The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

During it, Ricardo looked for work and Maria came dutifully to the Coyoacàn apartment every day to cook and clean for him. But Ricardo found no work and soon became touchy and irritable. He blew up at Maria, shouted at her, called her stupid. More, he behaved mysteriously. One day he left home for a few days and, when he returned, told her that from now on, she should call him not Richard Cooper Roman, but Ricardo Martinez Diaz.

  To give Maria her due, she did manage to ask him why. But when he responded, “Because I did some bad things in the past and I want to forget them,” she probed no further. So she never knew, she claimed, what the Mexican police eventually found out, which was that Ricardo and a friend of his had traveled to a distant village, bribed an official there, and obtained a false birth certificate and social security card in the name of Ricardo Martinez Diaz. But perhaps Maria didn’t want to know, wanted to look the other way. For at last, armed with proper identification, Ricardo got a job. He began working as a salesman for Time-Life Books.

  Nevertheless, as the police reports I had received revealed, there was to be no wedding. Despite having a job, Ricardo’s bad temper continued, and one day he punched Maria hard in the face. She wanted to leave him right then and there, but after he hit her, he sobbed and begged for her forgiveness. So she kept on coming to the apartment. But not long afterward they had another fight, this one about women. Other women. Ricardo told Maria that he didn’t need her because he could have any woman he wanted and that in fact he’d been having some behind her back. Maria got hysterical and, unaware of how lucky she was to exit the relationship with just a few scratches and bruises, fled the apartment, leaving Ricardo in full possession of the few objects they’d purchased together.

  I doubt that Ricardo regretted the departure of his fiancée. Indeed, I’m sure he welcomed that departure, for according to the reports I had received, he had by then met Laura Gomez, a woman he deemed far more desirable. Laura was younger than Maria, only twenty-three. She was better educated, a college graduate enrolled in a graduate program in industrial psychology at the nearby university. And her parents were rich. Her father, Fidel Gomez Martinez, owned one of Mexico’s largest trucking companies.

  Given this, Laura had been raised in the lap of luxury. The Gomezes lived in a neighborhood of Mexico City that resembled Beverly Hills, all sprawling mansions and lush gardens, and their house occupied almost an entire block. Out back, there was a large swimming pool, and in the garage, eleven cars, two of which, a Maverick and a sporty white Mustang, belonged to Laura herself. Laura’s parents had wanted Laura and their only other child, an older girl named Miriam, to be sophisticated. They had taken them on trips to Europe, South America, and the United States. And they had sent Laura, who was artistic and loved to draw and paint, to college in California, at UCLA.

  According to Ricardo, who after he turned himself in talked more admiringly of Laura than of his other murdered conquests, she was beautiful, the fairest of them all. A green-eyed woman with light brown hair that was almost blond, she had been chosen by an advertising agency to do television commercials for one of its clients, a beer called La Rubia Mejor, which means the best light beer but also the best blonde. Ricardo was to say that he met this telegenic beauty when he accompanied some friends to the TV studio where she was filming a commercial.

  Why would so attractive and worldly a woman become involved with a Ricardo Caputo? Ricardo would explain it by saying that despite her beauty, wealth, and sophistication, Laura held herself in low esteem and feared that her parents preferred her sister. “In this, we were like twins,” Ricardo would say.

  But back to the police reports: they revealed that Laura was, like so many of Ricardo’s victims, a nurturer, a giver. Soon after she met Ricardo, who was working at the time at his Time-Life job, he mentioned to her that he had higher ambitions than to be a mere book salesman, but that as a foreigner he was having trouble getting better work; Laura used her influence to win him a higher-paying position at a Mexican subsidiary of the Atlas steel company. And around that time, they became lovers.

  Laura never told her parents that she and Ricardo had a sexual relationship. Nor did she ever introduce him to them. But they knew she was dating him and, or so they told the police, they weren’t particularly worried about it. Their reason was that their home was full of housemaids who reported to them whenever this new friend of Laura’s came to visit and said he and Laura always sat properly in the living room, looking at and talking about drawings he had penciled.

