Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (6 page)

He brought Renee Curtiss up to Alaska to work for him. Geri Hesse was in the process of getting a divorce from Renee’s father, and she soon followed, bringing her granddaughter, Diana, with her. Renee’s son, Brent, was in one of the many foster homes he would live in.

Joe called his new company Alaska Meat Provisions. It was located on International Airport Road in Anchorage. He picked up the steaks, roasts, and ground meat from a wholesaler and delivered them to customers from Anchorage to Fairbanks while Renee managed the office in Anchorage.

In essence, Joe was supporting Renee, Geri Hesse, and Diana, although he never lived with them: they rented a house on Jewel Lake. Joe put a bed for himself in an unfinished room over his office.

Geri was much closer in age to Joe than Renee was, but it was Renee who fascinated Joe. He bought her jewelry and almost anything she said she wanted, along with presents for Geri and Diana.

It wasn’t long before Joe fell completely in love with Renee. He knew she didn’t love him as much as he cared for her, and he suspected she was seeing other men.

It didn’t matter. Joe Tarricone was obsessed with Renee Curtiss. His children disapproved, his parents in New York
weren’t at all happy that he was divorced and chasing after a woman thirty years younger than he was, and all his relatives and friends worried about him.

They wondered what such a young and beautiful woman might want from him. Renee could probably have just about any man she chose, and they were afraid she was after Joe for his money. He scoffed at the idea, convinced that he would win Renee over in time.

In the meantime, he had a warm friendship with her, Geri Hesse, and little Diana. In a sense, he had another family group.

Renee had an Irish pixie look about her, thanks to her bright blue eyes, deep dimples, and her cap of dark hair. Her figure was perfect. She didn’t
look
like a femme fatale; she resembled a wholesome college girl.

Being with her made Joe feel as though he was in his twenties again. His business was doing very well. Although he missed his seven “kids,” who were scattered from New Mexico to the Northwest to Hawaii, he was in touch with them often.

His life was good in 1977.

Believing that the victim on Canyon Road was, indeed, Joe Tarricone, Ben Benson realized that his prime suspects were likely to be Geri Hesse and two of her own children—Renee Curtiss and Nick Notaro, whom Geri had adopted when he was a baby.

Benson began background checks on all of them. He found that Renee had been arrested several times for DUI
(driving under the influence). In one instance, police had found her car stopped in the middle of the 405 freeway between Renton and Mercer Island in the wee hours of the morning. She was inside, passed out from alcohol. Renee was lucky indeed that there was little traffic on the usually busy freeway at that time of the morning. She would very likely have been killed had another car run into her vehicle—and so might the driver and passengers of that car.

Geri seemed to have a clean record, but Nick had a child molestation case on his record.

“I almost fell out of my chair,” Benson recalled, “when I read that one of the complaining witnesses had mentioned that Renee’s brother, Nick, had told her about killing a man and burying him in his mother’s yard. The Tacoma Police detective who did his child molestation investigation never followed up on the ‘murder’ story.”

Joe and Renee
worked well together in his meat business in Anchorage, so well that he announced one day that he was giving her half interest in Alaska Meat Provisions. She didn’t even have to put any money into the company; he was happy to give her what he felt was her share.

Joe bought prime meat wholesale from a ranch in Colorado. He was able to sell some of it in sides and quarters. He and Renee rewrapped and packaged smaller quantities in the office, which wasn’t really legal with the permits they had—but wasn’t a major infraction either.

Geri Hesse got a job as a saleswoman at a Lamonts department store, and both women lived quite comfortably. Whether Joe asked to move in with them in the Jewel Lake house is unknown—but he never did live there, staying instead in his barren, small office quarters.

Strangely, at one point the two women invited another man to move in with them. Renee always chafed at the idea of being totally bound to one man. She met a German national named Kurt Winkler in a Greek restaurant called
Andreas in Anchorage where she worked part-time as a hostess. Kurt was an accomplished chef and appeared to have money.

