The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “I’m going to see Ricardo next week,” Alberto said to me on this particular occasion. “Though he never has anything to say to me. And I’ve got nothing to say to him. We sit there like two lumps.”

  I’d heard that before. And I suggested something I’d suggested before. “So don’t go.”

  “No, I have to. I promised my mother I’d look in on him from time to time.”

  That was the end of that, but a few days later, we had another phone conversation. “I’m going to see Ricardo tomorrow,” Alberto said this time. “Why don’t you come with me? I hate going alone.”

  “Why don’t you ask Kim?” In all the months I’d been investigating the Caputo case, I’d never tried to obtain an interview with Ricardo. At the beginning, I’d thought it would be pointless. I’d made it clear to his lawyer that I’d undertaken my book because I knew Jacqui Bernard and that I had little sympathy for his client. He’d never have allowed Ricardo to see me. Later on, after Kennedy dropped out of the case and I had gotten to know Alberto, my feelings had grown more complicated. I was trying to sort them out when Alberto replied, “I’ve asked Kim. She doesn’t want to go.”

  “Me either,” I admitted.

  “Why not? I’d have thought you’d leap at the chance.”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid, I guess.”

  “Of what? Of prisons?”

  “No, I’ve been to see any number of prisoners. This is different.”

  “Then what are you afraid of? Him? He’s not getting out.”

  I had the phone in one hand, a pencil in the other. But I put the pencil down and began to rub my forehead, which had started to throb. “It isn’t that I’m afraid of Ricardo,” I said, not sure if I was telling the truth. “I think it’s more subtle than that. I think I’m afraid that if I meet him, the picture of him I’ve built up in my mind will alter, and I won’t be able to write the book. Either that, or I’m afraid I might like him.”

  “Oh, that,” Alberto said. “Well, yes, you’re a woman, so there’s always that.”

  18

  But of course, I did go. On a sweltering summer’s morning when the murky sky overhead seemed clamped down like the lid of a stone-gray coffin, I took a taxi up to Riverdale, then drove with Alberto to the Westchester County jail. It was situated, ironically, in the idyllically named town of Valhalla, New York, and unlike the other prisons I’d visited, it wasn’t a massive and stolid structure with the look of a human warehouse. Rather, it was low and sprawling, a red-brick, tile-trimmed building that appeared on first sight to be cheerful, a suburban medical center rather than a place of confinement.

  Once we passed through the doors, however, all resemblance to a less fearsome establishment ceased. We were greeted in a dimly lit entranceway by burly guards, directed peremptorily to stash our money and keys and even our jackets in a dilapidated locker, and barkingly instructed to enter our names and the name of the prisoner we wanted to see in a large battered register that looked like a relic from Dickensian days.

  I had not applied for permission to enter the jail as a journalist; there hadn’t been time to make that application and receive the approval of the warden. Instead, I wrote down, although the inscription gave me pause, that I was a friend of prisoner number 28176 and surrendered my notebook and pens. Then Alberto and I were passed through an electronic security machine, one apparently far more sensitive than those used in airports, for we had to remove our watches and even our eyeglasses, after which we were passed through a door that did not clang shut, as the doors of the other prisons I’d visited did, but which closed just as ominously, making a tremendous whooshing sound.

  I felt claustrophobic, and we weren’t even all the way inside yet. We were in a holding area, waiting to be okayed by yet other guards, who were too preoccupied with a hysterical woman demanding the right to bring cookies with her to pay any attention to us. We cooled our heels for a long time, Alberto quieter than I had ever known him to be. Then at last the woman with the cookies abandoned her efforts to bend the rules, and we were sent through another whooshing door to the visiting room.

  Noise was what greeted us: a grinding, overpowering noise. About forty little tables were in the modestly airconditioned room, and each was occupied by a jump-suited prisoner and three or four friends and relatives, many of them with babies in their arms, and the din of conversation and squalling was colossal. How would I ever be able to hear whatever it was that Ricardo might say to me? I wondered. And then, would he say anything? Alberto had informed him that he was bringing me and explained that I was writing a book about him, and Ricardo had raised no objections. But now, waiting as a guard looked for an empty table for me and Alberto, I was filled with doubts. “Are you sure he said it was okay to bring me?” I asked Alberto, speaking loudly so that he could hear me.

  “Yes,” he shouted.

  “And you told him I was writing about him?” I bellowed.

  “Yes,” he bellowed back.

  The guard, saving his vocal chords, used his chin to gesture at the table he wanted us to take. Mercifully, it was in a relatively quiet corner.

  Still, to hear one another, Alberto and I had to sit far forward in our chairs, and I realized that to make out whatever Ricardo might say to me, I was going to have to sit close to him. That, and to try to memorize whatever he said. Both were unhappy prospects, but I didn’t have time to brood about them for, a moment later, Ricardo arrived and plunked himself down on a chair between us.

  He looked terrible. He was dressed in a jaunty yellow jumpsuit, but his cheeks and chin were bristling with stubble, his sparse hair was plastered sweatily to his forehead, and his brown eyes were bloodshot and ringed with large dark circles. “Sorry I couldn’t shave,” he said, “but they limit your shaves. Showers, too. Even though it’s like an oven inside.”

