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

As the subtitle of the book suggests, sisterhood and the Knotek daughters’ devotion to one another is integral not only to Shelly and Dave’s arrests, but to their own survival. The book begins and ends with the three sisters and their relationships to one another, and Olsen places an emphasis on their survival and love for one another over the sensational, disturbing story of Shelly Knotek. He thus casts the three of them in heroic light.

Each daughter is abused, manipulated, and tortured in a variety of ways, one of which is that Shelly tells her own daughters not to trust one another. This is part of Shelly’s larger strategy when making others suffer: She strips her victim of support outside of her, forcing them to rely on her and her perspective alone. An independent person would be able to escape her or resist her sadistic violence, and Shelly quashes such independence whenever she can. She does this by trying to poison members of the family against one another. Amongst the sisters, this is especially true for Tori, who is kept away from Nikki and told that she is a monster: “Tori took it all in. She absorbed the message: she had the best mom in the world, and Nikki and Lara were her sworn enemies” (239).