The three troopers balanced the questions expertly. Their dialogue with Nick might well be taken from a movie script—but this was real, and their quarry now realized he was in deep trouble.
In the time-honored style of interrogation, Brad Brown talked to him as a friend, and McCoy was colder as he deftly described the degrees of murder. The thought of first degree wiped all color from Nick’s face. “In the heat of passion” wasn’t so bad—only second degree. Vickie might even have died of an accidental shooting, McCoy suggested.
Even a casual observer could see Nick Notaro’s mind darting from one choice to another. At length, he sighed and told them that it had been an accident. McCoy offered to leave the interview room and let Brad Brown take a statement, but Nick shook his head.
He was ready to talk, to tell the truth.
Perhaps.
“Well,” Nick began, describing the drive back to Healy on September 22. “I bought the gun at J.C. Penney, and I wanted to do some target practicing. I went up to the side road there, from off the highway. Vickie went up to set up some cans and some beer bottles that were lying around back there. The gun was loaded and it was lying right up by the windshield of the driver’s seat. I heard somebody talking on a CB, and I laid the gun down on the hood of the car [and got back in]. I wanted to listen because it sounded like an emergency call. I wanted to see what happened. And when I sat down in the car, the gun fell off the fender—and it went off.”
“Where was your wife when it went off?”
“About ten feet in front of it.”
“Where did it hit her?”
“It hit her in the head. I got scared.”
“You drug her body down through the weeds?”
“I knew she was dead.”
“Normally, when you’re hit in the head with a thirty-eight, you’re dead. No question about it,” McCoy said drily.
“I just panicked and drug her off into the side—and I left.”
Nick said he at first meant to go to Nenana and find a trooper and tell him what had happened, but he was “really scared” that he would not be believed. So he threw Vickie’s purse out of his car window and headed toward Healy.
The second tape ended. Once more, the troopers read Nick his rights, and he said he knew he could have an attorney—but he waived his rights to one.
With a new tape rolling, the four men studied the map of the area where Vickie’s body was found, but Nick wasn’t able to remember just where he had thrown her purse away.
“Why didn’t you contact me, Nick?” Brad Brown asked.
“Like I said before, Brad, I was scared. I’m still scared.”
And he was still lying, too. Asked if his car was running when the gun slid off the fender, he said it was.
“Did you see her hit the ground?” McCoy asked.
“No—I heard it. By the time I saw her, she was on the ground. From the way she was laying [sic], she looked like she had spun around. It was a distance within five feet.”
But he had told them Vickie was ten feet away from him. And Nick had overlooked other elements that would pin him to the wall.
“Nick, you’re lying to me,” McCoy said. “Are you familiar with hand guns? I want to explain a couple of things to you. And, after I tell you this, I want you to tell me the truth. Number one, a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight will not go off when you drop it. Number two, your wife died and she had two bullets in her. Both thirty-eights. One in the head and one in the back. How do you explain that? Did the gun fall twice?”
Nick was silent. He couldn’t explain that.
“Why did you kill your wife?” McCoy asked, his voice louder.
“It was an accident.”
“Accident, my butt. The gun doesn’t go off by dropping it. And you didn’t drop the gun. It doesn’t bounce two times and hit her once in the back and once in the head. And it was about two feet away from her head. It doesn’t happen, Nick,” McCoy said firmly. “You aimed the gun at her, and you pulled the trigger. Did you get in an argument with her? Over Richard? You told me she told you that Thursday night, the twenty-first. And it angered you?”
“I don’t think it was anger as much as hurt.”
“Of losing her?”
“Right.”
“You lived with a woman for four and a half years, and you loved her. And she finds another boyfriend. And tells you, ‘Nick, my darling, I’m leaving you forever.’ That would hurt you?”
Nick nodded.
“Am I correct in saying, If I cannot have you, no one will have you? Is that what you thought?”
“Yes.”
