The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “How do you know?” I asked, impatient to learn the details.

  “I got a call from an informant about three weeks ago. He said he’d gotten high with some Hispanic guy and the guy boasted that he’d killed Jacqui Bernard.”

  It was, I realized, just what McEwan had been hoping for when he’d said he’d just sit back and wait. I’d always imagined that killers buried the secret of their crimes deeper than gravediggers buried the bodies they left behind, but McEwan had known, as I hadn’t then, that a vast number of killers get caught because they’re proud of their savagery and sooner or later want to brag. “This guy’s clever,” McEwan went on. “But he’s stupid, too. His name’s Ricardo Caputo.”

  At this moment, I felt the relief I’ve mentioned earlier, at this moment and all the while that McEwan was telling me about his tipster. “My informant said he was calling in response to one of the posters Hickey and I put up,” McEwan said. “Wouldn’t give me his name. Said he’d been arrested in September 1983, gone to jail, got out a few months ago, and did drugs a few weeks ago with this Caputo fellow, who was living up around One Hundred and Fifty-eighth Street.” McEwan’s voice was breathless, as if he were running, not sitting on a banquette. “My informant had his girlfriend with him,” he went on, “and she said something that made my fellow mad and Caputo said, ‘Any bitch gives me trouble, I’d kill her.’ Then the girlfriend left, and Caputo started bragging about how he really had killed people. Men as well as women. And he mentioned Jacqui Bernard specifically. Said he’d met her in a bar or at some sort of outing. Said she was too old for him but he started seeing her anyway. Because she was rich. Because she loaned him money. Let him use her car. Even said she’d help him out with a problem he was having with Immigration. She knew people who could fix it. Then one night, he went to her apartment to borrow her car. He needed it for some job. But this time, Jacqui didn’t want him to have it—maybe she was starting to have her doubts about him. Anyway, she said no, and they started quarreling. And he strangled her.”

  “He killed her because she wouldn’t lend him her car?” I said.

  “He’s probably killed for even less. He’s been a busy sonovabitch. He killed a girl in Nassau County. Another one in Westchester. Two more after that.” McEwan had gone to the New York police and to the FBI with his informant’s story. They’d supplied him with a huge file on Caputo. “He stabbed and choked the first one. Strangled the next. The other two he beat to death. You want to know how?”

  I had the same feeling I’d had when he’d asked if I wanted to know about the bedspread. But this time he didn’t wait for my response. He just began talking, talking fast. Maybe he needed to get it off his chest. “One of them he stomped to death,” he said. “The other one, he used an iron bar. And he tortured her first. Pulled out all her teeth.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. I saw those teeth. Little pearls encrusted with blood. But I was determined to play the role of an unflusterable journalist. It meant that out of sight and under the table, I clenched my hands together and that I swallowed hard, but as surreptitiously as I could. Then I got my voice back and I asked, “You sure it’s the same guy?”

  “Damn sure.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  It was a photograph—a copy of a photograph, to be exact. The picture showed a soulful-looking young man with deep-set eyes, a sensual cleft chin, a graceful bowed mouth, and wavy, windswept hair: a handsome, even beautiful, young man. “This is Caputo,” McEwan said. “I got his picture from the FBI. And I’ve been showing it around. And you know what? I showed it to all the bartenders up near Jacqui’s building, and one of them, the bartender at a place called Cannon’s, said he’d seen this guy come into the bar. With Jacqui!” McEwan’s voice was triumphant. “And that’s not all. I showed it to the super at Jacqui’s building. He recognized the face, too. He said that a short while after Jacqui was killed, he noticed this very guy trying to get into the building. He had some keys that didn’t work, and when the super asked him what he wanted and who he was, the guy had a cock-and-bull story. ‘I’m Jacqui Bernard’s roommate,’ he says, ‘and I’ve got to get back into our apartment.’ The super doesn’t know anything about any roommate. Jacqui’d never mentioned one. So he says to the guy, ‘Jacqui’s dead, and the keys have been changed,’ and the guy doesn’t say a word, he just hurries away. But the super got a good look at him, and it was my guy. Caputo.”

