The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Did he steal from those women? Or just badger them for handouts? “I think he just borrowed money,” Alberto said. “And then didn’t pay it back. I met my first girlfriend because she went out with Ricardo and loaned him some money and then didn’t hear from him again. She kept phoning and phoning the house to try to get hold of him and get her money back, and finally I invited her over and we started going together.”

  However Ricardo got his money, he used it for luxuries. Alberto recalled that he sometimes borrowed Ricardo’s clothes because they were better than his own. “He had fancy shoes. Great jackets. Things that made him look rich, even though we were living in poverty. In Argentina, we call someone like that a fanfarrón, a person who’s a bluffer, who lives, say, in a one-room apartment but drives a Mercedes. Ricardo became a fanfarrón—maybe he wanted to look the way he might have looked if we’d grown up with our father.”

  Ricardo’s pursuit of money continued throughout his adolescence. Alberto had no recollection of Ricardo’s having entered a psychiatric hospital when he was sixteen. “It must have been when I went to school in Buenos Aires for a time,” Alberto said. But he remembered a different kind of confinement. When Ricardo was seventeen, he was briefly jailed for a robbery, and Alberto was delegated by their parents to go down to the town jail and get him out.

  By then, Ricardo’s relationship with his mother and stepfather, who had gone on to have two more daughters, was in tatters. And soon he left home altogether. He’d found work as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman, he told his family, and would be traveling all over the country. After that he rarely returned to Mendoza, although on the few occasions he did, he always brought with him expensive presents.

  “My poor brother,” Alberto said as he reminisced about the old days. “From his youth, he was always in love with money. And one night after we first came to the United States and he was working as a waiter, I remember him lying on his bed and posing for a picture—naked except for a great scattering of dollar bills he’d gotten as tips.”

  It was growing late. Matt came in and asked Alberto if he could help him with a computer problem. Kim came in and said she was making supper and when did Alberto think he’d be ready to eat? “I guess we’d better wind it up,” Alberto said to me, “though it’s too bad. I like talking to you. It’s sort of like talking to a therapist.”

  “Well, hardly,” I demurred. His flattery had discomfited me.

  “No, no. It is. It makes me think about things I haven’t thought about for years. See them in a different perspective. In fact, why don’t you come back another time? I could show you the videotapes.”

  “What videotapes?”

  “Dr. Park Dietz’s interviews with Ricardo. Kennedy gave them to me and I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch them. Would you want to see them?”

  Would I want to? I’d felt all afternoon as I’d listened to Alberto that although I was beginning to know Ricardo, he was still a distant figure, a shadow cloaked in history and family mythology. The idea of watching him as he was today, of hearing him explain himself to a psychiatrist, was immensely attractive to me, so attractive that I felt some need to mask my eagerness. “Yeah, might be interesting,” I muttered.

  Alberto smiled that dazzling smile of his. He had seen right through me. “Next week. Come back next week.”

  I wished he wasn’t quite so appealing. His very helpfulness made me uneasy, made me think of Ricardo’s famed ability to enchant and seduce.

  Ricardo had used that ability to pursue ulterior motives. Could Alberto have some ulterior motive in being so seductive with me?

  If so, I couldn’t think what it might be beyond the obvious one, the desire to have me portray him and his family in as good a light as possible. And the more I tried to conjure up some more unsavory intention, the less I was able to. Alberto did indeed have the selfsame kind of charm Ricardo was reputed to have had, but as far as I could determine, it wasn’t in the service of some nefarious end but of some almost automatic wish to please and be liked. Most likely it was a family characteristic, I told myself, a product of the genes inherited from the dashing Alberto Matias.

  I said yes, next week.

