The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  I found Caputo even less appealing at this second hearing than I’d found him at the first. He was wearing a sharp leather jacket and the same not-unstylish bluestriped shirt he’d worn on television, but his clothes were rumpled and dirty as though he’d slept in them. His mouth was set into a hard, stony slash, the result, I assumed, of whatever medication he’d been placed on. And his onyx eyes, which had been glassy the first time I saw him, now looked altogether vacant.

  I was making notes on his appearance when, to my surprise, he gave a nod to an attractive, even elegant, couple sitting in a front row. “It’s the family,” I overheard another reporter whisper to a colleague. “His brother. Alberto. And his sister-in-law. Kim. K-i-m.” The handsome couple, who had come to court with Kennedy, were holding hands and looking nervous.

  I knew a bit about Alberto and Kim Caputo by then, had found out that he owned a photography company in New York and that she was a writer and magazine editor who had previously been married to a psychoanalyst. But I’d made no effort to call them. I figured that if I phoned out of the blue and said, “Hello, I’m writing a book about Ricardo,” I’d get nowhere. They’d refuse to say anything or, more likely, just hang up. But I could wait. Time was on my side. And maybe if I waited, I’d get someone, maybe Kennedy, to put in a good word for me with the Caputos, get them at least to take my call.

  As I was musing, I saw that Ricardo was rising and being shackled by a pair of courtroom guards. The psychiatric examination had been ordered and the short hearing had ended. The guards led Ricardo out a back door and a moment later, Kennedy exited the well of the courtroom and began talking to Alberto and Kim. They huddled with him with their hands still entwined. And then Kennedy shepherded them out of the courtroom.

  I tagged behind, saw the little group besieged by reporters and cameramen, and heard them beg the representatives of the media not to ask them questions but instead to read a statement that Kim Caputo had composed. Then, as arms leaped toward them like fish toward bread crumbs, they handed out copies of a photocopied press release.

  I reached for a copy, too. And found it unsettling, for it seemed to blame society for neglecting Ricardo, rather than Ricardo for transgressing society’s rules. “Ricardo could have been helped long ago and none of these deaths would have come to pass,” Kim Caputo, apparently convinced that psychiatry could heal all wounds, asserted. “He begged for help many times and was left alone with his terrible illness and the devices that he created to deal with the pain and abuse of his childhood.… He turned himself in after committing his first murder in Long Island and was treated so loosely that he was on the street before two years were up. Not once in twenty years did any authority question his identity. He could walk on the streets of Hawaii like a tourist. He was able to travel from one country to another without being caught. The blood on his hands, the screams in his head, the hallucinations that blinded him from his deeds seemed to have veiled him from the world. He not only was left alone with his disease, he had become invisible.”

  The press release also attempted to answer the question of why Ricardo had turned himself in at this particular time. “We think it must be that the love and support of his present wife has given him the peace of mind,” it speculated. “The comfort of the relationship has made him visible again. His conscience has returned.”

  He’s visible all right, I said to myself, frowning as I stood in the corridor and scanned the document. But Natalie’s invisible. Natalie and his other victims.

  It wasn’t just that they were dead. It was that they were ciphers. Several newspapers had written about them, but they’d been allotted just a short paragraph or two apiece.

  Kennedy and the Caputos were leaving in a flurry of pursuing cameras. I went to the railroad, my mind bent on searching out people who might help me make Natalie Brown and Caputo’s other victims visible.

  3

  By the time I began my research, Natalie’s friends had scattered; her parents had died; so, too, had some of the law enforcement authorities who had worked on the case back in 1971. But eventually I found enough people who’d known Natalie to be able to get a sense of her. There was, for example, her brother Ed, the owner of a discount gift shop in North Carolina. “Nat—that was her nickname,” he told me, “was really pretty. Looked just like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. And she was the apple of my parents’ eyes. There were two boys, me and my brother, Bill, but Nat was the only girl.”

