Couple leave $160M stolen painting, and mystery
Jerry and Rita Alter kept to themselves. They were a lovely couple, neighbors in the small New Mexico town of Cliff would later tell reporters. But no one knew much about them.
They may have been hiding a decades-old secret, pieces of which are now just emerging.
Among them:
After the couple died, a stolen Willem de Kooning painting with an estimated worth of $160 million was discovered in their bedroom.
More than 30 years ago, that same painting disappeared the day after Thanksgiving from the University of Arizona’s Museum of Art in Tucson.
And Wednesday, The Arizona Republic reported that a family photo had surfaced, showing that the day before the painting vanished, the couple were, in fact, in Tucson.
The next morning, a man and a woman would walk into the museum and leave 15 minutes later. A security guard had unlocked the museum’s front door to let a staff member into the lobby, curator Olivia Miller told NPR. The couple followed. Because the museum was about to open for the day, the guard let them in.
The man walked up to the museum’s second floor while the woman struck up a conversation with the guard. A few minutes later, he came back downstairs, and the two abruptly left, according to the NPR interview and other media reports.
Sensing that something wasn’t right, the guard walked upstairs. There, he saw an empty frame where de Kooning’s “WomanOchre” had hung.
At the time, the museum had no surveillance cameras. Police found no fingerprints. One witness described seeing a rust-color sports car drive away but didn’t get the license plate number. For 31 years, the frame remained empty.
In 2012, Jerry Alter passed away. His widow, Rita Alter, died five years later.
After their deaths, the painting was returned to the museum. The FBI is investigating the theft.
Did the quiet couple who lived in a three-bedroom ranch on Mesa Road steal “Woman-Ochre” and get away with it?
The Alters had moved to Cliff (population 293) in the late 1970s or early 1980s, according to the Silver City Daily Press. H. Jerome Alter, who went by Jerry, had been a professional musician and a teacher in New York City schools before retiring to New Mexico, he wrote under “About the author” in “Aesop’s Fables Set in Verse,” a book he published in 2011.
“His primary avocation has been adventure travel,” the biographical sketch says, noting that he had visited “over 140 countries on all continents, including both polar regions.”
Rita Alter, who died in 2017 at age 81, had worked as a speech pathologist at the local school district after the couple moved to New Mexico, the Daily Press reported.
In 2011, a year before his death, also at age 81, Jerry published a book of short stories, “The Cup and the Lip: Exotic Tales.” One story stands out.
“The Eye of the Jaguar,” concerns itself with Lou, a security guard at an art museum. One day, a middleaged woman and her 14year-old granddaughter show up. The older woman asks Lou about the history of a prized emerald on display. Six months later, she and her granddaughter return, then leave in a rush.
“Wow, those two seem to be in a hurry, most unusual for visitors to a place such a this,” Lou thinks. He reinspects the room and realizes the emerald is gone. Running to the door, he sees the pair speeding away. Jerry Alter’s fictional tale ends with a description of the emerald sitting in an empty room. “And two pairs of eyes, exclusively, are there to see!”
He could have been describing the de Kooning. But nobody thought of that until the painting was discovered in the Alters’ bedroom, where it had been positioned in such a way that you couldn’t see it unless you were inside with the door shut.
After Rita Alter died, nephew Ron Roseman put the house on the market and began liquidating its contents. On Aug. 1, 2017, antique dealers from neighboring Silver City bought the painting and the rest of the Alters’ estate for $2,000. It didn’t take long for someone to recognize the painting in David Van Auker’s Manzanita Ridge Furniture and Antiques.
“It probably had not been in the store an hour before the first person came in and walked up to it and looked at it and said, ‘I think this is a real de Kooning,’ ” Van Auker told KOB 4-TV in Albuquerque. Then another customer said the same thing. And another.
Once the painting had been secured, Van Auker did a Google search for de Kooning. That’s when he spotted an article about the theft of “Woman-Ochre” and called the museum.
“I got a student receptionist, and I said to her, ‘I think I have a piece of art that was stolen from you guys,’ ” he told Dallas-based news station WFAA. “And she said, ‘What piece?’ And I said, ‘The de Kooning.’ And she said, ‘Hold, please.’ ”
The next night, a delegation from the museum arrived. When Miller walked in, Van Auker told the Daily Press, the room turned silent.
“She walked up to the painting, dropped down on her knees and looked. You could just feel the electricity,” he recalled. Authentication would confirm that it was a perfect match for the missing de Kooning.
Over the past year, a handful of clues potentially linking the Alters to the theft have surfaced.
Several people told The New York Times that they had a red sports car, similar to the one spotted leaving the museum. The car also appears in home movies obtained by WFAA.
Some of the couple’s photos show Rita in a red coat like the one that the woman at the museum had been wearing, KOB 4 reported. And Ruth Seawolf, the real estate agent who put the Alters’ house on the market, told the Silver City Sun News that she had taken home a luggage set and, inside, found glasses and a scarf that match the police description.
“In the Alters’ day planner from 1985, they took meticulous notes about what they ate, where they went, and the medications they had,” KOB 4 points out. “On Thanksgiving 1985, they mysteriously left it blank.”
The investigation has been underway for a year. The FBI has declined to comment.