Don't Look Behind You Read online

Owen Carlson talked with his sister Marilyn Miller shortly after she came back from Kansas, and he immediately typed up a report for Ben Benson that contained everything either or both of them remembered. Carlson’s narrative was of great help in giving the Pierce County investigators someplace to begin.

  When she learned of the bones’ discovery, Marilyn had consulted some loose notes in the file she’d kept on tenants since the house had become a rental in 1973. She found some information there about the family who leased it in 1978. Those notes triggered her brother Owen’s memory.

  “I recall now,” he wrote. “They [this family] moved in in June 1978. It was about nine months after that when the three women who said they were from some southwest state—maybe Arizona or New Mexico—came into my hardware store at Summit. Actually, there may have been two young women—sisters. And their mother was with them. They were inquiring about their father. He had formerly worked in Alaska.

  “The last time they had heard from their dad was when he lived in our family’s house at 10309 Canyon Road East,” Carlson continued. “They felt that he had met with foul play from his girlfriend or wife. They didn’t feel comfortable with that lady, and, as I told the first deputy, one daughter thought this woman was capable of murder. Those women actually walked the property to see if they could discover anything. Meeting and talking with them under such circumstances made an impression on me at the time. The daughters told me they would file a missing person report.”

  According to their conversation and Marilyn’s notes, the worried young women had come looking for their father on April 9, 1979.

  Marilyn Miller still had a copy of the rental agreement signed in June 1978. It was signed by “Mrs. A. M. Hesse,” who had given her first name as Geraldine, although she said she went by Geri. The rent would be $350 a month. At that time Geri Hesse had probably been in her middle to late forties.

  It was a stroke of luck in a very difficult case for the investigators to discover how meticulous Mrs. Miller had been about details. “Mrs. Hesse drove a 1977 Thunderbird—with an Alaskan license: AJH828,” she said. “She gave me a phone number for a man who worked for Century 21 real estate in Bellevue. I think he might have been a reference for her.”

  But all of that had been current twenty-nine years earlier. In 2007, would Ben Benson be able to trace “Mrs. Hesse” that far back?

  Marilyn Miller said that Geri Hesse’s daughters lived with her; one was a very pretty young woman, probably somewhere in her midtwenties. The other was much younger, a child about eight years old. Geri Hesse had given the impression that she also planned to live with a man named Ray Isaak, and he’d given a former address in Puyallup. In 1978, there had also been a yellow Chevrolet S-10 truck, license #8497AR, parked on the property, but which state had issued that license was lost in time.

  Still, very few law enforcement agencies are lucky enough to find witnesses with both great memories and documentation. The Carlsons offered both. Owen and his sister promised to bring the lease that Geraldine Hesse signed in 1978 to the Pierce County sheriff’s headquarters.

  Owen Carlson had even come up with the names of the young women who feared their father had met with some sort of homicidal violence. They were Gina and Jacqueline Tarricone. Jacqueline had told Carlson that she usually went by the name she’d chosen for herself: Gypsy. She had given Owen a phone number in New Mexico. Whether she still lived there was something Ben Benson would check as soon as possible.

  Carlson said that when his son Douglas, who was now forty-three, heard about the discovery of body parts on the family land, he remembered visiting the Hesse family when he was a teenager.

  “He, my wife, and my sister Marilyn went over to their house,” Carlson said, “and Douglas remembers that he noticed Mrs. Hesse had a number of new ‘scars’ on her face. As kids will, he asked about it, and ‘Mr. Isaak’ told him that Geraldine had recently had a face-lift so she could look ‘thirteen or fourteen years younger.’ I think Mr. Isaak was about that much younger than Geraldine Hesse.”

  Ben Benson asked them if they had heard from Geraldine Hesse’s family since they moved out. Christmas cards? Letters? Any phone calls?

  They had not. “When Mrs. Hesse moved out, she left no forwarding address,” Carlson said. “She also left with rent due, and an empty oil tank—which was supposed to be left half-full. It’s right here in her lease.”

