the times | Saturday April 9 2022 2GM 45
Wo r l d
Picking over the belongings of the late
Jerome and Rita Alter at the house
where they had lived in New Mexico, an
antiques dealer named David Van
Auker stepped into the bedroom and
stared at an abstract painting that hung
behind the door.
His partner came in to take a look at
it and said: “Er, I don’t like the frame. It’s
kind of cracked,” Van Auker recalled
this week. Some time later, after they
had paid $200 for it and loaded it and a
heap of other things on to the back of
their truck, they discovered that the
painting was by Willem de Kooning,
that it was worth $160 million, and that
it had been stolen from an art museum
in Arizona in 1985.
The painting, Woman-Ochre, was re-
turned to the University of Arizona
Museum of Art and then sent to the
Getty Center in Los Angeles for resto-
ration, where it appeared that Jerome
Alter, who was a painter, may have
attempted to touch up damaged sec-
tions. The restored painting will go on
display at the Getty Center in June.
A new film, The Thief Collector,
which draws on Rita Alter’s diaries and
a book her husband wrote in 2011, sug-
gests that this quiet, friendly couple
were thrill-seekers who may have been
responsible for a series of crimes.
Jerome Alter was a teacher in New
York who retired in 1977 at the age of 47
and moved to rural New Mexico where
his wife worked in schools as a speech
pathologist. They built a house on top
of a hill and pursued their love of
“adventure travel”.
In The Cup And The Lip, a collection
of stories he self-published the year
before he died in 2012, aged 81, Alter
said he had visited “140 countries on all
continents, including both polar re-
gions”, and they documented their trav-
els in a collection of 13,000 slides. It was
unclear how they could have afforded
this lifestyle on a single teacher’s salary.
But when Rita Alter died in 2017, aged
81, they had $1 million in the bank.
“I guess I figured they were very fru-
gal,” their nephew, Ron Roseman, told a
local television station. He did not like
to think they had stolen the painting,
but a year after his aunt died The
Arizona Republic published a photo-
graph of the Alters at a Thanksgiving
dinner in Tucson in 1985, the day before
the de Kooning was stolen from the
city’s University of Arizona Museum of
guard until the man came back down a
few moments later. They then left.
When the guard wandered up to the
second floor he found that the de Koon-
ing had been cut from its frame. A wit-
ness saw the couple drive off in a rust-
coloured sports car that sounded, in
retrospect, like one of the cars the
Alters drove.
Allison Otto, the film-maker behind
The Thief Collector, noticed similarities
between the theft and stories in Jer-ome’s book. It also seemed similar to
the theft in 1989 of a $1 million blanket
from a museum in Arizona. The Alters
were in the area that day and friends re-
called them owning a very valuable rug.
Otto said Alter’s stories featured pro-
tagonists who were “thinly veiled ver-
sions of Jerry and Rita themselves”. She
added: “Jerry told his nephew that all of
these stories were based on real-life
experiences.” One is about a man who
murders a Mexican worker whoseduced his wife, burying the body in
the home’s septic tank. Although there
is no evidence of such a crime, the film
relates that the Alters refused to replace
their overflowing septic tank, asking
guests not to flush, saying they would
dispose of the excrement themselves.
Van Auker, 59, the antiques dealer
who had bought some of the contents of
the Alters’ home, gasped when he saw
this. “Most of us around here, who live
on the outskirts of town — we all have
septic systems,” he said. “We have them
pumped. It’s just something you do...
It’s not like it’s an expensive process.”
Their tiny town is near the southern
border and craftsmen and labourers
would come up from Mexico, Van Auk-
er said.
“Unfortunately, back in the Seven-
ties, if someone disappeared no one
would follow up on it. That made me
really wonder,” he said. “Oh my gosh.”Art. In the photograph they looked
strikingly similar to the police sketches
of the thieves.
