Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (9 page)

When Detective Ben Benson first met Renee in Henry Lewis’s office, he had yet to find out about all of her activities and liaisons over the years. If he had, he certainly would have seen the pattern emerge again and again. Renee and her mother had sought out those things and people who would keep them living in style. For Renee, that had always meant seducing wealthy men by using her beauty and her ability to be whoever she perceived men wanted her to be.

Henry Lewis wasn’t a billionaire, but he owned a number of properties that had greatly increased in value over
the years. He wore a small fortune in gold jewelry, and there were times—as Henry told reporter Natalie Singer—that he had had his name and his fortune riding on $8 million out in bail money. He was good to his clients, tried to make them feel at ease, and trusted that they would show up on the dates their court appearances were scheduled. He even felt sorry for many of them. However, he wasn’t a patsy.

“But they have to go to court,” he told Singer. “There are no bad hair days.”

He was devoted to the memory of a musical giant, a dreamer who hoped to have his own museum for Jimi Hendrix someday—but Henry Lewis was also a no-nonsense man. A businessman. When he fell in love with Renee Curtiss, he placed his trust in her, although that might not have been as wise an idea as he believed it to be.

After Henry Lewis married Renee, she and her sister, Cassie, continued to work in his bail bonds company. No one ever said that Renee wasn’t a hard worker. For a time, she seemed to be an asset, but she came between Henry and his children. She was not the kind of woman they would have chosen for their father.

Renee’s cousin Victoria
had blurted out a question about
who
had been murdered, and that surprised Ben Benson. With the rumor that there had possibly been another homicide hanging from the Hesse/Notaro family tree, Benson contacted the Alaska State Patrol to see if they had any record of such an event.

They had indeed. Nick Notaro, Renee’s older brother, had confessed to killing his wife, Vickie, in October 1978.

Benson requested a copy of that murder file from the Records and Identification Unit in Juneau, Alaska. They promised to send a copy down for him to review.

It was six in the evening on October 15, 1978, and almost full dark when the Fairbanks detachment of the Department of Public Safety—the Alaska state troopers on duty—received a report from Wayne Walters, chief of police in Nenana. A dead body had been discovered by kids sledding and picnicking at a gravel pit at approximately Mile 317 on the Parks Highway just outside Healy. As
troopers Roderick Harvey, James McCann, and Steven Heckman headed to the location given for the corpse, they didn’t know whether the victim was male or female. If it had been there for weeks or even months, it might be difficult to tell—at least at first.

“The scene is located where there is a dirt road leading uphill from the Parks Highway on the east side of the road,” McCann wrote in his first report on the unknown deceased person. “Approximately halfway up the hill, the road tops out and levels into a gravel pit area. There is what appears to be a parking area. There is evidence of many people having come to this area for target practice as well as picnics. There are numerous fired cartridge casings of various calibers strewn around on the ground, and there is a campfire area. Approximately thirty feet south of this campfire, there is a trail [where someone] had carried or dragged a body to the open edge of the embankment. From the edge of that embankment to the victim’s head was about thirteen feet.”

There was little that could be done in the icy darkness, so the scene was protected until daylight. With winter approaching, dawn would come slowly, but the troopers could see that the dead person’s head was below the feet, and the arms were outstretched and over the head.

What was obviously the most-used trail into the brush had no matted-down vegetation. A narrower path, however, had crushed willow brush. It appeared that someone had taken that route and then pushed or thrown the victim over. Dropping to their hands and knees, the investigators gathered hairs and minute fibers that clung to the willows. They also found a pair of panty hose, size small.

They determined that the victim was a woman, but it wasn’t likely the panty hose belonged to her; she was a good-sized woman, close to six feet tall, and probably weighing at least 170 pounds. She had been shot in the head once, possibly more times.

But who she was, none of them knew.

There were several establishments of one sort or another along the highway, and trooper Steve Heckman stopped at every one that was open to see if anyone might know the woman’s identity. He began at the Clear Sky Lodge, and proceeded to Roscoe’s, the Corner Bar, Moochers Bar & Grill, Coghill’s store, and Parker’s Patch. The Dew Drop Inn and the Tamarac Inn were closed, but Heckman did get one possible ID at Moochers.

