True Crime Campfire - Found Out: A True Story of Double Murder

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

The Bible says, “Be sure: Your sin will find you out.” It’s certainly not a universal truth, as the long, long list of unsolved crimes out there proves. But even for those criminals who get away with it, surely there’s a little voice in their head wondering, is today the day they catch me? Is it tomorrow? And sometimes, that little voice is right. Join us for a story of lust, betrayal, and toxic family loyalty: The murders of Joseph Tarricone and Vicky Notaro.Sources: “Don’t Look Behind You” by Ann Rule“A Death on Canyon Road” by Gary Leon Zimmer Court papers: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/wa-court-of-appeals/1566822.html https://cases.justia.com/washington/court-of-appeals-division-ii/39106.6.11.doc.pdfFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. The Bible says, be sure your sin will find you out. It's certainly not a universal truth, as the long, long list of unsolved crimes out there proves, but even for those criminals who get away with it, surely there's a little voice in their head wondering, is today the day they catch me? Is it tomorrow? And sometimes, that little voice is right.

This is found out, the murders of Joe Terraconi and Vicky Nataro. So, campers, for this one, we're in Puyallup, Washington, just outside of Tacoma. June 4th, 2007, a warm spring day, and Travis Haney was part of a crew clearing land and demolishing a house on Canyon Road. As another load of dirt fell from the bucket of his excavator, something caught his eye. There was a black trash bag in amongst the debris. Curious, he hopped down to take a look. The bag was torn, and inside he could see some bones. It's not super unusual for excavation crews to come across bones,

especially on land like this that used to be farmland, but these didn't look like animal bones to Travis. And also in the bag were what looked like long-decade scraps of clothing. Travis's dad happened to be the chief of police on Bainbridge Island on the other side of Puget Sound, so Travis called him up and asked what he should do. His dad told him to call 911. The deputy who responded took a look and agreed that, yep,

they looked to be human remains. A forensics team staked out the land surrounding where Travis had dug up the bag and meticulously searched for more bones and after long hours of work they had collected a partial human skeleton. The investigators thought right away that they'd have a tough time identifying these remains.

For one thing, they'd clearly been buried for decades and for another, only a few fragments of the skull had been recovered. There were no teeth to compare with dental records. Human remains found in black trash bags are always going to get police thinking homicide, and that was all but confirmed when the medical examiner determined that some of the bones had been cut cleanly through, likely with a chainsaw. Oh, I know.

The number of non-murder reasons for cutting up a body and burying it in the backyard are vanishingly few. She was also able to determine that the victim was a man, and almost certainly over 40 years old. She wasn't able to make much of a guess as to his height because there weren't any complete long bones from the arms or legs. Investigators maybe learned the reason for that the next day when a woman showed up at the scene and told them she'd lived in the house from 1985 to 1995 and that her dog had often dug up bones.

The dog pen was right over there, she said, pointing right at where the black bag had been dug up. Figuring they were animal bones, she'd just checked them out. But now that I think about it, she told the police, they were kind of big. Yikes. All right. Are we adding mysterious bones dug up by canines to our list of items to call the police over? Like, okay, it's never a mannequin.

It's not any type of pillow or cushion. And it's not animal bones. Just give the non-emergency line of ring. Just to be sure. It might be animal bones. And that's good. But sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's not.

Yeah, it's 3-1-1, folks. Give them a call. Another witness gave the police some tantalizing, if vague, information. This guy's name was Owen Carlson, and he said his family owned the property the body had been found on and had rented it out since the early 70s. He didn't remember much about the various families who'd stayed there, but one thing stuck in his mind. At the tail end of the 1970s, a couple of young women had turned up, sisters from New Mexico. They'd said they were looking for their dad, who had dropped completely out of touch about a year before,

and they thought he'd been staying at the house on Canyon Road. They'd stuck in Carlson's mind because of something one of the women had said. One of them said that her father's new wife was the type of person who'd kill him, he told deputies. Carlson couldn't remember much more than that, but he told officers his sister had handled most of the rental arrangements back then, and she could likely tell him more. And that turned out to be the God's truth. Sis had a razor-sharp memory and kept meticulous notes Sis had a razor-sharp memory and kept meticulous notes

and she was able to tell investigators that the young women who had come looking for their father were named Gina and Jacqueline Terakone. Sis couldn't remember the name of the woman's dad if she'd ever even known it, but her records told her who'd been renting the place at the time he'd gone missing. A woman called Jerry Hess, who lived there with her two daughters,

one, a very pretty woman in her mid-20s named Renee, and the other a little girl maybe eight years old named Nicole. Sergeant Ben Benson, who would handle this case almost single-handedly, felt like things were starting to move, and they moved even faster when he got a call from a lady who worked for the major crimes unit of the King County Sheriff's Office up in Seattle. She'd seen the Canyon Road case on the news, and it reminded her of a cold missing person's case that had crossed her desk years ago.

