2

The Nassau County courtroom in which Caputo was about to be arraigned for the first killing to which he’d admitted—that of Natalie Brown—was jammed with TV and newspaper reporters by the time I got there, so jammed that I couldn’t get a seat in the press rows up front. I slipped into a back pew, just in time to see Caputo, hands cuffed and legs chained, being led into the room by several court officers. This can’t be him, I thought as he was unshackled. Not this paunchy, balding, glassy-eyed man. I couldn’t put such an ill-favored apparition together with the man in the photograph McEwan had shown me, couldn’t imagine him courting and seducing attractive and presumably discriminating women. But of course, I reminded myself, time and a life on the run would have taken their toll on the once comely young man.

Most of the press had already gotten their first glimpse of the forty-four-year-old Caputo. They’d been alerted the night before that there’d be an early “perp walk,” the parading of a criminal as he leaves police headquarters and goes to his arraignment. I’d missed that stagemanaged ritual. But, I comforted myself, at least I was seeing Caputo now, albeit from a seat so far back that I could barely hear him when in a whispered answer to a question of the presiding judge, he allowed that he was represented by an attorney.

Still, I heard the attorney, Park Avenue lawyer Michael Kennedy, well enough. Kennedy, who numbered among his clients the glittering socialite Ivana Trump, was a presence, a deep-voiced, confident courtroom performer. I had met him once when friends of mine took me with them to a benefit party at his East Side condominium, a palatial duplex that, with its sweeping staircase and grandly proportioned living room, had reminded me of a ballroom.

It crossed my mind that Caputo must be a wealthy man if he could afford to retain Kennedy. Maybe during his years on the run, I thought, he dealt drugs and secreted away a fortune. Either that or someone in his family is wealthy and sufficiently devoted to put up the money. His brother? In one of his calls to me, McEwan had mentioned that Ricardo had a brother named Alberto who’d become a great success in America, opened a business of some sort. I made a note to try to find out more about Alberto Caputo.

Then I got busy taking notes on what Kennedy was saying, which was that before the case went forward, he wanted to be certain that his client was given psychiatric medication to control his “terrible schizophrenia.” “He’s had some medication prescribed by an Argentinian doctor, but it will be exhausted as of today,” the lawyer intoned. “He needs to receive immediate medical and psychiatric attention.”

The judge, a gentle-looking man who was wearing his black robe casually open at the neck, as if to say he was no stickler for convention, granted the request. He ordered tersely that Caputo be seen by a prison psychiatrist as soon as possible, and moments later the arraignment was over.

Or rather, it was over for Caputo, who was led in his handcuffs and leg chains to the Nassau County jail. For Kennedy, there was still work to do, the work of affecting the public perception of the case. In a hallway outside the courtroom, he stood before a tangle of microphones and cameras and held an impromptu press conference in which he asserted that as a child, Caputo had been abandoned, raped, and beaten, that as a teenager he had been hospitalized in an Argentinian psychiatric institution and there declared schizophrenic, and that until recently he had been suffering as well from the newly popular psychiatric diagnosis, multiple-personality disorder. “He committed the murders while in the thrall of a psychotic personality,” Kennedy declared, his deep voice filled with sympathy and awe, “and then managed to repress that personality.”

“Why did Caputo choose this particular time to turn himself in?” one reporter asked.

“For a time he couldn’t remember the killings,” Kennedy replied. “But recently they came back to him. And they haunted him. He told me, ‘I would rather have my body locked up and my mind free than go on living as I was, with my mind locked up and my body free.’”

“Are you going to argue that he’s insane?” another reporter asked.

Kennedy’s head bobbed toward him, but he answered the question only indirectly. “He belongs in a medical facility. A high-security medical facility.”

In the next few days Caputo’s image was everywhere, in newspapers, on TV news reports, and even, made up and carefully lighted, on the ABC newsmagazine show PrimeTime Live. The show was a dramatic scoop, a lengthy interview with the confessed killer, which, astonishingly, had been taped in Kennedy’s office prior to the arraignment, prior even to the killer’s surrender.

Like millions of Americans, I watched that show. I saw Caputo, neatly dressed in a blue-striped shirt, wrinkle his brow earnestly as the interviewer, Chris Wallace, plied him with prearranged questions, and heard him say, his words accented and his tone mournful, that he was sorry for what he’d done and had turned himself in because he recognized that he needed psychiatric help.

“Do you remember the day you killed Natalie?” Wallace asked. It was just after an unseen narrator had informed the audience that Caputo had alleged that Natalie had been becoming too possessive.

“I picked up a knife but I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Caputo replied. “I could hear the screams, and see her—partially. I was seeing stripes and lines, whites and reds and blues. And dots, a lot of dots.”

“Were you aware that you were stabbing her?”

