The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s scared out of her mind, that’s why. Ever since the news about Barbara Taylor broke and she realized that the guy who’d beaten her in Hawaii was the same guy who killed Taylor, she’s been looking over her shoulder, afraid that he might come back and get her.”

  I was relieved to hear that O’Neill, after writing her plaintive missive to Ricardo, had come to her senses about him. But I was frustrated, too. Here was a living victim of Caputo’s and I wasn’t going to get to speak to her. Not that I needed McCarthy to tell me how to find her. I could have done it on my own, using her old address as a way of tracing her. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to respect her terror, and McCarthy’s obvious wish that I do so.

  Still, I longed to know more about O’Neill. And one day, during an interview with a Nassau County detective, Robert Hines, my longing bore fruit. Hines was putting together a dossier for McCarthy on Caputo’s activities since 1971. A chunky, broad-faced man with shortcropped, graying hair, he resembled Hollywood’s version of the hard-as-nails Southern sheriff. But Hines wasn’t ignorant and explosive like those celluloid sheriffs. He was smart, measured, observant. Indeed, he had a gaze so intent that at times I felt he wasn’t just studying me but memorizing me. Despite this, however, I found him a pleasure to talk to, for unlike Sanders, he had actually met with and spoken to Ricardo, albeit briefly, on the night he had turned himself in.

  “Ya ever notice his hands?” Hines asked me.

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “They’ve got calluses on them. And the calluses are in a funny place. Most people get calluses on their palms. He’s got them on the front of his hands. Ya know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “From doing push-ups. On his knuckles. I saw that as soon as I met him. Made me suspicious of him.”

  Hines had noticed other small but significant things about Ricardo, the kinds of details that only a man skilled at detection would not just observe but find useful. He’d seen, for example, a tiny scar on Ricardo’s arm and been able to postulate that despite Ricardo’s claims to insanity, he’d made a very sane effort to disguise his identity, for the scar turned out to be the result of the removal of a tattoo. Hines, whose eyes were never altogether still, seemed to rely a great deal on visual clues, on what he could learn from telltale revelations on skin, and from faces, whether seen in the flesh or in photographs. He was a Sherlock Holmes in a gray suit, white shirt, and paisley tie.

  I was talking to him at Nassau County Police Headquarters, sitting opposite him at a big table in a deserted hearing room. On the table was a storage box, one of those cardboard boxes that is used to transport files. I kept glancing at it, wondering what it contained. And then Hines began pulling out its treasures. Photographs of Natalie Brown. Photographs of her parents’ home. Photographs of Ricardo. In one, he was sitting on a low stone wall with a glorious blue sea behind him.

  “You wanted to know about O’Neill?” Hines said, pushing the picture closer to me. “Well, I got this picture of Ricardo in Hawaii from her. She kept it all these years. Kept it because once she knew what the guy she’d met in Hawaii was capable of, she wanted always to be able to remember what he looked like. In case he turned up at her house.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Married. Got a couple of kids. Nice lady.”

  Hines had located her through her old address and gone to visit her, but she’d been less than forthcoming on his visit. “My showing up scared her. After Taylor was killed, she’d been contacted by a San Francisco detective who’d gotten her address off a note she left for Ricardo. That had weirded her out, made her worry that Ricardo might reach out and hurt her or her family. So she’d moved, changed her name, tried to disappear. But then, when Caputo’s name surfaced in connection with the Jacqui Bernard killing, some New York City detectives managed to locate her. And now, here I was. And if I could find her, Ricardo could.” Hines stared at the picture. “Ya see the smile?”

  I did. Ricardo looked as cheerful as he’d looked in the pictures Barbara Taylor had taken of him in Yosemite.

  “I had to reassure O’Neill that Ricardo was in jail,” Hines went on. “But even so, she didn’t want to talk to me. Like I said, she was frightened. But there was more. She didn’t want to have this old stuff dredged up. She made it clear that what had happened to her with Ricardo had, in a way, happened to another woman. The woman she was twenty years ago. A tourist on a vacation.”