From that file, she was able to confirm the names of the women who'd been looking for their dad and gave Benson the missing man's name, Joseph Terricone. And he hadn't been staying at the house on Canyon Road. He'd come down from Anchorage, Alaska, to visit his girlfriend, Renee, who'd been living there with her mom, Jerry. Now, Renee is the pretty 20-something, right? Yeah, yeah. Now, Jerry Hess had died in 2000, where her two daughters were now, or even what last names they had, nobody seemed to know. One thing the investigators did soon confirm, though, was the identity of the buried body.

When they compared the DNA sample from the bones with one from Joe Terraconi's sister, they got an undeniable match. The partial skeleton belonged to Joe. Joe Terracone was born in Brooklyn in 2025, and if you have a preset image of an Italian-American family in the 1930s, Brooklyn, the Terraconies probably fit that pretty well. They had a loud, exciting house with lots of music, lots of arguments, and lots of laughter, and big homemade meals. When he was a teenager, Joe started dating a girl named Rose. Rose was kind of quiet and shy, and the first time Joe brought her home to his family, she was a little overwhelmed.

She'd later tell her daughters that her in-laws were nuts, but she loved them. She and Joe started dating just in time for him to be shipped off for the last couple years of World War II. And as soon as he got back in 1946, they got married. Joe was a people person, and he soon got a job as a salesman. It was work he could do anywhere in the country, and Joe wasn't the kind of person who was willing to stay in one place for long. He had a serious case of the travel bug. And one day, he came home from work and said, Rose, pack up, we're moving. We're going to Florida. Texas, Washington State, and New Mexico would follow. Joe would barely get the travel dust off his shoes before he'd start wanting to pull up stakes again. This was tough on Rose, who leaned much

more toward putting downroutes and settling in one place. God, I was going to say, I'm exhausted, just listen to that. But you know, you got to love that good old 1950s madman relationship dynamic, right? Rose, we're moving. Okay. Yeah. She and Joe would eventually have seven kids together. And although there's no question that Joe was a loving dad, he also had that mid-century, mindset that taking care of them was women's work. And it's a lot of work and moving hundreds of miles away every few years didn't make it any easier. Rose hated having to give up her garden when they moved and having to leave furniture behind. She wanted to be in one place. She wanted to have a garden and as most of the kids left home, she wanted to get a job of her own. Hell yeah. After they've

been married for more than 30 years, Joe and Rose were living in New Mexico for the second time. Joe came home one day and said, hey, baby, guess what? We're moving to Texas. And this time, Rose said, uh, no. She was tired of moving and she wanted to stay in Albuquerque. And Joe, underestimating how serious she was, responded with a flippant little, well, then I'll divorce you. Just blow and smoke, as their daughter would put it later. Fine, Rose said, divorce me. And though it took a little longer than that to wind down, that was pretty much it for their marriage. Rose stayed in New Mexico with the younger kids and Joe hit the road. They still cared about each other,

and Joe promised he'd support the kids who stayed at home with their mom, and he did, sending checks on top of his monthly child support to get clothes and school supplies. Those checks arrived regularly, right up to the fall of 1978, when the child support payments also ended, and so did any communication whatsoever with Joe Terraconi.

A 50 years old in the mid-70s, and single for the first time since his teens, Before you could say midlife crisis, Joe had put together a whole new wardrobe of leisure suits, bell bottoms, ties as thick as your whole entire neck, and gold chains to compliment his hairy chest. Ooh, I like it. Not enough hair on the chest these days. Have you noticed that? This is like the third time you've mentioned on the show. I think we've discovered the subject of your manifesto. Manifesto. Get it? Get it? unfortunately I do he was working in Seattle when his divorce was finalized

as a salesman for Gerard's Meets which just for some reason cracks me the hell up every time Gerard's Meets and he was lonely so he filled in another square on the midlife crisis bingo card and started dating women half his age they Joe was a big friendly charismatic guy

and there have always been younger women attracted to that type. Add the fact that he was making good money as a salesman, and he got the attention of a slightly different kind of younger woman, too. That sounded a little judgyer than I meant it, too. I just mean like, you know, the kind who likes money, the stability, which who doesn't. So he started dating Renee Curtis, a secretary at Gerard's meets. Renée was in her early 20s, pretty and bright. To start with, they kept things pretty casual and dated other people, too. Joe was smitten with Renee, but he had his doubts. Family was really important to him, and he wasn't super impressed with how Renee acted as a mom. See, that little girl who lived with Renee and her mom Jerry

