The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  To always be good and kind and loving

  There are times when I will be cold and

  Thoughtless and hard to understand

  But it will only be because of the weather

  Or the flu

  Or one of my moods …

  Please listen to me when I’m talking to you

  and please

  Don’t ever think about someone else

  When I kiss you.

  Please don’t start an argument

  Or make me look foolish

  In front of other people …

  Judith treasured the poetry and saved it all, no doubt believing that through her love and good offices, she might tame and even ennoble him. Psychoanalysts call such notions rescue fantasies, and they are particularly common among the kindhearted.

  Judith may also have been having different sorts of fantasies, masochistic sexual fantasies. Certainly Ricardo would claim when he turned himself in years after his romance with Judith that not only had she had such fantasies but that she had demanded that he act them out with her. Indeed, he would report that he had been so concerned about Judith’s favorite sexual activities that he had discussed them with a Manhattan State Hospital psychologist, informing him that what Judith asked for in bed was for him to slap her around, plunge his penis roughly into her delicate anus, even put a knife to her writhing body while she masturbated. “You ought to stop seeing her,” he would recall the psychologist’s having said. “Maybe she’s suicidal. But whatever she is, she’s playing with a loaded .45.”

  But did Ricardo have such a conversation with a psychologist? No record of it was ever found in the notes of any psychologist who saw him at Manhattan State. And whether or not he had such a conversation, at whose urging might the dangerous sexual games he described have taken place—if they did take place? In the early 1970s a proliferation of sexual advice books had promulgated the sharing and acting out of fantasies as a means of establishing sexual bliss and emotional good health. I suppose it’s possible that Judith could have been gullible enough to pursue this dubious fleshly Holy Grail with a man she knew to have been a murderer. But it seems to me far more likely that it was Ricardo who yearned for and practiced sadistic sex. Maybe he’s the one who longs for cruelty in bed, I thought when I first heard his account of Judith’s sexual tastes. Maybe he’s projecting, and revealing the perverse dramas that were swirling around in his head at the time. Because women may have fantasies about cruel sex, but it’s the rare woman indeed who desires to have those fantasies made real.

  Judith and Ricardo saw each other regularly well into the spring of 1974. But in the summer Judith, just like Natalie three years earlier, decided she wanted to end the relationship. She had ample reasons. For one thing, Ricardo had turned more unpredictable than he’d been in the beginning of their relationship. He had taken to walking off the grounds of his casually guarded hospital whenever he chose and showing up at her apartment without letting her know he was coming. For another, he had turned moodier. When he arrived unexpectedly, if he discovered she was not free to spend time with him because she had made plans with other people, he would fly into a tantrum. He’d even get angry when the plans she’d made were to see her family.

  But the most compelling reason may have been that Judith had become pregnant. She told a friend that Ricardo was the father of the child growing within her, but she didn’t say anything to Ricardo about it. And despite her religious upbringing, she began to consider having an abortion, no doubt fearing that if she didn’t, she might be saddled to her child’s father forever.

  Not long afterward, on a sunny July Saturday, Ricardo turned up without prior notice at her apartment. Judith told him she was on her way to her parents’ house in Connecticut. But he demanded that she take him along, and Judith, perhaps afraid of his temper, acquiesced. With him at her elbow, she telephoned her mother and said, “Hi, Mom, my friend Ritchie is here and I was wondering if I could bring him up with me.” Jane Becker, not knowing who Ritchie was or what her daughter’s feelings about him were, said yes.

  Later that morning the two arrived in Bridgewater. Mustachioed now, and with his hair down to his shoulders and his muscles bulging from years of karate practice at Matteawan and Manhattan State, Ricardo was something of an anomaly in the conventional little village. But Judith showed him around and then drove him to her family home. There, just as she had done with friends, she gave his name, but introduced him as a colleague. He worked at Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island, she said.

  Janie Becker remembered that afternoon. “He was charming,” she told me in her cultivated, Connecticut voice. “More reserved than gregarious. And very self-confident.”