“You went to the gravel pit. She starts running. You shoot toward her. Did you know you shot her in the back?”
“No.”
“But she fell down, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“And then you walked up to her and you shot her in the head. Is that right? You’re shaking your head yes?”
“Yes—more or less. I really didn’t mean to. I was trying to scare her. And she started running and the gun went off. I didn’t know I hit her. I just thought she went down on the ground to get out of the way. I walked up to her to lift her up, and I had the gun in my hand. And it went off. Approximately, like you said, probably within two feet …”
Once the door was open for him to confess to his wife’s murder, Nick Notaro added numerous details.
He said he had flown to Seattle within a day to stay with his mother and sister. He denied having told them anything about Vickie’s murder.
None of the investigators in Alaska ever located the man named Richard who Nick said was going to take Vickie to Rome. Nor did they find anyone who believed Vickie was cheating on Nick. When she wasn’t cleaning hotel rooms, she was busy doing laundry for pipeline workers to make enough money for herself and Nick to get by. If he really found other men’s clothing in their hotel room, it was laundry Vickie had done.
The state police detectives placed Nick under arrest. Initially charged with first-degree murder, he agreed to plead guilty to Vickie’s murder. He was subsequently convicted of his first wife’s shooting death. He began his sentence in the federal prison on McNeil Island, Washington, in June 1978. He stayed there a little more than a month and then was moved to another federal correctional facility in Englewood, Colorado, a low-security prison for male offenders with an adjacent satellite prison camp for minimum security convicts.
Nick obeyed the rules and built up “good time.” He stayed in the Colorado prison until the spring of 1983. Then he was transferred to a federal prison in Oxford, Wisconsin, where he remained until he was paroled in January 1986.
Chapter Thirteen
During the week Ben Benson spent in Alaska, he located the assistant prosecutor who had handled Nick’s case. Benson was curious why Nick had received only a short prison sentence for the cold-blooded killing of his wife.
The prosecutor said he barely remembered the Notaro case, explaining they had so many homicides to prosecute back then. “We’d make a deal with anyone willing to make a deal,” he ended lamely.
Nick had been allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter, and that meant less than eight years in prison.
As Lila May Notaro, Nick’s second wife, had told Ben Benson, Nick had lived in Marshfield, Wisconsin—working as a chef—until he moved back to Washington State in March 1989. He’d moved into an apartment with a fellow inmate with whom he’d shared time. They planned to open a janitorial service but it didn’t work out.
When Ben Benson flew to Baltimore, Maryland, to interview Nick’s former cellmate, the man talked to him willingly enough. He said he knew about Vickie Notaro’s death, but he insisted Nick had never mentioned anything about a man named Joe Tarricone, or just plain Joe, or even some guy who was bothering his sister. They had talked about a number of things during the long dark nights behind bars, but Nick had been closed-mouthed about a second homicide. Benson understood the code of prison where cons don’t “snitch” on
one another so he couldn’t be positive he was hearing the whole truth.
In October 1978, Vickie Notaro had her modicum of justice when Nick was locked behind bars. But none of the Alaska troopers had asked him about Joe Tarricone. Law enforcement officials in Alaska weren’t aware of Tarricone’s disappearance.
Puyallup was a world away. And the alarm bells about Joe rang very softly in the fall of 1978. Indeed, there was always the chance back then that Joe would show up with a good explanation about where he had been.
Ben Benson continually perused the thick Alaska State Police file on Vickie Notaro’s murder. He came to know Nick Notaro, before they ever met, as well as—or better than—close friends he’d known for years.
He had already talked to Lila May Notaro and learned of Nick’s life after prison. The Pierce County detective sergeant flew back to Seattle out of Anchorage. Now he needed to see what Nick was doing as the holiday season approached in 2007, or where he was living, or how he was living. He learned that Nick was still required to report to his probation officer once a week for failure to appear after the charges involving his stepdaughter, although records showed that his probation was soon coming to an end in June 2008.
