Shelly Knotek: When A Mother Becomes A Monster

For most of us, the phrase "look at what you made me do" sounds melodramatic, something straight out of a soap opera that we’d never take seriously. But for others, it's a bone-chilling reminder that their fate lies completely in someone else's control. That helplessness is at the heart of today's case, featuring none other than Michelle Knotek.

Born in Washington in 1964, Michelle, who went by the name of Shelly, had a much rougher start in life than many others. Her parents had separated, leaving Shelly and her two younger brothers solely in the care of their mother, Sharon Watson. 

Sharon suffered from addictions and had several mental health issues, meaning that she was drunk more often than she was not and she wasn’t there to look after her children. It is suspected but unconfirmed that during this time of her life, Sharon was working as a prostitute and would often bring strange men to the home her children were living in.

Just about when Shelly had turned six, Sharon disappeared and it was only then that Les Watson swooped in to try and save the day. The father to the three now homeless Watson children, Les was known to be charming and charismatic. He was a successful businessman, so he was able to financially provide for his three children and he even had a new wife, Laura Stallings, who could fill in for Sharon.

From the outside looking in, this could appear to be the fresh start that the Watson children so desperately needed. They would have a stable and safe home and two parents on hand to make up for the trauma that they had already experienced.

But that was only on paper.

In truth, the Watson/Stallings household was rife with grief and torment and at the heart of it was Shelly Watson herself.

Like many older siblings, Shelly enjoyed tormenting and teasing her younger brothers, but she would take things much further than most people would ever go. She did the somewhat usual thing of blaming them if she was caught skipping chores or missing homework, but then again she also would line the inside of their shoes with glass shards and beat them.

Stunned and shocked by her step-daughter’s behavior, Laura tried to do the responsible thing and step in only to find Shelly’s ire then directed at her instead.

Shelly hated Laura and used every excuse she had to try and make Laura’s life more difficult. She frequently refused to listen to her or flatout picked fights with Laura, all the while reminding everyone around them that Laura wasn’t her real mother.

And even though that could sound like Shelly was missing her mother Sharon, again, the truth is far more chilling than that. 

Les Waston later described what happened to his ex-wife Sharon when Shelly was only thirteen years old. He claimed that she was living with another man at the time, but that they were, in his own words, “Homeless. Drunks. Living on skid row. She was beaten to death.”

That was how Shelly lost her mother, but far from being even more traumatized by the situation, Shelly seemed to ignore it.

“(Shelly) never once asked about her mother,” Laura said in a later interview.

But, perhaps, it was that Shelly couldn’t let people in to show them her pain or, perhaps, it was because the trauma that she experienced in those first six years of her life when she was still living with Sharon had simply caused too much damage.

Only about a year later, Les and Laura found themselves panic-stricken and calling Shelly’s school when she didn’t come home. During that phone call, their worst fears were confirmed when the school informed them that Shelly had been picked up by the police.

Les and Laura then rushed down to the station, desperate to protect Shelly from whatever it was that she was in trouble for, only to find the spotlight directed at them. Well, directed at Les in particular.

Shelly had shared some startling and heartbreaking news both with her teachers and with the police. Les had been sexually abusing her.

Determined to get to the bottom of things, the police conducted a thorough investigation, but a medical exam revealed that Shelly had been lying about the whole thing.

After several failed attempts at patching their family back together, Shelly then went to live with Laura’s parents. Her behavior didn’t improve there though. Instead, she would often be caught tormenting neighborhood  children and locking them into rooms when she was babysitting them. She also made one more claim that her grandfather abused her during this time, but no one around her took the allegations seriously.

Now an adult, Shelly married and had two daughters, Nikki and Sami, before she met David Knotek. David was a navy veteran turned construction worker and five years after Shelly walked into his life, the two of them were married. Together they welcomed another daughter named Tori into the world and their family was complete.

But as Nikki would later say, “My mother was like a ticking time bomb. I never knew when she would go off.”

When Shelly was calm and happy, she showered her three daughters and husband with love and affection. When she wasn’t, she would turn in a flash into someone completely cold and sadistic. Whatever the girls had done wrong would need to be punished and Shelly’s favorite   method of punishment was something she liked to call “wallowing.”

