Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (10 page)

“What exactly did he tell you?” Benson asked.

“He told me she was cheating on him while … I think he said he was working in Fairbanks, she [Vickie] was down here staying on Canyon Road in a house with his mother. He was sending all this money down here to her and his sisters. And so he came down here without anybody knowing and he found out that she was [cheating]. He went back to Alaska and, three weeks later, had her come up there for a visit. He was driving down a road and he confronted her with this other man, and they started arguing, and he reached down and took his loaded gun from under the seat and shot her in the head at point blank range. And then he took the body up to higher ground somewhere in Fairbanks and buried her. He said she laid [
sic
] there for a very, very, long time before they found her. Some animals had come down ’cause it was cold in the winter and they found her and kinda dug part of her up and were chewing on her limbs, and later some skiers tripped across it, and they put her face on the news and that’s how he got caught.”

“Did he tell you who recognized her face on the news?”

“His boss … He had taken her and introduced her to his boss and when they showed her as a Jane Doe and a number you could call with information, he did.”

“And then did he tell you about coming down here to Tacoma and looking for the guy she was having the affair with?”

“Yes. After he killed her he came down to the Tacoma area and found the guy and killed him. His mother knew he was coming down, his sisters knew, and he got him
and killed him—and then brought the body back to his mother’s house on Canyon Road, and he told me his sisters helped him dismember the body, put it in bags, and buried him under his mother’s front porch. I asked him if his mother knew—and he said yes, and his sisters and him had made a pact never to tell anybody …”

Janet said that Nick Notaro had threatened
her
sometime later—after she helped his wife Lila May and Heidi get away from him because he was clearly molesting Heidi sexually.

“I moved them in with me.”

Lila May Notaro agreed to talk with Benson at her apartment in Tacoma. She told Ben Benson that she had married Nick Notaro in Marshfield, Wisconsin, in 1987. She was a dozen years younger than Nick.

“How did you meet him?”

“We both worked at Jimmy’s Cafe in Marshfield,” she began. “He was a cook and I was a waitress. I took him as being a kind gentleman. He treated me like a woman at the time … I saw his good side, him being a friendly, respectable person.”

Lila May was raising her six-and-a-half-year-old daughter alone. She and Nick Notaro dated for about six months, and she was happy when he asked her to marry him. She knew virtually nothing about his past—not until the night before their wedding.

“Did you know he had been to prison?” Benson asked.

“Nope. Not until he said he was feeling guilty that he
had done something wrong, and he thought he should let me know before we got married—to see how I would react or if I would go through with getting married.”

“Okay. And what did he tell you?”

“He told me he killed his first wife and someone else. He said they had an argument and they were fighting, and she fell between the tub and the toilet, and then he took her and put her in the car—and went to a ditch. And she got out of the car and he went after her and shot her. Killed her.”

“Did he tell you why he did that?”

“Because of her having an affair.”

“Did he say anything about the person she was having an affair with?”

She shook her head. “Just some guy who lived here in Tacoma. Nick said he cut someone up and put him in a pipe in the backyard.”

“All right. So then you went ahead with the wedding?”

“Yes.”

“How long were you married to Nick?”

“Just about six years. The first three years were wonderful. He was dressed decent, he worked, and I didn’t have any problems until the last three years.”

Lila May Notaro said that Nick had kept working at Jimmy’s Cafe until they had moved to Tacoma. He had moved out west a month before she did, and he got a job right away at Winchell’s Donuts.

But their marriage wasn’t as successful once they moved to Washington State.

“He just didn’t want to be bothered,” Lila May said. “He was starting to tell me that we should separate because it
wasn’t working out—I guess it was because of the way he was treating Heidi. He didn’t want me to interfere.”

Lila May said Nick would get mad at her seven-year-old daughter and make her sit still for long periods. “He wasn’t really disciplining her for the right reasons. I mean, he just took it out on her [because] of his actions.”

“He eventually started molesting Heidi?” Benson prompted.

“Yes—when she was the age of nine it started.”

