ARIZONA — NEW MEXICO
The Missing Masterpiece
Part 2: What motivated the theft of a $100 million painting?
In 2023, I revisited the University of Arizona Museum of Art, eager to view the once-stolen de Kooning in its frame and curious about the Alters’ motivations.
I stayed overnight at one of Tucson’s giant golf resorts, which pepper the city’s outskirts like creosote and swap acres of sandy desert for green turf. On a midweek night in October, the hotel was inexpensive and nearly empty. The accommodating weather permitted an unhurried dinner outdoors at the hotel’s steakhouse as the sun set.
The next morning, I navigated my way through the U of A campus, a red-brick, pedestrian-centered island amid the busy streets of Tucson. Because the museum is small, the power of its collection felt overwhelming. Like the thieves, I went straight to the de Kooning. An adjacent placard described the theft and restoration. The Plexiglas container and the guard sitting nearby also signaled that this painting was important, that it had a story to tell.
The painting was larger than I recalled and more visually commanding than I expected. It had something to say and said it with confidence. The restoration was almost imperceptible, except along the edges. There you could see spots where the cut canvas had been folded and stapled to a smaller wooden stretcher.
Though the story of the theft ended happily, the mystery it generated still echoed in my mind. I wanted to know more about the apparent thieves, Rita and Jerry Alter, and I was curious about the three men in Silver City who found the painting.
It was time to visit the other scene of the crime, the Alter’s former home in Cliff, New Mexico, where Dave Van Auker and his business partners found the de Kooning thirty years after its disappearance. The 3-hour drive from Tucson propelled me through a classic Southwest landscape: mesquite, small cacti, and straw-colored grasslands.
In the years since I first saw the empty frame, I’d retired early and devoted myself to writing books and playing the publishing game with mixed success. Now I had as much time as I wanted to chase mysteries. As I drove, I contemplated the puzzle of the Alters. How had they wound up with the de Kooning? Who were these people?
Approaching Cliff, I traversed hills where the Apache fought white settlers in the mid-1800s. I turned left at the Grant County Fairgrounds, winding past a rodeo arena and up dusty pavement to the Alter home. I chose not to disturb the current owners, but I took a gander from the road and pondered the odd couple that built the place.
Though initially everyone struggled to believe it, there was little doubt that Jerry and Rita Alter stole the painting. It was found at their home. Accounting for disguises, they generally resemble the sketches of the suspects. Their nephew discovered a photo of the couple at a family Thanksgiving gathering in Tucson the day before the theft. A snapshot found at the house shows a red Toyota Supra from the mid-eighties with black louvers on the back. After Rita’s death, the real estate agent who sold the home opened an old suitcase and discovered a scarf and eyeglasses that matched those in the composite sketch.
The couple had met and married in New York. Jerry taught music in public schools and worked pickup gigs playing the saxophone or clarinet at parties. Rita was a speech pathologist. Family members questioned how the Alters afforded their trips around the world and visited 140 countries. And no one understood how, on teacher salaries, they retired early, bought twenty acres of New Mexico land, and built a house. Rita left over a million dollars in the bank when she died.
When the Alters lived in New York during the 1950s, de Kooning’s paintings were displayed in local galleries, and the artist hung out at Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Some family members speculated that the Alters saw the 1955 Woman-Ochre painting when it was displayed in a gallery near where Jerry’s sister lived. De Kooning’s biographer, Mark Stevens, said it was also conceivable that Rita slept with the artist, a known womanizer, just before she met Jerry in 1955. ‟In the theft, you can see aspects of revenge and awe and worship,” he suggested.
After retiring to New Mexico, Jerry self-published a book of stories. Several involve characters cheated out of their destiny, living double lives, and stealing what they feel they deserve. None of the criminals in Jerry’s tales pay a price for their actions. One story depicts the theft of a famous emerald from a museum during opening hours.
Rita’s nephew speculated that perhaps Jerry believed his musical or artistic talent entitled him to more recognition than he received. A man in one story suffers a heart attack at a young age, just as Jerry did, and begins to paint, just as Jerry did. Soon, the artist’s works sell for $50,000 each and he is labeled a genius. No record indicates Jerry’s own paintings sold at any price.
Another story tells of a laborer hired to work at a remote house. The homeowner suspects he is having an affair with his wife, murders the man, and drops him into the septic tank. After Rita’s death, troubled by the story and knowing Jerry’s habit of hiring migrant laborers, the local sheriff investigated the Alter property with ground-penetrating radar but failed to find any indication of a buried body.