“No. I knew I was doing something bad, but I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Also on the show was a retired police detective, who explained that, in his view, “it was when Caputo was rejected that he killed these women.” But most of the program was given over to Caputo’s own explanations of why he had murdered and to an apologia offered by a woman to whom he was currently married and who had borne him four children. “During the ten years he lived with me, he was never aggressive,” she said, as if to substantiate Kennedy’s assertion that Caputo had several personalities. “The man who was married to me would never have harmed anyone.”

The broadcast made television history. For one thing, it offered an as yet unarrested killer the opportunity to explain himself before a national audience and thus gain the sympathy and even celebrity that could be useful to him once he went on trial. For another, at the end of the interview, a handful of New York State police who had been alerted by Kennedy that a long-hunted fugitive was ready to turn himself in (but not informed that if they took him into custody, their activities would be filmed) arrived in the lawyer’s office and in a dazzle of lights “captured” Caputo. Such a moment had never before been televised.

The day after the PrimeTime Live show, and a week after I’d seen Caputo in the flesh for the first time, I saw him again at a second hearing in Mineola. Its purpose was the ordering of a psychiatric examination to determine whether he was competent to stand trial for the murder of Natalie Brown. He’d had such an examination back in 1971 and been judged incompetent.

Is the same thing going to happen this time? I wondered as I listened to the brief proceedings. It was that first ruling of incompetency, handed down twenty-three years ago, that had made it possible for Caputo to go on killing, for he hadn’t been tried for Natalie’s murder but instead been remanded to a psychiatric hospital. Psychiatric hospitals were, then and now, notoriously easy to elope from, and Caputo had escaped from his and gone on to murder the other three women whom he now admitted having killed. And maybe more, I thought. Maybe Jacqui.

I found Caputo even less appealing at this second hearing than I’d found him at the first. He was wearing a sharp leather jacket and the same not-unstylish bluestriped shirt he’d worn on television, but his clothes were rumpled and dirty as though he’d slept in them. His mouth was set into a hard, stony slash, the result, I assumed, of whatever medication he’d been placed on. And his onyx eyes, which had been glassy the first time I saw him, now looked altogether vacant.

I was making notes on his appearance when, to my surprise, he gave a nod to an attractive, even elegant, couple sitting in a front row. “It’s the family,” I overheard another reporter whisper to a colleague. “His brother. Alberto. And his sister-in-law. Kim. K-i-m.” The handsome couple, who had come to court with Kennedy, were holding hands and looking nervous.

I knew a bit about Alberto and Kim Caputo by then, had found out that he owned a photography company in New York and that she was a writer and magazine editor who had previously been married to a psychoanalyst. But I’d made no effort to call them. I figured that if I phoned out of the blue and said, “Hello, I’m writing a book about Ricardo,” I’d get nowhere. They’d refuse to say anything or, more likely, just hang up. But I could wait. Time was on my side. And maybe if I waited, I’d get someone, maybe Kennedy, to put in a good word for me with the Caputos, get them at least to take my call.

As I was musing, I saw that Ricardo was rising and being shackled by a pair of courtroom guards. The psychiatric examination had been ordered and the short hearing had ended. The guards led Ricardo out a back door and a moment later, Kennedy exited the well of the courtroom and began talking to Alberto and Kim. They huddled with him with their hands still entwined. And then Kennedy shepherded them out of the courtroom.

I tagged behind, saw the little group besieged by reporters and cameramen, and heard them beg the representatives of the media not to ask them questions but instead to read a statement that Kim Caputo had composed. Then, as arms leaped toward them like fish toward bread crumbs, they handed out copies of a photocopied press release.

I reached for a copy, too. And found it unsettling, for it seemed to blame society for neglecting Ricardo, rather than Ricardo for transgressing society’s rules. “Ricardo could have been helped long ago and none of these deaths would have come to pass,” Kim Caputo, apparently convinced that psychiatry could heal all wounds, asserted. “He begged for help many times and was left alone with his terrible illness and the devices that he created to deal with the pain and abuse of his childhood.… He turned himself in after committing his first murder in Long Island and was treated so loosely that he was on the street before two years were up. Not once in twenty years did any authority question his identity. He could walk on the streets of Hawaii like a tourist. He was able to travel from one country to another without being caught. The blood on his hands, the screams in his head, the hallucinations that blinded him from his deeds seemed to have veiled him from the world. He not only was left alone with his disease, he had become invisible.”

The press release also attempted to answer the question of why Ricardo had turned himself in at this particular time. “We think it must be that the love and support of his present wife has given him the peace of mind,” it speculated. “The comfort of the relationship has made him visible again. His conscience has returned.”

He’s visible all right, I said to myself, frowning as I stood in the corridor and scanned the document. But Natalie’s invisible. Natalie and his other victims.

It wasn’t just that they were dead. It was that they were ciphers. Several newspapers had written about them, but they’d been allotted just a short paragraph or two apiece.

Kennedy and the Caputos were leaving in a flurry of pursuing cameras. I went to the railroad, my mind bent on searching out people who might help me make Natalie Brown and Caputo’s other victims visible.