Geri Lynn was certain that Nick had wanted to have an affair with her, if she had shown any interest at all. She said that when he was arrested for his wife’s murder, she wasn’t the only one in Healy who had been glad to see him go. She said she hadn’t known Vickie well at all.
The Pierce County detective sergeant found someone who had known Vickie Notaro very well—her friend and fellow employee at the Healy Hotel, Cheri Mueller. Cheri was also twenty in 1978, and she had lived in Healy since 1971. She and Vickie had liked each other from the first time they’d met in the summer of 1978. Employees had a free room at the hotel as part of their pay. Nick had a small room initially because he came to Alaska first, to work on the pipeline. Then he sent for Vickie, who was down in Washington State living with his sister. Not with Renee, but with her older sister, Cassie Martell.* As they were a married couple, the hotel gave them a larger space.
“Vickie and I spent time together—like hang out after work and stuff,” Cheri said. But she shook her head when Ben Benson asked if Nick Notaro had joined them. “No, we’d just see him at the [hotel] café when we went in to eat or whatever …”
“Okay. Throughout this investigation that the Alaska state troopers conducted, there were allegations from Nick—in the statement he gave them—that Vickie was having an affair, was seeing another man. Were you aware of anything like that?”
“No.” Cheri bristled. “She would never do that.”
“Okay, on the flip side of that, how about Nick? Are you aware of his having any relationships with other women?”
“No—I don’t remember hearing anything,” Cheri said, adding that Nick had been jealous of Vickie. “He didn’t trust her. I always thought that was odd because she was just a nice, nice person, and he just seemed like one of those jealous-type husbands, for no reason.”
Cheri could not recall that Vickie Notaro had been afraid of her husband. If she was, she hadn’t mentioned it.
“Tell me what you remember about Nick,” Benson probed.
“I cleaned his room and I remember it was thick with cigarette smoke. And I remember he was big. And I thought he was kind of weird, kind of different … He had weird books in his room: books—magazines, really—about murders and how they were solved. I thought it was really weird that somebody would be obsessed with murder.”
“How many of them do you remember being in his room?”
“He had a lot—he had them stacked up next to his bed and on shelves and stuff. Sometimes there were pictures in them—like graves, and crime scene photos.”
Cheri recalled the last time she ever saw Vickie. It was the day she was going up to Fairbanks to pick up Nick at the hospital. “She asked me to go with her, but something happened. I can’t remember why anymore, why I couldn’t go, but I didn’t end up going with her.”
“What do you remember about that trip to Fairbanks?” Benson asked quietly.
“She never came back.”
Chapter Eleven
Now Ben Benson had a new question: If Nick Notaro was released from a hospital in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Thursday, September 21, after undergoing an emergency appendectomy two days earlier, and claimed to have killed Vickie somewhere along the way back to Healy the next day, could he then have flown to Seattle to murder—or help to murder—Joe Tarricone in Puyallup, Washington, sometime in the next week? With a fresh appendectomy incision, would Nick have been in any shape to murder his wife on the way home, and then board a plane for the long flight to Seattle?
That seemed unlikely—at first.
Most people would have still been dealing with postsurgical pain and in no mood for a plane trip. Benson didn’t know much about Nick. Apparently he was very close to his sisters and defended them if anyone dared threaten them or said a bad word about them. They were reportedly much sharper than Nick was, but they still doted on him. It looked as though Nick had always run to them—especially Renee—when he was in trouble.
The infant boy that Geraldine Hesse adopted in 1948 had grown into a grizzled mountain of a man. He was once the baby who was slow to develop sitting, walking, and talking skills. He had polio as a child and that might have delayed some of his physical and mental growth.
Nick Notaro was termed “slow” by most people who dealt with him in his life. He was a great fry cook, but outside of that and driving souped-up cars, he seemed to have no particular ambitions or hobbies.
