When you start a video, and you hear it begin with, “Story time of how I used to mess with my mom’s head,” you expect it to be light-hearted and funny, but not in this case. On January 27th, a user named Sami on TikTok posted a video about her mom, who would hide her clothes when she was young. Sami tells the story of how she found her clothes in hiding spots and wore them in front of her without confrontation. In the middle of the video, Sami relates a story of a time when she was looking for her clothes under her mom’s bed and found a bag of bones, saying, “I guess it could’ve been my brother or cousin”. Sami’s calm demeanor surprised many people, and although her videos get under a thousand views on average, this video got 715 thousand likes and 4 million views. Sami did not live the life of any ordinary child; she was the daughter of an abuser and murderer named Shelly Knotek.
According to Oxygen: True Crime, “Shelly (Michelle) Knotek is an American convicted murderer from Raymond, Washington. She was convicted in 2004 of second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter for her role in the torture and deaths of Kathy Loreno and Ronald Woodworth, who were both boarders in Knotek’s home.” Shelly Knotek didn’t just abuse and murder people who wanted to board her home, but she also manipulated her own children and did the same to them.
Shelly Knotek was a sadistic mother who would abuse her children and force them to take part in sickening behaviors. Sami tells people her mom had always been like this. When Shelly Knotek was six, she would crush up glass and put it in her little sister’s shoes. As a child, Sami’s mother would steal her children’s clothes and homework and hide them to get them in trouble at school. She would yell and beat them when they “didn’t do their homework,” while knowing she was the one who took them. This manipulative mother abused her children for getting in trouble at school, almost like a reward for being the one to get them in trouble in the first place. Some punishments for this went as far as forcing them to sleep outside naked, making her daughter wait till midnight to get picked up from school, or pulling out their p*bes and forcing them to eat it. Although Sami and her siblings faced intense abuse, Shelly Knotek was strategic in hiding the truth, always taking family photos of them smiling together, buying her kids the latest clothes, inviting her friends over for fun, and making sure not to hit where it showed; everything was always for appearances.
Through her daughter’s TikToks, Sami can tell her story, and people can learn about some of the aspects of having a murderer for a mother. And Sami wasn’t the only survivor; she and her sisters published a book by Hregg Olsen called If You Tell. “The book tells the horrific, true story of three sisters—Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek—who grew up in a ‘house of horrors’ in Raymond, Washington, subjected to years of sadistic abuse, torture, and degradation by their mother, Shelly Knotek.” Shelly Knotek was an abuser who took joy in gaining power and control over others when she tortured them. Sami and her sisters were freed when Shelly was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2004. While the abuse is over, Sami continues to post her story on TikTok and inform people of what her life was like growing up in such a household.