  Natalie had grown up in the suburban Long Island village of Flower Hill. She’d attended public schools there. And when she was a senior in high school, she decided that she wanted to go to college and afterward study nursing. “Our mother was a nurse,” Ed explained, “and Natalie wanted to follow in her footsteps.”

  That year, 1969, she applied to and was accepted at Marymount College in Virginia, and after graduation, she did what so many graduating seniors do—spent a summer abroad. She toured through Italy, Germany, and Spain, writing ecstatic postcards to her friends back home in which she raved about the amazing sites she was visiting. And about the exciting young men she was meeting. “Dear Chris,” she wrote to one girlfriend in July 1969. “I’m nervous, waiting for Stefano. My hands are shaking, have not seen him.” “Dear Chris,” she wrote a few days later. “Hi! Oh wow am I in love. Not Stefano. I met the nicest guy—Czech.” But despite her absorption in the adventure and romance of Europe, she still intended to go to college and then study nursing, and when she returned home, she started Marymount.

  She attended the school for nearly a year, but Europe had given her a taste for freedom, and toward the end of her second semester, she dropped out. “She wanted to get a job and work for a while,” Ed Brown said. “Not a whole long while. She would have gone back to school, I’m sure of it. She just wanted to save up some money and see what it was like to be a working woman instead of a student.”

  What happened next, I learned from the police. Natalie got her job, a position as a teller in a midtown-Manhattan branch of the Marine Midland Bank. Caputo was working a few blocks away. The son of an Argentinian woman and an Italian immigrant to Argentina, he’d emigrated to the United States a year and a half earlier and was working in New York as a hotel janitor, cleaning floors at the Barbizon at night and washing walls at the Plaza in the daytime. And one day in November 1970, he went to Marine Midland to cash one of his Plaza paychecks.

  Natalie was standing behind her teller’s window, taking deposits, giving out cash. Ricardo, an inveterate smalltalker, struck up a conversation with her.

  The following week Ricardo came to her window again, and they chatted some more. Natalie found him appealing. But his English was not yet fluent and he didn’t understand some of her words.

  At that moment she made one of the most crucial decisions of her young life. She slipped Ricardo a note saying she’d like to get together with him sometime.

  He was pleased and, wasting no time, invited her to go out with him that very night. Natalie accepted, and they ate dinner in a restaurant and saw a movie.

  Several nights later Ricardo asked Natalie out on a second date and sometime that evening took her to see the small hotel room he was sharing with another Argentinian immigrant. His roommate was out and he and Natalie made love.

  “That note,” I said to a woman named Judy Epstein, who’d been one of Natalie’s closest friends. “You know, when I first heard about it, I thought it was something Ricardo made up. That really it was he who made the first advance, who wrote Natalie a note. But the police say no.”

  “Oh, Natalie wrote the note all right,” Judy said. The mother of two children, a twelve-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son, she was thin and lithe, but her no longer perfect vision required glasses and her once-blond hair was iced with gray. “Natalie told me about the note, and I still remember that afterward, I said, ‘Natalie! How could you! You don’t even know him.’ But Natalie just laughed at me and said, ‘Well, he was cute.’”

  Judy had grown up
in New Jersey, but she lived now in a loft in bohemian lower Manhattan where, with her husband, she ran a musical-instrument repair shop. We were talking in that shop, an antiquated establishment that smelled of sawdust and varnish and whose rickety floors were weighted down by stacks of bass fiddles in various stages of decay or reconstruction.

  “Natalie was bold,” said Judy. “Once when she was in Europe, she met a guy she liked, and she went over to his house and left him a note. And she and some of her Flower Hill friends used to go down to the docks in Manhattan and pick up guys who were working on cruise ships. I loved her boldness. Because I was the cautious type, and not very happy about it. Whereas Natalie was one of these people who wanted to experience everything there was to experience in life. She wanted to eat up the world.”

  There was a big black backpack at Judy’s feet and now she began rummaging in it. A moment later she extricated a photograph of Natalie, a black-and-white print set in an ornate inlaid frame. “Here, I brought you this. I keep it on my piano. Place of honor.” She handed me the picture, and as she did so, her tone turned indignant. “Does this look like the sort of cloying woman who’d become so possessive you’d have to kill her to get rid of her? That’s what they said on PrimeTime Live that Ricardo’s been saying.”