  Alberto was uncharitable. “I can tell you didn’t shower. You smell, man.”

  But Ricardo didn’t seem to mind. He made the pouting expression Alberto had once described to me and shrugged his shoulders.

  So far he’d said nothing directly to me, but now he turned and said, “Alberto says you know all about me. That true?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a lot to know.” He stared at me cheekily, appraisingly. “I’m an interesting fellow, right?”

  Was he flirting with me? Trying to impress me? It seemed that way, and to avoid his gaze, I cast my eyes down and studied his arms and hands, which were sprawled across the table. The arms were hairless and pasty white, and the hands were extraordinarily small, a phenomenon I found strange in view of all the damage he’d caused with them.

  “They say I’m a charmer,” he went on teasingly. “What do you say? You find me charming?”

  If he was coming on to me, there was something disconcertingly crude about the way he was going about it. Something hostile, too. And although I’d been worried that I might succumb to Ricardo’s much-touted ability to charm, I realized at this moment that I faced no such danger. If he had ever truly had that ability—and his behavior was making me wonder if what I’d heard about him wasn’t all myth—he had lost it by now, lost it along with his once-trim figure and smiling good looks. “I don’t know you yet,” I said coldly.

  “But you want to, right?” Once again, he gave me that creepy sexual stare, and leaning close to him the way I was, hanging on his lips, his words, I suddenly experienced his evil energy. It was trying to draw me into his orbit. I felt it, I swear.

  “Linda wants to ask you some questions,” Alberto, businesslike, broke the silence that had descended among us.

  “Yeah? Like what kind of questions?”

  I felt hostile, too. You killed Jacqui Bernard, didn’t you, was what I wanted to say, like some TV cop. But I knew I was going to have to defuse the tension between us before I could get to the subject of Jacqui. Or any controversial subject. So although I’d seen nothing particularly commendable about Ricardo, at least thus far, I decided to f
latter him, and I told him what a brave thing he’d done in pleading guilty to Judith Becker’s murder. “You spared her mother. That was a good thing to do.”

  He nodded, relishing the image of himself as a noble figure. “I’m not a bad man, whatever you’ve heard. I’m a sick man.”

  “Yes, of course,” I agreed, and as I did believe that anyone who could commit as many murders as Ricardo had was sick, in the soul if not in the legal sense of the word, I had no trouble sounding sincere. This was fortunate, for although he continued to stare at me, there was far less hostility in his glance than there had been earlier, so little that, a moment later, I asked him to begin our interview by telling me about the time he’d been raped as a child. I knew it was a subject that would allow him to present himself in another favorable guise, that of sufferer, victim.

  “I was a little kid,” he began, speaking slowly at first and then warming to his account. “And the guy who did it to me was in his thirties. He’d run into me on the street a few times, and each time, he’d given me candy. This time, he invited me into his house, and he gave me chocolate. I remember it was chocolate. Then suddenly he lowered my pants and grabbed me from behind and stuck it in. I wanted to get away, but he held on to me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.”

  I felt sorry for him. I’d have felt sorry for anyone who’d had, or even imagined he’d had, that experience. “It must have been awful for you,” I said without too much difficulty.

  “Yeah, terrible. You don’t know how terrible.” He was reveling in self-pity, his bloodshot eyes seeming to grow even redder.

  “What happened afterward? How did you get away?”

  “The guy let me go. He said that if I told anyone what he’d done, he’d hurt me, and he let me go. I ran out and then I walked home very slowly, and when I got there, I went to the bathroom and saw there was blood on my buttocks. I didn’t understand what had happened. I was only seven. But I knew something had happened to me.”

  Something profound, he was implying. Something that had somehow turned him into a murderer. I didn’t buy it. Wasn’t even entirely certain that he had been raped, given the things Dr. Padin had told me in Mendoza about his constant lies, and the way early sexual abuse has become, in our time, every criminal’s excuse for his own abusive activities. But I managed not to communicate my doubt, and my effort at concealment paid off. Ricardo proceeded from telling me about the rape to talking about how, two years later when he was nine, he was still feeling so miserable that he almost killed himself.

  “It was at that sleepaway school my mother and Luis sent me to. I had just received Communion and I was standing on a balcony, watching some priests who were down below, singing or chanting or something. And I thought, ‘Now I’m pure, I can go to heaven with no sins,’ and I leaned over the balcony and tried to throw myself down. But I couldn’t do it. Maybe it would have been better if I had. You think?”

  I knew it would have been politic to say no, to offer him a few comforting clichés along the lines Alicia might have tendered, things like “Life is best” and “Suicide is against God’s law.” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and I said, “Yes. Maybe it would have been better.”

  “You’re a tough one,” he said, and I thought, Damn, I should have handled that better. Now he’s going to clam up. But to my surprise, when I ignored his remark and suggested that now we talk about his adolescence, he went on speaking. I guess that by then he was basking in receiving attention, even negative attention.

