Don’t Look Behind You

Joe when she didn’t hear from him after thenight of the party. She told relatives that she took it upon herself to check out Tarricone’s business office when she went up to Alaska to stay for a while with her oldest child—her son, Nick.
    “She said she found the place a mess—as if someone had trashed it. She thought there had possibly been a fight there.”
    Ben Benson was learning more about Renee Curtiss. He knew now that she had a sister, Cassie, and a brother, Nick, as well as aunts, uncles, and more cousins. The two cousins Ben talked to had spoken of her as a generous woman who went out of her way to help them when they were down on their luck.
    On the other hand, the Tarricone family believed that she was a devil woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted—even murder.
    Benson looked for more of Renee’s relatives. Although Dean and Ron Isaak had spoken positively about Renee, their sister, Victoria, was more judgmental.
    When Benson spoke to Victoria McMillan, she was aware that some human remains had been found on the property where her aunt Geri and cousin Renee had once lived. Victoria didn’t know who the bones might belong to.
    Victoria said she had thought Renee Curtiss was “shady” during a time when she was younger. “In fact,” she said, “I thought she worked as a prostitute. Geri may have been, too, or she might have just introduced Renee to ‘dates.’
    “They always spent more than they earned; Renee wasalways flying here and flying there with men, and she got really neat presents from them,” Victoria said. “One time, Renee told me, ‘If you’re gonna give it up, you might as well get paid for it.’”
    Benson knew that of the many places Renee listed on her job résumé, one suggested that she
might
be selling sex. She had been employed by Elite Models in Seattle.
    Her cousin confirmed that Renee Curtiss had not one but two children, neither of whom she had raised herself. “Aunt Geri raised Diana, and Renee’s son, Brent—I don’t know
who
raised him. He was mostly in foster homes. I don’t know who his father was, but Renee’s son, Brent, was always in trouble. And I don’t think he ever actually lived with her.”
    So Renee had been helpful to her male cousins but apparently hadn’t taken responsibility for her own children. Ben Benson found her life story more tangled with everyone he interviewed.
    By this time, Benson had already done an initial check on Nick Notaro, Renee’s adopted brother, and noted that Nick had a criminal record, one for a sexual crime involving a juvenile girl.
    Victoria asked Benson if it was Nick’s wife they had found on the property on Canyon Road.
    “No,” Benson said slowly, puzzled. He hadn’t heard anything about Nick’s wife.
    “Nick went to prison for killing his wife,” Victoria continued. “But they never found her body.”
    “Is that right?” Benson said, letting that information sink in.
    “Oh, then it must have been Renee’s boyfriend—the one who disappeared,” Victoria said calmly. “I guess he never showed up either.”
    “I was beginning to think this was a very strange family,” Benson said later.
    Ben Benson contacted Dr. John Stewart at the FBI’s DNA laboratory and asked if he could send the bones that almost certainly belonged to Joe Tarricone to the lab to be tested. They had been kept sacrosanct in the chain of evidence system since they were found.
    “Yes,” Stewart said. “Send them by Federal Express to the Evidence Control Unit at our laboratory here in Quantico.”
    Dr. Stewart also asked Benson to send DNA samples from Joe Tarricone’s close relatives. Benson sent portions of the still officially unknown victim’s left humerus and left ilium, and he included DNA exemplars from Joe’s sister, Mimi Kraft, and from his son Dean.
    Even without a complete skull, there was a good chance the FBI lab could tentatively identify the bones as belonging to Joe Tarricone.
    It would take a long wait to receive an answer, however. The FBI is overwhelmed with requests for DNA matches. This was a homicide case thirty years old and didn’t demand the immediate attention that recent cases did. Indeed, it would be March 2008 when the FBI lab reported that they were unsuccessful in identifying the exemplars Benson had sent in using nuclear tests. But they
did
have better results with mitochondrial DNA comparison between Joe’s relatives and the unidentified bones. This wasn’t as