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by
Gregg Olsen
Read between
August 8 - August 13, 2025
Like her sisters, it’s the little things—duct tape, pain relievers, the sound of a weed eater—that propel her back to a time and place where their mother did things they swore they’d hold secret forever.
Shelly and Grandma Anna were inseparable, constant companions. While occasionally her victim, Shelly mainly served the role of protégé in her grandmother’s life. Grandma Anna’s favorite, her shadow, her mimic, was paying close attention to everything she did. In time, Shelly would reveal just how good a student she’d been.
Shelly wouldn’t entertain the idea that she might have problems that needed fixing. Even though she’d been confronted with the truth, Shelly remained adamant that nothing was her fault. Nothing had ever been. Lara and Les came to know something that few understood in the late sixties and seventies: no one can help a troubled person who doesn’t think they need it.
“I don’t understand Shelly’s constant need to try to ruin people’s lives.”
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.”
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
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.
“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.
“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
“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.”
Shelly called it “wallowing.” It was her way of proving she was the supreme being over the entire family. Like all her best inventions, wallowing was a mix of humiliation and physical pain. It was also the kind of punishment that she could direct from the sidelines. Wallowing was a nighttime activity, and an all-seasons endeavor. Nikki was almost always the primary focus.
It was true that Sami was abused too, yet she seemed to compartmentalize what happened better. She took the abuse and then found ways to sweet-talk her attacker with words of love. That singular ability worked in Sami’s favor.
think it worked like any abusive relationship . . . a person feels trapped, nowhere to go . . . they are abused and then the abuser reins them back in with kindness and the person being abused settles, not quite thinking about the next time they are beat etc. just relieved the abuse is over (for now). My mother was a ticking time bomb .
I loved my mother because I didn’t know I had a choice. I had to love her.”
The way the kids saw it, the nudity was more about power than sexuality. Sami came to see the nudity as her mother’s way of humiliating her victims, and also to keep them from running away. Forced nudity was one component of Shelly’s bizarre and demeaning methodology of stripping away a person’s identity. And their ability to leave.
For someone who always had so much to hide, Shelly had become an expert at keeping things out of view. It was a skill that would help her keep the darkest secrets from her family. And the authorities.
The pause in the abuse against the Knotek kids came with a steep price. They inhabited a world in which looking the other way kept them safe from their mother but led them to accept things that would haunt them forever.
If he didn’t do what she wanted, he’d be forced to wallow or would end up duct-taped to the wall naked or made to sleep on the concrete floor without clothing or a blanket.
“I wish you could help me,” Kathy said once. “But I know you can’t.” It wasn’t that Kathy was sacrificing herself to save them, Nikki thought. It was that she knew that in a very real way the situation was hopeless. For her.
Several hours into the search on the second day, Shelly found her wayward nephew and coaxed him back into the car with the words that meant more to him than anything. She told him how much she loved him. Words he had to have known by then were false.
When Shane had unlocked the door to let her run free, it was probably her last chance. Kathy just didn’t have any fight left. She’d simply given up.
In her heart, Nikki doubted she’d ever really be able to leave. She had her sisters to think about. She knew that her mother had a strange, ironclad hold on her. She also knew that no matter where she went, or how far away, her mom would track her down. She’d found Kathy at the mall. She’d even managed to track Shane in the middle of Tacoma. Her mom was a hunter.
felt unable to end what was happening to Kathy. It wasn’t that he looked the other way—really, there was no other way to look. He simply didn’t have it in him to fight Shell or even to tell her to knock it off.
Besides following Shelly’s orders, worry was all Dave seemed to do.
Nikki and Shane didn’t see how anyone would believe that story. Suicide? Nikki doubted it. No one takes a five-year route to kill herself. Kathy had been beaten, starved, and tortured to death.
It was typical of their mother, however, to suggest a shared memory as if it were something that could be planted and made to become real.
She loved her sisters more than anything, though she also wondered why her mother saw her so differently, treated her with such hatred. Why she told her over and over that she was garbage, a bitch, a loser, a whore, any nasty name that came to mind as she rattled off insult and epithet. “No one will ever love you, Nikki. No one!”
