by Linda Wolfe
“Yes,” Miron said again.
“Did it occur to you when you read Caputo his rights that he might need a Spanish translation of them?”
“No.”
“And when you turned him over to Detective Coningsby, did you say anything to the detective about Caputo’s ability to understand English?” Kennedy’s unpocketed hand was dancing and his deep voice had grown louder.
“No.”
“Were you present when Coningsby interrogated him?”
“Yes.”
“And you say that Caputo initialed each page of the statement and read it aloud?”
“Yes.”
Kennedy leaned forward on the podium, both hands still now. “How? Was his English fluent? Or hesitant?”
Miron leaned forward, too. “It was fine. When he read the statement back to me, I understood what he was reading.”
Kennedy grimaced broadly. And a few moments later, he announced he was finished with Miron.
Coningsby took the stand next. Under McCarthy’s questioning, the suntanned detective, who’d flown in that morning from South Carolina, described the crime scene and related the contents of Caputo’s confession statement. Coningsby also mentioned that after the statement was written out, an assistant district attorney had arrived and interrogated Caputo further. But he didn’t have a copy of that interrogation. “There was a fire in the warehouse where a lot of our records were stored,” he explained. “We think the Q and A burned up.”
I wondered what Kennedy would have to say about that, but he didn’t get a chance to cross-examine Coningsby. The judge announced it was time for lunch.
The area around most courthouses, except in Manhattan where the courts are cheek by jowl with Chinatown, is a culinary wasteland. So I didn’t expect to find a decent restaurant. I just left the building, ran through the cold, still-pelting rain, and entered the first eatery I encountered. It was an Asian lunch counter where the food, precooked and displayed in warming trays, looked gluey and unidentifiable. I ordered something the counterman said was chicken and vegetables and started to put it down on a table, when suddenly I noticed Kennedy behind me. He, too, had chosen this closest-at-hand canteen.
What good fortune! I suggested we eat together. “Maybe we could do that interview about your past,” I said.
“My past? I don’t think I want to talk about that over lunch,” he frowned. “It might make me sick.”
“Maybe,” I laughed, “we can find other things to talk about.”
“Sure.”
He slid opposite me into the booth, and we began talking. I didn’t bring up Kennedy’s past—I knew the ground rules. But I told him a little about mine, specifically that I’d known Jacqui Bernard. “Her brother-in-law is a good friend,” Kennedy said. “He called me up right after the story appeared in the newspaper and I told him I didn’t think Caputo had killed Jacqui.” Kennedy also mentioned that he’d spoken to a Manhattan Homicide investigator about Jacqui. “I told him,” he said, “that Caputo was living in L.A. at the time Jacqui was murdered.” I nodded when he said that—it was pretty much what Detective Giorgio had told me Kennedy had said to him, which was that Caputo had been living in L.A. and that he categorically denied having had anything to do with Jacqui’s death. The denial hadn’t meant much to me. As a judge friend of mine likes to say, “If a man can kill, he can lie.”
Still, I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with Kennedy. So I let it go, returning to the subject of Jacqui’s brother-in-law, whom I also knew, and chatting about him and about our other mutual friends, the couple who’d once taken me to that party at Kennedy’s house. Small talk. And then after a while Kennedy brought up Ricardo again. I guess his client was too much on his mind for him to avoid talking about him altogether. “You know, I told Ricardo on the phone the first time I spoke to him that there was no way he was going to see the light of day. He’d either go to a prison or a mental hospital for life.”
I wanted to ask, you mean he turned himself in even after knowing you—his lawyer—thought this? Why would someone do that? But before I could get the words out of my mouth, Kennedy started telling me that Caputo could have turned himself in to either New York or California, but had selected New York. And then, as if in answer to the unspoken questions that had earlier crossed my mind, he said, “I don’t ask Caputo much, because he’s wacky. He’s so wacky I can’t believe the things he says.”
I didn’t think Caputo was wacky. It was hard to think this now that I’d learned how he’d rallied himself after killing Natalie Brown and how carefully he’d planned his escape from Manhattan State Hospital just before he killed Judith Becker. Wacky people are seldom capable of such organization.
