Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases

“How about Cassie?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “Did Joe bring steaks and meat to the barbecue?”

  “I’m sure he would have.”

  “Do you remember having an argument with him at the barbecue?”

  Benson was leading Renee into territory that could be dangerous for her, and she parried his questions thoughtfully. “Yeah,” she finally answered. “It would’ve been something like [me saying], you know, ‘I’m not interested in you. I do not wanna be romantically involved with you.’ I don’t recall anything more specifically, and I don’t recall, you know, certainly there was nobody—there was no fisticuffs or anything like that. Would’ve been, you know, it was almost the same every time I saw him, you know, he wanted, would claim, ‘Oh, can’t we just be friends?’ and then he didn’t want just friendship. He wanted, you know, to—to somehow buy my love and affection.”

  Renee denied now that Nick had ever been to the Canyon Road house—until Benson reminded her she had told them early in their conversation that he had been there at least once.

  “That I recall.” She quickly recovered. “Yes.”

  “Let’s talk about that more,” Benson said easily. “In relation to when the barbecue happened to when Nick came down, do you remember how close that was?”

  “I mean, I’m not sure that Nick wasn’t there [at the barbecue], but I don’t recall him being there. It could’ve been within days—it could’ve been within weeks—”

  “But you’re certain—you told us earlier that what happened to Joe didn’t happen on the night of the barbecue?”

  “Um-hum.”

  “Why are you certain?”

  “’Cause I don’t recall Nick being there.”

  She remembered that her brother had come to Canyon Road right after his appendix surgery. “I talked to him on the phone when he was in the hospital.”

  “Did you talk to him after he was out of the hospital?”

  “Yes … I told him I could use some help and, you know, if he needed to come and rest, relax, and recuperate, it would probably be a good thing.”

  Renee’s version of how Nick happened to come down to Puyallup changed with every answer. She did recall telling him that her mother was putting a lot of pressure on her, and Joe Tarricone was practically stalking her and pressuring her, too. He hadn’t hurt her physically, but he’d pushed her, and threatened her.

  “And what was the nature of those threats?” Benson asked.

  “Everything from ‘I’m not gonna stop—I’m gonna continue to make your life miserable.’ He scared my mom at one point. He told her if I wasn’t with him, I shouldn’t be with anyone.”

  “Did you relay this information to Nick?”

  “I don’t recall.” She didn’t think she had specifically asked him to come down to help her with the Joe situation. “Maybe Nick could talk to him—I mean, I’m putting words in my head that I don’t recall.”

  Yes, she knew that Nick had killed Vickie after he’d gotten out of the hospital—learned about it, she thought, a day or so before he came down to Washington. It could have been in her phone call to him. She couldn’t recall. She’d been shocked that Vickie left her poor brother in the hospital with a “burst appendix” and never checked to see how he was.

  “How did you react when he told you about that [killing Vickie]?”

  “The same way most people would. A little bit of horror. I talked to him and he felt tremendous remorse. I think he turned himself in.” (This was not true.)

  “Was there anything to make him believe Vickie was having an affair with Joseph?”

  “Wow, I don’t know. Never heard that one before.”

  As Benson, Wood, and Renee Curtiss worked to bring 1978 into the present, they finally came to the night Joseph Tarricone died. Renee said she was at work when her mother told her to come home at once. It wasn’t a request; it was an order. Geri Hesse had sounded very serious.

  “Tell me what happened when you got home,” Benson directed.

  “I remember I was taken downstairs and shown a locked room; the door was unlocked and Joe was inside … dead.”

  “Who took you down there and showed you that?”

  “Both of them. Mom and Nick.”

  Nick had blamed his now-deceased mother for Joe Tarricone’s murder, and now Renee was putting the onus on both of them. She said that Joe was lying on his side, and that she’d been surprised that there was no blood. “I’m sure there had to have been blood, but I don’t recall any blood.”

  She couldn’t remember where her daughter, Diana, was. Renee knew that the ten-year-old wasn’t in the basement with them. The three adults had locked the door where Joe was, and gone upstairs to discuss what to do.

  “Tell me about that conversation with your mom and Nick about what happened.”

  “I don’t remember. We just talked about how to get rid of the body. We talked about burying him in the backyard at the house.”

  Renee said that Nick had dug either two side-by-side holes or one very large one. She couldn’t recall which.

  “It took a long time.”

  “Prior to that, did you and Nick go somewhere together?”

  “Either to a sporting goods section or a hardware store—someplace—to buy a saw.”

  “Do you remember what kind of saw it was?”

  “Not a brand—but it was a chain saw.”

  “A gas-powered chain saw?”

  “I can’t—I don’t, I assume so. I don’t think they make electric chain saws, do they?”

  Renee thought she and Nick had gone into the store together. She believed she had probably paid for it.

  “And then what did you do after you bought the chain saw?”

  “I used it on Joe.”

  Until this moment, neither Benson nor Wood had felt that Renee was anything more than an accessory after the fact; now they began to suspect that she had conspired with her brother to have him come down to Washington State to kill Joe Tarricone.

  “You used it on Joe. Did anybody else use it on Joe?”

