The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Alberto himself, after all the years he had spent worrying about and trying to come to terms with his brother, seemed finally to be at peace, and I was happy for him.

  I was happy, too, for Ed Brown and Janie Becker, who also seemed to be experiencing a kind of peace now that Ricardo was in prison. And I was pleased for Inspector Sanders, my favorite of all the many detectives I’d come to know during my research, for he was promoted to assistant chief of San Francisco’s police force.

  As to Ricardo’s pending cases, nothing further happened. Mexico didn’t ask to extradite him to try him for the murder of Laura Gomez, who had attended Mexico City’s National University. San Francisco didn’t bring him out West to stand trial in the murder of Barbara Taylor, who had been employed in the educational films division of McGraw-Hill. And Los Angeles didn’t indict him for the murder of Devon Green, who had worked side by side with him at Scandia. I suppose that the law enforcement authorities in the various locations in which those women had been killed felt it made no sense either economically or administratively to pursue their cases—the pursuit would have been costly and they had plenty of other unresolved murder cases with which to occupy themselves. Why bother with Ricardo when he had already been sentenced to jail for a minimum of thirtythree and a third years and would be close to eighty years old if and when he emerged.

  Similarly, New York didn’t charge Ricardo with the Manhattan murder of Jacqui Bernard. Indeed, “we’ve eliminated him in this case,” Detective Giorgio, who was in charge of the investigation, informed me the last time I spoke with him.

  “How come?” I asked.

  “Because Bobby Hines, the detective who was tracking Caputo’s movements, established that he wasn’t in New York but living in L.A. at the time Bernard was killed.”

  I was deep into the writing of this book at the time and hated to interrupt my work to do further research. But I was curious about Giorgio’s remarks and I immediately called Detective Hines to find out if he’d definitively placed Ricardo in L.A. at the time of Jacqui’s murder.

  “No,” he told me. “That’s incorrect. I never did establish where Caputo was at the time Jacqui Bernard was murdered. We don’t have a clue as to his whereabouts in the summer of 1983.”

  “So he could have been in New York?”

  “Sure. Personally, I think he was. And personally I wouldn’t be surprised if he was responsible not just for the Bernard killing but for a lot of other killings in this country.”

  So there that was. I put down the phone and went back to writing.

  Some months later, I was summering out on the eastern end of Long Island, and one evening I ran into Jacqui Bernard’s sister, Henriette, at the home of a mutual friend. Henriette had been the person who’d hired Gordon McEwan all those many years ago, and I’d talked to her from time to time over those years but never in any concentrated way. This time, however, I told her that since the last occasion on which we’d spoken, I’d learned quite a bit about Ricardo Caputo, and she invited me to come visit her and tell her some of what I’d discovered.

  The next Sunday I drove to her house, a weatherworn, sprawling place set on a verdant lawn edged with an abundance of purple and white and orange blossoms. Henriette, whose gray hair, dignified air, and smile that swelled her cheeks and crinkled the corners of her eyes reminded me a lot of Jacqui, had been tending those blossoms. A trowel in her hand, she led me to the back of the house, where we sat on a tranquil terrace facing a shimmering pond.

  It felt odd to be relating my sorry tale amid such prettiness, but I launched into it, giving Henriette details not just about Natalie Brown, Judith Becker, Barbara Taylor, and Laura Gomez, women with whose sad fates she was already familiar, but about women of whom she’d been unaware, about the mysteriously murdered Devon Green and the painfully traumatized Mary O’Neill, Maria Lopez, and Lotte Angstrom. I told Henriette, too, about my trip to Argentina and my jailhouse interviews with Ricardo, and finally about Detectives Giorgio and Hines.

  When I was done, Henriette said, “So what do you think? Could Ricardo have killed Jacqui?”

  “Yes.”

  Henriette stared out toward her pond. “I just don’t know. I guess that if Jacqui had met Ricardo, she’d have been intrigued by him. She was fascinated by all things Latin American. And I guess that if she’d met him, she’d have been sympathetic to his tales of hardship and wanted to help him out.”

  “That’s what Gordon said,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, but on the other hand, Jacqui never mentioned to us that she knew anyone of Ricardo’s description.”

  “Was she in the habit of telling you about her men friends?”

  “No,” Henriette allowed. “She didn’t talk much about her personal life. In the ten years before she died, I think she mentioned a man only once or twice.”

  “Well, you know what they say—you never really know about other people’s private lives.”

  “Not even when the people are members of your own family,” Henriette sighed.

  “Maybe especially not then.”

  After that we sat there for a long time, talking about Jacqui and how unique she’d been and reminiscing about how in her final days she’d been all wrapped up in the imminent birth of a grandchild, so excited about it that she’d gotten her daughter-in-law to promise she could be present at the birth.

  “She never made it, of course,” Henriette said. “My grandniece was born four weeks after we found her body.”

  “So sad.”

  “Yes, and so long ago. My grandniece is a teenager now. You know, it’s all so long ago that sometimes I can’t even remember all the things I felt at the time.”

  By then it was growing late and the shadows of the trees had begun to lengthen across the green lawn. I had friends coming for dinner that night, I remembered, and told Henriette I had to go.

  “Of course,” she said, nodding, and began walking me toward my car. As we strolled, she returned to her earlier theme. “Time does have a way of dulling the sharpness of memory.”

