by Linda Wolfe
I didn’t want Luquez to see my excitement. I asked him a few more questions. But my heart was no longer in conducting our interview, and in a few minutes I told him Alberto and I had to go. I didn’t want to ask any more questions. I’d found what I’d been seeking all this time.
I left Mendoza for Buenos Aires the next day. I was eager to get back to New York and start writing my book. I would have flown home that very morning if there’d been a flight. But there wasn’t one until the evening, and so I was forced to pass the day in Buenos Aires. What to do? I shopped for souvenirs, bought what tourists always bring home from Argentina, finely woven ponchos and silver maté cups. Then, stranded and not wanting to pass any more of my time just spending money, I rang up a few of the people whose names had been given me by friends in New York for just such an eventuality.
One such friend of a friend invited me to come visit him at his home. He was Emilio Mignone, a well-known human rights activist whose daughter had been abducted in 1976 by the military junta that had ruled Argentina at the time; she had not been seen or heard from since.
Mignone lived in a section of Buenos Aires I had not visited before, an area of cafés and old Parisian-looking apartment buildings. I took a creaky elevator up to a high floor in one of those buildings and was greeted by a distinguished-looking, bushy-eyebrowed man who appeared to be in his seventies but was youthfully dressed in a blue work shirt and jeans.
Mignone was a political man, still working hard to persuade the present Argentinian government to name and revoke its pardon of those who had tortured and murdered their fellow citizens during the country’s infamous Dirty War. He filled me in on what was happening in Argentina now that President Menem had been reelected, told me about the stir that had been created by one Dirty War military officer who had recently confessed to tossing political prisoners to their death from official airplanes, and the fact that for the first time in their militaristic history, Argentinians were experiencing a revulsion against the armed forces and declining in droves to sign up for positions in officer training schools.
Then he asked me what had brought me to Argentina. I explained about Ricardo, but Mignone’s eyes glazed over. His concerns were grander. And rightly so, for whereas Ricardo had murdered at least four and possibly six or eight or even a score of people, the Argentinian government during the Dirty War had murdered thousands.
Still, despite his having been dismissive of my project, I felt comfortable with Mignone. He reminded me of people I knew back home, people for whom politics is breath. And his apartment reminded me of the homes of several of my friends, a book-lined, plant-filled space hung with tapestries and warmed by a fireplace with a gas fire.
But on the mantelpiece was a photograph of a beautiful young girl, and I knew without asking that this must be Mignone’s daughter, the girl who had been “disappeared” so many years ago. It made me wonder if a part of Ricardo’s viciousness had been forged not just in the coals of his own perverse psyche but in the national climate of violence in which he had been raised.
I brought this notion up with Mignone, who validated it. “A government that murders its own citizens is a breeding ground for all manner of individual cruelty,” he said. But then, typically, he observed, “Still, it doesn’t really matter how cruelty is bred, does it? What is important is how it is dealt with. It must not go unpunished.”
What he was saying made me think immediately of how little punishment Ricardo had so far received for his crimes. He had been sentenced to eight and a third to twenty-five years for pleading guilty to manslaughter in the killing of Natalie Brown, a sentence that could, if he served just the minimum, see him out on the streets in a mere handful of years. And that was it, that was all, unless he got sentenced for murder in Westchester or San Francisco.
I hadn’t thought about Ricardo’s upcoming trials for weeks. I’d been too preoccupied with exploring his history, too focused on cause to think about resolution. Now, listening to Mignone, I felt a flare of curiosity about the pending trials. And when I left him to go to the airport, I realized that he had restored to me a certain lost balance and perspective, for as my taxi snaked through crowded rush-hour streets, I was no longer dwelling on Ricardo’s past but on his future, on how our society would ultimately punish him.
