s something wrong with this.”
Tori didn’t tell anyone what was going on at home because she didn’t want to get into trouble—and because she didn’t think that anyone would believe her. Whenever Sami asked her how things were, Tori always told her sister everything was fine. She wondered if she was a bad girl for always getting into such trouble. She vowed she’d try to do better.
Try to get her mom to love her.
Tori was twelve when she started a journal for school. She was struggling not to be the girl in class whose father lived on an island somewhere, and whose older sisters were long gone. And whose mother didn’t abuse her or the man who lived with them.
In one entry, she wrote how her favorite movie wasn’t a real movie at all.
“It is a home video. I really like it a lot. It’s when it was my third birthday and Mom got a kiddy pool. I seemed to really like it a lot. When no one was looking I took my birthday cake and dropped it into the pool. My mom thought it was really funny, but my sister didn’t because she had it specially made for me. I just like to watch home movies.”
Later, she wrote about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.
“I’m thankful for having all my family together at once. You see, my sister lives in Tacoma so I don’t see her very much. And my dad works far, far away when he builds underground foundation and wiring for houses all over the place. My mom, I see all the time.”
By then, like the others in the family, Tori didn’t mention Nikki anymore. Even though photos of Nikki—and Shane—were still up all over the house, it was like her mother had erased her eldest daughter from memory.
No one saw Nikki.
No one except Sami.
That remained a big secret.
Secrets, all three Knotek sisters knew, ran in the family.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Shelly pushed more buttons with Ron’s family behind his back. She phoned his family after taking his mother, Catherine, to a doctor’s appointment late in the fall of 2001. Shelly said that she’d had to remove three fleas from Catherine’s face while the two of them sat in the car. What’s more, she said that she’d witnessed on several occasions Ron bossing his mother around.
Shelly also bemoaned the condition of Catherine’s house and how it seemed that Ron had done nothing for his mother in quite some time. The poor woman didn’t even have a working TV! Shelly took care
of that and bought Catherine a twenty-seven-inch Daewoo. She also set up a $150 credit line with an appliance store.
When it came time to clean the house, Shelly arranged to have Catherine stay over while her house was being flea bombed. She was doing everything she could for the dear woman she considered a second mother.
And at the same time, Shelly was busy trashing her best friend. She told the family that Ron had enough money to pay the rent at his trailer court but had chosen not to do so.
“At the time they shut him out of [the rental] he had $600 and went to a lawyer instead who told him everything was legal,” Ron’s brother, Jeff, later said. “He had to go to court on that and the court even postponed it once so through his own negligence he lost out. He also had several chances to appear in court on the rental problem, but when he didn’t show, it was decided in favor of the landlord.”
On November 4, 2001, Catherine phoned her younger son, Jeff, and stated a desire to move to Michigan to be closer to him and to where her husband was buried. She said Ron was headed for court for bad checks and that there was “a federal warrant” out for his arrest. Later, she waffled on the idea to return to Michigan. She cited the cold climate there, as well as not wanting to be a burden.
Shelly inserted herself deeper into the Woodworths’ family matters. She sent a short note on November 29, 2001.
“Your mom’s doing well. I’m taking her picture this week for you all—and she’s having her hair fixed this week for the Christmas season. I wish I could do something to help you all. God bless you and yours.”
On December 2, 2001, Catherine phoned Jeff in Michigan and said Shelly had hand-delivered a letter from Ron in response to her giving away his clothes. Shelly had held the letter for some time and told Ron’s brother that she’d pleaded with Ron not to send it. But he was adamant; she had no choice. When Shelly finally did give Catherine the letter, she said she did so when they were together in the car, giving her time to absorb it all as they drove around. The message was included in a Christmas card with a note: “Give this to Mom as I don’t want her to know my PO box.”
“You are one fucking stupid bitch,” it began. “I really cannot believe that you could be so fucking incredibly stupid as to think that you had the fucking right to steal my few possessions from me.”
Shelly mailed the letter a few days later to Ron’s brother with her own addendum: “Enclosed you’ll find the letter that Ron had sent your mother. I feel so bad about all of this.”
Ron’s sister-in-law responded with her own assessment: “This letter was even more abusive than the last, using the F-word 22 times by Michelle’s count.”
And a plan to stem Ron’s abuse of his mother: “I gave Michelle permission over the phone to screen all mail to Mom from Ron and to contact adult protective services on 12-3-01.”
Jeff Woodworth continued to get calls from Shelly Knotek. As far as Ron’s family was concerned, Shelly was kind, smart, and conscientious. They were far away in Michigan, and Shelly was a lifeline at a very difficult time.
Ron sat there like a stone as his family left a voice message on the Knoteks’ answering machine. When Shelly came home, she played the message, then asked Ron if he’d heard it.
She later wrote Ron’s family what happened next.
“Ron acted indifferent . . . but then got defensive saying, ‘I don’t take orders from anyone’ and started a tantrum.”
Ron’s brother later indicated he thought Shelly was at her wit’s end too. He made a note of it:
“Michelle has talked to Ron repeatedly about ‘letting go’ and getting on with his life but he wouldn’t do it. Michelle said she was acting like his mother and not a friend and Dave said enough.”
