On Mar. 9, 1994, Ricardo Silvio Caputo, a 44-year-old from Argentina, turned himself in to police in Manhattan.
Despite a paunch and receding hairline, Caputo became known in the press as “The Lady Killer,” a master of love ’em and leave ’em dead.
In the 1970s, dark-haired, slender, and possessing considerable charm, this lethal Romeo wooed, won, and then murdered four women. Since 1974, he had been a fugitive, hiding behind more than a dozen aliases.
During his years on the run, he may have added others to his murder roster. In “Love Me to Death,” journalist Linda Wolfe advanced the theory that Caputo murdered her friend, Jacqui Bernard, 62, a fellow writer and philanthropist, in 1983.
Her book includes scores of interviews with major players in the case, including psychologists, cops, and Caputo’s brother. But interviews with the murderer himself failed to yield what she had hoped for — a confession that he killed Bernard.
When Caputo turned himself in, he said that he had started experiencing flashbacks — screams and fleeting bloody images of the women he had killed. By 1994, he had had enough.
“On his own he decided to confront his past and voluntarily surrender himself,” his lawyer, Michael Kennedy, told reporters. Kennedy said his client reported that “long-buried memories of his past began to re-emerge in bits and nightmares.”
“I would rather have my body locked up and my mind free than … my mind locked up and my body free,” Caputo told his attorney.
It was not the first time Caputo reached out to authorities. On July 31, 1971, Nassau Country police received a disturbing phone call from a young man at a gas station on Northern Blvd. near Flower Hill, on Long Island.
“I think I killed my girlfriend,” Caputo told a homicide detective. He led police to the home of Natalie Brown, where they found the girl dead with seven stab wounds in her chest.
Brown, a 19-year-old bank teller, lived with her family, but on the night of her murder the couple was alone in the house. They had been dating for about a year. Caputo made advances, but Brown was not interested.
“She pushed me and laughed at me. I grabbed a knife with my right hand and began hitting her with it. I could see blood,” Caputo told the officers.
A Nassau County judge ruled that the killer was not competent to stand trial. The judge sent him off to maximum-security Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Beacon, N.Y.
Within three years, he was moved to Manhattan Hospital on Wards Island. Manhattan State was a minimum-security facility with an open-door policy. Inmates were free to walk around but were not supposed to leave the grounds.
Caputo ignored this rule and strolled to freedom on Oct. 20, 1974.
“HUNT PATIENT IN GIRL’S KILLING,” screamed the front page of the Daily News on Oct. 23, 1974. “Psychologist treated suspect.”
Two days after Caputo vanished, the parents of Judith Becker, 26, became worried when they could not reach their daughter on the phone.
They found her dead in her Yonkers apartment, strangled with one of her own stockings and bludgeoned with a blunt instrument. Her car, purse, and wallet were missing.
Becker, a psychologist, met Caputo at Matteawan. He was one of her patients.
Becker’s neighbors said they had seen a man fitting Caputo’s description at her apartment several times. They heard violent quarrels coming from her home the day she was killed.
Nothing came of a nationwide manhunt, widespread distribution of his photo and description, and rewards for information leading to his capture.
In 1991, “America’s Most Wanted” aired a segment on him, describing him as a “cunning predator” who targeted independent, financially successful women.
But there were no clues to his whereabouts until 1994, when he appeared in person and talked about what he had been up to for the last 20 years. In an interview on ABC-TV’s “Prime Time Live,” he admitted to murdering four women.
After killing Becker, he fled New York by bus and landed in San Francisco. There he met and became romantically involved with a filmmaker, Barbara Taylor, 28. He murdered her in 1975.
He was last seen in April 1975 in El Paso, Texas. He had been picked up by immigration officers but broke away and fled to Mexico City.
In Mexico, he moved in with another young woman, Laura Gomez, 20, a college student. That relationship ended with her murder about a year later in October 1977.
That same year, he came back to the U.S., married, and lived as a respectable family man until 1984, when he left his wife and two kids, and returned to South America. There, he married another woman and had more children between 1985 to 1992. No one died in these encounters.
His brother, Alberto, a successful New York businessman, offered reporters a glimpse into the killer’s troubled past. Alberto painted a picture of a hellish home life in Argentina — their parents’ infidelity, divorce, abandonment, and physical and emotional abuse.
Caputo pleaded guilty to the murders. At his sentencing in Westchester in August 1995, Judge Kenneth Lange said, “In your life, any rehabilitation will be by the Almighty because you are too dangerous, in my opinion, to ever be released.”
Judge Lange’s words were prophetic. On Oct. 1, 1997, The Lady Killer suffered a fatal heart attack on a basketball court at Attica.