  “I guess that’s a blessing.”

  “I guess.” And then, just as I was about to say goodbye and get into my car, Henriette said, “Still, what gets me is that we may never know for sure who killed Jacqui.”

  “You mean, be absolutely and a hundred percent certain?”

  “Yes.”

  I started to nod my head, and then I realized I didn’t agree with her. To my mind, the killer was Ricardo, it had to have been Ricardo. Admittedly, Jacqui had been older than the women Ricardo had confessed to killing, the ones with whom he was known to have been romantically involved. And admittedly her murder had been less brutal that that of those women. But Inspector Sanders had had information that revealed Ricardo to have committed other crimes besides murder, among them armed robbery. And Sanders and so many of the other detectives I had spoken to believed that Ricardo had killed people whose murders he hadn’t acknowledged, and possibly that included men as well as women, as Gordon McEwan’s informant had asserted, and possibly people who weren’t young and people who’d been killed more efficiently than brutally—killed, like Jacqui, during a robbery.

  Moreover, when it came to Jacqui, so much pointed in Ricardo’s direction. There was the fact that Gordon’s informant had said that Ricardo had boasted of having killed her—an unusual thing, surely, to boast about a murder, but a habit of Ricardo’s that had been confirmed for me by Guillermo Villanueva in Argentina. There was that friend of Jacqui’s who’d told me years ago about Jacqui’s having taken up with a younger black or Latin American man she’d met in a bar on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the bartender at one such establishment who remembered having seen Jacqui and Ricardo come into his place together. There was the super of her building, who had recalled Ricardo’s trying to gain access to Jacqui’s apartment shortly after she’d been killed, and the fact that although Ricardo claimed to have been in L.A. at the time, this alibi hadn’t been verified. But above all, for
me, there was the way Ricardo had acted on my visits to him in prison, his coldness, his denials, his lies. I knew none of this was evidence, certainly not the kind of evidence that stands up in courts of law. Yet somehow, for me, the question of who had killed Jacqui no longer felt like a mystery.

  “I think we do know,” I said softly.

  Henriette gazed at me, and I gazed back, and for a moment I saw not Henriette’s face but that of her sister. She was smiling at me, her eyes crinkling and her cheeks filling up like the cheeks of the western wind on some ancient map. I murmured good-bye. Not so much to Henriette but to Jacqui. And then I drove home through the gathering dusk.

  AFTERWORD

  In October 1997, just as this book was going to press, Ricardo Caputo died of a heart attack while playing basketball in the Attica yard. He was forty-eight years old.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many of the people who helped me to write this book are mentioned in the text, but I’d like to single out Earl Sanders, assistant chief of police in San Francisco, California; John McGrath, a private investigator on Long Island, New York; Elise McCarthy, assistant district attorney of Nassau County, New York; and Clem Patti, assistant district attorney of Westchester County, New York. Their encouragement and assistance were invaluable. Not mentioned in the text, but also of great assistance, were Maj. Louis Souza of the Honolulu, Hawaii, police department and Immigration inspector Miguel Guerrero, of the El Paso Detention Facility in Texas.

  I am also deeply indebted to my editors at Pocket Books: to Bill Grose, who first suggested that I try to tell this tale and whose vision of how it might best be told challenged me to stretch myself as a writer; and to Emily Bestler, who inherited the manuscript upon his retirement but treated it not as a foundling but as her very own scion.

  Additionally, I’d like to thank Jessica Bernstein, who read the manuscript and provided sensitive and useful suggestions, and Alan Friedman, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Deborah Pollack, three other readers who were helpful in spotting rough spots.

  I owe special thanks to Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan, who died before I completed the book but who even while ill was generous in offering emotional support and astute psychological insights. I am grateful, too, to Dr. Ethel Person, again for psychological insights, and also for helping me gain entry into the world of Argentinian psychiatry, and to Malcolm Taub, who shared with me his considerable knowledge of Argentina.

  I also appreciate Martha Blumberg and Lourdes Bautista, for their help in translating, respectively, the Spanish poetry and documents used in the text; Michael Kelly, for transcribing lengthy interviews; and Naomi Bernstein, surely the best researcher any writer could hope to find.

  But to none of these people do I owe the thanks due my husband. I’d have floundered indeed without his sagacity, patience, and care during the three years this book was in the making.

  About the Author

  Linda Wolfe is the author of five true-crime books: The Professor and the Prostitute and Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, Love Me to Death, Double Life, The Murder of Dr. Chapman, and Wasted: Inside the Robert Chambers–Jennifer Levin Murder, an Edgar Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of My Daughter, Myself, a memoir; The Literary Gourmet, a classic cookbook; and Private Practices, a novel. Wolfe’s articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, among them Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, and New York magazine, of which she was a contributing editor. She currently writes a column about books for the website www.FabOverFifty.com.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Wasted copyright © 1989 by Linda Wolfe

  The Professor and the Prostitute copyright © 1986 by Linda Wolfe

  Double Life copyright © 1994 by Linda Wolfe

  The Murder of Dr. Chapman copyright © 2004 by Linda Wolfe

  Love Me to Death copyright © 1998 by Linda Wolfe

  Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4903-0

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  LINDA WOLFE

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