Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (8 page)

“She said she found the place a mess—as if someone had trashed it. She thought there had possibly been a fight there.”

Ben Benson was learning more about Renee Curtiss. He knew now that she had a sister, Cassie, and a brother, Nick, as well as aunts, uncles, and more cousins. The two cousins Ben talked to had spoken of her as a generous woman who went out of her way to help them when they were down on their luck.

On the other hand, the Tarricone family believed that she was a devil woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted—even murder.

Benson looked for more of Renee’s relatives. Although Dean and Ron Isaak had spoken positively about Renee, their sister, Victoria, was more judgmental.

When Benson spoke to Victoria McMillan, she was aware that some human remains had been found on the property where her aunt Geri and cousin Renee had once lived. Victoria didn’t know who the bones might belong to.

Victoria said she had thought Renee Curtiss was “shady” during a time when she was younger. “In fact,” she said, “I thought she worked as a prostitute. Geri may have been, too, or she might have just introduced Renee to ‘dates.’

“They always spent more than they earned; Renee was
always flying here and flying there with men, and she got really neat presents from them,” Victoria said. “One time, Renee told me, ‘If you’re gonna give it up, you might as well get paid for it.’”

Benson knew that of the many places Renee listed on her job résumé, one suggested that she
might
be selling sex. She had been employed by Elite Models in Seattle.

Her cousin confirmed that Renee Curtiss had not one but two children, neither of whom she had raised herself. “Aunt Geri raised Diana, and Renee’s son, Brent—I don’t know
who
raised him. He was mostly in foster homes. I don’t know who his father was, but Renee’s son, Brent, was always in trouble. And I don’t think he ever actually lived with her.”

So Renee had been helpful to her male cousins but apparently hadn’t taken responsibility for her own children. Ben Benson found her life story more tangled with everyone he interviewed.

By this time, Benson had already done an initial check on Nick Notaro, Renee’s adopted brother, and noted that Nick had a criminal record, one for a sexual crime involving a juvenile girl.

Victoria asked Benson if it was Nick’s wife they had found on the property on Canyon Road.

“No,” Benson said slowly, puzzled. He hadn’t heard anything about Nick’s wife.

“Nick went to prison for killing his wife,” Victoria continued. “But they never found her body.”

“Is that right?” Benson said, letting that information sink in.

“Oh, then it must have been Renee’s boyfriend—the one who disappeared,” Victoria said calmly. “I guess he never showed up either.”

“I was beginning to think this was a very strange family,” Benson said later.

Ben Benson contacted Dr. John Stewart at the FBI’s DNA laboratory and asked if he could send the bones that almost certainly belonged to Joe Tarricone to the lab to be tested. They had been kept sacrosanct in the chain of evidence system since they were found.

“Yes,” Stewart said. “Send them by Federal Express to the Evidence Control Unit at our laboratory here in Quantico.”

Dr. Stewart also asked Benson to send DNA samples from Joe Tarricone’s close relatives. Benson sent portions of the still officially unknown victim’s left humerus and left ilium, and he included DNA exemplars from Joe’s sister, Mimi Kraft, and from his son Dean.

Even without a complete skull, there was a good chance the FBI lab could tentatively identify the bones as belonging to Joe Tarricone.

It would take a long wait to receive an answer, however. The FBI is overwhelmed with requests for DNA matches. This was a homicide case thirty years old and didn’t demand the immediate attention that recent cases did. Indeed, it would be March 2008 when the FBI lab reported that they were unsuccessful in identifying the exemplars Benson had sent in using nuclear tests. But they
did
have better results with mitochondrial DNA comparison between Joe’s relatives and the unidentified bones. This wasn’t as conclusive as nuclear DNA. Still, it meant that only one person in hundreds would have the same characteristics in the mitochondrial DNA matches.

Benson and Dr. Kathy Taylor sent in another bone to be tested shortly thereafter, and this time the odds were much higher that Joe Tarricone was the victim.

Ben Benson continued to search for evidence and/or witnesses, checking out the backgrounds of all “persons of interest” in Tarricone’s homicide. He still worked alone from the summer of 2007 until the early months of 2008. Denny Wood had been called up as a reserve officer and was on a foreign assignment.