“When did you find out?”

“It was a while. One night he got up and I thought he went to the bathroom, but he went into her room, and I looked and he was kinda under the blanket. I kinda got the idea he was doing something, but you know, I didn’t want to believe it ’cause I didn’t think he was that type—”

A few weeks later, Lila May couldn’t lie to herself any longer. She had to leave for work at 7 a.m. “And he took Heidi and molested her—penetrated her and everything. Two days later, Heidi told me everything.”

Lila May had been horrified, but didn’t know what to do. She first went to Geri Hesse and told her what Heidi had said about Nick. Her mother-in-law didn’t seem shocked. She’d said only, “Then you better believe her.”

Geri Hesse told Lila May that Nick had also molested another girl—a young female relative—but she didn’t offer Lila May any solution to her problems.

Lila May Notaro wasn’t a very brave woman; she didn’t have the courage to confront Nick. It was her boss at the donut shop—Janet Blaisdell—who suspected something
was wrong and urged Lila May to confide in her. When Lila May finally did, Janet went immediately to the phone and called Child Protective Services.

Nick Notaro was arrested and the case of child molestation went to court. Sadly, it resulted in a hung jury. The prosecutor wanted Lila May to go to court again, but she said she was too frightened.

“I had a bad feeling something was going to happen if I did it.”

“What do you mean by that?” Benson asked her.

“I felt like he would’ve tried to do something.”

“To harm you or Heidi?”

“I had such a bad feeling that I told [the prosecutor] just to get Nick on whatever he could. So he did.”

Without the complaining witnesses, Nick Notaro drew a relatively short sentence. (The fact that he was a Level 2 sex offender in a Southern state wasn’t known to the sentencing judge. His “victim” in that case was a developmentally disabled teenager with whom he had had consensual sexual relations.)

Nick divorced Lila May but she didn’t know that until she was given some papers the night before Nick’s trial, papers that said their divorce was final.

“When did you last see Nick?” Benson asked.

“Sometime back in the middle of the nineties. I didn’t have a car, so I was taking a bus and I saw him sitting in the back. I turned my head away and didn’t look at him.”

Lila May said that her ex-husband had also told Janet Blaisdell about murders he had committed, and Janet had urged her to get away from him. Without Janet, she probably
wouldn’t have had the strength to leave Nick—and she felt grateful to Janet for having her back.

The two women had worked at the same places for a while, but over the years they had drifted apart.

Ben Benson was puzzled by the many versions that Nick Notaro had given when he decided to talk about the murder of his ex-wife Vickie. Was he trying to make it seem as though Vickie had been having an affair with Joe Tarricone? Or was he just making up details as he went along? Or was he a man who wanted to be the center of attention and told tall stories to achieve that?

One thing seemed certain; over a period of almost thirty years, Nick Notaro had admitted that he’d killed Vickie in every scenario he gave people.

Gypsy Tarricone told Ben Benson that she had talked to Renee on the phone a few times after her father disappeared, and Renee told her that she and her mother, Geri, felt that Joe had met with foul play. But they were emphatic in their denials that he had vanished from their rented house in Puyallup—even though Renee acknowledged that Joe
had
left his Mercedes, his pickup truck, and a camper at the house.

According to Renee and Geri, Joe had been in Alaska when he went missing. When Gypsy told Detective Jerry Burger of the Des Moines, Washington, police department that, he forwarded a copy of the information the missing man’s daughter gave him to Alaska State police trooper Roy Holland, and to the Anchorage Police Department.

In talking with Joe Tarricone’s family, Renee continually edited her recollections of the last few times she’d seen Joe. Whether it was Gypsy, Gina, or Dean Tarricone who called her in their desperate search for their father, Renee was friendly—but seemed completely mystified about whatever might have happened to Joe. She insisted she had no idea where he was and seemed surprised that none of his family had heard from him.