  I was astonished. And happy, sure that the next thing McEwan would say was that Caputo was about to be taken into custody. “I guess that’s it, then,” I said, and smiled. “I guess you’ve found your man.”

  But McEwan didn’t smile back. “I haven’t found him,” he muttered. “No one can find him. He’s disappeared.”

  Disappeared? The word brought my nausea back full force. “Yeah,” McEwan was saying. “He’s still out there somewhere. And that’s where you come in. I need a favor. I need you to get your magazine to run this picture.”

  I was still feeling sick, and I had a strong urge to put my hand over my mouth, but I swallowed again and nodded acquiescence.

  “I gotta get the picture out there,” McEwan said. “This guy could be anywhere. Here. Europe. South America. Who knows? But maybe someone’ll see the picture and recognize him, tell us where he is.”

  The next day I called the editor who’d handled my story about Jacqui. I told him about Caputo and asked him to run the photograph. But the editor wasn’t interested. “We can’t run a photo of every guy suspected of murder,” he said to me. “What are we? A post office wall?”

  I wish I could say that I argued with him. But I wasn’t a bold person then. When my editor told me no, I didn’t put up a fight. I just subsided, reported the conversation to McEwan, and told him unhappily that I couldn’t help him.

  That was pretty much the end of our dealings with each other, although we continued to speak on the phone for a few more months. Then I got busy on a book that required my living in Boston for a while, and McEwan got busy on other cases, and after a time we drifted apart. But I was happy to see when I turned on my television set one day in 1991 that he’d gotten Caputo’s photograph “out there.” On the popular true-crime show Unsolved Mysteries, there was McEwan, holding up the picture of Caputo, recounting the story of how he’d shown it around in Jacqui’s neighborhood, and urging viewers to call the show if they knew the whereabouts of the man in the picture.

  Still, I gather that no one called. That is, no one who really knew where Caputo was, though the show got lots of tips and leads from people who said they’d seen a man like the one in the picture, tips and leads that the FBI checked out but that ultimately came to nothing. Caputo was gone; dust gathered on the files of the women the FBI had solid evidence he had killed; and Jacqui’s murder, for which he was now viewed as the prime suspect, remained unsolved.

  All of which is by way of explaining why, when I unfolded my copy of the New York Times on the morning of March 10, 1994, I was beside myself with both amazement and excitement when I read, right on the front page, that Ricardo Caputo, who had been living in Mexico under an assumed name, had fled that country for Argentina and had there admitted who he was, confessed to having murdered several women, and arranged to turn himself in. He’d effectuated his surrender yesterday, the paper said, and was now in the custody of New York police. I wanted to share my amazement and excitement, and even though Jacqui’s name wasn’t among those Caputo had listed as his victims, and despite the fact that it was quite early in the morning, I reached for the phone and called McEwan.

  A strange voice answered his phone. It was his old partner, John McGrath, a man I’d never met. “Gordon’s gone,” he said.

  I thought he meant gone out, so I asked, “When can I reach him?”

  “He’s dead,” McGrath said. “Died eighteen months ago. Cancer.”

  It was hard to believe, the way getting that sort of
news about people with whom you’ve been out of touch is always hard to believe. You visualize them the way they were when you last saw them, and in McEwan’s case the last time I’d seen him—nine years ago, I realized with a start—he’d been not just vigorous, but bursting with passion. Remembering his vitality on that day, I murmured, “I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

  “Me, too,” McGrath sighed. “Especially today. Because Gordon would have been so happy today. The Caputo case drove him, you know.”

  “I do.”

  “It drove him almost to the day he died. He shoulda lived to see this.”

  “He should’ve.”

  “He shoulda got to meet that sonovabitch. Caputo.”

  “So you think this Caputo really killed Jacqui Bernard?” I interrupted him, thinking as I did how much less reticent I’d become over the past decade, how much the years I’d spent at crime reporting since I’d first met McEwan had altered me, made me come to inhabit the role I’d once merely practiced with him.