  “Nick—I’m not saying that we, you know, we would, you know … Sometimes, you’d hold, you would hold him while Nick used the saw.”

  “So it was a joint operation? Was your mom helping as well or was it just you and Nick?”

  Even for seasoned detectives—detectives who knew that Joe’s body had been dissected cleanly with a power saw—the conversation was grotesque. They fought to hide their own feelings. With the spirit and image of Jimi Hendrix on the walls surrounding them, they listened to Renee as she brought back the scene in the basement of a now-destroyed house.

  “Mom was down there as well. Whether she was holding him—I don’t know, but I have the memory of the three of us being in that basement.”

  “What specifically was the chain saw used for?” Ben Benson asked.

  “To make it so the body wasn’t so heavy—”

  “Okay. What part of the body was dismembered?”

  “Arms, legs—”

  “Did you cut his head off as well?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t remember that. I think so, I don’t—I don’t recall.”

  “Now, was this horribly messy?” Benson prodded. “Describe for me, were you cutting through his clothing or had you taken his clothes off?”

  “The clothes were not off.”

  “So the chain saw went right through his clothes?”

  “Correct.”

  “Did you ever hold the saw, and remove any part of Joe’s body?”

  “Possibly. I think I was mostly holding.”

  Even though the crime had happened three decades earlier, this interrogation sent chills through the detectives—and, possibly, through Renee Curtiss. It was a scene that almost anyone would want to bury deep in his or her subconscious memory. Renee described how each body part that was severed was put into black garbage bags. When they got too heavy, they were taken to the backyard where Nick Notaro had dug deep
holes.

  Renee was sure that all that remained of Joe Tarricone had been buried on the property; they hadn’t removed hands or feet or head to take them to another disposal spot so they would be more difficult to identify.

  The two detectives both thought about Nick Notaro’s statement that his mother had killed Joe and put him in the freezer. That could not possibly be true. Three people could not move his body without dissecting it into pieces.

  “Okay,” Benson asked. “How did Nick kill Joe?”

  “He shot him.”

  “And what did he use to shoot him with?”

  “A gun,” she said vaguely. Renee said she had no idea where Nick had obtained the gun. As she remembered, her brother had given her a handgun after the murder, and asked her to dispose of it. She wasn’t sure how long she had it—but she had been on another boyfriend’s boat on Lake Washington, just off Mercer Island, when she threw it in the deep water. The boat owner—also named Joe—hadn’t seen her toss the weapon away.

  As far as Renee knew, Joe Tarricone didn’t carry a gun, although she thought he might have had one in his truck in Alaska. “So many people had guns up there.”

  “Okay, I’ve been told,” Benson began, “that Joe was known to carry large amounts of cash with him. They say he carried a briefcase, and a lot of his business dealings were in cash?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “How much cash would he carry at any given time?”

  “Oh—it could be upward of a thousand dollars.”

  That would have been quite a lot of money in 1978. Asked about which of Joe Tarricone’s possessions were left at the Canyon Road house, Renee had a memory lapse again. She didn’t think his yellow truck with the camper on it was there because she believed it wouldn’t make the drive down from Alaska. (It was at Canyon Road after Joe vanished; Geri said Joe had signed it over to her.)

  “The briefcase where he carried his cash?”

  “You know,” she said. “I believe there was a briefcase, but I believe that was put back in the office in Alaska. I don’t know if Nick did that or if my mom did when she went up for Nick’s trial [for Vickie Notaro’s homicide].”

  “Speaking of that, you and your mom mentioned several times back then that Joe’s office in Alaska had been ransacked. Was that something to make it look like there was some kind of problem he had up there?”

  “You know, I don’t recall that … I wasn’t up in Alaska, so I wouldn’t have known his office was ransacked.”

  But, surely, Renee’s mother—Geri Hesse—would have told her about finding Joe Tarricone’s office a shambles after someone had trashed it? Benson thought that was something that Renee would remember.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Renee Curtiss’s answers came more slowly, yet she didn’t ask for an attorney or stop the questioning. When Denny Wood took over the questioning, she looked at him warily.

  “How did you know the briefcase got back there—you said it was returned to Alaska?”

  “Joe never went anywhere without his briefcase.”

  “You knew he was dead,” Wood pressed. “Why would your mother return the briefcase? He didn’t need it up there. He’s not taking it anywhere. Why would anybody return a briefcase that had nothing in it?”

  “I don’t know. There wasn’t anything in it.”

  “Well you mentioned—right?—that you sat down and had to come up with a plan?”

  “Right,” Renee said softly.

  Wood outlined that their plan might have been to make it look as if Joe Tarricone had returned to Alaska alive and well, since they believed no one would find his body or prove that he’d ever come to Washington. If someone could have broken into his Alaska office, murdered him, and then stolen the cash from his briefcase and ransacked his office, the false scene of the crime might look as though it occurred hundreds of miles from where he’d actually died.

  His vehicles left behind in Puyallup warred with that explanation. And several people recalled that Joe was at the birthday barbecue—the last time anyone the detectives talked to had ever seen him.

  What about the new Mercedes? Renee said that Joe had bought it for her, just as he had offered her the wedding trip to Europe. He was trying to buy her, and she wasn’t having any of it.

