by Linda Wolfe
“I guess so,” Naomi replied. “He knows this lawyer who knows everyone.”
“Great,” I said, and asked her to ask her husband to ask his contact to try to get the information from Clarín that McCarthy had wanted.
What happened afterward was odd. Naomi called back a few days later and said that the lawyer with whom her husband did business in Argentina had telephoned one of the top editors at the paper, a person he knew well. He’d asked about the source of the puzzling story and the editor had said, “Funny, someone else wanted to know that, too. But we couldn’t help. We don’t know.”
“Well, could I talk to whoever wrote the story?” the lawyer had asked. And the editor had said, “It wasn’t written here. We got it from the AP.”
I called the Associated Press after that and tried to find out who at the wire service had filed the story. But after numerous phone calls and the filling out of forms, I was informed that the story had not emanated from AP. “It must have been Clarín’s own stuff,” a perplexed but patient AP employee declared.
It was back to square one—except that now I suspected that Clarín was protecting its source. I told this to McCarthy, who said, “Damn. I know he didn’t turn himself in because all of a sudden what he did to those poor dead women started preying on his mind. But I sure wish we could prove it.”
Besides looking for elusive Argentinian sources, I was also trying at that time to find out whether the New York police were going to question Ricardo about the death of Jacqui Bernard. To that end I spoke with the detective who’d been put in charge of the case. He was Jerry Giorgio, a famous Manhattan detective who had unraveled a great many of the city’s more puzzling murders and was said to have an extraordinary ration of perseverance.
When I called Giorgio, he told me that Michael Kennedy had informed him that Caputo categorically denied any involvement in Jacqui’s murder. “He says he stopped killing back in the seventies,” Giorgio said, “and that besides, he was working in L.A. at the time she was killed.”
But had the police themselves talked with Caputo, I wanted to know. Not yet, Giorgio informed me. “We asked Kennedy to let us speak to him, and first he was going to, and then he said no, not unless you provide us with a list of questions. We didn’t want to do that, because it’s no good. They have your questions, they can shape the answers.”
“So what happens next?”
“Well, we’ve given Kennedy a list of dates and he’s supposed to give us a list of where Caputo was on those dates. But it hasn’t been forthcoming. So at the moment, you’d have to say things are up in the air.”
I said I’d stay in touch and shifted my focus to Westchester County, where Caputo’s second admitted victim, Judith Becker, had been killed. I interviewed the county’s charismatic district attorney, Jeanine Pirro, who told me, “We’re going to try Caputo for murder. We’re actively putting together our case.”
She was a small woman, or at least she seemed small, sitting in an extravagantly high-backed, maroon leather chair in front of an enormous desk. But her eyes were huge, ashy brown and long-lashed, and when she spoke, they seemed to light up with an inner fire. “Caputo’s not dissimilar to Scott Douglas,” she said, referring to a major case she’d recently had, Douglas’s murder of his wife, newspaper heiress Anne Scripps. “He, too, would cajole women and persuade them that he was a man of sensitivity. And then he would become insecure and worried about his position, and he’d take out his insecurities on whoever was the current woman in his life. There are a lot of men like that out there.”
The Simpson trial had not yet started, but it was very much on Pirro’s mind. “There are more men like Douglas and O.J. and Caputo out there than people realize,” she went on, eyes blazing. And she went even further. “If you look at homicide statistics, you see that women who are murdered are overwhelmingly murdered by men they know well. Caputo’s fascinating because he killed not just one but at least four women who knew him well. But he’s just an extreme example of the kind of man who imagines that once a woman gets involved with him, he owns her and consequently is entitled to do whatever he wants with her—even take her life.”
“Do you have a good case against Caputo?” I asked, thinking of McCarthy.
“I believe so,” Pirro said, “though the fact that it happened twenty years ago creates problems.” The light in her eyes went off as she spun out a depressing scenario. “We’ll have trouble putting it together. Witnesses have moved or died. Police officers have retired. Memories have faded. The case’ll have all those nightmares prosecutors hate.”
