Don’t Look Behind You

He admitted killing his wife on Friday, September 22 after he got out of the Fairbanks hospital. He then testified that he flew to Seattle on the following Monday—September 25—intending to kill Joe. But he hastened to explain that it had all been
his
idea.
    Nick said he had neither
seen
nor talked to Renee during the first four days he was at the Canyon Road house and believed that she was working in Hawaii. He said his long-dead mother—Geri Hesse—told him that. He had brought along the gun that he’d used in Vickie’s homicide, but he said that was only because he wanted Renee to get rid of it for him.
    Of course, it had come in handy since he had already decided—all on his own—to murder Joe Tarricone.
    Nick said he didn’t like Joe—never had—because he was too old for his sister, and that Joe was always “trying to get her in bed.”
    Renee had just testified that her mother liked Joe, but Nick testified that Geri didn’t like him. Nick testified that Joe had shown up on Friday, September 29.
    Over and over again, the witness took full responsibility for Joe Tarricone’s murder.
    “Do you remember when he arrived?” Gary Clower asked.
    “It was early evening—or early afternoon. He came to the house and Mom said, ‘Joe’s here.’ We were sitting at the table, and I went into the bedroom and got the gun and stuck it in my waistband.”
    “Why did you do that?”
    “Because I was going to kill him. Because he was messing with Renee.”
    Nick’s recollection was that Joe had arrived in his refrigerated yellow pickup truck.
    “Is it accurate to describe,” Clower asked, “that you asked him to go in the basement to help with a problem with the washing machine?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “So describe what happened then,” Clower urged as Nick seemed to lose track of his thoughts.
    “When we went over to the washer, Joe leaned over the washer, and I took the gun out and shot him.”
    “How many times?”
    “Twice.”
    “What happened then?”
    “Well, Mom was a little shocked and she said, you know, ‘What’d you do? You didn’t have to kill him.’ And I said, ‘I took care of a problem.’”
    With Renee’s defense attorney prodding him, Nick Notaro went into a long description of how he had driven Joe’s truck to a strip mall and bought a “come-along” so he could lift Joe’s heavy body up more easily. He needed to put him in the freezer.
    “I put one hook in his belt and the other hook over a rafter, and ratcheted him up.”
    Nick said his mother was there helping him load a man over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds into a ten-cubic-foot freezer—“three, four feet long, three feet deep, two feet wide.”
    Anyone in the courtroom could estimate that the victim could not have fit into such a small space. Nick rambled on that he wanted to freeze Joe’s body so that it wouldn’t be so “messy” when he cut him up.
    None of what he said matched Renee’s testimony, but Nick didn’t know that. With his misguided sense of loyalty, he continued to insist from the witness stand that his sister hadn’t been there.
    Gypsy and her sister Rosemary sat in the gallery, weighing every word of testimony as they had since the beginning of the trial.
    “How could it suddenly be Geri who had complained about Joe Tarricone to Nick?” Gypsy asked herself. “Nick didn’t know that Renee had just testified that she was there in the house helping to dismember my dad’s body.”
    Gypsy and Rosemary studied the jurors’ faces, trying to get some sense of who might be on their side.
    “There was an older, kind of country-looking man in the middle of the front row,” Gypsy remembers. “He had arather large belly and he crossed his arms across it. He sat there, not moving during the trial, but when Renee talked about cutting my dad up, tears rolled down this man’s face. I knew then that
he
was with us.
    “Another juror would look at Rosemary whenever Renee would act aghast—sighing and shaking her head—as she sat next to her attorney. Renee seemed horrified whenever someone testified about what a monster she was. We felt we could count on two jurors. We weren’t sure about the others.”
    While Gypsy Tarricone has never hidden her hatred for Renee Curtiss, she felt differently about Nick Notaro.
    “Yes, Nick has a sick perverted mind,” Gypsy says today. “That, no doubt, came from his upbringing by Geraldine—with her alcoholism and using