on Canyon Road, Nicole, remember? Well, she wasn't actually Jerry's daughter. She was Renee's. Renee had her when she was only 15, and then had a son, Aaron, a year later. She'd left Aaron with her ex-husband up in Alaska, and seems to have pretty much forgotten about him after that. And as for Nicole, well, Grandma Jerry mostly brought her up. When people would visit, Renee would often introduce Nicole as her sister. So there was reason, you know, for Joe to have doubts. Renee wasn't about to win Mother of the Year, but she had a spark. She was beautiful and she was a lot of fun, and pretty soon Joe had decided he wanted to see her exclusively. Shortly after, in 1977, Joe relocated to Anchorage, Alaska to start a meat distribution business, Alaska Meat and Provisions. Alaska, in the

70s was in the middle of an oil boom, and there was a flood of new money and new people, which meant more grocery stores, bars, restaurants, more everything. Joe, Salesman Supreme, soon had deals all over the place within hundreds of miles of anchorage, and he was raking it in. He asked Renee to come up and work as his office manager, which she did. Her family already lived up there, so this was kind of a homecoming for her. Joe set up Renee and her mom, Jerry, in a house on Jewel Lake while he slept in a sparse apartment above his office. Renee had affection for Joe, but it didn't really go much beyond that,

but he fell hard for her, got more and more besotted as time went by, even though he knew she didn't really feel the same way about him. He showered her and her family with gifts and even gave her a generous share in his business. He asked Renee to marry him several times, and each time she said no. Her mom, Jerry, who liked Joe and who very much knew the value of a dollar, thought she was crazy, but Renee was firm. When Joe pressed her on why she refused him, she was blunt. He was too old. What would their life look like 15 years down the road or 30? Renee Hess was born in Spokane in 1953. Her mom, Jerry's third child and second biological one. In 1948, Jerry's sister had had a baby, which for some reason drove Jerry nuts with jealousy,

and within a year, she and her husband, Chris Natarro, had adopted a boy they called Nicholas. Renee and her older sister Robin came along a little later during Jerry's second short-lived marriage to a guy called Albert Hess. Jerry was a nurse with a reputation for competence and caring, but at home, she was sort of a stereotypical chain-smoking, sharp-tongued mom. Bit of a hard ass. She drilled it into her kids that family had to come before anything else in their lives. Some took this to heart more than others. Like, Robin was confident enough to build a life and, Identities somewhat removed from her family and maintained a little bit of distance. Renee was a handful when she was young and she and Jerry butted heads a lot. They were actually really similar and once Renee grew up, they bonded tight.

Everywhere Renee lived as an adult, Jerry lived too, right up to her death in 2000. Wow. And Nick unquestioningly drank in everything his mom said. He might have been the older sibling, but he definitely wasn't a dominant for. All the female members of his family were smart and witty, and Nick, well, wasn't. And his quicker sisters ran circles around him. He was big, though, and eagerly took on the role Jerry demanded of him as his sister's protector. Nick dropped out of high school and joined the army.

He did well in that structured environment, including a tour in Vietnam, where he was a cook. When he got out, he married a pretty roommate of Robbins named Vicki Lee Snyder. physically at least they were a good match. Nick was 6-3 and well north of 200 pounds and Vicky was just shy of six feet herself. Oh like you, Amazon got us. Younger sister Robin adored Vicky, but Renee and Mama Jerry didn't really like her much. They were both neat freaks and they weren't impressed at how Vicky kept her home. Oh God, I'm on Vicky's side. You know, it's not your house. Why are you worried about it?

Man, these... Team Vicky. Old-timey mothers-in-law and in-laws are all in your business. God. By this time, Renee had also gotten married to an Alaskan bush pilot named Tom Curtis. And although the marriage didn't last, Renee stayed up in the land of the Midnight Sun with her kids and brought Mom Jerry up to stay too. Nick, newly married, but very much still a mama's boy, brought Vicky up north soon after. and a few years after that, Robin moved there too.

But Renee would come back to Washington State every now and again to work for a while. And it was there in 1976 that she met Joe Terakoni, started dating him, and eventually moved into the house he bought for her and her mama up in Alaska. But there was definitely some trouble in paradise. Joe was on the road a lot for work, making deliveries, meeting clients, and trying to find new ones. and he never called her out about it, but he suspected she was seeing other men. And he was right.

Renee was a gorgeous woman in her 20s. The idea of being tied to one guy made her uncomfy, and it made it worse that both Joe and her mom were constantly pressuring her to settle down. That just made her resist harder. Oh, hell yeah. And at some point, she full-on rebelled, hooked up with a German chef named Kurt Winkler.

