Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (7 page)

In 1993, when the missing report on Joe Tarricone was entered into NCIC computers, the system connected thousands of police agencies, and the computer monitors notified Dianna Darnell in 1993 that the stolen gun was linked to Joe Tarricone. When the gun was located, Dianna Darnell wanted to return it to Gypsy Tarricone.

Still, the discovery of his long-lost gun came with no new information on who had killed Joe.

Jan Rhodes learned a little more about Joe’s background when she got a phone call from Gypsy. Gypsy called from her new home in Hawaii and was surprised to learn that it had been difficult to locate her. She wanted to stay in touch
in case there were ever any human remains located where Renee Curtiss and her mother had once lived.

Although it was clear that Gypsy loved her father and worried about him, there were many things she didn’t know about him, and their contact had been infrequent after he moved to Alaska with Renee.

Fifteen years after her father vanished, Gypsy no longer knew where Renee Curtiss and her mother lived; they had moved often after they vacated the old yellow house. Still, she was encouraged to hear how positive Jan Rhodes was when she said she believed that she could find Joe Tarricone.

It was on
a June day in 2007 when Gypsy landed in Hawaii after her ship had returned from China. She planned to catch the first flight she could get to Seattle.

Suddenly her phone rang and a male voice identified himself as Sergeant Ben Benson from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.

“You know that place on Canyon Road in Puyallup?” he began.

“Yes,” she said cautiously, although she felt her skin prickle.

“Well … we found remains—”

“I knew it,” Gypsy said. “I knew it! All this time. She killed my father there. Renee killed him!”

Although she was initially elated to hear that Benson was working on her father’s disappearance, she didn’t allow herself to totally trust the Pierce County homicide sergeant.

“Now,” Benson said in 2010, “I’m one of her favorite people, but when we first met I was just another detective who had failed to locate her father years ago. I had to prove to her that I would stick with the case.”

Gypsy told Ben Benson that her father had visited her in Hawaii in July 1978. It hadn’t been a very good visit as far as she was concerned; Joe Tarricone was so besotted with Renee Curtiss that she was all he talked about, and he wouldn’t listen to her warnings to take things a little slower. But Gypsy told Benson that her father had changed in the last year or so before he disappeared. She realized now that he must have been in the last months of his life during his visit to Hawaii. He had played with her children and taken the youngest out in his stroller, but he seemed different somehow.

“He was a very secretive man,” Gypsy explained. “Even with his seven children. I do know he always carried lots of cash with him; he had a briefcase full of big bills, but we never knew where the money came from.”

Gypsy said she was sometimes afraid that her father could have been into something that was illegal.

“He almost wasn’t in his right mind, you know, not at the end. He was too crazy over Renee.”

Joe had cooked for Gypsy’s family as he always did and had even gone to a local supermarket to buy prime meat to fill her freezer.

“But he wasn’t like he had been—he wasn’t like my real dad,” she remembers sadly. “He was crazy to get back to visit Renee.”

Joe had also traveled to New Mexico in July or August 1978. He visited with his younger children, Dean and Gina; his ex-wife, Rose; and his best friend, Robert Silva—whom he’d called “Bobby Boy” for years. In fact,
he stayed with the Silvas—who still lived right across the street from where Rose lived.

Benson later spoke to Silva and learned that Joe had come down to Albuquerque, carrying his big briefcase full of bills—probably a few thousand dollars. Joe and Bob Silva even went to Disneyland together for what would prove to be their final outing. For them, two grown men going to Disneyland wasn’t unusual; the men were buddies going way back and Joe Tarricone had always enjoyed Disneyland. He had a childlike enthusiasm for the wonderland there.

Joe’s ex-wife, Rose, sighed as she told Ben Benson she could not imagine how the tragedy weeks after she’d last seen him could have happened to Joe. She recalled that she had often said to Gypsy, “I can’t understand why someone like your father would
ever
get mixed up with people like that—that Renee and her mother. That wasn’t like him—”

Benson was learning that, with Joe Tarricone, all roads led back to the mystifying Renee Curtiss.