Kennedy must have seen the skepticism in my face. “Just to show you how wacky Caputo was,” he said, “he left clues behind at all his killings. Here in Nassau, he left his watch and his shoes and socks.”
“But he changed his clothes,” I pointed out. “Threw his shirt into a trash can. I found that an important detail.”
Kennedy didn’t think so. But of course it was, suggesting as it did that Caputo had had at least some awareness of the difference between right and wrong when he killed Natalie, and Kennedy, for all his denial, appeared to be listening to me carefully. Maybe he’s wondering how he’ll explain away that discarded shirt, I thought. Not today. It wasn’t relevant to the hearing. But it might be a different story in front of a jury.
Then Kennedy mentioned something that he did seem to find significant. “That Q and A that disappeared,” he said. And he added, with a twinkle in his eyes, “An unscrupulous lawyer could make a lot out of that.”
Not long afterward, the lawyer cut our conversation short, saying he had to get back to the courthouse. I was disappointed. I hadn’t even gotten around to asking him if he’d put me in touch with Alberto and Kim Caputo. But he was out the door already. I put on my raincoat and sloshed my way back to the courtroom.
There, that afternoon, Kennedy cross-examined Coningsby. But although he raised the matter of the vanished Q and A, he didn’t dwell on it. Nor did he go back to the question of why the police hadn’t provided Caputo with a Spanish interpreter. Indeed, he seemed distracted, as if his mind was no longer fully on the hearing, and as soon as it ended, he raced out of the building.
“What did you think of Kennedy’s cross-examination?” Elise McCarthy asked me over the phone several days later.
“It was okay,” I said noncommittally.
“Well, I thought it was terrible. I thought he seemed nervous.” McCarthy was fierce, a young Turk battling the hegemony of the old. She was also unusually voluble. “Kennedy and I had something of a dustup,” she said. “Before the hearing started, we went in back and he said to me, ‘If Dr. Dietz finds Caputo not responsible, you’re not going to dispute it, are you?’ And I said, ‘It depends what Dietz bases his conclusions on. I mean, have you guys done an investigation of how Caputo’s spent the past twenty years?’ Kennedy didn’t answer that. He just said, ‘The defendant’s told Dietz everything.’ So I said, ‘Well, we’ve done an investigation.’ So then he wanted to know if he had everything I had, and I said, ‘Do your own investigation!’ And he stormed out.”
I scribbled furiously, relishing her loquacious account but wishing she’d slow down so I could uncramp my fingers.
But McCarthy kept talking. “And that wasn’t the end of it. During the lunch break, he brought it up again. He said, ‘Look, I really don’t want to go through all this. I’m really just going through the motions here. This isn’t going to be a trial, is it?’ And then he went, ‘What if Dietz doesn’t say Caputo’s not responsible, but he says it was extreme emotional distress? What then? Would you consider a manslaughter plea?’”
“Would you?” I managed to interrupt.
Her answer was indirect. “What I thought was, Frankly, I’d take that in a second. But I couldn’t believe Kennedy was really saying he wanted it. I mean, if Caputo took a manslaug
hter plea here in Nassau, it’d be hard for him to go ahead and argue insanity in any of the other jurisdictions.”
Despite my aching fingers, I was delighted to receive this behind-the-scenes account, which went a long way toward explaining why Kennedy had seemed so effective the morning of the hearing and so desultory in the afternoon. He talks to McCarthy after our Asian lunch, I speculated, he figures she’s going to go for the manslaughter deal, and so he lets himself just peddle down.
But if McCarthy was going to go for a manslaughter plea, she wasn’t telling me. When I asked her directly if such a plea was now in the works, she stopped talking.
I didn’t want to end our conversation on that silence, so I said, “By the way, how did Caputo spend the last twenty years?”
“Well, there’s a lot I can’t tell you just yet,” McCarthy said, her speed down to normal now. “But there’s more to this guy’s history than he’s admitting to.”
“Like what?”