  Geri, her husband or lover, and her two daughters sounded like a strange family. Not quite fly-by-nights, but close to that. Geri Hesse had probably been near fifty in the latter part of the seventies, old enough to have one grown daughter and another around nine. She had apparently been living with a younger man; perhaps she had had a face-lift so he wouldn’t notice their age difference so much. Her older daughter was said to be “a knockout”—or she had been at that time.

  One thought kept nagging at Ben Benson. Where was “Mr. Isaak?” Had he moved away with Geraldine and her daughters—or had he remained on the Canyon Road property until the earth gave up what was left of him?

  And who was Isaak? Benson figured that he might have been the man who told Owen Carlson’s son Douglas about why Geri had so many scars on her face. That, in itself, was fairly mean and must have embarrassed Geri. The younger man could have simply told the kid that that was a personal question and none of his business. But then, kids do ask awkward questions and the answer had certainly shut him up.

  There were so many blank spaces in the backstory of this case. At this point, Ben Benson didn’t realize that he was going to have to trace two extremely complicated family trees.

  Chapter Three

  There is nothing more important to a murder investigation than knowing just who the victim is. Aside from serial killings, sexually motivated crimes, and those that take place during robberies, most homicides are committed by someone close to the victim(s), often someone they know and even trust. Benson had virtually no solid clues to who the long-dead man might be, nothing beyond the possibility that his surname could have been Tarricone.

  He hoped that the media’s coverage might bring someone forward who knew something—anything—about the person whose bare bones offered no secrets about his identity. Truckloads of soil from the property had been run through a screen at the company where Travis Haney worked, without any personal property popping up.

  Sergeant Benson gave his permission to release that soil; they had gleaned all they could from the lot on Canyon Road.

  But as Benson watched the news flashes about the case, someone else did, too.

  Jan Rhodes, who worked as an administrative staff assistant in the Major Crimes Unit of the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle, watched the report on the grisly find in the Summit area of Puyallup and her heart began to race. She handled missing persons reports in King County and saw instantly that there were similarities to one of her cases.

  There was really no reason that Jan Rhodes should know about a missing report on a man who almost certainly had disappeared in Pierce County—and not King County. And yet it had ended up on her desk. In fact, she had found it so compelling that she had kept the missing man’s photograph on her desk. She was determined to find him—alive or dead. When she saw the news flash about body parts discovered in June 2007, it struck a chord with Rhodes.

  “Oh my God,” she said to herself as she frantically tried to scrape her cat off its sleeping place on her telephone book. She immediately contacted Pierce County and was directed from one department to another until finally she was told that a Sergeant Benson was the lead detective.

  “We have a missing persons case,” she said in an email to Ben Benson. “The man went missing about August 1978.”

  “Missing from where?” Benson asked when he called Rhodes.

  “10309 Canyon Road in Puyallup. There may be an ‘East’ on the end of that address. For some reason, your department didn’t take the missing report—so we took it. He’s apparently been missing since 1978, but we didn’t take the r
eport until 1993.”

  Jan Rhodes told Ben Benson that she had been in touch with the man’s daughter, who had stubbornly refused to give up looking for him.

  “What’s her name?” Benson asked.

  “Gypsy,” Rhodes said. “Gypsy Tarricone. Her father’s name is Joseph Tarricone.”

  “Bingo!” Benson thought.

  So the elusive Gypsy had been found. Benson hoped that she might have enough information to help him prove that the bones were those of her father.

  “We have dentals on our missing man,” Jan Rhodes said, “but I don’t know if you found a skull?”

  Benson told her that, regrettably, they had found only a few parts of the skull: the lower occiput (back), a piece of chinbone, but no upper or lower jaw.

  And no teeth.

  Even if the King County Sheriff’s Office had dental charts of the father of the woman called Gypsy, they would do no good in identifying him unless the Pierce County investigators searching the property should find more portions of skull and/or jawbones. And that search had been called off due to lack of success after the first bone discoveries.

