by Ann Rule
From the moment she took on the case, Dawn could see through Renee’s ploys as clearly as if she had x-ray vision.
Dawn Farina would handle the prosecution of Renee and Nick all on her own. She would not have an assistant prosecutor to help her, but the massive preparation ahead didn’t faze her.
Trial dates were set and set again. Delays in a major homicide trial are far from unusual. In September 2008, Dawn Farina asked for a rare “double” trial where both Nick and Renee would be tried—but there would be two juries. Renee’s jury would be excused when evidence was introduced against Nick—but not her—and vice versa. The deputy prosecutor argued that this would be the most expedient way to try two defendants for what was, essentially, the same crime. And perhaps it was, but there was also the possibility that it could be confusing.
Defense attorney Gary Clower, representing Renee, argued strongly against a dual trial.
Farina’s request was denied.
There would be two trials, one for Renee and one for Nick. After more delays, Nick’s trial finally began on Thursday, February 12, 2009, in Pierce County Superior Court with Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck presiding. Judge van Doorninck would oversee both trials—but separately.
By Farina’s special request, Ben Benson sat beside her at the State’s table. He knew every aspect of Joe Tarricone’s murder case by heart, and he was granted permission to sit with the prosecutor throughout both trials, even though prospective witnesses almost always are banned from the courtroom until after they testify. Dawn Farina didn’t have a coprosecutor, but she had Sergeant Benson.
Gypsy, Dean, and Rosemary Tarricone were in the courtroom observing everything. They all noted how slow Nick’s thinking was and felt he was a pawn for Renee.
Looking back, Gypsy sighed as she remembered Nick Notaro. “You could see that he was mentally disabled to some degree and he’d been manipulated by Renee. She probably paid him off all these years with money and other things. She really took advantage.”
In her final argument, Dawn Farina had ample ammunition, gleaned from Nick’s own statement. She showed jurors photographs of Joe Tarricone in life, immediately followed by pictures of his bones with the clean edges that proved a chain saw had cut through them.
“For the next twenty-nine years, Joseph Tarricone’s five grown children and two minor children would worry and wonder what happened to their father,” Farina said. “And finally, after thirty years, a family’s worst nightmare came true. Not only had their father been murdered, but his body [was] brutally dismembered limb by limb with a chain saw and then discarded in large plastic bags—like a piece of trash.”
Farina explained to the jury that they must find four circumstances true in order to convict Nick Notaro of murder in the first degree:
One: that on or about the period between the twenty-first day of September 1978 and the twenty-first day of October 1978, the defendant—as an accomplice—acted with intent to cause the death of Joseph Tarricone. Two: that the intent to cause the death was premeditated. Three: that Joseph Tarricone died as a result of the defendant’s acts. And four: that any of these acts occurred in the state of Washington.
And then Dawn Farina pointed out with details and examples that each of these conditions was true. Notaro had had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to kill Joe Tarricone.
“The defendant himself said it best during the interview with detectives Benson and Wood. When they asked him who told him to kill Joseph Tarricone, Notaro responded, ‘Nobody had to tell me to kill him. We went down to the basement and he leaned over [the washing machine] and I shot him in the back of the head. I shot him twice.’”
The jurors quickly found Notaro guilty of first-degree murder. Judge van Doorninck ruled that his sentencing would occur after Renee Curtiss’s trial.
Renee’s trial began in late March, almost exactly a year after Ben Benson and Denny Wood arrested her in Henry’s Bail Bonds. She had been out on bail for that year, and remained free. Ironically, she would face a female prosecutor and a female judge, probably not her first choice.
No one was more elated to see Renee go on trial for first-degree murder at last than Gypsy Tarricone. Gypsy put a banner up on her fence marking the first anniversary of Nick and Renee’s arrest, announcing her sentiments. When Ben Benson saw it, he told her to take it down immediately. The last thing the prosecution wanted was something that Renee’s lawyer could use in an appeal. Chagrined, Gypsy obeyed. Ben had always told her the truth and she knew that he, along with Denny Wood, had worked many off-duty hours to make this upcoming trial happen. She had waited three decades to see Renee Curtiss punished for her father’s death; she could wait a week or so longer to celebrate.
Renee dressed in expensive and flattering clothes at her trial. She was still free on bail and didn’t have to sleep in jail when each day ended. Her hair and makeup were more appropriate than usual. Her sister, Cassie, other family members, and a number of women whom she identified as her friends were there each day to support her.
One trial spectator described these women as “hardened by age and experience, wearing a lot of thick makeup—much like Renee,” while Gypsy Tarricone simply called them “the old biddy cheering squad.”
Henry Lewis couldn’t be there; his heart disease had progressed rapidly after Renee’s arrest, and the strain of a murder trial where his wife was the defendant had accelerated the damage. His coronary artery disease had brought him to the edge of death.
Gypsy was there, of course, along with her brother Dean, her sister Rosemary, and occasionally other family members. The two camps stared at each other coldly as the trial progressed.