  “Yeah. Probably,” McEwan’s old partner said. “I’ve already talked to the police. They think he’s killed a lot more people than the ones whose murders he’s admitted.”

  “Natalie Brown,” I said, glancing down at my newspaper. “Judith Becker. Barbara Taylor. Laura Gomez.”

  “Yeah,” McGrath snorted, “the ones we were ninety-nine percent sure he killed. The ones he was known to have been romancing.”

  They were all young women, much younger than Jacqui had been. “Maybe he didn’t want to admit he romanced an older woman,” I said.

  “Yeah. Mr. Macho,” McGrath snorted again.

  After that, we spent a few moments talking about why Caputo had turned himself in. The story we’d both read in the paper made no sense. It was that Caputo had suffered a sudden accession of remorse. “You know, folks don’t come down with remorse like a flu or a head cold,” McGrath said. “There’s gotta be more to the story.” I agreed. But what was the whole story? Neither of us could dope it out. Then, “They’re arraigning him this morning,” McGrath said. “Out in Mineola.”

  As soon as he said that, I knew I was going to try to write a book about Caputo. Partly it was because I still imagined that I could solve the mystery of Jacqui’s death. But mostly it was because Caputo had inhabited my mind for so many years that I wanted to get him out of it, to exorcise him.

  Mineola was half an hour by train from my apartment. I said a hasty good-bye to McGrath and headed for the railroad.

  2

  The Nassau County courtroom in which Caputo was about to be arraigned for the first killing to which he’d admitted—that of Natalie Brown—was jammed with TV and newspaper reporters by the time I got there, so jammed that I couldn’t get a seat in the press rows up front. I slipped into a back pew, just in time to see Caputo, hands cuffed and legs chained, being led into the room by several court officers. This can’t be him, I thought as he was unshackled. Not this paunchy, balding, glassy-eyed man. I couldn’t put such an ill-favored apparition together with the man in the photograph McEwan had shown me, couldn’t imagine him courting and seducing attractive and presumably discriminating women. But of course, I reminded myself, time and a life on the run would have taken their toll on the once comely young man.

  Most of the press had already gotten their first glimpse of the forty-four-year-old Caputo. They’d been alerted the night before that there’d be an early “perp walk,” the parading of a criminal as he leaves police headquarters and goes to his arraignment. I’d missed that stagemanaged ritual. But, I comforted myself, at least I was seeing Caputo now, albeit from a seat so far back that I could barely hear him when in a whispered answer to a question of the presiding judge, he allowed that he was represented by an attorney.

  Still, I heard the attorney, Park Avenue lawyer Michael Kennedy, well enough. Kennedy, who numbered among his clients the glittering socialite Ivana Trump, was a presence, a deep-voiced, confident courtroom performer. I had met him once when friends of mine took me with them to a benefit party at his East Side condominium, a palatial duplex that, with its sweeping staircase and grandly proportioned living room, had reminded me of a ballroom.

  It crossed my mind that Caputo must be a wealthy man if he could afford to retain Kennedy. Maybe during his years on the run, I thought, he dealt drugs and secreted away a fortune. Either that or someone in his family is wealthy and sufficiently devoted to put up the money. His brother? In one of his calls to me, McEwan had mentioned that Ricardo had a brother named Alberto who’d become a great success in America, opened a business of some sort. I made a note to try to find out more about Alberto Caputo.

  Then I got busy taking notes on what Kennedy was saying, which was that before the case went forward, he wanted to be certain that his client was given psychiatric medication to control his “terrible schizophrenia.” “He’s had some medication prescribed by an Argentinian doctor, but it will be exhausted as of today,” the lawyer intoned. “He needs to receive immediate medical and psychiatric attention.”

  The judge, a gentle-looking man who was wearing his black robe casually open at the neck, as if to say he was no stickler for convention, granted the request. He ordered tersely that Caputo be seen by a prison psychiatrist as soon as possible, and moments later the arraignment was over.

