Art for the People (Well, Two of Them): New Mexico Couple Potentially Responsible for Multiple ‘80s Art Heists
A New Mexico couple was found to have a priceless masterpiece hanging in their bedroom for decades. Maybe it was an attempt at performance art?
By Katie Compa · May 7, 2024
Disclaimer: While this article is based on exquisite brush strokes of facts, it does contain some paint-by-numbers satire.
The long-standing mystery of who stole a $160 million de Kooning masterpiece in a 1985 heist may be solved: A New Mexico speech pathologist, Rita Alter, had it among her belongings after her death in 2017—a fact her nephew found out when he got a phone call from the FBI. The discovery prompted an investigation that may finger Rita and her husband Jerry, a retired musician-turned-band teacher who passed away in 2012, as among the more successful art thieves of their generation.
Back in 1985, an unidentified man and woman sporting bulky winter coats attended an exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson, arriving just after opening. While she chatted up the security guard, he wandered upstairs to the exhibit, and a few minutes later, they departed suddenly in their reddish car. With no cameras in the exhibition and no fingerprints at the scene, the thieves were never caught. Recently, a snapshot of the couple at a relative’s home for Thanksgiving places them in Tucson at the time of the theft.
Much of the media coverage surrounding the latest discovery asks, “Did this couple steal a priceless painting in the 80’s?” And obviously, yes! Yes, they did [allegedly, don’t sue us, it’s circumstantial, but come on]. In the heist business, with which we’re more than conversantly familiar having seen each and every Ocean’s [#] movie, we believe this is called “getting away with it.”
Years later, upon seeing the de Kooning adjacent to the vacuum cleaner storage, Rita’s dementia care nurse exclaimed how ugly the painting was (damn girl, rude much?), prompting Rita to admonish her in the way art thieves do: “Honey, if you knew how much that painting was worth, you would eat your words.” Fair point—the free hand of the market is the only thing that decides good taste, and none of us has ever seen something both ugly and expensive.
And this is just one of the heists of which they’re suspected that same year—two paintings stolen from the Taos Society of Artists also were found after the Alters’ deaths but sold at auction to private collectors.
Despite their modest income, the Alters somehow funded visits to 140 countries on all of Earth’s seven continents and had over $1 million in their accounts when they died. In a documentary about them that debuted at South by Southwest in 2022, their travel agent said they were “adrenaline junkies,” who would sometimes book trips flying into one country, then paying smugglers to take them to another. Cool hobby, guys! Definitely not pathological! The 1995 establishment of the Schengen Area (29 European countries without mutual border controls) must have been devastating.
Rita and Jerry are the Heisenberg-style antiheroes to Herb and Dorothy Vogel (a New York City postal worker and librarian, respectively, who built up a priceless personal art collection over the course of their lives, then gave it all away—50 works to each of the 50 states—upon their deaths).
The de Kooning was returned to the museum from which the Alters ALLEGEDLY stole it; the other stolen works are still out there somewhere, and the FBI remains on the case. We recommend checking Julia Roberts’s Taos pad, just to rule her out.