‟Most people,” said nephew Ron Roseman, ‟who commit crimes, I would assume, think they could get away with it. So that wasn’t anything for my uncle to aspire to. He thought he was better than most people. He could confess to it and still get away with it. In a sense, his book was his confession.”
The final lines in Jerry’s book read, ‟To own wealth is to be possessed by it. Stolen assets are not safe anywhere. They can bring only disquietude to their possessor, for such is the nature of man. They spin an endless web of deceit, forever imprisoning their owner in an insidious embrace!”
The Alter’s son and daughter both struggled with significant mental health issues. Whether they knew their parents stole the painting and whatever drama it caused inside their home will likely remain mysteries.
No other artwork known to be stolen was found among the Alter’s possessions. The FBI even x-rayed the home’s walls. The Alters’ nephew donated several pieces to the local garden club thrift shop. Among that art were two paintings and a small sculpture. The FBI, which has closed its investigation into the de Kooning theft, said none of those items were in its stolen art database. The three works sold at auction for $150,000, and the proceeds went to the thrift store.
The Thief Collector documentary filmed Dave Van Auker and Buck Burns hanging the Alter’s cheap frame, now empty, as a reminder of their discovery. I traveled the thirty minutes to Silver City to visit their antiques shop and see the empty frame. I considered it a mirror image of the empty frame I’d seen at the Tucson museum in 2014 before the painting was rediscovered and restored.
Silver City, as its name suggests, is a mining town. While all sorts of precious metals have been extracted over the years, copper now drives the local economy. Like most old mining towns, Silver City is a shadow of its former self, but colorful shops, century-old buildings, and charming, walkable streets convey dynamism and resilience. Sidewalks are elevated two feet above the pavement to accommodate the flooding that accompanies the summer monsoon. In 1895, a torrent washed out Main Street and left a trench twenty feet deep. Now that gully is the verdant Big Ditch Park.
I stayed at the restored Murray Hotel, an Art Deco throwback where my clean, comfortable room felt like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, with Venetian blinds, a straight-back chair, and a rotary phone. I wondered if I should buy a fedora.
Waiting for Manzanita Ridge Furniture & Antiques to open at eleven the next morning, I had a biscuits-and-gravy breakfast at a picnic table on the patio of the rustic and revived Corner Kitchen, which gives off Austin vibes. Then I killed more time by perusing the town’s five used bookstores.
A few minutes after 11:00, I wandered into the antique shop. Burns, with a goatee and a backward baseball cap, was up front. He laughed when I asked about the empty frame. Everyone thinks it’s here, he said. It’s actually at a guest home he and Van Auker own. So I wouldn’t be seeing that empty frame. Burns could not have been friendlier, though, and when I asked whether he was sick of talking about the de Kooning, he assured me he wasn’t.
When a call came in for Burns, I began chatting with Van Auker, a big man with graying blond hair and a beard, who radiates enthusiasm. I asked whether the three shop owners had pieced the Alters’ backstory together from the household effects or whether others had done it. Several writers, a documentary crew, the museum staff, the university police, and the FBI had poured over the details. But Van Auker said it was mainly he and his co-owners who sorted through everything along with the FBI team.
Dropping the top on my convertible, I left New Mexico and headed to the small condo Wayne and I have in Scottsdale. I chose windy mountain roads and avoided Interstate 10. With changing mountain vistas that extend for dozens of miles, Highways 78, 191, and 79 are some of the most visually captivating and lightly traveled roads in the Southwest.
As I navigated the constant curves, I thought about the Alters. Did they steal the painting, or had it somehow, by accident, wound up in their home? Van Auker had told me he believed that Jerry Alter became permanently obsessed with Woman-Ochre after seeing it in the New York gallery.
Jerry’s writing suggested he was a conniving instigator. The Thief Collector documentary and articles about the theft reported that Rita accommodated his fantasies and schemes. One close friend reflected, ‟Rita may very well have gone along with it because it was Jerry, and she adored him, and I know people are capable of anything. There’s a part of me that says maybe they did do it.”
Forty-eight hours after my drive, I discovered another Alter crime. And as much as I’d love to share that now, I don’t want to interfere with the investigation I triggered.
In Part 3, I reveal an up-to-now unexplored crime that helps confirm the Alters’ motivations. Read Part 3 here: https://medium.com/@louschachter/the-missing-masterpiece-2caebd788a9d.
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