“Like an attempted murder, maybe. Talk to Sanders about it.” Sanders was the detective in San Francisco who’d investigated Caputo’s third admitted murder, that of Barbara Taylor. I’d mentioned to McCarthy that I was going out to the Coast shortly to interview him about Taylor.
“I will,” I promised. “I sure will.”
7
Taylor, a documentary filmmaker and the director of a McGraw-Hill subsidiary called Contemporary Films, had been twenty-eight years old when she was killed. Caputo had not yet been arraigned for her murder and all press inquiries were being handled not by San Francisco’s district attorney’s office but by its police department, and specifically by Inspector Earl Sanders. He was an authority on the nature and apprehension of serial killers. And he had a special interest in the Caputo case, having been one of the first detectives to discover Barbara Taylor’s body.
I’d talked to Sanders on the phone several times, told him about how I’d gotten interested in Caputo, filled him in on how the Nassau and Westchester cases were proceeding, and then made our interview date. I was to fly to San Francisco, and he was to pick me up in front of Nordstrom’s and take me to police headquarters.
I’m always apprehensive before an interview. Partly, it’s the remnant of my old shyness, but partly it’s because conducting an interview is not unlike giving a performance. You have lines—the questions you’ve meticulously prepared and rehearsed. You have a costume—you don’t wear your everyday writing clothes, your baggy jeans and shapeless T-shirts, but something tailored and chic and responsible-looking. And you have stage fright, a turbulence in the pit of your stomach. Maybe the interviewee won’t respond to you, you tell yourself, won’t open up, won’t give you the information you so long to obtain.
These customary anxieties multiplied as I waited for Sanders in front of Nordstrom’s for he was nowhere in evidence. He’s probably just late, I tried to reassure myself. He’ll be here any minute. But as I lingered on that unfamiliar, crowded street corner, I grew more and more uncomfortable. And then Sanders, a portly man dressed in a black trench coat and a black fedora with a jaunty red feather in its band, pulled up in a green Jeep Cherokee and waved to me. He recognized me. He’d seen my picture on a book jacket, he told me. And I recognized him. I’d seen him on the TV show America’s Most Wanted, and although the show had been taped a few years ago and he was heavier now, he had the same sparkling eyes and genial expression.
By the time we neared police headquarters in a rundown, warehouse-laden section of San Francisco, I had relaxed, for it was impossible in Sanders’s company to feel anything but at ease. He was a talker, a man who liked sharing the pungent anecdotes of the policeman’s life. “I had this case once,” he said as he drove, “where this guy murdered his mother and got off. End of story? Hell, no. Mom’s dead, he’s got no one to hate, he goes and shoots his lawyer.” And, “I had this teenager we call the Kervorkian kid. Him and another kid twisted a rope around a girl’s neck, and they each held an end and gave it a yank. End of story? No, the kid says, ‘The girl wanted to die, and she asked for our help. It ain’t murder if you’re just lending a hand to a friend who wants to kill herself.’”
Sanders was just as voluble once we reached the headquarters, where he made us a pot of coffee, plunked himself and a stack of thick loose-leaf notebooks opposite me at a beaten-up desk, and saying he didn’t hold with the kind of police paranoia that insisted on secrecy even where none was necessary, as in this ancient Taylor case, proceeded to tell me everything he knew about it. “Barbara was a terrific person,” he began, leafing through one of the notebooks. “She had loads of friends, and every one of them described her as someone they loved and trusted and liked to be around. Here. This is typical. One of her friends told us, ‘If people needed assistance, Barbara was always there.’”
“A nurturer?” I asked, thinking of Jacqui Bernard.
“Exactly.”
“What did she look like?”
Sanders flipped to another document and started to read me a description of her. “Well, she was five feet eight inches tall, weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds, had brown hair and eyes—but wait. You might as well see for yourself.” At this he handed me a collection of photographs of Barbara, who was attractive not in a glamorous but in a completely artless way. Her long, dark hair hung loosely to her shoulders, her large, unpainted eyes were luminous, and her unglossed lips stretched wide into an infectious smile.