  Janie had liked him. “Over lunch, we talked about Argentina and his family. He told us his people were wealthy and that they’d sent him up here to study. I got the impression that he was quite intelligent. And sophisticated, something of a wine expert, especially when it came to Argentinian wines.”

  After lunch, Judith and Ricardo went swimming in the family pool. “You must have seen their picture at the pool,” Janie said. “It was in all the newspapers.”

  I had. The picture showed Judith sitting in her two-piece bathing suit with her legs tightly crossed and her hands folded modestly in her lap, and Ricardo grinning expansively and dangling his legs in the water. To me, he had looked like a man convinced that the sparkling pool at which he sat and the proper heiress who was perched beside him would one day surely be his.

  “Were you at all worried about Ricardo that afternoon?” I asked Janie, hoping that she had been. I wanted to believe, will always want to believe, that the psychopath’s disguise is porous, less impenetrable than textbooks tell us it is.

  But, “Not at all,” Janie said sadly. “He was no one you’d be suspicious of in any way.”

  That evening, Judith took a step toward extricating herself from her relationship with Ricardo. Instead of driving back to her apartment with him, as he expected her to do, she deposited him at a train station and stayed on in Connecticut. And soon she made another, more difficult move to disentangle herself from him. She terminated her pregnancy.

  Around that time, she told Ricardo that she didn’t want to see him anymore. In fact she had another boyfriend, she said, a police officer.

  It was to no avail. Ricardo continued to call her and to drop in unannounced. And the more she tried to break up with him, the more possessive and furious he became. One day when he once again arrived unexpectedly at her apartment and she again made her wishes known, he shouted at her so angrily and loudly that some of her neighbors heard his rage through the walls.

  Still, Judith stuck to her guns. And in the early autumn Ricardo seemed finally to accept her retreat, or at least to accept her insistence that he stop paying unannounced calls on her, for he ceased his visits. Judith was extremely relieved. “I feel,” she told one of her closest friends, “like I have a monkey off my back.”

  But she hadn’t reckoned on Ricardo’s extraordinary ability to worm his way back into the good graces of those who wanted to be rid of him—or of those he deemed necessary to his future plans. And he had such plans. He was intending to escape from Manhattan State. One day he left the hospital and went to an antiques and used-clothing shop and there tried on a wig. Not long afterward he began withdrawing money from his bank account. He had almost six thousand dollars in it, money he would one day claim he had saved through the sale of his artwork and his job in the hospital cafeteria. He started by removing the money gradually. But on Friday, October 18, 1974, he closed the account altogether, taking out a final fifteen hundred dollars.

  Judith was still refusing to see him, but she was allowing him to telephone her, and after closing his bank account, he called and spoke to her with a new, apologetic disarmingness. He was sorry he’d caused her pain, he said. And because he still loved her, he would absolutely and surely mend his irritable ways.

  Judith must have judged him to be
sincere, for she agreed to go out with him on Sunday. She even told her parents that she was going to do so—“my friend Ritchie is going to take me on a boat ride,” she said.

  But there was to be no boat ride. Ricardo, his money in the pocket of an expensive suit that Judith had bought for him in the heyday of their relationship, made his way to Yonkers and, after he arrived, said he didn’t really want to go out, just wanted to hang around the apartment.

  Judith let him stay and later in the day even agreed to make him dinner. Steak—his favorite. She set two pretty plates down on her living-room cocktail table, put out a bottle of wine and two delicate-stemmed glasses, and began broiling the meat. But when it was done and they were eating it, Ricardo began yelling at her. Perhaps he had just told her of his plan to flee the hospital and she had attempted to dissuade him. Or perhaps he had requested help from her in the form of cash or her car and she had refused. What he said to her or she to him cannot be discovered. But whatever was said, Ricardo turned belligerent and soon he was shouting at Judith so vehemently that once again his voice pierced through the walls of the apartment building.