We don't know if Joe ever met the guy, but it wouldn't have been hard for Renee to keep her two men apart. Joe was always on the road, and Kurt worked nine-week shifts catering for crews on the oil fields. Kurt got Renee's brother Nick a job as a cook in an all-night diner, too, up in a tiny little town called Healy, where Nick's wife, Vicky, worked as a waitress and housekeeper at a hotel. Renee even got engaged to Kurt at one point, although for her that didn't necessarily mean she was, you know, committed. It was kind of like, yeah, I'll take that pretty ring. Thanks. Unsurprisingly, the wedding bells never got to ring. The engagement flamed out in the

Jerry Springerest way possible when Sister Robin visited and promptly banged her little sister's brand new fiancé. Wow, Robin. Girl, really? Like, that is outside the code. We do not have sex with our sister's fiance. So, needless to say, that was it for Renee and Kurt, and also it for Renee and Robin for a while, too, although the sisters would eventually kiss and makeup. also started to cool things off with Joe. She was the type of person who liked her clean slates all the way clean and she was restless and looking to turn

the page on her life in Alaska. So in 1978, she moved back to Washington to Puyallup and the house on Canyon Road with mom Jerry and daughter Nicole in tow, though not her son Aaron, who she left up north with his daddy. Poor kids, lucky shouldn't just leave him naked on a hillside

with the wolves, the bears or something. That's how much of a shit she gave about him apparently. Crap on a cracker. But she and Joe were still kind of sort of involved with Jerry constantly encouraging Joe to keep after Renee. Because for Jerry, wealthy plus older was the perfect combination in a potential husband for her pretty daughter. I mean, what else are pretty daughters for if not to hook us a fat wallet, right? The old love affair between a mother-in-law and her potential son-in-law's bank account, Taylor's as old as time. Yeah, me, it already bought my house, you know? Keep that gravy train going, right, Jerry?

And one of Joe's grown sons lived in Seattle, and whenever Joe visited, he'd drive down to Puyallup to see Renee, bringing him all kinds of gifts. He was just Santa Claus showing up, you know, stuff for everybody. In July of 78, Joe flew to Hawaii to visit with his daughter Jacqueline and her family, and it was not a good visit. Joe was distracted, only half there, even when he was playing with his grandkids. All he wanted to talk about was Renee. When Jacqueline, not for the first time, warned him that Renee was only interested in his money, true, he brushed her warnings aside. It was so frustrating for her. And that, sadly, was the last time Jacqueline would ever see her father alive. On September 23, 1978, Renee and Jerry threw a big barbecue at the house on Canyon Road,

a birthday party for one of Renee's cousins, and they invited Joe. Joe had learned to cook from his mom, and it was always a big social thing for him. Wherever in the country, he and Rose happened to be every Sunday, he'd cook big monster spaghetti dinners and invite all the neighbors or make enough pizza for the whole street. He'd make something he called a cuckoo fritz, which was pizza dough wrapped around a whole bunch of different cheeses mixed together and deep fried, which sounds amazing. It sounds fabulous, but it is a terrible name. Like, it sounds like a cocktail my grandma would drink.

does sound like a girl drink from the 20s. Yeah, it sounds awesome. It sounds so good. For the birthday party, he brought down a whole bunch of steaks and set himself up by the grill cooking him however anybody wanted. He'd bought so much meat that by the end of the party, he was just tossing strips of steak to some very happy doggies. Joe was his usual, amiable self during the party, but Renee's cousin remembered that she seemed kind of chilly towards Joe. His generosity with the steaks seemed to irritate her for some reason. Mostly she just ignored him. Decades later, when Sergeant Ben Benson tried to piece

together a timeline of Joe's disappearance, he figured it must have happened right after this party. Two of Joe's daughters, Jacqueline and Gina, had filed a missing person's report way back in January 1979, but it led to an investigation that was cursory at best. That'll happen when a grown man vanishes, especially if, like Joe, that man is single and been prone to wanderlust his entire life. I mean, how many times have we seen that, right? Including, like, you know, last week. A detective at the time had asked Renee when the last time she'd seen Joe was. She said he'd shown up sometime in August or September of 78 in a brand new Mercedes, once again asking her to marry him. He showed her two first-class air tickets to Rome, saying they'd fly there together. But Renee, yet

again, said no, and Joe got angry and teary-eyed, and then threw the tickets down and stalked off on foot. And that was, she claimed, the last time she'd ever seen him. Now, this didn't make a whole lot of sense if you thought about it for more than two seconds. Dude lives thousands of miles away in a whole other state, but just walks off on foot, leaving his brand new sports car behind. Yeah. Renee would claim Joe deliberately left the Mercedes for her to have, but said she refused to drive it on principle. But that doesn't add up with all the relatives.

who clearly remembered her showing off her fancy new car. Or with the fact that Renee never, like she wouldn't know a principal if it shit in her hair. Like, please. On principle, my ass. Yeah. Back to 2007, and it was a chat with one of those relatives, Renee's cousin, Victoria, that really opened up the case for Sergeant Benson. Victoria asked if it was Nick's wife that had been found out on Canyon Road.

