Don’t Look Behind You

men as well, and pimping her daughter to gain possessions and monetary gain. Geraldine was a piece of work.
    “Funny thing, I really don’t hate Nick. Truly, in my heart, I do not hate him. I feel nothing but the fact that his mind is twisted and something very wrong happened in his life, along with the fact that he is mentally slow. He didn’t have the brains to come up with a plot to kill my dad—but he would do whatever his mother or his sisters wanted. Many of my family members think like me. We hate Renee. It’s because of her that our dad is dead. I am not even too sure yet that Nick did it. Because they lied so much …”
    Would the jurors believe the defense witnesses, or would they recognize what was true and what was obviously alie—a plethora of lies? In final arguments, Dawn Farina said that Renee Curtiss was guilty as an accomplice to murder. She had asked her brother to kill the victim because she had grown weary of Joe Tarricone’s romantic advances.
She
was the link between Joseph Tarricone and Nick Notaro.
She
had the motive.
    Defense attorney Gary Clower gave his position that the prosecution had submitted no evidence that his client had solicited the murder of her former boyfriend.
    “The crime here is murder,” he pointed out. “Not anything else that she might have done. She isn’t charged with disposing of the body or covering up the crime. She is guilty of lying about Tarricone’s whereabouts for nearly thirty years—maybe even for helping dispose of his body.”
    It was time for Renee Curtiss’s jury to decide her fate.
    Appropriately, perhaps, it was April Fool’s Day 2009 when the jurors retired at noon to review evidence and testimony and deliberate on whether Renee should be found guilty or innocent of first-degree murder.
    Expecting that it would be at least a day before the verdict was handed down, Gypsy and Rosemary Tarricone left the Pierce County courthouse to keep a doctor’s appointment in Olympia, twenty miles south of Tacoma. Throughout the trial, Rosemary had said, “Jacqueline, you know, she could get off and you’d better be prepared if that happens.”
    Gypsy didn’t even want to think about that possibility, but she did know—she had known from the first day—that she had to be the one who held everyone else in her familytogether during both traumatic trials. In many ways, they were reliving the grief they felt for Joe back in 1978.
    Although they thought they would be back in Tacoma to wait out the jury’s deliberation in plenty of time, Gypsy’s cell phone shrilled, making them both jump. Suddenly, only a little more than three hours after jury deliberation had begun, it was over.
    As the sisters drove as fast as they legally could on the I-5 freeway back to the courthouse, Rosemary reminded Gypsy (whom she still calls Jacqueline) again that they couldn’t fall apart—no matter what the verdict was.
    But the next phone call obviated the need for that. Renee Ray Curtiss had just been convicted of first-degree murder!
    When Dawn Farina called Gypsy, she told her that the prosecution team and the detectives were holding a meeting on the tenth floor of the courthouse, and they were waiting for Joe’s two daughters to join them.
    Ben Benson had observed Renee closely as the jury was polled. One by one, they had all said “guilty.” She seemed to be stunned, and then her jaw set stoically. Perhaps she had really expected to return to her home and celebrate her acquittal. But she wasn’t going home at all; she was going directly to jail.
    After Gypsy and Rosemary parked in the courthouse’s rear parking lot, they saw Cassie, Renee’s sister, and “the old biddy cheer squad” coming out of the courthouse, most of them looking either dejected or angry. It was a tense moment; the air was full of electricity.
    Gypsy didn’t fall apart, but she could not resist shouting at Cassie, “Your sister got just what she deserved!”
    If it hadn’t been so serious, it might have been comical—a bunch of women well over fifty preparing to have what looked like a gang war. Cassie headed for Gypsy and she seemed to be very close to a physical attack on her when one of Renee’s supporters grabbed Cassie by the arm, shouting, “No! Don’t do that!”
    And it was over as soon as it had begun.
    Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck set Nick Notaro’s sentencing for April 4, and Renee’s for April 24.
    Renee lost another privilege on April 16—one that paled in the