If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood(14)

I need a break. Some rest. I need time away from her.

Sometimes he’d get in his truck and head up to the hills above Raymond to camp. On other occasions he’d stay with friends. He knew that life with Shelly was not like anyone else’s marriage. He didn’t miss work or climb into the depths of a whiskey bottle. He dealt with her by being away.

To survive Shelly meant avoiding her whenever possible. Even early in their marriage, Dave would retreat from her constant barrage of angry demands. Yes, she could be sweet. Yes, she could be fun. But as time went on, those attributes took a back seat to her uncontrolled anger, a temper that scared him. He knew that something wasn’t right with her. She was off. The screaming. The violent temper. The slamming of the doors until the hinges broke from the wooden frame. All of that. Dave would sit in his truck with a sleeping bag and pillow and ask God what to do.

“Lord, this isn’t right,” he’d say. “This isn’t normal. This isn’t how a family operates. I know it. Help me.”

“When somebody pushes, pushes, and pushes you into a corner, pretty soon you’re not going to want to be in that corner anymore. People would ask me later why I just didn’t leave. Take the kids and go. You just didn’t do that with Shelly. You can’t. She wouldn’t allow it. She’d hunt you down.”

Often when he’d return home after considerable introspection, Shelly would flip the switch and be sweet, soft voiced, and affectionate. That might last a few weeks, days, or merely a few hours.

And then the cycle would spin out of control again.





CHAPTER TEN

Years later, the house on Fowler Street in Raymond burned to the ground, leaving a big, gaping scar in the landscape—in its own way, a metaphor for the beginning of the Knotek marriage. When they passed by the spot, Nikki would frequently recall her mother’s tirades against her stepdad and herself. She’d fight to hold on to the good memories, scant as they were. Her mom loved her. That had to be true. Her mom loved Sami. That was obvious.

Painfully so.

Sometimes hitting the pause button on a life beginning to spiral out of control by moving to a new house can actually reset the situation and make things better.

Nikki hoped that would be the case.

It had to be.

Dave and Shelly Knotek moved their family into a big Craftsman rental home in Old Willapa, which they always referred to as the Louderback House, so named for its original owners, a family associated with the region’s historic maritime industry. The residence was at the end of a long private drive that snaked past farmland. The road turned sharply up a hill, where the house was tucked into the fringe of the forest. Painted dark evergreen with contrasting trim, it boasted a wide porch that swept around the corner, connecting the entry into the living room to a side door accessing the kitchen. Inside, the ceilings were at least twelve feet high; the floors, battered but beautiful hardwood; a large masonry fireplace filled a front room paneled with wide planks. Across from the living room, adjacent to the staircase, was a large bathroom with a big tub. Off to the right of the front door was the master bedroom with a window facing the front yard.

Nikki’s and Sami’s bedrooms were up a flight of improbably steep wooden stairs. Each girl had her own room, separated by an open space that they would use for a playroom. Nikki’s overlooked the grassy and wooded hillside above the kitchen. Sami’s windows took in a view of the side yard with its mature rhododendrons and the garden spigot. Two flights down, the basement was large and musty, with a furnace that burned diesel oil and smelled every bit of it—no matter the season. Shelly loved the house. She thought it was perfect and she wanted to buy, instead of rent, but that kind of expense wasn’t in the cards. Dave was working in the woods then, pulling extra hours and doing everything he could. Shelly said she might look for a job, though she never seemed to get around to it.

It was a great house, charming and comfortable.

It was also the place where everything bad started.



Anything could be a weapon. The kids knew it. Dave too. A spatula from a kitchen drawer, a fishing pole, an electric cord. Shelly Knotek would employ all of those—and anything else within her grasp—to beat her girls if she perceived they’d done something wrong. No matter how big. Or how small. When she found a punishment that worked, she looked for ways to make it even more effective, more brutal. The act of beating her children seemed to fuel her and excite her. She seemed to savor the rush of adrenaline that came with being on the attack.

“Discipline” came mostly at night, the girls later recounted.

Nikki and Sami would be asleep upstairs, unaware that their mother had been seething on the couch, making sure that their punishment would be both severe and a surprise. Shelly was a stealth attacker. Her daughters learned to wear extra clothes to bed in the event that their mom would drag them out into the yard in the middle of winter.

“Sometimes there were reasons, I guess,” Nikki said later. “Maybe we used her makeup or lost a hairbrush. Things like that. A lot of times we really didn’t know for sure what we’d done.”

Beatings like that nearly always ended in blood. On one occasion, Shelly pushed Nikki into a walk-in closet. Hard. Shelly was screaming at the top of her lungs.

“You fucking little bitch!”

Shelly jumped on Nikki and started punching and hitting while the girl cried out and begged her to stop.