Don’t Look Behind You

statement in the file from a woman named Janet Blaisdell* who said that Notaro had told her about killing his first wife in Alaska in the late seventies. Janet was the witness mentioned in the more recent child molestation charges against Nick. Benson wanted very much to find her.
    The Pierce County detective sergeant found it tantalizing when he first heard that Nick Notaro had told a woman named Blaisdell that he had killed a man in Tacoma and had buried him at Nick’s mother’s house on Canyon Road.
    Benson left a message on Janet Blaisdell’s answering machine. He also received a copy of a 1978 murder investigation file involving Vickie Notaro from the Alaska State Department of Public Safety’s Records and Identification Unit in Juneau, Alaska.
    Not one—but two—homicide cases were opening up like morning glories in bright sunlight. Either this was toogood to be true—the suspects were stupid—or they had been very, very lucky for almost thirty years!
    Jeanne Slook of the Alaska R. and I. office said she would mail Benson a copy of the Vickie Notaro case in Alaska, and Janet Blaisdell would be happy to fill Benson in on her conversations with Nick Notaro in Tacoma.
    On July 23, 2007, Ben Benson met with her and taped her statement. Janet said that she had first met Nick Notaro in 1987 or 1988. He came to work at Winchell’s Donuts as the night baker. They soon became casual friends. She met Lila May,* his wife, and Heidi,* his stepdaughter, shortly thereafter when they came in to wait for him to finish his shift.
    “I’d get Heidi a glass of milk and a donut, and Lila May and I would talk,” Janet said. “And then Lila May came to work for us, too.”
    The Notaros didn’t have many friends, and Janet Blaisdell said she would invite them over for dinner at her house, or they would drop by to visit.
    “After you became friends with Nick,” Ben Benson began, “did there come a time where he told you about an incident where he had murdered his first wife?”
    “Yes. Several months later—I’d say maybe even a year.”
    “Did you feel that he was trying to get it off his chest—or why do you think he told you?”
    “To this day, I don’t know why. I thought at the time he just wanted somebody to talk to, and he knew I was his friend—and he kind of unloaded. He asked me if I knew that he had been in prison, and I told him no, and then he began to tell me the story of how he killed his first wife.”
    “What exactly did he tell you?” Benson asked.
    “He told me she was cheating on him while … I think he said he was working in Fairbanks, she [Vickie] was down here staying on Canyon Road in a house with his mother. He was sending all this money down here to her and his sisters. And so he came down here without anybody knowing and he found out that she was [cheating]. He went back to Alaska and, three weeks later, had her come up there for a visit. He was driving down a road and he confronted her with this other man, and they started arguing, and he reached down and took his loaded gun from under the seat and shot her in the head at point blank range. And then he took the body up to higher ground somewhere in Fairbanks and buried her. He said she laid [
sic
] there for a very, very, long time before they found her. Some animals had come down ’cause it was cold in the winter and they found her and kinda dug part of her up and were chewing on her limbs, and later some skiers tripped across it, and they put her face on the news and that’s how he got caught.”
    “Did he tell you who recognized her face on the news?”
    “His boss … He had taken her and introduced her to his boss and when they showed her as a Jane Doe and a number you could call with information, he did.”
    “And then did he tell you about coming down here to Tacoma and looking for the guy she was having the affair with?”
    “Yes. After he killed her he came down to the Tacoma area and found the guy and killed him. His mother knew he was coming down, his sisters knew, and he got himand killed him—and then brought the body back to his mother’s house on Canyon Road, and he told me his sisters helped him dismember the body, put it in bags, and buried him under his mother’s front porch. I asked him if his mother knew—and he said yes, and his sisters and him had made a pact never to tell anybody …”
    Janet said that Nick Notaro had threatened
her
sometime later—after she helped his wife Lila May and Heidi