Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (19 page)

“I put one hook in his belt and the other hook over a rafter, and ratcheted him up.”

Nick said his mother was there helping him load a man over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds into a ten-cubic-foot freezer—“three, four feet long, three feet deep, two feet wide.”

Anyone in the courtroom could estimate that the victim could not have fit into such a small space. Nick rambled on that he wanted to freeze Joe’s body so that it wouldn’t be so “messy” when he cut him up.

None of what he said matched Renee’s testimony, but Nick didn’t know that. With his misguided sense of loyalty, he continued to insist from the witness stand that his sister hadn’t been there.

Gypsy and her sister Rosemary sat in the gallery, weighing every word of testimony as they had since the beginning of the trial.

“How could it suddenly be Geri who had complained about Joe Tarricone to Nick?” Gypsy asked herself. “Nick didn’t know that Renee had just testified that she was there in the house helping to dismember my dad’s body.”

Gypsy and Rosemary studied the jurors’ faces, trying to get some sense of who might be on their side.

“There was an older, kind of country-looking man in the middle of the front row,” Gypsy remembers. “He had a
rather large belly and he crossed his arms across it. He sat there, not moving during the trial, but when Renee talked about cutting my dad up, tears rolled down this man’s face. I knew then that
he
was with us.

“Another juror would look at Rosemary whenever Renee would act aghast—sighing and shaking her head—as she sat next to her attorney. Renee seemed horrified whenever someone testified about what a monster she was. We felt we could count on two jurors. We weren’t sure about the others.”

While Gypsy Tarricone has never hidden her hatred for Renee Curtiss, she felt differently about Nick Notaro.

“Yes, Nick has a sick perverted mind,” Gypsy says today. “That, no doubt, came from his upbringing by Geraldine—with her alcoholism and using men as well, and pimping her daughter to gain possessions and monetary gain. Geraldine was a piece of work.

“Funny thing, I really don’t hate Nick. Truly, in my heart, I do not hate him. I feel nothing but the fact that his mind is twisted and something very wrong happened in his life, along with the fact that he is mentally slow. He didn’t have the brains to come up with a plot to kill my dad—but he would do whatever his mother or his sisters wanted. Many of my family members think like me. We hate Renee. It’s because of her that our dad is dead. I am not even too sure yet that Nick did it. Because they lied so much …”

Would the jurors believe the defense witnesses, or would they recognize what was true and what was obviously a
lie—a plethora of lies? In final arguments, Dawn Farina said that Renee Curtiss was guilty as an accomplice to murder. She had asked her brother to kill the victim because she had grown weary of Joe Tarricone’s romantic advances.
She
was the link between Joseph Tarricone and Nick Notaro.
She
had the motive.

Defense attorney Gary Clower gave his position that the prosecution had submitted no evidence that his client had solicited the murder of her former boyfriend.

“The crime here is murder,” he pointed out. “Not anything else that she might have done. She isn’t charged with disposing of the body or covering up the crime. She is guilty of lying about Tarricone’s whereabouts for nearly thirty years—maybe even for helping dispose of his body.”

It was time for Renee Curtiss’s jury to decide her fate.

Appropriately, perhaps, it was April Fool’s Day 2009 when the jurors retired at noon to review evidence and testimony and deliberate on whether Renee should be found guilty or innocent of first-degree murder.

Expecting that it would be at least a day before the verdict was handed down, Gypsy and Rosemary Tarricone left the Pierce County courthouse to keep a doctor’s appointment in Olympia, twenty miles south of Tacoma. Throughout the trial, Rosemary had said, “Jacqueline, you know, she could get off and you’d better be prepared if that happens.”

Gypsy didn’t even want to think about that possibility, but she did know—she had known from the first day—that she had to be the one who held everyone else in her family
together during both traumatic trials. In many ways, they were reliving the grief they felt for Joe back in 1978.

Although they thought they would be back in Tacoma to wait out the jury’s deliberation in plenty of time, Gypsy’s cell phone shrilled, making them both jump. Suddenly, only a little more than three hours after jury deliberation had begun, it was over.

