Don't Look Behind You

by Ann Rule

  “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!

  Chapter Nine

  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.”

  “What exactly did he tell you?” Benson asked.

  “He told me she was cheating on him while … I think he said he was working in Fairbanks, she [Vickie] was down here staying on Canyon Road in a house with his mother. He was sending all this money down here to her and his sisters. And so he came down here without anybody knowing and he found out that she was [cheating]. He went back to Alaska and, three weeks later, had her come up there for a visit. He was driving down a road and he confronted her with this other man, and they started arguing, and he reached down and took his loaded gun from under the seat and shot her in the head at point blank range. And then he took the body up to higher ground somewhere in Fairbanks and buried her. He said she laid [sic] there for a very, very, long time before they found her. Some animals had come down ’cause it was cold in the winter and they found her and kinda dug part of her up and were chewing on her limbs, and later some skiers tripped across it, and they put her face on the news and that’s how he got caught.”

  “Did he tell you who recognized her face on the news?”

  “His boss … He had taken her and introduced her to his boss and when they showed her as a Jane Doe and a number you could call with information, he did.”

  “And then did he tell you about coming down here to Tacoma and looking for the guy she was having the affair with?”

  “Yes. After he killed her he came down to the Tacoma area and found the guy and killed him. His mother knew he was coming down, his sisters knew, and he got him and killed him—and then brought the body back to his mother’s house on Canyon Road, and he told me his sisters helped him dismember the body, put it in bags, and buried him under his mother’s front porch. I asked him if his mother knew—and he said yes, and his sisters and him had made a pact never to tell anybody …”

  Janet said that Nick Notaro had threatened her sometime later—after she helped his wife Lila May and Heidi get away from him because he was clearly molesting Heidi sexually.

  “I moved them in with me.”

  Lila May Notaro agreed to talk with Benson at her apartment in Tacoma. She told Ben Benson that she had married Nick Notaro in Marshfield, Wisconsin, in 1987. She was a dozen years younger than Nick.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “We both worked at Jimmy’s Cafe in Marshfield,” she began. “He was a cook and I was a waitress. I took him as being a kind gentleman. He treated me like a woman at the time … I saw his good side, him being a friendly, respectable person.”

  Lila May was raising her six-and-a-half-year-old daughter alone. She and Nick Notaro dated for about six months, and she was happy when he asked her to marry him. She knew virtually nothing about his past—not until the night before their wedding.

  “Did you know he had been to prison?” Benson asked.

  “Nope. Not until he said he was feeling guilty that he had done something wrong, and he thought he should let me know before we got married—to see how I would react or if I would go through with getting married.”

  “Okay. And what did he tell you?”

  “He told me he killed his first wife and someone else. He said they had an argument and they were fighting, and she fell between the tub and the toilet, and then he took her and put her in the car—and went to a ditch. And she got out of the car and he went after her and shot her. Killed her.”

  “Did he tell you why he did that?”

  “Because of her having an affair.”

  “Did he say anything about the person she was having an affair with?”

  She shook her head. “Just some guy who lived here in Tacoma. Nick said he cut someone up and put him in a pipe in the backyard.”

  “All right. So then you went ahead with the wedding?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long were you married to Nick?”

  “Just about six years. The first three years were wonderful. He was dressed decent, he worked, and I didn’t have any problems until the last three years.”

  Lila May Notaro said that Nick had kept working at Jimmy’s Cafe until they had moved to Tacoma. He had moved out west a month before she did, and he got a job right away at Winchell’s Donuts.

  But their marriage wasn’t as successful once they moved to Washington State.

  “He just didn’t want to be bothered,” Lila May said. “He was starting to tell me that we should separate because it wasn’t working out—I guess it was because of the way he was treating Heidi. He didn’t want me to interfere.”

  Lila May said Nick would get mad at her seven-year-old daughter and make her sit still for long periods. “He wasn’t really disciplining her for the right reasons. I mean, he just took it out on her [because] of his actions.”

  “He eventually started molesting Heidi?” Benson prompted.

  “Yes—when she was the age of nine it started.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “It was a while. One night he got up and I thought he went to the bathroom, but h
e went into her room, and I looked and he was kinda under the blanket. I kinda got the idea he was doing something, but you know, I didn’t want to believe it ’cause I didn’t think he was that type—”

  A few weeks later, Lila May couldn’t lie to herself any longer. She had to leave for work at 7 a.m. “And he took Heidi and molested her—penetrated her and everything. Two days later, Heidi told me everything.”

  Lila May had been horrified, but didn’t know what to do. She first went to Geri Hesse and told her what Heidi had said about Nick. Her mother-in-law didn’t seem shocked. She’d said only, “Then you better believe her.”

  Geri Hesse told Lila May that Nick had also molested another girl—a young female relative—but she didn’t offer Lila May any solution to her problems.

  Lila May Notaro wasn’t a very brave woman; she didn’t have the courage to confront Nick. It was her boss at the donut shop—Janet Blaisdell—who suspected something was wrong and urged Lila May to confide in her. When Lila May finally did, Janet went immediately to the phone and called Child Protective Services.

  Nick Notaro was arrested and the case of child molestation went to court. Sadly, it resulted in a hung jury. The prosecutor wanted Lila May to go to court again, but she said she was too frightened.

  “I had a bad feeling something was going to happen if I did it.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Benson asked her.

  “I felt like he would’ve tried to do something.”

  “To harm you or Heidi?”

  “I had such a bad feeling that I told [the prosecutor] just to get Nick on whatever he could. So he did.”

  Without the complaining witnesses, Nick Notaro drew a relatively short sentence. (The fact that he was a Level 2 sex offender in a Southern state wasn’t known to the sentencing judge. His “victim” in that case was a developmentally disabled teenager with whom he had had consensual sexual relations.)