Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (16 page)

“Mom was down there as well. Whether she was holding him—I don’t know, but I have the memory of the three of us being in that basement.”

“What specifically was the chain saw used for?” Ben Benson asked.

“To make it so the body wasn’t so heavy—”

“Okay. What part of the body was dismembered?”

“Arms, legs—”

“Did you cut his head off as well?”

“Oh, God, I don’t remember that. I think so, I don’t—I don’t recall.”

“Now, was this horribly messy?” Benson prodded. “Describe for me, were you cutting through his clothing or had you taken his clothes off?”

“The clothes were not off.”

“So the chain saw went right through his clothes?”

“Correct.”

“Did you ever hold the saw, and remove any part of Joe’s body?”

“Possibly. I think I was mostly holding.”

Even though the crime had happened three decades earlier, this interrogation sent chills through the detectives—and, possibly, through Renee Curtiss. It was a scene that
almost anyone would want to bury deep in his or her subconscious memory. Renee described how each body part that was severed was put into black garbage bags. When they got too heavy, they were taken to the backyard where Nick Notaro had dug deep holes.

Renee was sure that all that remained of Joe Tarricone had been buried on the property; they hadn’t removed hands or feet or head to take them to another disposal spot so they would be more difficult to identify.

The two detectives both thought about Nick Notaro’s statement that his mother had killed Joe and put him in the freezer. That could not possibly be true.
Three
people could not move his body without dissecting it into pieces.

“Okay,” Benson asked. “How did Nick kill Joe?”

“He shot him.”

“And what did he use to shoot him with?”

“A gun,” she said vaguely. Renee said she had no idea where Nick had obtained the gun. As she remembered, her brother had given her a handgun after the murder, and asked her to dispose of it. She wasn’t sure how long she had it—but she had been on another boyfriend’s boat on Lake Washington, just off Mercer Island, when she threw it in the deep water. The boat owner—also named Joe—hadn’t seen her toss the weapon away.

As far as Renee knew, Joe Tarricone didn’t carry a gun, although she thought he might have had one in his truck in Alaska. “So many people had guns up there.”

“Okay, I’ve been told,” Benson began, “that Joe was known to carry large amounts of cash with him. They say
he carried a briefcase, and a lot of his business dealings were in cash?”

“That’s correct.”

“How much cash would he carry at any given time?”

“Oh—it could be upward of a thousand dollars.”

That would have been quite a lot of money in 1978. Asked about which of Joe Tarricone’s possessions were left at the Canyon Road house, Renee had a memory lapse again. She didn’t think his yellow truck with the camper on it was there because she believed it wouldn’t make the drive down from Alaska. (It
was
at Canyon Road after Joe vanished; Geri said Joe had signed it over to her.)

“The briefcase where he carried his cash?”

“You know,” she said. “I believe there
was
a briefcase, but I believe that was put back in the office in Alaska. I don’t know if Nick did that or if my mom did when she went up for Nick’s trial [for Vickie Notaro’s homicide].”

“Speaking of that, you and your mom mentioned several times back then that Joe’s office in Alaska had been ransacked. Was that something to make it look like there was some kind of problem he had up there?”

“You know, I don’t recall that … I wasn’t up in Alaska, so I wouldn’t have known his office was ransacked.”

But, surely, Renee’s mother—Geri Hesse—would have told her about finding Joe Tarricone’s office a shambles after someone had trashed it? Benson thought that was something that Renee would remember.

Renee Curtiss’s answers
came more slowly, yet she didn’t ask for an attorney or stop the questioning. When Denny Wood took over the questioning, she looked at him warily.

“How did you know the briefcase got back there—you said it was returned to Alaska?”

“Joe never went anywhere without his briefcase.”

“You knew he was dead,” Wood pressed. “Why would your mother return the briefcase? He didn’t need it up there. He’s not taking it anywhere. Why would anybody return a briefcase that had nothing in it?”

“I don’t know. There wasn’t anything in it.”

“Well you mentioned—right?—that you sat down and had to come up with a plan?”

“Right,” Renee said softly.

