Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (11 page)

When Ben Benson arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 28, 2007, he had practically memorized the 1978 homicide case in which the Jane Doe victim turned out to be Nick’s first wife.

Not surprisingly, most of the Alaska investigators of Vickie Notaro’s homicide had long since retired. Luckily, Benson found Marjean Denison in the state police office, and she was of immeasurable help in locating contact information for the former troopers.

Benson found the Alaska State Police detectives quite forthcoming in talking with him about Vickie Notaro’s bizarre murder. The original investigators agreed to talk with him, recalling that her body was discovered twelve miles north of Nenana along the Parks Highway on October 15, 1978.

“How long had it been there?” Benson asked retired Alaska state trooper Detective James McCann. (McCann had been on the force from 1972 to 1999, and he was one of the first investigators into Vickie Notaro’s murder.)

“Probably two—maybe three weeks,” he answered slowly. “But it gets cold early here, and there was some snow on the ground already, so it’s hard to tell. Her body was frozen.”

McCann said that his memory had become vague in the thirty years that had passed since Vickie was murdered, but he did recall going to the crime scene and that there was one of many “gravel barrel pits” there where the
Department of Transportation loaded up gravel for road construction and repair. “Someone may have stopped to relieve himself, climbed up the gravel—it was higher than the road—and down into a depression and he found her there.”

McCann said that he and other Alaska detectives had photographed the scene, measured it, and taken some physical evidence—which they bagged and tagged.

Here, James McCann had a sore spot. He had always believed that evidence should be preserved forever, but their headquarters were very small in 1978 and there was barely space for an evidence room.

“Some of our commanders took it upon themselves to destroy evidence prior to a case being solved—and then some cases
were
solved—and I guess it was just taking up room …”

Earlier, Benson had called the 2007 evidence supervisor, Diane Lindner, and she had searched, but she had to tell him that they no longer had physical evidence on the murder of Vickie Notaro in their property room. It had been purged. Since Nick had been convicted of murdering his wife, this news came as no surprise to Benson.

Before the computer age, a lot of the old records in police evidence rooms disappeared. It is something that makes homicide detectives shudder, particularly in the twenty-first century when so many cold cases are being solved with DNA residue that has clung to physical evidence for decades—useless until now.

Lindner had, however, been able to locate some photographs from the case.

One photo showed Nick Notaro’s tennis shoes; they were spattered with dried blood. After he read about how Vickie died, Benson thought that her blood wouldn’t necessarily have been on Nick’s tennis shoes. But maybe those spatters had come from sawing up Joe Tarricone’s body?

Ben Benson pressed on with his questions about Vickie’s murder, which almost certainly had happened within the days before Joe Tarricone disappeared.

“Do you recall if the gun in the case was ever located?” he asked.

McCann tried to recall, saying he thought it had been a revolver.

Benson nodded. “He bought a thirty-eight Special from Gary Tellep when Gary worked at Penney’s up in Fairbanks. Notaro told some of your guys that he threw it in the river?”

“Yeah. We never did recover that gun,” McCann said.

“Okay,” Benson said, waiting.

“Our rivers—our rivers here hold a lot of guns,” McCann said with a sigh.

Benson talked next to retired Alaska State police detective Bradley Brown—who had been with the force from January 1973 until March of 1999.

Brown remembered Nick Notaro very well indeed. Brad Brown had been the sole trooper assigned to the Healy, Alaska, post. Healy is a small town just outside McKinley National Park, a popular tourist spot in warm
months. The park and Healy are roughly 120 miles south of Fairbanks.

Benson grinned at the thought of a single trooper handling such a relatively large area.

“So you were like a one-man show at that time—back in 1978?” he asked Brown.

“Yeah, I had an office in Healy alongside the Parks Highway at the intersection of Healy Road. I knew Nicky—that’s what I called him.”

“Did you know his wife, Vickie?”

“Yeah, she was kinda like a maid or worked housekeeping at the Healy Hotel and several other places around here. From my understanding she did some odd jobs on the side, like laundry, just to make ends meet.”

Although Healy was surrounded by natural splendor, the Notaros weren’t exactly living high on the hog.

In the late seventies, Nicky Notaro worked as a cook at Jerry’s Healy Service, a gas station/restaurant/store/gathering spot owned by Jerry Hamel. Brad Brown said he had often dropped into Jerry’s late at night when the rest of Healy had pretty much rolled up the sidewalks.

Even the Road House and the Auto Lake Lodge, the two bars in town, were closed.

“Maybe there were only one or two clientele inside Jerry’s,” Brown elaborated. “So I would talk with Nick because he did most of the nighttime work. I would just be friends—like everyone was [in Healy]—with him.”

