The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “Yeah, she was enthralled by him,” Sanders said as, struck most of all by that smile, I studied the pictures. Ricardo didn’t look like a man who had a care in the world, let alone a man who had murdered two women.

  “He was like a beautiful snake,” Sanders murmured. “He got Barbara so enthralled that she forgot that beautiful snakes can have deadly venom.” A moment later, Sanders took the pictures back and, staring at them himself, added, “No, he was more like a leech. He lived off women, that was his game. And he could be quite expensive.”

  “Could Barbara afford him?” I asked, a part of me wanting the pictures back, imagining that if I studied those smiling images long enough, I might, after all, see some hint of Ricardo’s true nature. I’d have felt more secure in the world if I could have detected that. But Sanders was putting the photographs away.

  “Well, she wasn’t rich,” he answered my question. “Her family was middle class. Her father was a high school principal in Union City. She didn’t have money, just her salary. And a bit of savings. But Ricardo, he was determined to get his hands on every last bit of it.”

  According to Sanders, this became clear to Barbara when, sometime after the trip to Yosemite, Ricardo began hitting her up not just for lunches, dinners, and local trips, but for something more costly—a trip to Hawaii. Barbara resented the demand and said so to several friends. But if she had begun to suspect that Ricardo was interested in her not for herself but for her money, she had also begun to feel, whether for this reason or another, that she herself was no longer interested in him. After a while, she gave in to his demand for plane fare to Hawaii and told one intimate, “I want to be rid of him. I bought him a one-way ticket.”

  “End of story?” Sanders said. “No. Ricardo was out of her hair, but not for long. He went out to Hawaii. Tried to pick up women. Looked for a place to stay. Knocked on the door of some painter and told her he’d been given her name by someone in San Francisco. This woman didn’t know anyone in San Francisco. But she let Ricardo spend the night at her place anyway—that’s how ingratiating he could be. Still, she didn’t let him stay longer than just that one night. He didn’t find a meal ticket. Not like Barbara. So just before Christmas, he phoned her and begged her for a return air ticket. He missed her, he said, and wanted to spend the holiday with her.”

  Barbara had been planning to spend it with her parents and sister. But she bought him a ticket. And on Christmas Day, she brought him with her to the family gathering, just as Judith Becker had brought him to her family’s gathering. And just as he had done with Judith Becker’s family, and with that of Natalie Brown, he made a favorable impression, mingling sociably and talking interestingly about his life in Argentina. Indeed, Judson and Vera Taylor, Barbara’s father and mother, thought him a most sincere and serious young man, and Barbara’s sister, Susan, decided he was deeply in love with Barbara.

  But Barbara knew better. And after Christmas, when Ricardo asked her for more money, she coolly refused him.

  “We know this for a fact,” Sanders said, and shoved a piece of paper at me. It was a police department interview with a dealer in guns and false identity papers who had been visited by Ricardo shortly before New Year’s Day. “Ricardo had a big powerful gun that he wanted to sell,” the detective who had written up the interview reported. “Ricardo said that Barbara took care of him … [but] he was going to drop her because she wasn’t giving him enough money. Ricardo told the dealer to tell him of a place with a lot of money. He wanted to rob the place.… He said he’d [already] ‘knocked down’ two places. The gun that Ricardo wanted to sell was a handmade gun, chrome-plated, with a pearl handle.… Ricardo said he’d asked Barbara for a lot of money—like $1,000—and she’d refused. He was upset about that.”

  I’d known that Ricardo had had some experience with theft. After all, Detective Pierce, to whom I’d spoken in connection with the murder of Natalie Brown, had told me that a man who’d roomed with Ricardo when he first came to the States had claimed to the police that Ricardo used to rough up and rob gay men. That knowledge had several times made me wonder about the source of the money Ricardo had had in the bank just before he murdered Judith Becker. Six thousand dollars. Surely that was a far more substantial sum than an inmate might have been expected to earn from working in the hospital cafeteria and selling an occasional pencil sketch. But even with my suspicions about how he came by money, here was a Ricardo Caputo I hadn’t expected. Here was a Ricardo Caputo with clear-cut underworld aspirations and contacts, with the kinds of ambitions and friends that would surely have startled the dutiful daughters and hardworking professional women whom he courted.