It was winter break and Sami was home from Evergreen. Tori was off with friends somewhere, and Ron was working out in the pole building when a Pacific County sheriff’s cruiser pulled up. A deputy got out and knocked on the front door. Shelly answered right away. Sami couldn’t hear what was being said, but she was sure it was about Kathy. It had been months since Nikki had first gone to the police.
They know! she thought. It’s all happening.
Her mom shut the door.
“Why are they here?” Sami asked, suddenly panicked. “It’s about Kathy, isn’t it? They know about Kathy, Mom!”
Shelly’s eyes got really wide and she ran to hold her daughter.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s papers for Ron. It’s nothing, I tell you. Not about Kathy.”
Sami started to cry and went into her mother’s bedroom. A second later, Shelly came in and held her, telling her that she was sorry for everything. She said that Kathy’s death had taken a terrible toll on her too. She said she could barely live with herself because she’d let things get out of control. Shelly admitted she’d made mistakes in judgment; however, she blamed Nikki and Shane for most of it.
“They abused her so much,” she said.
Sami couldn’t think of a single time Nikki had ever abused Kathy. Shane might have done some, but only with their mother standing next to him telling him what to do.
“Kick her in the head, Shane!”
“I feel horrible for what this has done to you,” Shelly said, crying too. “I’m so, so sorry. It won’t ever happen again. I promise. If anyone ever found out, your dad and I will kill ourselves so you don’t have to live with it any longer.”
Even though Ron was busting his butt working like a slave in the yard, Shelly kept telling Sami that she wanted him to leave, but he refused. She had only intended to help him out through a difficult time in his life, not have him live there forever.
“He needs to go,” Shelly told her.
“Go where?” Sami asked.
“Just go. Get a job. Move out.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
“He’s too attached to us. He thinks we need him.”
“He’s a hard worker.”
“Not really,” her mother said. “He is always guilting me. Telling me that he wants to stay.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Tori was twelve years old now, and she took in everything. Every. Single. Thing.
Ron had a pair of short-shorts that he wore at the beginning of his stay with the Knoteks, and a couple of tank tops too. After a while, however, Shelly took away his clothes and, as was her MO, made him work outside only in his underwear.
Tori also heard everything.
“You don’t deserve clothes,” her mother told Ron. “You are worthless. So don’t ask me about it again. Don’t even think about it. Now get your fat ass out the door and do your chores.”
From 7:30 in the morning to nearly 8:00 at night, Ron would be outside in his underwear feeding the animals, weeding the garden, cutting down brush, burning trash. Whatever was on Shelly’s long list of things that needed to be done.
At night, Ron would eat his dinner upstairs, alone. On most nights, Shelly would give him a couple of sleeping pills. Despite an empty bed and bedroom in the house, he slept on the floor.
If he made any noise at night, Shelly screamed at him to come downstairs, so she could punish him. Tori stayed as quiet as she could, refusing to move a muscle. She lay there, considering telling her dad what was going on, but she knew where his loyalty stood.
Telling on Shelly would only make things worse for Ron.
Tori hated what her mom was doing to him.
One time, she even tried confronting her about it. “Do you have to be so hard on him, Mom?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ron’s nice. He’s a good guy.”
Shelly made a disgusted face.
“If you like him so much, Tori,” she said sourly, “then why don’t you marry him?”
Not long after that encounter, Shelly called Tori into the living room. Ron stood still for the longest time before he spoke.
“He has something to say to you,” she prodded.
“I don’t love you anymore, Tori,” he finally said.
Tears filled Tori’s eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
Ron struggled to keep on message. His eyes were wet and he could barely look at the girl.
“It’s true,” he said, pulling himself together. “I don’t.”
“I knew it wasn’t true,” Tori said later. “She was making him say it just to hurt both of us.”
Ron, in typical Shelly style, was instructed to never speak to Tori after that. There was no reason for the edict except that Shelly resented the two of them having any kind of relationship. She could see that Ron had grown fond of her youngest, and that Tori, in turn, had taken to calling him Uncle Ron. That Tori cared for Ron and worried about him must have been obvious to her mother.
As with Sami and Nikki, Shelly made it abundantly clear she didn’t want Tori and Ron talking when she wasn’t around to supervise the conversation. Tori didn’t want her uncle Ron to get in trouble. He was smart and had a dry sense of humor. He had a kind of alternative personal style with his ponytail and his cool Egyptian jewelry that the girl admired.
They barely spoke, even though he slept most nights on the floor outside her bedroom door.
“It was best to keep quiet,” Tori said years later, “because we didn’t want anything to happen. The less you did that might bother her, the better.”
When Tori was sure her mother was asleep and couldn’t hear, however, she would tiptoe from her bedroom to where Ron slept. In the middle of the night, she’d stoop down and give him a quick, quiet hug. He’d smile and give her a little nod. Neither said anything.
Ron and Tori shared a fear of what might happen if they were caught talking.
Uncle Ron would be made to pay, and Tori never wanted to be the cause of that.
As had been the case for as long as she could remember, Sami was in the middle. She was the golden child. She could see her mother for what she was, yet she was seldom the target of the vilest punishments. Her relationship with her mom was as normal as it could be, all things considered. Shelly would come to Evergreen with groceries, they’d talk on the phone, or they’d go together to Target by the Capital Mall and shop.