Ben Benson continued to search for what he could learn about the two women who had once lived in the old yellow house on Canyon Road. Geraldine and Renee hadn’t kept up correspondence with the people who knew them slightly in 1978, and no one in Pierce County appeared to know where they were in 2007.

He had begun with computer searches for Renee Curtiss. Her driver’s license had been renewed in Washington State on August 1, 2003, despite her many DUIs. Her date
of birth was August 1, 1953. That would make her fifty-four in 2007. Her driver’s license photo showed a brown-haired woman with a pixie haircut and blue eyes. She had a pronounced dimple on the left side of her mouth, and she smiled brightly at the camera. Unlike most driver’s license photos, this one was attractive. Benson figured if she looked this good in her midfifties, she had probably been a knockout in her midtwenties.

Over the years, Renee had used several names with the same social security number: Renee R. Curtiss, R. R. Curtiss, Renee Wallach,* and R. C. Wallach.*

After she and her mother had left Puyallup twenty-nine years ago, without paying rent or filling the oil tank, they had lived in a myriad of places. Benson traced the addresses listed. Apparently they had moved first to Tacoma—only ten miles away from Canyon Road—and then lived at five addresses in Seattle; two addresses in Sausalito, California; two addresses in Bellevue, Washington; and briefly in San Carlos, Woodside, and San Francisco, California.

And he found Renee’s current address: a condominium in Seattle.

Apparently she was still alive. At least Benson didn’t find any death certificate for her. That she might have died was one possibility he had considered.

He drove by Renee’s condominium and took surreptitious photos of it, noting that it was in a good neighborhood and definitely upscale. But he didn’t knock on the
door. First, he wanted to get as much background as possible on the mother and daughter’s travels and activities since 1978.

Florence Geraldine Bogner Hesse—Geri—had lived with Renee at every address listed. They appeared to have been very tightly bonded. But, of course, when Benson checked death records, they indicated that Geraldine had died in 2000. He sighed; there was no way to interview her now, seven years later.

He learned later that, in an eerie way, Geri Hesse was still with Renee. Her ashes rested in an urn on the fireplace mantel in Renee’s condo. Geri still accompanied her youngest daughter whenever Renee moved on.

Benson suspected that Renee and Geri might have been mother-and-daughter con artists who had used men to build their fortunes. If that was true, they must have been good at it; he found no felony criminal record for either.

During the months of June and July 2007, Benson found that Renee and Geraldine had a number of close relatives. Their extended family members lived in either Washington State or Alaska. Tracing their family tree proved to be a convoluted and difficult process, but Benson was able to make some initial connections.

He learned that Geri Hesse had a sister named Lillian. When Lillian gave birth to a boy, Ron, in July 1947, Geri had been envious. They had always been somewhat competitive; the Bogner sisters were born only fourteen months apart.

Geri, the younger sister, had no children at the time, but she heard about a baby boy who was born on July 9, 1948,
to a mother who gave him up. Geri arranged to adopt him in the fall of that year. At that time she was married—for a very short time—to a man named Notaro, and she named her infant son Nick. Benson figured that in the summer of 2007, Nick Notaro would be closing in on sixty.

Census records showed that Geri had subsequently given birth to a girl she named Cassie* on June 3, 1952. Her second biological child was Renee, who was born fourteen months later.

At some point, Geri had married again at least once; that would be where the “Hesse” name came from. Both Cassie and Renee had used Notaro as their last name until they married.

As the Notaro/Hesse family tree kept sprouting new limbs in Benson’s investigation, he drew up a chart so he could remember the entire cast of characters.

The mystery of the man named Isaak was quickly solved. He was neither Geri’s nor Renee’s boyfriend; he had been married to Renee’s aunt Lillian when Joe Tarricone vanished. At the time, her aunt had lived only a few miles from Canyon Road East.

Florence Geraldine had had numerous last names, and so had her daughters Cassie and Renee. Renee’s cousins—Ron and Dean Isaak, who were Lillian’s sons—talked to Ben Benson about their memories of the late summer of 1978. Their mother was currently living in Tacoma, and their father had passed away a few months before. That would be Ray Isaak, the man the Carlson family had met at the yellow rental house.