  He was a friend from school, her parents told the police they had assumed. She had many of those, but no doubt she particularly liked this new young man because, like her, he was artistic.

  But there was, of course, far more to Laura’s relationship with Ricardo than a homebound mutual appreciation of art. Laura was seeing Ricardo outside the parental nest, was sleeping with him in the apartment he had once shared with Maria. And although Laura’s parents would eventually say they were ignorant of the fact, Laura, like Natalie and Judith before her, became pregnant.

  On a Friday afternoon in September 1977, she mentioned casually to her parents that her friend Ricardo had invited her to attend a karate exhibition in the evening and asked their permission to join him. They themselves were going out to a conference and dinner that night, and they agreeably said yes.

  Laura spent the afternoon at home, then toward evening got dressed. She put on a skirt, a white blouse with a mandarin collar, and a gold ring studded with three diamonds. Ricardo arrived for her in a taxi around 8 P.M. Her parents had already left, but the housekeeper answered the doorbell. Laura, bidding the housekeeper good-bye, told her she and Ricardo were going directly to the exhibition and got into the taxi.

  That was the last time she was seen alive. She and Ricardo didn’t go to a karate exhibition but went instead to his apartment, and there he killed her.

  I read the details with dismay. Ricardo ripped off Laura’s clothes, dragged her from room to room throughout the apartment, burned her body in several places with cigarettes, and beat her about the head and face with his fists. Then he picked up a steel bar and smashed it down on her skull no fewer than ten times, bashing in her forehead and jaw so that her teeth went rocketing from their cradle of bone. The disbursement of her teeth had prompted the Mexican press to report initially that before Ricardo killed Gomez, he had tortured her, pulled her teeth. Gordon McEwan had read those first accounts, which was why he’d told me about the teeth. But the Mexican police report suggested that Ricardo hadn’t pulled them out, just knocked them out.

  It makes little difference. Just as I had imagined when McEwan told me about Laura’s death, those teeth, little pearls encrusted with blood, lay scattered across the floor.

  Reading, I wished the reports said less about Laura’s destruction and more about her relationship with Ricardo. Had she, like Natalie, Judith, and Barbara, become disillusioned with her handsome lover? Had she, like them, been planning to break up with him? Had she hidden from him the fact that she was pregnant, as Judith had done? Had she told him she was pregnant, as Natalie had done and later denied? Or had she perhaps told him she was pregnant but said that the father was someone else, thereby arousing Ricardo’s jealous fury?

  There was no information that could help me answer those questions. But something indicated a surprising similarity between Ricardo’s movements on the day he killed Laura Gomez and his movements on the day he killed Judith Becker. The similarity was that, just as he had closed down his bank account before murdering Judith, he had taken out some loans immediately before murdering Laura.

  To me, that information suggested that Ricardo was getting ready to leave town, just as he had before murdering Judith, and that on the eve of his departure he had asked Laura, just as he appears to have asked Judith, for something she hadn’t wanted to grant him, a refusal that triggered his rage. As with Judith, I surmised, it could have been something material. But what? One of her cars? Her diamond ring? And then, buried in the Mex
ican police reports, I saw a little statement about that ring. It was missing when they found her body. The only thing on or in her hands were ripped-out clumps of Ricardo’s hair.

  He had made no effort to disentangle them from her fingers. Nor had he attempted to retrieve his possessions from the apartment. He had simply cleared out and, once again, totally and effectively vanished.

  After learning about Gomez and putting together my new knowledge with what I’d already learned about Brown, Becker, and Taylor, it was impossible for me to entertain even for a moment the notion that Ricardo was a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are disorganized, have confused and chaotic thoughts. Ricardo’s thinking had been shrewd and organized. In his relationships with each of the women he had admitted killing, he had been manipulative, asking them for money or other assistance. And after each killing except for that of Natalie Brown, he had covered his tracks, disappeared in a most skillful fashion.

  An insanity defense? I said to myself when I put down the packet of papers. Ridiculous.