Kurt was about thirty in 1976. He was much shorter than Joe Tarricone, and not nearly as handsome, but Renee was attracted to him and they dated. According to Winkler, they eventually became lovers.

Joe probably suspected that there was more than friendship between the two, but Renee said a long time later that he never confronted her about it.

Perhaps he didn’t know. Kurt soon got a job with Campo Pacific, a company that offered catering service to workers in remote locations across Alaska. The pipeline provided high-paying jobs to thousands of them, and seeing to their needs meant more jobs for those who had flocked to Alaska and the pipeline. It wasn’t that different from the Alaska gold rush a hundred years earlier.

Kurt worked eight or nine weeks up on the North Slope at a stretch, and then had two weeks off. At least he was supposed to work that rotation, but if his replacement didn’t get off the plane, Kurt had to stay until they could fill that job. Often, Kurt was gone from Anchorage for fourteen or fifteen weeks.

Joe, of course, traveled much of the time. He drove his yellow truck from Anchorage to Fairbanks and back, going up the eastern highway and returning along the western route. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for Renee to keep the two men from confronting each other. Neither of them spent much time in Anchorage.

Renee reportedly became engaged to Kurt Winkler.
Years later, Renee said she broke up with Kurt when she found out he had slept with one of her female relatives.

That may or may not have been true. One thing is certain, however: Renee Curtiss’s life was always full of drama, usually centered around her relationships with men.

Gypsy and her sister, Gina, remained convinced that Renee had something to do with their father’s disappearance. They had no idea how difficult that would be to prove.

Gypsy tried to file a missing report with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and asked for a meeting with then-sheriff Mark French.

“He wouldn’t see me,” Gypsy recalls. “I actually had to get a county commissioner to intercede—and I finally got French to talk with me. All I asked was would they just reinterview Renee Curtiss. He wouldn’t even agree to do that!”

In reality, Pierce County investigators
never
interviewed Renee, and no missing report was ever filed in their jurisdiction. Sheriff Mark French retired under a cloud that centered on his alleged interest in pornography and had nothing to do with Joe Tarricone; it was not French’s detectives’ fault that they hadn’t acted on Gypsy Tarricone’s report—they weren’t aware of it.

Gypsy was extremely frustrated. Both she and her younger sisters, Gina and Rosemary, would slip into depression every year as summer drifted into fall and their father was still missing.

“We felt that was the time when our father died,” Gypsy remembers. “And no one seemed to care enough to investigate what had happened to him. So our brother Dean came up with an idea. We all got together and made up a story that Dad had left an insurance policy where the proceeds would go to Renee Curtiss and to Dean. So Dean called her, and we taped the call. She was very interested at the thought that she might get money from an insurance policy, but she sounded baffled that my dad was still missing.

“She kept saying, ‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ as if she was surprised that my dad hadn’t shown up somewhere. But she didn’t want the insurance money enough to admit that our dad was dead.”

Eventually, of course, Gypsy and Gina had found detectives who would listen to them at the Des Moines Police Department and at the King County Sheriff’s Office. And, finally, in 2007, in Pierce County.

By the time Sergeant Ben Benson became the lead investigator on the case of the unidentified bones, Pierce County had a new sheriff, Paul Pastor, and things were very different there.

Benson wanted to talk to Renee Curtiss, but he needed to find out as much about her as he could before he confronted her.

Gypsy Tarricone had never stopped looking for her father. She even bought a book on how to find a missing person
and tried some of the techniques suggested there. If she had to do it all by herself, she was prepared to do that. Gypsy is an upbeat, attractive woman with thick black hair, and her career is an unusual choice for a female; she is a merchant mariner and is often out at sea for months at a time, stopping in exotic ports of call. Occasionally, she will be the only woman on board.

Wherever she was, Gypsy thought of her dad, determined not to give up her search for him as decades passed.

“Whenever I thought of him,” Gypsy recalls, “I always pictured Canyon Road and 104th. I recalled walking that long driveway to the house that was at the back of the lot. That would have been in 1990, a dozen years after he disappeared. I knew my dad was there somewhere. It was like a chain reaction—it all fit together. But I couldn’t prove it, and I couldn’t find him.”

