Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases

  “I don’t know. He could’ve gone back to Italy,” Nick answered, and the detectives could almost see the wheels whirling in his brain as he struggled to make his story match up with facts.

  “He was from Italy, and Renee mentioned one time that he had talked about goin’ back. Their business was starting to peter out, and he was talking about goin’ back.”

  Nick denied now that he had ever seen Joe Tarricone in Washington State. He had been wrong about that. He was sure he had seen him only in Alaska. Nick had backed his chair as far away as he could from the desk where Wood and Benson sat, far away from the digital recorder. Any farther and he would have had to go through the wall behind him.

  At 11:43 on the morning of March 24, the detectives read Nick his Miranda rights and took a break while Nick went to the restroom.

  Ten minutes later, Ben Benson looked squarely into Nick Notaro’s eyes as he told him that he and Denny Wood were investigating the death of Joe Tarricone.

  “Human remains were found on your mother’s property on Canyon Road in Puyallup, Nick. DNA tests have been done and the bones are identified as belonging to Joe Tarricone.”

  Benson told Nick that he had been investigating the case for several months. “We have probable cause to arrest you—and your sisters—for the murder of Joe Tarricone.”

  Nick Notaro looked stricken. When had the conversation gotten away from him? One minute he’d been talking about regaining his freedom, and now he was about to be arrested!

  “We need you to tell us what happened at your mother’s house,” Benson said.

  “Renee—my sisters—weren’t involved. Not one iota.”

  “Then tell me what happened there—because the information I have is that your sisters were involved.”

  Nick shook his head. “No. When I came down from my appendectomy, Mom told me she had shot him, and he was in the freezer. I helped Mom put him in the place where you found him. Renee was in Hawaii and she wasn’t involved.”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  “We took him out of the freezer,” Nick said slowly, “and me and Mom used a chain saw to cut him up, and we buried it [the bones] in the yard.”

  Geri Hesse was dead, and had been for eight years. Blaming her for the murder itself—if anyone believed that—would take suspicion off Cassie and Renee, and Nick apparently thought he would get a lesser sentence as an accomplice after the fact.

  “I don’t believe you,” Denny Wood said. “How could your mother—at her age—shoot a man and then carry him downstairs to the freezer and put him in? I think you asked Joe to go downstairs and that you’re the one who shot him. And that would have had to be a really big freezer to fit a large man into.”

  “Yes,” Nick admitted, he had shot Joe Tarricone. “But Renee was in Hawaii when it happened.”

  “What happened after you shot him?” Wood asked.

  “We went to K-Mart and bought a chain saw—and a tarp. Mom held the tarp while I used the chain saw. I cut off Joe’s legs, his arms, and his head. My mother took the head away and got rid of it separately.”

  “How did you get to K-Mart?” Wood questioned. “You say you didn’t know the area?”

  “I don’t remember. I buried Joe’s legs, arms, and torso in the yard.”

  “But how did you get to K-Mart?” Wood pressed, believing that there was someone present that night other than Geri Hesse.

  “I don’t remember who drove me.”

  “Why did you kill Joe Tarricone?” Wood asked bluntly.

  “He was always trying to get Renee into bed, and he wouldn’t leave her alone. He kept asking her to marry him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. My mother called me in Alaska and she asked me to come and take care of the problem. She said Renee had gone to Hawaii to get away from Joe. It made her mad when Joe kept showing up at the house.”

  “Did anyone tell you to kill him?”

  “Nobody had to tell me to kill him.”

  Nick Notaro seemed almost proud to be the avenging brother who took care of his sisters. When he was asked about where Cassie was on the date Joe died, he said she was in Anchorage.

  “You can check her employment records up there, and you’ll see she never left Anchorage.”

  Nick had given the details of Joe Tarricone’s murder for an hour, but when he was asked to record his confession, he balked.

  “I fell for that in Alaska,” he said gruffly. “I’m not going to fall for it again.”

  He requested an attorney before they went any further. He was immediately arrested, taken into custody, and handcuffed. Detective Gary Sanders and Deputy Erik Clarkson transported Nick Notaro to the Pierce County jail where he was booked for first degree murder.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Beginning with a case that seemed certain to be a “loser,” and after nine months of steady, cautious, and intuitive investigation, the avalanche had finally begun. Suspects were about to tumble like dominoes. Although it had been frustrating to wait until all of their ducks were in a row to make solid arrests, Denny Wood—and especially Ben Benson—were seeing it all come to fruition.

  With Nick Notaro on his way to jail, they contacted Cassie Martell and Renee Curtiss (Renee never took Henry Lewis’s last name) where they were both at work at Henry’s Bail Bonds. Renee gave no sign that she recognized Ben Benson from the time he had dropped in the previous summer and asked her about bailing out his “nephew.” She probably didn’t; she must have seen a lot of faces come and go since Benson had been in the previous July.

  Benson told Cassie and Renee only that their brother was in a little trouble, and that he and Wood needed to talk to them over at the Seattle police precinct.

