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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gregg Olsen
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February 7 - February 7, 2024
“It’s very important that we stick together on this, okay? I need all of you to understand and know that Kathy went off with Rocky.”
Next, Shelly had Nikki forge cards and letters with Kathy’s signature to make the Rocky love-on-the-run tale even more convincing.
“She actually wiped down each card and put them into the plastic bags. She was putting to use all of her forensic knowledge, I guess. Or thought she was.”
missives
Canada to
steal a card back before Kaye got it.
“we’ll pin it all on you, Shane.”
that. She’d do whatever it took to save herself. Everything that had happened to Kathy—the bloody snow, the
done was out of love for Kathy.
she dialed Kaye at her little house in South Bend. The call lasted barely a minute.
“Didn’t want to talk with Kathy at all.”
neighbors
her parents would likely get arrested and sent to jail. She and Shane would be homeless.
There were times when she and Sami thought their mom was psychic because she just knew things.
Crawlspace
Nikki spent her days in the neighbor’s crawlspace, against the garbage, looking up between slits in the floorboards as the family that lived there went about their daily lives.
“You need to follow them the next time they leave,”
Her mom had Shane steal the neighbor’s food a few times too. He also put pepper spray on their door handles.
Neighbor steel food
“I’m going. Are you staying or leaving?”
For more than a year after Kathy’s death, Shelly burrowed
With Kathy gone, she ramped up the punishments on the two oldest kids in the house, Nikki and Shane.
But it wasn’t her.
Shane wasn’t going to squeal on his parents and send his cousins to foster care.
When Shelly didn’t get her way, she manufactured the evidence—the way she had with her hair loss because of the supposed cancer, the bruises when she claimed to have been raped by the intruder when she was married to Randy, or the forged cards to Kathy’s family. Proof was important to Shelly. Proof was undeniable. One time when Dave came home,
Manufactured Enders
“They’re Tori’s,” she said flatly. “Shane’s abusing our baby! You have to do something!”
Dave beat Shane that night.
Suddenly, Shane was gone.
February 1995, just a couple of weeks before Nikki’s twentieth birthday.
February 1995 share left
Nikki didn’t want to think that anything had happened to the boy she considered her brother.
“I don’t think we looked for Shane more than a couple of times.”
“Maybe he didn’t run away?”
their cousin was fishing on Kodiak Island.
got another one last night,” she announced with complete conviction. “I’m pretty sure it was Shane.”
“California. Why don’t you ever listen? Shane’s in Alaska.”
Shelly ignored her and stayed on the couch watching TV.
Once, Nikki stashed a sleeping bag and some matches under the old dilapidated barn.
wishing the night away.
Shelly would fix her something hot to eat and tell her daughter how much she loved her.
her mother came at her with a knife.
Shelly went after Nikki with a
Knife
sliced her leg with the knife. Blood oozed from the wound. Shelly looked at what she’d done, then let her go.
Nikki slept in the woods that night.
“I tried to kill myself,” she told Sami.
Nikki med to kill herself
“I can’t even do that right,” she added. Despite the circumstances, both sisters laughed.
when she came home her mother refused to let her in. “You’re
was trying to make a statement by eating those berries and she didn’t even care.”
have spent a good part of my life raising my children, helping with their schoolwork, their school activities, volunteering
Sami was a social queen bee who used her sense of humor as a cover for life with her mother.
royal bitch with nonsensical rules and punishments that went far beyond any real or perceived transgressions.
Sami’s friends knew that her mother was a weirdo who was holding Sami captive.