17
When I returned to New York I paid an immediate visit to Jeanine Pirro’s office up in Westchester County. She had by now assigned an assistant district attorney named Clem Patti to handle the prosecution of Ricardo for the murder of Judith Becker, and Patti was busily, but none too confidently, putting together his case. He was uneasy because his opponent, a legal aid attorney named Arlene Popkin, while not a star like Kennedy, nevertheless had a reputation as a formidable adversary. “She’s planning to argue that Caputo was insane when he killed Becker,” Patti, a handsome but dour-looking young man with a dark, brooding face, told me, “and while that’s absurd, given what we know about him, you never can tell with juries. I mean, Ricardo was a patient in a mental hospital at the time he killed Becker.”
We were sitting in Patti’s office up at the Westchester County courthouse. The tiny space was filled with the usual clutter that marks the offices of junior district attorneys, the enormous notebooks and overstuffed cardboard boxes, the coffee-stained folders and stacks of unanswered message slips. Except for a couple of framed diplomas, there was no sign of personal ownership other than a lone little carved wooden duck high up on a bookcase crammed with law journals. Patti was not a man who liked to be known.
He also didn’t like talking to the press. But he managed to open up long enough to tell me that because of Popkin’s plans, the prosecution had begun testing Ricardo for a brain abnormality. “We gave him an MRI,” he said, “and we’re probably going to follow it up with something called a Nasal Forensic Leads test. I don’t think anything’ll turn up, but nowadays, when there’s going to be an insanity defense, you have to do all of this stuff. Just in case the defense asks one of your psychiatric witnesses whether there are any tests that could have been done to establish that a defendant has brain disease and the witness says yes. Costs a fortune.”
“Well, maybe Ricardo will plead guilty again,” I ventured, to lift Patti’s spirits. “Maybe he’ll cop out like he did in Nassau County.”
“Maybe,” Patti glowered. “But I doubt it. I imagine his family wants him to take a shot at a trial.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and told him about my trip to Argentina. Patti was fascinated and surprised that I’d been able to interview Ricardo’s family. “Well, I guess it’s because I got to know the brother,” I offered.
“Alberto? You mean he talked to you?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m amazed. He wouldn’t talk to us. To our police. Not back when Judith Becker was murdered and we were trying to find Ricardo.”
“That was a long time ago. I think Alberto has changed a lot since then.”
Alberto. While we were still in Argentina, we’d discussed the information Luquez had given us about Ricardo’s flight from Mexico, and during that conversation Alberto had looked at me with a jaundiced expression and said, “It figures. It never made sense that Ricardo would just turn himself in out of the clear blue.” But we’d never talked about whether he thought Ricardo should plead guilty in the murder of Judith Becker or hold out for a trial. And now that we were both back home, I made a date to visit him up in Riverdale again and discuss the matter with him.
His position was pretty much what I’d anticipated it might be when I talked to Patti. “Have Ricardo go to trial? Why would I want that? The only thing a trial’ll do is create more pain for the Becker family. And for me and my family, too.”
The serenely beautiful Kim was sitting across from us, just as she’d been when I’d first come to their home and Alberto had told me the story of his parents and childhood. And just as she’d been on that day, she was quiet, letting her husband do most of the talking. “Of course, I c
an’t tell Ricardo what to do, can I?” he was saying. “It’s up to him. But he knows how I feel. I just want him to get the thing over and done with.”
“And you?” I said to Kim, wanting to include her. Besides, I really was curious as to how she, who had written the couple’s original apologia for Ricardo, the press release in which she’d taken society to task for leaving her brother-in-law “alone with his disease,” felt about him now.
She lowered her gaze and answered me indirectly in that high-pitched, childlike voice of hers. “Since I first met Ricardo, my husband’s pain, my child’s confusion, and my own anger and shame have done nothing but grow. Did Alberto ever tell you about the time he was away in Australia and Ricardo called me up?”
She looked over at Alberto, who shook his head.
“Well, Ricardo called me from jail,” Kim singsonged. “He said his wife was in town. Up from Mexico. And that he wanted me to put her up. He called me five times about it. And one of the times, he said the most awful things. Said he’d gotten out of jail and gone to a hotel with his wife. Said they tried to screw, but he couldn’t do it because she looked repulsive, all swollen and hideous. I didn’t know what to think and I called Kennedy in a panic, and he called the jail and we found out it was all just a story.”
