Don’t Look Behind You

centered around her relationships with men.
    Gypsy and her sister, Gina, remained convinced that Renee had something to do with their father’s disappearance. They had no idea how difficult that would be to prove.
    Gypsy tried to file a missing report with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and asked for a meeting with then-sheriff Mark French.
    “He wouldn’t see me,” Gypsy recalls. “I actually had to get a county commissioner to intercede—and I finally got French to talk with me. All I asked was would they just reinterview Renee Curtiss. He wouldn’t even agree to do that!”
    In reality, Pierce County investigators
never
interviewed Renee, and no missing report was ever filed in their jurisdiction. Sheriff Mark French retired under a cloud that centered on his alleged interest in pornography and had nothing to do with Joe Tarricone; it was not French’s detectives’ fault that they hadn’t acted on Gypsy Tarricone’s report—they weren’t aware of it.
    Gypsy was extremely frustrated. Both she and her younger sisters, Gina and Rosemary, would slip into depression every year as summer drifted into fall and their father was still missing.
    “We felt that was the time when our father died,” Gypsy remembers. “And no one seemed to care enough to investigate what had happened to him. So our brother Dean came up with an idea. We all got together and made up a story that Dad had left an insurance policy where the proceeds would go to Renee Curtiss and to Dean. So Dean called her, and we taped the call. She was very interested at the thought that she might get money from an insurance policy, but she sounded baffled that my dad was still missing.
    “She kept saying, ‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ as if she was surprised that my dad hadn’t shown up somewhere. But she didn’t want the insurance money enough to admit that our dad was dead.”
    Eventually, of course, Gypsy and Gina had found detectives who would listen to them at the Des Moines Police Department and at the King County Sheriff’s Office. And, finally, in 2007, in Pierce County.
    By the time Sergeant Ben Benson became the lead investigator on the case of the unidentified bones, Pierce County had a new sheriff, Paul Pastor, and things were very different there.
    Benson wanted to talk to Renee Curtiss, but he needed to find out as much about her as he could before he confronted her.
    Gypsy Tarricone had never stopped looking for her father. She even bought a book on how to find a missing personand tried some of the techniques suggested there. If she had to do it all by herself, she was prepared to do that. Gypsy is an upbeat, attractive woman with thick black hair, and her career is an unusual choice for a female; she is a merchant mariner and is often out at sea for months at a time, stopping in exotic ports of call. Occasionally, she will be the only woman on board.
    Wherever she was, Gypsy thought of her dad, determined not to give up her search for him as decades passed.
    “Whenever I thought of him,” Gypsy recalls, “I always pictured Canyon Road and 104th. I recalled walking that long driveway to the house that was at the back of the lot. That would have been in 1990, a dozen years after he disappeared. I knew my dad was there somewhere. It was like a chain reaction—it all fit together. But I couldn’t prove it, and I couldn’t find him.”
    And she was right. She had gone up that driveway and felt so very close to Joe. She felt his spirit, but she still didn’t know where he was.
    That year Gypsy tried, in vain, to request a presumptive death certificate for her father from the medical examiner of Pierce County. One of the medical investigators wrote back to her: “We are not insensitive to your situation. However, we cannot issue a presumptive death certificate at this time. Mr. Tarricone was last seen in this county,” he wrote. “However, the only evidence that he is dead is the length of time since he has been seen. In the absence of any known event that would reasonably have taken his life or a known location for this event, we lack jurisdiction to act on your request.”
    The investigator suggested that Gypsy “appeal to a court in the area where he last lived.”
    Although Alaska authorities were kinder to Gypsy and her siblings, they could not offer closure either.
    By 1993, Gypsy had moved from New Mexico to Hawaii. When she contacted the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle, she was told that they could