No, Benson said. completely in the dark. This was the first time he was hearing about Nick's wife. Nick went to prison for killing his wife, but they never found the body, Victoria said. Just casual, like, oh yeah, you didn't know this? Uh, no. In 1978, Nick Natara was working as a nighttime fry cook at an all-night gas station slash diner on the outskirts of Denali National Park. His wife Vicky worked as a maid and waitress in the Healy Hotel, and their paychecks didn't add up to a whole lot. They lived in a trailer behind the truck stop, and cash was always tied. and their marriage wasn't happy for long.

Nick was always insecure, especially about his intelligence, and he started to imagine Vicky sliding him all the time or disrespecting him, God forbid. Sometimes what she said would confuse him, and that was just as bad. When he drank, he'd get angry and accuse her of cheating on him. He needed to know where she was at all times. If he didn't know, it meant she must be cheating on him.

One time he hit her and she left, got a protection order against him, but Nick, with Renee acting as an intermediary, talked her into going back. Oh, great. Nice, Renee. But the marriage was on its last legs. They separated again in the summer of 1978, with Vicky staying for three weeks with Nick's sister Robin in Anchorage. Robin would later say she always felt closer to Vicky than she did to Nick. Nick scared her. Yeah, Robin seems like the voice of reason in this family, I mean, obviously, except for the whole. whole sleeping with her sister's fiancé part, but she was the one who kind of had her own identity outside the family. And in this family, I think that was probably a smart thing to do.

Yeah, I feel like the bar's super low. So, like, she's cleared it. She's cleared it by a mile. She's fine. She eventually went back to Healy to give things with Nick one last try, but she already had one foot out the door. She'd barely come back, though, before Nick woke up early in the morning with a stabbing pain in his side. His appendix had burst, and that's a big deal when you're in the middle of nowhere Alaska like they were. Vicky drove him the 111 miles to Memorial Hospital in Fairbanks, and with a rushed goodbye, dropped him off and raced back to the highway.

See, Vicki's job at the Healy Hotel was on shaky ground, and she'd been in such a rush to get on the road with Nick that she hadn't had time to call and let them know what was going on. If she wasn't in Healy in time for her shift, thought she'd be fired, and they could not afford to lose her income. But Nick was hurt that she'd just rushed out of there and didn't stay by his bedside, and over his three days in the hospital, that hurt stood into anger. Vicky didn't care about him.

She didn't respect him. She'd raced off back to Healy to be with some other guy. She hadn't even called. She had, in fact, called every day. But it was always when nurses were walking Nick through the hospital halls as part of his post-surgery. rehab. Nick was immune to logic by this point, though. He wound himself up tighter

and tighter, as paranoid people tend to do, and he discharged himself from the hospital before his doctors thought he was ready to leave, so against medical advice, and called a co-worker asking her to find Vicky and tell her he was ready to come home. The co-worker told him to call back in 45

minutes. Nick wandered over to J.C. Penny, which back in the 70s still sold guns. He told the clerk in his slow, careful way, that he wanted a handgun, something his wife could use to protect herself while he was at work. A few minutes and $156 later, he walked out with a bag holding a 38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver and a box of shells. He went back to the hospital and called Healy, learned that Vicky was on her way, had set off as soon as she'd heard he was ready, and would be there in about

45 minutes. So he sat and waited and let himself get angry again. When Vicky got there, he told or they'd be staying in a motel in Fairbanks tonight instead of heading back to Healy and sent her out to the liquor store to get Seagram's whiskey and 7-Up. When they got into their room at the motel, Nick ignored the 7-Up and took long poles of whiskey straight out of the bottle.

Vicky refused when he offered it to her. A lot of her relationship with Nick these days was knowing how to handle him when he was angry, and she felt she needed her wits about her tonight. She'd just have to do her best to keep him calm till he passed out. Sure enough, Nick unloaded on her

with accusations that she didn't care about him, that she thought he was stupid, that she was cheating on him. Vicky weathered the storm and worked hard to reassure him until half a bottle in and still tired from the surgery, Nick passed out. In the morning, they stopped for breakfast at a restaurant, and Nick had some more whiskey in seven-ups, a little hair of the dog. On the road back to Healy, he kept sipping from his bottle of seagrums,

or at least that's what Vicky thought. Nick wasn't actually drinking anymore, but he wanted his wife to think he was more drunk than he actually was. About 50 miles north of Healy, there was a turnoff that led to a gravel pit. As they approached, with the sky already dark, Nick started groaning in pain, and when Vicky asked what was wrong, he told her his stitches must have opened. They needed to pull over so they could stop the bleeding. They could drive up to that gravel pit.