Back in 1978, Geri Hesse had explained to the Alaska state troopers who were investigating Vickie’s homicide that Nick “lived within himself” and was a “dreamer” and somewhat of a loner. She nodded when asked if her son was slow.
“He is slow, like people say, but he isn’t retarded or anything like that; Nick does everything slowly and never seems to be in a hurry. He’s very quiet. He’s Scandinavian, or mostly Scandinavian. He’s not talkative. He’s very slow to anger.”
Considering that Nick was rapidly becoming the prime suspect in the murder of his wife, this hardly sounded like an apt summation of Nick Notaro.
Geri had continued painting her only son with a loving and rather strange brush. “He never dated in high school, but he ran with a bunch of boys I didn’t approve of. He wasn’t doing well in school, so I gave him a choice: either stop running with them or join the service.”
Nick had chosen the second option. Three days after he turned seventeen, he joined the army. He went AWOL soon after because he was homesick. The army meted out a relatively mild punishment, and he was sent to Vietnam.
“He was there for three tours of duty,” Geri said. “The first time he was assigned there, but he volunteered to go back two more times.”
Geri Hesse shook her head when asked about young Nick’s interest in guns. “We didn’t have any [in our home]. We never had any. My husband was no sportsman—he didn’t even like a picnic! So we had no firearms. Nick never had a BB gun. He didn’t play cops and robbers like most youngsters do. He was content with games. He’d sit and read a little in his room, so he was a dreamer. He really loves his family.”
Asked how Nick and Vickie met, his mother said Vickie had moved to the Spokane, Washington, area from a little town in Montana. Nick’s sister Cassie had taken Vickie in as she had no other place to go.
“That’s where Nick met her. As I say, she was a very good girl—but anything she learned was after she came west and lived with Cassie.”
Geri’s opinion of Vickie was somewhat ambivalent. She admitted that she hadn’t wanted her son to marry her because she was too young and had no experience in life. “He was twenty-seven and she was barely eighteen.”
But the two of them had gone to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and gotten married on November 16, 1974. The Notaro women had to accept the surprise wedding and made the best of it, although they would tsk-tsk over Vickie’s talents as a wife—or lack thereof.
According to Geri, she and Renee, Cassie, and Nick had been quite poor as the three children grew up. She gave no hint of her expensive tastes as she piously said, “Nick always had clean clothes and a neat house. We may not have had much, but we always had clean things.”
Her mother-in-law’s disapproval of Vickie’s housecleaning and cooking was evident. According to her, Vickie didn’t even know how to separate laundry, and their small trailer was a mess most of the time.
Yes, Geri had agreed, Nick had come down to Washington State right after he left the hospital, arriving on about September 23. She and her daughters had picked him up at Sea-Tac Airport. All of them felt sorry for him, she said, because Vickie had left him, just run off with another man without leaving a note. Nick had been very sad and brooded about his lost wife. As always, though, he didn’t talk much about Vickie—nothing beyond his recall of her picking him up at the hospital in Fairbanks, their night at the hotel, and then his discovery the next morning that she had left him. She hadn’t even taken her clothes with her. Nick gave one of her friends her wardrobe—including the green evening gown she’d worn when they’d gotten
married.
“He was having a lot of pain when he was down here that week—his back hurt, he couldn’t really walk, and you could tell it was from his surgery,” Geri said. “He spent most of his time lying on the davenport at Renee’s and my house.”
Nick had asked his mother to come up to Healy and take care of him. With Vickie gone, he had no one. At first she said she couldn’t—because she had Renee’s daughter, Diana, to care for and because Renee needed her.
“But Vickie was going to be gone,” Geri said, “and I thought Nick needed me more than Renee did. I thought, ‘Well, I could go there just as easily as be at Renee’s until he was over being lonely and found someone else.’”
Poor Nick. He’d told his mother he’d finally gotten all his bills paid up and he was ready to start a family—and then Vickie had abandoned him for another man. He believed that this man was older, could buy her more things, and had even promised he would take her on a luxury trip to Europe. He didn’t mention the seducer’s name, however.