Benson and his partner, Sergeant Denny Wood—who had returned from reserve duty—were ready to confront both Nick and his sister Renee. Renee’s life over the past thirty years was not the open book that Nick’s was.
And so they started with Nick.
The two Pierce County detectives arranged to meet Nick Notaro in his probation officer’s office on March 24. Nick was living wherever he could. His current home was at the Bread of Life Mission on Skid Row in Seattle; he had been there since early September 2007. For the price of listening to a daily sermon and doing odd jobs around the mission, he could get a free meal and a bed. Sometimes, if the weather wasn’t too bad, he lived under a bridge. And, apparently, Nick was still close to his sisters—Cassie and Renee—and would visit them often where they worked at the bail bonds company.
Seeing Nick in person was something of a shock. He had been fairly good-looking in his early booking photographs, but now Nick had aged tremendously. The skin on his face drooped; he could have been sixty or eighty. His thick white hair grew into sideburns down his cheeks and then became a brushy mustache and a beard, giving him the look of the fabled Sasquatch, the half man/half wild creature thought to ramble through Northwest forests.
When Ben Benson and Denny Wood spoke to Nick, they told him only that they were detectives who were checking on what his plans were once he was off supervision. They didn’t say they were from Pierce County and he didn’t ask why they wanted to know; he simply assumed that they were conducting a routine exit interview from his probation.
“I doubt very much that he would have talked to us if we’d said we wanted to talk to him about his dead wife and his sister’s missing boyfriend,” Benson said. “But it worked out perfectly.”
The two detectives had different interview styles. Benson appeared pleasant and nonconfrontational; it was hard to read what he was thinking. Wood asked mostly hard questions. They were a subtle version of good cop/bad cop.
Nick spoke to them readily. He said he’d lived at his sister Renee’s condominium before he moved to the mission. He said he also had another sister named Cassie.
“How often do you see them?” Denny Wood asked.
“Daily,” Nick began, “but Cassie only works three days a week. I see Renee every day. When I have a travel permit, I go to Cassie’s house in Federal Way.”
Nick said that when his probation was up in June, he planned to move to Arkansas where he had lived recently. He had good friends there who were holding a place for him to live.
For a long time Benson and Wood asked Nick questions that they already knew the answers to. He was most forthcoming as he answered—even about the time he killed his wife. He had paid the price for that, and he knew that he could not be charged again for that crime because double jeopardy would attach.
He said he no longer drank alcohol, and he proved to have a remarkable memory when it came to his family. Although he didn’t seem particularly intelligent, Nick recited their ages, where they all lived, and how he was related to them.
“Cassie and Vickie—my first wife—were working together in a nursing home in Spokane,” he said. “They were sharing a house, and that’s where I met Vickie. She lost her mother when she was ten. She became the mom because she was the oldest. She never got to be a kid, you know. The main thing my mother and Renee had against her was the way she kept house. To me, it was good—but they’re clean freaks. My mom smoked, too, like Vickie, but there was no such thing as a dirty ashtray in her house.”
Geri Hesse had never liked Vickie, and Nick felt it was because she thought no one was good enough for her son.
On the surface, they almost sounded like a typical family. If the two detectives didn’t suspect the grotesque things they had done, they might have accepted the folksy meanderings. But they did know, and it seemed almost eerie listening to Nick, who became more voluble with every sentence. Oddly, he seemed to have no regrets about the sad and premature death of his first wife, even speaking of her with affection.
Nick said that he had always been closest to his sister Renee. Cassie and his mother had friction between them, and he often had to play the middleman.
“If I prefer one of those [sisters], the reason is because Cassie is Italian,” he explained in a seeming non sequitur. “My dad and mom adopted me, but Mom left my adopted dad not knowing that she was pregnant with Cassie by her lover. Cassie didn’t learn about that until she was in high school. I believe it was my uncle who introduced her to her [real] dad—and she was the spitting image of him. He paid for DNA tests [that] proved he was her biological dad.”