  A neighbor heard it. But she didn’t think anything of it. She was used to the sounds of quarreling coming from Judith’s apartment.

  But this time Ricardo didn’t stop at shouting. He pushed Judith into the bedroom, ripping off her clothes until she had no covering but her panties. He flung her onto the bed, but he didn’t rape her. Instead, he began pummeling her about the head, breaking her nose and both her cheekbones. And then, as blood poured down her face, he grabbed one of the stockings he’d yanked off her and twisted it tightly around her throat.

  Next door, her neighbor heard sudden silence. She didn’t know that Judith had just died, that as the stocking had tightened she had gasped one final breath. Nor did the neighbor know that in the silence she thought blessed, Ricardo was methodically cleaning himself up and riffling through Judith’s possessions in search of her wallet and car keys.

  A short while later Ricardo had found what he wanted, and taking Judith’s cash and car keys, he went outside and looked for her car. It was parked where she often left it, just behind her building. He unlocked the door, started the car, and drove himself into Manhattan, where he abandoned the car near a bus terminal and boarded a bus headed to California.

  Inside her apartment, Judith was still lying spread-eagled on the bed. Her face was completely awry, like a head begun by a sculptor who had changed his mind and mashed up his clay. Her neck was discolored, with a scar like a nightmare rainbow across it. And her eyes were open—wide open to Ricardo at last. She would remain just this way until the following afternoon when her parents, alarmed because she hadn’t called them on Sunday night as was her wont, traveled to her apartment and let themselves in.

  I knew only some of these facts at the time I interviewed Ann Berrill, one of Judith’s high school friends who now practiced law. I’d found Ann by chance—she played in a women’s poker group with a good friend of mine—and she’d agreed to meet me for brunch at a coffee shop near her apartment in midtown Manhattan.

  “Why would a woman like Judith, a woman with professional training in psychology, fall in love with a Ricardo Caputo?” I began over our eggs and coffee.

  “You have to remember where we came from,” Ann said. “How sheltered we were.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you have to remember the era. It wasn’t like today, after the AIDs scare, when people are cautious about who they get involved with. We got out of college, we started living on our own, and we went out with all sorts of creeps. Men we hardly knew anything about. It was pretty scary, let me tell you.”

  “It was the same for me when I got out of college. God, when I think of some of the weirdos I went out with!”

  “Exactly. Sometimes I wonder how any of us ever survived our young womanhood.”

  “You seem to have survived all right.” I smiled.

  “Yes. Sure. But you know, I chalk it up to luck. I mean, after Judith died, a lot of the women we’d known accused her of having had bad judgment. ‘I’d never have gotten involved with a guy like that,’ they said. Not me. Because a part of me always knew that in those days, if a fellow with the right line had come along, I’d have fallen for it.”

  I appreciated her candor and told her so, and Ann said, “Look, I think you’re asking the wrong question. What you should ask is not why Judith fell for Ricardo, but how he made her fall. Some men have no skills at seduction. Some men know exactly how to go about it. How did Ricardo go about it?”

  I told her about Ricardo’s poetry—she hadn’t known about it—and when I was done, Ann nodded and said, “Yes, that would have done it.”

  “Even though the poetry was kind of scary? I mean, in some of it he let her know outright about his moodiness, his jealousy.”

  “Yes, but he was writing. I know Judith. She’d have felt he was a wounded bird that she was nursing back to health.”

  Ann and I got on well, and a few weeks later, I met with her again because she’d offered to show me Judith’s high school yearbook. This time we sat side by side in Ann’s apartment, leafing through the yearbook and studying, first, the many pictures of New Milford High’s class of 1966 at play or in their clubs. We saw Judith posing like a bookend back-to-back with a best friend, Judith lounging on a classroom floor with two other friends. Then we flipped to the part of the book that featured individual portraits of the graduates and their answers to the questions the yearbook editors had deemed important that year: What subjects had they failed? What were their pet peeves? What were their secret ambitions? There was Judith again, her smile gentle, the ends of her hair painstakingly flipped up in the most popular style of the period. And there were Judith’s answers to the editors’ questions.