  Poor O’Neill, I thought. She’d gone off on a holiday, had a little fling, and then been haunted by it the rest of her life. I was glad I’d decided not to try to find her.

  “So I left,” Hines was saying. “What else could I do? But I must have won her confidence, because after I left, she sent me the picture. So I went back. I took Elise McCarthy with me. We drove up there—upstate New York, to hell and gone, and the whole time Elise was complaining about my driving. Too fast for her.” He smiled at the idea of his speed having worried a presumably intrepid assistant district attorney. “But it was still no go. We sat at O’Neill’s kitchen table and begged her to say she’d testify against Caputo if we needed her to. We practically went down on our hands and knees. But she was adamant, and we left without getting a commitment from her.”

  I had told Hines I wanted to know as much as he could tell me about Ricardo’s past, and now he produced from his storage box a time chart he had made, two big sheets of taped-together cardboard covered with bold, handdrawn lines and inky scrawls. The lines were for years. The scrawls were for the names of the women Caputo had admitted killing, the names of the women he was suspected of having killed, and the names of the cities and towns all across America where, with painstaking effort, Hines was gradually establishing that Caputo had on occasion been present.

  One of them was El Paso, Texas. Four days after killing Barbara Taylor, Caputo had turned up at a bridge that spans the Rio Grande between El Paso and Juarez, Mexico, and attempted, without documents, to talk his way across the border. He had said first that he was a Mexican returning home. But when Mexican border guards heard him talk, they had become suspicious of his accent, and he had backtracked, admitted he was from South America. He’d been a stowaway, he said, and had just gotten off an Argentinian ship that had docked in Florida.

  The Mexican guards turned him over to U.S. authorities, who placed him in an El Paso detention camp. There, he was fingerprinted and interviewed by two FBI agents, and he might have been caught except for two things—the slowness with which fingerprints could be compared in those mid-1970s, precomputer days, and his own astonishing quickness. Having learned by the time of the interview an arcane piece of information, which was that while stowaways fell under the jurisdiction of the FBI, deserters from their country’s ships did not, he amended his story and claimed to be not a stowaway but a defector. As a result, the FBI agents had no choice but to turn him over to Immigration investigators. Of course, those investigators also attempted to interview him, but Ricardo had learned something else as well, had discovered that he needn’t talk to Immigration without being represented by an attorney. So, demanding time to get a lawyer, he asked the Immigration authorities to leave. They did, but warned him he had only seven days in which to get a lawyer, and that they’d be back in a week.

  Four days later, in the dead of night, Ricardo and three other detainees overwhelmed an unarmed guard in the men’s dormitory of the El Paso Detention Center, took him hostage, and demanded his keys and intercom. The guard hesitated, but Ricardo had fashioned a makeshift knife from a metal bed frame. He ran it across the guard’s neck, gave him a three-inch gash, and the guard complied. Moments later, Ricardo and his accomplices unlocked the Center’s kitchen and, arming themselves with proper knives and a meat cleaver as well, made their hostage use the confiscated intercom to inform the guards outside that he was a prisoner. “Tell them to open the electrical gate,” Ricardo ordered. “I’m wanted for murder,
so don’t fuck around, because I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  The hostage did as he was told, and his colleagues, fearing for his safety, opened the gate. Ricardo and his men came storming through it, locked up their hostage and the other guards, stole money and guns, and commandeering a car and a guard’s uniform, succeeded in making their way across the border into Juarez. Soon afterward, Ricardo’s accomplices were apprehended. But not Ricardo. He had managed to board a train for Mexico City. “And that’s where he met the next woman he’s confessed to killing,” Hines said. “Laura Gomez.”

  “Did she look like the other women he’s said he killed?” I asked. “Long-haired, full-bodied?”

  Hines shrugged. “We haven’t been able to get a picture of her.” The he smiled and said triumphantly, “But I’ll tell you what I do have. A picture of another woman who went out with Caputo. Kept a diary, too. And sent it to us.”