A female bartender recalled a woman who matched some of the details in the dead woman’s description: “She was from Anchorage and she sometimes traveled between Anchorage and Fairbanks with a man who looked Spanish. He drove a new black car,” the bartender said. “I thought she might be a hooker—because of the way she dressed, and because of what she said about the neighborhood she frequented in Anchorage. I think she is half white and half black, almost six feet tall, slender and well built. She’s probably in her twenties, dark brown curly shoulder-length hair. Very fine facial features. Oh, and a sharp nose.”

This woman was a most perceptive witness, with a great memory for details. “She usually wears expensive clothing and good jewelry—she has a large diamond dinner ring and chain necklaces with coins on them. Her nails are long, and they’re painted orange.”

“Anything else?” Heckman asked.

“She speaks Spanish. I think—I’m not sure—and she may have come from New Orleans originally.”

The unknown victim was also tall, and she had shoulder-length curly brown hair. However, she’d worn blue jeans, a cheap polyester blouse, and J.C. Penney sneakers. Her nails weren’t long and polished; they looked to be the blunt-cut nails of a woman who did physical work. Although the bartender at Moochers was a superb witness, she must have been describing another woman passing through.

There was one way they might be able to identify the nameless victim: she had had extremely good dental work done. Trooper Rod Harvey took photos of her teeth and gave copies to five dentists who practiced nearby.

None of them recognized the work. Troopers tried to find a match with a half-dozen more dentists, but gleaned nothing that would identify the victim.

On October 17, 1978, Dr. Michael Probst arrived from Anchorage to perform a postmortem examination of the dead woman. He felt she was twenty-five to thirty years old, but it would be impossible to accurately pinpoint her date and time of death. Her body was frozen when she was found, and still somewhat frozen as her autopsy began. Ordinarily, the stiffening of muscles after death—rigor mortis—can begin a few hours to even twelve to eighteen hours after death. A body’s muscles may be immovable from any time from twenty-four to thirty-six or forty-eight hours after death before the stiffening relaxes.

The Jane Doe victim’s rigor mortis had come and gone.

Livor mortis—or lividity—occurs when the heart stops pumping, leaving the lowest body parts stained a purplish red with pooled blood, and that can take up to a dozen hours. This victim’s lividity was, as expected, in her head, neck, shoulders, arms, and hands, which had all been on the downhill side of the trail. It was complete.

The dead woman had to have been dead a day or so before her body was discovered, but she could also have been deceased for a lot longer than that, given the thirty-one-degree temperatures charted for the Healy area for that October.

No one had reported anyone resembling the victim missing.

The cause of death was horribly easy to detect. She had fought for her life gallantly and sustained numerous scratches, cuts, and what were clearly defense wounds. The injuries had been inflicted both before and after death. X-rays taken before this postmortem exam showed two projectiles (slugs) in the body—one in the brain and the other in the abdominal/pelvic cavity.

Dr. Probst looked at the entrance wound in the victim’s left temple first and found gunpowder
inside
the wound, but the rounded wound had no charring and no ragged (stellate) edge. He determined that this wound had been in the “close category,” but was not a “contact.” The bullet had traveled in a straight line through her brain, ending up in the
right
occipital (back) of the brain. The copper jacket had separated from the slug. This slug had fractured her skull, not to mention causing shock and hemorrhage in her brain.

It would have been rapidly—if not instantly—fatal.

The second entrance wound was in her lower back in the left lumbar region. It had entered her back and ended at her right iliac crest (hip bone), traveling back to front, left to right. This would not necessarily have been a fatal wound, if the victim had had immediate medical attention. It had been fired from some distance. While the bullet had gone through the back hem of the woman’s blouse, it hadn’t caused any singeing or melting of the material. A close-up shot would have.

The pathologist and the Alaska troopers observing the autopsy agreed: the back wound would have been the first, possibly as the victim was running away from her killer. The head wound came second, almost as if the shooter was clamping her head close so that she could not avoid the fatal shot.