  “What did you do with the plane tickets he threw down—after you said no to his proposal?”

  “I don’t believe we did anything with them.”

  “You don’t recall cashing them in for money?” Wood asked.

  “It’s possible. I don’t remember—it was thirty years ago.”

  “But Joe didn’t pick them up. He threw them on the ground and his heart’s broken?”

  “He threw them down. I believe he threw them down. He was very angry.”

  Renee said the Mercedes had been taken to her aunt’s house. Joe had tried to give it to her in Alaska, and he brought it down to Washington. “I didn’t want it—I didn’t drive it. I had a new Alfa Romeo that I leased at the time.”

  How long had the Mercedes been there? Perhaps Joe had driven it down before his final visit; he couldn’t drive both the Mercedes and his yellow meat truck and camper at the same time.

  Denny Wood asked Renee about the wound in Joe’s head. She didn’t know what had caused it. Was it from a bullet, a baseball bat, perhaps a knife? She apparently had forgotten what she said about the gun.

  “I don’t know. It was just a head wound. I can’t recall if there was blood,” she said slowly. “It’s almost as if—like it’s in black and white.”

  “But you knew he was dead at that time?”

  “Yes.”

  Renee Curtiss’s memory was growing more and more clouded. She was fairly sure that they had kept Joe’s body in the basement for a few days before they dissected his body and buried the pieces.

  “Was he put in a freezer in the basement?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Well, think back. You were either working the chain saw or holding on to the limbs while they were being cut off. It’s a huge difference if somebody’s flexible and warm or whether they’re stiff as a board and cold and frozen. Was he frozen when you cut him up?”

  “I don’t recall that.”

  “Was there a freezer in the basement?”

  “I think there was a small chest freezer.”

  “Was there a freezer big enough to put a body into?”

  “I don’t think so. It was small.”

  Ben Benson and Denny Wood had begun interviewing Renee Curtiss at twenty minutes to five, and it was now sixteen minutes to six. By the time they finished, their subject’s answers were mostly “I don’t recall.”

  They had begun believing that she hadn’t been present when Nick Notaro called Joe Tarricone down into the basement on the pretext of fixing the washing machine, that she wasn’t there as Joe bent over, all unaware, and was shot in the head.

  Now they were sure from both her answers and her failure to answer that she had been far more than a shocked witness after the fact of Joe’s sudden, violent death. They believed that she had been there during his murder, standing beside her mother and her brother.

  They also believed that she had phoned Nick in Alaska and asked him to come down and “take care of her problem” with Joe.

  And Nick—who had always vowed to protect his sisters—had done just that. He had put the blame on his dead mother at first and then admitted shooting Joe himself. But he denied that either Renee or Cassie had been there. He said Renee had been in Hawaii—but she hadn’t even mentioned Hawaii.

  Well, Cassie hadn’t been in Puyallup. She had been in Anchorage, Alaska.

  But Renee had been there. She was shocked when Ben Benson informed her that she was under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, which is basically a murder charge. Grim faced, the two detectives, with Renee handcuffed between them, walked out of Henry’s Bail Bonds. Her expression was stoic. The new world she had fashioned for herself had come tumbling down.
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  Renee was going to jail, a thought that had probably never occurred to her.

  Renee Curtiss spent the night of March 24 in jail. The next day she was led into court for her arraignment. Both Renee and her brother Nick were charged with first-degree murder. Despite the fact that both of them had admitted to the details of Joe Tarricone’s murder, they each pled “not guilty.”

  Judge Susan Serko set bail for Nick at $2 million and for Renee at $500,000. She stipulated that Renee could not arrange bail through Henry’s Bail Bonds because of “a conflict of interest.”

  Which was, of course, obvious.

  But Henry Lewis was close to all the long-standing bail bonds companies and they respected him, so something was worked out between them. Renee was released from jail and returned to the luxurious condominium where she lived with her husband.

  Nick was not bailed out; actually, jail was probably a much nicer place to be than under a bridge or in a mission. At least he knew where he was going to sleep and that he would eat every day. “Three hots and a cot,” was the term veteran prisoners used. His plans to retire down South were no longer on Nick’s agenda. He looked old, stooped, and tired as he left the courtroom.

  With this arraignment, the Northwest media publicized the awful details related in the courtroom and the story of a thirty-year-old unsolved crime of monstrous proportions was at the top of television news and in bold headlines in newspapers.

  Quoting Deputy Prosecutor Dawn Farina, most lead-ins began with: “Miss Curtiss, along with her brother, chopped up Mr. Tarricone’s body and buried it …”

  There were undoubtedly many men who had once been involved with Renee Curtiss who heard about that and heaved a sigh of relief.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dawn Farina doesn’t look like a hard-hitting criminal-prosecuting attorney. She is a slender, pretty woman with long blond hair, but dumb blonde jokes never fit Dawn. She was to be Renee’s nemesis. Beyond Dawn Farina’s expertise in prosecuting homicide cases, Pierce County prosecuting attorney Mark Lindquist made an astute decision when he chose her to face Renee Curtiss in a courtroom.