The defense had planned to call Nick Notaro to the witness stand first, but as the trial started, circumstances made it impossible for him to be in court on time, and Judge van Doorninck wanted the trial to move as quickly as possible without long delays. Had Nick testified first, Renee would have heard his version of their “facts,” and tailored her testimony to fit. Usually witnesses are not allowed in the courtroom until after they have testified—to avoid hearing something that might change their testimony. But Renee was the defendant so she was allowed to hear every word witnesses said.
But Nick was late, so Renee began.
Renee Curtiss was determined to testify in her own defense, a choice that defense attorneys dread. By doing so, she was opening herself up to cross-examination by Dawn Farina, but Renee clearly counted on her own powers of persuasion and her ability to deny many things she had told Ben Benson and Denny Wood.
Renee’s lawyer, Gary Clower, began the direct questioning of his client. Her affect was flat, unemotional, almost disinterested at times as she responded to his questions. If anyone in the gallery expected tears and emotion from Renee Curtiss, they were to be disappointed.
Renee gave her age as fifty-five and said her two children were now thirty-eight and thirty-nine. Gary Clower introduced Defense Exhibit #203, a picture of Renee at twenty-five. This was what she had looked like when Joe Tarricone was murdered—a sweet, almost innocent-appearing young woman. Would the jurors consider the young Renee as incapable of such a grisly crime?
“What was this photograph taken for?” Clower asked.
“For a makeup ad for our makeup store.”
“Did you used to do a little bit of modeling?” Clower was obviously preparing for any questions that might come from the prosecution about Renee’s escort and “modeling” career.
“Yes.”
Asked to talk about her early life, Renee testified that she went to Alaska first in 1973, when she was the nineteen-year-old wife of a bush pilot. When the marriage failed, she said she was left alone with two children—alone until her mother moved up to join her. She recalled that she had been a bookkeeper for the Black Angus restaurant chain, a hostess at a Greek restaurant, and the night manager of an airport restaurant.
“Eventually, [I] went to work for Joe Tarricone for Alaska Meat and Provisions.”
Renee continued along the paths of her life—at least as she remembered. She testified that she, her mother, and her daughter moved to a northern suburb of Seattle in 1977. She didn’t mention her son. The trio had lived in Kirkland, Washington, for about a year.
“Where were you employed?” Clower asked.
“I worked two different places—actually three—different places. I worked for Elite Models. I also worked for Frederick & Nelson. Then I went to work for the Griffin Group.”
Renee had a precise memory for these details, odd, because her memory would soon fail her again and again. She believed that she and her mother had moved to Canyon Road in the summer of 1978, but she wasn’t sure of the month. Shown the lease for the Pierce County house, she agreed that it must have been in June.
The defendant said she had lived in two rentals at the same time. One was the Canyon Road house, where she “spent weekends” with her mother and daughter, and the other was in downtown Bellevue some thirty-five miles away. Gary Clower didn’t ask her why she didn’t go home to her mother and daughter at night; the thirty-five-mile commute would have been on freeways all the way.
Nor did he ask her who—if anyone—she lived with during the week.
Renee remembered how ill her husband, Henry, was when Ben Benson and Denny Wood came to interview her a year before: “He was in late-stage heart failure and late-stage renal failure,” she testified, omitting the fact that the Pierce County detectives had offered to take her to see Henry’s doctors before they asked her any questions.
“When the police came to talk to you, they told you that they wanted to talk to you about Mr. Tarricone?”
“That’s correct.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Um … my heart probably went to my stomach. Frightened. Worried about not being able to keep the appointment. Worried about the trouble I would be in for my actions.”
Gary Clower could not erase his client’s gory confession to Benson and Wood about how she helped to dissect and hide Joe Tarricone’s body. But he needed to raise the doubt that Renee’s Miranda rights might not have been given correctly and in time; he suggested that Renee had somehow been tricked into talking freely, believing that the statute of limitations on being an accomplice after the fact had run out.
Of course, he would hit on that. All he had going as a defense strategy was to paint his client as a vulnerable young woman at the time of the murder, and to do whatever he could to remove her as far as possible from the scene of Joe’s killing.
Asked to recall her relationship with Joe Tarricone, Renee described him as a somewhat crass man, much too old for her. She said she had met him at the Cattle Company restaurant in Anchorage. “He used to come in and I repeatedly had to ask him to leave because he was trying to sell his salami and different things at the bar.”
Despite her early distaste for him, at some point—she could not recall when—Renee said she had gone to work for Joe, answering the phone, keeping some of the bookwork straight, even delivering meat herself to the Kenai Peninsula.
She estimated that Joe had been in his mid- to late fifties, the same age as her mother, who, she commented, liked him.
“Was Joe a generous sort of person?” Clower stepped into more dangerous waters.
“Very generous. He’d buy me things, my mother things, my daughter things.”
“Did he buy you a Mercedes?”
“He did.”
“Did you accept it?”
“No, I did not,” Renee testified. She had another car already—but Joe had persevered and practically forced the Mercedes on her, shipping it down to Seattle by boat.
