If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood(15)

“I’m sorry, Mom! I won’t do it again!”

The truth was, Nikki had no idea what had set her mother off.

Something she said? Something missing? Something else?

Nikki got up and tried to make a run for the door, but her mom grabbed her, swung her around, and shoved her up against the wall, where she hit a protruding nail.

It was only then, with Nikki’s head literally nailed to the wall, that Shelly backed off.

When she played volleyball at Raymond Elementary, Nikki wore opaque ballet tights under her shorts to conceal the bruises and bloody cuts on her legs from a phone cord—another of her mother’s favorite implements of rage.

Later, she’d accept some of the blame for her abuse because her mom “had gotten carried away during the beatings because I was trying to get away.”

While she had many opportunities to tell someone what was happening to her, Nikki didn’t. She stayed private and guarded. She didn’t want anyone to know that anything bad was happening to her or that her family was engaged in any kind of violence.

“I never even thought to tell,” she said later. “I didn’t want the attention. I didn’t want people to think I was weird. And no one ever asked. Not even once.”

Not all of the abuse was physical. Shelly employed a series of mind games on her daughters as well.

During the week before one Christmas, Shelly locked Nikki in her room. She’d told her that she was worthless and would never amount to anything.

“You fucking loser! You make me sick!”

And when Christmas Day came, Shelly acted like everything was perfect. She showered the girls with presents, served wonderful holiday treats, and for that one day, they were the happiest family in the world.

Then it was over.

Some things their mother did were routine. All of the presents were taken back from the kids within days. Shelly would tell them they were bad, or ungrateful, and that they didn’t deserve anything she’d given them.

One year Nikki got a Cabbage Patch doll. She could not have been more excited. But Shelly took it away right after she’d given it to her, and put it in a closet. The girls knew that their mother set traps for them to see if they’d gotten into anything when she was away. She’d arrange things just so or would put tiny pieces of tape on the edge of the door to see if the trigger was tripped. Nikki learned to be as careful as she could. Especially with that Cabbage Patch doll.

“I’d wait for my mom to leave and then, very carefully, I’d get the doll out of Mom’s closet, so I could hold it for a while,” she said later. “Sometimes she’d catch me. Sometimes not.”

Another Christmas, Shelly gave Nikki and Sami teddy-bear pins in their stockings. As the mountain of wrapping paper started to grow as present after present was opened, the little pins somehow went missing. Shelly became unhinged and beat both girls with an electric cord.

“You girls are the most selfish, ungrateful kids!”

With Dave’s backing, Shelly kept them up all night looking for the pins. When they finally found them—tucked inside another Christmas gift—they instantly knew who had hidden them there.

A holiday drama culminating in a beating, it seemed, had been just what Shelly had wanted for Christmas.



As the kids got older, Shelly spent considerable effort concocting new techniques to make them suffer.

“The well’s about to run dry,” she announced out of the blue, referring to the water source at the new house. “No showers. Also, check with me before you try to use the bathroom.”

It was a lie she’d use over and over—even when on city water at the house on Fowler.

Whenever Shelly left her daughters alone, they’d hurry into the bathroom and shower as quickly as they could. Sami would dry the floor, the shower walls, and the faucet. She’d hide the damp towels. There could be no hint left behind that they’d done what their mother had forbidden. After cleaning up, Sami would try to make herself look as if she hadn’t had a shower at all.

“It was embarrassing going to school without a shower,” she recalled. “You want to look clean and smell good. My mom wanted to control everything. She wanted to decide when we could bathe, even when we could use the bathroom. We had to have permission. Everything as simple as a shower was considered a privilege that only she could give us.”



Sometimes after the beatings, Sami snuck into her sister’s bedroom and crawled into bed with her. She and Nikki would lie there for hours talking about how much their butts hurt and thinking of what they could do to their mother to stop her from hurting them.

“I wish we could shrink her,” Sami suggested. “Make her supersmall and put her in a cage.”

Nikki liked the idea but saw a pitfall.

“She’d get out and bite our ankles!”

They laughed about it.

“Can you imagine our mother stabbing us with little sticks and stuff?” Nikki asked.

They could.

No, shrinking Mom wouldn’t help. Not even a little.





CHAPTER ELEVEN

Though no one came over to visit, appearances were important in the Knotek household. Dave saw it. Nikki did. Even Sami would later say she understood the significance of making things look “nice” no matter how far the world was tilting toward crazy. It was makeup on a bruise. A fake rose in a garden of straw and twigs. It was as if making things appear pretty just inside the front door meant that whatever was going on in the bathroom, the back bedroom, the basement, the backyard couldn’t be so bad.