  I could see why that allegation had angered her, for the picture showed a voluptuous teenager with a proud smile, long, flowing dark hair, and a majestic arms-akimbo, chest-forward stance. “That’s Natalie?” I murmured. “I’d imagined her more delicate, more—overwhelmable.”

  “No. She was big. And strong. And one of the things I never understood was how Ricardo managed to overwhelm her. I guess it was because she was so innocent, so good-hearted, that violence was beyond her imagination. So her guard would have been completely down when Ricardo attacked her.”

  Judy was filled with memories of Natalie. How they’d met at summer camp when they were little. Stayed friends throughout their teenage years. Curled up on one another’s beds and talked late into the night about love and sex and life. Sprawled on the floor and listened to the Monkees—“‘I want to be free.’ That was her favorite song,” Judy said, “‘free like the warm September breeze.’”

  “What about sex? Did she have much sexual experience before Ricardo?”

  “Some. Guys liked her. She had these big breasts, and she was lighthearted, fun, the kind of girl who took all the dirt and guilt out of sex. But in a way, that’s what made her vulnerable to Ricardo. There were always guys in her life, but all of them took her lightly. They didn’t court her. Take her out. Want anything from her except fun.”

  “And Ricardo did?”

  “He told her he did. And it made Natalie happy, at least at first. She’d always been looking for what she called ‘real love.’ And she’d always been complaining that no one took her seriously. Not her parents. Not boys. And now, suddenly she had this guy in her life who was saying not just ‘I want you,’ but ‘I love you. I’m serious about you.’ I think that was Ricardo’s appeal. I think so because I could never see any other. And I thought about it a lot, even before he killed her.”

  Judy had thought about what Natalie found so appealing about Ricardo because she’d met him and been singularly unimpressed. “The three of us went walking around Greenwich Village one afternoon,” she informed me. “And I remember not quite getting it—her and him. I mean, Natalie was bigger than life. And when she told me this guy was in love with her, I expected someone very special. Someone as imposing as she was. But Ricardo seemed sort of ordinary. I felt sad for her. I mean, not just me but all her friends were away at college that year. And she was working. In a boring bank job. And seeing this not very prepossessing guy. But he had told her he loved her, and that filled a void for her.”

  At this, Judy shook her head sadly. “It’s so dangerous, this business of being a teenager. Sometimes I look at my daughter and I just wonder and wonder what’s going on in her head now that her hormones are starting to kick in.”

  If Natalie had been eager to have a man claim to be serious about her, she had also been eager to convince her parents, her mother Julie, a nurse, and her father, Harold, an executive at a linen corporation, that she was capable of a serious relationship. And one day, not long after she’d started dating Ricardo, she took him home to meet her family.

  Ed Brown remembered the occasion. “Ricardo was nice,” he told me, emphasizing the word as if he was sure I would find it incomprehensible. “He was respectful, polite, even courtly. My mother and father liked him, and they told Natalie she could have him over anytime she liked.”

  That turned out to be frequently. “He came out most weekends,” Ed said. “Natalie wasn’t a hippie or a rebellious kid. I mean, she quit school, but she didn’t go down and live in the East Village. She was a homebody. Liked to cook. Hang around the house. So she liked having Ricardo come out. And he liked it, too. He was living in a furnished room somewhere, and when you’re living that way, it’s nice being in a real home.”

  According to Ed, when Ricardo came to visit, he and Natalie were not overtly sexual. They slept in separate bedrooms and spent most of their time in childish pursuits, playing checkers and Monopoly, or watching TV.

  But there was another side to their lives. Parties. Marijuana. An Argentinian man who once met Natalie and Ricardo at a party told me that he recalled that most of the guests that evening were turning on and growing ever more giddy and gigglish. But then something went wrong. “Ricardo got paranoid,” he said. “He started yelling and screaming. Natalie was great. She kept trying to calm him and comfort him and talk him down. Sort of like a little mother.”