But a moment later the light was back. “Twenty years ago. Thirty years ago. It doesn’t matter how long ago a murder happened. A victim must never be forgotten.” She had recharged herself right there in front of my eyes and was letting me know that whatever the difficulties, the Becker case was going to be pursued vigorously.
5
Becker. Her story was altogether different from Natalie’s. She was no rebel, no adventure-seeking teenager. Twenty-six years old when Caputo killed her, she’d been a psychologist, a respected staff member at New York’s Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. “Tell me about her,” I said to her sister, Janie Becker, one day.
“Judith was intelligent, hardworking, and idealistic,” Janie, her elder by two years, said. At the time, we were standing in a corridor of the Westchester County courthouse, and as I looked at Janie, who was dressed in pearls, a flowered print dress, and spotless white sandals, I felt certain I knew what Judith would have looked like if she, too, had reached her forties. Like a suburban matron. Like a woman you see lunching at a tea shop where the window curtains are tied back with sashes and the tables are adorned with tiny vases of flowers.
The pair of them, Judith and Janie, had grown up in Bridgewater, Connecticut, a quiet, pristine town that seems almost the quintessential example of the America city dwellers like me dream of when we imagine life must somewhere be better than it is where we live, a town with a village green, colonial houses, gleaming white churches, huge shade trees, and neighbors who not only know each other’s names but family histories as well. Their parents were Catholic and community-minded. When they were youngsters, their mother, Jane, worked as a secretary at the parochial school to which they were sent, and their father, Henry, was elected first selectman of Bridgewater, the equivalent of mayor. The girls grew up loving music, and especially the musicales their parents were fond of giving, lively neighborly evenings at which Jane served home-baked cakes and Henry entertained by caroling old-fashioned songs such as “In the Gloaming” and “Beautiful Dreamer.”
Janie had been the more sparkling sister, I learned from friends of Judith’s. At the high school both girls attended, New Milford High, Janie had been a star, a cheerleader, whereas Judith had been shy. “Almost painfully shy,” a woman named Alanna Keating, who had gone to high school with the two of them, remembered. “New Milford High had a dress code, buttoned-up shirts and short hair for the boys, skirts that came down below the knees for the girls. But Judith’s skirts were the longest. Her blouses were really demure. And she almost never went out on dates.” But she was good-natured, well liked by both boys and girls. And she was smart. “Her best friend was the class genius,” Alanna commented.
Judith’s shyness abated somewhat during her college years, which she spent at Central Connecticut State. There, her intellect impressed several professors, one of whom, noting that she was altruistic and longed to better the lives of people less fortunate than herself, suggested she pursue a career in psychology.
Judith took his advice and, intending one day to work with disadvantaged children, enrolled in a master’s degree program in clinical psychology at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. While studying, she lived on her own in an apartment near the school, had a few boyfriends, and became a little more sophisticated. But she remained, essentially, a reserved and unworldly young woman with a generous but somewhat unrealistic view of both li
fe and the reaches of her profession. When she completed her degree and, instead of holding out for a job that would allow her to work with children, took the position at Matteawan, she told a friend that she was convinced that with her newly won arts and skills, she could save anyone.
Ricardo was at Matteawan. Detective Coningsby, when I’d visited him at Myrtle Beach, had told me how he’d come to be there. “You know, Ricardo had seemed perfectly normal to me the night I took his confession about Natalie,” Coningsby had said. “I mean, as normal as a person can be after killing someone. He knew just what he’d done and why he’d done it. It was only later that anyone thought he might be nuts.”
“And why was that?” I’d asked, making my notes with difficulty, for at that point we’d been talking so long on Coningsby’s screened porch that it was nearly evening.
“Because he began talking to Natalie,” Coningsby had replied. “Because he began saying things like ‘Natalie, I love you so much’ and ‘Natalie, when are we going to get together?’ sounding like he didn’t realize she was dead.”
