Don't Look Behind You Page 4

  Joe cooked huge spaghetti feeds on Sundays and invited all the neighbors. Joe, Rose, and their youngsters probably lived longer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, than any other place. They became friends with the Bob Silva family who lived across the street. The Silvas had children just about the same age as the Tarricone offspring and it was a happy time for all of them.

  “My dad figured out a way to make enough pizza for most of our neighborhood,” Gypsy recalls. “He got these boards and covered them with clean linoleum so that he and the men on our street could roll out pizza dough in four-foot-by-four-foot sheets.

  “He also made something he called ‘Coo-Coo Fritz’; it was dough filled with mozzarella, Parmesan, and all different kinds of cheese. And then he would deep-fry it.”

  Joe Tarricone could energize any group and a lot of people loved him. Rose remained quieter and more thoughtful. As her children grew older, she wanted to get a job. Joe pictured a marriage much like his parents’ union: he wanted to be the breadwinner and have Rose stay home. But Rose had had a taste of forced independence during the months when her husband was away in the service and she was alone with their children.

  “She got a job in Old Town in Albuquerque,” Gypsy says. “It was in a specialty candy store and she was really good at rolling chocolates—so good that she was offered a management job there. But the woman who had that job was older, and an alcoholic. Mom said she just couldn’t accept if it meant that woman lost her job.”

  Joe made good money most of the time. He worked mostly in sales, selling everything from the Famous Schools job training courses to gas to meat. While he and the family lived in Seattle, he owned the Shamrock gas station under the viaduct in south Seattle. He had a huge billboard with his picture on it, and it said, HI! MY NAME IS JOE! That became a familiar sight to drivers.

  When he sold memberships to Famous Schools, he outsold most of his peers. One year, he was given a valuable painting as first prize in a sales competition. Joe could sell anything, and his customers were always glad when he came by.

  “When we were in Washington State,” Gypsy recalls, “we lived in Lower Preston, a very small town east of Seattle, and our house had a Coleman stove. Sundays were still special days for us. Mom got us all up and dressed, and Dad dragged us to church at Our Lady of Sorrows in Snoqualmie. Mom started the spaghetti sauce the night before, and she stayed home getting Sunday dinner ready. We all went out for hot chocolate after church, and then we went to K-Mart. My dad loved chasing the Blue Light Specials there.

  “When we got home, we ate spaghetti and meatballs. I came to dread Sundays because I was the one who had to wash all those greasy dishes!”

  There was no question that Joe Tarricone forged deep bonds with all seven of his children. He and Rose had been married three decades, and they were living back in New Mexico when Joe came home and once again shouted, “Pack up, Rose! We’re moving to Texas!”

  For the first time, Rose said, “No, Joe—I’m not leaving my house. I’m tired of moving for thirty years. No more.”

  He didn’t believe her, and his response was flip: “Then I’ll divorce you.”

  “Fine.”

  “My dad was blowing smoke,” Gypsy says. “But my mother meant it. She didn’t want to move again.”

  Joe hadn’t really expected to be divorced, thinking at first that Rose would change her mind about moving to Texas. And, of course, she didn’t.

  Their affection for each other didn’t diminish, but Joe was still the eagle, flying free, looking for a fortune in the next town or the next state.

  And Rose loved her garden and especially enjoyed knowing that she would be there when the perennials she planted returned each spring. She gloried in the permanence of being in her own house with her treasured furniture, curtains, and knickknacks around her.

  Gina was sixteen, Rosemary was thirteen, and Dean was ten when their parents broke up. Claire, Aldo, Joey, and Gypsy were out and on their own. Joe promised to support his youngest children and he kept that promise; he would never miss sending a check to Rose for their school clothes and monthly expenses.

  Not until the fall of 1978.

  School was starting in Albuquerque, and Rose looked for the extra check Joe always sent to buy Gina, Rosemary, and Dean new clothes for school and money for books and supplies. Day after day she checked her mailbox, but the check never came. Nor did the monthly child support that had arrived in the first week of every month. There was no check in October, or ever again.

