Don’t Look Behind You

deep dimples, and her cap of dark hair. Her figure was perfect. She didn’t
look
like a femme fatale; she resembled a wholesome college girl.
    Being with her made Joe feel as though he was in his twenties again. His business was doing very well. Although he missed his seven “kids,” who were scattered from New Mexico to the Northwest to Hawaii, he was in touch with them often.
    His life was good in 1977.
    Believing that the victim on Canyon Road was, indeed, Joe Tarricone, Ben Benson realized that his prime suspects were likely to be Geri Hesse and two of her own children—Renee Curtiss and Nick Notaro, whom Geri had adopted when he was a baby.
    Benson began background checks on all of them. He found that Renee had been arrested several times for DUI(driving under the influence). In one instance, police had found her car stopped in the middle of the 405 freeway between Renton and Mercer Island in the wee hours of the morning. She was inside, passed out from alcohol. Renee was lucky indeed that there was little traffic on the usually busy freeway at that time of the morning. She would very likely have been killed had another car run into her vehicle—and so might the driver and passengers of that car.
    Geri seemed to have a clean record, but Nick had a child molestation case on his record.
    “I almost fell out of my chair,” Benson recalled, “when I read that one of the complaining witnesses had mentioned that Renee’s brother, Nick, had told her about killing a man and burying him in his mother’s yard. The Tacoma Police detective who did his child molestation investigation never followed up on the ‘murder’ story.”

Chapter Five
    Joe and Renee worked well together in his meat business in Anchorage, so well that he announced one day that he was giving her half interest in Alaska Meat Provisions. She didn’t even have to put any money into the company; he was happy to give her what he felt was her share.
    Joe bought prime meat wholesale from a ranch in Colorado. He was able to sell some of it in sides and quarters. He and Renee rewrapped and packaged smaller quantities in the office, which wasn’t really legal with the permits they had—but wasn’t a major infraction either.
    Geri Hesse got a job as a saleswoman at a Lamonts department store, and both women lived quite comfortably. Whether Joe asked to move in with them in the Jewel Lake house is unknown—but he never did live there, staying instead in his barren, small office quarters.
    Strangely, at one point the two women invited another man to move in with them. Renee always chafed at the idea of being totally bound to one man. She met a German national named Kurt Winkler in a Greek restaurant calledAndreas in Anchorage where she worked part-time as a hostess. Kurt was an accomplished chef and appeared to have money.
    Kurt was about thirty in 1976. He was much shorter than Joe Tarricone, and not nearly as handsome, but Renee was attracted to him and they dated. According to Winkler, they eventually became lovers.
    Joe probably suspected that there was more than friendship between the two, but Renee said a long time later that he never confronted her about it.
    Perhaps he didn’t know. Kurt soon got a job with Campo Pacific, a company that offered catering service to workers in remote locations across Alaska. The pipeline provided high-paying jobs to thousands of them, and seeing to their needs meant more jobs for those who had flocked to Alaska and the pipeline. It wasn’t that different from the Alaska gold rush a hundred years earlier.
    Kurt worked eight or nine weeks up on the North Slope at a stretch, and then had two weeks off. At least he was supposed to work that rotation, but if his replacement didn’t get off the plane, Kurt had to stay until they could fill that job. Often, Kurt was gone from Anchorage for fourteen or fifteen weeks.
    Joe, of course, traveled much of the time. He drove his yellow truck from Anchorage to Fairbanks and back, going up the eastern highway and returning along the western route. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for Renee to keep the two men from confronting each other. Neither of them spent much time in Anchorage.
    Renee reportedly became engaged to Kurt Winkler.Years later, Renee said she broke up with Kurt when she found out he had slept with one of her female relatives.
    That may or may not have been true. One thing is certain, however: Renee Curtiss’s life was always full of drama, usually