The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  I was curious about those demands, and one day I managed to locate Jim Gay. Nowadays, he makes his home in a spacious, neat-as-a-pin house on Long Island’s opulent “Gold Coast,” and he’s a banker and the father of two adolescents. But in the days he knew Natalie, he lived near her in Flower Hill and, an adolescent himself, played the electronic organ in a rock band.

  Jim and Natalie had dated during their junior and senior years of high school, and Natalie had often gone to hear Jim and his band play. Then they’d broken up, gone off to college, and stopped seeing each other. But in the summer of 1971, Jim was home from school and, like Natalie, working in Manhattan. “That summer, she and I used to commute home together from our jobs,” he explained. “Not every day. But whenever we could. We’d meet in Penn Station and ride back out to the Island together. And sometimes when we did, she’d talk to me about Ricardo.”

  “What did she say about him?” I asked.

  “That he was asking her for things all the time.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Money. I guess he thought she was a rich American, that all Americans were rich. Anyway, Natalie didn’t like it. And she complained about it to me several times. Even mentioned it the last time I saw her, which was a day or two before she was killed. We’d met at Penn Station, and on the way home, she talked about how he was still asking her for money. And then, she said something new. Something she hadn’t said before.”

  “What was it?” I was impatient to know.

  “That she didn’t have the time or patience for Ricardo anymore and was going to end the relationship. I still remember her words. She said, ‘I’ve already told him I want to break up with him. But it didn’t seem to register. So next time I see him, I’m going to lay down the law.’”

  At this, Jim sighed, a long, loud sigh. “You know, it’s funny, after all these years, but I remember being so pleased when she said that. I still liked her, and I guess I figured that if she broke up with Ricardo, maybe she and I might get together again. So I invited her to come hear the band on the weekend. We had a gig at a neighborhood bar, both Friday and Saturday nights. ‘For old times’ sake,’ I said. And Natalie said, ‘Great. Maybe Saturday. I don’t think Ricardo will still be around by Saturday.’ And I felt”—Jim paused, the sound of his breath once again heavy—“terrific. That’s what I felt. She was the kind of girl who could make you feel terrific just thinking you were going to see her.”

  Shortly after Natalie told Jim Gay she was going to break up with her Argentinian suitor, Ricardo came out to Flower Hill for another weekend, arriving on Friday evening, July 30, 1971. Natalie may have meant to do what she’d told Jim she was going to do, may have intended to lay down the law and get Ricardo to leave. But her parents and brothers were home when he arrived; she and Ricardo slept in their separate rooms, and on Saturday, when she might have hoped to grab a few minutes of private conversation with him, her mother asked for her help in preparing the family’s meals. Natalie bided her time. Her parents and brothers would be going out in the evening, she knew, and she could talk to Ricardo then. So she assisted Julie in the kitchen, then played a long game of Monopoly with Ricardo. And when he tired of playing, she turned on the TV and watched a Marx Brothers movie with him.

  Ed Brown joined them in front of the set. He noticed that Ricardo seemed to be having a fine time, laughing spiritedly at the jokes he got and asking eagerly for explanations of the ones he couldn’t fathom. Then Ed took off for his job as a nighttime cab dispatcher. And everyone else, except for Natalie and Ricardo, took off, too, Bill for a date with a girlfriend, Harold and Julie for a friend’s anniversary celebration.

  As soon as Natalie and Ricardo were finally alone, according to a confession Ricardo later dictated to the police, they went upstairs to Natalie’s bedroom, a room still furnished with stuffed bears, plush monkeys, and other childhood treasures but adorned with more womanly trophies, too, with posters from Natalie’s trip to Italy and a portrait of her that Ricardo, who fancied himself an artist, had drawn and presented to her. When they entered the room, Ricardo wanted to make love. But Natalie, he confessed, rejected his advances. Perhaps she said merely that it was because she wanted to break up with him. Or perhaps she said what he claimed she did, which was that she had been making love with someone else. In any event, she turned aside his embraces and, leaving the bedroom, went downstairs and outside onto a porch.