The gravel pit was a wide, flat area dotted with six-foot-tall piles of gravel. It was isolated, deserted. it. At this time of day, the only people who would ever come here were young couples looking to make out in their cars, and there were none of those right now. When she stopped the car, Vicky got out and hurried around to the passenger side to help Nick, but he opened the door himself as she got there. He looked past her and said, Vicky, look behind you, look. She turned around. Why wouldn't she? And Nick pulled his newly purchased revolver from the waistband of his jeans and shot her right in the head.

She fell forward onto the ground, dead immediately. Nick stumbled painfully out of the car and shot her again, in the back. Then he dragged her body to an embankment at the edge of the gravel pit and pushed her off. His wife's body rolled down into the darkness. Nick, not one of the world's great forward thinkers, figured no one would ever find her. She was only 25 years old and would have had a whole life ahead of her when she'd kicked this sack of shit to the curb. This was September 22nd, 1978, just days before Joe Terricone would go missing down in Puyallup.

As he drove back to Healy, the gravity of what he had just done settled down to Nick, and he started to panic. So as soon as he got home to his trailer, he called Jerry and told her everything. A boy's best friend is his mother, after all. I hate this little fucking weasel so much. After berating Nick with all the force you'd used to scold a puppy for peeing in the wrong place, Jerry told him to come on down and stay with her and Renee and Puyallup. Telling him to turn himself in probably never occurred to her. Family had to come first.

A little later, Nick also spoke to Renee, and we'll circle back to that conversation a little later. He went back to the house on Canyon to stay with his mom and his sister. A week later, he was back in Alaska telling everyone that Vicky had just run off, probably with whatever guy she'd been seeing. Vicky's body already frozen solid in the Alaskan weather was found on October 15th by some kids out sledding. She didn't have any idea on her, but when police published her description in the local papers, the owner of the Healy Hotel came forward and identified her.

He told them no one had seen Vicky since she'd driven over to Fairbanks to pick up Nick from the hospital. A little digging showed that a maid from the hotel where Nick and Vicky had stayed had found boxes for a gun and ammunition under one of the beds, plus a receipt showing that Nick had bought a 38 Smith & Wesson in shells on September 21st. Oh, good job, guy. God, he's so bad at this. This was not a tricky case. Nick was arrested.

His initial story was that driving home after a major surgery, he got an urge to try out some target shooting with his new gun. You know, like you do after an appendectomy. Right. So he had Vicky pull into the gravel pit and start setting up some cans. and bottles on a fence, then the gun had fallen, landed on the fender of the car, gone off, and shot Vicky in the head. As you might have gathered, saying Nick wasn't the brightest bulb in the box was an insult to dim bulbs everywhere. No kidding. The police soon got something like the truth from him, and the case moved on to the prosecutor's office, who let Nick plead down to a manslaughter

charge in a sentence of 15 years. Why? Apparently, there were so many murders in Alaska in the 70s that the state would take any deal they could and defense attorneys knew it. Oh, boy. Nick Nataro had flat out executed his wife and he was released in 1986 after serving only seven years. Great job, Alaska. Great fucking job. That is nauseating. Nauseating. Disgusting. Nick very much did not keep his nose clean after his release. He got arrested twice for sex.

crimes, the second in the mid-90s for molesting his stepdaughter. Fucking gross. In 2008, when Sergeant Ben Benson and his partner talked to Nick, he was still on probation for that crime. He was almost 60 now, but looked closer to 80. He split his time between the Bread of Life mission and living on the streets. So Benson figured that after you've killed one person, killing another one gets easier. He had Nick Nautaro as the prime suspect in Joe Terraconi's death.

Nick was nearing the end of his probation, and the detectives met him under the pretext of finding out what he intended to do when it was up. The detectives figured they'd have a better chance of getting something out of Nick if they started things off easy before turning the screws, and that's how things turned out. Nick talked readily about his past crimes, mentioning Vicky's murder as casually as you might talk about stubbing your toe. When Benson eventually told him they were investigating the death of Joe Terracone, Nick looked shocked and scared. Whenever the detectives mentioned Joe's name, he'd push his chair back a little from the table until he was sitting right up against the far wall. Talk about revealing body language. Benson told him they'd been investigating the case for months and had probable cause to arrest Nick and his sisters for murder. Nick's response was telling, Renée, my sisters weren't involved, not one iota.

