Don’t Look Behind You

defense, a choice that defense attorneys dread. By doing so, she was opening herself up to cross-examination by Dawn Farina, but Renee clearly counted on her own powers of persuasion and her ability to deny many things she had told Ben Benson and Denny Wood.
    Renee’s lawyer, Gary Clower, began the direct questioning of his client. Her affect was flat, unemotional, almost disinterested at times as she responded to his questions. If anyone in the gallery expected tears and emotion from Renee Curtiss, they were to be disappointed.
    Renee gave her age as fifty-five and said her two children were now thirty-eight and thirty-nine. Gary Clower introduced Defense Exhibit #203, a picture of Renee at twenty-five. This was what she had looked like when Joe Tarricone was murdered—a sweet, almost innocent-appearing young woman. Would the jurors consider the young Renee as incapable of such a grisly crime?
    “What was this photograph taken for?” Clower asked.
    “For a makeup ad for our makeup store.”
    “Did you used to do a little bit of modeling?” Clower was obviously preparing for any questions that might come from the prosecution about Renee’s escort and “modeling” career.
    “Yes.”
    Asked to talk about her early life, Renee testified that she went to Alaska first in 1973, when she was the nineteen-year-old wife of a bush pilot. When the marriage failed, she said she was left alone with two children—alone until her mother moved up to join her. She recalled that she had been a bookkeeper for the Black Angus restaurant chain, a hostess at a Greek restaurant, and the night manager of an airport restaurant.
    “Eventually, [I] went to work for Joe Tarricone for Alaska Meat and Provisions.”
    Did she not remember that she had met Joe in Seattle—not in Alaska? It was of no import, really, and Clower moved on.
    Renee continued along the paths of her life—at least as she remembered. She testified that she, her mother, and her daughter moved to a northern suburb of Seattle in 1977. She didn’t mention her son. The trio had lived in Kirkland, Washington, for about a year.
    “Where were you employed?” Clower asked.
    “I worked two different places—actually three—different places. I worked for Elite Models. I also worked for Frederick & Nelson. Then I went to work for the Griffin Group.”
    Renee had a precise memory for these details, odd, because her memory would soon fail her again and again. She believed that she and her mother had moved to Canyon Road in the summer of 1978, but she wasn’t sure of the month. Shown the lease for the Pierce County house, she agreed that it must have been in June.
    The defendant said she had lived in two rentals at the same time. One was the Canyon Road house, where she “spent weekends” with her mother and daughter, and the other was in downtown Bellevue some thirty-five miles away. Gary Clower didn’t ask her why she didn’t go home to her mother and daughter at night; the thirty-five-mile commute would have been on freeways all the way.
    Nor did he ask her who—if anyone—she lived with during the week.
    Renee remembered how ill her husband, Henry, was when Ben Benson and Denny Wood came to interview her a year before: “He was in late-stage heart failure and late-stage renal failure,” she testified, omitting the fact that the Pierce County detectives had offered to take her to see Henry’s doctors before they asked her any questions.
    “When the police came to talk to you, they told you that they wanted to talk to you about Mr. Tarricone?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “How did that make you feel?”
    “Um … my heart probably went to my stomach. Frightened. Worried about not being able to keep the appointment. Worried about the trouble I would be in for my actions.”
    Gary Clower could not erase his client’s gory confession to Benson and Wood about how she helped to dissect and hide Joe Tarricone’s body. But he needed to raise the doubt that Renee’s Miranda rights might not have been given correctly and in time; he suggested that Renee had somehow been tricked into talking freely, believing that the statute of limitations on being an accomplice after the fact had run out.
    Of course, he would hit on that. All he had going as a defense strategy was to paint his client as a vulnerable young woman at the time of the murder, and to do whatever he could to remove her as far as possible from the scene of Joe’s killing.
    Asked to recall her