Don’t Look Behind You

frigid hours before dawn when Healy was mostly dark except for the neon sign glowing at Jerry’s, the trooper drank hot coffee and watched Nick slap burgers oreggs on the grill, scraping it clean when he was finished. Nick Notaro wasn’t a particularly scintillating conversationalist, but he was a pleasant enough guy to talk with when the rest of Healy was asleep.
    “Did you know him on a personal level?” Ben Benson asked Brown.
    The retired trooper shook his head. “No—not per se. When we speak ‘personal,’ I think like being close to him, like going to his house for dinner. No, it wasn’t anything like that. I knew him as far as his general demeanor. He was a hard worker behind the grill, and he would always talk and communicate, [with a] smile on his face. That’s kind of how I knew him.”
    Like almost everyone else in Healy, Brad Brown had been surprised when he heard that Nick Notaro was the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Nick had seemed like a “gentle giant.”
    “Did you participate in the investigation?”
    Brown nodded. “Yeah, I did.” He remembered the details quite clearly. There had been nothing gentle about Vickie Notaro’s death.
    There were many longtime residents who still lived in Healy. Ben Benson found Shirley Hamel, Jerry Hamel’s widow, and her daughter, Geri Lynn Lucier, who both recalled Nick working at Jerry’s Healy Service. Shirley said she and Jerry had arrived there in 1978 and bought the business. They hadn’t had a large staff—just two or three of their children, and perhaps the same number ofunrelated employees. Jerry was the one who had hired the mountain of a man who cooked at the Healy Hotel and seemed to have good references as a fry cook.
    “But Nick was a strange sort of person,” she said. “After I heard he’d been arrested, I felt nervous about the fact that I’d often let my kids go to town with him.”
    Benson asked Shirley Hamel if she had ever heard rumors that either Nick or Vickie was unfaithful.
    “Not at all,” she answered, surprised.
    She explained that the Healy Hotel had been located in “Old Healy” in 1978. Later, the railroad bought up much of the property there, leaving it a virtual ghost town. Shirley told Benson that even the Healy Hotel had been physically moved the four miles to the new part of town.
    “They call it the Stampede, now,” she said.
    “Did your daughters tell you any stories about any weird behavior on his part?”
    “Geri Lynn used to say he made her nervous. She didn’t want to have him go to town with her when she was carrying a bank deposit. I guess he never did much to help her, although he was supposed to. He’d go to town and take care of
his
personal business.”
    Shirley Hamel recalled that Nick had had sharp pains in his abdomen one night in the fall of 1978, and she and Jerry figured it was probably appendicitis. She had helped Nick pack a bag, throwing in his cigarettes, and then given him a ride to Fairbanks because he was complaining about how bad his belly hurt.
    “And do you remember him coming back to town after he had his appendix surgery?” Benson probed.
    “I saw him the day he got out of the hospital. He stopped by the little shop in Fairbanks where I was working,” Shirley said.
    “He told me they were staying in town that night, and they were going to head to Healy the next day.”
    She knew that Vickie was with him, but she could not remember if she came into the shop or if she was waiting in the car.
    Ben Benson hadn’t found anyone else who had seen Vickie Notaro after the day she picked her husband up at the hospital—September 21, 1978. He didn’t tell Shirley Hamel, but he suspected she might have been the last person to come close to seeing Vickie alive.
    Shirley had known Vickie only slightly—from when she came into their business to wait for Nick. Asked if she had heard from Notaro after he was arrested and imprisoned, she nodded.
    “He called me around the time he either got out of prison or was about to get out, and asked if I would re-employ him as a cook. I told him no. That was all but that was pretty final.”
    Benson talked next to Geri Lynn Lucier, the Hamels’ daughter, who had been twenty when Nick Notaro had worked at her folks’ place.
    “Why don’t you tell me where you were and what you were doing in 1978—as best as you can remember?” he began.
    “In May or June of 1978, I left Tacoma, Washington, and returned to Healy with my