It was a familiar scenario. As Sergeant Ben Benson read over the old homicide file on the death of Vickie Notaro, he wondered at the coincidence that both Renee and Vickie were having “affairs” with older men with money who offered them trips to Europe, specifically Rome, Italy.
Nick had had a number of run-ins with the law for minor offenses, and he never had been particularly clever about coming up with convincing alibis. But until September 1978, Nick Notaro had never been known for being violent.
And then he was suspected of having been extremely violent. But it wasn’t Joe Tarricone for whose death he was the prime suspect.
It was his first wife: Vickie Notaro.
Chapter Twelve
Vickie Notaro had felt very insecure in her marriage to Nick. In December 1977, she wrote a letter to a friend while she was living with Nick’s sister Cassie in Anchorage—just before she went to Healy to join her husband. They had separated over the summer months. Cassie liked Vickie and once again had taken her under her wing.
“I can’t say what’s going to happen to Nikkie [sic] and I yet,” Vickie wrote. “I doubt very much that our marriage will work out. I’d like it to, but he’d rather be by himself than with me.”
Perhaps looking for someplace to land if Nick dumped her, Vickie wrote that she had casually dated a few men when she was down in Washington, but her preference, clearly, was to save her marriage. Ambivalent, she was both in love with and afraid of Nick Notaro.
“Oh my God,” she wrote, worrying that Nick was talking about getting her pregnant, “I think I’m going to be dead. And I don’t know really about our marriage or not …”
Her words were tragically prophetic.
The news that the dead body in the gravel pit had been tentatively identified as Vickie Notaro had not yet spread when Nick Notaro faced two Alaska state troopers at 7:15 a.m. on October 21, 1978.
Nick Notaro listened to his Miranda rights, and agreed to be interviewed by Alaska troopers C. Roger McCoy, Brad Brown, and Glenn Flothe. He knew Brown, of course, and seemed comfortable with him. The troopers began with small talk and then asked Nick about his life with Vickie. He said he’d met Vickie Schneider in Spokane, where he lived at the time, and that she had recently moved west from her family home in Kalispell, Montana. They had been married for four years but had no children.
“When was the last time you saw Vickie?” McCoy asked.
“The twentieth of September—in Kalispell.”
That was a surprising answer and didn’t jibe with what Nick had told others in Healy, but none of the investigators commented on it.
“And she was all right?”
“Yes, she was.”
“Did she tell you what her plans were?”
“She left a week prior to that—and she left a note,” Nick said haltingly. “She didn’t really explain why or anything. I wanted to find out and I figured she would head for home—to Kalispell. I went there—I had just gotten out of the hospital, and I hadn’t gone back to work yet. So I went down to Seattle to see my relatives. My mom, and—”
“Where did you see her [Vickie] in Kalispell?”
“At the airport. I went over to Kalispell to see if I could find her, and, ah, then I saw her at the airport. She told me about her and another man. She told me his name was Richard. They had plans of going to Rome, Italy, and she said I should go ahead and get the divorce.”
It was obvious that Notaro was making it up as he went along. He said he’d had no idea that Vickie was seeing another man.
That was one version.
“You mentioned something about being in the hospital,” Brad Brown interjected.
Nick changed his story in a fumbling attempt to make the dates match. He now recalled that Vickie had come to the hospital to pick him up on September 21, and they had stayed at the Towne House Motel in Fairbanks.
“We checked in about four in the afternoon. Vickie went in to take a bath, and I turned on the TV and lay down on the bed and fell asleep. Probably about eight, we went out for dinner, and got back to the hotel about ten.”
Nick said that, once again, he’d fallen asleep. When he woke up in the wee hours of the morning, Vickie was gone and he found the note. He was scrambling to make it all fit. It was after that when she had gone to Montana, and he’d followed her there. Again, he spoke of the mysterious Richard who was going to take Vickie to Rome.