As the sisters drove as fast as they legally could on the I-5 freeway back to the courthouse, Rosemary reminded Gypsy (whom she still calls Jacqueline) again that they couldn’t fall apart—no matter what the verdict was.

But the next phone call obviated the need for that. Renee Ray Curtiss had just been convicted of first-degree murder!

When Dawn Farina called Gypsy, she told her that the prosecution team and the detectives were holding a meeting on the tenth floor of the courthouse, and they were waiting for Joe’s two daughters to join them.

Ben Benson had observed Renee closely as the jury was polled. One by one, they had all said “guilty.” She seemed to be stunned, and then her jaw set stoically. Perhaps she had really expected to return to her home and celebrate her acquittal. But she wasn’t going home at all; she was going directly to jail.

After Gypsy and Rosemary parked in the courthouse’s rear parking lot, they saw Cassie, Renee’s sister, and “the old biddy cheer squad” coming out of the courthouse, most of them looking either dejected or angry. It was a tense moment; the air was full of electricity.

Gypsy didn’t fall apart, but she could not resist shouting at Cassie, “Your sister got just what she deserved!”

If it hadn’t been so serious, it might have been comical—a bunch of women well over fifty preparing to have what looked like a gang war. Cassie headed for Gypsy and she seemed to be very close to a physical attack on her when one of Renee’s supporters grabbed Cassie by the arm, shouting, “No! Don’t do that!”

And it was over as soon as it had begun.

Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck set Nick Notaro’s sentencing for April 4, and Renee’s for April 24.

Renee lost another privilege on April 16—one that paled in the face of what might lie ahead. The Washington State insurance commissioner, Mike Kriedler, sent her a form letter telling her that her insurance agent’s license had been revoked.

“This order is based on the following: You have been found guilty of Murder in the First Degree, a Class A. Felony, on April 1, 2009. Revocation is therefore appropriate under RCW 48.17.530 (1)(g).”

It may have been a “whatever” moment for Renee. Where she was going, she wouldn’t be able to sell insurance anyway.

When Nick Notaro
appeared for sentencing on April 4, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The future he had pictured in Arkansas no longer existed for him. Maybe it never had; he had a warrant waiting for him on sex charges there.

On April 24, Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck’s courtroom was packed with spectators and media who waited to observe Renee Curtiss’s sentencing. Sergeant Ben Benson got there too late to find a seat, and he stood in the back of the room with Denny Wood and his lieutenant, Brent Bomkamp.

Judge van Doorninck is admired for her grasp of the law and for her honesty, but she can also be crisp. She speaks her mind. As she sentenced Renee Curtiss to life in prison, she told the convicted woman that she was “appalled” that Renee had never showed one iota of remorse throughout her entire trial.

Detectives often go above and beyond their basic duties to their departments and the victims as they work unpaid overtime and sleepless nights. They cannot help but be involved in the lives of survivors and of the victims
themselves. Still, standing at the back of the crowded courtroom, Ben Benson was surprised when Judge van Doorninck singled him out. She said that the case just ended had finally come to a successful conclusion “thanks to Detective Sergeant Ben Benson.”

It was exceedingly rare for a judge to do that, and it was something Benson would never forget.

Joe Tarricone’s remains had lain in the morgue for a very long time, and now they were released to his family for burial. There was no question that his seven children wanted his last resting place to be in Albuquerque, where they’d had happier days.

“My dad was buried three times,” Gypsy Tarricone remembers wryly. “First—where his murderers put him, and second because of a mix-up in Albuquerque. My mom wanted to be buried at the Sunset cemetery, but that is such a boring place. I know it sounds strange to say it but the ‘hip’ cemetery is Mount Calvary. It’s full of life and there’s always something happening there. Families come for holidays, or just to visit. You see people you know.

“On Christmas Eve, there are luminarias, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. They’re little paper bags with sand in the bottom and a candle in each. They light up the whole cemetery, and the paths are full of people. We knew my father would want to be at Mount Calvary.”