  He followed her there, he explained to the police, and said calmly, “I thought you wanted to marry me.” And he only got mad, he further explained, when she left the porch, went into the kitchen, and, seeing him behind her, pushed him away and called him a “fucking spic.”

  Maybe. But some of the detectives who heard his confession thought, based on their years of experience with similar cases, that most likely he had become enraged as soon as she turned down his sexual offer, and that when she traveled from bedroom to porch to kitchen, she was already trying to fend him off.

  Certainly, in the kitchen she was like a cornered animal. Ricardo chased her and caught up with her in front of the stove, grabbed a long, thin kitchen knife her mother used for boning fish, and began stabbing her. She got away for a second and scurried toward the sink. But he caught up with her and stabbed her some more. And some more. And when she fell down, her legs sprawled beneath her and her eyes staring up at him, he got down, too, and, dropping the knife, put his hands around her throat and held them there, tightened them there, until her jerking body went still. Then he got up, saw that his shirt was drenched with blood, took it off, put on a sweater, and, carrying the shirt, fled from the house.

  It was dark and silent on the suburban streets. Ricardo raced down them and, passing a gas station, tossed the bloody shirt into one of the station’s trash cans. But after that, that first time, he didn’t know what else to do, where he might go. He stood in the shadows for a while and then, not yet the escape artist he would one day become, went to the gas station’s phone booth, dialed 911, and said, “I’ve just killed my girlfriend.”

  Minutes later, the police arrested him.

  “What else did Caputo say that night?” I asked Detective William Coningsby, who had been one of the first police officers on the crime scene and who had later taken down Caputo’s confession. Coningsby had retired and was living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I’d flown down there to interview him. A suntanned golfer, he’d met me at the airport, showed me around the town, and regaled me with Myrtle Beach arcana such as the story of the ghostly Gray Man who is said to haunt the powdery strands at dusk. Then he’d driven me to his home, a peaceful haven on the edge of a golf course.

  “Well, Caputo certainly didn’t say anything like what he said on that PrimeTime Live show,” Coningsby began, offering me a seat on a screened porch. “He knew why he’d killed Natalie Brown. One of our guys, an officer named Lawrence Miron, was one of the people who arrested him. He was sent to pick Ricardo up at the gas station, and he and his partner put him in their car and drove with him to Natalie’s house. Then, Miron went into the house. He saw what was in there, and he came back out and asked Caputo why he’d killed the girl who was lying in the kitchen. And Ricardo said it was because she was in love with someone else.”

  Coningsby had a file on his lap, and he opened it and began leafing through it. “Here. Miron went into the Browns’ house, leaving Ricardo out in the car with his partner. He saw Natalie’s body, came out, and told his partner that it was true, someone had indeed been murdered. And Ricardo said, ‘Kill me.’ So Miron said, ‘Why?’ And Ricardo said, ‘Because I think I killed her.’ And then Miron asked him why he’d killed her. And he said what I told you. He said, ‘Because she loves another.’”

  “And now he’s saying she didn’t?”

  “Well, you heard him. He’s saying she was possessive, wanted him to marry her. I guess he forgot what he said the first time around. But he didn’t say it just to Miron. He said it to me, too.”

  Turning pa
ges in his file, Coningsby pulled out a copy of the written confession he had elicited from Ricardo.

  “‘My name is Ricardo Silvio Caputo,’” he read. “‘I slept over on Friday in the TV room.… Bill and Edward went out.… Natalie’s mother and father also went out. Natalie took me by the hand and we went upstairs to her room.… I tried to make love to her, she pushed me away, and said, “I do not want to make love to you because I’ve been making love with someone else.”’”

  The discrepancy between what Ricardo had said right after he killed Natalie and what he had been saying since he had turned himself in was dramatic. But I was even more fascinated by something else Coningsby read to me later from Ricardo’s confession. It was a section in which Ricardo had talked about the early days of his relationship with Natalie. “She always wanted to make love,” he’d said. “I had to quit my night job because she was always in my room after four P.M.”