I’d shivered when Coningsby said this, and I’m not sure whether it was because the shadowy gray air had turned the porch cold or because, in the approaching dusk of this region of specters and ghost stories, I was finding it eerie to think of Ricardo talking to his dead girlfriend. But whatever it was, Coningsby had taken it for the latter and he’d laughed at me, a booming, cheerful laugh. “It was a ploy,” he’d said. “Caputo had gotten some jailhouse education, had heard he might be better off if he pretended to be insane. So he started acting crazy—acting, mind you.”
That was the police theory back in 1971. But when Ricardo’s conversations with the dead Natalie hadn’t abated, the Nassau County district attorney’s office had had him examined and tested by a team of court-appointed psychiatrists. They’d found him pleasant and cooperative but disoriented—he’d stated among other things that the month was February, when in fact it was August. They’d also found his emotional reactions inappropriate and his grasp of reality shaky. He’d smiled and seemed quite happy, and he’d spoken as if not just Natalie was still alive, but even his father, who had been dead for more than a dozen years. “My father isn’t good to me,” he’d said. “But Natalie is going to help me with that. She’s very nice. She comes to see me in jail.” And when his interviewers had informed him firmly that Natalie and his father were dead, he’d allowed that it was possible that he was hearing voices and confessed that he’d heard voices before, had been so plagued by them when he was a teenager that he’d voluntarily committed himself to an Argentinian mental hospital. The psychiatrists charged with examining him concluded he was “suffering from a severe mental illness” that was most likely schizophrenia, and shortly thereafter, a judge remanded him not for trial but to Matteawan.
There, at the dreary, antiquated hospital for the criminally insane, he continued at first to act disoriented and to hallucinate about Natalie’s coming to see him. He also expressed paranoid ideas, blamed his father for all that had happened to him. And he spoke about being depressed and wanting to commit suicide. But within weeks of his arrival, he showed signs of improvement, mingling with other patients, boasting about his artistic talents, and asking repeatedly for special treatment. “Patient is very demanding,” observed one Matteawan staff member. “Patient shows manipulative tendencies in his manner of responding to questions and answers,” observed another.
In the light of these characteristics, several Matteawan psychiatrists began to suspect that Ricardo was a dissembler, a con artist, a shrewd man pretending to a sickness he didn’t have. And they began to theorize that rather than being schizophrenic, as the court-appointed psychiatrists who’d examined him previously had concluded, Ricardo was suffering from an antisocial personality disorder—that he was what used to be called a psychopath but is today more commonly known as a sociopath.
Sociopathy is not a condition that can be used to argue insanity in a criminal case. Nor is it a treatable condition. No psychotherapies or psychopharmacological drugs can eradicate it. Still, his case periodically reviewed by judges who periodically ruled that he should be kept at Matteawan, Ricardo remained at the hospital, where he was given occasional counseling and psychological testing. And thus it was that in the fall of 1973, when he had been at Matteawan close to two years, he met Judith Becker, who had just joined the staff.
A fellow worker remembered what she was like at the time. “She was sweet,” he told me. “And very natural in her dress and demeanor. She wore clothes that weren’t flashy, shoes that were sensible. In fact, sensible was the chief impression she conveyed.”
She appeared so sensible, and her training was so impeccable, that she was assigned to the hospital’s most dangerous ward, the one that housed violent patients. But Judith wasn’t fazed. She went about her tasks, chiefly the administering of psychological tests to the inmates, with seriousness and dedication, and in September 1973, she was assigned to test Ricardo.
She had read his case history by that time, had learned that he had once killed a girlfriend. But she liked him, viewed him as more intelligent, more courteous, more rehabilitable than other patients. Soon after she tested him, she visited his ward with some other female staff members and, music lover that she was, brought him a record player. But she didn’t have much of a chance to get to know Ricardo. In a few weeks, he was transferred to a different, less guarded facility, Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island.