On the day of the theft a couple
arrived at the museum a few minutes
before visitors were allowed in, Olivia
Miller, the curator, told the NPR station
in 2015. A guard, thinking it was nearly
opening time, let them in and followed
them as they walked up to the second
floor. The woman stopped on the stairs
and struck up a conversation with theWoman-Ochre was
stolen from a museum
in Tucson in 1985;
Jerome and Rita Alter
visited 140 countries
despite having only
one income; police
sketches of the art
theft suspectsA cargo plane split in two after it skid-
ded off the runway during an emer-
gency landing in Costa Rica.
The DHL aircraft was carrying mail
and packages to Guatemala when a
mechanical failure forced the pilots to
return to the international airport near
San José.
Video showed the Boeing 757-200
skidding along the tarmac before spin-
ning 180 degrees and falling off the side
of the runway. Smoke billowed from the
plane as firefighters moved in to rescue
the crew and douse the area with foam
to prevent spilt fuel igniting.
The pilot and co-pilot were taken to
hospital as a precaution but Hector
Chaves, the fire chief, said they were
“in good health”. He added that they
were conscious after the incident and
“remember everything vividly”.
A spokesman for DHL later said both
pilots were unharmed.
The crash, which happened at about
10am local time on Thursday, forced
the closure of the Juan Santamaria
international airport for nearly six
hours.
Some 8,500 passengers and 57 com-
mercial and cargo flights were affected,
according to a statement from Aeris,
the public company that manages the
airport.
Luis Miranda, the deputy director of
civil aviation for Costa Rica, said the
DHL plane appeared to have suffered a
hydraulic problem. It had travelled onlytreason, pushing the US towards a civil
war. Jurors were shown evidence of a
rudimentary house erected in Luther,
Michigan, so the men could allegedly
practise manoeuvres in preparation for
storming the home of Whitmer, 50.
Jonker declared a mistrial in the
cases of Adam Fox, 38, and Barry Croft,
46, because the 12-member jury was
deadlocked after five days of delibera-
tions. Prosecutors plan to retry Fox and
Croft, the Detroit Free Press reported.
The four were among 14 alleged mili-
tants, associated with the armed anti
establishment Boogaloo movement,
arrested in October 2020 by the FBI.
Eight of them still face trial.
The acquittals came despite testimo-
ny from Ty Garbin, 26, and Kaleb
Franks, 27, two other men who were
charged in the alleged plot before strik-
ing plea deals with prosecutors. Garbin
is serving a six-year sentence. Franks is
awaiting sentencing.Secret life of $160m De Kooning thieves
United States
Will Pavia New York
BOB DEMERS/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA; THE THIEF COLLECTOR/XTR/SXSW; UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POLICE DEPARTMENTabout 35 miles from the airport when
the pilots requested permission to turn
back to land.
A spokesman for DHL, which is a
subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL
Group, said that investigators were
working to determine the cause of the
incident.
“DHL’s incident response team has
been activated and an investigation will
be conducted with the relevant author-
ities to determine what happened,” the
spokesman said.‘Militia’ pair cleared of plot
to kidnap Michigan governor
David Charter WashingtonCargo, but not plane, lands in one piece
Costa Rica
Peter Stubley
A jury acquitted two men of conspiring
to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the gov-
ernor of Michigan, and the judge
declared a mistrial for two other de-
fendants after no verdict was reached.
Daniel Harris, 24, and Brandon Cas-
erta, 33, were found not guilty of con-
spiracy to commit kidnapping after a
month-long trial. They embraced their
lawyers when Robert Jonker, a US dis-
trict judge, said that they were free after
18 months in jail on remand.
The four men, all said to be members
of a self-styled militia, were charged in
a plot that prosecutors said grew out of
their opposition to pandemic restric-
tions imposed by the prominent Demo-
crat, who in 2020 was under considera-
tion to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
They were accused of planning to
break into Whitmer’s holiday home,
take her away and put her on “trial” forThe DHL Boeing
757-200 skidded
along the tarmac
before spinning
and falling off
the side of the
runway. Both
pilots escaped
unharmed