“So you say Renee is the sister you’ve always been the closest to?” Benson asked.
“I’m not so sure anymore … I’m finding now that Cassie and I have a lot more in common. Cassie is definitely opinionated, and Renee is a person that is easy to take advantage of,” Nick said, adding how he treasured both his sisters. “You can do anything you want to me, call me anything you want, but don’t mess with my sisters. And like Merle Haggard said, ‘You’re walking on the fighting side of me.’”
Nick was garrulous, emphasizing that he couldn’t wait to get his life back and be a law-abiding citizen. He could afford to live in Arkansas on his disability payments—but not in Seattle. Still, he didn’t want to move away from Renee and Cassie, so he’d been applying for local jobs—principally as a flagger on highway construction projects. So far, he hadn’t been successful.
“I just wanna get this over with, and go back to my life. I just wanna be left alone—nobody mess with me and I ain’t gonna mess with them …”
It seemed abundantly clear that Nick no longer thought about what had happened to Joe Tarricone. In his mind, he was in the clear. After all, Joe had been gone for thirty years.
The Pierce County detectives’ questioning had begun to change direction so subtly that Nick didn’t sense a shift in the wind. Ben Benson and Denny Wood were asking more about his sisters than they were about his plans for the future. Ben Benson told Nick that he’d done some “research” on his past.
“I believe you’ve been truthful with us to this point,” Benson said. “I did review some of the case file from Alaska in your wife’s case—that’s all public information. The one thing that stands out in my mind in talking about Vickie is her having a boyfriend who wanted to take her to Rome.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah …” Suddenly Nick was wary.
“What was that about?”
“Okay. That was a gentleman that had a meat company and he delivered [meat], you know, to different places in Alaska.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And he was Renee’s partner—business partner.”
“What was his name?”
“Oh—Joe.”
Nick Notaro’s answers came halti
ngly now. He explained that he had seen this guy—Joe—down in Washington when he came down after he left the hospital in Fairbanks. Before that, Vickie had told him she was going to Italy with Joe.
“Where did this guy named Joe come into play?” Denny Wood asked.
“Well, he stopped in the restaurant there [in Healy] and sold some meat where I was working. He had good hamburger patties. And because he knew I was Renee’s brother, he came over to the hotel where we were staying a couple of times.”
“Talk about body language,” Benson recalled later. “Every time we mentioned Joe, Nick involuntarily backed up his chair. He was halfway across the room when I asked him, ‘Nick, where you going?’”
Nick hastened to explain that Renee and Joe had been only business partners and platonic friends. Renee had been seeing another man, a chef named Keith or perhaps Curt.
In the meantime, he sold his house on Green River Road and moved to the yellow rambler in Auburn. The 14th Avenue house wasn’t nearly as imposing as the white stucco house Bob had built near the river, but it didn’t matter; he didn’t intend to spend much time in Washington.
“He was German. He’s the one who got me a job up on the pipeline for Campo Pacific.”
“What was Joe’s last name?”
“I don’t remember. Joe was Italian.”
“Now, you did tell somebody that you saw your wife Vickie and Joe together down in Washington?” Ben Benson probed, seeing sweat bead up on Nick’s forehead.
“I believe I did. I’m not positive, but I don’t remember [if] I either saw them together or whether I saw just one of them.”
Nick Notaro was stumbling over his own tongue at this point. He recalled that he and his mother had felt Joe was much too old for Renee—closer to Geri Hesse’s age than Renee’s. He thought Geri or Renee had told him that Renee traveled with Joe only for business reasons, and they stayed in separate hotel rooms. If they went out for dinner, it was also for business. He was positive that Renee had no romantic relationship with Joe.
“Now, you killed Vickie and you told people she went to Italy with Joe. Where did Joe go? Why wouldn’t people still see Joe around?”