Three days later—after the Jane Doe’s description was published in nearby newspapers—a woman came forward. She gave her name as Laverne Isaacson and said she owned the Healy Hotel.

“One of our maids is missing,” she explained. “She’s about twenty-five, more than five foot eight, and she’s kind of chunky. I’d say she weighs about one hundred sixty pounds or so. I believe she has some Indian blood—she has brown hair and brown eyes. She wears glasses. She’s a good person, and we’re worried.”

“Why is that?” Rod Harvey asked.

“Well, she went to pick up her husband from the hospital in Fairbanks on September 21. And she never came back to Healy—hasn’t shown up for work … it’s not like her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Vickie. Vickie Notaro. When I asked her husband, Nick, about where she was, he told me that they had a fight that night. They were staying in a hotel there—and he said she just up and left him.”

The Jane Doe was no longer unidentified; she was the late Mrs. Nick Notaro, Renee Curtiss’s sister-in-law. The Alaska detectives had been able to pinpoint the last day she was seen alive—they found a motel owner in Fairbanks whose records showed that Nick and Vickie had checked in on Monday, September 21, 1978, and left the next morning. They had stayed in Room 104 at the Towne House Motel, and paid $37.80. They often stopped at the Towne House, and no one—staff or guests—had heard or seen anything unusual during the night.

“One thing, though,” manager Steve Nord added. “One of our maids found a box for a gun and some bullets. There was a receipt there, too—from J.C. Penney.”

The receipt showed that Nick Notaro, six feet three inches, age thirty, weighing well over two hundred pounds, had purchased a Smith & Wesson .38 Special, .38 double action revolver for $156.75 and a box of bullets
on September 21
!

On July 18, 2007
, Ben Benson obtained the complete criminal history of Nick Notaro. He found that Notaro had been a suspect in a child rape case in Tacoma in 1994. There was also a statement in the file from a woman named Janet Blaisdell* who said that Notaro had told her about killing his first wife in Alaska in the late seventies. Janet was the witness mentioned in the more recent child molestation charges against Nick. Benson wanted very much to find her.

The Pierce County detective sergeant found it tantalizing when he first heard that Nick Notaro had told a woman named Blaisdell that he had killed a man in Tacoma and had buried him at Nick’s mother’s house on Canyon Road.

Benson left a message on Janet Blaisdell’s answering machine. He also received a copy of a 1978 murder investigation file involving Vickie Notaro from the Alaska State Department of Public Safety’s Records and Identification Unit in Juneau, Alaska.

Not one—but two—homicide cases were opening up like morning glories in bright sunlight. Either this was too
good to be true—the suspects were stupid—or they had been very, very lucky for almost thirty years!

Jeanne Slook of the Alaska R. and I. office said she would mail Benson a copy of the Vickie Notaro case in Alaska, and Janet Blaisdell would be happy to fill Benson in on her conversations with Nick Notaro in Tacoma.

On July 23, 2007, Ben Benson met with her and taped her statement. Janet said that she had first met Nick Notaro in 1987 or 1988. He came to work at Winchell’s Donuts as the night baker. They soon became casual friends. She met Lila May,* his wife, and Heidi,* his stepdaughter, shortly thereafter when they came in to wait for him to finish his shift.

“I’d get Heidi a glass of milk and a donut, and Lila May and I would talk,” Janet said. “And then Lila May came to work for us, too.”

The Notaros didn’t have many friends, and Janet Blaisdell said she would invite them over for dinner at her house, or they would drop by to visit.

“After you became friends with Nick,” Ben Benson began, “did there come a time where he told you about an incident where he had murdered his first wife?”

“Yes. Several months later—I’d say maybe even a year.”

“Did you feel that he was trying to get it off his chest—or why do you think he told you?”

“To this day, I don’t know why. I thought at the time he just wanted somebody to talk to, and he knew I was his friend—and he kind of unloaded. He asked me if I knew that he had been in prison, and I told him no, and then he began to tell me the story of how he killed his first wife.”