The detectives, who were not dumb, took this as Renee was involved, Robin maybe wasn't. When they pressed Nick, telling him they had evidence his sisters were involved, he shook his head. When he'd flown down to Pew Allop after killing Vicky, his mom told him she'd shot Joe, then put him in the freezer down in the basement. Nick had just helped her cut him up and bury him. Renee was in Hawaii and had nothing to do with it. The detectives told him, they didn't believe him. Joe was a big guy over six feet tall and built like a Honda Civic. Nick's mom had somehow managed to get his body down into the basement by herself,

and crammed it into the freezer? Come on. Like, how big was this freezer anyway? They told Nick they thought he'd shot Joe, and that's all it took to get him to admit it. He told them he'd asked Joe to come down to the basement and take a look at their busted washing machine. And when Joe bent over, Nick had shot him twice in the head, with the same gun he'd killed Vicky with same exact MO, too. Again, he told them Renee had been in Hawaii. He hadn't brought up Robin at all and had apparently forgotten the police had even mentioned her. And after he'd Joe? We went to Kmart and bought a chainsaw on a tarp. Mom held the tarp while I used the chainsaw. I cut off Joe's legs, his arms, and his head. My mother took the head away and got rid of it

separately. Now something about that, we? Set off the detective's spidey senses. Who had driven Nick to Kmart to get the chainsaw? It would have taken only some moderately quick thinking for Nick to say, my mom, seeing as how he'd already thrown Jerry, safely dead now and unable to conjure. predict him under the bus, but quick-thinking was not a thing Nick had in his repertoire. I don't remember, he said. Oh, bravo. Truly one of the century's finest minds. Yeah, this guy's a hoot.

So, why had he shot Joe? He was always trying to get Renee into bed, and he wouldn't leave her alone. He kept asking her to marry him, and wouldn't take no for an answer. My mother called me in Alaska, and she asked me to come and take care of the problem. She said Renee had already gone to Hawaii to get away from Joe. Now, this didn't exactly jive with what detectives already knew. For one thing, they knew damn well Renee was in town at the time of Joe's disappearance and that Jerry, as well as really liking Joe, had encouraged him to keep pursuing Renee.

But replaced Jerry with Renee in Nick's version of events, and you had a lot more believable story. So was that it? Renee learns from her mom that Nick has just killed his wife when it's coming down to Puella, so she calls up her brother and tells him about her little problem. She knows now Nick's capable of murder and that his anointed position of family protector was one of the few things he was actually proud of in his life. Even now, 30 years later, Sergeant Benson thought Nick seemed proud of helping out his sister, even as he was taken downtown and charged with first-degree murder.

After Joe's disappearance, Renee had moved all over California in the Pacific Northwest, mainly doing retail and office work interspersed with the gig modeling lingerie down in San Francisco and employment at a place called elite modeling in Seattle. Now, there are two types of businesses that call themselves elite modeling. One is a one-room operation in a small-town strip mall taking pictures of pretty high school girls holding bone-in hams in ads for the butcher down the street. And the other's an escort service. Right.

Which is where Renee worked. Of course. No judgment on her for that whatsoever. I just thought the name was funny. Yeah. Yeah. Elite muddling. Got to have something to put on the credit card receipts, right? Right.

Over the years, she came around to her mom's way of thinking, that the best kind of husband was older and loaded, but she had trouble landing the really big fish. She did date a retired Exxon executive, a billionaire, and for a few years, she lived a life of glamorous parties and unlimited cash. But she kept pushing too hard for marriage, and the guy wouldn't bite. That's a rookie mistake right there, Renee. To show him what life would be like without her, Renee packed her bags and left, and she was hardly out the door before the billionaire up and married somebody even younger and more nakedly greedy.

Probably more naked in general. He died a month after the wedding, leaving every cent to Renee's replacement. Oh, my God. That's almost punishment enough. Like, just imagine the rage when she saw that obituary. Oh, and the picture of the bereaved widow inherited all those billions of dollars. Yeah, if you're going to be, yeah, if you're going to be like a sugar baby or a gold digger,

I hate that phrase because it seems so, like, cruel. But like, you got to play the long game. You can't be like, put a ring on it, bitch. You've got to be like, oh, whatever. You can marry me or I could leave you tomorrow. Who knows? Whatever. Play coy.

But that is not something Renee could do. because after that, there was an executive for an auto repair chain. Also older, also richer than fuck. And again, Renee pushed too hard for a ring. This time with a guy who only wanted arm candy, not a wife, and oop, another one bites the dust. The third time was kind of the charm, though. When Renee was 50, she hooked up with Henry Lewis, who owned a string of bail bond's offices in Seattle. He wasn't like Exxon rich, but he was successful and he fell hard for Renee. They got married in 2006, and Renee was working in his office on the day in 2008 when Sergeant Ben Benson, named like a cartoon character, walked through her door and told her that her brother Nick was in some trouble. Now, that wasn't a big surprise.