  Those sentences struck me as bizarre. He’s blaming his quitting work on her sexual appetites, I thought when I heard them. He sees female sexuality as voracious. And failure-inducing. It was my first clue to his psyche, my first insight into the exact nature of his hatred toward women.

  4

  While I was researching Natalie’s story, Caputo was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist. He concluded that Ricardo was not psychiatrically ill but merely feigning illness and ruled him mentally competent to stand trial for Natalie’s murder. Additionally, a Nassau County assistant district attorney named Elise McCarthy was assigned to prosecute the case.

  “Do you have any contacts in Argentina?” she said to me one afternoon in September. I’d spoken to her on the phone several times, but this was our first face-to-face meeting, an interview in a dimly lit conference room where the table was pitted with scratches and the ripped upholstered chairs displayed not just their stuffing but their springs.

  “Maybe,” I answered, though what I was thinking of was a long shot. “I have a friend whose husband does business in Argentina. Maybe he knows someone—though I’m sure you have better contacts than him.”

  “Not necessarily. At least, my contacts haven’t been able to get me what I want.” I was pleased that she was asking for my help. Getting information is always easier if you can provide information. “What is it you want?” I asked.

  “The source of a newspaper story,” McCarthy said, and launched into a curious tale. “Clarín, the leading Buenos Aires newspaper, printed a story about Ricardo right after he turned himself in which asserted that, contrary to what he’s been saying about his surrender—which by the way has always seemed like pure crap to me—he didn’t come in out of the cold because he felt remorse but because he had to give himself up. Someone was on to him for something.”

  “That sure puts things in a different light,” I said.

  “You bet.” McCarthy pulled a photocopy out of a manila folder she’d been balancing on her lap and looked down at it. “How’s your Spanish?”

  “So-so.”

  “That’s better than mine.” Reaching across the sorry table, she handed me the document, a newspaper clipping from Clarín. “Ricardo Caputo confesó,” I read, “que el 18 de enero en el aeropuerto de la Ciudad de México, fue detenido por cuatro policías que lo buscaban por un quinto homicidio.” Ricardo Caputo confessed that on January 18 at the Mexico City airport he was stopped by four police officers who were looking for him regarding a fifth homicide.

  The photocopy was muddy and blurred and I struggled over the words, but in the end I made out most of the article. Its gist was that according to Ricardo, after the police stopped him, they took him to a room in the airport and interrogated him, upon which he volunteered the information that he had a substantial sum of money in a local bank. This suggestion of a bribe, again according to Ricardo, prompted the officers to escort him to his bank, where he withdrew and gave them money, after which he returned to the airport and boarded a plane bound for Argentina.

  “Where’d Clarín get this information?” I asked, stunned at the difference between this account of why Ricardo had fled Mexico for Argentina and the one he’d given on television, which was that his flight had been sparked not by pursuit but remorse.

  “That’s what I want to know.” McCarthy pointed a scarlet fingertip at the top of the article. “They attribute the story to Ricardo. But who did he tell it to?” Her voice rose with annoyance. “As you can see, there’s no byline. And when I had one of our people call down there, no one would say who their source was, or even who wrote the story.”

  “What makes you think I’ll fare better?”

  “Maybe you won’t. But it’s worth some more digging, and I don’t have the money, the resources.”

  Money and resources were very much on McCarthy’s mind that day. “Kennedy is probably going to plead Caputo not guilty by reason of insanity,” she said, “and in an insanity case, everything matters. Not just what Caputo did here in Nassau County, but what he did everywhere else he lived over the past twenty-three years. And I don’t have the help. I’ve had to make the most basic phone calls on my own.”