And she was right. After thirty years in a hidden grave, Joe Tarricone, who always loved a party, belonged at Mount Calvary.

“Rose, Claire, Aldo, Joey, me, Gina, Rosemary, and Dean were all there at 10 a.m. on May 2, 2009, for my dad’s graveside military services, all of us carrying flags,” Gypsy says.

“And then we realized that they had put our father in the wrong grave. I had some choice sailor’s words to say about that, but my sister Claire said, ‘Let’s just go ahead with it. They can move him later.’”

And so they did. At last, Joe Tarricone rests easy at Mount Calvary Cemetery where his family visits often.

Henry Lewis passed away fifteen days after Renee was sentenced to life in prison. He died without leaving a will. For the first time, Renee Curtiss was, technically, a wealthy widow—something she might have been striving for since she was in her twenties. None of the older men she’d lived with had married her. And now she fought to inherit Henry’s estate. She wouldn’t be able to use much money at the time, since she was in prison, and prisoners’ accounts had limits, but both she and Nick planned to appeal their verdicts and sentences to the Washington State Court of Appeals and she would need money for attorneys.

Gypsy Tarricone supported Henry’s grown children in their efforts to receive the estate their father had worked for his whole life. In the end, they prevailed. As it turned out, the Lewis family was granted everything. “We were all happy with that decision,” Gypsy says.

Renee Curtiss’s appeals challenged the admission of her taped confession, comments on her right to remain
silent, and the alleged admission of improper opinion testimony. She also claimed she had been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct and an ineffective defense attorney, and insisted that the evidence introduced hadn’t been sufficient to cause her to be found guilty and also accused the State of “crowd manipulation” to influence the jury.

On May 6, 2011, the Washington State Court of Appeals denied all of her claims and affirmed her conviction.

Nick Notaro, who had a substantial rap sheet going into his trial, fared no better. On that same day in May, the court of appeals also denied his request for a new trial. Nick may be handling being behind bars better than his sister; he had done quite well settling into prison life easily in his earlier incarcerations.

Renee, however, who is used to the finer things in life, has had to face a major adjustment.

The Tarricone family does not feel sorry for her. They still miss their dad. But they have some serenity in knowing that he is, finally, in Mount Calvary Cemetery, with its glowing luminarias and the laughter of happy family celebrations—while his killers face the rest of their lives behind bars.

Once again, Ben Benson has proven—as so many dedicated law enforcement officers have all over America—that getting away with murder isn’t nearly as simple as it may look. With old-fashioned, dogged detective work and space-age forensic technology, scores of murderers have found they aren’t as smart as they thought they were.

Readers often ask
me, “Where do you get the cases you write about?” I hear about intriguing cases from many sources, including detectives, relatives of homicide victims, the rare victim who has managed to stay alive, my readers, the Internet, email, snail mail, newspapers, radio, and television news. Out of the some four thousand suggestions I receive each year, I can choose only five to seven cases at the most. I have some books that feature only one case. Books like this one—my Crime Files—give me an opportunity to write about several felony cases. Still, there is no way one woman could write all the mysteries that occur in America.

My criteria in selecting cases are quite simple: if I am fascinated by what happened and I want to know more, I assume my readers will, too. Every once in a while, homicide cases choose me—not just by tugging on my sleeve, but by figuratively blocking my path so effectively that I have to write them! The story of Joann Ellen Cooper Morrison Hansen is one of those. Each time I looked at it and turned away to write something that seemed easier,
I was contacted, reminded, and persuaded to return to it, by a number of people who didn’t even know one another at the time. It happened only a five-minute walk from my home in the little town of Des Moines, Washington, where I lived off and on for about twenty years.

And yet I was unaware of this tragic mystery.

In 2010, I heard from two people whose feelings about this case had become obsessions. My first email came from a man who had gone to school with my older son. Only weeks later, it was another email that cemented what I had to do. Kathleen Huget’s message sounded a lot like many I receive from strangers who write that they have unearthed an amazing story that should be a book—but they are wary about telling me the details through the Internet or over the phone.