Renee recalled that she and Joe had only dated about six months, although she still worked for him for another six months before she moved to Seattle. She was dating Kurt Winkler at the same time, and they became engaged.
“Kurt was planning on taking a job that was going to relocate him to Seattle.”
“Did Mr. Tarricone ever ask you to marry him before you left Alaska?”
“More than once.”
“What was your answer?”
“No.”
Asked if she had told Joe Tarricone that she was leaving Alaska, Renee wasn’t sure. Her memory was fading in and out. “I don’t believe that we told him because he was—could be persistent.”
Kurt Winkler hadn’t followed them to Seattle after all, but Renee testified that Joe had come down to visit several times. She felt her mother had been on his side in trying to get Renee to marry him. But, when he proposed to her once more in Washington, she said he’d been very angry when she refused.
Renee Curtiss was adamant that she had never suggested to her brother that he hurt or kill Joe. “It was annoying,” she said, “[but] I mean it wasn’t annoying enough to have someone hurt over a situation like that. Not at all.”
The prosecution believed Renee had asked Nick Notaro to come to Washington to get rid of Joe for good. His wife’s blood had barely been washed from his hands when he flew to Seattle. Renee shook her head firmly. No, she was sure now that she didn’t know that Nick had just killed his wife in Alaska when she talked to him after his appendectomy. Maybe she had told Ben Benson and Denny Wood that when they interviewed her in the bail bonds office, but once she thought about it later, she had realized exactly where she was when Nick told her.
“Where was that?” Clower asked.
“It was at the Canyon Road house, sitting in the kitchen nook, sitting there with my mom and Nick.”
“And that was after Mr. Tarricone was killed, wasn’t it?”
“Correct.”
Renee stressed that she also learned that Nick had killed Joe Tarricone as they sat at their kitchen nook. Her mother had told her—quite urgently—to hurry home from Bellevue. Only when she arrived on Canyon Road had she learned that Joe was in the basement—dead.
Renee testified that the three of them had debated what they should do. She had been concerned about her mother and her brother. What would happen to them, she testified, if they were arrested for murdering Joe? Feeling “a little bit of horror,” she described her feelings as she heard about two murders in a week. Even so, she had agreed with them that they had to get rid of Joe’s body.
“So what did you do?” Clower asked.
“Nick was going to—we were going to buy a chain saw and cut him up and bury him.”
No one in the courtroom envied Gary Clower; this had to be one of the toughest clients he’d ever defended. Renee evinced no emotion at all; her eyes were dry as she spoke of the cold-blooded disposal of a human being—a scene right out of a horror movie.
At this moment, she could not remember who had gone to buy the chain saw.
“What was your role in disposing of Mr. Tarricone’s body?”
“We initially went down there—my mom, Nick, and myself—and he started the chain saw. I think we were holding a tarp, and I got—I got physically ill so I went upstairs. I came back down periodically, but Mom stayed down there, and I recall helping put body pieces in plastic bags.”
Gary Clower needed to remove as many of the motives for murder Renee might have had as he could. Witnesses had told Ben Benson about the briefcase full of large bills, the Mercedes, Joe’s gold nugget jewelry, even the yellow meat truck that Geri Hesse had. He asked Renee about those things of value.
She could not recall Joe’s briefcase. She was sure she had kept nothing that belonged to the victim. She admitted disposing of the gun, simply because she had access to a boat trip some weeks later and she could toss it to the bottom of Lake Washington without arousing suspicion.
She hadn’t wanted the Mercedes in the first place, and she had no idea what had happened to Joe Tarricone’s jewelry.
“Since that day at the house, have you talked to anybody about what happened there—other than your mother and
your brother?”
“No, I have not.”
“And is it accurate to say that for the last thirty years, that you lied about the last time you saw Mr. Tarricone?”
“Continuously,”
“Why did you do that?”
“To protect my brother, my mother, and myself.”
“Did the extent of Mr. Tarricone’s attention to you cause you to hurt him or kill him?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Did you ever ask your brother to harm him in any way?”
“I did not.”
“Did you kill him?”
“I did not kill him.”
“Were you present in the house when he was killed?”
“I was not.”
“Did you do anything at all to encourage your brother to kill Mr. Tarricone?”
“No,” Renee answered to this final question by her own attorney, “I did not.”
She had done nothing to ingratiate herself with the jury; Renee Curtiss seemed offended that she had even had to answer her own attorney’s questions.
Chapter Eighteen
If Renee Curtiss’s testimony in her own defense had left jurors and court-watchers sick to their stomachs, revulsed by a side of life they might never have imagined, what would happen now as Deputy Prosecutor Dawn Farina rose to cross-examine her?
Renee eyed Farina warily as she faced questions not designed to make her look even marginally innocent.
“When detectives Benson and Wood contacted you on March 24, 2008, they advised you of your Miranda warnings? Correct?” Farina began.
“That’s correct.”
Yes, Renee agreed that it was her signature on the bottom of the rights form, and her initials after each warning. Yes, Ben Benson had offered to take her to see her husband’s doctor. Yes, she had worked for Joe for over a year, and he had bought her many presents.