  10

  But an insanity defense was still what Kennedy was apparently planning. In December 1994 there was another hearing to determine if Ricardo’s statements to the police on the night he killed Natalie could be considered to have been fairly gotten, and this time it was the defense’s turn to call witnesses. Kennedy put on a mental health expert—not Dr. Park Dietz, the famed psychiatrist who had videotaped his examination of Ricardo, but a man named Sanford Drob, a psychologist who had given Ricardo psychological tests and studied his Matteawan and Manhattan State Hospital records. Dr. Drob’s view was that Ricardo’s statements should be disallowed, for, “three weeks after his arrest,” he asserted, “he was diagnosed with a serious psychotic disorder.”

  Elise McCarthy, sitting at the prosecution table, began scribbling energetically. She had asked to have this hearing delayed because the defense had only three days ago supplied her with the notes on which Dr. Drob would be basing his testimony. But the judge, John Dunne, had ruled against her, saying he’d give her a few weeks to prepare her cross-examination of the psychologist but that his direct testimony had to be heard today.

  Drob was expansive, prolix. “When you talk with Mr. Caputo,” he said, “he presents, particularly at this point, as an intelligent, verbal individual. But his scores on a wide variety of tests of perceptual functioning, intellectual functioning, abstract ability—let’s forget construction ability where he does better than the fiftieth percentile—but in perceptual functioning and abstract reasoning and general intellectual functioning, his scores all cluster between the tenth and twenty-fifth percentile, which doesn’t make him mentally deficient but significantly below average on these measures. For example, his IQ is measured at a full scale of eighty, which is just at the cusp between the low normal and borderline level of intellectual functioning.”

  Kennedy knew that the court-appointed psychiatrist who had found Ricardo competent to stand trial had described him as a faker or malingerer. And he knew, too, that however long-windedly Drob was expressing himself, he was reporting a discrepancy between Ricardo’s highly intelligent manner and his dismally low scores on intelligence tests. It was a potentially harmful discrepancy, one that could support the notion of Ricardo’s being a faker by suggesting he had made an effort to do poorly on Drob’s tests, that he had purposefully feigned dim-wittedness. So Kennedy attempted damage control and asked Drob directly if he thought Caputo was a malingerer.

  “No,” Drob answered with merciful brevity.

  “Why not?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well, there are three reasons,” Drob said. “The first is that he was in hospitals for over three years and found incompetent for over three years. The second is that my own psychological testing shows that without question this is a seriously disturbed psychotic schizophrenic individual. And the third reason I have is a kind of commonsense reason. Mr. Caputo was living in Mexico, apparently without any reason to turn himself in. Yet he voluntarily and on his own did so, as a result of haunting nightmares and perceptual and hallucinatory experiences that gave him to believe that the only way that he himself could gain peace with his own mind would be to turn himself in for these previous crimes, which had now come back to him and were given to haunting him.

  “For an individual to do that, to come clean, if you will, with all of these crimes and all of this horror that has been his life, and now fake a mental illness, would be very unusual, if just inconceivable in my mind.”

  “Come clean!” Elise McCarthy was beside herself when I spoke to her after the hearing. “Caputo hasn’t come clean. Hines has turned up all sorts of dirt about him. Him and that sweet little wife of his. The one who went on PrimeTime and said he was the nicest, kindest man in the world.”

  “What kind of dirt?”

  “False documents. Unpaid bills. Fleeing the country with illegal funds. I’m talking about recent stuff—things that happened long after the time Caputo claims to have stopped killing and begun living a so-called respectable life.”

  With McCarthy’s help, as well as with that of Hines, I was able to piece together the outlines of that life, to learn that after leaving his first wife, the one who had vanished, Ricardo had in the mid-1980s fetched up in Guadalajara, Mexico. There he had again gotten new identity papers, and with them landed a job as an English instructor in a privately owned language school. And there he had begun dating the woman who would become his second wife and speak up for him on PrimeTime, a seventeen-year-old beauty queen named Susana Elizondo, whose coronation had netted her many prizes, among them a six-month course of English lessons at Ricardo’s school.