  “We can’t both leave at the same time,” Renee said, apparently neither surprised nor disturbed that Nick was in trouble—again. Cassie Martell said she would go first and then come back so Renee could talk to them.

  From the beginning of the interview with Cassie Martell, it was obvious that she didn’t know what had happened to Joe Tarricone; she had been living in Anchorage from 1977 to 1980, and had come outside to the lower forty-eight states only once.

  “I came down for Christmas that first year I lived in Alaska,” she said. “That would have been in 1977.”

  Asked if Nick had ever lived with her in Anchorage, she shook her head. She had really been closer to Vickie, who had lived with Cassie for two or three weeks shortly before Nick killed her.

  “He never gave me a reason why he did that,” Cassie said. “You know, I finally asked him just a few months ago. First, he said that he did it because our mother didn’t like her. Then he said he was in the hospital with appendicitis and he believed Vickie was fooling around on him. I don’t think she was. I knew that he was seeing someone else—a woman who had children—and he just wanted to get rid of Vickie.”

  “We think someone was murdered in that house where your mother and Renee lived in Puyallup,” Benson said.

  “That might have been where something happened. I think so. My mother and sister were not murderers—but there was a man my sister knew. I can’t think of his name right now. I want to say Tony. I know he was Italian. He had a meat business in Anchorage. He came down to see Renee a couple of times, and he left a car there. But no one ever heard from him again.”

  “Do you think Nick is capable of murder?”

  “I think he’s a psycho,” Cassie responded. “I know not to push him too far. He’s my brother, and he comes to see me a lot, but I’m afraid of him.”

  It was clear that Cassie wasn’t in on the family secrets, nor had she wanted to be. She thought the victim in Puyallup—probably the man she called Tony—was dead. She even allowed that he might have been murdered by someone she didn’t know. She wasn’t even convinced there had ever been a homicide on Canyon Road.

  “How close are you to Nick?” Benson asked.

  “Not close. He slept one night on the floor of my house in Anchorage right after Vickie was killed. Befor
e that, I hadn’t seen Nick for years.”

  “You didn’t enter into a pact with Nick never to talk about the incident when the person was killed in Puyallup?” Benson prodded. “You and your sister?”

  “I have never had a pact with him concerning murdering anybody!”

  Cassie was upset, but she was more angry. She was furious that Nick had tried to draw her into a murder plot—something she knew nothing about.

  Both Denny Wood and Ben Benson felt Cassie was telling the truth. She hadn’t been part of the tight circle formed by Geri Hesse, Renee, and Nick, rarely being close to them geographically or emotionally.

  Chapter Fifteen

  March 24 was turning out to be a very long day. Denny Wood and Ben Benson returned to Henry’s Bail Bonds to talk to Renee Curtiss. She told them that she had an appointment with a doctor at the University of Washington Medical Center. “He’s treating my husband—Henry—who is very ill with heart failure.”

  Henry Lewis was scheduled to have a heart pump installed the next day. The two detectives offered to accompany her and wait until she had talked with Henry’s doctors, but she said she preferred to talk to them first. They then agreed to interview her at the bail bonds office rather than take her to the precinct.

  As Benson already knew, the woman who spoke with them was nothing at all like her brother; she was expensively dressed in a black dress and matching sweater. Although she used thick makeup and had a hard edge to her, she was still attractive. If Renee and Nick had colluded in a plan to kill Joe Tarricone, that seemed bizarre. Benson and Wood could easily visualize Nick as a murderer. Indeed, they knew he had already killed at least once before Joe died.

  Renee was calm and friendly. For the first minutes of this interview, they made small talk and asked easy questions. She gave her birth date as August 1, 1953; she was fifty-four but didn’t look it. She seemed to feel that she was the one in charge of the interview.

  “We’re investigating a murder with ties to Alaska,” Ben Benson said.

  “Oh, yes,” Renee said, “You mean my brother’s wife—”

  “No,” the Pierce County sergeant said flatly. “We’re investigating the murder of Joseph Tarricone.

  “Okay, Renee,” he began, “we’ve explained that we have your brother Nick in custody for his murder. We need to talk to you. I think I’ll start with you explaining to us what your relationship with Joseph Tarricone was.”

  At the first mention of Joe Tarricone’s name, Renee’s demeanor changed. “First, she gasped,” Benson recalled, “and then her chest and neck flushed scarlet. The redness rose up into her face and even her ears. She was shocked.

  “Denny told me later that he expected her ears to burst into flames—she was that red. After thirty years, I don’t think she expected us to be wondering about any relationship she might have had with Joe, or that anyone would come asking about him so long after.”

  Renee listened as Benson read her her Miranda rights, and she nodded that she understood them and signed on the bottom of the card. Recovering some of her composure, she agreed to have their conversation recorded after Ben Benson explained that he believed she might be guilty only of offering “criminal assistance” after Joe was murdered. And he did believe that. At the time.

  “But that was twenty-nine years ago,” Benson said, “and the statute of limitations for that ran out a long time ago. You can’t be arrested for that in 2008.”