Wood outlined that their plan might have been to make it look as if Joe Tarricone had returned to Alaska alive and well, since they believed no one would find his body or prove that he’d ever come to Washington. If someone could have broken into his Alaska office, murdered him, and
then stolen the cash from his briefcase and ransacked his office, the false scene of the crime might look as though it occurred hundreds of miles from where he’d actually died.

His vehicles left behind in Puyallup warred with that explanation. And several people recalled that Joe was at the birthday barbecue—the last time
anyone
the detectives talked to had ever seen him.

What about the new Mercedes? Renee said that Joe had bought it for her, just as he had offered her the wedding trip to Europe. He was trying to buy her, and she wasn’t having any of it.

“What did you do with the plane tickets he threw down—after you said no to his proposal?”

“I don’t believe we did anything with them.”

“You don’t recall cashing them in for money?” Wood asked.

“It’s possible. I don’t remember—it was thirty years ago.”

“But Joe didn’t pick them up. He threw them on the ground and his heart’s broken?”

“He threw them down. I believe he threw them down. He was very angry.”

Renee said the Mercedes had been taken to her aunt’s house. Joe had tried to give it to her in Alaska, and he brought it down to Washington. “I didn’t want it—I didn’t drive it. I had a new Alfa Romeo that I leased at the time.”

How long had the Mercedes been there? Perhaps Joe had driven it down before his final visit; he couldn’t drive
both the Mercedes and his yellow meat truck and camper at the same time.

Denny Wood asked Renee about the wound in Joe’s head. She didn’t know what had caused it. Was it from a bullet, a baseball bat, perhaps a knife? She apparently had forgotten what she said about the gun.

“I don’t know. It was just a head wound. I can’t recall if there was blood,” she said slowly. “It’s almost as if—like it’s in black and white.”

“But you knew he was dead at that time?”

“Yes.”

Renee Curtiss’s memory was growing more and more clouded. She was fairly sure that they had kept Joe’s body in the basement for a few days before they dissected his body and buried the pieces.

“Was he put in a freezer in the basement?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, think back. You were either working the chain saw or holding on to the limbs while they were being cut off. It’s a huge difference if somebody’s flexible and warm or whether they’re stiff as a board and cold and frozen. Was he frozen when you cut him up?”

“I don’t recall that.”

“Was there a freezer in the basement?”

“I think there was a small chest freezer.”

“Was there a freezer big enough to put a body into?”

“I don’t think so. It was small.”

Ben Benson and Denny Wood had begun interviewing Renee Curtiss at twenty minutes to five, and it was now
sixteen minutes to six. By the time they finished, their subject’s answers were mostly “I don’t recall.”

They had begun believing that she hadn’t been present when Nick Notaro called Joe Tarricone down into the basement on the pretext of fixing the washing machine, that she wasn’t there as Joe bent over, all unaware, and was shot in the head.

Now they were sure from both her answers and her failure to answer that she had been far more than a shocked witness
after the fact
of Joe’s sudden, violent death. They believed that she had been there during his murder, standing beside her mother and her brother.

They also believed that she had phoned Nick in Alaska and asked him to come down and “take care of her problem” with Joe.

And Nick—who had always vowed to protect his sisters—had done just that. He had put the blame on his dead mother at first and then admitted shooting Joe himself. But he denied that either Renee or Cassie had been there. He said Renee had been in Hawaii—but she hadn’t even mentioned Hawaii.

Well, Cassie hadn’t been in Puyallup. She had been in Anchorage, Alaska.

But Renee had been there. She was shocked when Ben Benson informed her that she was under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, which is basically a murder charge. Grim faced, the two detectives, with Renee handcuffed between them, walked out of Henry’s Bail Bonds. Her expression was stoic. The new world she had fashioned for herself had come tumbling down.

Renee was going to jail, a thought that had probably never occurred to her.

Renee Curtiss spent the night of March 24 in jail. The next day she was led into court for her arraignment. Both Renee and her brother Nick were charged with first-degree murder. Despite the fact that both of them had admitted to the details of Joe Tarricone’s murder, they each pled “not guilty.”

Judge Susan Serko set bail for Nick at $2 million and for Renee at $500,000. She stipulated that Renee could not arrange bail through Henry’s Bail Bonds because of “a conflict of interest.”