  McCarthy, who appeared to be in her late thirties, was a handsome woman with a statuesque figure, deep blue eyes, and long, glossy black hair. A graduate of St. John’s Law School in Queens, New York, she’d been working in the Nassau County DA’s office for eleven years, the last six in the Major Offense Bureau, where she’d handled a number of high-profile cases. But never one as complex as this, she told me, explaining, “Part of the problem is that it’s so old. Some of our witnesses have died. And some of the 1971 records have disappeared. We don’t even have a transcript of the hearing that found Caputo not competent. We think it burned up in a warehouse fire.”

  I nodded. I’d been having difficulties, too.

  “But there’s one thing that pleases me,” McCarthy went on. “Caputo’s been given another psychiatric examination, this time by the defense. It’s all on videotape—and guess who conducted the examination.”

  “Beats me.” I shrugged.

  “Dr. Park Elliott Dietz! You know, the guy they call Witness for the Prosecution, because that’s which side he generally works for. I can’t imagine why Kennedy chose him, except that Kennedy must like celebrities. Because Dietz isn’t like some of these doctors who’ll say anything to satisfy whoever’s paying their bills. He has a stipulation in his contracts that says he’s there to find the truth, and not necessarily to find for the party who’s hired him. So maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he won’t find Caputo insane.”

  We talked a bit about Dietz, about how he’d examined John Hinckley and helped put away Jeffrey Dahmer, and then I switched the subject to Jacqui Bernard. “Do you think Caputo killed her, too?”

  “Not just her,” McCarthy said, “but maybe even another woman as well. A woman in Los Angeles. She worked with Caputo in the early 1980s, and during the time they worked together, she was found murdered.”

  “The early 1980s! Caputo’s been saying he stopped killing back in 1977.”

  McCarthy opened the folder on her lap and looked down at a piece of paper. “Well, this woman was killed in 1981. Two years before Jacqui Bernard. She was a waitress or a cook at the Scandia restaurant. And he was a waiter there.”

  I was fascinated by the coincidence. But confused. “If Caputo killed her, why wouldn’t he say so? I mean, here he’s turning himself in and admitting he’s killed four people. What’s another two to him?”

  McCarthy shrugged. “I don’t know. But I don’t have to know.”

  I couldn’t let it go. “Could it be that he’s saying he had nothing to do with that killing because it happened after California reinstated the death penalty? Could that be a factor?”

  “Anything’s possible,” McCarthy said. “But the most likely explanation is that the murders which Caputo has admitted are all murders where there’s absolutely no doubt that he did the killing. Murders where he was known to have been involved with the victims, had been seen with th
em by their friends and families. Jacqui Bernard’s case was different. She didn’t introduce her friends and family to Caputo—but maybe she liked to keep her love life to herself. And this L.A. woman, she wasn’t known to have any relationship with him except for working in the same place he did. But maybe she was a private person, too. Or maybe she went out with him just once—that once.”

  I was puzzled. “Are you saying Caputo may be a true serial killer? That he didn’t kill only women with whom he’d had long-standing relationships?”

  “It’s one of the theories we have,” McCarthy nodded. “But it’s going to be hard to tie him to any killings to which he hasn’t confessed. Because it’s all so long ago. And there wasn’t much evidence to go on in the first place. Not with Jacqui, and not with this L.A. woman, either. He wasn’t even questioned in her death.”

  McCarthy, who had earlier mentioned that she was a keen victim’s advocate, sounded discouraged. I got the feeling she wanted passionately to see Caputo put into prison for the rest of his life and was worried that it might not happen, worried that for all her hopes about Dietz, a jury might find Caputo not guilty by reason of insanity. Or guilty of manslaughter, rather than murder. And indeed, a few minutes later, she said as much to me. “I envy the folks up in Westchester,” she sighed. “Because their case, the Judith Becker case, is clearly murder. This one is trickier. It’s got elements of extreme emotional distress. I mean, Caputo did call the police right after he killed Natalie.”

  As soon as I was home, I phoned my friend whose husband did business in Argentina. “Does your husband know anyone connected with the press in Buenos Aires?” I asked.