Don’t Look Behind You

gone.
    Livor mortis—or lividity—occurs when the heart stops pumping, leaving the lowest body parts stained a purplish red with pooled blood, and that can take up to a dozen hours. This victim’s lividity was, as expected, in her head, neck, shoulders, arms, and hands, which had all been on the downhill side of the trail. It was complete.
    The dead woman had to have been dead a day or so before her body was discovered, but she could also have been deceased for a lot longer than that, given the thirty-one-degree temperatures charted for the Healy area for that October.
    No one had reported anyone resembling the victim missing.
    The cause of death was horribly easy to detect. She had fought for her life gallantly and sustained numerous scratches, cuts, and what were clearly defense wounds. The injuries had been inflicted both before and after death. X-rays taken before this postmortem exam showed two projectiles (slugs) in the body—one in the brain and the other in the abdominal/pelvic cavity.
    Dr. Probst looked at the entrance wound in the victim’s left temple first and found gunpowder
inside
the wound, but the rounded wound had no charring and no ragged (stellate) edge. He determined that this wound had been in the “close category,” but was not a “contact.” The bullet had traveled in a straight line through her brain, ending up in the
right
occipital (back) of the brain. The copper jacket had separated from the slug. This slug had fractured her skull, not to mention causing shock and hemorrhage in her brain.
    It would have been rapidly—if not instantly—fatal.
    The second entrance wound was in her lower back in the left lumbar region. It had entered her back and ended at her right iliac crest (hip bone), traveling back to front, left to right. This would not necessarily have been a fatal wound, if the victim had had immediate medical attention. It had been fired from some distance. While the bullet had gone through the back hem of the woman’s blouse, it hadn’t caused any singeing or melting of the material. A close-up shot would have.
    The pathologist and the Alaska troopers observing the autopsy agreed: the back wound would have been the first, possibly as the victim was running away from her killer. The head wound came second, almost as if the shooter was clamping her head close so that she could not avoid the fatal shot.
    Three days later—after the Jane Doe’s description was published in nearby newspapers—a woman came forward. She gave her name as Laverne Isaacson and said she owned the Healy Hotel.
    “One of our maids is missing,” she explained. “She’s about twenty-five, more than five foot eight, and she’s kind of chunky. I’d say she weighs about one hundred sixty pounds or so. I believe she has some Indian blood—she has brown hair and brown eyes. She wears glasses. She’s a good person, and we’re worried.”
    “Why is that?” Rod Harvey asked.
    “Well, she went to pick up her husband from the hospital in Fairbanks on September 21. And she never came back to Healy—hasn’t shown up for work … it’s not like her.”
    “What’s her name?”
    “Vickie. Vickie Notaro. When I asked her husband, Nick, about where she was, he told me that they had a fight that night. They were staying in a hotel there—and he said she just up and left him.”
    The Jane Doe was no longer unidentified; she was the late Mrs. Nick Notaro, Renee Curtiss’s sister-in-law. The Alaska detectives had been able to pinpoint the last day she was seen alive—they found a motel owner in Fairbanks whose records showed that Nick and Vickie had checked in on Monday, September 21, 1978, and left the next morning. They had stayed in Room 104 at the Towne House Motel, and paid $37.80. They often stopped at the Towne House, and no one—staff or guests—had heard or seen anything unusual during the night.
    “One thing, though,” manager Steve Nord added. “One of our maids found a box for a gun and some bullets. There was a receipt there, too—from J.C. Penney.”
    The receipt showed that Nick Notaro, six feet three inches, age thirty, weighing well over two hundred pounds, had purchased a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, .38 double action revolver for $156.75 and a box of bullets
on September 21
!

Chapter Nine
    On July 18, 2007 , Ben Benson obtained the complete criminal history of Nick Notaro. He found that Notaro had been a suspect in a child rape case in Tacoma in 1994. There was also a