  I shook my head, and Sanders read my expression. “You know, people think Ricardo Caputo was just a lady-killer,” he said. “Some kind of romantic with a screw loose. But the fact of the matter is that killing women was just the tip of his iceberg. You’ll see as we move along that he was a thug, a guy whose chief interest was money and who knew how to get it in a lot of different ways. Most of them outside the law.”

  We’d been talking a long time, and at this juncture Sanders got up and poured us both some more coffee. “We are going to move along, aren’t we?” he said as he did so. “I’ve got lots more to tell. You got the time?”

  Was he serious? I’d been mesmerized by his information, so mesmerized that I’d forgotten to bring up the attempted murder that McCarthy had suggested I ask him about. As soon as our cups were full and he had seated himself again, I did so, interrupting his account of Barbara. “Elise McCarthy in Nassau mentioned another case to me. An attempted murder. Was it here? In San Francisco?”

  “Ah, you know about that?”

  I nodded as if I did, or at least as if I knew more than just what I’d said. And Sanders started talking again. “It was in Hawaii. After that meeting with the gun dealer, Ricardo hightailed it back there.”

  “Because Barbara wouldn’t give him any more money?”

  “Maybe. But probably not. Maybe it was just because by this time, he’d hooked up with a man who made his living by stealing credit card numbers and using them to purchase and then sell expensive goods. Ricardo was a good sidekick for this guy. He knew how to be a waiter, and waiters knew how to get their hands on credit card numbers.”

  Ricardo’s new friend had an attractive two-bedroom apartment in one of Waikiki Beach’s most pleasant neighborhoods, an area of small apartment buildings built before the trend to mammoth high-rises, and one that was just a few blocks from the water. He offered Ricardo a room in his place, and Ricardo got himself a waiter’s job at a popular restaurant.

  Ricardo remained in the apartment for several months, enjoying a life that was very much to his taste. He only worked lunches, and when his labors were over, he donned a pair of minuscule bathing trunks, sunned his muscular body at the beach, then wandered the sands hoping to pick up tourists and shake them down for cash or meals. “He had a quite a system,” Sanders said. “He’d start by offering to take the tourists out. Then he’d get them to take him out. We know this because of what happened next. With the woman you asked me about. Her name was Mary O’Neill. He met her late in March and invited her out to dinner and she went.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah, well, he told her he owned a restaurant—the one he worked in. Oh, he could shovel it, he could shovel it with the best of them. O’Neill was impressed, and she goes out for a steak dinner with him. Then he asks her to buy him dinner the next night, but she can’t, she’s going on a tour of the island. End of story? No. The next day, he finds her and tells her he knows a little beach that’s better than anything she’s seen on her tour and he’ll take her there. Maybe he only has her wallet on his mind, but then he gets another idea, tells her they have to stop at his apartment first because he needs something.”

  I gave a little groan. I could see what was coming.

  “Yeah,” Sanders said. “But I go back to my snake analogy. He had so much charm that O’Neill t
rusted him, forgot about poison. She says yes, she’ll go with him. They get to his apartment. He hits on her, starts kissing and petting her. She goes along with it for a while. But then she wants him to stop. And he won’t stop. He starts to rape her. She resists. And he begins beating her. Hard. And then all of a sudden, his roommate comes home, shouts at Ricardo to stop, and O’Neill gets away and runs screaming out of the apartment.”

  “Lucky woman,” I sighed. “I mean, suppose the roommate hadn’t come home.”

  “Exactly. Exactly. But hold on, there’s something I want to show you. Because it’s going to help you understand Barbara Taylor better.” He began rummaging in one of his notebooks, then snapped out a sheet of paper.

  “Mary O’Neill didn’t report the attack to the police,” Sanders said. “But Ricardo figured she would, and pronto, he moved out. And then, incredibly, the next day she went looking for him and left this with his roommate.” Shaking his head, he handed me the piece of paper.