“Did she have luggage or anything?” McCoy asked.
“She must have,” Nick said quickly. “Because we’re missing one big suitcase and an overnight bag.”
“You didn’t see them in the car when she picked you up at the hospital?”
Nick shook his head.
“How were you financially set? I mean—can she afford a ticket to Rome? Or can she afford to go ‘outside [out of Alaska]’?”
“She couldn’t, herself, no. She probably had three or four hundred dollars that I know of. Evidently, it was Richard—”
“Did you ever see airline tickets lying around the house?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Nick was no longer wearing his wedding band and the troopers asked him about it.
“I’ve been working on my car, and—ah—I took it off to clean my hands.”
As for Vickie, Nick was sure she had been wearing her wedding ring the last time he saw her.
McCoy tightened the screws more. He told Nick that a dead woman had been discovered in the gravel pit outside Healy; he even drew him a map. But Nick denied any knowledge of that area.
He grew nervous, however, when McCoy said that they had made moulages of tire tracks found near the body.
Yes, Nick said he had told a few people who he knew in Healy that Vickie had left him. He could not recall how many.
“Did you report her missing to anybody?”
“No. The reason for that is because she left the note, saying she was going to see her relatives and that she’d get in touch with me later.”
The tape was coming to an end. McCoy asked Nick if there was anything else that he might not have told them.
“On the night of September twenty-first, I purchased a thirty-eight Special from J.C. Penney in Fairbanks. The last time I saw her, Vickie said she had pawned it—that was when I saw her in the airport in Kalispell.”
“Why did you purchase it—the gun?”
“For the restaurant—not just for myself. Jerry [Hamel] said that if somebody came in with a gun and robbed you, give him the money. But this one morning, Jerry—we—were discussing about buying a handgun, I told him I already had one. But that Vickie had it.”
The more he talked, the more Nick entangled himself with statements that didn’t make sense, but he hadn’t seemed to notice that yet.
“Do you still love your wife?” McCoy asked softly.
“Yes, I do.”
“Have you always loved your wife?”
“Yes, I have—ah—until, ah, this happened, I didn’t know how much I did.”
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“In other words, you wish she was back, then?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well,” McCoy said, “I’ll be honest. I think it’s your wife. The woman we found. Really do. I brought the gold ring here. I’ll turn the tape off, and show you the ring and watch that we brought down.”
Nick looked at the wristwatch and ring and at the artist’s drawing of the dead woman’s face. It was difficult to read his emotions, but he seemed either saddened or frightened. He said he thought the woman might be Vickie, but he could tell better if she had glasses on.
“You know how to cook, don’t you?” McCoy asked.
Wary, Nick said only “Yes.”
“And you know how to do your job well?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know how to cook,” McCoy said. “So I can’t do your job. Right? My job is to talk to people. And I feel that I can generally tell when someone’s lying. I think you’re lying to me. I’m just going to be very frank with that. I’m not gonna beat around the bush and I hope you don’t. If you’re gonna lie to me, I’d rather not have you say anything to me … I think you killed your wife. You never saw your wife in Montana. Your wife died September twenty-second. What I don’t know is why. Did you have a fight? Was she whoring around? Did you catch her? Did she try to kill you? I don’t know. That’s what I got to get from you. You’ve never seen me before. I’ve never seen you. And your wife is dead.
“You’ve known Brad for some time, and I hope you regard him as a friend. I hope you regard me as a friend. All I’m asking is tell me why it happened. Don’t lie to me.”
“I didn’t—” Nick stuttered, poleaxed. He’d thought he was doing so well in the give-and-take, and suddenly the power shifted and he was losing.
“There’s too much that doesn’t add up, Nick. That just blows your story all apart. She never went to Montana. She was lying up there in the gravel pit, dead. You knew it, but you had to have some kind of cover.”