Which was, of course, obvious.

But Henry Lewis was close to all the long-standing bail bonds companies and they respected him, so something was worked out between them. Renee was released from jail and returned to the luxurious condominium where she lived with her husband.

Nick was not bailed out; actually, jail was probably a much nicer place to be than under a bridge or in a mission. At least he knew where he was going to sleep and that he would eat every day. “Three hots and a cot,” was the term veteran prisoners used. His plans to retire down South were no longer on Nick’s agenda. He looked old, stooped, and tired as he left the courtroom.

With this arraignment, the Northwest media publicized the awful details related in the courtroom and the story of a thirty-year-old unsolved crime of monstrous proportions
was at the top of television news and in bold headlines in newspapers.

Quoting Deputy Prosecutor Dawn Farina, most lead-ins began with: “Miss Curtiss, along with her brother, chopped up Mr. Tarricone’s body and buried it …”

There were undoubtedly many men who had once been involved with Renee Curtiss who heard about that and heaved a sigh of relief.

Dawn Farina
doesn’t look like a hard-hitting criminal-prosecuting attorney. She is a slender, pretty woman with long blond hair, but dumb blonde jokes never fit Dawn. She was to be Renee’s nemesis. Beyond Dawn Farina’s expertise in prosecuting homicide cases, Pierce County prosecuting attorney Mark Lindquist made an astute decision when he chose her to face Renee Curtiss in a courtroom.

Before he gained fame as the “baby doctor of America,” Dr. Benjamin Spock did some psychological studies while on duty at a military hospital. He found that attractive women who exhibit sociopathic tendencies are quite good at manipulating men. But they don’t fool other women. (The reverse is also true; sociopathic males can delude women quite easily, but their real motives are transparent to other men.)

From the moment she took on the case, Dawn could see through Renee’s ploys as clearly as if she had x-ray vision.

Dawn Farina would handle the prosecution of Renee and Nick all on her own. She would not have an assistant
prosecutor to help her, but the massive preparation ahead didn’t faze her.

Trial dates were set and set again. Delays in a major homicide trial are far from unusual. In September 2008, Dawn Farina asked for a rare “double” trial where both Nick and Renee would be tried—but there would be two juries. Renee’s jury would be excused when evidence was introduced against Nick—but not her—and vice versa. The deputy prosecutor argued that this would be the most expedient way to try two defendants for what was, essentially, the same crime. And perhaps it was, but there was also the possibility that it could be confusing.

Defense attorney Gary Clower, representing Renee, argued strongly against a dual trial.

Farina’s request was denied.

There would be
two
trials, one for Renee and one for Nick. After more delays, Nick’s trial finally began on Thursday, February 12, 2009, in Pierce County Superior Court with Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck presiding. Judge van Doorninck would oversee both trials—but separately.

By Farina’s special request, Ben Benson sat beside her at the State’s table. He knew every aspect of Joe Tarricone’s murder case by heart, and he was granted permission to sit with the prosecutor throughout both trials, even though prospective witnesses almost always are banned from the courtroom until after they testify. Dawn Farina didn’t have a coprosecutor, but she had Sergeant Benson.

Gypsy, Dean, and Rosemary Tarricone were in the courtroom observing everything. They all noted how slow Nick’s thinking was and felt he was a pawn for Renee.

Looking back, Gypsy sighed as she remembered Nick Notaro. “You could see that he was mentally disabled to some degree and he’d been manipulated by Renee. She probably paid him off all these years with money and other things. She really took advantage.”

In her final argument, Dawn Farina had ample ammunition, gleaned from Nick’s own statement. She showed jurors photographs of Joe Tarricone in life, immediately followed by pictures of his bones with the clean edges that proved a chain saw had cut through them.

“For the next twenty-nine years, Joseph Tarricone’s five grown children and two minor children would worry and wonder what happened to their father,” Farina said. “And finally, after thirty years, a family’s worst nightmare came true. Not only had their father been murdered, but his body [was] brutally dismembered limb by limb with a chain saw and then discarded in large plastic bags—like a piece of trash.”