  It was a letter that Mary O’Neill had written to Ricardo, and I saw at once why Sanders had wanted me to read it. Its few short lines conveyed better than all his words that Ricardo did indeed possess an extraordinary ability to fascinate women—and to hold on to them even after they had become acquainted with his viciousness.

  “Dear Ricardo,” O’Neill had written. “I can’t believe that you would do something like this to me. Your roommate said you don’t live here anymore. I feel very bad about all this. Maybe you could at least write to me and tell me what changed please!”

  The note was plaintive, but what was most telling about it was its end. Despite having been beaten by Ricardo, despite having escaped his violence merely by the timely return of his roommate, O’Neill wanted to hear from him again. She finished her missive by giving Ricardo her home address in upstate New York.

  I was stunned by this example of Ricardo’s capacity to enthrall, so stunned that I asked if I might copy it out then and there. Sanders said yes, and I began to write. And maybe it was because Sanders saw me sitting there studentlike and quietly scribbling away, but as I wrote, he turned professorial. “You know, it isn’t just Ricardo. A lot of serial killers have this uncanny ability to get women—yeah, and men, too—to put themselves in harm’s way. You know, we know a lot about them. Even that they’ve been around for centuries. Probably inspired all those stories about werewolves.”

  “But is Caputo a serial killer?” I asked, handing him back Mary O’Neill’s letter. “From what I’ve read, they kill for the thrill of killing, while he seems to kill because women reject him or some demand of his. At least, that’s what seems to have happened with the first two women. And what almost happened with O’Neill.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you this. Caputo’s a little different from your garden-variety serial killer, but yes, I’d term him a serial killer. He’s different in that he got into relationships with his victims—at least, with the victims whose murders he’s confessed. But he may have killed a lot more people. Remember, Gordon McEwan’s informant said he bragged about having killed men as well as women. And even as far as women go, I’m sure he’s killed more than those four he’s taking the credit for. You know about the one in L.A.?”

  “A little.”

  Sanders fisted a hand, then raised a thumb. “Okay. In 1981, four years after Caputo claims to have stopped killing, a woman who works with him at a restaurant in L.A.—her name is Devon Green—is found murdered.” He raised his index finger. “Okay. They find her body and Caputo isn’t questioned because he isn’t known to have any relationship with the woman.” He raised his middle finger. “But hell, Caputo was married at the time. Maybe he was seeing her on the sly and asked her to keep it quiet.”

  I sat forward. “Maybe it was the same with Jacqui Bernard. She didn’t tell anyone about Ricardo, and maybe it was because he asked her not to.”

  “Maybe. The funny thing is, we can’t find the wife. She disappeared.”

  “You mean the one that was on PrimeTime?”

  “No. That was his second wife. I’m talking about the first one. A Cuban refugee he says he married in 1979 and split up with in 1984. Name’s Felicia Fernandez. We can’t find her anywhere. Her or the two children he says he had with her. Maybe she ran away because she wanted to make sure he never found her. Or maybe he killed her, too. But whatever, back in 1983, when your friend was murdered—”

  “He was still married to Felicia?”

  “Right. And working in L.A. But the wife’s gone, so we don’t know if he was always at home. And maybe he wasn’t always at work. Who’s to say he didn’t go East for a while?”

  I nodded. I’d thought that ever since Kennedy had told me that Caputo couldn’t have killed Jacqui because he was living in L.A. when she was murdered.

  “Look, I’ll tell you something else,” Sanders interrupted my thoughts. “If Ricardo Caputo told me he’d stopped killing after murdering just four women, I’d tell him to his face, you’re a liar. I’d tell him, the only reason you’re not copping to any other murders is because you know which are the ones we’ve got the goods on you for—the ones where we know you were involved with the victims. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t do any more. Because serial killers don’t stop killing. They can’t.”

  My thoughts were racing, my mind on Jacqui. Had Gordon McEwan’s informant been right? Had Caputo murdered her? So much that I’d learned today suggested its likelihood. But we went back to Barbara Taylor, and Sanders told me the end of her story.

