Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases Read Online Free PDF Page A

her heart began to race. She handled missing persons reports in King County and saw instantly that there were similarities to one of her cases.
    There was really no reason that Jan Rhodes should know about a missing report on a man who almost certainly had disappeared in Pierce County—and not King County. And yet it had ended up on her desk. In fact, she had found it so compelling that she had kept the missing man’s photograph on her desk. She was determined to find him—alive or dead. When she saw the news flash about body parts discovered in June 2007, it struck a chord with Rhodes.
    “Oh my God,” she said to herself as she frantically tried to scrape her cat off its sleeping place on her telephone book. She immediately contacted Pierce County and was directed from one department to another until finally she was told that a Sergeant Benson was the lead detective.
    “We have a missing persons case,” she said in an email to Ben Benson. “The man went missing about August 1978.”
    “Missing from where?” Benson asked when he called Rhodes.
    “10309 Canyon Road in Puyallup. There may be an ‘East’ on the end of that address. For some reason, your department didn’t take the missing report—so we took it. He’s apparently been missing since 1978, but we didn’t take the report until 1993.”
    Jan Rhodes told Ben Benson that she had been in touch with the man’s daughter, who had stubbornly refused to give up looking for him.
    “What’s her name?” Benson asked.
    “Gypsy,” Rhodes said. “Gypsy Tarricone. Her father’s name is Joseph Tarricone.”
    “Bingo!” Benson thought.
    So the elusive Gypsy had been found. Benson hoped that she might have enough information to help him prove that the bones
were
those of her father.
    “We have dentals on our missing man,” Jan Rhodes said, “but I don’t know if you found a skull?”
    Benson told her that, regrettably, they had found only a few parts of the skull: the lower occiput (back), a piece of chinbone, but no upper or lower jaw.
    And no teeth.
    Even if the King County Sheriff’s Office had dental charts of the father of the woman called Gypsy, they would do no good in identifying him unless the Pierce County investigators searching the property should find more portions of skull and/or jawbones. And that search had been called off due to lack of success after the first bone discoveries.
    Sergeant Ben Benson was about to follow a dizzying trail that would lead him from the baking heat of the Southwest to the frigid temperatures in Alaska and on to the East Coast. And he would realize once again what strangers neighbors can be. It was no longer the way it was earlier inthe century, when neighbors often knew almost everything about families who lived on their block. The extended Carlson family was the exception. But even they knew only bits and pieces of the lives of the tenants in their old yellow house.
    “Jan Rhodes deserves so much credit for the effort she put into a missing case that wasn’t even in her department’s jurisdiction,” Benson recalls. “She went back to old records and found the original missing report that Gina Tarricone, Gypsy’s younger sister, had filed in January 1979!”
    The report had not been filed with Pierce County, and Benson wondered why. It had been filed in the small town of Des Moines, Washington, which is in the southwest part of King County.
    Odd.
    The complainant’s name was Gina Tarricone.
    Benson set out to locate the elusive Tarricone sisters. The Des Moines police department still had the missing report Gina filed, and it was full of information.
    Apparently Gina had gone to the Des Moines police department as she tried desperately to locate her father. She had given all the facts she knew to Detective Jerry Burger.
    Benson found that the entire Tarricone family had been distraught over Joe’s disappearance, but Gina was the official complainant. She was living with her brother Aldo at the time and