In the frigid hours before dawn when Healy was mostly dark except for the neon sign glowing at Jerry’s, the trooper drank hot coffee and watched Nick slap burgers or
eggs on the grill, scraping it clean when he was finished. Nick Notaro wasn’t a particularly scintillating conversationalist, but he was a pleasant enough guy to talk with when the rest of Healy was asleep.

“Did you know him on a personal level?” Ben Benson asked Brown.

The retired trooper shook his head. “No—not per se. When we speak ‘personal,’ I think like being close to him, like going to his house for dinner. No, it wasn’t anything like that. I knew him as far as his general demeanor. He was a hard worker behind the grill, and he would always talk and communicate, [with a] smile on his face. That’s kind of how I knew him.”

Like almost everyone else in Healy, Brad Brown had been surprised when he heard that Nick Notaro was the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Nick had seemed like a “gentle giant.”

“Did you participate in the investigation?”

Brown nodded. “Yeah, I did.” He remembered the details quite clearly. There had been nothing gentle about Vickie Notaro’s death.

There were many longtime residents who still lived in Healy. Ben Benson found Shirley Hamel, Jerry Hamel’s widow, and her daughter, Geri Lynn Lucier, who both recalled Nick working at Jerry’s Healy Service. Shirley said she and Jerry had arrived there in 1978 and bought the business. They hadn’t had a large staff—just two or three of their children, and perhaps the same number of
unrelated employees. Jerry was the one who had hired the mountain of a man who cooked at the Healy Hotel and seemed to have good references as a fry cook.

“But Nick was a strange sort of person,” she said. “After I heard he’d been arrested, I felt nervous about the fact that I’d often let my kids go to town with him.”

Benson asked Shirley Hamel if she had ever heard rumors that either Nick or Vickie was unfaithful.

“Not at all,” she answered, surprised.

She explained that the Healy Hotel had been located in “Old Healy” in 1978. Later, the railroad bought up much of the property there, leaving it a virtual ghost town. Shirley told Benson that even the Healy Hotel had been physically moved the four miles to the new part of town.

“They call it the Stampede, now,” she said.

“Did your daughters tell you any stories about any weird behavior on his part?”

“Geri Lynn used to say he made her nervous. She didn’t want to have him go to town with her when she was carrying a bank deposit. I guess he never did much to help her, although he was supposed to. He’d go to town and take care of
his
personal business.”

Shirley Hamel recalled that Nick had had sharp pains in his abdomen one night in the fall of 1978, and she and Jerry figured it was probably appendicitis. She had helped Nick pack a bag, throwing in his cigarettes, and then given him a ride to Fairbanks because he was complaining about how bad his belly hurt.

“And do you remember him coming back to town after he had his appendix surgery?” Benson probed.

“I saw him the day he got out of the hospital. He stopped by the little shop in Fairbanks where I was working,” Shirley said.

“He told me they were staying in town that night, and they were going to head to Healy the next day.”

She knew that Vickie was with him, but she could not remember if she came into the shop or if she was waiting in the car.

Ben Benson hadn’t found anyone else who had seen Vickie Notaro after the day she picked her husband up at the hospital—September 21, 1978. He didn’t tell Shirley Hamel, but he suspected she might have been the last person to come close to seeing Vickie alive.

Shirley had known Vickie only slightly—from when she came into their business to wait for Nick. Asked if she had heard from Notaro after he was arrested and imprisoned, she nodded.

“He called me around the time he either got out of prison or was about to get out, and asked if I would re-employ him as a cook. I told him no. That was all but that was pretty final.”

Benson talked next to Geri Lynn Lucier, the Hamels’ daughter, who had been twenty when Nick Notaro had worked at her folks’ place.

“Why don’t you tell me where you were and what you were doing in 1978—as best as you can remember?” he began.

“In May or June of 1978, I left Tacoma, Washington, and returned to Healy with my child. I was going through
a divorce and went to work for my father at Jerry’s Healy Service. That was when I met Nick.”

“What do you recall about him—when you met him?”

Geri Lynn grimaced. “I didn’t like him. He was a weird guy. He made me very nervous. He made suggestive comments and I didn’t like being around him—so I tried to avoid him, except if my father asked me to run to town with him on a grocery trip. Otherwise, I basically stayed clear of him.”

There had been only two or three times when she couldn’t get out of a shopping trip with Nick. As her mother had said, he hadn’t helped at all with carrying groceries, but had gone off on his own to do whatever he needed to do.

“You said he would make suggestive comments. Would he be making passes at you?”

“Sometimes passes—sometimes just lewd comments, of a sexual nature. I knew he was married …”

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.”

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?