Ben actually talked to Renee Curtiss in late summer. He had found that she was working—or had been working—for Henry’s Bail Bonds near Pioneer Square in Seattle. He went there and talked to a black man, who introduced himself as Henry Lewis. Ben asked if he knew of a Renee Curtiss.

“She’s right here,” the bail bonds company owner said, and Benson found himself looking at Renee Curtiss in person for the first time. She was an attractive, well-groomed woman in her fifties who now had some hard edges. She smiled as she invited him to sit down at her desk.

Benson chose not to let on that he was a detective from Pierce County who was investigating the disappearance of Joe Tarricone, and Renee quickly assumed he’d come to inquire about bailing someone out. He acquiesced—inventing his “mythical sister’s son.”

“I told her I wanted to know the cost of bailing someone out and how the process would work,” Benson remembers. “She told me everything. She knew the justice system backward and forward and explained to me what would happen. She asked what he’d been arrested for, and I said, ‘Burglary—but it’s kind of a hokey deal.’”

Benson was impressed that Renee really knew her stuff. She was clearly an intelligent woman. Benson left, without ever revealing who he was.

As it turned out, he wouldn’t talk to Renee again for months.

Working solo made him only more determined to find vital information that had scattered like a broken string of beads over the prior three decades.

Geri Hesse’s three
children were separated by distance and circumstance over the thirty years since Joe Tarricone disappeared. Her older daughter, Cassie, lived a relatively stable life in Anchorage in a very nice home there. After Cassie’s brother—Nick—confessed to the murder of his wife, she visited him in prison in Colorado only once, and that was when she accompanied her mother, Geri, and sister, Renee.

Even armed with the many addresses where Renee Curtiss and Geri Hesse had lived since they left their Canyon Road rental in 1979, it was impossible for investigators to trace just what jobs they’d held. They were both intelligent and streetwise women. Renee had worked as a model and an escort a few times, and she made a good impression as she entered parties and dinners and, sometimes, grand hotels on the arms of her clients. She was also a competent office worker. Geri had a variety of jobs—as a salesclerk and in the medical field as a nursing assistant—although she probably slowed down as the years passed and she grew older.

Renee and Geri had expensive tastes; they preferred upscale clothes and jewelry, and cars that people of wealth drove. Renee, of course, hadn’t been able to keep the new Mercedes that she said was a gift from Joe Tarricone way back in 1978; the loan company picked it up from where she had hidden it at her aunt’s home. Still, she had usually managed to drive a luxury car. It’s quite possible that she wasn’t looking for love when she chose to date men. A lot of them were considerably older than she was, and on a scale of physical attractiveness, could not possibly equal hers.

When the two women returned to the Northwest from California, and after Geri died, Renee soon met a retired Exxon executive, reputed to be a billionaire, who lived in one of Seattle’s posher suburbs—Mercer Island.

Luther Wallach* was certainly attracted to her, and she soon moved into his palatial waterfront estate, living with him for quite some time. She encouraged him to throw lavish parties and to travel. She hoped to marry him but, at his age, he didn’t want to become legally entangled with her. He may even have sensed that her affection for him had dollar signs connected to it.

When the shocking news broke about Renee and her purported connections to Joe Tarricone, Gypsy Tarricone received a phone call from a KIRO reporter, Deborah Horne. The Seattle-based CBS reporter was passing on the name of a man who was trying to contact Gypsy.

“I called him,” Gypsy remembers. “His name was Richard and he lived on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle. He told me he just couldn’t believe the things he was hearing about Renee.”

Richard explained that he had been the driver for Luther Wallach during the time she lived with her billionaire paramour.

When Richard knew Renee, she was beautiful, a glamorous hostess at their parties, and everything was “perfect.” She chose gourmet food, the finest wines. In Richard’s eyes—then—Renee was the epitome of class, seemingly born to the upper stratosphere of society in Seattle.

Richard thought that the old man might have married her in time, but the chauffeur saw that she kept pushing too hard and his boss wasn’t about to be forced to the altar. Perhaps thinking that he would change his mind if he thought he couldn’t have her, Renee packed her things and left Wallach.