When Sami’s friends came to pick her up and there was no answer, they’d just wait. Nikki’s friends weren’t like that; if they came for Nikki and she wasn’t there, they figured she’d changed her mind or was off somewhere else. Sami’s friends knew that her mother was a weirdo who was holding Sami captive. So they’d knock. They’d wait. As long as they needed. Sometimes they’d go to McDonald’s in Raymond, then come back and wait some more. The teenagers could outlast and annoy Shelly, so that’s just what they did.
And then the biggest lie of all: “She feels so bad.” Shelly never felt bad about anything. At least not when it came to other people’s feelings. The girls noticed she’d shed a torrent of tears for dead pets, but never for another person.
Sami sat there in the dark, thinking over and over that telling someone was not a good idea. It hadn’t felt good. It hadn’t freed her from anything. Instead, it had made her sick to her stomach, angry, confused. It didn’t matter that she trusted Kaley. It was his reaction that had sucker punched her. She’d been a part of something so terrible that, even though she’d been a child, it felt like a huge, ugly mark against her. Against the family. Against her sisters.
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.
Though she couldn’t quite put it into words, on some level Tori knew her mother was only happy when someone else was suffering. There had to be a word for a person who found joy in another’s pain.
At first, she wrote it off as her mom’s obsessive need to lie. Lying was like taking a breath to Shelly. Sami could never grasp why her mother felt compelled to lie when saying nothing at all would be a smarter course.
Seeing her big sister for the first time in years, Tori would later say, was the biggest deal of her life. Even after she’d been bombarded by the lies that her mother flung to keep the estrangement intact, Tori knew right in that instant that she had missed Nikki with all her heart.
She would have braced for her world to come crashing down if she’d thought for one second that Tori was being abused. Tori had seemed okay. And the police hadn’t followed through. So she didn’t tell.
Coming up with cover stories was well-trod territory for the Knoteks. Kathy was off with Boyfriend Rocky touring the country. Shane was in Alaska, fishing off Kodiak Island. Nikki had left Raymond to pursue a new life in Seattle. They hadn’t merely vanished; they’d gone somewhere they’d always wanted to go.
She kicked herself for not doing more. She’d seen the problems with Ron. She knew the warning signs. Yet in order to survive, she’d swum in a sea of denial. No life preserver. Just Sami bobbing along until a wave would suck her downward. And drown her.
Dave was Himmler to her mother’s Hitler, blindly doing whatever evil bidding she’d demanded.
Going to the police wasn’t only about making her mother pay. It wasn’t even vengeance. It was her way of stopping all the madness so she could be with her sisters again.
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.
None of her daughters have seen her since she left Pacific County, though a visitor to the women’s prison in Gig Harbor, Washington, says Shelly’s hair is white now and that she’s fighting cancer. At least that’s what she says.
“Mom liked to torture people. It just went too far, and she found she had a taste for it. I don’t know.”
First, they look for compliant people with few resources: their own children or elderly parents, friends in need, homeless people, the mentally ill, or those without family ties. Then they pursue a program of steady erosion of their victims’ ability to resist. Even in the face of outrageous behavior, such people will be too frightened, docile, confused, or incapacitated to retaliate or seek help.
Controlling others with pain empowers them. A bent toward sadism forms during certain associations in early adolescence, coupled with a callous temperament that needs control and lacks remorse. Even so, more than one-third of sadists report discovering their perverted propensities well into adulthood; they enjoy the sense of authority that arises from having their way with a vulnerable and submissive human being, and their fantasies grow increasingly more sophisticated and perverse. Because they seek stimulation, they become quite inventive in the types of cruelties they inflict on others. The
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He labels as evil those parents who present a normal social persona to shield the harm they do in private. They serve their own needs and desires at the expense of their relatives, especially their children. The more pleasure they derive from acts of torment, the more they indulge. Indeed, Stone reserves the “most evil” category—level 22—for psychopathic torture-murderers, with torture as their primary motivator. They thrive on inflicting pain.
Skilled predators know how to stay in control.
Even when sadistic parents are caught, convicted, and sentenced, the nightmares continue for their children. Some shun the media, change their names, get therapy, and hope to live their lives as normally as they can. Others seek out a public forum. No matter which route they take, the offender has stained their souls.
Victims of abuse can still love the monster. This ambivalent loyalty might just be the predator’s ultimate form of damage.
