Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (14 page)

“So you say Renee is the sister you’ve always been the closest to?” Benson asked.

“I’m not so sure anymore … I’m finding now that Cassie and I have a lot more in common. Cassie is definitely opinionated, and Renee is a person that is easy to take advantage of,” Nick said, adding how he treasured both his sisters. “You can do anything you want to me, call me anything you want, but don’t mess with my sisters. And like Merle Haggard said, ‘You’re walking on the fighting side of me.’”

Nick was garrulous, emphasizing that he couldn’t wait to get his life back and be a law-abiding citizen. He could afford to live in Arkansas on his disability payments—but not in Seattle. Still, he didn’t want to move away from Renee and Cassie, so he’d been applying for local jobs—principally as a flagger on highway construction projects. So far, he hadn’t been successful.

“I just wanna get this over with, and go back to my life. I just wanna be left alone—nobody mess with me and I ain’t gonna mess with them …”

It seemed abundantly clear that Nick no longer thought about what had happened to Joe Tarricone. In his mind, he was in the clear. After all, Joe had been gone for thirty years.

The Pierce County detectives’ questioning had begun to change direction so subtly that Nick didn’t sense a shift in the wind. Ben Benson and Denny Wood were asking more about his sisters than they were about his plans for the future. Ben Benson told Nick that he’d done some “research” on his past.

“I believe you’ve been truthful with us to this point,” Benson said. “I did review some of the case file from Alaska in your wife’s case—that’s all public information. The one thing that stands out in my mind in talking about Vickie is her having a boyfriend who wanted to take her to Rome.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah …” Suddenly Nick was wary.

“What was that about?”

“Okay. That was a gentleman that had a meat company and he delivered [meat], you know, to different places in Alaska.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he was Renee’s partner—business partner.”

“What was his name?”

“Oh—Joe.”

Nick Notaro’s answers came haltingly now. He explained that he had seen this guy—Joe—down in Washington when he came down after he left the hospital in Fairbanks. Before that, Vickie had told him she was going to Italy with Joe.

“Where did this guy named Joe come into play?” Denny Wood asked.

“Well, he stopped in the restaurant there [in Healy] and sold some meat where I was working. He had good
hamburger patties. And because he knew I was Renee’s brother, he came over to the hotel where we were staying a couple of times.”

“Talk about body language,” Benson recalled later. “Every time we mentioned Joe, Nick involuntarily backed up his chair. He was halfway across the room when I asked him, ‘Nick, where you going?’”

Nick hastened to explain that Renee and Joe had been only business partners and platonic friends. Renee had been seeing another man, a chef named Keith or perhaps Curt.

In the meantime, he sold his house on Green River Road and moved to the yellow rambler in Auburn. The 14th Avenue house wasn’t nearly as imposing as the white stucco house Bob had built near the river, but it didn’t matter; he didn’t intend to spend much time in Washington.

“He was German. He’s the one who got me a job up on the pipeline for Campo Pacific.”

“What was Joe’s last name?”

“I don’t remember. Joe was Italian.”

“Now, you did tell somebody that you saw your wife Vickie and Joe together down in Washington?” Ben Benson probed, seeing sweat bead up on Nick’s forehead.

“I believe I did. I’m not positive, but I don’t remember [if] I either saw them together or whether I saw just one of them.”

Nick Notaro was stumbling over his own tongue at this point. He recalled that he and his mother had felt Joe was much too old for Renee—closer to Geri Hesse’s
age than Renee’s. He thought Geri or Renee had told him that Renee traveled with Joe only for business reasons, and they stayed in separate hotel rooms. If they went out for dinner, it was also for business. He was positive that Renee had no romantic relationship with Joe.

“Now, you killed Vickie and you told people she went to Italy with Joe. Where did Joe go? Why wouldn’t people still see Joe around?”

“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.

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. Before 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.

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.