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

This chapter moves backwards in time to the day after Kathy Loreno’s murder in 1994. Shelly is afraid Shane and Nikki will talk, but Dave disagrees. When Shelly reminds him that Shane isn’t a blood relative, “it was obvious to Dave that Shane was indeed the weakest link” (384). From that moment onward, Shelly is convinced Shane needs to go, calling and pestering Dave incessantly to make him do something.

Shane has stolen photographs Shelly took of Kathy’s corpse. He shows them to Nikki, urging her to go with him to the police and turn her in. Nikki agrees, but she begins to have doubts and fears that turning her mother in will ruin her chances of going to college or having a life outside of their small town. She also does not want to see her family ripped apart. The next morning, she confesses to Shelly that Shane found the photos she took of Kathy. When Dave comes home from work, Shelly tells him what Nikki told her and tells him he needs to find the photos and confront Shane. Nikki saw Shane as her brother and still wrestles with her decision to turn him in and wonders whether it led to his death.

Nikki hears a physical confrontation coming from the pole building. Shelly is yelling at Shane that he will ruin the family. When Nikki finally sees him, he is covered in bruises. Meanwhile, Shelly pressures Dave to kill Shane at every opportunity. When he balks, she berates him, telling him it needs to look like an accident. Shelly tells him Shane is the one who truly killed Kathy and something must be done. Six months after Kathy’s murder, Shane disappears in the night. Nikki is awoken by a strange noise but falls back asleep.

In February 1995, Dave shoots Shane in the back of the head. Numb and disbelief at his own actions, he goes inside and tells Shelly, who bursts into tears and asks him why he did it. Confused, he tells her they will do what they did to Kathy and burn the body when the girls are away from the house. He cremates Shane and dumps the ashes into the ocean.

Afterwards, Dave grows concerned about the rifle he used to shoot the boy. He buries the weapon in the dirt in a remote forest area because, as Olsen describes, “[t]he gun that killed Shane was like Edgar Allen Poe’s tell-tale heart, always mocking Dave, reminding him what he’d done to his nephew” (394). Shelly, however, tells him to retrieve the gun two weeks later. Dave tries to burn it in a fire but to no avail. Eventually, it is tucked away into a cabinet, never to be seen again.

Shelly is unable to find the photos of Kathy’s corpse. She enlists Dave to help her search for them, worried they will incriminate her and calling Shane’s actions a betrayal. Unable to help herself, Shelly makes more and more elaborate cover-up stories to explain Shane’s disappearance until Dave reminds her to keep her story simple and straightforward. Dave claims today that he still thinks about Shane every day.

Nikki and Sami remain in close contact. All three sisters make a vow never to speak to the media and hold true to the promise. Shelly and Dave face a litany of charges and multi-million-dollar bonds. As sweet as it is to see them under arrest, confronting the truth of their parents’ actions is difficult. Sami is granted guardianship of Tori, who comes to live with her in Seattle.

Shelly attempts to contact Sami, who she knows is the most likely to take her calls from jail. She demands specific objects to be brought to her, and Sami sends them to her. Imagining her mother in jail saddens Sami. When Nikki calls her out for doing what her mother asked, Sami realizes that Shelly is still manipulating her.

In 2004, Dave Knotek pleads guilty to second-degree murder for Shane’s death. He is sentenced to just under 15 years in prison. Shelly enters an Alford guilty plea to the charges filed against her, avoiding a drawn-out trial. She is tentatively sentenced to 17 years in jail, but two months later at her sentencing hearing, she appears more bedraggled and exhausted than ever before. No one in her family speaks up to support her. She cries as she delivers her final remarks to the judge and blames Nikki and Sami for abusing Kathy. Throughout her time to speak, she blames everyone but herself. The sentencing judge and increases her jail time to 22 years for the second-degree murder of Kathy Loreno and a manslaughter charge for the death of Shane Watson.

Released from prison in 2016, Dave Knotek lives on the coast of Washington and works at a seafood processing plant. He maintains relationships with Sami and Tori but is still estranged from Nikki. Nikki, now a mother, raises her children with love and respect. She spares her children the details of exactly why their grandmother went to prison. Nikki is still unable to shake her guilt over the deaths of Kathy and Shane, although she herself was also a victim of Shelly’s abuse.

Shelly will be released from prison in 2022 at the age of 68. She still claims her innocence and claims she did not understand what the Alford plea really meant. None of her daughters come to visit her. She still claims that she has cancer. Sami wrestles with her own guilt and her relationship to Dave, struggling to move on while still grieving for Shane. Tori is sometimes nostalgic for her mother’s more tender side; she misses having a mother in her life. She has grown close to Dave. Shelly tried to make Sami deliver a letter to Tori, but Sami never delivered it.

All three Knotek sisters gather throughout the year. In 2018, Nikki and Sami return to Raymond to revisit the place of their childhood trauma. The three sisters remain bonded together for life, survivors of their parents’ abuse and there to support one another forever.