  When you write about murdered people, you frequently learn something that breaks your heart, some unexpected and often tiny detail. In Judith’s case, it happened to me when I read the responses she’d given. I noted that she had failed gym, and that her pet peeves were naturally curly hair and having to wait for people. These replies were not very different from those of her fellow graduates. But her secret ambition was a world apart. Where her fellow graduates had responded with remarks like “To make a million dollars,” “To own the New York Times,” “To discover a cure for cancer,” Judith had written, “To grow old gracefully.”

  6

  I was still looking into Judith Becker’s story when in November 1994, Nassau County’s first hearing in the Caputo case got under way. I took the train out to Mineola, arriving in the midst of a dreadful downpour that was stripping the leaves from the trees around the courthouse and making the building’s walkways into little rivers. But inside it was warm and dry, and I had no trouble getting a front-row seat—hardly anyone from the press was present. The media had been ignoring Caputo ever since June, when the O. J. Simpson case had broken.

  Today’s hearing was to be an investigation into whether Caputo’s statements to the police at the time he killed Natalie had been legally and properly obtained. Lawrence Miron, the officer who had arrested Caputo, was to be examined in the matter. So was Bill Coningsby.

  McCarthy was there, looking chic in a black suit and glistening pearls. Kennedy was there, too. I’d called his office, telling his secretary I was writing a book about Caputo and asking to speak to Kennedy, but she’d said he was no longer speaking to the press about the Caputo case. Later, still hoping that he might talk to me, and that if he did, he might be willing to put me in touch with Alberto and Kim Caputo, I’d written him a letter, reminding him that we’d met and requesting an interview. To prepare myself for the interview, I’d done a little research into his background. He’d started his career in the late 1960s and seemed then, and for many years afterward, primarily a political idealist. He’d defended radicals like Bernadine Dohrn and Black Panthers like Huey Newton. He’d been quoted as praising “almost any act that disrupts or disturbs the gove
rnment” and predicted for America “a system where people work together in a Communist way.” He’d also supported and become a spokesperson for left-wing movements like Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. But in recent years he’d taken to defending extremely wealthy clients whose cases and causes were hardly the stuff of radical ideology—not just Ivana Trump, but even Gaetano Badalamenti, a heroin-dealing Mafia chieftan. Was he political or simply defiant? Did he act on the basis of ideas or self-interest?

  I’d been eager to find out, to get more of a fix on him than I’d gotten when I’d met him socially. But Kennedy had replied to my letter with a note saying, “I am buried in trials now through May. Can we talk in June?” And when June had rolled around, although I’d called his office several times, his secretary hadn’t put me through to him. Mr. Kennedy is too busy, she always said. He’ll get back to you.

  This morning, I found him impressive. After McCarthy took testimony from Officer Miron, Kennedy rose sternly to cross-examine him, and with virtually every question managed to imply that Caputo’s English had been so bad at the time of Natalie’s death that, absent a Spanish interpreter, his statements couldn’t possibly be considered to have been properly obtained. “After you met him in the gas station,” Kennedy said to Miron, “and after he said to you, ‘I need help. I just killed Natalie,’ you asked, ‘Where?’ Am I right? And then, when he didn’t respond, your partner asked him the question in Spanish, right?”

  “Yes,” Miron said shortly. He was a hefty man in his mid-fifties who had left the police department years ago but still seemed imbued with the defiant brusqueness that many police officers manifest when they’re questioned by defense attorneys. Kennedy wasn’t fazed. “But back in 1971, the card that you police officers carry with the Miranda rights on them didn’t yet have them written in Spanish,” he continued, one hand in his pants pocket, as if to prevent it from moving, the other gesticulating rhythmically to the beat of his words. “Am I right?”