  The day after the O’Neill incident, Barbara was at her job at the film company when she received a call from Ricardo. He had fled Hawaii right after Mary O’Neill had run from his apartment, had flown all night, and was now in the San Francisco airport. He’d come home, Ricardo said to Taylor, because he’d realized he loved her and wanted to marry her. And would she please come and pick him up at the airport.

  She went, though she had no intention of resuming her relationship with Ricardo. Deflecting his protestations of love but agreeing to pick him up and let him rest at her apartment until her workday was finished, she left her office, fetched him, dropped him off at the apartment, and went back to work. But when she got to her desk, she called a man with whom she had made a date for the evening, broke the date, and explained that she couldn’t keep it because her old boyfriend had turned up unexpectedly and she had to go home and get him to understand once and for all that they were through.

  That evening she did just that. Did it firmly and directly. Ricardo exploded. He acted “as if I owed him something,” she confided to a friend the next morning. But he was gone, and she felt safe. So that day, Good Friday, she relaxed, shopping for groceries at a local market and treating herself to coffee at an Italian coffeehouse. She lingered a long time over the coffee, sitting alone at a marble-topped table. Then eventually she went home.

  There was no sign of Ricardo, who seemed to have accepted her wishes and gone his own way. But the following night one of her neighbors was awakened by the sound of a man and woman quarreling and shouting at each other. The neighbor didn’t call the police, just burrowed his head down into his pillow. And while he tried to get back to sleep, Ricardo began beating Barbara Taylor, just as he’d beaten Mary O’Neill. This time, however, no door opened, no rescuing roommate returned. Ricardo socked Barbara in the face with one of his iron fists, splitting her skin just above the eyelid. Then he punched her in the eye. Then he knocked her to the ground.

  Barbara was naked, but he didn’t rape her. He just began kicking her, forcing his booted feet into her soft flesh. He struck a thigh, an arm, a hand. Then he began concentrating on her head, crashing his boot into her ear, her forehead, the back of her skull. He rammed into these places so hard that he split the skin right down to the bone.

  Punching and kicking at her, he kept up his onslaught for an agonizingly long time—nearly fifteen minutes, the police were to estimate. But at last she was dead, as dead as she’d have been if he’d used a gun or a
knife instead of his hands and feet. When he realized it, he threw a towel over her bleeding head, as if to make her face go away. But he could still see her body, the body he had so often made love to, and snatching an electric blanket from the bed, he draped it over her, so that at last she was covered, invisible to him. Then he scurried through the apartment, searched the drawers and closets for money, and hurriedly disappeared into the now silent night.

  “I didn’t know about it until the next day,” Sanders said when he’d finished describing the murder to me. “Easter Sunday. Barbara’s father had gone to her apartment because she hadn’t shown up for the family’s Easter dinner, and he discovered the body and phoned the police. My partner and I were on call that day. We went over, saw the body, looked for the murder weapon. But we couldn’t find one. Then we started looking harder, digging into the bottoms of drawers and the backs of closets. And way in the back of one closet, we found a suede boot covered with blood. It was the murder weapon. One of those pretty boots Barbara had bought Ricardo.”

  8

  When I got back to New York, my mind was ablaze with the new information I’d learned. Mary O’Neill. Devon Green. These were new names to me, an example, in O’Neill’s case, of how charming the canny Ricardo could be, and in Green’s case, of the possibility that he was lying about the number of murders he had committed. I called Elise McCarthy to tell her what I’d learned from Sanders and to see if I could get more information about O’Neill and Green from her.

  I was in luck, at least about O’Neill. McCarthy had just been to see her. “I needed to because, as I told you, if Kennedy goes ahead with the insanity defense, it isn’t just Natalie’s killing that’s relevant, but everything Caputo’s done since he killed her. So O’Neill becomes very important.”

  “Where does she live? Where did you see her?”

  “I can’t tell you that. She doesn’t want to talk to a journalist. She didn’t even want to talk to me.”