  He was twenty years Susana’s senior, but as was his wont, he proposed marriage—even though he had never divorced his first wife. Susana didn’t know this. Nor did she know much about Ricardo at all. In fact, she thought his name was Roberto Dominguez, which was the name on his identity cards. But like Felicia Fernandez, she, too, married him and, in her case, remained with him until he turned himself in.

  They lived first in Mexico, then in Chicago, where Ricardo got a job at Harry Caray’s, a famous restaurant in downtown Chicago. “It was owned by an announcer for the Chicago Cubs,” McCarthy told me one day in her office, a cell-like space as dreary as the conference room in which we’d met earlier. “The kind of place that’s popular with sports figures.” Then, “Law enforcement types, too,” she added ironically.

  “You mean that while the FBI and Interpol were searching for Ricardo all over the world, he was living right here among us? Working in a place where the police ate lunch?”

  “Yes. And if you think that’s something, wait’ll you hear about Caputo’s house. Somehow or other he got his hands on enough money to buy a little house in Cicero, on the outskirts of Chicago. And guess what? The house was right across the street from a police station.”

  We were both surprised by how casual Ricardo had become, how sure he was that he wouldn’t be caught. And as McCarthy continued to fill me in about this period of Ricardo’s life, I found myself even more surprised by how normal, how ordinary, that life seemed. I’d always been fascinated by people who’d led double lives and had frequently written about them, but none of the grand impostors whose lives I’d explored in the past were as skillful at concealing their secret sides as Ricardo, who had become a master at deception.

  His house in Cicero had only a tiny scrap of yard and narrow strip of alleyway separating it from its neighbors. Ricardo made friends among the families who lived in the nearby houses and conducted himself, when he was around them, like any suburban family man. He went to their backyard barbecues, held a few of his own, borrowed and lent groceries, and paid the local teenagers to baby-sit for his and Susana’s three children. He also helped his neighbors with home repairs, lending them tools and offering to hang kitchen cabinets, nail together bookcases. Not that he was a model of propriety—he drank, heavily at times, and sometimes he frequented nudie bars. But so did other suburban family
men.

  At work, too, according to McCarthy, he made friends, seemed like a regular enough sort of fellow. He even won the admiration of his bosses. “Harry Caray’s conducted periodic evaluations of its staff,” McCarthy informed me. “And you should see his early marks!”

  “His marks?”

  “Yes.” She pulled a photocopied form from a folder on her desk and handed it to me. The form, designed for the evaluation of Harry Caray staff members, had boxes in which a supervisor could rate an employee’s skills and abilities, and it had been filled out shortly after Ricardo, who was using the name Franco Porraz, had started working at the restaurant. For Attitude, a supervisor had given Ricardo a 5 out of 5, the highest grade. For Job Knowledge, he had given him another 5 out of 5. For Quantity of Service, again a 5. For Dependability, a 4. The supervisor was pleased with Ricardo’s performance, and in an area at the bottom of the form where comments could be made, he had written that the new waiter was a “true professional.”

  Sometime later, I obtained through Detective Hines the name and phone number of Ricardo’s supervisor. He was Steve Borchew, a general manager of Harry Caray’s. Borchew hadn’t hired Ricardo, but he’d been present when another manager did so, and he’d given his approval to the selection.

  “I looked over Franco’s résumé—we knew him as Franco—and it was very impressive,” Borchew told me. “He listed all these fine restaurants he’d worked in—there were some in New York, as I recall, and some in Hawaii and L.A. And I talked to Franco. Liked him. So I said, yeah, let’s take him on. I trusted my judgment about people back then. Still do. No, still try to. I mean, I’ve been general manager here for seven years. And now I’m telling myself that no matter what, even when you check the references, it doesn’t mean anything. You just can’t know. But you can’t live with yourself if you’re thinking that all the time. You gotta have trust.”

  I said, “Yes. If you can.”