And she was right. She had gone up that driveway and felt so very close to Joe. She felt his spirit, but she still didn’t know where he was.

That year Gypsy tried, in vain, to request a presumptive death certificate for her father from the medical examiner of Pierce County. One of the medical investigators wrote back to her: “We are not insensitive to your situation. However, we cannot issue a presumptive death certificate at this time. Mr. Tarricone was last seen in this county,” he wrote. “However, the only evidence that he is dead is the length of time since he has been seen. In the absence of any known event that would reasonably have taken his life or a known location for this event, we lack jurisdiction to act on your request.”

The investigator suggested that Gypsy “appeal to a court in the area where he last lived.”

Although Alaska authorities were kinder to Gypsy and her siblings, they could not offer closure either.

By 1993, Gypsy had moved from New Mexico to Hawaii. When she contacted the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle, she was told that they could not officially take on the case, but this time Gypsy had had a glimmer of hope; Jan Rhodes of the missing persons unit took her report anyway. Rhodes had a feeling.

Gypsy was out at sea when Jan Rhodes called Gypsy’s union representative and asked to have a message relayed to her—Rhodes needed to talk to her. When Gypsy called back from her ship, she told Jan that she wanted to keep her dad’s missing report in the system—whatever it took.

Gypsy wasn’t about to give up in her search for her beloved father. Although so many law enforcement agencies had refused to take a missing report because Tarricone wasn’t linked to their jurisdiction and others had marked the case “closed” or “inactive,” when Gypsy tried again in 1993 she’d finally found a kindred spirit in Jan Rhodes.

Another solid supporter was Bill Haglund—whom Gypsy dubs “a great man.”

Haglund was a chief criminal deputy in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office who was known for his refusal to give up on trying to identify John—and Jane—Does, and he, too, stepped in to argue Gypsy’s cause.

For over a decade, Bill Haglund had become a familiar image on television news shows. In the eighties and early nineties, Haglund could be seen holding one end of the
sad parade of stretchers holding one Green River victim after another.

In 1993, when Haglund listened to Jan Rhodes describe the Tarricone case, he’d encouraged her to write an incident report on the missing man. He also suggested that an incident report and Tarricone’s previous dental charts would allow them to enter Tarricone’s information into the vast database of the National Crime Information Center.

The missing report on Tarricone drew a number of hits through NCIC over the next few years. But all of them were eliminated because when the victims were found—dead or alive—there was always something that didn’t match. Their eye color was wrong; their height, weight, or age was wrong; fingerprints didn’t match; or there was some other specific detail that did not fit.

A man’s body was discovered at the bottom of a factory’s smokestack in Bellingham, Washington, which was close to the British Columbia border. Could it be Joe? Forensic pathologists said it had been there for only six to nine months and was so badly burned that identification proved impossible. They believed that the man was alive when he jumped or fell into the stack because he had removed his clothing and folded it beneath him in a hopeless attempt to fight the heat. A partially burned plane ticket was found beside him—but heat had obliterated the destination listed.

The dead man in the smokestack could not possibly be Joseph Tarricone; he had died years after Joe vanished.

Most laymen have no idea how many lost souls disappear each year, many of whom will never be found or
identified. Bill Haglund tracked every hit from the computers at NCIC that he possibly could. There were many Joseph Tarricones in America, all with different social security numbers, but none of them proved to be Gypsy’s father. In the end, none of the computer hits told Haglund where Joseph Tarricone was.

There was one hit, though, that had an interesting connection to the missing man. Dianna Darnell, of the Wasilla Police Department in Alaska, called to say that a gun Tarricone had reported as stolen on January 16, 1977, had been located! Darnell worked for the State of Alaska, but she was stationed in the Wasilla police office in the town where Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin had once served as mayor and where she still lived. Tarricone’s gun had been stolen thirty years before, a year before he disappeared.