Don’t Look Behind You by Ann Rule Page A

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 toogood 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