“What did she do at Contemporary Films?” I asked.
“She managed the U.S. distribution of educational documentaries. Traveled abroad to acquire foreign productions. Made good money.”
Barbara’s salary, I soon learned, had allowed her to take an apartment in Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s loveliest neighborhoods, a hilly tumble of fretted Victorian houses, elaborate stone mansions from the twenties, and graceful, low pre-World War II apartment buildings, set on steep streets with spectacular views of the Bay. “Ricardo Caputo liked the neighborhood,” Sanders sniffed. “Before he met Barbara, he was living in a flophouse off Broadway.”
He was in San Francisco because after the long cross-country bus ride he’d embarked on the night he killed Judith, he’d decided to make his new home there. Back in New York, he was the subject of public outrage. Newspaper editorials were denouncing government officials for putting people like him into minimum-security hospitals and attacking the administrators of those hospitals for letting patients elope. But in San Francisco, a city thronged with tourists and the itinerant peddlers who made their living off them, he apparently felt safe. He shaved off his mustache, cut his hair, obtained a new identity from a dealer in black-market documents, and began going out in public, drawing penciled portraits in the heavily trafficked bars and cafés of North Beach and Union Street.
“I don’t think he intended to make a living as a portrait artist,” Sanders told me dryly. “No, he’s a guy who loves the feeding trough. He was looking for something more lucrative, for someone who’d support him.”
He found that someone in Barbara Taylor, just a month after he killed Judith. One night after work, Barbara strolled the two blocks between her apartment and Union Street and ended her walk by going into Moonie’s, an Irish bar and café frequented by young professionals like herself. Ricardo was drawing there, and she stopped to look at his work. When she did, he offered to sketch her, and when she said okay, he began talking to her. He said his name was Ricardo Donoguier, and that he was from Argentina, where his family owned a big ranch. He said he’d be inheriting the ranch one day, but that in the meantime, he preferred the joys of expressing himself creatively. And he said that he supplemented his income as an artist by working as a waiter or busboy and was looking for such a position just now.
Barbara was intrigued by him. She bought his portrait of her. And she took another picture as well, a drawing of Humphrey Bogart. It wasn’t very good. Bogart’s face looked pinched and elongated. But Barbara thought both drawings showed talent. And later that
night, after talking some more with Ricardo, she invited him to come home with her.
“It was that kind of time,” Sanders said. “Women were moving, making their stand, doing things they’d never done before. We don’t know whether Barbara was in the habit of inviting men home with her right after she met them, but she did it with Ricardo. We do know that she’d never lived with a man before, and yet pretty much right after that first night, she started living with Ricardo. That is, he started living with her. Brought his things over and moved right in.”
Sanders had talked to a great many of Barbara’s friends and gotten pretty much the same story from all of them: that she said she’d met the most wonderful man at Moonie’s; that she said she was having with him the most incredible relationship; and that she didn’t keep her new boyfriend hidden. “She showed him off,” Sanders said. “Brought him to her office. Went out to dinner in little ethnic restaurants with him. She also spent money on him. Paid for those dinners. Gave him carfare and a small lunch allowance so he could go out job hunting. Bought him clothing. He liked good stuff, and she got it for him. Fancy sneakers. Even a pair of expensive suede hiking boots with steel-reinforced heels.”
She bought him the boots so that they could go hiking at Yosemite and, when they went, did what Natalie had done when she and Ricardo traveled to the Caribbean—paid for the trip. Barbara took a thousand dollars out of her bank account and supplemented the cash by using her credit card, too. She also, during their stay in the majestic park, snapped picture after picture of Ricardo, although when they returned home she neglected to get the pictures developed.
“We found the roll in her apartment after he killed her,” Sanders said to me. “Wanna see?” And he laid out in front of me a handful of snapshots of Ricardo. In one, he was bare-armed and bare-chested, his muscles visible under his well-tanned skin. In another, he was perched in a tree, balancing himself proudly on its precarious branches. In all the pictures, he was smiling—a lighthearted, confident smile.