The decision to transfer Ricardo was not Judith’s. He was one of some five hundred mentally disturbed New York prisoners who were ordered into more loosely supervised hospitals because of two judicial decisions. The first was a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The high court had ruled that defendants considered insane could be kept in close confinement only if found dangerous by a jury. The second, a New York State decision, had ruled that defendants who were incompetent to stand trial could not be held at Matteawan until their cases had been adjudicated.
This loosening of the rules regarding mentally disturbed defendants was part and parcel of other, vast changes regarding mental illness that were sweeping through American society in the early 1970s. Everywhere, largely as a result of powerful and efficient new drug therapies, psychiatric hospitals were being shut down, patients were being released into their communities, and the very notion of insanity as a stigma and an incurable condition was being overhauled.
Ricardo was simply a beneficiary of this optimistic climate of opinion. But he said a happy farewell to Matteawan and to Judith, who promised to come see him at his new institution.
Judith was true to her word. Sometime in the mid-autumn of 1973 she visited Ricardo at Wards Island, where she learned he was behaving like a model patient, working in the hospital cafeteria and in his spare time drawing portraits of his fellow inmates. Her optimistic view of him confirmed, she asked the hospital administrators if she could take him on an outing—Wards Island inmates were not only permitted to roam the hospital grounds freely but were frequently given passes to leave the facility altogether—and her request was granted.
On that first outing she took Ricardo to dinner and to see a cowboy movie. And on another day she took him to see the new apartment in which she was living. It was in Yonkers, about a forty-five-minute drive from Wards Island, a small apartment, but one she had furnished tastefully. In the living room there was a flowered rug, a few rattan chairs, a spacious glass cocktail table, and a soft upholstered couch. In the bedroom there was a bed covered with a cozy quilt of crocheted squares.
Judith and Ricardo lay down on that bed one night, and Judith, the sexual side of herself long contained and given little expression, was enthralled by Ricardo’s lovemaking.
At Christmas she sent him an appreciative greeting card, a card that was at once childish and suggestive. On the outside, there was Santa, listening to the whisperings of a cartoon figure, and the message:
YOU SHOULD GET A LOT OF PRESENTS THIS CHRISTMAS I TOLD SANTA TH
AT YOU HAVE BEEN GOOD ALL YEAR!
On the inside, the message read:
FORTUNATELY
I DIDN’T TELL HIM AT WHAT
She signed it “Judy.”
Their relationship intensified in the next two months. Judith frequently drove down from Yonkers to Wards Island, picked Ricardo up at the mental hospital, and took him home to her apartment, where they made love. But their lovemaking was not always a happy experience for her. Ricardo, even when he was at his most seductive, did something in bed that unnerved her. He liked to tickle her, no doubt making her squirm and wriggle. But she tried to grow used to it. She had come to believe she was in love with him.
In February, just before she left town on a brief vacation to Puerto Rico, she mailed him a love letter, one of several she was eventually to send him. In a neat hand, using her prim, personalized, blue-edged stationery and addressing him as “Ritchie,” she wrote, “I’ll miss talking with you, looking at you, making love with you. But I won’t miss the tickling! Yeah, I guess in a way I’ll miss even that. Every time I see you … I feel closer to you.” She signed it “Love, Judy.” And soon, she began not just sleeping with Ricardo, but introducing him to her friends. She never told them exactly who he was. She said he was a coworker of hers, a colleague who worked at the psychiatric hospital on Wards Island.
She also encouraged him to write poetry. And he did. Love poems. In one, he alluded to having a secret self, but implied that Judith’s love for him was making it fade away:
“Love” that pulls at me …
peeks
At that inner me
That’s hiding …
hesitating, I slowly
Reach out.
In another poem, he warned her that she’d best not expect too much from him and revealed a certain touchiness about being argued with or slighted:
Please don’t expect me