“Some story,” I said.
“Yes,” she sighed, her voice belying the indignation that resided in her words. “Yes. And why tell it to me? And why just then, when he knew Alberto was out of town?”
Kim didn’t come out and say that she felt Ricardo had been toying with her, or that he’d scared the life—and the idealism—out of her. She was too circuitous a person for that, too bent on maintaining an aura of calm. But it was clear to me that the brother-in-law she had once seen as society’s neglected victim was no longer someone she cared much about urging to go to trial.
But there was still Arlene Popkin. She was still hoping to come up with some neurophysiological evidence that might enable her to persuade a jury that Ricardo belonged in a mental hospital, not a prison. And to that end, after Ricardo received the brain abnormality test Patti had mentioned to me and it failed to show any noticeable brain disease, she had begun trying to find a neuropsychiatrist with better equipment than that which had so far been used to study Ricardo.
I’d met Popkin, had spoken to her briefly when she’d come to one of Ricardo’s court sessions in Nassau. She’d struck me as an intense and ideological woman, passionate about her role as a public defender, and passionate, too, in the defiant unfashionableness of her dress. Unlike most of the women lawyers I knew, who went to court in high heels, fitted suits, and chic haircuts, she’d been wearing flats and a long, shapeless dress, and her graying, wavy hair had flowed thick and loose past her shoulders.
Popkin was certain Ricardo was insane, and one of her reasons, she told me when I telephoned her now about the Westchester case, was that “he isn’t really a violent man.”
“Huh?” I said rudely.
“Yes, he has used excessive horrific violence, but on discrete occasions. As far as I can see, he doesn’t get into fistfights. He doesn’t spank his children. He doesn’t display uncontrollable anger—I mean, take that incident in El Paso, when he put a weapon to the neck of a guard. He didn’t do more than scratch the man. If he were truly a violent individual, he would have cut him severely. But he didn’t. Because he’s not a violent man. He’s just a man who kills on some occasions.”
“Quite a few occasions,” I muttered. “By his own account.”
“There are all kinds of physiological abnormalities that can spark occasional violence,” Popkin said, and, sounding like the optimistic Dr. Linares in Mendoza, trilled, “structural abnormalities, chemical abnormalities, electrical abnormalities. In addition, there are all sorts of tests to detect them. NMRs. CAT scans. PET scans. Spinal fluid analyses.”
I daresay Popkin could have presented some interesting arguments, but she never got the chance. Toward the end of June, Ricardo did decide to plead guilty. But neither of the lawyers seemed to know why. Patti thought it might be because if he did, he had a shot at a lesser sentence. “The maximum for murder is twenty-five to life,” Patti explained, “the minimum, fifteen to life. A plea, depending of course on the judge, could net him something on the low end of the sentence.” Popkin thought it was because Ricardo didn’t want to cause any further suffering. “He’s a man with a conscience,” she insisted.
Neither explanation made much sense to me. I felt certain that no judge, once having read the detailed account of Ricardo’s history that the prosecution was sure to file before the sentencing, would offer Ricardo the low end of the scale, and I doubted that Ricardo was a man of conscience. So I called Alberto to see if he knew what had prompted the sudden plea. But, “Beats me,” Alberto said. He had been visiting Ricardo in jail regularly ever since he’d been moved from Nassau to Westchester. “Maybe that lawyer of his told him she didn’t have anything much to go on.”
“You think?”
“Don’t know why else. Not that he’d ever tell me. Whenever I ask him about something important, something I want to know, he just makes a kind of pouting face, like a baby, and shrugs his shoulders.”
Several weeks later Ricardo was taken from his jail cell to a large, sterile courtroom in the Westchester County courthouse to learn his second sentence. He looked different from the way he had on the day of his sentencing in Natalie Brown’s killing, looked heavier, paler, less kempt. His hair had gotten long, his cheeks were hairy with sideburns that gave him the disheveled aspect of a nineteenth-century bandito, and although Alberto and Kim had sent him a jacket and white shirt to wear, he had eschewed them, donning instead a casual yellow T-shirt.