  He told me about his fights with Luis, his hospitalization—“it was for depression,” he insisted—and his involvement with a neo-fascist group in Mendoza. “They had meetings, taught you judo and gave you sandwiches. I liked it, but then they wanted me to go out on an action, stand in front of the local synagogue and shout insults at the Jews as they came out. I didn’t want to do it. I hate that kind of thing. And I quit the group.”

  It was an odd story in view of the fact that Alberto had told me that Ricardo had been apolitical as an adolescent, and I suspected that he’d told it, perhaps even made it up right there on the spot, because he was still trying to find a way to impress me. I knew that Alberto had informed him that I was Jewish.

  Still, it was an interesting story, and if Ricardo’s purpose was to court favor with me, he’d found a cleverer way of going about it than his earlier crude efforts at flirtation. Indeed, I felt I was witnessing at last the kind of shrewdness with which he had insinuated himself into the good graces of his victims, the way he’d made a practice of telling them things they wanted to hear and wanted to believe about him.

  A while later, after some further, not very fruitful, discussion of his adolescence, I asked him to tell me about the women he’d killed. He did, describing how he’d met them and, invariably, telling me that each had allowed him to take her to bed on their first or second date. He also claimed that each of them had loved him to distraction and, interestingly, attributed that love almost solely to his sexual prowess.

  The twenty-year-old Natalie, he told me, as he’d told Dr. Dietz, had had a great many lovers before she met him, but they hadn’t been any good. “Just young kids, mostly. I was young, too, but I’d been going to whores for years. I knew what I was doing. That was why she loved me.”

  The popular Barbara, he related, had never been able to have an orgasm with a man before he came along, and that had made her devoted to him. “I was the only one who could get her to come. She used to use a vibrator on herself, but she didn’t have to with me. And that made her adore me.”

  The idealistic Judith, he said, had loved him because he had allowed her to express the secret side of herself, the one that liked pain and humiliation during sex.

  Only the wealthy Laura Gomez had been a little bit different. She, too, had loved him for his sexuality. But she’d also loved him “because we were so alike. Both of us were the neglected children in our families.”

  I listened to all this with my most professional demeanor, remembering how Dietz had listened to him. Coolly, nonreactively. Then I gradually led him to the subject of the murders. He showed no resistance, indeed talked openly about them, but he told me nothing new, insisting on the explanation I had already heard him offer to Dr. Dietz: that there was no premeditation, only a sudden and overpowering urge to kill inspired by visual and auditory delusions. “I loved Natalie,” he said. “Why would I have wanted to kill her? I loved Laura, too. Barbara I didn’t love, but she was my friend. I liked her a lot. The only one I didn’t love or like was Judith. With her, it was more a matter of need. I needed her.”

  Still, for all his protestations about having felt love, friendship, or need for the women he’d admitted killing, it was apparent that he hadn’t respected them, had felt he had won them too swiftly. This became evident a while later when I got him to talk about the women in his life whom he hadn’t killed. The women he’d married. “Susi,” he said, referring approvingly to his current wife, “was a virgin when I met her, and she wouldn’t have sex with me until we were married.” And “Felicia,” he said, referring admiringly to his first wife, the one who’d disappeared in the early 1980s “made me wait until two weeks after we met.” Talking about Felicia brought out in him an emotionality that had been lacking when he’d spoken of the other women, including Susi. He smiled—it was the only time that day that I saw him smile—when he told me that on the night he first met Felicia, they’d danced a glorious tango together. And he half-closed his eyes and looked genuinely sad when he told me about their first date. “She said, ‘I don’t know anything about you. Who are you? For all I know, you’re the Hillside Strangler.’ And in a way I was. But I couldn’t tell her that, could I?”

  I went past the question. I was interested in the distinction he’d made just before between the women he’d killed, all of whom he’d said had gone to bed with him right after meeting him, and the women he’d married, both of whom had insisted on a waiting period for sex. “Do you think the fact tha
t Felicia and Susi didn’t go to bed with you right away was what kept them safe from you?” I asked. “Do you think you might have wanted to kill Natalie and Judith and the others because they were so sexually free?”

  The assumption seemed an obvious one to me, especially given what I knew to be Ricardo’s fury at Alicia for her sexual appetites, but Ricardo, perhaps to curry favor with me, acted as if I’d just offered him a rare and subtle bit of wisdom. “That’s interesting,” he said, nodding and dramatically wrinkling his excessively high forehead. “I hadn’t thought of it before. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s true.”

  That was the closest I came that day to getting Ricardo to say anything about the murders that he hadn’t said before, hadn’t proffered to Kennedy and Dietz. More, the momentary insight he seemed to have gained had no staying power. Toward the end of our visit, he returned to insisting that there was no rational explanation for the murders. “I don’t know why I killed those women,” he said. And then, giving voice to his true delusion: “Because I’m not that kind of person. Because basically, I’m a good person.”

  By then, a guard had come to our table and indicated that the visiting period was about to end. I realized with dismay that I hadn’t asked Ricardo about Jacqui Bernard, and that if I was going to do so, I would have to come back another time. Right now, it was too late. He was on his feet, as disciplined as a soldier, and moving toward the entrance to the cells without so much as the wave or backward glance in which other prisoners were indulging.