  He began rifling through his box of files and soon pulled out a large color photograph of Ricardo sitting at a restaurant table alongside a redheaded woman. “Ya know, our friend Ricardo struck me as very intelligent the night I spoke to him,” he said as he waved the picture at me. “But he isn’t so intelligent. Him or his lawyer, either. Because if they hadn’t reached out for publicity and gotten all that press and TV, the LAPD wouldn’t know about Devon Green. And we wouldn’t know about this woman.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Lotte Angstrom. Lives in Denmark now. But she used to live in L.A., and when the story about Caputo’s return hit the papers, one of the friends she’d made in L.A. remembered that when she lived there, she’d gone out with an Argentinian guy. So the friend sent Angstrom some newspaper clippings about Caputo, and after she saw them, Angstrom sent me this picture—and her reminiscences.”

  Angstrom didn’t look at all like the women Caputo had admitted murdering. Unlike them, her hair was short, her features coarse, and her clothing dowdy. But in one respect she reminded me of them. Mouth parted and eyes wide, she had a needy and trusting look about her. To me, it seemed the face of a woman eager to be liked and ready to believe only the best of others.

  “Angstrom met Caputo when he was working at Scandia, one of L.A.’s top restaurants,” Hines said. “She knew him as Bob Martin. Here—’October ninth, 1982. Met Bob, thirty-seven. Divorced. No children. From Argentina. Served in Vietnam. Lives with two men in a house.’”

  “Lives with two men? Not his wife?” I said. “Inspector Sanders in San Francisco told me Ricardo was married when he worked at Scandia.”

  “Well, Ricardo didn’t tell Angstrom anything about a wife. He just said he was living with two roommates. Who knows if it was true? Any more than that he had a lot of money, which he also told Angstrom.”

  “She believed that?”

  “Yeah. And liked him. Dated him for a while. Spoke with him on the phone every day. Then she stopped hearing from him. She thought he’d gone back to Argentina, because that’s what he’d said he was going to do. But then one night she went to Scandia again, and she saw him there. And realized he’d been conning her. ‘He made great plans,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘And promises which he did not keep.’”

  “Fascinating.” I was reading between the lines, imagining Caputo telling Angstrom his family was wealthy, as he’d told Judith Becker’s parents, and that he was going to inherit a ranch, as he’d told Barbara Taylor. I was imagining him promising Angstrom that if she helped him out with some money, he’d go home and claim his inheritance, then return for her and take her to the Andes to live a rich and exotic life.

  Hines broke my reverie by saying, “Yeah, fascinating. But what’s important are the dates. Dates are what you’re always hoping to get in my business. And in this case, we got some, and they establish that in October of 1982 and in March and April of 1983, Caputo was working at Scandia.”

  “And going out with women,” I exclaimed, remembering my conversation with Sanders about Jacqui. “Going out with women even when, according to him, he didn’t do that kind of thing because he was married.”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe he went out with Jacqui that year, too.”

  “Possible.”

  Remembering that Gordon McEwan’s informant had said that Caputo had been living up near 158th Street in New York around the time he killed Jacqui, I asked, “Could he have left Scandia and gone East to live? Could he have quit his job?”

  “That’s something we don’t know. Angstrom sees Caputo for the last time on April eighth, 1983. After that, she doesn’t see him anymore, or at least, she doesn’t write about him anymore. So we have no way of knowing whether he was still at Scandia.”

  “What about his job records, time cards?”

  “Scandia closed a few years ago,” Hines sighed, “and the records can’t be located. Was he at Scandia after April 1983? Was he still in L.A.? Was he living in the East? Was he living on the moon? Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Hines had been a fountain of information. After telling me about Angstrom, he’d filled me in about Devon Green, informing me that she’d wanted to become a model and had only gone to work at Scandia, where she’d become an apprentice chef, while waiting for her big break. “Her body was found, brutally beaten and partially clothed, in an empty lot off a highway,” Hines had said. “The LAPD didn’t know at the time they found her that she and Ricardo were friends. But they know it now. Because all that attention Ricardo got when he turned himself in made a witness come forward.” Hines had chuckled at this, then said with elation, “Seems Devon used to hang out after work with a group of Scandia employees that went drinking and dancing in nearby clubs—and Ricardo was part of the group.”