  “What about Ricardo?” I said. “What was he like when he wasn’t high?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know him well.”

  Few people did, according to a homicide detective I interviewed. “He didn’t have friends. He had secrets,” the detective, Ray Pierce, said to me.

  “Secrets?”

  “Yeah, after he killed Natalie, we spoke with a roommate of his, and we learned something very interesting.” According to the roommate, when Ricardo first came to this country, he hung out in gay bars and gave sex for money and jewelry. And sometimes when he wasn’t satisfied with what was offered, he’d rough up and rob his clientele.

  Did Natalie know this? I doubt it, for in February 1971, when she had been dating Ricardo for three months, she went on a vacation with him, a vacation for which she paid both their expenses. They traveled first to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, where they swam in the sapphire Caribbean and slept beneath palm trees in public campgrounds. Ricardo took pictures and Natalie wrote postcards, telling friends that she was being “eaten alive,” presumably by the Caribbean beaches’ notorious sand flies, and that she wasn’t “as zonked as I used to be.”

  When their Caribbean idyll was over, the pair impulsively decided not to return home. Ricardo wanted to see Florida and California, and Natalie agreed to accompany him. They visited Miami and Los Angeles, then made their way to San Francisco.

  At the time it was a mecca for middle-class runaways, the legendary home of the hippies and flower children, and although the sixties were over, parts of the city were still filled with hucksters selling the accoutrements of the just vanished decade, its tie-dyed shirts and gauzy dresses, its beaded headbands, massage oil, peace symbols, and common and esoteric drugs.

  Ricardo was intrigued by the scene, and so was Natalie, who agreed to take an apartment in San Francisco with him. No matter that she didn’t have with her any apparel suitable for life in a nontropical climate. She called her parents and asked them to send her some of her clothes.

  What did her parents think? They are dead and gone and there is no way to know for sure. But they were conventional people—“Depression babies for whom making a living was very important,” Ed Brown had described them—and Natalie was their special joy. So I suspect that, like most parents whose children were lured to abandon their education or j
obs by the siren songs of the time, they were exceedingly worried. And angry. They sent Natalie the clothing she requested. But they didn’t send her any money—even though by then she was running out of it—and several weeks later, strapped for cash, Natalie decided to return to the East. Ricardo said he would, too, and they headed home, hitchhiking across the country.

  On their return, Ricardo began insisting to Natalie that they get married. His visa had expired, but if she married him, he explained, he could remain in the United States. Natalie, who was living at home once again, went down to an office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and filled out papers saying Ricardo, too, was living at her Flower Hill address, and that they were engaged.

  But something had changed. Natalie, who may have seen during their travels too much of the angry, touchy side of her lover, began to sour on Ricardo. One day, she told him she was pregnant, but not long afterward she visited a doctor and returned with the news that she wasn’t pregnant after all. Or anymore. Another day, she wrote to a friend that she was considering going back to a previous boyfriend. And throughout the spring, despite what she had told immigration officials, she said nothing to her family about being engaged to Ricardo or even about wanting to marry him.

  “I doubt she ever had any real intention of doing so,” Ed Brown told me. “My parents wouldn’t have objected. They liked Ricardo a lot. But my father was a self-made man, an executive who’d started out in his company as a traveling salesman. He would have wanted Ricardo to have a good job before he married Natalie, would have offered him one in his firm, and that simply never came up.”

  Nor did Natalie tell her friends that she was engaged to or going to marry Ricardo. Indeed, as spring turned to summer, she began complaining about him. Early in June she went swimming at Taconic State Park with Judy Epstein and two male friends, buddies from their old summer camp, and when one of the men told her she looked sensational in her little black bikini, she said, “Don’t ever let Ricardo hear you say that! He’s terrifically jealous.” Later that month, she told a neighbor who often dropped by to visit her that he’d better stop doing so because his presence made Ricardo angry. And in July she repeatedly told one of her old boyfriends, a fellow named Jim Gay, that Ricardo was getting on her nerves because he was always making demands on her.