She would force the children outside, usually during the night, and make them roll around naked in the mud. Then to clean them off, she would hose them down with the cold water from the garden hose and make them stand outside until they were dry enough to come back in.

Wallowing was Shelly’s go to answer for most things. If the girls ticked her off, or even didn’t ask permission before using the bathroom, they would all find themselves outside in the mud.

This was also the case when Shelly invited her nephew Shane Watson to come and live with them while his father was in prison. Shane, like others that would follow after him, actually believed that he was walking into a warm and safe home, but he quickly discovered that that was far from the case. Like his cousins, he would face wallowing too and as an extra form of punishment, he would sometimes have to slow dance naked with his cousins in the living room.

It was during this period that Shelly would further torment Nikki and Sami by demanding handfuls of their pubic hair and locking them in a dog kennel after they’d been out wallowing. And it was also during this period that Shelly shoved Nikki’s head through a glass door and yelled at her: “Look what you made me do.”

But it was also only a few short months after Shane had moved in that the children found a brief moment to breathe. Shelly got herself a new victim and usually directed all of her attention towards him instead of at the children. It was this fact that kept the children quiet during most of the abuse that would follow; a silence that they later said they would forever regret.

Kathy Loreno was one of Shelly’s old friends who had fallen on hard times after losing her job. Shelly invited Kathy to live with them until she had gotten back up on her feet, but soon after Kathy moved in, Shelly did everything she could to make sure that that never happened.

Shelly would beat Kathy. After claiming that Kathy was a binge eater, Shelly took all of her clothes and forced her to do chores around the house naked. After accusing Kathy of sleepwalking, Shelly then started forcing her to take sedatives and made her sleep in the basement.

During the five years that Kathy endured this abuse, she lost 100 pounds and most of her teeth, and then one night she suddenly disappeared.

According to David Knotek, Shelly had beaten Kathy before leaving the house that evening. He could hear Kathy down in the basement, but something about the way she was breathing made him want to go and check on her.

“I know I should have called 911,” he later said. “But with everything that had been going on I didn’t want the cops there. I didn’t want Shell in trouble.”

David found Kathy unconscious and choking on her own vomit. He performed CPR and tried to save her, but the beating had gone too far. Kathy died on the basement floor. When David told Shelly what had happened, she flew off the handle and told everyone in the household that they would all go to jail if anyone talked to the police.

David and their daughters believed her. They stayed silent while David burned Kathy’s body and he and Shelly disposed of her ashes.

But Shane didn’t.

He told Nikki that he had taken pictures of Kathy during the abuse and he was going to show them to the police. Terrified, and a victim herself, Nikki told Shelly about the pictures. Shelly then ordered David to handle the situation.

David shot Shane in the head. He then burned Shane’s body and scattered his ashes into the ocean.

It was shortly after the murder of her own nephew that Shelly found yet another victim. He was another friend who had fallen on hard times, but in Shelly’s opinion Ron Woodworth was nothing but “an ugly lowlife.”

Ron was a fifty-seven-year-old veteran who struggled with addiction, but Shelly believed she would be the one to convince him to get his life together. 

Ron wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom in the house. He was instead forced to go outside and was on at least one occasion forced to drink his own urine. Shelly made him cut all ties with his family and with no one else to look out for him, or ask questions, Shelly could do what she liked to Ron.

She then made him jump barefoot off the roof of the house onto the gravel pathway. Ron was severely injured from the jump and Shelly treated his wounds by pouring bleach onto them.

Ron wouldn’t survive the abuse.

After he’d died from his injuries, Shelly hid his body in the freezer and told David that he had committed suicide. David then helped Shelly cover her tracks by burying Ron in the garden.

By that point in time, only fourteen-year-old Tori was still living at home and after witnessing her mother murdering Ron, she knew that enough was enough. She went to her sisters and all of them agreed that they were finally going to talk to the police.

The subsequent police investigation uncovered Ron’s remains in the garden and confirmed the sisters’ stories.

David was sentenced to thirteen years for second-degree murder for killing young Shane. Shelly was sentenced to twenty-two years for second-degree murder and manslaughter for killing Kathy and Ron. She was released in November 2022 at the age of sixty-eight.