  Hines had told me all this and shown me one of Green’s modeling shots, a large color photograph showing a shapely woman with a jaunty nose, dove gray eyes, and a cascade of glossy amber-colored hair. But Hines hadn’t known much about Caputo’s last admitted victim, Laura Gomez, who’d been murdered in Mexico in 1977. When I’d asked about her again, he’d said, “I can’t help you out there. Every time we talk to Mexico, the only thing they tell us is what they can’t tell us. Partly it’s the language barrier. Partly it’s because the case is so old. But whatever it is, Mexico’s giving us trouble.”

  9

  Mexico was giving me trouble, too. I’d gotten the names of the relevant police inspectors down there, and I’d called and written and faxed them for information about Laura Gomez, but my calls and letters and faxes had gone unanswered. And then one day, as if miraculously, I received a thick packet of police reports. There was no sender’s name, no one with whom to communicate. But the packet contained a vast amount of material about Ricardo’s stay in Mexico and his eventual relationship with Gomez.

  She wasn’t his first girlfriend in Mexico. Leafing through the reports I’d been sent, I discovered that initially he’d bent his sights on a different woman, one Maria Lopez, a twenty-nine-year-old high-school-educated interior decorator who lived at home with her parents, religious Catholics. Ricardo had met her less than three months after escaping from El Paso and arriving in Mexico City and, after only a brief relationship, had asked her to marry him.

  Maria didn’t know much about Ricardo at the time. He’d told her that he was an American and that his name was Richard Cooper Roman. She’d doubted this. He hadn’t seemed, she felt, like an American. But he’d shown her his driver’s license, which did indeed identify him as Richard Roman, and he’d explained that he hadn’t always been an American, that he’d begun his life as an Argentinian, only to be brought to the States by his parents when they and his sisters emigrated there. His parents? Maria had asked him. What were they like? His father was dead, Ricardo had replied. And as to his mother and even his sisters, he didn’t have much to do with them anymore. Because they were prostitutes.

  The young Mexican interior decorator was hesitant about marrying a man she’d known only a short while, and especially a man from a family like that. But at his su
ggestion, she took him home to meet her family. The visit reassured her. Ricardo, charming and garrulous as always, made the same kind of favorable impression on her parents that he’d made on the parents of so many of his victims, and after the visit Maria said yes, she would be his wife. Still, she wanted to wait until he had a good job. Ricardo dressed well and he had managed to purchase a sleek, expensive motorcycle. But he was apparently making his living merely by giving karate lessons. Maria wanted more in a husband.

  Nevertheless, she agreed to a different proposal of his, agreed that while he was looking for work and they were waiting to wed, they take an apartment together. She needn’t move in, he said to calm her fears about propriety. Not until they tied the knot. But he would live in the apartment and fix it up and get it ready for the time when she did become his bride.

  Maria said yes and they went apartment hunting. Ricardo wanted a good address, and they found a place that pleased him, a terraced, three-room spread in Coyoacàn, a middle-class neighborhood not far from sites beloved by tourists, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, with its Diego Rivera murals, and the Bosque de Chapultepec, with its gardens, zoos, and museums. But when they signed the lease, Ricardo insisted they put it in Maria’s name only. This worried her. But since Ricardo said he would pay the rent, she went along with his request and even agreed to another—that she put the utilities in her name, too.

  I learned all this from the reports of the Mexican police, who had interviewed Maria shortly after the murder of Laura Gomez, and I was struck by the fact that in those reports, Maria came across as so passive and acquiescent that she sounded positively feather-brained. But I suppose that when she talked to the police, she had some investment in presenting herself as foolishly good-natured and naive at the time she started seeing Ricardo. It allowed her to rationalize the fact that she had entered upon what would soon prove a highly unpleasant relationship.