Don’t Look Behind You

not officially take on the case, but this time Gypsy had had a glimmer of hope; Jan Rhodes of the missing persons unit took her report anyway. Rhodes had a feeling.
    Gypsy was out at sea when Jan Rhodes called Gypsy’s union representative and asked to have a message relayed to her—Rhodes needed to talk to her. When Gypsy called back from her ship, she told Jan that she wanted to keep her dad’s missing report in the system—whatever it took.
    Gypsy wasn’t about to give up in her search for her beloved father. Although so many law enforcement agencies had refused to take a missing report because Tarricone wasn’t linked to their jurisdiction and others had marked the case “closed” or “inactive,” when Gypsy tried again in 1993 she’d finally found a kindred spirit in Jan Rhodes.
    Another solid supporter was Bill Haglund—whom Gypsy dubs “a great man.”
    Haglund was a chief criminal deputy in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office who was known for his refusal to give up on trying to identify John—and Jane—Does, and he, too, stepped in to argue Gypsy’s cause.
    For over a decade, Bill Haglund had become a familiar image on television news shows. In the eighties and early nineties, Haglund could be seen holding one end of thesad parade of stretchers holding one Green River victim after another.
    In 1993, when Haglund listened to Jan Rhodes describe the Tarricone case, he’d encouraged her to write an incident report on the missing man. He also suggested that an incident report and Tarricone’s previous dental charts would allow them to enter Tarricone’s information into the vast database of the National Crime Information Center.
    The missing report on Tarricone drew a number of hits through NCIC over the next few years. But all of them were eliminated because when the victims were found—dead or alive—there was always something that didn’t match. Their eye color was wrong; their height, weight, or age was wrong; fingerprints didn’t match; or there was some other specific detail that did not fit.
    A man’s body was discovered at the bottom of a factory’s smokestack in Bellingham, Washington, which was close to the British Columbia border. Could it be Joe? Forensic pathologists said it had been there for only six to nine months and was so badly burned that identification proved impossible. They believed that the man was alive when he jumped or fell into the stack because he had removed his clothing and folded it beneath him in a hopeless attempt to fight the heat. A partially burned plane ticket was found beside him—but heat had obliterated the destination listed.
    The dead man in the smokestack could not possibly be Joseph Tarricone; he had died years after Joe vanished.
    Most laymen have no idea how many lost souls disappear each year, many of whom will never be found oridentified. Bill Haglund tracked every hit from the computers at NCIC that he possibly could. There were many Joseph Tarricones in America, all with different social security numbers, but none of them proved to be Gypsy’s father. In the end, none of the computer hits told Haglund where Joseph Tarricone was.
    There was one hit, though, that had an interesting connection to the missing man. Dianna Darnell, of the Wasilla Police Department in Alaska, called to say that a gun Tarricone had reported as stolen on January 16, 1977, had been located! Darnell worked for the State of Alaska, but she was stationed in the Wasilla police office in the town where Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin had once served as mayor and where she still lived. Tarricone’s gun had been stolen thirty years before, a year before he disappeared.
    In 1993, when the missing report on Joe Tarricone was entered into NCIC computers, the system connected thousands of police agencies, and the computer monitors notified Dianna Darnell in 1993 that the stolen gun was linked to Joe Tarricone. When the gun was located, Dianna Darnell wanted to return it to Gypsy Tarricone.
    Still, the discovery of his long-lost gun came with no new information on who had killed Joe.
    Jan Rhodes learned a little more about Joe’s background when she got a phone call from Gypsy. Gypsy called from her new home in Hawaii and was surprised to learn that it had been difficult to locate her. She wanted to stay in touchin case there were ever any human remains located where Renee Curtiss and her mother had once lived.
    Although it was clear that Gypsy