Don’t Look Behind You by Ann Rule Page B

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 himand 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 hehad 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 itwasn’t working out—I guess it was because of the way he was treating Heidi. He didn’t want