Don’t Look Behind You

hospital in Fairbanks, their night at the hotel, and then his discovery the next morning that she had left him. She hadn’t even taken her clothes with her. Nick gave one of her friends her wardrobe—including the green evening gown she’d worn when they’d gotten married.
    “He was having a lot of pain when he was down here that week—his back hurt, he couldn’t really walk, and you could tell it was from his surgery,” Geri said. “He spent most of his time lying on the davenport at Renee’s and my house.”
    Nick had asked his mother to come up to Healy and take care of him. With Vickie gone, he had no one. At first she said she couldn’t—because she had Renee’s daughter, Diana, to care for and because Renee needed her.
    “But Vickie was going to be gone,” Geri said, “and I thought Nick needed me more than Renee did. I thought,‘Well, I could go there just as easily as be at Renee’s until he was over being lonely and found someone else.’”
    Poor Nick. He’d told his mother he’d finally gotten all his bills paid up and he was ready to start a family—and then Vickie had abandoned him for another man. He believed that this man was older, could buy her more things, and had even promised he would take her on a luxury trip to Europe. He didn’t mention the seducer’s name, however.
    It was a familiar scenario.
As Sergeant Ben Benson read over the old homicide file on the death of Vickie Notaro, he wondered at the coincidence that
both
Renee and Vickie were having “affairs” with older men with money who offered them trips to Europe, specifically Rome, Italy.
    Nick had had a number of run-ins with the law for minor offenses, and he never had been particularly clever about coming up with convincing alibis. But until September 1978, Nick Notaro had never been known for being violent.
    And then he was suspected of having been extremely violent. But it wasn’t Joe Tarricone for whose death he was the prime suspect.
    It was his first wife: Vickie Notaro.

Chapter Twelve
    Vickie Notaro had felt very insecure in her marriage to Nick. In December 1977, she wrote a letter to a friend while she was living with Nick’s sister Cassie in Anchorage—just before she went to Healy to join her husband. They had separated over the summer months. Cassie liked Vickie and once again had taken her under her wing.
    “I can’t say what’s going to happen to Nikkie [
sic
] and I yet,” Vickie wrote. “I doubt very much that our marriage will work out. I’d like it to, but he’d rather be by himself than with me.”
    Perhaps looking for someplace to land if Nick dumped her, Vickie wrote that she had casually dated a few men when she was down in Washington, but her preference, clearly, was to save her marriage. Ambivalent, she was both in love with and afraid of Nick Notaro.
    “Oh my God,” she wrote, worrying that Nick was talking about getting her pregnant, “I think I’m going to be dead. And I don’t know really about our marriage or not …”
    Her words were tragically prophetic.
    The news that the dead body in the gravel pit had been tentatively identified as Vickie Notaro had not yet spread when Nick Notaro faced two Alaska state troopers at 7:15 a.m. on October 21, 1978.
    Nick Notaro listened to his Miranda rights, and agreed to be interviewed by Alaska troopers C. Roger McCoy, Brad Brown, and Glenn Flothe. He knew Brown, of course, and seemed comfortable with him. The troopers began with small talk and then asked Nick about his life with Vickie. He said he’d met Vickie Schneider in Spokane, where he lived at the time, and that she had recently moved west from her family home in Kalispell, Montana. They had been married for four years but had no children.
    “When was the last time you saw Vickie?” McCoy asked.
    “The twentieth of September—in Kalispell.”
    That was a surprising answer and didn’t jibe with what Nick had told others in Healy, but none of the investigators commented on it.
    “And she was all right?”
    “Yes, she was.”
    “Did she tell you what her plans were?”
    “She left a week prior to that—and she left a note,” Nick said haltingly. “She didn’t really explain why or anything. I wanted to find out and I figured she would head for home—to Kalispell. I went there—I had just gotten out of the hospital, and I hadn’t gone back to work yet. So I went down to Seattle to see my relatives. My mom, and—”
    “Where did you see her [Vickie] in