As he read through the thin files on Joe Tarricone, Benson saw that about a month after Gypsy Tarricone filed the first missing report on her father, Des Moines detective Jerry Burger had received a call from Renee Curtiss. Even though the Des Moines police had closed their case on Joseph Tarricone, since he hadn’t gone missing from their jurisdiction, Renee had had something more to tell him.

She said she now remembered that Joseph Tarricone
had
come to her house in Puyallup sometime in August or September of 1978. She wasn’t sure which month it was. “He said he had a surprise for me,” she began. “Joe showed me two tickets to Italy, and he asked me to go on a trip there with him—a honeymoon. He wanted to marry me.

“I didn’t want to go,” Renee continued. “I didn’t want to marry him—not at all. That made him very angry and upset. He threw those tickets on the ground and walked off. That was the last time
I
ever saw him.”

“What happened to the plane tickets?” Burger asked.

“When he didn’t come back for them, I cashed them in at a travel agency. He also left his 1978 Mercedes 240D at my house,” she said. “He had already signed his pickup truck with the camper on it over to my mother. He likes
my mother. I think he financed the Mercedes through some credit union in Anchorage.”

“Was he drinking that last day you saw him?”

“No.”

Gypsy didn’t believe that version of Renee’s ever-changing memory for a minute. She told Burger: “I don’t buy that he would walk away from her place in Puyallup and hurt himself because Renee rejected his proposal. I don’t think he proposed to her at all, but they definitely were involved in some kind of a relationship. I believe that. I think Renee led him on because he had money. She was only in her twenties and she already had a boyfriend.”

When Ben Benson read this old report years later, he shook his head. Why would a man
walk
away from the home of a woman he’d apparently been in love with when he had a brand-new expensive car, and, quite possibly, a truck and camper, too?

Sure, he might have been disappointed—even devastated—if he had, indeed, proposed marriage to Renee and shown her the tickets and reservations for their honeymoon trip to Rome—only to be turned down. But Joe sounded like a tough and rugged man, a man who had survived wars. He had taken hits before, and gotten up to regroup.

Renee Curtiss had offered a lot of information back in the late seventies, but it had come out in peculiar segments—disjointed recollections that seemed to contradict things she had told people earlier.

Even before the DNA match came in from the FBI, Ben Benson and his partner, Denny Wood, had no doubt
that the remains found on the Canyon Road property were those of Joseph Tarricone. Any reasonable person would feel the same way. And they believed that any reasonable juror would agree. It seemed completely implausible that Tarricone would
walk
away from the semirural property and abandon his Mercedes and the rig he used for his meat delivery business.

More than that, from what the detectives had learned so far, Tarricone was an excellent father, one who kept in touch with his children and grandchildren. And he was the son of aged parents who depended on him, lived for his phone calls, and looked forward to his visits to New York every year.

It would have been totally against his grain to disappear into the moonless night, leaving behind his obligations and those who loved him, no matter how besotted he’d been with the mysterious Renee Curtiss.

Over the last part of 2007, the Pierce County detectives were almost positive that he was the homicide victim. However, they had to wait for the FBI lab tests to come back.

And the more they investigated Renee, the more suspects they uncovered.

By that time, they had learned a great deal more about the violent background of Nick Notaro, Renee and Cassie’s adopted brother.

Nick Notaro
, who was thirty at the time, had had a remarkably busy week in late September 1978. If he had been all the places people said he had, his activities between September 18 and September 23 would have required a superman. Nick was a huge man, well over six feet, and closer to three hundred pounds than two hundred. The old records from Alaska showed that he entered the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital on Monday—the eighteenth—to have his festering appendix removed. Dr. J. K. Johnson was the surgeon who operated, and Nick recovered without incident. He was released earlier than the hospital advised, on Thursday, the twenty-first.

And Nick was also one of the family members who witnesses remembered being at the birthday barbecue Renee threw on Saturday, September 23.

Ben Benson traveled far in his search for Joe Tarricone’s last moments: New Mexico, Maryland, Oregon, and now—Alaska. The Alaska State Police in Anchorage had
assured him on the phone that their old records on Nick Notaro still existed, and they believed there was physical evidence, too.