  13

  The tapes, when I watched them with Alberto some days later, proved mesmerizing. Dr. Park Elliott Dietz was one of America’s foremost forensic psychiatrists. Hearing him question Ricardo not only about his murders but also about his childhood memories and intimate sexual fantasies was, for someone like myself who fancies herself a scholar of the psychology of criminal behavior, as exciting as listening to a master class taught by a virtuoso. Dietz, whose boyish face and deep-set, owlish eyes were familiar to me from television, never appeared on the screen—the camera was focused exclusively on Ricardo—but I felt his presence. It was there in his gentle, soothing voice, his insightful questions, the subtlety with which he teased out the information that could help him determine Ricardo’s mental status.

  He began his examination by informing Ricardo that he had come to ascertain the truth about that status, but he made no bones about his dedication to objectivity. “If the truth helps you,” he said, “I’ll tell it. But if it doesn’t, I’ll still tell the truth.” Then he asked Ricardo to tell him about his childhood.

  “My mother left my brother and me for another man,” Ricardo said, and at once began to talk about himself in words full of self-pity. “I was left in the care of maids. I was beaten by my father. Then, my mother came back. But I was very much rejected by her.”

  Dietz kept him talking, listened to him ventilate his anger at his mother: “When she went away, I was raped, I was bleeding, and she wasn’t there”; his rage at his stepfather: “He beat me, too, and later he made me pay for my room and board”; his wrath at the priests who had educated him: “They slapped you, slapped you hard, if you got in trouble”; and his fury at the doctors who had cared for him when he had hospitalized himself as a teenager: “They said they’d help me, but they didn’t, they studied me, treated me like a guinea pig.” And soon, Dietz began firing questions about those teenage years at Ricardo.

  “When you were a boy, did you ever force yourself on a girl? Or another boy?” he asked.

  “No,” Ricardo said indignantly. But he followed his denial by offering up the information that he had begun masturbating at the age of ten or eleven, as if that activity at what he seemed to consider a precocious age might indicate some tendency toward mental illness.

  Dietz pursued the direction into which Ricardo’s thoughts had taken him. “What did you think about when masturbating?” he asked.

  “Fornicating,” Ricardo said, providing nothing out of the ordinary. “And parts of a woman. Breasts and pelvis.”

  “Did you ever use pictures to masturbate?”

  “Yes, from magazines.”

  “What were your favorites?”

  “A woman sitting down with a bathing suit on. I used that all the time. The breasts were showing. They made me feel very excited.”

  Dietz probed further, no doubt trying to see if Ricardo had ever entertained the kinds of sadistic or fetishistic obsessions that were the hallmark of orgasm-driven serial murderers. “Did anything else about the picture excite you? Anything about the hair or jewelry or shoes?”

  But Ricardo said, “No. Breasts excited me. And eyes excited me.”

  “What about clothing?” Dietz persisted.

  “Yeah. Underwear. Black, soft underwear.”

  “Did you ever buy underwear for a woman?” Dietz asked next.

  “Yeah. For Natalie,” Ricardo said.

  “Would she wear it for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you find other things useful as toys during sex? Handcuffs? Ropes? Gags? Leather or whips? Rubber or vinyl?”

  “No.” Ricardo sounded uneasy and amplified his answer by saying, “With Natalie, it was just plain sex.”

  “What about with other women?” Dietz pressed him.

  But Ricardo’s re
sponses continued to be within the range of normality. “Before Natalie, I went out with prostitutes and it was just regular paying and coming inside them.”

  Having failed to elicit youthful sexual deviancy, Dietz moved to another line of questioning—a line that might establish psychopathy. “Did you use drugs before the age of fifteen?” he asked blandly.

  “No.” Then: “Well, only marijuana.”

  “Did you drink alcohol before the age of fifteen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get into trouble?”

  Ricardo seemed more comfortable with this line of questioning, little recognizing that his answers to Dietz’s nonsexual queries were as potentially damning to him as any answers he might have given to the sexual ones. “Yeah. My stepfather and my mother threw me out of the house when I came home drunk. I was around thirteen.”

  “What was the first time you left home and stayed away overnight?”

  “It was right after I was finished at the priest school.”

