by Gregg Olsen
She suggested taking Shane up into the woods to cut wood and have a tree fall on him.
“An accident like that,” she said.
Again, Dave was unsure. “It would be pretty hard to do that.”
Wrong response.
Shelly flew into a rage.
“You need to fucking man up. Grow a pair. Jesus! What kind of a man are you? Do you realize what’s at stake here? Our girls! Do you want him to tell and then ruin our lives for what he did to Kathy?”
Shelly was never part of any blame. She’d tell everyone that Shane had been Kathy’s abuser. That her husband had. That she had no idea what was going on when she wasn’t there to take care of Kathy.
“You know that Shane killed our Kathy! We both know it. He deserves to die for what he did. Dave, be a man!”
Dave promised that he’d get it done. He told Shelly he was taking his time and thinking it through, considering the best plan, but inside hoping she’d forget about it.
She didn’t.
For the longest time, nothing happened. At Shelly’s instruction, Shane and Nikki hid under the neighbor’s house listening for any clue that they might have heard or seen something about Kathy. The screaming out in the yard during the waterboarding? Maybe the acrid smell of the fire?
Nothing.
The summer flew past, and the kids returned to school. Christmas came and Shelly made a big deal out of it as she always did, piling up the gifts and then taking them away. Shelly didn’t drink, so New Year’s Eve was a quiet one at home.
Everything was relatively calm until February, six months after Kathy died.
Nikki woke up in the middle of the night. A noise had interrupted her sleep. Something happened. She looked around her room and listened carefully. The house was silent. She went back to sleep, wondering if the noise had been part of a dream.
Not hardly.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
It was February 1995. Late. Quiet. Pitch black outside. Dave retrieved his .22 from the cab of Old Blue, and went into the pole building to find Shane. He felt like an automaton: one foot in front of the other. The door was shut. He twisted the knob and went inside. The light went on. He didn’t say a word.
Dave fired the rifle into the back of his nephew’s head.
Blood oozed over the cement floor.
Shane was gone.
Dave was numb as he bent down. He hadn’t wanted to kill the boy. He hadn’t thought he could ever kill him. But it was as if he’d been programmed, harangued into it by the pretty redhead he’d married.
The woman he loved despite everything.
The woman that could look at him when their bank account had been overdrafted to kingdom come and say it was the bank’s fault. “They keep screwing up our account! I’m going to complain tomorrow!”
The woman his dad had spotted as a fraud and troublemaker from the minute he’d met her. “Sawdust for brains if you stay with her.”
He went back inside to tell Shelly what he’d done.
“I killed Shane.”
Shelly’s mouth dropped open like a safe hurled from a ten-story building. She appeared to be in complete shock. It was as if her husband’s actions had come out of the blue.
“You did what?” she asked, her eyes growing very wide. “You killed our nephew? Why?”
Seriously, Shelly?
Dave didn’t know what to make of her just then. It was what she’d begged him, harassed him, cajoled him into doing nearly since the day Kathy died.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“What we did with Kathy,” he said.
Shelly liked the idea.
It had worked before.
After composing himself, Dave returned to the pole building and put Shane’s body into a sleeping bag and carried it to a space near the workbench. He poured some bleach into a Home Depot bucket of water and did his best to clean up the bloody mess. He had promised his wife there would be no trace. No DNA. Nothing would be left behind to indicate what might have happened.
And then he waited for a chance—when the girls would be away from home—to burn the body.
The next morning, the girls woke to the birdhouse and the tale that Shane had run away to Alaska to fish. A day or so later, Shelly offered the girls the chance to stay overnight with friends—a rare occurrence that each jumped at.
This time, when Dave burned the body, he did so without the aid of the accelerants or the metal sheeting he’d used with Kathy. No tires. No diesel either. He only used wood and kept putting more on top of his nephew’s body until it vanished into ash and bone. It took all night and a portion of the next morning—longer than Kathy’s cremation had.
The metal sheeting he’d used on her had, he reflected, been very effective.
When the ashes were cool enough, Dave shoveled them into bags for the familiar drive out to Washaway Beach. He parked his truck, looked around to make sure no one was watching, then dumped the ashes into the white-foamed surf of the Pacific.
When Nikki, Sami, and Tori returned home a day later, the burn pile was out.
A short time later, Dave brought in an excavator and pushed the dirt down the hill to a tangle of blackberry bushes.
Shelly insisted they report to the Pacific County sheriff that Shane had run away. Dave made the call, telling the deputy that his nephew often disappeared for days at a time.
“Came from a screwed-up family,” he said, adding that he and his wife had looked everywhere.
The deputy thanked him for the report, and Dave told Shelly that they were instructed to “just let it go.”
Shane was gone. The body was gone. Next on Dave’s and Shelly’s minds was the weapon used to kill the boy.
The short carbine .22 rifle used to shoot Shane was indeed a problem. Dave didn’t want it around the house. He was sure that someone would find it and somehow discover the truth about what had happened to Shane. He was a nervous wreck when he came up with a half-baked plan that Shelly approved. He drove north out of Raymond to a remote logging road, and when he was sure no one was looking, he got out and buried the weapon in the dirt. The gun that killed Shane was like Edgar Allan Poe’s tell-tale heart, always mocking Dave, reminding him of what he’d done to his nephew. Shelly, too, was absolutely certain that, despite how isolated the location was, and how careful her husband had been, someone would surely stumble across the gun and figure out what had happened.