  Sergeant Ben Benson was about to follow a dizzying trail that would lead him from the baking heat of the Southwest to the frigid temperatures in Alaska and on to the East Coast. And he would realize once again what strangers neighbors can be. It was no longer the way it was earlier in the century, when neighbors often knew almost everything about families who lived on their block. The extended Carlson family was the exception. But even they knew only bits and pieces of the lives of the tenants in their old yellow house.

  “Jan Rhodes deserves so much credit for the effort she put into a missing case that wasn’t even in her department’s jurisdiction,” Benson recalls. “She went back to old records and found the original missing report that Gina Tarricone, Gypsy’s younger sister, had filed in January 1979!”

  The report had not been filed with Pierce County, and Benson wondered why. It had been filed in the small town of Des Moines, Washington, which is in the southwest part of King County.

  Odd.

  The complainant’s name was Gina Tarricone.

  Benson set out to locate the elusive Tarricone sisters. The Des Moines police department still had the missing report Gina filed, and it was full of information.

  Apparently Gina had gone to the Des Moines police department as she tried desperately to locate her father. She had given all the facts she knew to Detective Jerry Burger.

  Benson found that the entire Tarricone family had been distraught over Joe’s disappearance, but Gina was the official complainant. She was living with her brother Aldo at the time and she didn’t have a car—so she went to the closest police station, even though she believed that her dad had gone missing in Puyallup.

  If it was Joe who was missing, who then was the man known as Isaak? Benson checked missing persons complaints in Pierce County and Tacoma for 1979. He found nothing that seemed to fit. Next, he asked law enforcement agencies in counties north and south of Pierce County.

  With Jan Rhodes’s help, Benson learned that Gypsy and Gina’s missing father was Joseph Anthony Tarricone, who would have been fifty-three in 1978. There was only a blurred photo of him available in the old file, but his daughter had given his description: six feet one inch, two hundred–plus pounds, brown eyes and graying black hair, partially balding.

  In 1979, Gypsy and Gina had said that their mother—Joseph’s ex-wife Rose—lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as did most of their five siblings. On that day in January, twenty-eight years before, Joseph Tarricone had been missing for about four months. He had failed to contact his elderly parents, his ex-wife, or any of his children.

  Benson’s eyes widened as he read further; apparently the last time anyone saw Tarricone, he had been visiting a girlfriend who lived near Puyallup, Washington.

  The girlfriend’s name was Renee, and her phone number was on the report, although it was hardly likely she still had the same number after so long. Chances were that she had married in the years between 1978 and 2007 and probably had another last name now.

  Fortunately, Des Moines detective Jerry Burger had added many details to the missing report. Gina Tarricone had told him that her father owned a business in Anchorage. She said she and Gypsy had called his girlfriend several times over the years, but Renee had always said she was as mystified as anyone about where Joe might have gone. She did say, however, that she and her mother—Geraldine Hesse—had moved to a town north of Anchorage in the seventies.

  That answered one important question. Geri Hesse had been the renter of the Carlsons’ house. Maybe it was her older daughter—Renee—who had dated Joe. By Benson’s figuring, that young woman would probably be in her fifties now, if she was still alive. But three decades was a long time. The Pierce County detective checked death records and found that Geri Hesse, the mother, had died in 2000.

  No one seemed to know where her daughters were in the summer of 2007.

  PART TWO

  JOE TARRICONE

  Chapter Four

  Joseph Anthony Tarricone had come a long distance from the place he was born to meet his killer. His parents lived in New York—in Brooklyn—and they always would. But not Joe; he had itchy feet and the personality of a natural-born entrepreneur.

  Joe was the Tarricones’ oldest child and only son, and his Italian parents were thrilled with their dark handsome baby son when he was born in 1925. Two sisters joined the Tarricone family in the following years, but Joey was always the star, the innovator, whose expansive personality drew people to him all his life.