  Rose and Joe were divorced by then, but she counted on him. That just wasn’t like Joe. He had always been a good provider. Rose had gone to a legal aid office when she and Joe split up, and they helped her get the divorce. She also got her GED certificate, a high school degree, after all that time. Rose was only fifty and she still had three children at home. Although Joe’s contributions helped out, she knew she would have to get a job, something she was actually looking forward to. After he vanished, she had no choice but to provide financially for the children.

  Rose applied for a job with See’s Candies and soon became a manager. She had no animosity toward Joe; it was just that their goals in life had grown so far apart. He kept his promise to come home at least twice a year to see their children and they had talked comfortably when he did.

  A few years after her divorce, Rose Tarricone began seeing an aeronautical engineer and they eventually married. He saw how hard she had worked over the years, and he also worried about her chronic migraine headaches. Her new husband wanted her to relax, and she finally agreed to retire from her candy factory job.

  No longer a married man, Joe Tarricone had been ripe for a midlife crisis when he received his divorce papers. In his midfifties, he was still a good-looking man, although his dark, wavy hairline had crept backward several inches. He embraced the style of men’s fashions in the late seventies. Up until then he’d mostly worn work clothes or armed service uniforms. Now he chose brightly colored leisure suits, polyester bell-bottom trousers, wide neckties, or muslin shirts with embroidery. Heavy gold chains were de rigueur for hairy-chested men like Joe, and he soon bought a few.

  He had married so young, he was suddenly single after thirty years, and it somehow felt wrong for a man who had always been part of a Catholic family. There was an emptiness that Joe wasn’t prepared for, even though he was regularly in touch with his seven children and ex-wife. He wasn’t broken-hearted, but he was lonely, and he was ready to date.

  He was attracted to women a generation—or more—younger than he was. That wasn’t unusual; many men in the grip of a midlife crisis seek to recover their youth by dating women young enough to be their daughters. Joe Tarricone was certainly one of them.

  He was living in Seattle at the time of his divorce, working for Gerard’s Meats. After dating many young women once or twice, Joe ended his frenzied dating and settled down to seeing just two women. They were both pretty and easy to get along with, and he wasn’t sure which of them was right for him. He was honest with them and made no promises.

  One was named Kim. She was the one Joe chose to accompany him to Gypsy’s wedding in July 1977. He had flown the younger kids in from New Mexico, and he picked them up in California and drove them to the wedding in Lake Tahoe. His children liked Kim, and they all had a good time during the festivities. Naturally, Joe cooked for the reception and put together huge antipasto platters with cheeses, meats, peppers, olives, and tomatoes.

  The other woman was Renee Curtiss. Joe first met Renee when he worked at Gerard’s, and he had been very attracted to her, even though she was in her early twenties, thirty years his junior. She was the secretary at Gerard’s Meats, efficient, very pretty, and fun to be around. The one thing that bothered Joe about Renee was that she wasn’t taking care of her own daughter, Diana,* and was even rumored to have another child who lived someplace else—a son, Brent.*

  The Carlsons had been mistaken about the relationships in Geri Hesse’s family.

  Diana,
an eight-year-old in 1977, wasn’t Geri’s daughter, after all; she was Renee’s daughter. Geri was her grandmother, but she might have told people that Diana was hers—in order to protect Renee’s reputation. Renee would have been very young when she gave birth to two babies, probably in her midteens.

  Joe hadn’t found her to be a very attentive mother to either of her children. He disapproved of that. He had no idea who had fathered Diana and Brent; Renee didn’t talk about it.

  Joe had always put his own children first—and he vacillated over which of his young girlfriends to choose.

  “On the drive back from my wedding,” Gypsy remembers, “my brother Dean said Dad asked the kids which of his girlfriends they liked best, Kim or Renee? They told him they couldn’t make that decision for him, although I guess all of us secretly wished he would choose someone closer to his own age.”

  In the end, Joe chose Renee. Unfortunately, in choosing Renee, Joe also got her mother, Geri. They came as a matched pair.

  In 1977, he decided to move to Alaska. The pipeline construction was under way, and he could see tremendous potential there if he started his own door-to-door meat business. He’d learned the ins and outs of selling meat in big lots while he worked at Gerard’s in Seattle and was confident about striking out on his own.

  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.”

  Chapter Five

  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 in
terviewed 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.