“You need to go get it,” she’d said.
So that was what he did. Two weeks later, Dave went back into the woods to retrieve the gun and bring it back to the house. He put it in the firepit and burned it.
“I was hoping the stock would melt or something,” he said later. “But it didn’t.”
Dave handed what remained of the murder weapon to Shelly, who stored it in the back of a cupboard. He never saw it again.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Even after Shane’s murder, Shelly stayed on the hunt for the Kathy photos. The photos that Shane had were proof of something that couldn’t be explained away. Not easily anyway. She tore through the house when the girls were away at school. She looked through the outbuildings, poking under boards and pulling away clutter in the pole building.
They had to be around there somewhere.
Shelly didn’t know it at the time, but at least one other image of Kathy also existed, on a roll of undeveloped film stashed in a drawer in the living room. Shane had taken the photo of Kathy, naked, crawling on the living room floor. It was horrific and sickening. Kathy was clearly struggling. She must have been cold. She was trying to move from one room to the next, and it appeared that she was too weak and too abused to stand.
Kathy had been reduced from a person to an animal.
“We have to find the pictures,” Shelly reminded Dave as she rifled through the kids’ rooms and the kitchen junk drawer. She couldn’t let go of the endless quest to get the photos and destroy them.
“If someone gets his or he
r hands on it,” she said, “we’ll be in hot water.”
Hot water? That was an understatement typical of his wife. Dave, however, was aware that life as they knew it would be over. He was in this mess with Shelly up to his neck. He’d help search and then she’d start over a few weeks later, tearing up the place again looking, berating Shane for his double cross.
“He would have betrayed us,” she said.
Around that time, she started to embellish the story of Shane running away by telling the girls that he had just called.
“He said he’ll call back,” she said.
Another time before leaving the house, she told the girls, “If Shane calls while I’m gone, be sure to find out where he is.”
Dave pulled his wife aside.
“You need to keep the story simple,” he said. “Don’t keep adding to it. He ran away. He’s gone.”
Shelly couldn’t help herself, though. Thinking ahead, she made a notation on a calendar about when the boy had run away. She added other notes as time went on, recording the few times she and the girls piled into the car and made trips around Pacific County looking for her nephew.
She’d been great at searching for him in the past. This time, however, nothing.
Dave even missed work a few times on fruitless searches for Shane. The girls believed that their father was doing the best he could to find their cousin.
Years later, he claimed that he thought about Shane every day. Every night too.
“Killing someone is something you never get over,” he said. “Not even for a second. It’s always there.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Nikki and Sami stayed in constant contact after their parents’ arrests, avoiding TV when they could, though that was nearly impossible. The Raymond Torture Killings, as their mother’s and father’s crimes were summarily dubbed, invaded all the space around them. TV accounts played up the angle of a house of horrors in the middle of a bucolic oceanfront community. It was Arsenic and Old Lace. It was Mommie Dearest. It was Psycho. Everyone was talking about the Knoteks.
Except the Knotek girls. Nikki, Sami, and Tori never said a word to the media. It was a promise they’d made to each other.
Shelly and Dave were held on multimillion-dollar bonds and faced all kinds of charges, from murder to concealing a death.
While the Knotek sisters had all wanted justice for Kathy, Shane, and Ron, it still didn’t feel great to see one’s life through the lens of the media—a reflection of something at once foreign and familiar.
Their parents had killed multiple people.
They’d done the most cruel and vile things anyone could do to another person.
And so much of it had happened right before their eyes.
It took only two weeks for Sami, then twenty-five, to get guardianship of Tori. Sami, who was then living alone in a one-bedroom apartment off Greenwood Avenue in Seattle, made arrangements to get a two-bedroom apartment. She felt good about the opportunity to give her sister a fresh start, away from their parents.
Shelly knew that Sami was her best target—Dave was also in jail, Tori was a minor, and after everything she’d done to her, Nikki was a lost cause. Shelly had to have realized there was no way back into her oldest daughter’s life. She barely even tried.
But Sami, a classic middle-kid peacemaker, was a pleaser.
Nearly from her first day in jail, still pending trial, Shelly sent Sami letters from prison with lists of items she needed. She wanted everything and anything that her daughter would provide her, and she was very specific. A certain bra. A special robe. A particular tube of lotion. Her tone was demanding, and demeaning. Even from jail, Shelly acted certain that whatever she desired was owed to her.
Sami dutifully packaged up what she was told to send. Even though she knew Shelly belonged right where she was, picturing her there all alone made Sami sad, as did the idea that everyone else in there had comfy underwear and nice bathrobes, while her mother was just getting what the state gave her.
She didn’t tell either of her sisters that she was helping their mother, though Nikki picked up on it one time when Sami let slip that their mother was struggling behind bars.
“Are you sending stuff to Mom?” Nikki asked.
Sami deflected the question at first, then conceded that, yes, she had been.