  Most Italian sons adore their mothers, and Joe was no exception. Wherever he might travel, he would always keep in touch with her. Her name was Clara, and Joe never failed to remember her with gifts on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. He called home to New York frequently. Among the things that Joe and his wife, Rose, argued about were the huge phone bills that came in. He explained that he wasn’t going to put a time limit on his conversations with his folks.

  As Joe and his sisters were growing up, the Tarricone household was full of music, noise, hilarity, and the redolent smell of ravioli, spaghetti, pasta fagioli, sausages and peppers, and pizza; Joe learned to cook from Clara, and it was to become one of his favorite pastimes as an adult.

  All the Tarricones were devout Catholics. Going to mass wasn’t a choice; it was taken for granted that they would attend on Sundays and holy days. Faith in God was another thing Joe learned in his childhood home and it stayed with him.

  Joe met Rose in the early forties when they were both in their teens. They were soon dating exclusively and they made an extremely attractive couple. He was unabashedly handsome, with thick wavy dark hair, and dark-eyed Rose was very pretty. Her hairdo then was a faithful copy of the upswept, side-parted pompadour with the back tucked under into a pageboy that actresses Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth wore during the Second World War years. Photos of Joe and Rose in their youth remain in family archives: some photos obviously taken in photo booths, which offered four pictures for a dollar; others from school proms. There were shots of them together at Coney Island. Even sixty-five years later, their engagement photo is especially endearing.

  Rose and Joe seem frozen in time, grinning as he hugs her and they look forward to their future together.

  But they were opposites. Rose wasn’t Catholic, which could have been a huge obstacle for them, but they dealt with that. Rose was quiet and a little shy. When Joe took her home to meet his family for the first time, she was shocked by the life force that ran through the elder Tarricones’ house. There were five Tarricones and they held nothing back. Rose was startled by the arguments that ended in hugs, and the clatter of unchecked emotions, shouting, and loud music.

  “But, you know,” their daughter Gypsy recalls, “my mother told me later that she enjoyed going to her in-laws’ house because she found it ‘exciting.’ She said it was probably because they were ‘so nuts!’ Even though M
om was a little overwhelmed at first, she loved her sisters-in-law a lot. If she had had her choice, she and my dad would never have moved away from New York.

  “My dad was outgoing and loud. They were so different, but they loved each other.”

  Joe had all kinds of jobs, spaced between three active-duty assignments in the armed services. He served in World War II in the army. Later, he was in the air force, and he was called up from his reserve status after that. He was a natural salesman, a studied pitchman, and it was difficult to keep up with his various careers—sometimes door-to-door, occasionally from the back of a truck, sometimes behind a desk.

  Joe Tarricone also had a wanderlust that surfaced often. Where Rose longed to live in one house in one place and to have her garden and her precious furniture around her, Joe often came home in an ebullient mood and called out, “Rose, pack up! We’re moving! We’re going to Florida!”

  Or New Mexico, or Texas, or the Pacific Northwest.

  During many of the early years of their marriage, Rose was pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Claire, the oldest, was born in 1947. Then came Aldo in November 1950, Joey two years later, and Gypsy in 1957. Gina came along in 1960, Rosemary in 1963, and Dean, the baby, in 1966.

  Coping with seven children and a peripatetic husband who always saw rainbows over the next horizon wasn’t easy for Rose.

  “She left so much furniture behind,” Gypsy remembers. “Sometimes she would cry over it, but she went where my dad wanted to go for so many years.”

  Joe Tarricone was thrilled with the birth of all of his children, and he was a loving and caring father, however bombastic his personality. He cherished each baby and took the time to walk the floor with them, tussle with them, hug them, and let them know that each was special.

  He became the Pied Piper for kids on the blocks where he lived. He liked nothing better than to gather up his children and a lot of the neighbor kids every Sunday. He’d take them all to a movie, a ball game, or the zoo. He often took a bunch of them to Disneyland, enjoying it as much as the children did.