  “Why were you thrown out?”

  “My family didn’t like me. Luis, especially. He thought I was no good. He used to tell my mother I was crazy.”

  “Did you ever become violent to Luis?”

  “I was afraid of him physically. But I told him to fuck off. And I dreamed about killing him. About making him suffer.”

  “What other things did you do before the age of fifteen?” Dietz asked, his tranquil voice giving no sign of the significance of what he had been finding out.

  “Nothing. I never did anything to anybody. I just had fantasies. And sometimes I said crazy things.”

  “What kinds of crazy things?”

  “What I felt, and what the world was all about.”

  “What did you think the world was all about?”

  “I thought it was mean and cruel.”

  “Who was your best friend?”

  Ricardo’s answer was like a classical illustration of the psychopath’s notorious detachment from other people. “Myself,” he answered unwittingly.

  Alberto and I watched the tapes for hours. The camera never shifted from Ricardo’s face, a brooding face with thin lips that didn’t smile and dark-circled eyes that didn’t blink. The face seemed almost to inhabit a corner of Alberto’s study, for it hovered in his extra-large video-screen like some looming domestic icon. And what was strange was that even when it described stabbings and beatings, the screams of victims and the directives of imagined spirits, it remained expressionless.

  These descriptions were curiously antiseptic. Ricardo claimed to remember little of his actual actions when he committed murder, remembered chiefly that each time, just before he killed, he saw colors and dots and lines in front of his eyes or heard growling voices in his mind’s ear. “They didn’t say to kill. But they said, ‘Blood,’ and, ‘We want your blood.’”

  When he killed bank teller Natalie Brown, he told Dr. Dietz, “I can’t remember picking up the knife. Or striking her. I heard screams. But they were kind of far away. Behind the lines.”

  When he killed psychologist Judith Becker, “I saw the colors. And I heard screams. But I remember nothing else.”

  When he killed film editor Barbara Taylor, “I saw the colors again, and then I was looking at her hair, and I grabbed her throat.”

  When he killed graduate student Laura Gomez, “we were sitting together and talking and all of a sudden I saw the colors and dots and I hit her with an object I had in my hand. I think it was an iron bar.”

  Ricardo also provided Dietz, albeit in a guarded way, with further information about his sexual interactions with some of the women he had admitted killing. Natalie, he said, had had lots of men before him, but considered him the best of the lot. Barbara, he said, liked to make love after smoking pot. Judith, he claimed, was sexually kinky. “She would ask me, ‘Ricardo, why don’t you do something? Slap me. Go in from the back. Pose with a knife in your hand.’ When I did those things, she would start fingering herself. And she’d have an orgasm.”

  “What other things did she ask you to do?”

  “She asked me to push her onto the bed. To push her and slap her and make love from the back.”

  “Did she ever ask you to tie her up?”

  “Yes. With nylon panty hose.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She had leather. Short leather skirts that she used to wear during making love.”

  “Did she have leather straps for tying up?”

  “No.”

  “Did she have a dildo?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did she ever ask you to use it?”

  “No.” Then Ricardo hesitated, perhaps trying to ascertain what the best answer to that question might be, and suddenly he changed his mind. “Yes. Yes, once.”

  Ricardo also provided Dietz with information about his interactions with the women immediately before he killed them, information that invariably served to present him rather than the women as having been victimized. Natalie, he said, had been pressuring him to get married, even though she knew he was feeling depressed. “We went upstairs and made love. It was short sex. I don’t even remember if I ejaculated. I got on top of her and I came off. And she asked me what was wrong. And she asked me about marriage. [But] I was feeling like in a daze. I was depressed. And I felt angry because I felt helpless.”

  Laura, too, he said, had talked marriage to him at an unfortunate moment, a time when he couldn’t “take the responsibility. So I felt a huge depression. And I heard the voices again.”