Renee’s cousins recalled that Renee had thrown a “big
barbecue” party in the late seventies at the Puyallup house she shared with her mother and her daughter. A number of their relatives had attended the party.

Dean confirmed that Renee had had at least
two
boyfriends at the time of the party. She had lived for a while in Alaska, working, they thought, for Joe Tarricone. The other man was also living near Anchorage, Alaska. That man’s name was Curt or Kurt. Dean recalled that he was a cook and that he’d come from Germany.

With the pipeline going in, Alaska had been the place to go for high-paying jobs if one was willing to work hard for weeks without time off. Kurt had practically lived on the job. Renee’s cousin Dean said that Renee was very helpful in recommending him to Kurt and that had helped him get a job on the North Slope.

“Renee was like that,” Dean Isaak told Ben Benson. “I mean, she’s one of these ladies that likes to help family and stuff. She knew I was down and out … so she told me to come up to Anchorage. Kurt was living at this house they rented and I talked to him. They had me fill out an application and he said he’d take me in until I got on the pipeline. I was there a couple of weeks. I went and got a job in a bar as a bouncer. I wasn’t there very long when I got called to work up there on the Slope.”

Dean described the bleak pipeline construction site far up in the northern part of Alaska. “Ketchikan and Barrow. I think Barrow’s the tip of the world.”

Ron Isaak agreed with his brother about his cousin Renee. She was a “good egg” who tried to help her family. In fact, it had been for Ron’s birthday on September 23,
1978, when Renee threw the big barbecue that Dean had described.

She wasn’t normally a party giver, but she went all out for Ron’s special day. Benson’s ears perked up when Ron Isaak said that Joe Tarricone had attended that party.

“My cousin [Renee] told me that he kept calling from Alaska and wanting to come down, so she finally says to bring a bunch of steaks and stuff ’cause we were having my birthday party. And he came down.”

“Did he bring a lot of steaks?” Benson asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Ron said, explaining that Tarricone’s business was traveling around Alaska selling meat out of his truck. “He brought a whole case of them.”

“Remember anything else at that party between you and Renee and Joe that day?”

“Being as it was my birthday and I had a bar I’d built a couple of years earlier, she wanted to help me stock it. She told Joe to go down to the liquor store and get a gallon jug of rum. He came back with just a small one, and she told him, ‘No, I want a
gallon
jug’—so he comes back with a gallon of vodka. She was handing it to me, and he got upset,” Ron said. “So she took it back and whispered to me that once he left, I could have it.”

Asked if Renee had seemed happy or annoyed when Joe showed up at her house, Ron Isaak remembered that she had seemed irritated with him despite his generosity with all the free prime steaks. “She mostly ignored Joe that night,” Ron said.

Ben Benson realized that the night of the barbecue could well have been the last night that Joe Tarricone was alive: September 23, 1978. Or had the barbecue taken place on some other night—some night that was only close to Ron Isaak’s birthday?

According to both of her cousins, Joe had done everything he could to please Renee at the birthday barbecue. He’d cooked all the steaks. There were so many that people at the party had even tossed the expensive cuts to the dogs.

But nothing Joe did had any positive effect on Renee.

Renee had bragged to her cousins that Joe had already given her a black Mercedes convertible, and she kept it—although she stored it at her aunt Lillian’s house until it was repossessed by an Alaskan finance company a few years after Joe disappeared.

Renee couldn’t seem to say anything nice about Joe Tarricone. She had even hinted to several of her relatives that she believed Joe was involved in something crooked—possibly with the Mafia. She said it was likely that Joe’s meat company was only a front for some illegal operation, and that could be dangerous.

Neither Ron nor Dean had seen Joe since the night of the birthday barbecue. They had asked Renee about him.

“She said that he disappeared and that maybe he even got thrown in the ocean or something by the mob,” Dean Isaak said. “But she really didn’t know.”

Their aunt—Geri Hesse—had seemed to be very worried about Joe when she didn’t hear from him after the
night of the party. She told relatives that she took it upon herself to check out Tarricone’s business office when she went up to Alaska to stay for a while with her oldest child—her son, Nick.