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

by Gregg Olsen

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.

She didn’t cook. She didn’t clean. All she seemed to like to do was lie around and tell everyone in earshot what they should be doing, though she was never shy about telling others what she deserved, and how they should help her get whatever she wanted.

In reality, the Watsons were afraid of Shelly and what she might do. It was easier to give her everything she wanted, just to keep her happy and at bay.

Whatever Shelly wanted, she got.

When Shelly announced she was pregnant in the summer of 1974, everyone took a gulp of air. Maybe this would help?

Delusional, just like my mother.

It was apparent to many, including Nikki, that Dave Knotek had been made less of a man by marrying Shelly.

Shelly gave her daughter a Popple, a stuffed toy that all the girls had wanted that year.

I vaguely remember those!

The girls noticed she’d shed a torrent of tears for dead pets, but never for another person.

He had lost his home, his father, his partner. He was also estranged from his mother, with whom he had lived after the foreclosure of his trailer in 1999. Worst of all, he had lost his cats.

She didn’t care. She’d been slighted and she was at war.

Unbeknownst to Ron, Shelly was also driving a wedge as deeply as she could between Ron and the rest of his family. She’d done it with Kathy. She’d done it with Dave too.

Sami could never grasp why her mother felt compelled to lie when saying nothing at all would be a smarter course.

Shelly wanted to control people. She loathed any scenario in which she wasn’t the center square.

Or get them out of the way so she could watch TV or sit around unencumbered by having to address the needs of anyone else in the house.

Shelly loathed weakness and ambivalence.

The woman his dad had spotted as a fraud and troublemaker from the minute he’d met her. “Sawdust for brains if you stay with her.”

Having only superficial emotional attachments to truth and moral behavior, predators train themselves to imitate trustworthy behaviors like honesty and compassion so they can exploit what people expect.

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.

The usual nurturing that accompanies parenthood means nothing to them.

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.

Each reminds me that as terrible a person’s starting point in life might be, it’s where one ends up that really matters.