I suppose this was fitting, for all in all, the proceedings were far less formal, or at least less filled with pomp and circumstance, than they had been on the day he was sentenced for what he’d done to Natalie Brown. Fewer reporters were present, and the speeches of the lawyers were shorter and less ardent than they had been at the earlier sentencing.
But Judith’s mother, Jane Becker, and her sister, Janie, had come to court, dressed in their Connecticut-matron floral prints, polished white sandals, and pearls, and Janie, who also made a speech, was every bit as moving as Ed Brown had been months before. “My sister, Judith Becker, was murdered by Ricardo Caputo in October of 1974,” she said. “With my sister’s violent death, I lost my only sibling and my parents suffered the devastating death of their child. Unfortunately, there are no adequate words to describe the emotions I felt, nor the scars that, although this happened so long ago, still remain with me and my family and will remain with us for the rest of our lives.”
As she spoke, reading her words from a prepared statement, Janie’s hands began to tremble. And soon the paper she held between them was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm. But she plowed ahead: “Ricardo Caputo has a personality capable of manipulating and using anyone for his own benefits. I say this having met him once, albeit briefly. He appeared to be an articulate, charming young man. And herein lies the tremendous danger he presents to us all, even today.
“He has a personality capable of manipulating anyone. If these tactics fail, he is more than capable of murder. If there is anyone able to be viewed as a menace to society, it should be him. And I beg the court to sentence him to the most severe penalty allowable by law.”
Ricardo, who knew Janie, who had once instructed her in the merits of various Argentinian wines, avoided her gaze. He sat stiffly, morosely, eyes on the judge. And when he was asked if he had anything to say in his own defense, he volunteered only, “I want to say that I’m sorry for what I did. I was sick when I did it. I was in the hospital and unfortunately I couldn’t help myself.”
The judge, Kenneth H. Lange, thanked him coolly and coolly began his own oration. “This was no simple crime of passion. You beat and strangled Judith Becker. But you also took her keys, her pocketbook, her credit cards, and her car. Judith Becker’s deat
h devastated her parents and her sister, but there was also a real sense of loss among her colleagues and even among the patients in the penal institution where she worked. This devoted person, Judith Becker, was a bright young woman who had studied hard to prepare for a career as a psychologist. She apparently saw some good in you, Mr. Caputo, and she went out of her way to improve your life as an inmate in the correction system that she served. Perhaps her inexperience led her to discount the risk that you would do to her what you had already done to Natalie Brown. But you did it and went on to commit other murders.”
Lange then delivered his sentence: the maximum, twenty-five years to life, to run consecutively with the sentence of eight and a third to twenty-five years that Ricardo had already received for killing Natalie Brown. Ricardo, it was apparent, would be an old man before he saw the outside of a prison—and he hadn’t even been sentenced yet for killing Barbara Taylor.
Alberto had stayed away from the sentencing, even though the Westchester courthouse was only a few minutes from his home. I took that as an indication that in some major way, he was washing his hands of his brother. Yet he was still going to visit him, still bringing him packages of food and clothing, as I discovered in a telephone call several days later. It was a call I made, to let Alberto know what had transpired at the sentencing. But it could just as well have been one he made to me, for ever since my trip to Argentina, he and I had been calling each other regularly, sometimes to convey information, sometimes just to check in, rather as if we were friends. And I suppose that’s what we were, our discoveries in Mendoza about Ricardo having created a bond between us, one that our spouses, for all their interest in what we’d learned, didn’t quite share. More, Alberto and I had gotten into the habit of complaining to each other—he about how unresponsive he felt Ricardo was or how onerous it was to have to visit him, me about the difficulties I was experiencing now that I was starting to write my book—and I’ve often felt that what lies at the heart of friendship is the chance to exchange grumbles, that our friends are the people to whom we feel free to complain.