Don’t Look Behind You

something.”
    “To harm you or Heidi?”
    “I had such a bad feeling that I told [the prosecutor] just to get Nick on whatever he could. So he did.”
    Without the complaining witnesses, Nick Notaro drew a relatively short sentence. (The fact that he was a Level 2 sex offender in a Southern state wasn’t known to the sentencing judge. His “victim” in that case was a developmentally disabled teenager with whom he had had consensual sexual relations.)
    Nick divorced Lila May but she didn’t know that until she was given some papers the night before Nick’s trial, papers that said their divorce was final.
    “When did you last see Nick?” Benson asked.
    “Sometime back in the middle of the nineties. I didn’t have a car, so I was taking a bus and I saw him sitting in the back. I turned my head away and didn’t look at him.”
    Lila May said that her ex-husband had also told Janet Blaisdell about murders he had committed, and Janet had urged her to get away from him. Without Janet, she probablywouldn’t have had the strength to leave Nick—and she felt grateful to Janet for having her back.
    The two women had worked at the same places for a while, but over the years they had drifted apart.
    Ben Benson was puzzled by the many versions that Nick Notaro had given when he decided to talk about the murder of his ex-wife Vickie. Was he trying to make it seem as though Vickie had been having an affair with Joe Tarricone? Or was he just making up details as he went along? Or was he a man who wanted to be the center of attention and told tall stories to achieve that?
    One thing seemed certain; over a period of almost thirty years, Nick Notaro had admitted that he’d killed Vickie in every scenario he gave people.
    Gypsy Tarricone told Ben Benson that she had talked to Renee on the phone a few times after her father disappeared, and Renee told her that she and her mother, Geri, felt that Joe had met with foul play. But they were emphatic in their denials that he had vanished from their rented house in Puyallup—even though Renee acknowledged that Joe
had
left his Mercedes, his pickup truck, and a camper at the house.
    According to Renee and Geri, Joe had been in Alaska when he went missing. When Gypsy told Detective Jerry Burger of the Des Moines, Washington, police department that, he forwarded a copy of the information the missing man’s daughter gave him to Alaska State police trooper Roy Holland, and to the Anchorage Police Department.
    In talking with Joe Tarricone’s family, Renee continually edited her recollections of the last few times she’d seen Joe. Whether it was Gypsy, Gina, or Dean Tarricone who called her in their desperate search for their father, Renee was friendly—but seemed completely mystified about whatever might have happened to Joe. She insisted she had no idea where he was and seemed surprised that none of his family had heard from him.
    As he read through the thin files on Joe Tarricone, Benson saw that about a month after Gypsy Tarricone filed the first missing report on her father, Des Moines detective Jerry Burger had received a call from Renee Curtiss. Even though the Des Moines police had closed their case on Joseph Tarricone, since he hadn’t gone missing from their jurisdiction, Renee had had something more to tell him.
    She said she now remembered that Joseph Tarricone
had
come to her house in Puyallup sometime in August or September of 1978. She wasn’t sure which month it was. “He said he had a surprise for me,” she began. “Joe showed me two tickets to Italy, and he asked me to go on a trip there with him—a honeymoon. He wanted to marry me.
    “I didn’t want to go,” Renee continued. “I didn’t want to marry him—not at all. That made him very angry and upset. He threw those tickets on the ground and walked off. That was the last time
I
ever saw him.”
    “What happened to the plane tickets?” Burger asked.
    “When he didn’t come back for them, I cashed them in at a travel agency. He also left his 1978 Mercedes 240D at my house,” she said. “He had already signed his pickup truck with the camper on it over to my mother. He likesmy mother. I think he financed the Mercedes through some credit union in Anchorage.”
    “Was he drinking that last day you saw him?”
    “No.”
    Gypsy didn’t believe that version of Renee’s ever-changing memory for a minute. She told Burger: “I don’t buy that he would walk away from her place in Puyallup and hurt