  In truth, Benson and Denny Wood didn’t expect to arrest Renee Curtiss, at least not on this day. That was why they were interviewing her in the bail bonds office rather than taking her to the police station. Hearing that the statute of limitations had passed, she relaxed a little.

  Even so, Ben Benson advised her once more of her rights so that the Miranda rule was on tape. Most Americans know the rights by heart—either from watching television or by reading a crime novel. And, of course, a certain number have actually had Miranda rights read to them.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Benson began. “Any statement that you do make can be used as evidence against you in a court of law. You have the right at this time to talk to an attorney of your choice, and to have your attorney present before and during questioning and the making of any statement. If you cannot afford an attorney, you are entitled to have one appointed for you—without cost to you—and to have the attorney present at any time during the questioning and the making of a statement. You may stop answering questions or ask for an attorney at any time during any questioning and the making of any statement. Renee, do you understand each of these rights?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is this your signature on the bottom of the rights form?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Renee Curtiss’s position with her husband’s bail bonds firm had taught her a great deal about the judicial process; Benson had been impressed with her knowledge the first time he met her.

  She began with a lie, saying that she had met Joe in Alaska when, in reality, she’d met him at the wholesale meat company in Seattle. Unfortunately for Renee, she had no idea how much of her background Ben Benson had uncovered.

  Renee denied that she had ever lived with Joe; she said he had lived above his business in Anchorage where he had just a bed and a small space for his clothes and belongings; he had been on the road selling meat most of the time.

  Her words came out haltingly, and she stuttered as she looked for answers. “My mother and I had a house—had a house on Jewel Lake.”

  “Okay. And that’s where you were living when you met Joe?”

  “You know, I don’t recall if it was then or prior to that. It might have been when I was renting an apartment off of C Street.”

  “Now, you told us that you were a business partner with him?”

  “He gave me part of his business, yes.”

  “Now, did you start out working for him initially, or did he bring you in as a partner?”

  “No, I think he brought me—I mean, I may have started [by] working for him. I don’t recall.”

  “Did you buy into the company, somehow?”

  “No.”

  “He just made you a partner?”

  “Yes … yeah.”

  “And was that while you were romantically involved with him?”

  “Correct.” Renee’s voice was taut and her answers very short.

  “At that point in time, had he started asking you to marry him?”

  “No.”

  “So this was early in your relationship?”

  “I—I, as I recall.”

  Renee said she had worked with Joe for over a year, and then she had broken off her relationship with him.

  “But you did become engaged to him?”

  “I did.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “He wanted to move to Seattle and we did move, and he was still working up there in Alaska, and planning on coming down. And then something happened that he did—I broke that relationship off.”

  “Okay. Can you tell me what that was?”

  Renee said that Joe had slept with one of her female relatives. When she learned that, she dumped him.

  “Did Joe have any kind of relationship with your mother?” Benson asked.

  “I don’t—no.”

  “They were just friends?”

  “Yes. She liked him.”

  “Was he paying for things up there in Alaska? I know he bought you a car. Was he paying for your rent?”

  “You know,” Renee said carefully, “I was generously compensated for working for him, so if you want to say he paid the rent—he was always buying stuff, always buying jewelry or buying my mother something or my daughter something. I mean, he was always buying something. I mean he was a hard worker.”

  After she broke it off with Joe Tarricone, Renee said, Kurt Winkler, the German chef whom she was dating at the same time she dated Joe, had proposed and they became engaged. She had continued to have a working relationship with J
oe, although she knew he wasn’t happy about Kurt.

  Although Renee’s answers often began with “I don’t recall,” she did remember that Kurt and Joe had known about each other, but she couldn’t say if they ever had harsh words about it.

  And then, in the midseventies, Renee said, she, her mother, and her daughter had moved to Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle.

  “So when you moved down here to Kirkland,” Benson asked, “did that end your working relationship with Joe?”

  “It did.”

  “What did you do for a job when you lived in Kirkland?”

  “I was working for a company called Elite Models.” She acknowledged that it was an escort service.

  “Was your mom working?”

  “She might’ve been working in a nursing home.”

  Renee said she had broken her engagement to Kurt Winkler because he wouldn’t leave Alaska either. After a year in their north end apartment, the women had moved to the Canyon Road house in Puyallup.

  “Okay. Did Joseph Tarricone come and visit at that house?”

  “Joe didn’t know where to find me at first, but eventually he located me,” Renee said. “He was there several times … several times. The majority of the time uninvited. I can’t recall how many times.”

  Renee’s face and chest were now brick red. She said her mother might have invited Joe over some of the time.

  “He was, he was kind of obsessed. I mean he’d do almost anything to be around me.”

  Ben Benson asked Renee about the barbecue at her house in the summer of 1978. “Do you recall what month the barbecue would’ve taken place?”

  “Summer … July or August. I mean it was warm. It could’ve been in August because there’s probably three or four of us who have birthdays in August.”

  “Okay. But Joseph was there for that barbecue?”

  “I remember him being there.”

  “Was Nick there?”

  “I do not believe Nick was there.”