I mean, Nick was usually in trouble, and Renee reacted pretty casually until Benson told her they were investigating the death of Joe Terakone. At Joe's name, Renee gasped and went into a full body flush, her face and chest turning bright red. Obviously, she thought anything to do with Joe was quite literally dead and buried. She only chilled out when Benson told her he thought she might be guilty of criminal assistance, helping Nick out after the murder, and that the statute of limitations for that had run out long ago. This let Renee relax more than it should have. Being off the hook for one crime didn't mean she couldn't talk herself into being arrested for another one. Mm-hmm.

And that is just what Renee did. She talked about her frustration with Joe, how he'd ask her to just be friends and then push to be more than that. She'd spoken to Nick after he got out of the hospital. She said, I told him I could use some help. And, you know, if he needed to come and rest, relax, and recuperate, it would probably be a good thing. As the interview progressed and got more and more dangerous for Renee, her version of

events fractured and contradicted itself, and her memory, which at the start had been as sharp as attack, got increasingly fuzzy. By the end, it was mostly, I don't recall to every question. But by then, she'd already admitted that she knew Nick had murdered Vicky at the time she asked him to come down and help her. Renee's story was that her mom had called her in a panic and told her to come home. When she got there, Jerry showed her Joe's body in the basement, saying Nick had killed him. just on his own accord, because reasons, I guess. So Renee said she took Nick to Kmart to get a chainsaw in a tarp, and she and Nick took turns cutting up Joe's body.

Jesus Jones, a chainsaw. Oh, it's just so awful. And then Nick buried the remains in the backyard. He headed back to Alaska soon after that, leaving the gun for Renee to dispose of. Sometime later, a boyfriend took her out on Lake Washington, and Renee discreetly dropped the gun over the side. Ben Benson thought that everything after Renee and Nick picking up the chainsaw was probably

true, but he figured Renee was lying through her teeth about what happened before. Her answers and lack of answers led him to believe that Renee had brought Nick down to Puyallup specifically to have him kill Joe, and that she'd probably been right there in the basement when he did it. And why? The answer Nick had given him was probably true. Renee was just tired of Joe bothering her. She wanted a clean slate, and he was getting a little.

on her nerves and that evidently was enough. What happened to ghosting? Or like, just telling guys to fuck off. I found that's pretty successful. Yeah, it's bonkers to me. Renee had talked herself into a conspiracy to commit murder charge and there was no statute of limitations on that.

She was shocked, all shocked Pikachu face as Ben Benson put the old habeas gravis on her and walked her out of Henry's bail bonds and handcuffs. Renee Curtis and Nick Nautaro were tried separately for first-degree murder in 2009. Nick's goose was well and truly cooked after his confession, but the case against Renee was a little dicier. Nick stubbornly refused to implicate his sister, but still did her no favors when he testified, with his version of events radically differing from her own.

But then Renee, who insisted on testifying in her own defense, because of course she did, did herself no favors either, being caught in multiple lies and described. describing, dismembering Joe Terraconi with like no emotion at all, like to a point where it was chilling to everybody in the room. Renee and Nick were both found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison where they remain. After the sentencing, Jacqueline and Rosemary, two of Joe's daughters, saw Robin and some of Renee's other supporters come out into the parking lot and Jacqueline couldn't resist. Your sister got just what she deserved, she yelled.

Hell yeah, it's hard to argue with that. Renee Curtis had her monster of a brother kill a man just to make her life a little easier. And though she'll quite likely die in prison, she's still got a whole lot more free time on planet Earth than Joseph Terraconi. She did get what she deserved. And I got to say, this has got to be one of the most senseless murders I've ever heard him in my life. These people didn't get shit all out of killing this poor man. I mean, she got the Mercedes, I guess, but that was it. Like, she didn't even life insurance policy on him.

Nothing. She just wanted him out of her life. Fine. Like have the emotional fortitude to say that and stick to it. I just cannot wrap my head around the fact that she felt it was appropriate to kill this man just because she didn't want to marry him. Unbelievable. I don't know if it was because she knew her mom wouldn't stop harping on it because her mom clearly had like a really tight psychological grip on her and Jerry was always like, marry him, marry him, marry him. So maybe that was it. I don't know. You know, I'm sure Joe had his fault. It's annoying when a guy won't leave you alone. I get that. But at the same time, I just keep seeing. and him making those big pizzas and spaghetti dinners and inviting the whole neighborhood and tossing big pieces of steak to all the pet dogs, and he didn't deserve this. And neither did Vicky, for God's sake, and it's a shame that justice was so long delayed. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week.

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