Her tactics didn’t work. Shortly after she walked out of his life, Wallach married a young woman whom Richard categorized as “trailer trash.” The new bride had a small child. Ironically, when the Exxon billionaire died a little more than a month after their marriage, he left everything to the woman who had quickly replaced Renee.

Renee Curtiss was smart and manipulative—but she had one flaw when it came to ending up with wealth: bad timing.

Renee wasn’t alone for long. Next, she dated another very wealthy man—Charlie Gunderson.* He wasn’t a billionaire, but he had an executive position in a huge chain of auto parts stores. He was, as was her pattern in the men
she chose, quite a bit older than Renee. Once again, she lived a lush life. But once again, it became obvious that her goal was marriage. Charlie, who had ties to Anchorage, Alaska, wanted only a lovely companion—not a wife with expensive tastes.

Renee hadn’t learned from her previous relationships. Charlie Gunderson, too, balked. And Renee walked out, just as broke as she was when she’d met him.

For Renee, the third time was almost the charm. She soon met Henry Lewis, who owned one of the top bail bonds businesses in Seattle and was a beloved local fixture. How she met him—or any of the men in her life—remains clouded. It’s quite likely that she may have gone to Henry’s place of business after one of her DUI arrests.

Renee was growing older; she was nearing fifty and the men she chose to seduce weren’t that much older than she was anymore. Henry “Fireball” Lewis was eleven years older than Renee and beloved in the black community, and he was a great friend to many big names in the Seattle music world, especially Jimi Hendrix, one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

Henry had been a baseball star in his younger years, and he’d owned Henry’s Bail Bonds for almost two decades. He had several children who adored him and scores of grateful clients. His bail bond business was one of five or six in Seattle that people who found themselves under arrest or in jail turned to.

When
Seattle Times
reporter Natalie Singer interviewed Henry in May 2006, she wrote, “It’s too bad you have to get arrested to see the office of Henry ‘Fireball’ Lewis.
Tucked inside a historic Pioneer Square building, Henry’s Bail Bonds doubles as a Jimi Hendrix shrine of sorts … [Henry Lewis] reigns over the collection of framed Hendrix posters and T-shirts, just a sampling of the memorabilia he hopes to turn into a museum one day.”

Some people even called Henry “the Jimi Man.”

Jimi Hendrix was, according to experts, one of two of Seattle’s massively talented guitar players, singers, and songwriters, both of whom died prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, both under suspicious circumstances where drug use and the possibility of foul play were considered. Kurt Cobain, the front man for Nirvana—one of the first grunge rock groups to fascinate a new age in music—was the other. They both grew up in Washington State and lived, as adult superstars, close to Lake Washington in the Seattle area.

Kurt died on April 5, 1994, by his own hand, according to Seattle police detectives, as he held a rifle to his head. His fans still dispute the official decision to rule that suicide was his manner of death.

Jimi Hendrix, widely considered to be the greatest electric guitarist in musical history, died in London on September 18, 1970. It would take pages to list the honors bestowed upon him by the music world.

Henry Lewis was born in 1942, the same year as Jimi Hendrix, and he was a longtime friend of Leon Hendrix, Jimi’s brother, and the entire Hendrix family. Henry was part owner of the small red house in Renton, Washington, where Jimi lived in his teenage years and where he played his “broom guitar” before he could afford a real one. It had
long been Henry’s mission to keep Jimi’s legacy alive, to see that that modest house was preserved and that suitable memorials existed in Jimi’s honor in Seattle. The inside of his office was papered with homages to Jimi Hendrix.

When the city was prepared to tear down Hendrix’s former home, Henry Lewis told the media, “I won’t let that happen. To save it, I’ll carry it on my back if I have to.”

Lewis’s world seemed a million miles away from Renee’s.

Renee’s life was a series of vignettes as she moved from place to place, man to man, and through lifestyles that were diametrically opposed. Henry Lewis hired her—she was always a good study and quick to learn new businesses—and he fell in love with her, much to his children’s dismay.

Henry suffered from a bad heart, but that didn’t deter Renee; they were married in 2006.