Don’t Look Behind You

relationship with Joe Tarricone, Renee described him as a somewhat crass man, much too old for her. She said she had met him at the Cattle Company restaurant in Anchorage. “He used to come in and I repeatedly had to ask him to leave because he was trying to sell his salami and different things at the bar.”
    Despite her early distaste for him, at some point—she could not recall when—Renee said she had gone to work for Joe, answering the phone, keeping some of the bookwork straight, even delivering meat herself to the Kenai Peninsula.
    She estimated that Joe had been in his mid- to late fifties, the same age as her mother, who, she commented, liked him.
    “Was Joe a generous sort of person?” Clower stepped into more dangerous waters.
    “Very generous. He’d buy me things, my mother things, my daughter things.”
    “Did he buy you a Mercedes?”
    “He did.”
    “Did you accept it?”
    “No, I did not,” Renee testified. She had another car already—but Joe had persevered and practically forced the Mercedes on her, shipping it down to Seattle by boat.
    Renee recalled that she and Joe had only dated about six months, although she still worked for him for another six months before she moved to Seattle. She was dating Kurt Winkler at the same time, and they became engaged.
    “Kurt was planning on taking a job that was going to relocate him to Seattle.”
    “Did Mr. Tarricone ever ask you to marry him before you left Alaska?”
    “More than once.”
    “What was your answer?”
    “No.”
    Asked if she had told Joe Tarricone that she was leaving Alaska, Renee wasn’t sure. Her memory was fading in and out. “I don’t believe that we told him because he was—could be persistent.”
    Kurt Winkler hadn’t followed them to Seattle after all, but Renee testified that Joe had come down to visit several times. She felt her mother had been on his side in trying to get Renee to marry him. But, when he proposed to her once more in Washington, she said he’d been very angry when she refused.
    Renee Curtiss was adamant that she had never suggested to her brother that he hurt or kill Joe. “It was annoying,” she said, “[but] I mean it wasn’t annoying enough to have someone hurt over a situation like that. Not at all.”
    The prosecution believed Renee had asked Nick Notaro to come to Washington to get rid of Joe for good. His wife’s blood had barely been washed from his hands when he flew to Seattle. Renee shook her head firmly. No, she was sure now that she didn’t know that Nick hadjust killed his wife in Alaska when she talked to him after his appendectomy. Maybe she had told Ben Benson and Denny Wood that when they interviewed her in the bail bonds office, but once she thought about it later, she had realized
exactly
where she was when Nick told her.
    “Where was that?” Clower asked.
    “It was at the Canyon Road house, sitting in the kitchen nook, sitting there with my mom and Nick.”
    “And that was
after
Mr. Tarricone was killed, wasn’t it?”
    “Correct.”
    Renee stressed that she also learned that Nick had killed Joe Tarricone as they sat at their kitchen nook. Her mother had told her—quite urgently—to hurry home from Bellevue. Only when she arrived on Canyon Road had she learned that Joe was in the basement—dead.
    Renee testified that the three of them had debated what they should do. She had been concerned about her mother and her brother. What would happen to them, she testified, if they were arrested for murdering Joe? Feeling “a little bit of horror,” she described her feelings as she heard about
two
murders in a week. Even so, she had agreed with them that they had to get rid of Joe’s body.
    “So what did you do?” Clower asked.
    “Nick was going to—we were going to buy a chain saw and cut him up and bury him.”
    No one in the courtroom envied Gary Clower; this had to be one of the toughest clients he’d ever defended. Renee evinced no emotion at all; her eyes were dry as she spoke of the cold-blooded disposal of a human being—a scene right out of a horror movie.
    At this moment, she could not remember who had gone to buy the chain saw.
    “What was your role in disposing of Mr. Tarricone’s body?”
    “We initially went down there—my mom, Nick, and myself—and he started the chain saw. I think we were holding a tarp, and I got—I got physically ill so I went upstairs. I came back down periodically, but Mom stayed down there, and I recall helping put