“A couple times,” she said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
Nikki couldn’t believe her ears. “Are you serious? After all she did to us? You’re helping her?”
In a way, Sami still felt she didn’t really have a choice.
“She’s controlling you,” Nikki said. “Don’t you get that? She’s doing what she always did.”
In February 2004, six months after his arrest, Dave Knotek pleaded down his first-degree murder charge for killing Shane Watson to second-degree murder, and pleaded guilty to unlawful disposal of human remains and rendering criminal assistance. While the Knotek girls made it clear that helping their mother would mean the end of any relationship he might ever have with them, Dave insisted that he wouldn’t assist in Shelly’s prosecution. For her part, Shelly was desperate to make sure Dave kept his mouth shut—even though Washington’s marital privilege laws could keep him off the stand. It wasn’t what he’d say on the stand, anyway, that her daughters knew would concern her. All he had to do was back up what they had seen and said.
Which he did.
He was sentenced to a little under fifteen years in prison.
And then it was Shelly’s turn.
Pacific County prosecutors told the victims’ families they couldn’t make the first-degree murder charges stick against Shelly. No body for Kathy. No bones and ash under the bed. An autopsy on Ron that couldn’t prove how exactly he’d been injured—or by whom. Given the condition of his remains, it would be hard to say what had actually killed him. Kathy’s and Ron’s supporters figured the case was too big, too involved, for the county to do what really needed to be done.
Nikki, Sami, and Tori knew that their mother was smart, devious, and the kind of person who would never accept blame for anything she’d done.
The boiling water.
The bleach.
The weeks in the pump house.
No food.
No clothes.
Everything was a lie, or facts were misconstrued.
Ten months after her arrest, Shelly entered a so-called Alford plea of guilty to the charges. An Alford plea can be rather perplexing; it’s a plea that allows the defendant to plead guilty yet assert innocence at the same time. It’s also a plea that allows the defense and the prosecution to save face—and money—by avoiding going to a trial that would almost surely result in a conviction. The plea probably saved Pacific County a measure of embarrassment too. The media wouldn’t rehash the missed warning signs by the police that Shelly and Dave were involved in nefarious deeds. No one could deny that Ron would likely have still been alive had Nikki’s story of Kathy’s murder been more aggressively pursued by the sheriff’s office. Maybe Mac would have lived longer too.
Ultimately, both sides worked out a tentative sentencing agreement for seventeen years.
At sentencing two months later, Shelly looked beat down. Her hair was scraggly, and her Clairol red had long since faded to a mix of gray and reddish blonde. Her jail-issue orange jumpsuit loosely hung on her frame.
No one from her family was there to support her.
She spoke to the court before the judge pronounced her sentence. Her words sputtered through some tears.
“In this jail and in this courtroom and in this community,” she told the court, “and everywhere else I’m known as some kind of horrible monster. I’m not. I’ve made such horrible mistakes though. Kathy was my friend, she had value and she had purpose. She would have been there for me. I wasn’t there for her a lot. I was not there when Kathy died. Not there for her.”
Shelly pointed the finger at Shane and Nikki, claiming the teenagers had been Kathy’s abusers.
&
nbsp; None of it was her fault. Not Kathy. Not Ron.
“I believe I am not guilty of murder, of deliberately causing her death. But a mother is the most responsible for her home environment. She was mistreated in my home and now she’s gone. I’ll never get over it and I don’t deserve to.”
The sentencing judge took it all in while both sides said their piece. The prosecutor noted how convoluted the case had been and how it was possible the truth of what happened might never be known.
The Alford plea, unlike many plea bargains, didn’t require her to tell the court what she’d done.
Shelly seemed surprised, however, that her words did not have the desired effect on the sentencing judge. Instead of sympathizing with her, he added more years to the tally. While Shelly’s mouth hung open, the judge sentenced her to more than twenty-two years—five more than the seventeen she’d agreed to—for the second-degree murder of Kathy and for the manslaughter charge relating to Ron’s death.
Nobody was happy. Everyone was satisfied.
For a woman who lived to control others, who reveled in telling people what to do and how to do it, it was fitting justice.
Shelly Knotek wouldn’t be in charge of anyone or anything for more than two decades.
EPILOGUE
Dave Knotek was released from prison in 2016. He lives on the Washington Coast and, despite health challenges, works long hours at a seafood processing plant. He’s thin and struggles being on his feet all day. The only thing that keeps him going is his relationship with his daughters Tori and Sami. Nikki refuses to see him, which he understands. He says that the remorse he feels for his role in what happened at the Louderback and Monohon Landing houses hasn’t left him. He knows it never will.
Nikki can neither forgive nor forget. She can only move on, raising her children in a way that her mother could never understand. With love. Respect. She knows that what happened to her has altered her life in ways that are invisible, but though she chooses to think the best of people, she can’t do that when it comes to her parents. Nikki tries not to think about her mother. While she’s told her oldest children that their maternal grandmother is in prison for doing something very bad, she’s refrained from sharing any of the details. Her heart remains heavy and full of regret for her part in what happened to Shane and Kathy. Being a victim herself has never been an excuse for Nikki.