  Or rather, it was over for Caputo, who was led in his handcuffs and leg chains to the Nassau County jail. For Kennedy, there was still work to do, the work of affecting the public perception of the case. In a hallway outside the courtroom, he stood before a tangle of microphones and cameras and held an impromptu press conference in which he asserted that as a child, Caputo had been abandoned, raped, and beaten, that as a teenager he had been hospitalized in an Argentinian psychiatric institution and there declared schizophrenic, and that until recently he had been suffering as well from the newly popular psychiatric diagnosis, multiple-personality disorder. “He committed the murders while in the thrall of a psychotic personality,” Kennedy declared, his deep voice filled with sympathy and awe, “and then managed to repress that personality.”

  “Why did Caputo choose this particular time to turn himself in?” one reporter asked.

  “For a time he couldn’t remember the killings,” Kennedy replied. “But recently they came back to him. And they haunted him. He told me, ‘I would rather have my body locked up and my mind free than go on living as I was, with my mind locked up and my body free.’”

  “Are you going to argue that he’s insane?” another reporter asked.

  Kennedy’s head bobbed toward him, but he answered the question only indirectly. “He belongs in a medical facility. A high-security medical facility.”

  In the next few days Caputo’s image was everywhere, in newspapers, on TV news reports, and even, made up and carefully lighted, on the ABC newsmagazine show PrimeTime Live. The show was a dramatic scoop, a lengthy interview with the confessed killer, which, astonishingly, had been taped in Kennedy’s office prior to the arraignment, prior even to the killer’s surrender.

  Like millions of Americans, I watched that show. I saw Caputo, neatly dressed in a blue-striped shirt, wrinkle his brow earnestly as the interviewer, Chris Wallace, plied him with prearranged questions, and heard him say, his words accented and his tone mournful, that he was sorry for what he’d done and had turned himself in because he recognized that he needed psychiatric help.

  “Do you remember the day you killed Natalie?” Wallace asked. It was just after an unseen narrator had informed the audience that Caputo had alleged that Natalie had been becoming too possessive.

  “I picked up a knife but I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Caputo replied. “I could hear the screams, and see her—partially. I was seeing stripes and lines, whites and reds and blues. And dots, a lot of dots.”

  “Were you aware that you were stabbing her?”

  “No. I knew I was doing something bad, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Also on the show was a retired p
olice detective, who explained that, in his view, “it was when Caputo was rejected that he killed these women.” But most of the program was given over to Caputo’s own explanations of why he had murdered and to an apologia offered by a woman to whom he was currently married and who had borne him four children. “During the ten years he lived with me, he was never aggressive,” she said, as if to substantiate Kennedy’s assertion that Caputo had several personalities. “The man who was married to me would never have harmed anyone.”

  The broadcast made television history. For one thing, it offered an as yet unarrested killer the opportunity to explain himself before a national audience and thus gain the sympathy and even celebrity that could be useful to him once he went on trial. For another, at the end of the interview, a handful of New York State police who had been alerted by Kennedy that a long-hunted fugitive was ready to turn himself in (but not informed that if they took him into custody, their activities would be filmed) arrived in the lawyer’s office and in a dazzle of lights “captured” Caputo. Such a moment had never before been televised.

  The day after the PrimeTime Live show, and a week after I’d seen Caputo in the flesh for the first time, I saw him again at a second hearing in Mineola. Its purpose was the ordering of a psychiatric examination to determine whether he was competent to stand trial for the murder of Natalie Brown. He’d had such an examination back in 1971 and been judged incompetent.

  Is the same thing going to happen this time? I wondered as I listened to the brief proceedings. It was that first ruling of incompetency, handed down twenty-three years ago, that had made it possible for Caputo to go on killing, for he hadn’t been tried for Natalie’s murder but instead been remanded to a psychiatric hospital. Psychiatric hospitals were, then and now, notoriously easy to elope from, and Caputo had escaped from his and gone on to murder the other three women whom he now admitted having killed. And maybe more, I thought. Maybe Jacqui.