  Barbara, he said, had plied him with drugs just before he killed her because she wanted more sex from him than he was able to provide. “We had been making love and smoking marijuana all night. And then, I couldn’t get my sex erected anymore. She said she would give me a pill. I think it was speed. I don’t know if it was the pill or me, Doctor, but I saw the colors again.”

  But it was Judith, who had once inspired him to write love poetry, who came in for the harshest blame. Not only did she want nothing but sex from him, Ricardo said, but the sex she wanted, particularly just before he killed her, was abhorrent to him. “I went to her house and right away she wanted to make love. She took her clothes off. She kissed me on the penis. And masturbated me. Then she asked me to do the real part—insert my penis into her anus. She had an orgasm while I was in her anus. Then she wanted the vagina. She didn’t ask me to wash in between.” He further insisted, somewhat stuffily, “I didn’t want to do it. I think it’s unhealthy.”

  I’d never believed that Judith had asked Ricardo to make love to her anally; I’d thought it more likely that he himself had demanded the act of Judith—and not because I didn’t believe that some women enjoy anal sex. My conviction had sprung from the fact that, in Judith’s case, Ricardo’s claim that she had had a taste for pain and fear in bed had also been hard to believe. More recently, my conviction had been reinforced by a passage I’d read in V. S. Naipaul’s insightful study of Argentina, The Return of Eva Perón: “The act of straight sex, easily bought, is of no great consequence to the [Argentine] macho. His conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her. This is what the woman has it in her power to deny; this is what the brothel game is all about, the passionless Latin adventure that begins with talk of amor. La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse: this is how the macho reports victory to his circle, or dismisses a desertion. Contemporary sexologists give a general dispensation to buggery. But the buggering of women is of special significance in Argentina and other Latin American countries. The Church considers it a heavy sin, and prostitutes hold it in horror. By imposing on her what prostitutes reject, and what he knows to be a kind of sexual black mass, the Argentine macho, in the main of Spanish or Italian peasant ancestry, consciously dishonors his victim.”

  I remembered this passage as I listened to Ricardo talk about Judith’s final sexual demand and I was awestruck by the man’s insatiable need to present himself as a victim, a dishonored victim. Had Di
etz recognized this? From his calm voice on the videotape, there was no way of telling. But it didn’t matter. In the end, he had, of course, come to the conclusion that Ricardo’s view of himself as a victim not just of women but of mental illness wasn’t valid.

  The whole while Dietz had been asking his questions and Ricardo had been giving his answers, Alberto, sitting alongside me on a small couch with Truman curled at our feet, had kept stopping the tape with his remote to proffer observations. When Ricardo talked about Natalie’s wanting to marry him, he said, “He’s lying. I think every time he was rejected by a woman, he killed her. But he always makes it sound as if he was rejecting them.” When Ricardo talked about his isolation as a child, Alberto said, “You know, I think the prosecutors may be right that he’s malingering. He remembers all sorts of little details, but not the big things, as if he’d planned certain parts of his story.” And when Ricardo mentioned to Dietz that he was contemplating suicide and had no qualms about doing away with himself because he didn’t believe the soul lived on after death, Alberto blurted out, “This really gets me! Because Ricardo’s been asking me for Bibles and saying he’s religious, and I’ve been telling him that no matter what he’s done, it’s not too late to square himself with God.” He spoke so sharply that Truman stirred from his nap and gave a low, sleepy growl. “I’ve been talking to Ricardo like I’m a priest or something,” Alberto went on indignantly. “But maybe he isn’t religious. Maybe he’s been lying about that, too.”

  I felt that the tapes were opening Alberto’s eyes, giving him a new view of his brother, or at least allowing him to express a view that he had long held but, out of family loyalty, denied, even to himself. Indeed, I was certain that although he had initially agreed to speak with me because he’d wanted me to see Ricardo as he claimed to see him, as someone ill rather than evil, what was happening was that as a result of watching the tapes, he was coming around to my view—that Ricardo was a manipulator.