FBI takes up ’85 Taos art heist tied to married couple

Pair of paintings taken from Harwood Museum using ploy where woman diverted guards, man hid works under shirt

TAOS — What happened to two Taos Society of Artists paintings after they were stolen from the Harwood Museum of Art 39 years ago?

Stayed tuned: The FBI recently agreed to assist in tracking down Victor Higgins’ Aspens and Joseph Henry Sharp’s Indian Boy in Full Dress.

The paintings were stolen in a brazen heist March 20, 1985, back when the Harwood was primarily the Taos Public Library with a small unaccredited museum upstairs. After the thefts, the paintings appear to have landed in the remote southwestern New Mexico community of Cliff, of all places, where they hung inside an innocuous-seeming married couple’s home until 2017. A Willem de Kooning painting stolen from a Tucson museum on the day after Thanksgiving 1985 also graced the couple’s walls.

The now-deceased couple, Jerry and Rita Alter, are now suspected of leading double lives as educators and successful art thieves.

Investigators suspect their crimes were committed using a similar method: A woman distracted museum staff during visiting hours while a mustachioed man removed the targeted artwork and left with them under a long coat. At the Harwood, the woman was in a wheelchair and requested assistance with a troublesome elevator, investigators say; in Tucson, the woman peppered a staffer with questions about art elsewhere in the museum.

Witness descriptions of the thieves are a match for the Alters, with the exception of a fake-looking mustache worn by the man.

“There was no physical evidence left at the scene” by the suspects other than a broken picture frame, Officer Tommy Gallegos wrote in a Taos Police Department report at the time of the Harwood thefts. He added the librarian, Tracey McCallum, “advised that the subject looked at him momentarily before he made a sharp left turn [to exit the building]. The subject had his hands in his pockets as if he was holding something under his coat.”

The Taos News reported on the heist, indicating then-Harwood Foundation Director David McCaffey “noted ironically that museum curator David Witt had been attending a seminar on museum security at the time of the thefts.”

When he met with The Taos News at the Harwood on April 22, Witt recalled he had been “badgering the bosses in Albuquerque” — the Harwood is part of the University of New Mexico — to increase security in the years leading up to the theft.

“I told them I suspected we would get hit sooner or later, because we had a total lack of security,” he said.

Witt was the Harwood’s curator from 1979-2005. In the ‘80s, he said, library patrons “would have been keeping the librarian busy, but on any given day in March there might be between no people and four people” visiting the upstairs museum space. “It was very quiet up there,” he added.

Around 2:30 p.m., McCallum left the circulation desk, from which he could see the library entrance and the only stairs to the second floor, to help a woman in a wheelchair use the finicky elevator. Witt believes Jerry Alter, meanwhile, wearing a long black coat, had crept unseen partway up the winding stairs before Rita Alter entered as the decoy.

“Then he’s up there with a room full of paintings and can make as much noise as he wants — but he works fast,” Witt said. “By the time he’s done with his commotion up there, Tracy’s back at the circulation desk — in time to hear Jerry run down the stairway.”

Hearing the noise on the stairs, McCallum looked up, saw the man and then went on with his work at the circulation desk. The crime wasn’t discovered until hours later, when McCaffey went upstairs 10 minutes before closing time to turn off the lights.

When Witt returned from his security seminar in Santa Fe, he was devastated.

“Those people were very good at what they did. They got us good,” he said.

Witt said the prospect of the art being recovered is “quite thrilling.”

“Somebody has the stolen paintings,” he added.”That person or persons, or someone who may have seen them, needs to contact the Harwood.”

Margot Cravens, a spokesperson for the FBI, confirmed the agency is now involved in the case but declined to comment further on the active investigation.

Jerry Alter died in 2012; Rita Alter, who developed dementia, died in 2017. That summer, their nephew cleared out their home. He hired a Silver City estate sale company to collect the bulk of the home’s contents and donated other items to a tiny thrift shop, also in Silver City.

After customers at the estate company’s resale shop identified a painting from the Alter house as a de Kooning, news broke

Woman-Ochre, a 1955 work of abstract expressionism now valued at $160 million, had been found. After some twists and turns, and a lengthy restoration process, it was returned to the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson last year.

The Higgins and Sharp paintings were among the items donated to the humble Town and Country Garden Club Thrift Store. The nonprofit behind the store ultimately sold the works through the Scottsdale Art Auction in 2018 for $93,600 and $52,650, respectfully. The shop closed in 2021.

Initial speculation the Alters stole from the art museums strictly to keep the works for themselves soon began to morph into theories by amateur investigators that the couple were professional art thieves.

They traveled internationally and domestically several times each year, living beyond their means. In The Thief Collector, a 2022 feature-length documentary film about the Alters, the couple’s former travel agent calls them “adrenaline junkies” who thrilled at risk taking, flying to one country, for example, then paying folks to smuggle them into adjacent ones.

Juniper Leherissey, executive director at the Harwood, said it’s important the works are returned. She can’t imagine where they are.

“I think they were purchased at auction by an unwitting individual, and I don’t know if they’ve since been sold from that buyer, but likely someone purchased and has been living with them for many years,” she said. “Hopefully they’ll recognize that they belong to the Harwood and give them back.”

This story first appeared in The Taos News, a sister publication of The Santa Fe New Mexican.